Tag: News

Former President Donald Trump isn't completely ready to abandon South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem amid the uproar over her disclosure that she killed her 14-month-old dog named Cricket decades ago.

Trump effusively praised Noem and other potential vice presidential picks during a closely watched Mar-a-Lago fundraiser over the weekend, according to audio of the private event obtained by Axios.

"Somebody that I love," Trump said of Noem. "She's been with me, a supporter of mine and I've been a supporter of hers for a long time."

Noem had long been viewed as a potential Trump running mate before her disclosure in a forthcoming autobiography about her decision decades ago to kill her family's dog. Since then, the South Dakota Republican's political stock has cratered. Noem has refused to back down from her description of the incident, even arguing that President Joe Biden should treat his dog Commander, who has had many biting incidents, similarly.

Some Republicans have described Noem as toast amid the uproar.

Decades ago, Noem wrote that she killed Cricket after she decided that the dog was untrainable and overly aggressive.

Noem on Sunday tried to defend her memoir, including its inaccurate claim that she met with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un during a combative interview on CBS' "Face the Nation." She also reiterated that killing Cricket illustrates that she won't avoid hard choices.

"The reason that this story is in the book because people need to understand who I am and some of those difficult decisions," Noem told host Margaret Brennan.

• Peter Gray, 35, from the UK, was jailed in February after scamming three women out of over $100,000.
• The man met his victims on Tinder and took out loans in their names without their knowledge.
• "He was just so good at being the person that you wanted him to be," one of the victims said.

The victims of a romance scammer who defrauded women he met on Tinder out of over $100,000 have spoken out about being targeted.

Peter Gray, 35, from Yorkshire, UK, found his victims on Tinder and won their trust, BBC News reported. He was sentenced to 56 months in prison in February.

Romance scams have boomed since the onset of the pandemic, with Americans losing over $1.3 billion to the practice in 2022, up 164% from 2019, Business Insider previously reported. Some 70,000 people in the US reported being a victim of a romance scam in 2022, according to the Federal Trade Commission.

In the UK, over £92 million (about $115 million) was lost to romance scams in the same year, according to data from the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

Gray used information from driving licenses to scam Tinder dates

"It was shocking," a sister of one of Gray's victims told BBC News. "You see these things happening on TV. You never believe it's going to happen to you, but believe me, it can."

Gray engaged in this behavior for several years. In 2018, he matched with a woman BBC News identified as Jessica. On their third date, Jessica went to Gray's apartment and used the bathroom.

She told BBC News: "I left my bag on his dining table, he went in my bag and took pictures of my driving license and both my bank cards,"

A few weeks later, Jessica found out Gray had taken out £1,000 ($1,250) from her bank account and a £9,000 loan (about $11,000).

Something similar happened to a woman identified only as Hannah, who had only been seeing Gray for a week when she realized a loan for £20,000 (about $25,000) had been taken out in her name.

When Gray showered her with gifts and love declarations — in what has echoes of love bombing — the two got back together.

Hannah ended up falling pregnant with Gray's baby without knowing his history. Hannah learned more about Gray when her sister tracked down of his ex-partners and had a conversation with her.

"There's no way that I'm going to let a child be brought up anywhere near such a vile human," Hannah said. "My world had just literally broken apart in front of my eyes in that half an hour conversation."

The third victim, identified as Elizabeth, began dating Gray in 2020.

Gray sent her flowers despite her never telling him her address, and she later found out that he had taken a loan out for £10,000 (over $12,000) using information he obtained from her driver's license.

"You question yourself and your judgment, and it's like, why didn't I listen to my gut?" Elizabeth said. "He was just so good at being the person that you wanted him to be."

In an article on its website, Tinder shares tips on how users can protect themselves from romance scammers, including using reverse image search to check if matches are genuine, never sending money online, and making sure that people have verified their identity — a new tool the app recently introduced in an attempt to clamp down on scams.

Tinder did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, but a spokesperson told BBC News that it "acts to help prevent and warn users of potential scams or fraud by using AI tools to detect words and phrases and proactively intervene."

The spokesperson added: "We have implemented various ways to warn users of potential scams or fraud, from in-app features to pop-up messages and education."

