• Fans can tune into Elon Musk's gamer livestreams on X, which can last multiple hours.
• Musk streams under the handle cyb3rgam3r420 and plays games and answers questions via the chat.
• Recently, Musk talked SpaceX, plans for reaching Mars, and favorite podcasts.

Elon Musk has never been shy in sharing his thoughts through social media, and fans can now tune into hours of his musings through his gaming livestreams.

A known avid gamer, the Tesla CEO has recently been streaming live on X, formerly Twitter, the social media company he owns. The livestreams are under his gamer-focused handle @cyb3rgam3r420 (yes, it references 420 — a favorite number of Musk's), not his usual @elonmusk handle.

But as one of Musk's recent livestreams demonstrates, they offer Tesla fans and those interested in his various other companies, like SpaceX or Neuralink, another channel to hear the billionaire riff on his plans.

The sessions last several hours (his latest stream was over five hours long), and while Musk was partly focused on playing a video game — in this case, "Diablo IV" — he also responded to people in the livestream chat.

Gaming aside, it's classic Musk. He talks in a stream-of-consciousness fashion about Tesla, SpaceX, X, Neuralink, and the future, sometimes touching on some of his go-to points, such as his concerns about human population levels and encouraging his friends to have more children.

In his latest stream, for example, he talked about:

• The logistics of terraforming and building a self-sustaining city on Mars — which he estimates could be done in 20 to 30 years. "I think we'll launch the first Starship to Mars in less than three years," he said.
• When asked whether he'd like to die on Mars, Musk responded, "Sure, why not die on Mars. I just don't want to die on impact."
• His AI company, xAI, bringing its chatbot Grok to Tesla. Musk said users will be able to ask it to go pick up a friend or groceries.
• His optimism about Optimus humanoid robots, which he anticipates will come to Tesla within the next year or two.
• Musk's podcast recommendations, which included "The Age of Napoleon" and Dan Carlin's "Hardcore History."
• SpaceX's plans to take a lens from a ground telescope and put it in space. Musk said combining the ground lens with more advanced electronics would "probably be roughly 10 times the resolution of Hubble."
• Starship's 3D metal printed engine parts and the multiple prior iterations Musk went through before settling on the final rocket design.
• He also answered random questions from the chat, like what he's drinking (Diet Coke) and whether Tesla plans to launch a phone (no).

In some ways, his game sessions feel like an extended edition of his speeches during a Tesla earnings call or while onstage at a company event or panel interview. But it's rare to see a CEO stream and talk for hours about such a range of topics, free from PR handlers, and for people following Musk, they might just hear something new between dungeon fights and quests.

This is not the first alternative account Musk has been found using. He appeared to have an X account where he would tweet as his now-four-year-old son X Æ A-12.

America is running headlong into a big problem: Boomers are getting older. In the coming years, the retirement-age population will balloon to its largest size yet, drawing down Social Security funds, overwhelming retirement homes, and leaving a labor shortage in its wake.

Larry Fink, the 71-year-old CEO of the asset-management behemoth BlackRock, offered a two-part solution to the looming retirement crisis in his annual March letter to shareholders. In order to avoid economic catastrophe, he argued, people should save more money and work longer. "What if the government and the private sector treated 60-plus year-olds as late-career workers with much to offer rather than people who should retire?" Fink wrote. The current Social Security retirement age is 67, but most Americans depart the workforce earlier than that. If more people kept working into their late 60s and 70s, the impending crisis would soften.

In some ways, Fink's solution sounds nice and even sensible — many able-bodied, energetic 70-year-olds are happy to stay employed and contribute to the economy, so why not encourage more people to do the same?

The problem is that his plan overlooks a few key realities. For one, many older people cannot work because of a disability or because they need to care for someone else with a disability. The second is that those who are willing and able to work are often unwanted. Despite a legal ban on discriminating against people 40 and older in the workplace, it's still common.

Instead of making it easier for Americans to save for retirement and work as long (or as short) as they want, Fink is setting up a catch-22: The economy needs aging Americans to work longer, but many companies simply don't want them.

