Tag: News

• An Estonian official told Breaking Defense that his government is "seriously" discussing putting troops in Ukraine.
• Those soldiers would be put away from the frontlines and relieve Ukrainian troops of non-combat roles, he said.
• Estonia has around 4,200 active-duty soldiers, with a core reservist call-up of 38,000 more people.

Estonia has been "seriously" discussing sending troops to Ukraine in roles positioned away from the front lines, per a national security official.

Madis Roll, national security advisor to Estonia's president, told military news outlet Breaking Defense that his country's leaders were assessing the viability of sending Estonian soldiers to "rear" roles that wouldn't see direct combat in Ukraine.

Such a move would help relieve Ukraine's manpower crunch and allow it to send more soldiers to the front lines.

And while Estonia, a North Atlantic Treaty Organization country, prefers to act together with the alliance's major members, it's also not closed to the idea of jumping in with a smaller group of allies, Roll said.

"Discussions are ongoing," Roll told Breaking Defense. "We should be looking at all the possibilities. We shouldn't have our minds restricted as to what we can do."

Breaking Defense reported that Roll made these comments on Friday, just days after the country's defense chief, Gen. Martin Herem, told the outlet that Estonia had internally talked about sending troops to Ukraine.

But there hadn't been a "serious discussion" due to domestic political concerns, Herem told the military news site on May 9.

Estonia is one of the geographically closest NATO members to Russia, with an eastern border shared with the Russian regions Pskov and Leningrad. Its military relies largely on reservist units, with about 4,200 permanent staff and 38,000 reserve troops ready for wartime operations.

Additional reserves bring the total number of Estonians with military training to around 230,000 of its 1.3 million population, per the official defense forces website.

More NATO members are thinking about troops in Ukraine

Tallinn is now joining a growing chorus of alliance members touting the possibility of backing Ukraine's forces with troops, with French President Emmanuel Macron drawing Moscow's ire for repeatedly floating such a strategy.

The Baltic States are following suit. Lithuanian Prime Minister Ingrida Šimonytė told The Financial Times on May 8 that she had the authority from parliament to deploy troops to Ukraine for training, but that Kyiv had not put forward such a request yet.

NATO needs the consensus of its members to send troops as an alliance to a war zone, but individual states may deploy their own forces as they see fit.

Russia, meanwhile, has said that any significant NATO troop presence in Ukraine would be seen as a major escalation, regularly bringing up the threat of nuclear war.

But its gains in Ukraine, where Kyiv for months suffered from ammunition undersupply and now faces a widening manpower disadvantage, have spooked Western Europe.

States bordering Russia's western flank, like Finland and Estonia, are cautioning that a Ukrainian defeat means they may soon be the next targets of Russian aggression.

Estonia has given Ukraine about $640 million worth of military, humanitarian, and financial aid, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy's aid tracker.

That's about 1.6% of its total GDP, more than any other nation that has supplied Ukraine with aid. The latest tranche of US aid to Kyiv, of $61 billion, is worth around 0.2% of American GDP.

• Mark Zuckerberg is celebrating his 40th birthday — and he's had quite a decade.
• Over the past 10 years, his wealth has surged to $169 billion, largely due to his 13% stake in Meta.
• The CEO's lifestyle has also evolved. He has a $200 million real estate portfolio and a megayacht.

May 14, 2024, marks Mark Zuckerberg's 40th birthday — and he's had quite the decade.

Zuckerberg's children were born while he was in his 30s, and he earned a degree from Harvard and a blue belt in jiu-jitsu. He also added more than $140 billion to his fortune.

Zuckerberg's net worth of $169 billion makes him the fourth richest person in the world, according to Bloomberg. As of May 16, 2014, he was worth $26.1 billion.

Zuckerberg owns most of Facebook with his 13% stake in its parent company Meta, and nearly all of his fortune — $164 billion worth — is tied to it. The company's stock has grown more than 700% over the last decade.

The company has gone from being Facebook, a website that had only traded publicly for two years, to Meta. It's the world's seventh-largest company and controls sizable portions of the world's social media platforms and advertising economy. The number of daily active users on Facebook has more than tripled, from 890 million at the end of 2014 to 2.11 billion at the end of 2023.

And while he's far from the flashiest of the centi-billionaires, Zuckerberg's lifestyle has changed in conjunction with his wealth.