• Judge Juan Merchan hit Trump with his 10th gag order violation Monday, along with a warning of jail. 
• Merely fining Trump $1,000 per violation has not been a sufficient deterrent, the judge said.
• "Therefore, going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction," he said.

Next time, it could be jail.

The judge in Donald Trump's New York hush-money trial on Monday found the former president has violated his gag order a tenth time — and warned that another violation could put him in jail.

"It appears the $1,000 fines are not serving as a deterrent," state Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan told Trump, addressing him directly as "Mr. Trump."

"Therefore, going forward, this court will have to consider a jail sanction," the judge warned.

"The last thing I want to do is put you in jail," Merchan added. "You are the former president of the United States. And you may be the next president as well."

The logistics for incarcerating Trump would be monumental, involving court officers, corrections officers, and Secret Service agents, the judge noted.

"The magnitude of such a decision is not lost on me," the judge said.

"But at the end of the day, I have a job to do," he said.

Trump's gag order violations — the most recent one involved statements he made to reporters — constitute "a direct attack on the rule of law," the judge said.

"I cannot allow that to continue. So as much as I do not want to impose a jail sanction, and I have tried everything to avoid doing so, I want you to know that I will," if appropriate, he said.

The stern warning came first thing Monday morning, before the start of the third week of testimony in the GOP frontrunner's ongoing Manhattan trial on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.

• Columbia has canceled its main commencement event in the wake of campus protests.
• The school said it'll focus on smaller ceremonies and relocate festivities away from the South Lawn.
• Protests over Israel's war in Gaza led to dozens of arrests

Columbia is canceling its main commencement event in the aftermath of protests against Israel's war in Gaza that roiled the campus and ended in dozens of arrests.

Rather than the university-wide event previously scheduled for May 15, Columbia will instead focus on school-level ceremonies — where students are individually honored — and Class Days, it said.

Ceremonies were previously scheduled for the Ivy League university's South Lawn where pro-Palestinian demonstrators had set up a camp. Now, a majority of the commencements will be held at the Baker Athletics Complex, Columbia said.

Columbia said it came to the decision based on feedback from students, and the changes would not impact travel plans for families.

"Our students emphasized that these smaller-scale, school-based celebrations are most meaningful to them and their families," the university said in a statement."

Still, Columbia is "looking at the possibility of a festive event on May 15 to take the place of the large, formal ceremony."

The university said it would share more info in the coming days.

The protesters had demanded Columbia divest from Israel and companies tied to the country. But the demonstrations sparked unrest on campus, where Jewish leaders accused protesters of shouting hateful rhetoric at Jewish students.

The outrage sparked calls for the university's president to resign and led major donor Robert Kraft to pull his support for the school.

The demonstrations lasted roughly two weeks before the NYPD was called in, breaking up the encampment and arresting protesters who had taken over a campus building.

• This post originally appeared in the Insider Today newsletter.
• You can sign up for Business Insider's daily newsletter here.

Welcome back! The stars will be out at the Met Gala in New York today. But something shines even brighter than the attendees: their incredibly expensive jewelry.

In today's big story, we're looking at people who feel like a middle-class salary doesn't equal a middle-class lifestyle. 

What's on deck:

• Markets: All the best bits from Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting.

• Tech: Our annual list of the 100 best early-stage investors. 

• Business: How Workday became the most loathed workplace software on the planet.

But first, six figures ain't what it used to be.

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The big story

Middle-class meltdown

"Lately, I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over." 

It's been 25 years since Tony Soprano bemoaned his life in the opening scene of "The Sopranos." A quarter-century later, plenty of Americans feel the same about the middle class.

Business Insider's Jennifer Sor has a report on the people making over six figures who think the middle-class lifestyle they dreamed of isn't realistic for their salary. Take Vincent, a 29-year-old medical sales rep who makes $130,000 a year but feels big-ticket items like a home or a car are out of reach. 

The middle class's obituary has been written before. In 2015, the Pew Research Center noted that middle-income households were losing ground.

Still, it's gotten even harder. Owning a home, a key piece of middle-class life, has become impossible for many. According to a recent report from Zillow, homebuyers need to earn 80% more than before the pandemic.

