Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that the financial realities of the project, which could cost as much as $1.5 trillion, have started to cause alarm within the Saudi government.
In an apparent effort to refute some of these claims, the Saudi economy minister, Faisal Al Ibrahim, told CNBC that all Neom projects were continuing at the planned scale.
"There is no change in scale. It is a long-term project that's modular in design," he said.
"These projects will be delivered to their scale and in a manner that in terms of priorities suits the needs of the projects, the returns of these projects, and the economic impact. It's like minimizing any leakage, minimizing any overheating risks as well," he said.
Al Ibrahim also said the country was seeing growing investor interest in all of the Neom developments. The kingdom has recently been touring its Neom road show, making stops in Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong in an apparent attempt to lure Chinese investors.
Representatives for Neom did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
The comments come two days after the kingdom's finance minister said "challenges" meant adjustments would be made to some aspects of its Vision 2030 plan, of which Neom is the centerpiece.
Speaking at a World Economic Forum meeting in Riyadh on Sunday, Mohammed Al Jadaan said the country would "change course" and "adjust" as needed.
"We will downscale some of the projects, we will accelerate other projects," he said during a session on global economic growth.
Saudi Arabia plans to open Sindalah, the megacity's first region, by the end of the year.
Noel Quinn is stepping down as CEO of the bank HSBC.
Vernon Yuen/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Noel Quinn is leaving HSBC. CEOs are quitting in droves as the top job loses its appeal for some.
There were a record 622 CEO changes at US companies last quarter, up 48% from a year earlier.
Elon Musk has complained his Tesla job is "really not that fun" and he often feels "quite lonely."
It's a tough time to be a CEO, if the crowd of people quitting the top job is any indication.
HSBC's Noel Quinn unexpectedly announced on Tuesday that he'd step down as the bank's boss once its board picks his successor. Paramount Global's Bob Bakish resigned from the media titan on Monday, while Dr Martens' Kenny Wilson recently said this would be his final year in charge of the footwear company.
Their departures are part of a broader trend. There were a record 622 CEO changes at US companies last quarter, a 48% rise from the same period last year and a 27% increase from last quarter. That's according to staffing firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which has been tracking those moves since 2002.
"C-Level leaders have had an incredibly challenging few years, and are transitioning out of their roles, whether for new opportunities or to get fresh starts elsewhere," said Andrew Challenger, the company's senior vice-president, in the latest report.
"Rapid technological advancements, in addition to an election year, may make it a palatable time to make changes at the top."
In recent years, corporate chiefs have contended with everything from labor shortages and strikes to layoffs and culture wars, actual conflicts, the remote-working boom, snarled supply chains, pandemic shutdowns, historic inflation, surging interest rates, and a deeply uncertain economic outlook.
Perhaps it's no wonder that the median tenure for S&P 500 bosses has fallen from six years in 2013 to below five years in 2022, per one analysis of CEO longevity.
Pressure, stress, and loneliness
Head honchos have been calling out the difficulties of their jobs for years.
"Being a CEO sucks," Emad Mostaque, the former boss of Stability AI, said in March.
"After an intense five years, it is now the right time for me to get a better balance between my personal and business life," HSBC's Quinn said in a press release on Tuesday, underscoring how top dogs struggle to juggle their jobs with their other responsibilities.
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has bemoaned that running a company is "really not that fun" and "just awful" at times. CEOs are lumped with the "crappiest problems in the company" that nobody else can solve, he said.
Musk also lamented in 2022 that he sometimes feels "quite lonely" if he's living alone while working on a project and doesn't even have his dog for companionship.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Grzegorz Wajda/SOPA/Getty Images
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky has had a similar experience. "The depths of loneliness I experienced as a CEO are difficult to put into words," he posted on X in January.
The combination of immense pressure, stress, loneliness, and lack of work-life balance that often comes with being a CEO may well explain why few people last long in the role. The raft of recent challenges likely fueled last quarter's exodus from the top job.
But there are exceptions to every trend: Warren Buffett has been the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway for more than half a century.
The 93-year-old has probably lasted so long because he employs an army of CEOs to manage the scores of businesses he's acquired over the years.
"We delegate almost to the point of abdication," he wrote in his "Owner's Manual" for Berkshire shareholders. Handing off daily responsibilities lets Buffett focus on what he loves to do: allocate capital within and outside of his company.