The Meta CEO has amassed a real estate portfolio with an assessed value of about $200 million. He and his wife, Priscilla Chan, spent $50 million buying up properties in Palo Alto, and he spent about $59 million on two adjacent Lake Tahoe properties.

He's purchased at least 1,200 acres in Kauai, Hawaii, including about 750 acres for which he reportedly paid $100 million and 600 acres for which he paid $53 million. On part of the property, Zuckerberg is reportedly building a $100 million doomsday compound, including a 5,000-square-foot underground bunker that will be self-contained, with its own energy, food, and water supply. Try to rephrase 2nd sentence to contain phrase "Zuckerberg Hawaii compound/bunker" — that's ideal anchor text. I'm stuck!

Zuckerberg also loves his water toys. While he went viral for his $12,000 electric surfboard, he more recently splurged on a much more expensive plaything: the megayacht Launchpad, which made her maiden voyage in March. Very few details of the ship have been made public, but she reportedly cost about $300 million — and will cost six figures a year to maintain.

His spending isn't all about pleasure. In 2015, he committed to giving away 99% of his Facebook stock during his lifetime. The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative that he and his wife run is committed to "eradicating disease and improving education, to addressing the needs of our local communities."

It's yet to be seen how exactly he celebrates the milestone birthday, but if his latest appearances are any indication, a new chain may be on his wish list.

• It looks like Elon Musk realized he needs his Supercharger team after all.
• The mercurial billionaire axed the entire charging infrastructure team two weeks ago.
• But Musk is rehiring some of the team's members, including the charging director for North America.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk is re-hiring some of the workers from the Supercharger team he dissolved two weeks ago, Bloomberg reported on Monday.

Last month, Musk said in an email to his staff that he was dissolving the team behind Tesla's Supercharger charging-station network, per The Information. But it seems that Musk has backtracked on his decision.

Musk has brought back some Supercharger workers, including Tesla's charging director for North America, Max de Zegher, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

The longtime Tesla employee joined the company in 2013 and has spent more than a decade with EV giant, per de Zegher's LinkedIn profile. De Zegher started out in sales before focusing on the Tesla's charging infrastructure in the UK, Europe, and North America.

Representatives for Musk and de Zegher didn't respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment. The outlet said it wasn't immediately clear how many Supercharger workers were brought back.

Musk's initial decision to lay off the Supercharger team shocked Tesla's investors, partners, and customers. In particular, major automakers, like General Motors, Ford, and Mercedes-Benz, who adopted Tesla's charging tech were left hanging by Musk's move.

"There's no one remaining from the team that we worked with. In terms of formal communication from Tesla, we haven't received anything," Aaron Luque, CEO of Tesla charger installer Envirospark, told BI's Tom Carter.

A slowdown in the rollout of Tesla's charging infrastructure would be a setback for President Joe Biden's clean energy agenda as well. In February 2022, the Biden administration said that it was handing out five billion dollars in funding to build 500,000 EV chargers in the US.

Tesla is a huge beneficiary of federal funding, winning almost 13% of all EV charging awards from Biden's bipartisan infrastructure law, Politico reported in February, citing data it reviewed. The company currently has over 50,000 Superchargers globally.

The backlash toward the Supercharger's team dissolution might have been a critical factor in changing Musk's mind. The billionaire spent the past two weeks engaging in damage control, where he repeatedly assured that Tesla's superchargers weren't going anywhere.

"Tesla still plans to grow the Supercharger network, just at a slower pace for new locations and more focus on 100% uptime and expansion of existing locations," Musk said in an X post on April 30.

And on Friday, Musk took to his social media platform once more to clarify that Tesla was still committed to building out its Superchargers.

"Just to reiterate: Tesla will spend well over $500M expanding our Supercharger network to create thousands of NEW chargers this year," Musk wrote. "That's just on new sites and expansions, not counting operations costs, which are much higher."

Musk's seeming about-turn on the Tesla's Supercharger business underscores the challenges he faces in trying to reposition the automaker as a bleeding edge software company.

On April 5, Musk announced in an X post that Tesla would be launching its long-awaited robotaxi on August 8. The Tesla chief even told investors last month that the company's Optimus robots could become the company's most valuable asset.

"We should be thought of as an AI or robotics company. If you value Tesla as just like an auto company, fundamentally, it's just the wrong framework," Musk said in an earnings call on April 23.

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

• OpenAI on Monday announced its new chatbot model, GPT-4o, with voice and vision abilities.
• The reveal quickly prompted jokes about digital girlfriends, and parallels to the movie "Her."
• Some sex workers are embracing AI as a way to make their jobs easier and safer.

OpenAI's new GPT-4o model sounded more than a little flirty in its demo released Monday.

The announcement of the new chatbot, which boasts voice and vision abilities, quickly prompted parallels to the 2013 movie "Her" — in which Scarlett Johannson voices the artificially intelligent love interest of Joaquin Pheonix — and jokes about society coming a step closer to normalizing 100% digital companions.

"OpenAI wants you to want to bang your smartphone," Scott Woods, the blogger behind Whole Mars Catalogue, quipped on X in response to a post-demonstration post by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that read, simply: "her."

While some speculate that the opportunity to flirt with a chatbot could change how the world views romance and relationships and potentially alter how the sex work industry operates, some in that line of work are enjoying innovations in AI that they say make their jobs both easier and safer.

Linda, a phone sex operator, told Business Insider that artificial intelligence is being adopted by some in the sex work community, and she now regularly sees AI-generated images on profiles of fellow phone sex workers.

Linda was granted anonymity to speak freely about her work and maintain her privacy. Her identity has been verified by BI.

"I kinda want a chatbot sometimes to deal with timewasters," Linda said, adding that slow conversations often begin with simple hellos and other pleasantries she'd rather skip. A chatbot, she said, would help her "make that $15-20 in chat fees just doing boring small talk without the boredom or loathing."

Major creators like OnlyFans titan Kaitlyn "Amouranth" Siragusa have already embraced the power of AI bots. Last summer, Siragusa launched her own chatbot for fans to interact with for $1 a minute, offering an artificial version of her voice to indulge in explicit conversation. Following the launch, she told Polygon the tech would simplify her job and protect her from overly-attached fans.

Others have adopted the tech to boost customer satisfaction by creating a log of personal preferences and details from past conversations, and The New York Post reported earlier this year on a brothel in Berlin run entirely using AI, virtual reality, and robotic sex dolls.

"It's not for everyone, but, honestly, I think it's great — like you want a sex robot, guys — here ya go! " Linda said.

Representatives for OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Walmart is cutting corporate jobs and asking remote workers to relocate to central hubs: WSJ 
• The retail giant is reducing its site presence, further to closing multiple stores this year.
• The move is part of a trend called "quiet firing," a method to motivate employees to quit.

Walmart is cutting hundreds of corporate jobs, asking remote employees to move to offices, and relocating workers in smaller sites, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday.

Along with axing jobs, the retail giant is directing workers in small offices in Dallas, Atlanta, and Toronto to move to central hubs like Walmart's corporate headquarters in Arkansas, New Jersey, or Southern California, people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Previously-remote staff can work hybrid schedules, the Journal reported.

Walmart did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment sent outside standard business hours.

Last week, the retailer announced it will close two more stores, bringing the number of closures this year to eight. The company quietly reduced its US store count by more than 100 locations between January and August last year — a repositioning celebrated by Wall Street. The company operated 4,615 US stores as of January 31, according to its website.

Walmart, the country's largest employer, has 1.6 million workers in the US. It is one of several companies that have been pushing a return to office mandate — a tactic career experts say is a way of getting rid of employees without conducting mass layoffs.

The move has been called quiet firing. It's a subtle way to make roles less appealing, motivating workers to quit rather than slashing jobs only through layoffs, BI previously reported.

Major companies across the US have enforced RTO mandates in the past year, including Meta, Google, and Salesforce.

• Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded and launched Google from a dorm room near Stanford University.
• Since then, Google has become the world's most popular search engine and the company has evolved.
• Here's everything you need to know about Brin, who is now worth about $134 billion.

Sergey Brin has amassed a multi-billion-dollar fortune after co-founding Google.

Brin teamed up with Larry Page at university in 1998 to launch what would become one of the world's most powerful search engines. Brin also spearheaded many of Google's innovative projects beyond search before stepping down from Alphabet, Google's parent company, in 2019.

But his influence is still clear. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet's current CEO, reportedly began meeting with Brin and Page throughout 2023 to strategize the development of Google's Gemini to rival OpenAI's chatGPT.

Outside his career, Brin enjoys extreme sports and attending music festival Burning Man. He has been married twice; he filed for divorce from his second wife in January 2022.

Brin's early life

Brin might have a sizable net worth now, valued at $134 billion, per the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, but the tech mogul comes from humble beginnings. He was born in the Soviet Union during the summer of 1973.

Brin's father was an economist who had bigger aspirations than the USSR allowed at that time. His father dreamed of being an astrophysicist, but his Jewish background and the USSR's antisemitism kept him from those ambitions.

Brin's family managed to get exit visas and flee the country when Brin was 6. But his family's stressful, troubled experience left him with a lasting appreciation for democracy and freedom.

The Brin family ended up in Maryland, where the Google cofounder was enrolled in a Montessori school — like Larry Page — that emphasized independence and fostering creativity.

Brin didn't revisit Moscow until he was 17, during a class trip led by his father. "Thank you for taking us all out of Russia," Brin told his dad, a former math professor at the University of Maryland.

Spurred on by a blossoming defiant streak, he threw pebbles at a police car while in Russia and almost got in serious trouble when the officers inside noticed.

Brin and Larry Page create Google

Brin earned his bachelor's degree in mathematics and computer science at the University of Maryland and a Ph.D. in computer science from Stanford.

There, his love of high-adrenaline exercise flourished: he tried out skating, skiing, gymnastics, and even trapeze.

Brin met Google cofounder Larry Page at Stanford in 1995.

The two reportedly found each other "obnoxious" at first, but they later became classmates and close friends who geeked out about computer science.

Brin and Page started collaborating in 1996 on a search engine they initially called BackRub.

Before Google, Brin was more focused on making an algorithm for personalized movie recommendations or finding a way to automatically detect copyright infringement cases.

Brin's résumé from back in 1996, as he was working toward his Ph.D. at Stanford, is still available online.

The pair registered the domain Google.com in September 1997. Brin and Page had a mission to organize the world's information and dropped out of Stanford the following year to work on their search engine. The rest, as we now know, is history.

That same year, the pair created the first Google Doodle.

Both Brin and Page are "burners," meaning they're devout fans and attendees of Burning Man, the freewheeling art festival in the middle of the Nevada desert. They made the first Google Doodle to let people know they weren't around to do damage control if the site broke while they were at the event.

When the time came to find an outside CEO for Google, they approved the hire of Eric Schmidt in 2001 after learning he had attended the festival. They then brought Schmidt to Burning Man to "see how he would do."

Brin led Google's ambitious moonshot projects

Some of Brin's projects at Google include self-driving cars now known as Waymo, smart contact lenses, and smart glasses.

As Google ballooned from simply a search engine to a massive corporation with dozens of diverse projects, Brin became the mastermind behind some of its most ambitious ones as the head of Google X, the company's innovative moonshot factory.

Brin was a big proponent of Google Glass — Google's failed attempt at launching smart glasses.

For a long time, you couldn't spot Brin without the computerized Google Glass smart glasses.

Brin reportedly played a big role in the product's rocky launch in 2012, but famously, it was rushed into the world before it was ready for public scrutiny.

Brin also worked on Google's now-dismantled social network, Google Plus.

He admitted onstage in 2014 that he should have never worked on it because he's "kind of a weirdo" and not very social.

"It was probably a mistake for me to be working on anything tangentially related to social to begin with," Brin said in 2014.

He has maintained an eclectic presence at Google since its beginning.

Brin's fashion style is well-known around the Google campus

Even as Google grew into a multibillion-dollar company, Brin maintained the freewheeling spirit of the early days. Around Googleplex, Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, Brin typically wore workout clothes and Vibram barefoot shoes, and he was frequently seen zipping around the office on Rollerblades, doing yoga stretches during meetings, or walking around on his hands for fun.

The Economist once dubbed Brin the "Enlightenment Man" for his dedication to using reason and science to solve huge world problems.

Brin's personal life

In 2007, Brin married Anne Wojcicki, the CEO of the genetics company 23andMe.

She's the sister of early Google employee — and former YouTube CEO — Susan Wojcicki. For the wedding, the couple invited guests to a secret location in the Bahamas and wore bathing suits for the ceremony, which reportedly took place on a sandbar.

Brin and Wojcicki have two children together. Both kids have the last name Wojin, a portmanteau of their parents' last names.