It's not just life-changing purchases, though. Stubborn inflation has made daily purchases — even something as simple as fast food — a burden. And good luck trying to climb the corporate ladder to get a better-paying job. They aren't hiring. 

Let's address the elephant in the room: A six-figure salary is still a lot of money.

What might seem disappointing for some would be a godsend to those barely getting by.

Location plays a huge factor. The aforementioned Vincent lives in Santa Barbara, California, one of the more expensive cities in one of the most expensive states. 

So why not live in a city with a more affordable cost of living?

Relocating is easier said than done. Cities with higher costs of living tend to have more job opportunities and better jobs. (Although, that's changing.) And even if you're lucky enough to nab a fully remote job — again, good luck — moving away from a big city could cost you in the long run.

Perception, though, is just as detrimental as reality for some. It's always been easy to believe the grass is greener on the other side, but now you can see it 20 times a day across social media. 

Constantly seeing how well others appear to be doing can make it a lot easier to feel bad about your own status. It's why people love hanging out with friends who they think make less than them.

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News brief

Your Monday headline catchup

A quick recap of the top news from over the weekend:

• Jon Stewart says Biden is so old he 'shouldn't be president.'

• There's a messy battle over AI going on in DC — and there's no end in sight.

• Tech titans love Modi's economic powerhouse India — despite mass unemployment and abject poverty.

• Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hang out with celebrities in Miami during the F1 Grand Prix weekend.

• America's big stagflation scare is over.

• Meta employees say internal posts on support for Palestinians have been 'censored,' in an open letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

• A YouTuber let the Cybertruck frunk close on his finger to test the new sensor update. It didn't go well.

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3 things in markets

1. Investors' summer vacations may be canceled. Thanks to higher inflation and stock market volatility, Wall Street workers' dreams of a summer in the Hamptons may be put on ice.

2. Nvidia is dominating earnings season — and it hasn't even reported yet. The chip-maker has been mentioned, both directly and indirectly, in several mega-cap tech companies' earnings calls this spring. Words like "AI Infrastructure" and "generative AI" point to more money heading to Nvidia for its popular H100 GPU chip.

3.  Warren Buffett raised the alarm on AI. During Berkshire Hathaway's annual shareholder meeting on Saturday, Buffett likened AI to the atom bomb, saying the world has let the "genie out of the bottle." He also made jokes about his age and expressed thoughts about how the company would move forward without him.

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3 things in tech

1. The Seed 100: The best early-stage investors of 2024. Behind most startup founders is an investor who saw their potential, nurtured their ambition, and backed their ideas. Now in its fourth year, our list celebrates these figures, from OpenAI's Sam Altman to Verge Genomics' Alice Zhang. Plus, we're also highlighting the top 40 women early-stage investors, including Serena Ventures' Serena Williams and Array Ventures' Shruti Gandhi.

2. The EV market isn't in peril — it's just changing. The industry is going through its biggest change yet, but that doesn't mean it's all bad news. Despite what it may feel like, demand for EVs hasn't dried up entirely, and legacy car companies aren't going to give up on them yet.

3. Jack Dorsey is no longer at Bluesky. Amid a posting frenzy on X — where Dorsey was spilling tea all over the platform — Dorsey announced that he left Bluesky, the Twitter offshoot he helped get off the ground

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3 things in business

1. WorkDay is the worst part of many workers' workdays. It's supposed to make everyone's lives easier, but job candidates, employees, and HR people say WorkDay does the opposite. Despite its near-universal hatred, more than half of the Fortune 500 companies continue to use it — and the reality is that its pros outweigh the cons.

2. The days of McDonald's dollar menu are long gone. Fast-food prices have shot up since the start of the pandemic, and people are sick of it — they're placing smaller orders or opting to cook at home instead. Grocery inflation cooling off, soaring wages, and more are to blame for rising prices.

3. We need to talk about whatever's happening with Starbucks' drinks. Iced Lavender Oatmilk Matcha, anyone? BI's Katie Notopoulos was left befuddled by the wacky, multi-ingredient sweet drinks now on offer at Starbucks, but she noted that the rise of complicated concoctions has coincided with the rise in popularity of the Starbucks app. 