Down in Texas, Daniel Ross has been busy. As a founding partner of Ross Scalise Employment Lawyers, an Austin firm that represents people who have experienced age discrimination, this isn't necessarily a good thing. Over the past five years, he said he's noticed an increase in age-discrimination cases, especially those alleging wrongful discharge. "Here in Austin, we have a lot of tech jobs and tech companies," he said. "They want to look younger."

In 2023, a Society for Human Resources Management survey found that 30% of workers felt discriminated against because of their age at some point in their careers.

"This absolutely isn't good when we are in a moment in time where we still have so many more jobs to fill and people who are trained to fill them," Emily Dickens, SHRM's head of government affairs, said about the survey results.

We've got one group of people who are apparently only hiring their own age group, because they seem to be biased against those younger than them and older than them.
Stacie Haller, a chief career advisor at ResumeBuilder.com

According to the US Chamber of Commerce, there are 8.5 million open jobs in the US and only 6.5 million unemployed people looking for work. The shortages span several industries, with healthcare, hospitality, and business services such as accounting topping the list for the most unfilled positions. In the Texas tech scene, job openings are on the rise. But despite the shortages, many companies are reluctant to fill their open roles with older people.

Patrick Button, a professor of economics at Tulane University, has done extensive work on employment discrimination, mostly through what's known as résumé correspondence field experiments. These studies involve creating fictional résumés that vary in a few ways and using them to apply for job openings. The number of callbacks that each résumé receives indicates the employer response to that type of worker.

One of Button's studies looked at "bridge jobs," part-time jobs in administration or retail that many people use to ease into retirement and cushion their finances. "The ability to get these sorts of jobs is one mechanism that older people use to work longer and then provide better security for themselves in retirement," Button said. He and his coauthors sent out 40,000 résumés they wrote to represent different age groups: younger workers between 29 and 31, middle-aged workers between 49 and 51, and older workers between 64 and 66. They applied to listings for administrative, retail sales, security, and janitorial positions — all typical bridge jobs that attract applicants from every demographic.

Among women, they discovered a 3 percentage-point drop in résumé responses around age 50 with a significant decline around 65. For men, the decline appeared at age 65. The results were clear: "There is a significant amount of age discrimination in the ability to take these jobs, particularly against older women," Button told me.

Other studies have found a similar pattern: A 2024 survey of 1,000 hiring managers conducted by ResumeBuilder.com, a website that helps people write résumés, found that more than one-third of respondents admitted to a bias against candidates older than 60 and Gen Z candidates.

"We're in a situation where we've got one group of people who are apparently only hiring their own age group, because they seem to be biased against those younger than them and older than them," Stacie Haller, a chief career advisor at ResumeBuilder.com, told me.

Several companies have recently come under fire for explicit age bias. A 2018 ProPublica and Mother Jones investigation found that IBM had an express, top-down program in place from 2013 until 2018 to fire workers over 40 and replace them with workers under 40. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that there was "reasonable cause" to believe that IBM discriminated against certain employees based on their ages. The case is ongoing.

Sure, we've all been told that life isn't fair — usually by the people who hold all the cards — but the system isn't set up to help people work longer or save more money.

In 2023, the pharmaceutical company Lilly was ordered by the EEOC to pay a $2.4 million fine for a program it operated between 2017 and 2021 to attract "early career" salespeople, which included incentives for managers to hire people under 40. The same year, Scripps Medical Clinic in San Diego was ordered to pay $6.9 million for setting a mandatory retirement age for physicians of 70, regardless of the doctors' interest or abilities.

More often, though, the discrimination is less explicit. Ross, the age-discrimination lawyer, said that most of his cases involve circumstantial evidence. He told me that people who would never dream of making remarks about race, gender, or religion will casually joke about old people, ask people when they are retiring, or otherwise contribute to making an older colleague feel unwelcome. Often, he said, this kind of circumstantial evidence helps him build cases.

Age discrimination happens for a host of reasons. We live in a youth-obsessed culture, and gray hair doesn't reflect corporate branding. Employers may assume that older workers have health problems and so might require more time off or that they're out of touch with rapidly changing technology. Some managers don't know how to talk to their older reports. And some older workers have heard all the corporate buzzwords and blather before, so they don't buy into management's sloganeering, rendering them "difficult."

