Tag: News

• Google Slides is Google's slideshow presentation program that allows real time collaboration.
• Google Slides is part of the Google Workspace suite, which also includes Google Docs and Gmail.
• Google Slides differs from Microsoft PowerPoint in its simplicity and collaboration options.

Google Slides is a presentation program that's part of Google Workspace, a group of productivity apps that also includes Gmail, Google Sheets, Goole Docs, Google Meet, and more. Workspace has more than 3 billion users worldwide. 

With Google Slides, users can create, present, and collaborate via online presentations from various devices. You can present during Google Meet calls directly from Slides and embed charts from Google Sheets. You can also add YouTube videos to Slides presentations. 

Google recently announced plans to add artificial intelligence features like its Gemini AI tool to its Workspace programs, which include Slides. Users will be able to use Gemini to create images or written content for slides, or even reference other files in their Drives or emails in their Gmail accounts.

What is Google Slides? 

Google Slides is a cloud-based presentation program that's part of the Google Workspace. Google Slides can be used to create and deliver presentations online. 

Several different themes are available in Slides for designing presentations. Users can customize Slides presentations in a variety of colors and styles. You can add photos, videos from YouTube, charts from Google Sheets, and information from many other sources. Different members of a team can contribute and collaborate on the presentation in real time. 

There's no specific limit on how many slides you can add to your Google Slides presentation, but there is a 100 MB file size limit.

How to download Google Slides 

To access Google Slides, visit slides.google.com. 

You can also open Slides while Gmail or Google Chrome is open by clicking on the Google Apps icon in the upper-right corner (shown as three rows of dots) and selecting Slides. 

Another option is to download the Google Slides app for your Apple or Android device. Search for Google Slides in the Apple App Store or Google Play Store.

What templates are available? 

Dozens of Google Slides templates are available, depending on your needs. For instance, there are general presentation templates, photography portfolios, pitch decks, case studies, science fair projects, and more. 

To browse the templates available, open Google Slides. Then, click Template Gallery in the upper-right corner. Scroll through the options, choose the one that meets your needs, and start creating a presentation. 

What's the difference between Google Slides and PowerPoint? 

Both Google Slides and PowerPoint are presentation programs. Google Slides is a program within Google Workspace, and PowerPoint is a Microsoft program. PowerPoint is an offline program, while Slides is online which allows for real time collaboration.

The programs share many features that allow for presentation creation and delivery, but PowerPoint may offer more advanced design features. 

You can convert Google Slides into PowerPoint presentations, and vice versa. From the top menu in Slides, click File, Download, and choose Microsoft PowerPoint. 

How to learn to use Google Slides 

Through Google Workspace, you can access several quick-start guides, cheat sheets, and troubleshooting resources to help you learn to use Google Slides. There are also many YouTube videos with tutorials for using Slides.

• Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said the company's newest AI chip will start shipping next quarter.
• The Blackwell chip is twice as fast Nvidia's current Hopper chip. 
• Huang made the announcement during a Wednesday earnings call.

Nvidia's new era of computing is already well underway.

In a gangbusters earnings call on Wednesday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang laid out an accelerated timeline for the deployment of Blackwell, the company's newest AI chip that is twice as fast as Nvidia's current iteration and boasts five times the AI performance.

Huang unveiled the Blackwell chip earlier this year in March, but the company has been working on its production for some time now, he said this week.

During the question-and-answer portion of the quarterly call, Huang said production shipments of Blackwell will start in the second quarter and ramp up in Q3. According to Huang, customers should have data centers up and running by the fourth quarter.

"We will see a lot of Blackwell revenue this year," Huang said during the call.

The company's hot streak doesn't appear to be slowing anytime soon. Nvidia stock surged to record highs on Wednesday afternoon following first-quarter earnings results, which saw the chip maker report a 262% surge in year-over-year revenues.

"We are poised for our next wave of growth," Huang said, citing the Blackwell platform.

But even as Huang offered a bullish perspective on Blackwell, excitement for the coming chip doesn't seem to be killing demand for Nvidia's current hardware.

"We see increasing demand of Hopper through this quarter," Huang said, adding that he expects demand to outstrip supply for "some time" as Nvidia transitions to Blackwell.

Blackwell systems have been designed to be "backwards compatible" with Hoppers for an easy transition from one to the other, Huang said Wednesday.

