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Business Archive

Archives for May 2025

Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Business Insider lays off 21 percent of staff to “endure extreme traffic drops.”

As reported by The Information and Axios reporter Sara Fischer, CEO Barbara Peng emailed staff on Thursday announcing Business Insider is “scaling back on categories that once performed well on other platforms” and mostly exiting its search-reliant Commerce business in an apparent acknowledgement of Google Zero, despite Sundar Pichai’s rebuttals.

Now it’s shrinking, noting “70 percent of our business has some degree of traffic sensitivity,” while going all-in on AI with a push to use Enterprise ChatGPT, gen-AI site search, an AI paywall, and other products.

How private equity kills companies and communities

Journalist Megan Greenwell’s new book Bad Company explores the ways private equity has transformed American business.

Nilay Patel
Richard Lawler
Richard Lawler
Elon Musk reportedly approached Apple years ago about an iPhone / SpaceX satellite deal.

The Information reports that three years ago, Musk offered Apple an 18-month exclusive connection via SpaceX in return for $5 billion up front, and $1 billion per year after that to support satellite-connected iPhone features. If Apple didn’t take it within 72 hours, he threatened to announce a competing feature.

Apple went forward with Globalstar (the report also mentions a canceled “Project Eagle” effort with Boeing that would’ve delivered full-blown internet service), and before the iPhone 14 launched, Starlink announced a deal with T-Mobile. Later that year, Musk and Cook met at Apple HQ to discuss Twitter’s App Store presence, “among other things.”

Mia Sato
Mia Sato
Big box retailers are hiking prices.

In the midst of Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, prices are rising at retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Home Depot, according to data provided to The Verge by Bright Data, which tracks prices week over week. As of May 11th, for example, 21.5 percent of the 1.5 million tracked Amazon products had increased in price. Check out an interactive chart here.

A chart showing the % of products from retailers that increased in price week over week. Retailers analyzed include Amazon, Home Depot, and Walmart. The percentage of products that increased in price jumped for all retailers in the data.
Image: Bright Data
Emma Roth
Emma Roth
Target responds to tariff uncertainty.

“We’re constantly adjusting pricing,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said during an earnings call on Wednesday, as reported by CNBC. “Some are going up, some will be reduced, but that’s an ongoing effort that takes place each and every day.”

Last week, Walmart’s CFO directly linked tariffs with the potential for price increases, sparking a warning from Trump, who told the retailer to “eat the tariffs.”

Workday’s new head of product wants you to like Workday as much as he does

Gerrit Kazmaier on what AI can really do and the quest to make enterprise software suck less.

Nilay Patel
Mia Sato
Mia Sato
The cost of Trump’s tariff flip-flop.

The New York Times walked through one business owner’s tariff bill, breaking out all the taxes that stack on top of each other. On April 27th when the shipment arrived in the US, the total cost of tariffs was $34,389. Today, the tariff rate would be $12,954 now that Trump has slashed rates. His frequent tariff changes mean everyone is in a constant state of uncertainty.

Max was an all-time bad rebrand

Warner Bros. Discovery did the right thing today — people mostly hated when HBO was cut from “HBO Max.”

Wes Davis