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What's happening today

• This year's Pulitzer Prize winners will be announced.

• Tonight is the Met Gala.

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The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Jordan Parker Erb, editor, in New York. Hallam Bullock, editor, in London. George Glover, reporter, in London. Grace Lett, associate editor, in Chicago.

• Debra Crockett decided to retire early eight years ago and moved from the US to Turkey.
• Her Social Security checks are enough to cover her basic monthly expenses given the strength of the US dollar.
• She said moving abroad was the best financial decision she made for her retirement.

Eight years ago, Debra Crockett decided it was time for a change.

She and her then-husband were doing well in the US. They were earning decent wages, owned a home, and had a couple of cars, but after working her whole life — most recently as a director of retail sales — she decided she was ready to see the world.

To make that happen, Crockett retired a few years ahead of schedule, collected early Social Security, and sold her house, cars, and most of her other valuable belongings. Using the housesitting platform Trusted Housesitters, Crockett could live in local homes in her desired travel destinations without having to pay for housing.

When her 90-day visa expired in Europe, Crockett set her sights on Turkey, and she's been there ever since.

"I live here for next to nothing," Crockett told Business Insider.

BI reviewed documents verifying Crockett's expenses. When converted to US dollars, her rent is $463 a month, her electric bills are $25 a month, her water bill is just over $1 a month, and her internet is just over $11 a month.

Even with the nearly $200 it takes to renew her residency in Turkey each year, her Social Security check is $2,929 a month, verified by BI, which is more than enough to cover her basic expenses.

"It's ridiculous to think that you have to have millions or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the bank to survive. I live totally on my Social Security," she said. "I have other funds, but I use those mainly for traveling expenses. I don't have any bills. I paid everything off when I left the US, and I keep a daily report of everything I spend."

By keeping daily notes of her expenses, Crockett can easily detect if she goes over her budget one month, allowing her to adjust her spending for the next month. She also said that one of her biggest expenses in the US was her healthcare — something that she has found is also much more affordable in Turkey.

Crockett is among many Americans who became expats over the past few years, moving from the US to a location abroad with the hopes of living a better, cheaper life. Older Americans, in particular, are benefitting from more affordable bills as the US faces a looming retirement crisis, and many boomers feel like they do not have sufficient savings to retire on time — or at all.

Of course, moving abroad has its challenges, requiring funds to travel and the ability to leave friends and relatives behind. But Crockett said it was important to her that she didn't spend the entire second half of her life working, and it's allowed her to make the most out of her retirement.

"We work all our lives from high-powered jobs to blue-collar jobs. It really doesn't matter. We all work hard and we get maybe a few years of retirement," Crockett said. "That just doesn't seem like it's worth it. So if you can, just sell it all. It's only things, and you can replace it with beautiful memories in the future."

'I'm living a great life on limited expenditures'

Crockett rents her apartment to allow her the freedom to get up and move if she choose, but for now she plans to remain in Turkey. Notably, the Turkish economy is struggling — in March, the country hiked interest rates to 50% to fight "higher than expected" inflation that has burdened Turkish citizens.

American expats don't feel the same financial pressures, though, because the Turkish Lira has weakened against the US dollar, allowing American cash to go much further.

"I'm living a great life on limited expenditures," Crockett said.

"There is a huge expat community here, so there's never a language issue at all," she continued. "You can go down to the beach and just sit with a glass of wine and look at the beautiful scenery, or you can be more adventuresome. There's walking groups, there's jogging groups, there's knitting groups, there's yoga, there's something for everyone here."

BI has previously spoken to retirees in the US who are facing severe financial strains. One 63-year-old said that she doesn't see her Social Security keeping her afloat due to the lingering impacts of the pandemic, which caused her to lose her job and run through her savings.

"I know so many people my age that just don't know what they're going to do," she said. "Other countries take care of their older people, and we should be able to do it, too."

Crockett said that living in Turkey has given her so much financial relief that she doesn't see money being an issue for her as long as she remains abroad. She contributes to the community financially through donations as often as she can, and she said she's grateful for the welcoming atmosphere that greeted her upon her arrival.