"Companies want to create a younger workforce. And I think one of the reasons they want to do that is so they look like a younger workforce to customers and to potential employees who are statistically going to be younger than 40 or so," Ross said.

In an ideal world, older workers could retire peacefully, leaving the work of running the country's economic engine to younger generations while they enjoy a well-deserved break. But increasingly, retirement-aged Americans are stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can't retire when they want to because they don't have enough money saved up. But they can't continue working, either, because companies don't want them.

Larry Fink is correct that most industrial countries have not prepared for the economic impact of an aging population. In the US, the Silent Generation and older baby boomers have enjoyed relatively rich pension and healthcare benefits. But for most retirees, it simply isn't enough. Fewer than half of boomers have enough retirement savings, with one-fifth saying they have none at all. Already, retirement-age Americans are struggling to get by, reckoning with working into their 70s in order to stretch their meager savings.

The problem with Fink's assessment is that it just isn't realistic. He's asking people who have not yet retired to work longer than their elders did and to save even more money, without changing the systematic barriers to either. Sure, we've all been told that life isn't fair — usually by the people who hold all the cards — but the system isn't set up to help people work longer or save more money. Already, younger generations are panicking about how much money they need to save in order to retire.

For Fink and others in the executive class, the dilemma is this: They can either pay workers more and let them work longer so that they can be better prepared for retirement, or they can pay more in taxes so that the government can provide better retirement benefits that allow people to stop working when they need to.

They can't have it both ways. If they ignore the problem and do nothing, they will leave the average person to live out their golden years in bad financial shape — sparking an economic disaster for everyone.

Ann C. Logue is a writer specializing in business and finance. Her most recent book is "Options Trading." She lives in Chicago.

• Four of the world's 11 "impossibly unaffordable" housing markets are in California, a study found.
• There are seven of these pricey markets across the US and Canada, per the Demographia report.
• The study blamed land use policies for constraining housing supply and driving up prices.

Fans of "Selling Sunset" know just how expensive property in California can be.

In fact, four of the 11 most unaffordable housing markets in the English-speaking world are in California — and seven are in the US and Canada, a new study has found.

San Jose, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and San Diego are all "impossibly unaffordable," according to the 2024 Demographia International Housing Affordability report.

The median house price in San Jose last year was 11.9 times the gross median household income in that market, per the report published by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy, a Canadian think tank.

The median price-to-income ratio was 10.9 in Los Angeles, and not much lower in San Francisco (9.7) and San Diego (9.5). In other words, if the median household income was $100,000 in those markets, the median home cost more than $900,000 in the two most affordable locales, and almost $1.2 million in San Jose.

The researchers classified a ratio of 9 or higher as "impossibly unaffordable," saying it was virtually unfeasible for a middle-income housing to raise enough financing to afford a typical home in the area. That level of unaffordability didn't exist three decades ago, they noted.

The study analyzed housing affordability in 94 major markets across eight countries including the US, Canada, Australia, China, and the UK. Hong Kong (16.7) topped the ranking for a 13th time, followed by Sydney (13.3) and Vancouver (12.3), which have secured top-three spots in 15 and 16 of the last 16 years respectively.

Honolulu (10.5), Melbourne (9.8), Adelaide (9.7), and Toronto (9.3) rounded out the list of "impossibly unaffordable" markets.

Most affordable markets

At the other end of the spectrum, Pittsburgh (3.1) ranked as the most affordable US market, followed by Rochester (3.4), St. Louis (3.4), and Cleveland (3.5).

The report's authors blamed the astounding lack of affordability in some markets on governments constraining housing supply.

"The crisis stems principally from land use policies that artificially restrict housing supply, driving up land prices and making homeownership unattainable for many," they wrote.

They gave examples of policies designed to combat urban sprawl, such as greenbelts, boundaries, and densification. These can "severely constrict the land available for housing," and "higher land values translate to dramatically higher house prices," they added.