In the early hours of Tuesday morning, protesters declared they had taken over Hamilton Hall, flying a Palestinian flag from the building's windows. An NBC News reporter said windows had been smashed, and dozens of people had entered the building.
CNN reported that about 200 student protesters had barricaded the building's entrance, with about a dozen people inside. John Towfighi, a CNN staffer and Columbia student, told the outlet there was no visible police presence.
An NYPD spokesperson told NBC that officers were "outside the campus, not on the grounds" just before 2 a.m.
The Columbia Spectator student newspaper reported that dozens of protesters had occupied Hamilton Hall, using metal gates, tables and chairs as barricades and zip-tying doors shut.
Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine issued a press release on X early on Tuesday in which they declared protesters would remain until the university met its demands of "divestment, financial transparency and amnesty."
The group posted a video on X that appeared to show student protesters forming a human chain to protect those occuping Hamilton Hall.
Protesters who entered the building, where the dean's office is located, were reportedly heard chanting: "Disclose, divest. We will not stop, we will not rest."
On Monday, Columbia president Nemat Minouche Shafik released a statement announcing the university would not "divest from Israel." The university also ordered protesters to leave their encampment by a 2 p.m. deadline and threatened students who defied the order with suspension.
Shafik appealed directly to Jewish students in the statement, saying: "I know that many of our Jewish students, and other students as well, have found the atmosphere intolerable in recent weeks. Many have left campus, and that is a tragedy."
Columbia University did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours. It's told staff and students to avoid the campus on Tuesday, The New York Times reported.
Last week, the university moved to online-only tuition due to the escalating protests.
The protesters say they are peaceful, but campus tensions have sparked concerns in the Jewish community. Rabbi Elie Buechler wrote to Jewish students to "strongly recommend" they leave campus for their safety, CNN reported.
The action is part of a wave of protests at a number of universities across the country in recent weeks over the Israel-Hamas war.
Musk's fortune, closely tied to his 20.5% stake in Tesla, has fluctuated considerably over the past few years.
Despite the latest rally, the SpaceX CEO has seen his personal wealth drop by $27.5 billion since the start of the year, according to Bloomberg data, as Tesla shares have trended downward.
Shares rose by 12% on Monday's opening bell following Musk's surprise trip to China, which Wedbush analyst Dan Ives described as a "home run," although they are still down nearly 22% since the start of the year.
Musk is also still a lot less rich than he was in 2021, when he was top of the billionaire's index with an estimated fortune of $340 billion. Three years later, he's now behind LVMH boss Bernard Arnault and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with a current estimated net worth of $202 billion.
Musk has had a difficult few months. Tesla briefly lost its crown as the world's largest producer of electric vehicles to Chinese upstart BYD, and laid off more than 10% of its global workforce earlier this month.
But Musk has proved adept at spinning bad news into share price bumps in the past, raking in $100 billion last year despite ongoing issues at social media site X, and after a bumpy few weeks, it looks like he's been able to do it again.
Tesla did not immediately respond to a request for comment made outside normal working hours.
Apple has lured away 36 Googlers with AI expertise since 2018, the Financial Times reported.
It's part of a broader talent war among Big Tech firms seeking to bolster their AI capabilities.
The battle could escalate when Microsoft opens an AI hub on Google DeepMind's home turf in London.
Apple has convinced at least 36 Googlers with AI expertise to jump ship since 2018, according to a Financial Times analysis of LinkedIn profiles.
An Apple research paper on multimodal large language models published last month listed six authors who were former Google staff and had been recruited in the past two years, the report says.
Nine of the 31 authors listed on the research paper had Google listed as their last employer on their LinkedIn profiles, Business Insider found, and two authors came from Microsoft.
Some senior Microsoft leaders have also departed to join other firms in roles with an AI focus, Fortune recently reported. They include former executive Gurdeep Singh Pall, who became software management firm Qualtrics' AI president earlier this month.
It's not just the Big Tech firms competing for AI talent. Even startups are trying to secure expertise that will help them to expand.
The newly appointed CEO of Microsoft AI, Mustafa Suleyman, told the FT last month: "It is hyper-competitive at both ends of the spectrum. At the small, start-up scale everybody is on fire in terms of their creativity. And at the big end, everyone's going head-to-head there, too. I think it's just a ferociously competitive time to be working in tech."
Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, made outside normal working hours.
New York, Austin, and LA were the top cities tech talent moved to in 2023, according to a report.
San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston lost the greatest share of relocating tech workers.
Several places attracting tech workers are "blue island" cities in red states.
Tech talent making moves aren't just ending up in Austin and Miami.
In fact, the No. 1 place tech workers moved to in 2023 was New York City, according to a recent SignalFire report.
While the San Francisco Bay Area is still the center of the tech world, a migration of tech employees out of California has continued since the rise in remote work.
Among tech workers who relocated last year, the most common states for them to end up included New York, Texas, California, and Florida, according to the SignalFire report.
The top nine cities tech workers relocated to were:
New York City, New York
Austin, Texas
Los Angeles, California
Denver, Colorado
San Diego, California
Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Florida
Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas
Nashville, Tennessee
Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida
New York had a net gain in tech talent of about 3.5%, while Austin had a gain of about 1.5%. In third was Los Angeles, with a net gain of around 0.5%
Meanwhile, the nine cities tech workers moved away from were:
San Francisco, California
Seattle, Washington
Boston, Massachusetts
Phoenix, Arizona
Washington, DC
Sacramento, California
Portland, Oregon
Detroit, Michigan
Provo, Utah
San Francisco saw a net loss in tech talent of over 3.5%, while Seattle lost just under 2.5%, and Boston lost more than 0.5 percent.
Fifteen percent of all tech employees who moved between 2023 and 2024 went to New York, according to the report. New York drew a significant share of the tech workers who relocated from San Francisco, Boston, and Seattle, among other cities.
The trend of people moving out of San Francisco and California, generally, to cities in Texas and Florida, has been partially explained by a desire to escape high costs of living. But New York City managed to draw the biggest share of tech workers who moved last year despite its high housing prices and cost of living.
Several of the cities attracting tech workers also happen to be "blue island" cities located in red states, such as Austin, Nashville, Tampa, and Miami.
An emergency exit slide came off a Delta Air Lines Boeing 767 on Friday.
A lawyer, whose firm is suing Boeing over the Alaska blowout, spotted it outside his home two days later.
He told the New York Post the firm hasn't decided if the slide is relevant to its case.
An emergency slide that came off a Delta Boeing 767 was found by a lawyer whose firm is suing Boeing, the New York Post reported.
"Our case is all about safety issues at Boeing, and this slide is literally right in front of my house," Jake Bissell-Linsk told the newspaper.
The wild coincidence happened on Sunday, two days after the slide fell off the Boeing 767 operated by Delta Air Lines.
Flight 520 was flying from New York's JFK Airport to Los Angeles on Friday, April 26 — but was forced to turn back after the incident. It was only in the air for around an hour.
A warning on the flight deck and a "non-routine sound from near the right wing" alerted the crew to a problem before the missing slide was observed upon landing, a Delta spokesperson previously told Business Insider.
Bissell-Linsk, a partner at law firm Labaton Keller Sucharow, told the Post he was looking out the window of his oceanfront home in Queens when he spotted the slide.
The Missing emergency escape slide that fell off Delta Air Lines Boeing 767-300 aircraft (N176DN) on 27 April, have been found, as it washed up in front of house of lawyer whose firm is suing Boeing.
"We are right on the beach and I saw it was sitting on the breakers," he added. Bissell-Linsk said a crew of Delta workers turned up to pull it out of the water about five hours later.
A Delta spokesperson confirmed to the Post that it had retrieved the slide and added, "we will fully cooperate with all relevant investigations."
Bissell-Linsk's firm is representing Boeing shareholders in a case, filed on January 30, that claims the planemaker made misleading statements about safety following the Alaska Airlines blowout.
That incident, which saw a door plug come off a 737 Max 9 in midair, has marred Boeing's reputation and resulted in its CEO resigning.
However, it should be noted that since the Delta Boeing 767 was built in 1990, the incident points to a maintenance issue rather than the planemaker's fault. By contrast, the Alaska 737 was delivered to the carrier just 66 days before the blowout.
"We haven't decided if the slide is relevant to our case," Bissell-Linsk told the Post.
Pool/Getty Images, Douglas Sacha/Getty Images, Abanti Chowdhury/BI
The Federal Reserve is expected to once again hold interest rates steady on Wednesday.
Some predictions also do not forecast any interest rate cuts until the second half of the year.
Powell has emphasized the importance of more data before deciding to cut rates.
It's probably still not time for the nation's central bank to cut interest rates just yet.
On Wednesday, the Federal Open Market Committee will announce whether it will continue holding interest rates steady or give Americans some relief, and it's looking likely it will choose the former — according to the CME FedWatch Tool, which estimates the market's views onprobabilities for interest rate changes, there is a 97.1% chance rates will remain unchanged as of Monday morning.
It all comes down to the data. Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter, told Business Insider after the jobs report published earlier in April that it was "the Fed's holy grail: strong job market with non-inflationary growth."
That report showed average hourly earnings growth cooled in March, the unemployment rate wasn't too high, and there was strong job growth, with 303,000 jobs added. In addition to the growth in January and February, these monthly job gains indicate that 2024 has had a strong labor market so far.
However, even with the strong data, inflation isn't quite where it needs to be. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said he needsto see more consistent proof that the economy is moving in the right direction before cutting interest rates, stressing that it's best to hold off rather than cut too early — and risk having to hike rates again.
Inflation based on the consumer price index and the personal consumption expenditures price index both accelerated in March — the CPI rose 3.5% year-over-year in March after a 3.2% reading in February.
"The recent data have clearly not given us greater confidence and instead indicate that it's likely to take longer than expected to achieve that confidence," Powell said during a panel discussion in Washington in April.
Thursday's news release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis about GDP showed the US economy continued to slow. Real GDP growth at an annualized rate ended up cooling down more than expected — with an estimate of 1.6% compared to the 2.5% forecast.
Given that inflation is still above the Fed's 2% target, it's looking like rate cuts might not come until the second half of 2024. According to the CME FedWatch Tool, there's an 88.4% chance rates will remain steady again after the Fed's next meeting in June, with just an 11.3% chance of a rate cut.
"Right now, given the strength of the labor market and progress on inflation so far, it's appropriate to allow restrictive policy further time to work," Powell said during the April panel discussion. His cautious remarks have some experts predicting that cuts will likely not come until July at the earliest.
"With Powell indicating the Fed should allow restrictive policy further time to work and a clear majority of policymakers favoring two or fewer rate cuts, we expect only two 25bps rate cuts in 2024 in July and November," Gregory Daco, EY's chief economist, said in a recent commentary.
Still, some Democratic lawmakers have been urging Powell to consider cutting rates sooner rather than later to provide relief to Americans who are struggling with high prices. Ahead of the FOMC's March decision to hold rates steady, a group of 23 Democrats asked Powell to "seriously consider the harmful economic consequences of maintaining excessively high interest rates for an unnecessarily long period of time."
For now, proceeding carefully is Powell's core focus — and it'll likely mean the relief Americans want will not come until the second half of this year.
"Despite evidence that economic growth is beginning to slow, the Federal Reserve isn't as close to cutting interest rates as they thought they might be at their last meeting in March," Greg McBride, chief financial analyst for Bankrate, said in a statement. "Inflation has continued to run hot and there is no compelling need for the Fed to cut interest rates until they're comfortable with where inflation is headed."
Over the past year or so, pretty much everyone who's looked for a job has told me the same thing: The job market is brutal right now. They've applied to dozens if not hundreds of openings, only to get one or two callbacks. No one's hiring, they tell me. I've never seen it this bad.
Listening to them, you'd think we were in the middle of a recession. But the confusing thing is we're nowhere close to one. Unemployment is near a five-decade low. The economy is adding hundreds of thousands of jobs each month. Wages are growing faster than inflation. By all the standard measures, the job market is doing just fine. So why am I hearing such a different story from people on the ground?
The dissonance finally started to make sense to me when Vanguard, the investment-management company, released its latest report on hiring. By looking atthe enrollment and contribution rates of its 401(k) retirement plans, Vanguard is able to calculate a national hiring rate broken down by income level. And what the numbers show is a two-tier job market — one divided between a blue-collar boom and a white-collar recession.
Among Vanguard's lowest earners — those who make less than $55,000 — the hiring rate has held up well. At 1.5%, it's still above pre-pandemic levels. But among those who make more than $96,000? It's pretty depressing. Hiring has slowed to a dismal 0.5%, less than half the peak it reached in mid-2022. Excluding the dip in the early months of the pandemic, that's the worst it's been since 2014. If you make a six-figure salary, it really is a bad time to be looking for a job.
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The question here is why. Why are companies hiring so few white-collar workers right now? Several possible explanations come to mind. It might be that fewer people in corporate jobs are quitting right now, which would mean companies have fewer openings they need to fill. It might be that the industries that are struggling the most — tech and finance — are the ones that employ a lot of high-earning professionals. Or it might be that CEOs are making good on their threats to cut back on what they see as corporate bloat — what Mark Zuckerberg has called "managers managing managers, managing managers, managing managers, managing the people who are doing the work."