Parkinson's runs in Brin's family, so he does what he can to lower his likelihood of getting the disease. Brin and Wojcicki donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, including to Parkinson's research. A test through 23andMe revealed that Brin has a genetic mutation that makes him predisposed to the disease.

To lower his chances of developing it, Brin started exercising even more intensely and drinking green tea twice a day. Due to his health regimen and scientific progress, he estimated in 2010 that he now has only about a 10% chance of getting the disease.

Brin's marriage to Wojcicki hit the rocks in 2013, and the couple separated. Around the time of his separation with Wojcicki, Brin had reportedly started an affair with a Google employee who was also in a relationship with another high-level Google executive at the same time.

Brin and Wojcicki officially finalized their divorce in June 2015 after eight years of marriage.

The 2018 book "Valley of Genius" described Brin as "the Google playboy" during the company's early days.

"He was known for getting his fingers caught in the cookie jar with employees that worked for the company in the masseuse room," a former employee said. "He got around."

In 2018, Brin married Nicole Shanahan, a lawyer and the founder of a legal-tech startup. The couple met in 2015 at a yoga retreat. They had a baby girl together the same year they wed.

Four years later, Brin filed for divorce from Shanahan. The filing came after rumors swirled that his wife at the time was having an affair with Elon Musk, the billionaire Tesla CEO.

Their divorce was finalized in 2023. Both Musk and Shanahan have denied the cheating allegations.

Brin stepped down from his role as Alphabet president in 2019

In August 2015, Brin's title got a major upgrade when Google underwent a major restructuring.

Brin transitioned from director of special projects at the moonshot division, Google X, to become the president of Alphabet, Google's new parent company. Page was named Alphabet's CEO.

Then, in December 2019, Brin and Page shocked the world: They announced in a joint statement that they were stepping down from their respective roles at Alphabet.

Since leaving, Brin has stayed busy with exercising, philanthropy, and an airship startup.

"We've never been ones to hold on to management roles when we think there's a better way to run the company," they wrote. Both Page and Brin remain members of Alphabet's board of directors.

Brin's life outside Alphabet

Meanwhile, Brin and Page had become billionaires several times over.

In 2005, they bought a 50-person plane together.

Brin owns real estate in both New York City and California.

He's invested a lot of money in Los Altos, where he owns property, through a real estate investment firm called Passerelle Investment Co. The investments reportedly went toward helping mom-and-pop, kid-friendly stores and cafés spring up or stay in business.

Brin has tried to learn several Olympic sports, runs a family foundation supporting Parkinson's research and education, and has been working on an airship startup called LTA Research.

In 2023, the company received an airworthiness certificate for its Pathfinder 1 airship to begin test flights. The massive vessel is almost 400 feet long and about 66 feet wide at its widest point.

And Brin is no stranger to flashy modes of transportation. The mogul owns a collection of watercraft that his friends call the "Fly Fleet." It includes a 40-meter superyacht called Butterfly and 73-meter megayacht known as Dragonfly. He bought Dragonfly in 2011 for $80 million.

Brin was also been rumored to be writing a physics textbook in 2022, but there's no sign it's been published yet.

Brin and Page's return to Google

At the beginning of 2023, reports emerged that Alphabet tapped Brin and Page to help Google compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT in the race to dominate the artificial intelligence space.

By the end of the year, Google confirmed that Brin was a key factor in bringing its AI model Gemini to fruition. In the white paper explaining Gemini's capabilities, Brin is listed as a "core contributor."

When he spoke at San Francisco's AGI House in March, Brin said he "kind of came out of retirement just because the trajectory of AI is so exciting."

He also addressed criticism of Gemini by defending the text generation feature but conceding that Google "definitely messed up on the image generation."

• It seems as if Mark Zuckerberg will celebrate his 40th birthday on the megayacht, Launchpad.
• The yachting world has speculated for months that the Meta CEO is the owner of the vessel.
• Now, both the boat and Zuckerberg's private jet have landed in Panama.

All signs point to Mark Zuckerberg celebrating his 40th birthday on what many speculate is his brand-new superyacht Launchpad.

The boating world has been buzzing about Launchpad — a 118-meter yacht built by the Dutch shipyard Feadship — for months, with rumors swirling that her owner is none other than the Meta CEO. But in the yachting world, where privacy is paramount, no party would confirm her owner.

"It is Feadship's standard policy to never divulge any information about our yachts with reference to ownership, costs, or delivery, etc," Feadship, the ship's builder, wrote to Business Insider in March. "Whether it is an 18-meter Feadship from the 1960s or a 118-meter Feadship from the 21st century, we do not share private information."

Representatives for Zuckerberg did not respond to requests for comment from BI.

Now there's even more evidence: The megayacht arrived in Panama on Monday, making her way there from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where she's predominantly been moored since she made her maiden voyage across the Atlantic in March, according to public ship-tracking data. Wingman, the support superyacht that he is suspected to have purchased with Launchpad, made the journey with her.

Zuckerberg's plane also landed in Panama on Monday, per a private jet tracker, and if his Instagram is any indication, he was on board.

Putting two and two together — along with the many other clues linking Zuckerberg to the yacht — we can surmise that the Meta CEO is likely kicking off his new decade aboard his new toy.

Little is known about the luxury vessel, which was said to have been built for a sanctioned Russian businessman before it was handed over to the Dutch government, which served as a middleman for the purchase. Her final purchase price is unknown, but it's safe to say a yacht of that size from that shipyard would cost nine figures upfront and six figures a year to maintain.

The few photos of Launchpad available on the industry site SuperYacht Times show there appears to be a helipad and a swimming pool on her main deck.

A vessel of her size can typically sleep dozens of guests and crewmembers and likely has an expansive gym (where Zuckerberg could practice his jiu-jitsu), a spa, a movie room, and a garage to fit plenty of toys like his viral hydrofoil.

Zuckerberg's name was first connected to Launchpad in December when reports swirled that he visited Feadship's shipyard in the Netherlands. In March, yachting bloggers like eSysman SuperYachts and Autoevolution suggested he officially snagged the boat. Launchpad also bears the flag of the Marshall Islands, a US territory that is commonplace for American buyers to register their ships.

We will never know for sure whose name is on her title, so unless Zuckerberg confirms he's Launchpad's owner, we will have to wait for an invitation to Zuck's birthday party to confirm.

• Red Lobster is closing over 50 US locations, a restaurant liquidator confirmed.
• TAGeX Brands will auction off furniture and kitchen items from the closing locations.
• Bloomberg previously reported that the seafood restaurant chain is considering a bankruptcy filing.

Red Lobster, the seafood restaurant chain considering a bankruptcy filing, is shutting down over 50 locations across the US.

TAGeX Brands, a restaurant liquidator, confirmed to Business Insider on Monday that it would be auctioning off kitchen items and furniture from the locations that would be shut down. The auction began Monday and will end Thursday. Neal Sherman at TAGeX Brands told BI that four sales were completed on Monday.

"TAGeX Brands is conducting the largest restaurant equipment auction event ever, auctioning off the contents of 50+ former Red Lobster locations across the country that were closed as part of Red Lobster's footprint rationalization," the company wrote in a statement to BI.

Red Lobster has not made a public statement about the restaurant closures and did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Per the Red Lobster website, locations TageX Brands lists as part of their liquidation auction appear to be closed for the rest of the week. Local outlets from Orlando to Buffalo reported that locations had been listed as "temporarily closed" on the website.

States that will see Red Lobster closures include California, Colorado, Florida, New York, and Texas. The company has over 700 locations, although it's unclear if the total was updated to reflect the restaurant closures.

Red Lobster has seen its share of financial struggles over the years.

The 56-year-old chain founded in Florida recently blamed $11 million in losses in the third quarter of 2023 on its all-you-can-eat shrimp promotion.

The restaurant also reported losing billions in sales in March 2020 during the start of Covid-19 lockdowns.

Bloomberg reported in April that the restaurant company was considering filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

Retail experts who previously spoke to Business Insider said some of the company's troubles are due to the private equity firm Golden Gate Capital, which took over the struggling business in 2014.

Golden Gate Capital sold Red Lobster's real-estate holdings that same year to a separate company to help finance the deal and later leased those restaurants back, which has cost the brand.

In the past two years, the company has also faced unsteady leadership, with multiple Red Lobster executives leaving roles.

• Killer whales took down another yacht on Monday as the Mediterranean yachting season begins.
• It's the latest incident of orcas clashing with boats, which has been on the rise in recent years.
• Marine biologists say the orcas are likely playing and may be learning the behavior from each other.

The Mediterranean yachting season has kicked off for the summer — and it didn't take long for another yacht to fall victim to a killer whale encounter.

A group of orcas sank a 50-foot sailing yacht in Moroccan waters on Sunday in the latest of several similar incidents involving the highly social species that have occurred over the past four years.

An unknown number of orcas were involved in the incident, which took place in the Strait of Gibraltar, Spain's maritime rescue service said Monday, according to Reuters.

The incident is the most recent in a spate of bizarre orca encounters with boats that have been on the rise in recent years, primarily in Mediterranean waters south of Spain, where many yachts cruise during the summer months.

Two passengers were on board the Alboran Cognac around 9 a.m. local time on Sunday when they felt sudden hits to the hull and rudder, Reuters reported, citing the maritime service. Water soon started to pour into the yacht.

A nearby oil tanker came to the people's rescue, saving them from the waterlogged ship and delivering them to land.

But the yacht wasn't as lucky. The Alboran Cognac stayed adrift for a time until it ultimately sank.

Since 2020, hundreds of similar encounters between boats and orcas have been documented off the southern coasts of Spain and Portugal, often near the Strait of Gibraltar. And it's not just yachts. The orcas have also rammed into sailboats, and some mariners have even created heavy-metal playlists in hopes of deterring the killer whales — though experts say it'll do little to help.

Researchers say the clashes typically follow a similar pattern, with a killer whale repeatedly ramming into the rudder of a ship, often until it breaks and the boat is stranded. Most of the time, the ships are able to escape with minimal damage, but several boats have sunk.

While the so-called orca "attacks" may appear violent, marine biologists have said it's unlikely the encounters are actually malicious. Several experts told Business Insider last year that the orcas are probably just playing.

Andrew Trites, director of the Marine Mammal Research Unit at the University of British Columbia in Canada, said ramming into the boats may simply be a "playful activity that's gotten way out of hand."

Researchers have also said the killer whales may be learning the behavior from each other through simple imitation.

• A legendary Danish coin collection will go up for sale later this year after 100 years.
• The auction house handling the sale says the collection is worth $72 million.
• The tycoon who compiled the collection stipulated it could not be sold until 100 years after his death.

One of the most valuable privately-owned coin collections is headed to auction later this year after spending more than a century shrouded in secrecy.

The collection once belonged to Danish businessman and butter tycoon Lars Emil Bruun, who spent decades compiling the nearly 20,000 coins, bank notes, and medals that comprise the set. For over a century, the collection has been kept out of the public eye due to a stipulation in Bruun's will that forbade the coins from being sold until a century after his death in 1923 at 71.

Emotionally impacted by the devastation of World War I, Bruun determined the collection should be kept as backup reserves for Denmark should a second war ravage Europe, The Washington Post reported.

The collection in total is estimated to be worth up to $72 million, making it the most valuable coin collection ever to go to sale, according to Stack's Bowers, the New York rare coin dealer and auction house overseeing the sale.

The proceeds from the sales will go to Bruun's heirs. At least one of Bruun's descendants was involved in an effort to negotiate a sale of the coins to a museum in Denmark before the required century of waiting was up, but Danish authorities ultimately shut down the sale, citing the businessman's will, The Post reported.

Bruun began collecting coins as a boy in the 1850s and 1860s, long before he made millions exporting butter to England and other countries, according to The Associated Press. His vast wealth allowed him to continue pursuing his coin hobby in later years. Bruun initially kept his collection at Frederiksborg Castle, the former royal residence located north of Copenhagen, but it was later moved to the Danish Central Bank, per The Post.

Since 2011, however, the collection has lived in a secret location of which even coin enthusiasts are in the dark.

"When I first heard about the collection, I was in disbelief," Vicken Yegparian, vice president of numismatics at Stack's Bowers Galleries, told The AP, calling the collection "the best open secret ever."

The National Museum of Denmark got first dibs on the collection, ultimately snagging seven rare coins, including six gold and one silver, that were minted for $1.1 million, according to the outlet.

"We chose coins that were unique. They are described in literature as the only existing specimen of this kind," Helle Horsnaes, senior researcher at Denmark's National Museum, told The AP.

The sales are set to begin this fall and could take anywhere from three to five years, according to Stack's Bowers.

Some pieces in the collection could go for as cheap as $50, while others could fetch $1 million, Yegparian told The AP.