US housing has become especially unaffordable in recent years for other reasons. Unprecedented amounts of government spending during the pandemic, rock-bottom interest rates, and shortages caused by global supply chain disruptions drove inflation to a 40-year high of over 9% in 2022.

The Federal Reserve's solution has been to raise interest rates to above 5%, which has driven mortgage rates up from below 3% to two-decade highs of about 7%. One consequence has been that homeowners who've locked in cheap mortgages don't want to lose them by selling, contributing to an inventory shortfall that has pushed home prices even higher.

Affordability crisis

At the same time, many consumers have been hit by soaring food, fuel, and housing costs. They're also paying more each month toward their credit cards, car loans, and other debts due to rate increases. That has crimped their ability to save and borrow at a time when home prices are near record highs, resulting in an affordability crisis.

Whether land use restrictions, monetary and fiscal policy, or reluctant sellers are most to blame for "impossibly unaffordable" housing markets, the dream of homeownership is clearly out of reach for many people.

• Almost every summer, I travel to Taiwan in order to enroll my children in local summer camps.
• I can send my four kids to a full week's camp — including lunch — for cheaper than the US. 
• My children are immersed in my culture and can practice speaking Chinese with locals.

Every year, it seems like the rush to sign my kids up for summer camp begins earlier and earlier. For some of the more competitive programs, enrollment can begin as early as January or even November/December of the previous year.

As a mother of five, that's too much for my addled brain — let alone my wallet. Unless it's concert tickets to K-pop band BTS, I try never to compete for anything — mostly because it spikes my blood pressure, and I hate the anxiety it induces.

Instead, I send my kids to summer camp in Taipei because not only will my children have fun and learn, but they'll be doing so in Chinese.

Immersing my children in family, language, and culture

One of the primary reasons I enroll my children in local camps is so that they are forced to speak and listen to native Chinese speakers. Though my children have Chinese tutors and can speak, read, and write the language, I know that is an artificial environment. Being able to speak and respond in a classroom environment is very different than doing so in "real" life.

I choose to throw my kids in a Chinese only environment so that they have to communicate in Chinese out of necessity. Truthfully, many Taiwanese people will try to speak English to my kids even though my kids understand Chinese just fine.

Plus, not only do my kids get to see our relatives, but they also experience a whole new way of living for four to eight weeks. They try new foods, live a car-free existence and navigate the bus, subway, and train systems — sometimes unaccompanied — and have far more personal freedom than I would allow them in the US due to safety. They also venture out on their own to buy food from local restaurants and convenience stores.

Summer camps in Taiwan are so much more affordable

Every year, it seems as if the cost of summer camps in the US increases — and while I do want people to be paid a fair wage, it can also be true that with four children, paying for camps becomes cost-prohibitive. However, thanks to the exchange rate of about $1 USD to $32 NTD and the lower cost of living in Taiwan (on average, it is 35.6% lower than in the US), I can sign up my children for a fraction of the cost.

For example, through our town's parks and recreation department, a half-day camp for five days costs around $300 a week. If I enrolled them elsewhere for a week-long full-day camp, the price range is around $725 to $1,200 (and doesn't include lunch). For a weeklong sleep-away camp for five days and four nights, the cost is about $2,000 to $3,000.

However, even in Taiwan's capital and most expensive city of Taipei, I can enroll my kids in all the fun camps I would not consider in the US due to cost. A one-week, full-day camp, including lunch, is about $207 per child. If I wanted to be fancy and send them to a Model UN-like camp for the same amount of time, it would be $529 per child. For an 8-day, 7-night sleep-away camp for teenagers, the cost for the entire camp would be $711.

Not only summer camps but vacations, too

Yes, the cost of traveling to Taiwan is expensive (the average round-trip flight will be $1,200 to $1,500 during peak season), and of course, I do have to pay for additional housing, but food expenses will be lower, and we don't have to pay for utilities. But I also try to maximize the time spent in Taiwan, so the trip doubles as a vacation, too. In the end, I will choose to gift my children an international summer of family and fun over costly US camps any day of the week.