But there could be a bigger, more worrisome explanation for the downturn in white-collar hiring. Maybe companies are anticipating tough times ahead and trimming their budgets accordingly. "If you need to pull back on costs," says Fiona Greig, the global head of investor research and policy at Vanguard, "pulling back on expensive workers will reduce costs to a greater extent than pulling back on your lower-income workers." Translation: The more you earn when budgets are tight, the less an employer wants to hire you.
Now, you could argue that a slowdown in white-collar hiring doesn't really matter in the current economy, even for white-collar workers. Sure, Vanguard's data show that things are tough for professionals who are looking for a job. But there aren't that many people who actually need a new job right now: The unemployment rate for people with a college degree is 2.1%, and the national layoff rate is below what it was pre-pandemic. When the vast majority of professionals already have a job — and are able to keep their jobs — maybe it's OK that companies aren't hiring.
But that argument doesn't take into account one important factor: What if the job you have is one you hate? I have several friends who are unhappy in their current jobs, but they can't quit because no one is hiring. Some observers have called this combination of lower hiring and less quitting "the Big Stay," suggesting a kind of equilibrium after the chaos of the Great Resignation. But my colleague Emily Stewart has a better name for it: the "trapped in place" economy. I think professionals feel this trapped-in-placeness particularly acutely. After all, it wasn't that long ago that they were enjoying a "take this job and shove it" swagger, which was fun to watch. During the Great Resignation, they knew it'd be easy to find a new job, which meant it'd be easy to walk away from their current one. Even if they weren't planning to leave, the job market gave them a sense of freedom — the feeling that they no longer had to put up with a bad boss, or a brutal workload, or an arbitrary return-to-office mandate.
This, I think, is what explains what people are calling the "vibecession": the weird state of feeling like we're in a recession even though all the standard metrics show we're not. What we're experiencing is actually a slowdown in white-collar hiring — and white-collar professionals (me and my angsty friends) are the people who shape the public discourse about the economy. "People feel that things are moving in the wrong direction," says Guy Berger, the director of economic research at the Burning Glass Institute, which analyzes the labor market.
And for the most elite professionals, things could get worse before they get better. Berger tells me he doesn't expect a full-on recession anytime soon. But he's keeping an eye on the unemployment rate for people with advanced degrees. Pretty much everyone else is doing OK, job-wise — but there's been a slight uptick for all the smarty-pants with master's degrees and doctorates. They aren't exactly struggling right now. "We're still talking about the people that have the highest pay in the job market and the lowest unemployment rate," Berger says. But for them, hiring is headed in the wrong direction. And as AI tools increasingly encroach on professionals' tasks — writing, coding, coordination, analysis — we'll likely see a lot more weakness at the higher end of the income scale than at the lower end.
This isn't the story we're used to hearing about employment. For decades the economy has been leaving workers with lower incomes and less education behind while professionals have reaped all the gains. But now those roles are reversed, and it's the high earners who are taking the hit. No wonder everyone is confused about how the economy is doing. "We're having some trouble collectively digesting that," Berger says. And the longer the white-collar hiring lull continues, he warns, the more the resentment will build.
"Even if there's no big surge in layoffs, people are just going to get grumpier and more dissatisfied," Berger says. "If it continues for three or four more years, it's going to cause a lot of discontent and low morale in corporate America."
Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider.
"I did partly pick it because 8/8 is a lucky number in China!" Musk told X user Michel de Guilhermier on Monday. This was after the latter pointed out the date's significance in Chinese culture.
The date, Musk added, was also chosen because it is the birthday of his triplets. Musk fathered the triplets — Kai, Saxon, and Damian — with his first wife, Justine Musk.
I did partly pick it because 8/8 is a lucky number in China! Also, the birthday of my triplets, who are now 17.
The number eight is seen as an auspicious digit in Chinese culture. This is because it has a similar pronunciation to the Chinese word for wealth and prosperity. When China hosted the Olympics in 2008, they opened the games officially at 8 p.m., on August 8.
With Tesla's growing troubles over sluggish sales and declining revenue, the Chinese market is now of vital importance to the company's survival and growth.
Musk also received a critical lifeline from China over the weekend, when officials gave their in-principle approval for Tesla to roll out its Full Self-Driving technology in the country, Bloomberg reported on Monday citing an individual familiar with the matter.