"It's eye-opening," she said. "It's an amazing, fulfilling experience to wake up in a country where you know absolutely no one, and you have to rely on your skills of communication, intuition, your skills of just being able to survive. And it's so fulfilling and so rewarding."

Are you living abroad? Did moving improve your quality of life or do you want to return to the US? Share your story with this reporter at asheffey@businessinsider.com.

• Walmart primarily focuses on delivering ultra-low prices, which sometimes means lower quality.
• However, the retailer plans to stock more premium items to attract wealthier shoppers.
• I visited Walmart to see which fancy brands and products it already carries.

There's a reason "Save money" comes before "Live better" in Walmart's well-worn motto.

The Bentonville-based retail giant's primary focus since day one has been to drive down costs and offer rock-bottom prices. Before 2007, its motto was "Always low prices."

The strategy has served it well, even if there are sometimes necessary compromises regarding product quality.

But in recent years, the company has taken steps to shake the characterization of cheapness in favor of value, part of a larger push to attract higher-income shoppers with the sort of products and brands you'd see at Target or Whole Foods.

And now, with the announcement this week of its upscale Bettergoods private label grocery brand, Walmart is leaning more into the second half of its slogan.

Before the new products hit shelves, I visited my local Supercenter to see what premium items the retailer already carries.

• Hunterbrook Media is a hedge fund that also does journalism. Or maybe a journalism startup that also runs a hedge fund.
• Will that work? A new story in The New Yorker wonders whether you can combine those things.
• One thing the story makes clear: Having well-connected parents is useful for startup founders.

Can a hedge fund also be an investigative-journalism outfit?

That's a provocative question, generated by the existence of Hunterbrook Media, the combination hedge fund/investigative-journalism outfit that launched this spring.

The idea in a nutshell: Hunterbrook's small team of investigative journalists look for stories about companies that could be attractive targets for a hedge fund to invest in or — more likely — bet against. Then the journalists tell Hunterbrook's hedge-fund arm about the stories they will publish about a company so the fund can short the company (or invest in it).

You can read more about that via The New Yorker's Clare Malone's excellent look at Hunterbrook, though it's way too soon to assess how any of this will work.

Read The New Yorker's story on Hunterbrook

Hunterbrook's first big published investigation was into the mortgage underwriter United Wholesale Mortgage. Before publication, Hunterbrook's fund went short on UWM and long on its rival Rocket Mortgage; a month later, UWM shares are up and Rocket is down slightly. ("We're just getting started, but early signs are that it's working," the company told my colleague Bradley Saacks last month.)

But Malone's piece also raises a different question: What kind of background do you need to raise $10 million for a media startup — and $100 million for a hedge fund — these days?

And that one does have an answer: It helps if you are very, very connected.

Malone never uses the epithet "nepo baby" to describe the Hunterbrook cofounders Sam Koppelman and Nathaniel Horwitz. But they are indeed people who have successful and well-connected parents: Koppelman's father is the screenwriter and TV showrunner Brian Koppelman; Horwitz's mother, Geraldine Brooks, is a much-lauded journalist and author, so was his father, Tony Horwitz, who died in 2019.

That family history, of course, doesn't automatically persuade people to give a couple of 20-something Harvard grads millions of dollars for their first foray into journalism. But it certainly helps them meet people that will eventually do that.

And Malone spells that part out quite clearly:

"Nathaniel and Sam have a pretty ridiculous network," Matthew Termine, one of the Hunterbrook reporters on the U.W.M. investigation, told me. E-mails that Koppelman wrote to the chair of Sony Entertainment about his application to Harvard appeared in the 2014 Sony Pictures leak, as did a note to the school on his behalf from Matt Damon. (Koppelman's father co-wrote "Rounders" and "Ocean's Thirteen.") For a time, he dated the "Euphoria" star Maude Apatow. Horwitz, for his part, once wrote about a series of conversations he had with the Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes as her life and company crumbled.

Hunterbrook's advisers include Paul Steiger, the founder of ProPublica, and Daniel Okrent, the first public editor of the Times. Former Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Matt Murray and the financial journalist Bethany McLean gave notes on the U.W.M. investigation before publication. Hunterbrook's hedge fund has raised a hundred million dollars, and the company received seed funding from, among others, the venture arm of Laurene Powell Jobs's Emerson Collective and the hedge-fund billionaire Marc Lasry, who, Brian Koppelman once told the Financial Times, helped the "Billions" showrunner develop an "understanding of the billionaire psyche."