• Adobe is facing allegations from the FTC that it hid cancellation fees from customers. 
• Affinity and Linearity are some alternative apps that are gaining popularity.
• Both firms slashed prices on subscription plans and are prompting customers to make the switch. 

As Adobe reels from a lawsuit accusing it of hiding early termination fees, its competitors may be seizing the golden opportunity to cash in.

On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission sued Adobe, alleging that it deceived consumers by "hiding the early termination fee for its most popular subscription plan and making it difficult for consumers to cancel their subscriptions."

The lawsuit comes as Adobe faces a firestorm of criticism from creatives over some of its terms of service. A vaguely worded notice from Adobe hinted that the software may be looking to use creators' content to train AI models. Adobe then published a June 6 blog post clarifying that it "does not train Firefly Gen AI models on customer content."

Creative software like Linearity and Affinity, which boast similar capabilities, have slashed prices on their services in what appears to be a gambit to entice Adobe's disgruntled customer base.

Linearity, a vector-based app similar to Adobe's Illustrator, did not disguise its intention to get customers to switch apps.

As part of its limited-time promotion, new users can subscribe to Linearity Pro for $59 for their first year. They can use the code "SWITCH59" at checkout to unlock the discount.

Linearity's website reads: "Why choose Linearity Curve over Adobe Illustrator? No hidden AI, machine learning training, or ownership over your creations."

Graphic design and photo editing software Affinity, recently acquired by Canva, is offering a half-off discount on its Photo, Designer, and Publisher services and all its add-ons.

Affinity's post on X on Friday subtly urges people to switch to their software: "Whether you're switching from other software or new to photo editing and digital design, there are tons of resources to help you get the most out of Affinity."

Inkscape, a free, open-source software similar in function to Illustrator, took a subtle swipe at Adobe in a June 9 X post.

"We can't believe we need to say this, but… your files are yours," its caption read. "The #Inkscape project will never peek at your files, and what's yours stays on your computer."

And some users seem desperate to make the switch, with creatives on TikTok and X sharing extensive lists of alternatives to Adobe's apps.

Others have posted screenshots showing themselves canceling their Adobe subscriptions and switching to other software.

One user on X wrote, " Bye-bye, @Adobe! Your MRC subscription and shady contract terms won't be missed."

The user, who said they used to work on Premiere Pro, added on Thursday that they "fully switched" to video editing software Davinci Resolve six months ago. They have now bought a "one-time $82.00 license for Affinity's suite to replace Photoshop."

Representatives for Adobe, Linearity and Affinity didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.

• The Department of Justice is suing Adobe over deceptive subscription practices.
• The lawsuit claims Adobe hides fees and makes it hard to cancel subscriptions.
• This follows backlash over new terms of service that led some users to quit.

Adobe spent the first half of June addressing user fury around its terms of use. Before the controversy fully settled, the company is facing another significant challenge: a lawsuit from US regulators.

On Monday, the Department of Justice sued, saying Adobe violated consumer protection laws by hiding expensive fees and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions. The lawsuit follows a Federal Trade Commission investigation into Adobe's practices.

Regulators said in the complaint that Adobe entices people to "enroll in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms."

Per the DOJ, Adobe fails to tell users that when they sign up for an annual plan that's charged monthly, they are agreeing to a year-long commitment — including a termination fee that could be hundreds of dollars.

The disclosures are hidden behind optional textboxes and hyperlinks and are "designed to go unnoticed," the lawsuit said. Early termination fee details only appear when users try to cancel, effectively trapping them in subscriptions they don't want.

"Through these practices, Adobe has violated federal laws designed to protect consumers," prosecutors wrote.

Prosecutors wrote that the company has been made aware of government scrutiny into its subscription practices since June 2022, but continued with them.

The suit also names two Adobe executives as defendants: Maninder Sawhney, the senior vice president of digital go-to-market and sales, and David Wadhwani, the president of the digital media business. The complaint says both executives "directed, controlled," or "participated" in Adobe's practices.

Adobe plans to refute the government's claims in court, the company said in a statement.

"We are transparent with the terms and conditions of our subscription agreements and have a simple cancellation process," Dana Rao, Adobe's general counsel, said in the statement.

Adobe previously sold its popular products, like Photoshop, for an upfront fee. In recent years, it switched to monthly subscriptions, which investors prefer because revenue is easier to predict.

The company nearly doubled its subscription revenue from 2019 to 2023, to $14.2 billion. Adobe made $19.4 billion overall last year.

New terms of service lead to outcry

The lawsuit comes on the heels of another serious concern artists and designers have recently raised with Adobe products.

Earlier this month, the tech giant asked users to sign new terms with language that some thought implied that their content could be reproduced, displayed, or modified by Adobe — a big concern since Adobe is pushing hard into generative AI.

Some creators said they quit the platform over their licensing and AI scraping concerns, prompting the company to clarify the new terms in two blog posts over the last two weeks.

"Your content is yours and will never be used to train any generative AI tool. We will make it clear in the license grant section that any license granted to Adobe to operate its services will not supersede your ownership rights," a pair of Adobe executives wrote in the post.

The news even frustrated Adobe employees, who complained internally about the company's poor communication, Business Insider reported last week.

"The general perception is: Adobe is an evil company that will do whatever it takes to F its users," an employee wrote in an internal Slack message.

The clarifications did little to calm some customers.

"Pretending that this wasn't intentional only makes Adobe and its employees look even more pathetic," said Sasha Yanshin on X. Yanshin said that he canceled his Adobe subscription after many years as a customer.

• The US surgeon general is pushing for a warning label on social media about teen mental health risks. 
• A comparison to cigarette warnings is tempting, but social media might be more like explicit lyrics. 
• It's hard to see how a warning label could be as effective as government regulation.

US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy is recommending a warning label on social media sites cautioning that "social media is associated with significant mental health harms for adolescents."

This label would warn teens and their parents of the potential risk of harm from using social media. In an op-ed for The New York Times, Murthy writes, "the mental health crisis among young people is an emergency — and social media has emerged as an important contributor."

Murthy references the warning label on tobacco products, which is viewed as a public health success story, helping reduce tobacco use significantly since the 1970s.

But is social media really comparable to cigarettes? And could a warning label actually make an impact? Sure, apps like TikTok and Instagram can be addictive and potentially harmful. However, there are a few really basic differences that I think are worth considering.

First of all, unlike social media apps, cigarettes are aimed at adults (yes, it has also been stealthily marketed to teens), and they are only legally sold to adults (yes, obviously teens are getting their hands on them anyway). The warning label is for everyone: cigarettes pose a health risk to anyone who smokes.

Secondly, there's little hope that tobacco companies will be inspired to make cigarettes healthy — there is no healthy version of an American Spirit. But there is hope that social media could be less harmful. There could be all sorts of tweaks and changes, small and large, that could make social platforms safer for kids. Big Tech platforms could make these changes if spurred by regulation, negative media coverage, advertiser boycotts, or simply because they believe it's the right thing to do.

Speaking of regulation, the decline in cigarette use over the last 50 years has also been aided by smoking bans in offices, planes, restaurants, bars, and other public places. These bans resulted from a series of state, local, and federal regulations.

So far, the government's approach to social media regulation has been somewhat chaotic. A few potential bills exist, like the Kids Online Safety Act, Protecting Kids on Social Media Act, and an overhaul of the existing COPPA laws on data privacy and advertising to kids online.

There's also a bunch of state attorneys general who have filed lawsuits over social media harms to kids, and individual states have crafted their own laws, like a new bill in New York that would ban "addictive" algorithmic feeds for teens. Meta has said it would welcome regulation (meaning regulation that it likes) and has also suggested that it would like the responsibility of age-gating and parental consent to download social apps be shifted over to Apple and Google's app stores.

Perhaps instead of thinking of social media like cigarettes when it comes to warning labels, there's another analogy that might help us make more sense of this moment: the parental advisory stickers on music albums with explicit lyrics.

Social media is maybe closer to music than cigarettes, at least in terms of the First Amendment (there's a far more obvious speech implication than the right to rip heaters in the airport).

In the mid-1980s, a group called the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), which included a handful of influential wives of senators like Tipper Gore, was incensed over songs like Prince's "Darling Nikki" and Judas Priest's "Eat Me Alive" and urged record labels to attach warnings to albums containing explicit lyrics. The pressure campaign culminated in a media spectacle when John Denver, Frank Zappa, and Dee Snider of Twisted Sister spoke before Congress to defend their art.

Ultimately, no law was passed — the parental advisory labels you still see on albums today resulted from self regulation by the record industry to avoid actual regulation: a compromise between the Recording Industry Association of America and the PMRC. (This 1999 article from the journal Popular Music is a fun read if you're interested in dividing deeper into the history of the warning labels).

A surgeon general warning label that pops up when you open Instagram is probably going to be annoying, but it can't really hurt. So, hey, why not? I'm not going to sit here and say a government effort to help teen mental health is bad. Go for it.

But I am skeptical of how effective it will actually be, and how much political capital might be wasted on this instead of the hard, unfun work of coming up with regulations on social platforms that are actually effective.

• Apple's head of AI strategy and machine learning, John Giannandrea, has run Siri since 2018.
• His first instruction to the Siri team, he says, was "failure is not an option."
• The popularity of Apple's voice assistant makes it an exceptional proving ground for AI.

When Apple's head of AI strategy and machine learning, John Giannandrea, joined the company in 2018, the company's voice assistant, Siri, was struggling to live up to its promise.

Looking for a turnaround, Giannandrea says his first instruction to the Siri team was inspired by legendary NASA Chief Flight Director Gene Kranz: "Failure is not an option."

"A lot of people use Siri a lot of the time," Giannandrea said in an interview with John Gruber after Apple's WWDC last week. "And as it's gotten better over the years, we see in our data that people just use it more."

Now 14 years after Apple launched Siri, the voice assistant's growing popularity has made it an exceptional proving ground for AI, raising the stakes still further.

The recent introduction of Apple Intelligence, as well as a partnership with OpenAI, may bring a flood of new users to Siri, each with more complicated requests than ever before.

And given the central role of Apple's iPhone, it's fitting that Giannandrea is leading this effort. He has long argued that on-device AI models are critical to the technology being practical for everyday users.

"The inference of large language models is incredibly computationally expensive," he said, explaining why Apple's newest A17 chips are so well suited for the task. "It's the oomph in the device to actually do these models fast enough to be useful. You could in theory run these models on a very old device, but it will be so slow will not be useful."

In addition to getting the technical parameters right, Giannandrea said his team is also wrestling with philosophical and ethical questions about the role AI will play in people's lives.

"We've been very careful about applying this technology in a very thoughtful way," he said. "We've tried to corral this technology to do what it's really good at doing."

At the same time, even though researchers are concerned about "the safety problem," Giannandrea said Apple is not interested in limiting the creativity of its users with an overly restrictive set of rules.

"It's a very fine balance as we spend a lot of time and a lot of years trying to figure out because this is new for us. This is new for the whole industry," he said.

• Apple discontinued its buy now, pay later service on Monday.
• The company is also looking to end its consumer banking partnership with Goldman Sachs. 
• Apple's struggles in banking suggests that it has lost its touch at reinventing industries.

It sure looks like disrupting the world of finance isn't as easy as Apple initially thought.

On Monday, the iPhone maker told 9to5Mac that it was discontinuing its buy now, pay later service, Apple Pay Later, just months after it was rolled out across the US in October.

"Starting later this year, users across the globe will be able to access installment loans offered through credit and debit cards, as well as lenders, when checking out with Apple Pay," the company said. "With the introduction of this new global installment loan offering, we will no longer offer Apple Pay Later in the US."

Last year, reports emerged that Apple wanted to end its partnership with Goldman Sachs. The companies had joined forces to offer an Apple-branded credit card in 2019, followed by a high-yield savings account in 2022.

But growing losses may have prompted Goldman Sachs to rethink its partnership with the tech giant. In January 2023, the bank revealed that it had lost $3 billion from its consumer banking activities since 2020.

Apple is looking to exit from its partnership with Goldman Sachs in the next 12 to 15 months, The Wall Street Journal reported in November, citing people familiar with the matter.

It is unclear if Apple will replace Goldman Sachs with another financial services partner, though the chances of that happening appear slim.

Banking giant Citigroup previously passed on the partnership over profitability concerns, CNBC reported in May 2019, citing people with knowledge of the bank's negotiations with Apple.

Representatives for Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from BI sent outside regular business hours.

Disrupting businesses is a tough business

Apple's travails in the financial services sector underscore the immense challenges it faces when trying to disrupt an established industry.

The Cupertino-based giant has a stunning track record for disruption — whether it be with the music industry with the iPod and iTunes or when it reinvented the phone with the iPhone.

However, Apple's recent attempts at innovation haven't hit the same bar.

For one, the company's attempt at a mixed-reality headset, the Apple Vision Pro, was met with muted sales and middling reviews.

And if that wasn't enough, Apple said in the same month that it was pulling the plug on its electric car project after working on it for nearly a decade, per Bloomberg.

In fact, Apple once had dreams of reinventing the television, with the company's late founder, Steve Jobs, proclaiming that he'd figured out how to do it.

"I'd like to create an integrated television set that is completely easy to use," Jobs told his biographer Walter Isaacson. "It will have the simplest user interface you could imagine. I finally cracked it."

It's been over a decade since Jobs' death, and Apple doesn't seem anywhere close to realizing his vision, besides their set-top box Apple TV and its fledgling streaming service Apple TV+.

To be sure, disruption is tough, even for a trillion-dollar tech behemoth like Apple. But the company could increase its chances of success by sticking to what it knows best — making great consumer-facing technology.

While some might view Apple as a laggard in AI, the company has managed to charm the markets with its vision of practical and user-centric AI tools.

Now, a lot could still happen down the line, but offering a highly personalized and seamless AI service is right up Apple's alley.

And for a company whose motto is "Think Different," relying on its ethos instead of deep pockets might be the key to beating the competition.

• Biden's support among swing-state Black voters has cooled considerably compared to 2020.
• Still, he's kept majorities of Black support in must-win Michigan and Pennsylvania, per new polling.
• Trump is hoping to win over more Black voters, but he's not benefiting from Biden's weaker numbers.

Former President Donald Trump is trying to cut into President Joe Biden's support among Black voters this fall, but new swing-state polling shows the former president still has a long way to go.

That's not to say that Biden is currently dominating among this critical group.

Ahead of November, Biden is struggling to recreate the electoral coalition — anchored by overwhelming support among Black voters — that sent him to the White House in 2020.

The latest USAToday/Suffolk University poll of Black voters in Michigan showed Biden leading Trump 54.4% to 15.2%, with 8% of respondents opting for independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr., 6.2% of respondents backing independent Cornel West, and 1% of respondents supporting Green Party candidate Jill Stein. That same poll showed that 13.8% of Black respondents were undecided.

A similar story unfolded in Pennsylvania, where Black voters in that state opted for Biden over Trump 56.2% to 10.8%, with 7.6% of respondents choosing West, 7.4% of respondents supporting Kennedy Jr., and 1% of respondents opting for Stein. And 13.8% of Black respondents were undecided, a mirror image of the Michigan survey.

In 2020, Black voters in both Michigan and Pennsylvania backed Biden over Trump by a whopping 92% to 7% margin, according to exit polling.

While Biden continues to win over a majority of Black voters in both states, his support among this group has softened considerably. And while Trump remains optimistic that he can win more Black support, he's only marginally improved on his 2020 performance.

The swing-state polling shows that one of the biggest threats to Biden being able to replicate his previously-robust showing with Black voters is the emergence of third-party candidates, as well as the share of undecided voters — which includes voters who could potentially sit out the election if they're not persuaded to come out to the polls.

For many Black voters critical of Biden over the conflict in Gaza or skeptical of the president's handling of the economy, third-party candidates — as well as Trump — are potential options.

And it's one of the reasons why the Biden campaign is ramping up its advertising and outreach in an effort to appeal to Black voters, aware that the intensity of their support in key swing states could be X-factor in the race.