The next-generation graphics processor will cost between $30,000 and $40,000 per unit, Huang said back in March. 

But even as Nvidia courts unparalleled success, possible challenges loom ahead, as competitors work tirelessly to develop rival chips, Business Insider reported ahead of Wednesday's call.

• Millennials are "quiet vacationing" or taking time off without informing their employers.
• A Harris Poll found that 38% of millennials have taken secret time off, more than Gen Zers and Gen Xers.
• Many workers face pressure to be always available, which may be blurring lines between work and PTO.

Quiet quitting — coasting along at your job without actually leaving it or giving up your salary — became all the rage in the early years of the remote work era, but some workers have found another way to take a break from their jobs.

Rather than coast along indefinitely, some employees are opting to take time off without formally taking any paid time off, let alone informing their bosses.

It's called "quiet vacationing," and millennials, in particular, seem to love it.

Nearly four out of 10 millennials said they've taken time off work without actually informing their employer, according to a new survey of 1,170 employed Americans conducted by The Harris Poll. That's compared to 24% of Gen Zers and Gen Xers who reported doing the same. The survey was conducted online between April 26 and 28.

Millennials were also more likely to say they have taken actions to make it appear like they are working when they really aren't: 38% of millennials said they've moved their mouse just to keep their status on messaging apps active compared to 30% of Gen Zers.

They even want to look like they're working when they're supposed to be off the clock, with 37% of millennials saying they've purposefully scheduled a message to send outside their usual hours to make it look like they're working overtime. Only 27% of Gen Zers said they've done the same.

"There's a giant workaround culture at play," Libby Rodney, The Harris Poll's chief strategy officer, told CNBC, adding, "It's not exactly quiet quitting, but more like quiet vacationing."

Millennials may be quiet vacationing more than other groups due to generational differences. Rodney told CNBC that Gen Z is more vocal about criticizing employers that don't have a good work-life balance, while millennials are more likely to find a quiet workaround "behind the scenes."

The Harris Poll also found that 78% of American workers reported not using all their PTO days, with nearly as many saying they wish they were able to take all of their available days off.

About a third of respondents said the biggest barriers to them taking more PTO was pressure to always be available and meet work demands, as well as a heavy workload.

More than half of employees said they had taken work-related calls while on vacation, while 86% said they'd check an email from their boss while on PTO, suggesting that work time and personal time may be bleeding into each other in both directions.

Have you taken time off without telling your employer? Have a news tip or story to share? Contact this reporter at kvlamis@businessinsider.com or through secure-messaging app Signal at 708-476-8802.

• Another OpenAI employee quit over safety concerns after two high-profile resignations.
• Gretchen Kruger announced her resignation on X, echoing the concerns of Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike.
• Kruger said tech firms can "disempower those seeking to hold them accountable" by sowing division. 

OpenAI faces more turmoil as another employee announces she quit over safety concerns.

It comes after the resignations of high-profile executives Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, who ran its now-dissolved safety research team Superalignments.

Gretchen Kruger announced in a thread on X on Wednesday that she quit the ChatGPT maker on May 14 and that it "was not an easy decision to make."

Kruger wrote, "I resigned a few hours before hearing the news about @ilyasut and @janleike, and I made my decision independently. I share their concerns. I also have additional and overlapping concerns."

She added that more needs to be done to improve "decision-making processes; accountability; transparency; documentation; policy enforcement; the care with which we use our own technology; and mitigations for impacts on inequality, rights, and the environment."

The former policy research worker said that people and communities share these worries and "influence how aspects of the future can be charted, and by whom" and that they shouldn't be "misread as narrow, speculative, or disconnected."

In another post, she wrote, "One of the ways tech companies in general can disempower those seeking to hold them accountable is to sow division among those raising concerns or challenging their power. I care deeply about preventing this."

Last week, chief scientist and cofounder Ilya Sutskever announced his resignation, followed by executive Jan Leike. The pair co-led its Superalignment team, which was tasked with building safeguards to prevent artificial general intelligence from going rogue.

Leike accused OpenAI of putting "shiny products" ahead of safety
and claimed that the Superalignment team was "struggling for compute" resources and that "it was getting harder and harder to get this crucial research done."

The exits this and last week followed those of two other safety researchers, Daniel Kokotajlo and William Saunders, who quit in recent months over similar reasons. Kokotajlo said he left after "losing confidence that it [OpenAI] would behave responsibly around the time of AGI."

OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Testimony concluded Tuesday in the Trump hush-money trial in Manhattan.
• The parties then argued over how the judge will instruct the jury on the law.
• "Less is better," the judge has said. Still, the jury charge will be long and complex.

Lawyers in the Donald Trump hush-money trial spent Tuesday afternoon in a spirited battle over this question: what will the judge tell jurors right before they begin their deliberations next week?

The prosecution and defense fought for three hours over this, the so-called "jury charge," splitting hairs over what language New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan will use to instruct the seven-man, five-woman jury on the law.

The level of skill and fervor in these arguments was no surprise.

The jury charge is so important, so sacrosanct, that Merchan will order the doors to his courtroom sealed for its duration, with no one in the well or audience allowed to enter or leave.

He will then tell jurors something like this:

"Under our law, a person is guilty of falsifying business records in the first degree when, with intent to defraud that includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof, that person makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise."

These are the opening paragraphs to the New York state court system's jury-charge guidelines for falsifying business records in the first degree.

It's the basic starting template for any New York judge who needs to charge a jury on what's known in legal shorthand as first-degree falsifying.

Trump has been charged with 34 counts of this one felony. That's the entirety of his indictment. There's one count for each of 34 invoices, checks, and Trump Organization ledger entries — all of the records that Trump allegedly "caused" to be falsified throughout 2017, his first year in office.

Prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg allege that each falsified invoice, check, and ledger entry counts as a felony because it concealed an underlying crime. (They say the underlying crime is a state election law violation — more about that in a bit.)

How were they allegedly falsified?

Bragg says each of the 34 records disguised the true nature of a year's worth of payments to Trump "fixer"-turned-foe Michael Cohen by making the payments look like monthly legal retainer fees.

In reality, Bragg alleges, Trump wasn't paying Cohen a monthly retainer at all — he was instead concealing an illegal conspiracy to influence the 2016 election.

Rather than compensating Cohen for legal work — Cohen testified he only did a few hours of work for Trump in all of 2017 — the payments secretly reimbursed Cohen in monthly installments for a campaign-law-violating $130,000 hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, prosecutors allege.

How do they decide?

OK it's a little tricky.

Let's say business records were indeed falsified to hide hush money. That's the coverup of a coverup. And let's say that the hush-money payment — which silenced Daniels just 11 days before the 2016 election — was itself illegal. That's a crime within a crime.

Still, it's not terribly tricky, right?

Trump faces 34 counts of only a single charge, first-degree falsifying, for which the standard charging language barely fills two pages.

And for each count, the jury must consider just two things: whether Trump caused the record to be falsified, and whether he did so to hide his intent to commit "another crime."

If prosecutors meet their burden to prove both tiers — falsification and intent to conceal another crime — beyond a reasonable doubt, then Trump is guilty. If they don't, then Trump is not guilty.

Prosecutors don't even have to prove that "another crime" was actually committed. They just have to prove that Trump intended to commit another crime and then falsified records to hide his tracks.

The jury charge for this single felony should be easy, right? Clear-cut and beyond dispute?

Wrong.

Yes, first-degree falsifying is the only law in Trump's indictment.

But it's not the only law jurors must understand and weigh when they begin deliberations as early as Wednesday.

Prosecutors allege that Trump falsified the hush-money reimbursements in order to conceal his intent to commit an obscure New York election-conspiracy law.

This is what they mean by Trump's "intent to commit another crime." Under the prosecution theory, this "another crime" is election law section 17-152, which it makes it a misdemeanor to conspire to influence an election "by unlawful means."

A crime within a crime within a crime

So you see, to win a conviction, prosecutors must demonstrate three layers of unlawfulness involving at least three separate laws.

They're alleging Trump committed a crime (under the Federal Elections Campaign Act) within a crime (under the state election-conspiracy law) within a crime (the first-degree falsifying charge he's actually indicted on).

It's a Russian nesting doll of wrongdoing, though only the outermost doll, first-degree falsifying, needs to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Prosecutors also plan to give jurors two alternatives to the FECA violation, that innermost of the three nesting dolls.

These alternatives are a violation of federal, state, and/or city tax laws (alleging that Cohen's hush-money reimbursements were unlawfully disguised as taxable income) and yet another records-falsification violation (alleging that Trump was responsible for bogus hush-money paperwork at the National Enquirer.)

That means three layers of wrongdoing under a half-dozen potentially applicable laws, all with their own wording and definitions, much of which had to be argued over on Tuesday.

What is a "conspiracy?" What is "intent?" What is "accessorial liability?" Do those definitions differ, law to law?

And then there were broader, more arcane questions, including this one:

Must jurors agree unanimously on the "unlawful means" at the center of the case?

Meaning, must all jurors find that, in causing Cohen to pay the hush money, Trump conspired to violate FECA campaign-contribution limits? Or can some jurors find that Trump conspired to violate tax law, while other jurors see the falsification of National Enquirer business records as the central offense?

In other words, do jurors need to be unanimous in deciding which of the three options, if any, is the central unlawfulness?

That brings us back to Tuesday's charge conference and why the sides fought for three hours as the defendant, and many in the audience struggled to stay awake.

"This is, obviously, an extraordinarily important case," defense lawyer Emil Bove told the judge, in arguing that jurors be instructed that they must unanimously decide on an underlying wrongdoing.

"The most critical point here is that the jury does not need to conclude unanimously what the specific unlawful means are," Matthew Colangelo, a prosecutor, argued back Tuesday, referring to "well-established New York law."

"So I think the key point here for this instruction is to advise the jury that, yes, there has to be some unlawful means, and to alert them as to what those unlawful means are, but also advise them that they don't have to unanimously agree on each of the unlawful means," he added.

"We think your honor has some discretion," countered Bove.

Merchan was not swayed. 

"I think I understand what you're saying, what you mean when you're saying it's an important case," Merchan told Trump's lawyer. "What you're asking me to do is change the law, and I'm not going to do that."

Charging the jury is a tedious task

Tuesday's debate was granular stuff.

In general, Bove pushed for longer, more complex definitions of such terms as "contribution" and "unlawful means." This was in the apparent hope that the narrower the definitions, the less likely jurors would find that Trump's actions fell within their bounds.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, fought to keep the charge as simple as possible.

"As we discussed, we think the jury needs less, not more, on FECA instructions," Colangelo, the prosecutor, argued at one point Tuesday.

"And we think the term, 'for the purpose of influencing an election' is a pretty straightforward term that jurors can understand," Colangelo added.

In awarding the most "wins" to prosecutors, Merchan chose brevity over expansiveness.

"Some of the issues are confusing enough, I think," the judge said Tuesday. "We want to make it as easy as possible for the jury."

Merchan told prosecutors and Trump's lawyers that he'll give them the final draft of his instructions on Thursday.

He told jurors to expect his charge to last "at least an hour."

• Nvidia's Q1 revenue hit a record $26 billion, surpassing analyst estimates.
• Nvidia also gave a bullish second-quarter sales forecast.
• Demand for its new AI chips may exceed supply well into next year, it said.

Tech's hottest stock isn't cooling down anytime soon.

Nvidia released its fiscal first-quarter results on Wednesday and reported record quarterly revenues of $26 billion — outdoing analyst estimates for $24.65 billion. That's up over 260% from a year ago, showing that raging demand for its chips, which are used to power artificial intelligence technology, is still growing.

Nvidia shared a solid forecast for the future, too, saying second-quarter revenue will be about $28 billion, also ahead of expectations.

The news helped push Nvidia's shares up in late trading to above $1,000 for the first time. The stock has risen more than 200% in the last twelve months.

Even as customers wait for Blackwell, Nvidia's next GPU chip, to be released later this year, sales of its H100 chip are still strong, the company said. CFO Colette Kress also told investors on a call that demand for its H200 and Blackwell chips is well ahead of supply as the company works towards global availability of the latter later this year.

"We expect demand may exceed supply well into next year," Kress said.

Meantime, CEO Jensen Huang said the company would see "a lot of Blackwell revenue this year."

Nvidia also raised its quarterly dividend by 150%, from four to 10 cents per share, and announced a 10-for-1 stock split, effective next month.

Jacob Bourne, a senior analyst at Emarketer, a sister company to Business Insider, said Nvidia defied gravity again as "AI companies globally continue to depend on its chips, networking hardware, and its software ecosystem."

Some tech giants have recently announced plans to create their own chips to help power their AI offerings. Google is making its own Arm-based CPU processor, Axion, and Microsoft is also attempting to develop its own AI chips. However, most companies are still relying on Nvidia.

"Tech companies' public praise of Nvidia is a telltale sign of its dominance — they want to reduce their dependence on the chipmaker but realize they're not quite there yet," Bourne said. "We can expect that more bold innovative moves from Nvidia will help it maintain its industry position for the foreseeable future."

• The Regeneron ISEF is a huge science fair that attracts top talent from all over the world.
• This year, the competition awarded $9 million in prizes. It has a history of prestigious winners.
• That can make for a stressful competition, but parents shouldn't add to it, CEO Maya Ajmera said.

What's been called the "granddaddy" of science fairs took place last week.

With over $9 million in prizes and heaps of prestige, the Regeneron International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) attracts some of the best and brightest students from around the world, like Hawaii and California as well as Kildare, Ireland and Shanghai, China.

Past winners include Nobel Prize recipients, Rhodes Scholars, and MacArthur Foundation genius grant awardees.

With that kind of money and acclaim on the line, it's not surprising that the atmosphere surrounding the competition is intense.

"I think a lot of kids who are here actually — I don't think I'm reading it wrong — are truly excited to be here," said Maya Ajmera, the president and CEO of the Society for Science, which coordinates ISEF. "But they also feel the pressure of wanting to win and the pressure of going to college," she told Business Insider last week.

The biggest mistake that parents with ambitious, curious kids can make is adding to that pressure, she said.

Besides, between addictive social media, the climate crisis, growing up during the pandemic, and feeling lonelier than ever, Gen Z already has more than enough sources of anxiety.

Stepping back and letting the kids do the work

While it can be useful to have a parent invested in helping their kid meet deadlines and make a nice-looking poster, some adults take it too far. Ajmera advises parents to "stand back and let your kid do it."

"Get out of their way," she said, "and don't pressure them too much."

If competing at ISEF is any indication of success, then Ajmera's advice certainly seems to work. Parents of ISEF competitors who spoke with Business Insider shared her philosophy.

"We never pressure them," Maria Estrada, whose two children have both competed and won awards at ISEF, told Business Insider. Estrada said she's never expected her children to have 5.0 GPAs, and that she's even asked her daughter to slow down and be a kid.

"I accepted my kids for who they are," she added. "I think it's important for parents to know their kids' abilities."

Another parent, Alexa Groff, has a daughter, Taylor, who competes in science fairs and is a competitive dancer. She said that a friend recently told her she'd expected Groff to be an intense "dance mom" who showed up early to everything.

In reality, the friend told her she was "super-duper chill."

"I think it's important for Taylor to explore her passions without my hand in it," Groff said. When her daughter wanted to quit volleyball, for example, she said she let it happen and supported the decision."I want her to figure things out on her own, but know that I'm there for whatever she needs me for," Groff said.

Combining passion and hard work to solve problems

As part of the ISEF competition, nearly 2,000 students from 49 states and 70 countries gathered in Los Angeles to showcase their research to judges. ISEF pulls the finalists from 400 smaller science fairs from around the world, taking the winners from a pool of 175,000 competitors.

While not typically at the same level as peer-reviewed scientific research, ISEF students' topics can be as sophisticated as microbial genetics, bone tumors, and microplastic filtration.

Far from overly involving themselves, parents are often surprised at what their children accomplish with their projects. "They're kind of amazed, actually," Ajmera said.

Students are often inspired to pursue these difficult subjects because of real-world issues and not by their parents' insistence to compete, Ajmera said.

"A lot of kids have their own personal stories to share of something that's affected their families or their communities, and they want to go in and solve it," Ajmera said of the Gen Z competitors.

For example, 18-year-old Maddux Alexander Springer received this year's $10,000 Peggy Scripps Award for Science Communication for his studies on a tumor-causing disease in green sea turtles near his home in Hawaii.

That kind of interest and enthusiasm can carry a student far, which is important since most winning projects are often complex and time-consuming.

For example, 16-year-old Grace Sun won this year's top prize, the $75,000 George D. Yancopoulos Innovator Award, for her project on organic electronic devices. Sun told Business Insider she had to miss hours of school to work in a university lab for her project.

For some kids, though, it's all worth it because the time and effort are investments in what they hope will be their future careers.

"A lot of these kids are going to either land in academia doing research, or they're going to be entrepreneurs and start new companies on the new cutting-edge technologies," Ajmera said.

• Vivek Ramaswamy ran a failed campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.
• Now he owns 7.7% of BuzzFeed, the struggling digital media publisher.
• What's going on? We don't know. So we're guessing here.

Why is Vivek Ramaswamy buying up shares of BuzzFeed?

Let's start by stating the obvious: It is very funny to type the sentence "Why is Vivek Ramaswamy buying up shares of BuzzFeed?"

Ramaswamy, as you may recall, was a fringe candidate in the most recent Republican presidential primary, where his platform consisted of praising Donald Trump and promising to "Take America First further than Trump." He dropped out of the race in January, after spending a reported $30 million of his own money on the campaign and coming in fourth in the Iowa caucuses.

And BuzzFeed is BuzzFeed — the cheeky digital publisher that sprouted up alongside Facebook and, at one point, seemed poised to become the future of media. At its peak, it sported a valuation of nearly $2 billion and had a knack for commanding the attention of millennials, advertisers, and old media giants like The New York Times, which worried that BuzzFeed would displace it.

By the time BuzzFeed went public in 2021, however, almost all of the air had left the digital publishing bubble. Since then BuzzFeed has gone through multiple layoff rounds, unwound a big M&A deal that was the supposed reason for its IPO in the first place, and its stock sank so low it risked getting kicked off the Nasdaq.

And now Ramaswamy has bought up 7.7% of BuzzFeed — for a little less than $4 million — and announced that he will be an activist investor — someone who thinks the company's shares are undervalued and that he can convince BuzzFeed's management to make changes that will make the shares worth more.

One issue complicating any of Ramaswamy's plans is that BuzzFeed founder and CEO Jonah Peretti controls the company, even though he owns a minority of its shares, due to a dual-class stock structure.

But that doesn't mean Peretti is immune to shareholder pressure. Just this month, he announced a new plan that ties his compensation to the company's stock performance in an attempt to convince investors that he's really serious about turning things around.

So, again: What's Ramaswamy's actual plan?

Ramaswamy has yet to talk to BuzzFeed's board or management, says a person familiar with the company. And neither BuzzFeed nor Ramaswamy has responded to requests for comment, so we're just going to have to guess here. A few theories from the peanut gallery:

• It's the money! This is the most obvious answer because it's why any activist shareholder invests in a company. They may say they have better strategy, or that management is incompetent, or whatever. What they really want is for shares in the company to be worth more than what they paid for them, and it doesn't really matter how they get there.
• It's the clicks! Ramaswamy likes attention — he spent $30 million of his own money getting himself onto the national stage last year. So why not spend a few million more and buy his very own media platform? BuzzFeed no longer commands the same kind of media spotlight it used to, but it's still pretty big and includes not just BuzzFeed.com, but also The Huffington Post as well as First We Feast — better known as the company that makes the "Hot Ones" viral chicken wing/celebrity interview show. ("Viral chicken wing/celebrity interview show" is also fun to type.)

• It's a troll! $4 million is a lot for a practical joke, but Ramaswamy (apparently) has cash to burn. Maybe he's getting a kick out of the idea that a Trump-loving Republican can cause chaos at a media company famous for publishing the infamous Trump "dossier".
• It's the wings! Again: BuzzFeed owns Hot Ones, the show that most recently helped Conan O'Brien take over the internet again. And again: Ramaswamy likes attention. There are probably cheaper ways to secure a booking with Sean Evans. But this could speed things up.

• Nicole Shanahan reportedly received over $1 billion from her divorce from Google founder Sergey Brin.
• Brin, one of the wealthiest persons in the world, is worth over $139.5 billion.
• Shanahan has used her wealth to buck up RFK Jr.'s long-shot presidential campaign.

Attorney Nicole Shanahan, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s running mate, has a staggering wealth that would make her one of the wealthiest vice presidents in history if their long shot campaign were successful this November.

According to The New York Times, Shanahan's largess is largely due to her divorce settlement with Google founder Sergey Brin. Shanahan received more than $1 billion from the divorce, three people with knowledge of her finances told The Times. Brin, one of the wealthiest people in the world, is worth an estimated $139.5 billion, according to Forbes.

Forbes previously estimated in March that Shanahan received roughly $390 million in Alphabet shares from Brin based on the then-estimated value of shares that were likely transferred to her. Their divorce records are not public. Forbes tried to piece together what Shanahan may have received from her husband of three years based on Brin's public disclosures about his stake in Alphabet.

The Wall Street Journal reported last year on rumors that Shanahan had an affair with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, a claim both have denied. The Times, citing three sources, reported that the affair happened after both of them took ketamine at a Miami party in late 2021 and that she told Brin about it.

Brin and Shanahan reportedly separated weeks later, and Brin filed for divorce in early 2022.

Shanahan has used her wealth to help Kennedy's campaign, donating $10 million to a pro-Kennedy super PAC. Her $2 million donation helped the group, American Values 2024, secure a Super Bowl ad that compared Kennedy to his father, RFK, and his presidential uncle, JFK. Other Kennedys did not appreciate his allies blatantly using the family's image to boost his campaign.

Kennedy, according to The Times, initially eyed Jets Quarterback Aaron Rodgers and former Minnesota Gov. Jesse Ventura before settling on Shanahan as his running mate. Former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has also claimed to have had conversations with Kennedy about being his vice president but has said to shift her focus to trying to join former President Donald Trump's ticket.

Rodgers told reporters on Tuesday that he wasn't quite ready to retire from the NFL to enter politics.

"I love Bobby," Rodgers said. "We had a couple of really nice conversations. But there were really two options: It was retire and be his VP or keep playing."

Kennedy's largest focus at the moment is trying to make next month's debate between President Joe Biden and Trump. The unprecedented early debate does offer him a narrow path to get on the stage, but it's unclear if he can meet both the polling and ballot access thresholds in time. A third-party presidential candidate hasn't debated alongside the two major nominees since Texas businessman Ross Perot in 1992.

• American Airlines is facing backlash for blaming a 9-year-old girl in a hidden camera lawsuit.
• The airline's defense claimed the girl should have seen the phone filming her in the bathroom, court document show.
• Lawyers amended the court record after criticism; American Airlines says it does not blame the child.

American Airlines is facing backlash after saying that a 9-year-old girl should have seen the cellphone filming her in the bathroom in its initial lawsuit defense.

Paul Llewellyn, an attorney for the girl's family, told Business Insider that the airline placing blame on the 9-year-old was "shocking." Llewellyn is representing several families who claim Estes Carter Thompson filmed their children on American Airlines flights in separate civil lawsuits against the airline.

Lawyers for the airline amended the court record to remove the claims of fault placed on the girl.

Thompson, a former flight attendant for the airline, is also facing federal charges of attempted sexual exploitation of children and possession of images of child sexual abuse.

Federal authorities charged Thompson after police say he taped his phone to a toilet seat during a flight from Charlotte, North Carolina, to Boston to film a 14-year-old girl in September 2023. Thompson pleaded not guilty on Monday.

Llewellyn is representing that girl's family in a civil lawsuit against the airline. The lawsuit alleged Thompson used "psychological tricks" to make her think the filming wasn't strange. He is also representing the family of a 9-year-old girl, who says Thompson filmed her in the bathroom during a flight from Texas to Los Angeles in January 2023.

The family of the 9-year-old became aware of the incident after FBI agents informed them that images of their child were found on Thompson's iCloud account, according to the lawsuit.

In a response to the family's complaint, lawyers for America Airlines denied negligence on the part of the airline, claiming that the girl "knew or should have known" that the bathroom was "compromised" because it "contained a visible and illuminated recording device."

The 9-year-old girl's mother said in a statement that the family was both "shocked and angered" by the defense.

"How in good conscience could they even make such a suggestion?" the family said. "American Airlines has no shame."

American Airlines told Business Insider in a statement that it does "not believe this child is at fault, and we take the allegations involving a former team member very seriously."

"Our outside legal counsel retained with our insurance company made an error in this filing," American said in the statement. "The included defense is not representative of our airline and we have directed it be amended this morning."

Llewellyn said that the airline's defense is "not credible" and that "the bell can't be unrung."

"They should never have taken such a position in the first," Llewellyn said.