So, again: None of Horwitz's or Koppelman's family histories and networks will make their company succeed. But it certainly didn't hurt them getting out of the gate.

Correction: May 6, 2024 — An earlier version of this story misstated Nathaniel Horwitz's experience in finance; he previously worked at RA Capital.

• Longtime Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz has some thoughts on Starbucks' poor sales.
• He said the chain needs to listen to baristas, fix its app, and focus on the customer experience.
• Starbucks posted a drop in same-store sales in North America and China, its two biggest markets.

Howard Schultz says Starbucks needs to fix its stores and mobile app to reverse its "fall from grace."

The coffee chain must focus on the customer experience in its outlets, the longtime former CEO wrote in a LinkedIn post on Sunday in the wake of last week's weak results.

"The company's fix needs to begin at home: US operations are the primary reason for the company's fall from grace," Schultz wrote. "The stores require a maniacal focus on the customer experience, through the eyes of a merchant. The answer does not lie in data, but in the stores."

Schultz knows what he's talking about — he's had multiple stints leading Starbucks, spending more than two decades as CEO.

Although he didn't found the chain, instead buying it from its previous owners, Schultz shaped the company's growth and turned it into a global giant.

He most recently returned as interim CEO for nearly a year after Kevin Johnson retired in April 2022.

"Senior leaders — including board members — need to spend more time with those who wear the green apron," Schultz wrote on LinkedIn, referring to its baristas. He said that Starbucks needed to "overhaul" its strategy and reinforce its "premium position."

"Through it all, focus on being experiential, not transactional," Schultz wrote. Starbucks has long positioned itself as a "third place," where people can spend time outside their home or workplace, although this model is under threat as the chain increasingly embraces drive-thru and delivery sales.

Schultz added that one of leadership's first actions should be to "reinvent" its mobile app to make it an "uplifting experience" again, without elaborating. App orders made up 31% of all US transactions in the quarter.

CEO Laxman Narasimhan told investors last week that a "mid-teens percent" of potential mobile orders weren't being completed, with customers putting items into their carts but then not finalizing orders. Baristas have complained that the app can leave stores inundated with too many orders, and that customers sometimes use it to order drinks with excessive modifications.

Recovery 'certain'

Starbucks posted a 1.8% fall in quarterly net revenues to $8.56 billion, with fewer visits from what Narasimhan described as "occasional" customers.

In North America, comparable sales fell 3%, driven by a 7% drop in the number of transactions. That's where almost half Starbucks' stores are located, and the region accounts for almost three-quarters of its revenues.

The decline was far worse in China, Starbucks' second-biggest market behind the US, where comparable sales plunged 11%. The number of orders was down 4%, with an 8% decline in ticket size. Total revenues in China fell 8% to $705.8 million.

William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia said in a note to clients that the chain had posted a "stunning across-the-board miss on all key metrics."

The stock is down 22% this year, and by almost a third over the past 12 months, leaving Starbucks worth about $82 billion.

It's not the first time Schultz has offered some advice to management. Earlier this year he said Starbucks should go on a soul-searching journey and reinvent itself in a two-page letter posted on LinkedIn.

However, the "chairman emeritus" hasn't lost faith in the business.

"Starbucks will recover — of that, I am certain," Schultz wrote on Sunday. "I am confident the China business will return to health and become the company's largest market. The brand is incredibly resilient, but it's clearly not business as usual."

Do you work at Starbucks? Got a story? Email this reporter at gdean@businessinsider.com

• Tech titans like Elon Musk and Tim Cook run some of the world's biggest companies.
• In so doing, they've employed some outright strange management practices.
• From banning PowerPoints to having 50 direct reports, here are tech leaders' most unconventional management habits.

They're some of the best-known CEOs in the world. But while we may know more about their flashy real estate buys and jet-setting habits, we don't have as good a glimpse into how they run their companies behind closed doors.

Here are some of the most notable management quirks from tech's biggest names: