Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, which recently marked down the value of its equity stake in the company.

Musk has acknowledged he overpaid for Twitter, which he bought for $44 billion, including $33.5 billion in equity. More recently, he said Twitter is worth less than half what he paid for it. It’s unclear how Fidelity arrived at its new, lower valuation or whether it receives any non-public information from the company.

Fidelity first reduced the value of its Twitter stake in November, to 44% of the purchase price. That was followed by further markdowns in December and February.
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Twitter has struggled financially since Musk took over. After saddling the company with $13 billion of debt, Musk’s erratic decision making and challenges with content moderation led advertising revenue to decline by 50%, Musk said in March. An attempt to recoup that revenue by selling Twitter Blue subscriptions has so far failed to take off. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up.

Read More: A Brief History of Elon Musk Saying One Thing and Doing Another at Twitter

Twitter didn’t specifically respond to a request for comment.

Musk’s investment in Twitter is now worth $8.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which uses Fidelity’s valuation to calculate the value of his holding. Musk spent more than $25 billion to acquire an estimated 79% stake in the company last year.

The latest markdown erases about $850 million from Musk’s $187 billion fortune, according to the index. Despite Twitter’s issues, Musk’s wealth is up more than $48 billion this year, largely due to a 63% surge in Tesla Inc.’s share price.

BRYAN, Texas (AP) — Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes entered Texas prison where she could spend the next 11 years for overseeing a blood-testing hoax that became a parable about greed and hubris in Silicon Valley.

Holmes, 39, on Tuesday entered a federal women’s prison camp located in Bryan, Texas — where the federal judge who sentenced Holmes in November recommended she be incarcerated. The minimum-security facility is about 95 miles northwest of Houston, where Holmes grew up aspiring to become a technology visionary along the lines of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

As she begins her sentence, Holmes is leaving behind two young children — a son born in July 2021 a few weeks before the start of her trial and a 3-month old daughter who was conceived after a jury convicted her on four felony counts of fraud and conspiracy in January 2022.
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Holmes was free on bail up until Tuesday, most recently living in the San Diego area with the children’s father, William “Billy” Evans. The couple met in 2017 around the same time Holmes was under investigation for the collapse of Theranos, a startup she founded after dropping out of Stanford University when she was just 19.

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While she was building up Theranos, Holmes grew closer to Ramesh, “Sunny” Balwani, who would become her romantic partner as well as an investor and fellow executive in the Palo Alto, California, company.

Together, Holmes and Balwani promised Theranos would revolutionize health care with a technology that could quickly scan for diseases and other problems with a few drops of blood taken with a finger prick.

The hype surrounding that purported breakthrough helped Theranos raise nearly $1 billion from enthralled investors, assemble an influential board of directors that include former Presidential cabinet members George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and James Mattis and turned Holmes into a Silicon Valley sensation with a fortune valued at $4.5 billion on paper in 2014.

But it all blew up after serious dangerous flaws in Theranos’ technology were exposed in a series of explosive articles in The Wall Street Journal that Holmes and Balwani tried to thwart. Holmes and Balwani, who had been secretly living together while running Theranos, broke up after the Journal’s revelations and the company collapsed. In 2018, the U.S. Justice Department charged both with a litany of white-collar crimes in a case aimed at putting a stop to the Silicon Valley practice of overselling the capabilities of a still-developing technology — a technique that became known as “fake it ’til you make it.”

Holmes admitted making mistakes at Theranos, but steadfastly denied committing crimes during seven often-fascinating days of testimony on the witness stand during her trial. At one point, she told the jury about being sexually and emotionally abused by Balwani while he controlled her in ways that she said clouded her thinking. Balwani’s attorney steadfastly denied Holmes allegations, which was one of the key reasons they were tried separately.

Balwani, 57, was convicted on 12 felony counts of fraud and conspiracy in a trial that began two months after Holmes’ ended. He is currently serving a nearly 13-year sentence in a Southern California prison.

Maintaining she was treated unfairly during the trial, Holmes sought to remain free while she appeals her conviction. But that bid was rejected by U.S. District Judge Edward Davila, who presided over her trial, and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, leaving her no other avenue left to follow but the one that will take her to prison nearly 20 years after she founded Theranos.

Attorneys representing Holmes did not immediately respond when contacted by The Associated Press for statement on Tuesday.

FPC Bryan, a minimum-security prison camp located about 95 miles northwest of Houston, encompasses about 37 acres of land and houses about 650 women — including “Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” star Jennifer Shah, who was sentenced earlier this year to 6 1/2 years in prison for defrauding thousands of people in a yearslong telemarketing scam.

Most federal prison camps don’t even have fences and house those the Bureau of Prisons considers to be the lowest security risk. The prison camps also often have minimal staffing and many of the people incarcerated there work at prison jobs.

According to a 2016 FPC Bryan inmate handbook, those in the Texas facility who are eligible to work can earn between 12 cents and $1.15 per hour in their job assignments, which include food service roles and factory employment operated by Federal Prison Industries.

Federal prison camps were originally designed with low security to make operations easier and to allow inmates tasked with performing work at the prison, like landscaping and maintenance, to avoid repeatedly checking in and out of a main prison facility. But the lax security opened a gateway for contraband, such as drugs, cellphones and weapons. The limited security has also led to a number of escapes from prison camps.

In November, a man incarcerated at another federal prison camp in Arizona pulled out a smuggled gun in a visitation area and tried to shoot his wife in the head. The gun jammed and no one was injured. But the incident exposed major security flaws at the facility and the agency’s director ordered a review of security at all federal prison camps around the U.S.

—AP Technology Writer Michael Liedtke is in San Francisco. AP U.S. Law Enforcement News Editor Mike Balsamo and AP Business Writer Wyatte Grantham-Philips contributed to this report.

A consumer class action lawsuit filed Tuesday claims Delta Air Lines inaccurately billed itself as the world’s “first carbon-neutral airline” and should pay damages. The complaint in federal court in California alleges the airline relied on carbon offsets that were largely bogus.

Polluting companies around the world buy carbon credits to cancel out their emissions with projects that promise to absorb carbon dioxide out of the air or prevent pollution. But they’ve been the spotlight in recent months with claims their benefits are exaggerated. Delta is a big customer, purchasing credits from projects including wind and solar projects in India and an Indonesian swamp forest, the lawsuit says.
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The airline did not respond to a request for comment.

Read More: Hydrogen-Powered Planes Could be the Best Bet For Greener Air Travel

The case, filed by Glendale, California resident Mayanna Berrin, claims to act on behalf of anyone who flew Delta while living in the state since March 2020. It says benefits from the offsets are likely to be temporary and would have happened even without the firm’s investment. For a carbon credit to be valid, it must provide a benefit that would not have happened otherwise.

Berrin argues this enabled the firm to gain market share and charge higher prices. She argues through her attorneys, Haderlein and Kouyoumdjian LLP, that she wouldn’t have bought the tickets — or would have paid less — had she known the nature of the offsets.

The passenger bought the flights at a market premium “due to her belief that by flying Delta she engaged in more ecologically conscious air travel,” the case says. The case number is 2:23-cv-04150.

Delta announced three years ago it would go carbon neutral, which means releasing no more climate-changing pollution than it absorbs, or pays to guarantee is absorbed elsewhere.

In 2021 aviation made up more than 2% of global CO2 emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.

Earlier on Tuesday, Delta, based in Atlanta, Georgia, had 672 flights in the air globally, according to FlightRadar24, which tracks GPS data pinged to satellites and receivers.

Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Nvidia has joined the exclusive club of companies with a $1 trillion market capitalization as the chipmaker benefits from the growing use of artificial intelligence.

Nvidia Corp. joins tech titans like Alphabet, Apple and Microsoft in the $1 trillion club. Its stock rose 5% in Tuesday trading, eclipsing $408 per share. Since its initial public offering in 1999, the stock is up roughly 33% annually compared with an average annual gain of 7% in the benchmark S&P 500 index over the same time.

Read More: The Metaverse Is Coming. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on the Fusion of Virtual and Physical Worlds

Last week the maker of graphics chips for gaming and artificial intelligence reported a quarterly profit of more than $2 billion and revenue of $7 billion, both exceeding Wall Street’s forecasts.

Industry experts believe Nvidia, based in Santa Clara, California, could be an early look at how AI may reshape the tech sector. The company was founded in 1993 and initially focused on 3D graphics and gaming. Co-founder Jensen Huang remains the company’s president and chief executive.

AI chips are designed to perform artificial intelligence tasks faster and more efficiently. While general-purpose chips like CPUs can also be used for simpler AI tasks, they’re “becoming less and less useful as AI advances,” a 2020 report from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology notes.

Nvidia’s chips are used in applications ranging from robotics and the metaverse to medical imaging and video analytics.

The CEOs of the world’s leading artificial intelligence companies, along with hundreds of other AI scientists and experts, made their most unified statement yet about the existential risks to humanity posed by the technology, in a short open letter released Tuesday.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war,” the letter, released by California-based non-profit the Center for AI Safety, says in its entirety.

The CEOs of what are widely seen as the three most cutting-edge AI labs—Sam Altman of OpenAI, Demis Hassabis of DeepMind, and Dario Amodei of Anthropic—are all signatories to the letter. So is Geoffrey Hinton, a man widely acknowledged to be the “godfather of AI,” who made headlines last month when he stepped down from his position at Google and warned of the risks AI posed to humanity.
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The letter is the latest effort by those within the tech industry to urge caution on AI. In March, a separate open letter called for a six-month pause on AI development. That letter was signed by prominent tech industry figures including Elon Musk, but it lacked sign-on from the most powerful people at the top of AI companies, and drew criticism for presenting a solution that many said was implausible.

Tuesday’s letter is different because many of its top signatories occupy powerful positions within the C-suite, research, and policy teams at AI labs and the big tech companies that pay their bills. Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft, and James Manyika, a vice president at Google, are also signatories to the letter. (Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest investor, and Google is the parent company of DeepMind.) Widely revered figures on the technical side of AI including Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, and Yoshua Bengio, winner of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Turing Award, are also signatories.

The letter comes as global governments and multilateral organizations are waking up to the urgency of somehow regulating artificial intelligence. Leaders of G7 nations will meet this week for their first meeting to discuss setting global technical standards to put guardrails on AI development. The European Union’s AI Act, which is currently under scrutiny by lawmakers, will likely set similar standards for the technology but is unlikely to fully come into force until at least 2025. Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has publicly called for global AI regulations but has also pushed back at the E.U.’s proposals for what such regulations should look like.

“AI experts, journalists, policymakers, and the public are increasingly discussing a broad spectrum of important and urgent risks from AI. Even so, it can be difficult to voice concerns about some of advanced AI’s most severe risks,” a statement accompanying the letter reads, noting that its purpose if to “overcome this obstacle and open up discussion.” The statement adds: “It is also meant to create common knowledge of the growing number of experts and public figures who also take some of advanced AI’s most severe risks seriously.”

Some criticism of the March letter calling for a six-month pause came from progressives in the artificial intelligence community, who argued that talk of an apocalyptic future distracted from harms that AI companies perpetrate in the present. Dan Hendrycks, the Center for AI Safety’s director, wrote on Twitter that both near-term and long-term risks are in the scope of the latest letter published on Tuesday. “There are many important and urgent risks from AI, not just the risk of extinction; for example, systemic bias, misinformation, malicious use, cyberattacks, and weaponization. These are all important risks that need to be addressed,” he wrote. “Societies can manage multiple risks at once; it’s not ‘either/or’ but ‘yes/and.’ From a risk management perspective, just as it would be reckless to exclusively prioritize present harms, it would also be reckless to ignore them as well.”

Notably absent from the list of signatories are employees from Meta. The company’s AI division is widely regarded as close to the cutting edge in the field, having developed powerful large language models, as well as a model that can outperform human experts at the strategy game Diplomacy. Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann Lecun, has previously rubbished warnings that AI poses an existential risk to humanity.

Twitter exited the voluntary European Union’s Code of Practice on Disinformation, the bloc’s Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton said.

Twitter Inc. was earlier this year the only major tech platform that didn’t send a complete report to the European Union under the code, which the company agreed to follow before it was taken over by Elon Musk in late 2022. Its report was short of data and didn’t include commitments from the social media company that it would empower fact-checkers, the EU’s executive arm said in February.

“Twitter leaves EU voluntary Code of Practice against disinformation. But obligations remain,” Breton said on his Twitter account late on Friday. “You can run but you can’t hide.”

He said that beyond voluntary commitments, fighting disinformation will become a legal obligation as of Aug. 25 under the EU Digital Services Act. Twitter will qualify as a “very large online platform,” requiring the company to address harmful content and submit annual risk assessments to the commission.

“Our teams will be ready for enforcement,” Breton tweeted.

Musk’s massive job cuts at Twitter — including the exodus of the company’s entire Brussels office — have raised concerns about whether it will be able to make the necessary changes to comply with the EU’s rules. Failing to follow the DSA could cost a business fines of as much as 6% of its annual revenue or even prompt the commission to ban a platform altogether.

A year ago, heading into Memorial Day weekend, people were freaking out about gas prices.

Prices at the pump hit $4.72 a gallon on May 30 and then soared past $5 a gallon in June. Diesel prices were as high as they’d been in the U.S. since the government started tracking them, which sent prices soaring for just about everything that moves by truck or boat or plane.

This year, though, travelers are getting a reprieve; gas prices are hovering around $3.57 a gallon, down from both a month ago and a year ago. These lower prices are tied to the price of crude oil, which is down about 35% from last year, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
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Oil production has not been impacted as much as analysts worried it would be during last year’s invasion of Ukraine, says Patrick De Haan, head petroleum analyst at GasBuddy, and Russia is still sending crude oil to the market. At the same time, demand is weakening as worries about a recession dampen consumer spending and as retailers flush with inventory order less stuff.

Last year, by contrast, worries about supply constraints were happening as consumer demand was soaring, requiring more trucks on the road and more diesel to fuel them, causing prices to rise.

“The big story from my chair is that demand is weaker,” De Haan says. On average, between lower diesel and gasoline prices, the U.S. spends roughly $667 million less per day on fuel than it did a year ago, De Haan estimates. Low prices should continue throughout the summer and into October, according to a forecast from UBS.

But there is, perhaps, a silver lining from last year’s high gas prices: they motivated people to start buying electric vehicles. Google search interest in “electric cars” reached a record high in March of 2022 as gas prices started to climb following the invasion of Ukraine. EV purchases have been high ever since—about 7% of new car sales in the first quarter of 2023 were EVs, according to Cox Automotive, up from just 2.4% in the same period of 2021. Overall in 2022, total new vehicle sales fell by 8% from the previous year but EV sales grew 65%, according to Cox.

Cox expects EV sales to continue their fast pace this year, despite low gas prices, because of various incentives from the Inflation Reduction Act that will start to be offered at dealerships. This, too, could have an impact on gasoline prices, pushing them down even more as demand drops as more consumers say goodbye to volatile gas prices, replacing their combustion engine cars with EVs.

Netflix, the streaming company that once tweeted “Love is sharing a password,” has begun cracking down on password sharing in the United States, as it looks to increase revenue in what has become a saturated streaming market.

The company has previously said that more than 100 million subscribers worldwide access Netflix through password sharing and revealed in April 2022 that it lost subscribers for the first time in over a decade. The company added 7.66 million new subscribers for the final quarter of 2022, when it launched its lower-cost, ad-supported tier, and gained 1.75 million net new subscribers in the first quarter of 2023.
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The streamer has been slowly rolling out its new password protocol worldwide. Earlier this week, the company began alerting U.S. customers who shared their accounts with others outside their household about the new policy. “Your Netflix account is for you and the people you live with—your household,” the company said on Tuesday.

Here’s what this means for users.

How Will Netflix Enforce This?

With the new policy, only users who are part of a “Netflix Household”—those who are using the same internet connection—will be able to access the account unless they are paid additional users added onto a Standard or Premium plan. Those who are currently borrowing a Netflix password will get an update when they try to log in that tells them how to start their own account, the Washington Post reported.

The company says it will use​​ information such as IP addresses, device IDs, and account activity to determine whether a device is part of a household, and insists that it will not collect GPS data from users.

Netflix has said that customers will still be able to access their accounts while traveling, on their personal devices or a television in a hotel or vacation home. It remains unclear how long a device will be allowed to remain logged in from another location.

What Can Users Do?

For a price, subscribers with the $15.49 a month Standard plan can add one extra member outside of their household, while those with the $19.99 a month Premium plan can add two. For both tiers, each extra user would cost an additional $7.99 per month. According to Netflix, the additional member will have their own profile, account, and password, but their membership will be paid for by the person who invited them to join.

Users who have been added to these memberships have to activate their accounts in the same country as the original membership, can only view or download content on one device at a time, and they can’t create extra profiles, or log in as a Kids profile.

Users who were previously sharing a subscription and decide to fork the cash for their own account, can transfer their old profiles to a new account. The streamer now offers a $6.99 “Standard with ads” that includes “all but a few movies and TV shows” while the $9.99 Basic account offers unlimited, ad-free streaming. The company’s Standard and Premium options offer additional perks like the option to use more than one device at a time and download content on multiple devices.

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The E.U. is in the middle of implementing its Green Deal program with a wide range of implications for how the world tackles climate change. Perhaps nothing is of more obvious import to global business leaders than the bloc’s coming climate disclosure rules, which are scheduled to be finalized next month. The rules will start in Europe, but will soon affect companies around the globe.

That will likely include more than 3,000 U.S. and 1,300 Canadian companies, according to an analysis shared with me by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), an international standards organization whose work has informed the new E.U. directive. Any company that isn’t paying attention risks being left unprepared.
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To understand the implications of the rules, it’s helpful to look briefly at the long history of climate disclosure. For decades, civil society groups and governments have pushed companies to disclose both their climate impact and the risks that climate change poses to their business. Many companies have jumped on board the disclosure train, and a range of different yet overlapping voluntary standards have emerged. At the same time, many other firms, including some large ones, have declined to participate, leaving a knowledge gap about the true scale of both the risks that companies face and the role they may be playing furthering climate change.

Governments are trying to change that. In the U.S., the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) introduced a proposal last year that would require publicly traded companies to disclose their emissions and other climate-related factors. The proposal has split U.S. business leaders, with some welcoming the call for transparency and others saying it will be too burdensome. The agency has delayed finalizing its proposal as it tries to craft them in a way that will stand up in court and avoid the ire of businesses while remaining meaningful.

The SEC rules, however, may end up being less significant than what’s coming out of Brussels, known in typical wonky E.U. language as the Corporate Reporting Sustainability Directive (CSRD). While the proposed SEC rule focuses only on factors that it says are material to a company’s financial performance, the E.U. rules rely on a different, more consequential standard known as double materiality. That is, companies will need to disclose not only the material risks that climate change poses to their bottom line but also the way their operations materially impact the environment.

On top of this, the E.U.’s disclosure directive will extend far outside the bloc. The directive will apply next year to large, listed firms based in Europe. From there, it will expand to medium-sized firms in Europe in 2026, before eventually expanding again in 2028 to businesses around the world that derive significant revenue from the E.U. This will then spread even wider as companies evaluate the climate impacts and risks in smaller firms that they do business with. “It will affect not just the company itself, but the entire supply chain,” Olivier Boutellis-Taft, CEO of Accountancy Europe, which represents European accountants, told me in his office in Brussels.

In Europe, many in the business community are up in arms about the cost of compliance as the E.U. rolls out a range of new climate-linked regulations beyond the corporate reporting requirement, from new passenger vehicle standards to an expanded emissions trading system. These businesses are especially concerned about the possibility of too many different standards in different jurisdictions. The key to address that concern will be to align the standards—an ongoing discussion in climate disclosure circles. “The idea that business is against sustainability reporting is just not true,” says Eelco van Der Enden, CEO of GRI. “Business is against too much and too different. The more alignment, the better.”

Regardless of how that discussion shakes out, change is afoot. This new information will shape the marketplace. Investors will have more information about where companies face risk of climate disasters—or are vulnerable to new regulation. The data that come from these disclosures will likely to trickle down to consumers in the form of new labels and standards that seek to explain corporate climate impact concisely.

However the debate over these standards shakes out, business leaders need to be aware that mandatory disclosure is coming one way or another—and likely sooner than later.

Germany suffered its first recession since the start of pandemic, extinguishing hopes that Europe’s top economy could escape such a fate after the war in Ukraine sent energy prices soaring.

First-quarter output shrank 0.3% from the previous three months following a 0.5% drop between October and December, the statistics office said Thursday. Its initial estimate, last month, was for stagnation.

“The reluctance of households to buy was apparent in a variety of areas,” the office said in a statement. “Households spent less on food and beverages, clothing and footwear, and on furnishings.” They also purchased fewer electric cars as incentives were reduced.
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Elsewhere, there was a plunge in government expenditure, while investment was up —aided by construction in unseasonably warm weather.

The result is a setback for Germany, which despite escaping the bleakest scenarios feared in the aftermath of Russia’s invasion has nevertheless succumbed to a recession that Chancellor Olaf Scholz appeared to rule out in January.

“We must turn the corner in economic policy and put an end to the neglect of our competitiveness,” Finance Minister Christian Lindner said in Berlin, adding that this included the “acceleration of planning and approval procedures and strengthening the idea of technological freedom in order to leverage our creative potential.”

Markets shrugged off Thursday’s numbers — despite their implications for the wider performance of the 20-nation euro zone.

In Germany, companies like Zalando SE reflect the flagging consumer sentiment. The fashion retailer saw inventory levels driven higher in the first quarter by falling demand. Domestic car orders, meanwhile, were down by about a third between January and April, according to the VDA auto industry association.

The key manufacturing sector is also proving to be a problem: A deepening downturn is casting doubt on the rebound many anticipate for the coming quarters.

Indeed, industrial weakness is taking a toll on the business outlook. A gauge of expectations by the Ifo institute fell for the first month in eight in May, while a survey by lobby group DIHK pointed to zero GDP growth for 2023.

A Bundesbank report this week offered some optimism — suggesting the economy may grow “slightly” this quarter as large order backlogs, an easing of supply bottlenecks and lower energy costs support manufacturers.

But goods demand is cratering as consumers faced with elevated inflation prefer to splurge on leisure and travel. That’s making economic growth increasingly uneven — a trend some analysts say isn’t sustainable.

“The optimism at the start of the year seems to have given way to more of a sense of reality,” ING economist Carsten Brzeski said in a report to clients. “A drop in purchasing power, thinned-out industrial order books as well as the impact of the most aggressive monetary policy tightening in decades, and the expected slowdown of the US economy all argue in favor of weak economic activity.”

For economists at Commerzbank, a second-half recession now looks likelier than the rebound most of their colleagues continue to forecast.

Inflation isn’t helping. It still exceeds 7% and isn’t expected to retreat quickly as rising wages feed strong underlying pressures, according to the Bundesbank.

The European Central Bank’s efforts to bring price gains back to its 2% target risk further damping demand. Bank loans are already getting pricier and interest-rate hikes aren’t yet complete, risking a stronger drag on growth.

—With assistance from Joel Rinneby, Kristian Siedenburg, Christoph Rauwald, Monica Raymunt, Constantine Courcoulas and Kamil Kowalcze.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on Wednesday that the Treasury Department was not currently talking to investors about what would happen if a deal on the debt ceiling isn’t reached and the U.S. defaults, affirming her belief that an agreement is possible and emphasizing the necessity for a resolution by the June 1 deadline.

“We are committed to not having missed payments and raising the debt ceiling,” she said while speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s CEO Council Summit via video link. She said the Treasury Department is not currently in conversations with investors about what might happen if the U.S. does miss payments. “We’re not involved in planning for what happens if there’s a default.”
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Read More: What to Know About the History of the Debt Ceiling

As President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy continue negotiations over raising the federal debt ceiling, Yellen reaffirmed Wednesday that the Treasury would be unlikely to meet all U.S. government payment obligations as early as June 1, without a congressional decision to raise the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling. Without such action, a U.S. default would be triggered.

Yellen said that the agency is working to reach a more precise forecast to give Congress for the exact date the U.S. is expected to run out of financial resources.

The Treasury Secretary did not specify the kinds of prioritization that be required if a deal is not reached, but noted that the situation would not be operationally feasible for the government. “We will default on some obligation, and that’s really not an acceptable state of affairs,” she said. “It threatens the strong recovery that we have in the U.S. economy. It threatens financial markets. We simply have to raise the debt ceiling.”

Yellen also spoke about the recent turmoil in the U.S. banking sector. She said JPMorgan Chase’s recent acquisition of failing First Republic Bank had been a necessary, but not ideal move for the health of the U.S. banking system. Earlier this month, San Francisco-based First Republic Bank became the third U.S. bank to shutter in just two months, with JPMorgan acquiring most of the bank’s assets in a weekend deal shepherded by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC). It followed government takeovers of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in March.

“In general, seeing greater concentration among the largest banks is not something that’s desirable,” Yellen said of JPMorgan Chase’s merger with First Republic Bank. “But the FDIC, in resolving a company, is…required to take the best bid for a failing bank. And in this case, that was the bid of JPMorgan Chase.” She added, “We want to make sure that there is healthy competition throughout the economy, including in the banking system, but this was something that the FDIC was required to do.”

As the U.S., along with many other countries, continues to face stubborn inflation, Yellen remained hopeful that relief could be on the way, noting that certain factors, such as a tight labor market and high rental costs, have been critical in pushing up inflation rates. “We’ve seen housing price increases taper off. The prices of new newly rented apartments [has] stabilized and over time, I think that will show up in bringing core inflation down further,” she said, “The labor market is also arguably loosening up a little bit, becoming a bit less hot.”

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Wednesday his company could “cease operating” in the European Union if it is unable to comply with the provisions of new artificial intelligence legislation that the bloc is currently preparing.

“We’re gonna try to comply,” Altman said on the sidelines of a panel discussion at University College London, part of an ongoing tour of European countries. He said he had met with E.U. regulators to discuss the AI act as part of his tour, and added that OpenAI had “a lot” of criticisms of the way the act is currently worded.
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Altman said that OpenAI’s skepticism centered on the E.U. law’s designation of “high risk” systems as it is currently drafted. The law is still undergoing revisions, but under its current wording it may require large AI models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 to be designated as “high risk,” forcing the companies behind them to comply with additional safety requirements. OpenAI has previously argued that its general purpose systems are not inherently high-risk.

“Either we’ll be able to solve those requirements or not,” Altman said of the E.U. AI Act’s provisions for high risk systems. “If we can comply, we will, and if we can’t, we’ll cease operating… We will try. But there are technical limits to what’s possible.”

The law, Altman said, was “not inherently flawed,” but he went on to say that “the subtle details here really matter.” During an on-stage interview earlier in the day, Altman said his preference for regulation was “something between the traditional European approach and the traditional U.S. approach.”

Altman also said on stage that he was worried about the risks stemming from artificial intelligence, singling out the possibility of AI-generated disinformation designed to appeal to an individual’s own personal biases. For example, AI-generated disinformation could have an impact on the upcoming 2024 U.S. election, he said. But he suggested that social media platforms were more important drivers of disinformation than AI language models. “You can generate all the disinformation you want with GPT-4, but if it’s not being spread, it’s not going to do much,” he said.

On the whole, Altman presented a rosy view to the London crowd of a potential future where the technology’s benefits far outweighed its risks. “I am an optimist,” he said.

In a foray into socioeconomic policy, Altman raised the prospect of the need for wealth redistribution in an AI-driven future. “We’ll have to think about distribution of wealth differently than we do today, and that’s fine,” Altman said on stage. “We think about that somewhat differently after every technological revolution.”

Altman told TIME after the talk that OpenAI was preparing, in 2024, to begin making public interventions on the topic of wealth redistribution, in much the same way that it is currently doing on AI regulatory policy. “We’re going to try,” he said. “That’s kind of a next-year project for us.” OpenAI is currently carrying out a five-year study into universal basic income, he said, which will conclude next year. “That’ll be a good time to do it,” Altman said.

Altman’s appearance at the London university drew some negative attention. Outside the packed-out lecture theater, a handful of protesters milled around talking to people who’d failed to get in. One protester carried a sign saying: “Stop the suicide AGI race.” (AGI stands for “Artificial General Intelligence,” a hypothetical superintelligent AI that OpenAI has said that it aims to one day build.) The protesters handed out fliers urging people to “Stand up against Sam Altman’s dangerous vision for the future.”

“It’s time that the public step up and say: it is our future and we should have a choice over it,” said Gideon Futterman, 20, one of the protesters, who said he is a student studying solar geoengineering and existential risk at the University of Oxford. “We shouldn’t be allowing multimillionaires from Silicon Valley with a messiah complex to decide what we want.”

“What we’re doing is making a deal with the devil,” Futterman says. “A very large number of people who think that these systems are on track for AGI, also think that a bad future is more likely than a good future.”

Futterman told TIME that Altman came out and had a brief conversation with him and the other protesters after his panel appearance.

“He said he understood our concerns, but thinks that safety and capabilities can’t be separated from each other,” Futterman said. “He said that OpenAI isn’t a player in the [AI] race, despite the fact that this is so clearly what they are doing. He basically said that he doesn’t think this development can be stopped, and said he’s got confidence in their safety.”

Apple announced a multibillion dollar deal with the U.S. chipmaker Broadcom to use chips manufactured in the United States, as part of its 2021 plan to invest $430 billion in the U.S. economy over five years. The move comes as the U.S. seeks to reduce its reliance on foreign chip manufacturers.

As part of the multi-year deal, Broadcom will collaborate with Apple to develop 5G radio frequency and wireless connectivity components. According to Apple, the technology will be designed and built in facilities across the country, including in Fort Collins, Colorado, where Broadcom has a major facility.
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“Apple already helps support more than 1,100 jobs in Broadcom’s Fort Collins FBAR filter manufacturing facility, and the partnership will enable Broadcom to continue to invest in critical automation projects and upskilling with technicians and engineers,” Apple said in a statement on Tuesday.

The announcement comes as the U.S. continues to turn its attention towards domestic semiconductor production in an effort to reduce American companies’ reliance on foreign chipmakers. Last summer, President Biden signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, one of the biggest federal investments in a private industry, which includes $52 billion in subsidies for domestic chip manufacturers, $24 billion to fund a tax credit for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities, and more than $170 billion over five years to boost U.S. scientific research.

The vast majority of advanced semiconductors are manufactured in China and Taiwan, which many U.S. officials viewed as a national security concern. Pandemic-spurred supply chain shocks that triggered a semiconductor shortage also exposed global reliance on a few key players for chips that are essential in the electronics and automotive industries, in particular.

“All of Apple’s products depend on technology engineered and built here in the United States, and we’ll continue to deepen our investments in the U.S. economy because we have an unshakable belief in America’s future,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

The U.S. isn’t the only country seeking to reduce its dependence on Asian chipmakers. Member states of the European Union agreed their own €43 billion ($46 billion) Chips Act to boost semiconductor production in the bloc, while the U.K. also unveiled its £1 billion ($1.2 billion) semiconductor strategy in recent days.

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman said part of the reason for his current tour of European cities is to discover a suitable location for a new office.

“Poland would be an interesting place,” Altman said in an interview Tuesday when asked about European offices. “We want to do a research and engineering office in Europe, not a regulatory one. We are trying to figure it out. This is part of the goal of this trip.”

The “talent density” of any potential location of a new office is key, Altman told Bloomberg News on the sidelines of an event hosted by the University of Warsaw and the National Centre for Research and Development.
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Poland is a hotbed within the IT industry, hosting large engineering hubs for Alphabet Inc., JP Morgan Chase & Co. and Visa Inc., as well as developer CD Projekt SA, creator of The Witcher and Cyberpunk 2077 games.

The CEO’s comments follow his appearance last week in front of US senators, to whom he spoke about a variety of areas where he’d support regulation, including preventing election misinformation and making AI-generated content clear to users. Altman said on Tuesday he supported Europe’s effort to lead a global approach to regulating AI companies.

Read More: Lawmakers Aren’t Giving Sam Altman the Zuckerberg Treatment (Yet)

On stage, he said he’d spoken to Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki during his trip. The CEO is expected to visit Paris later on Tuesday, followed by the UK on Wednesday.

The ChatGPT boss also said the newly-released mobile version of the AI tool was driving a small but “visible bump” in subscriptions to the company’s paid-for Pro version.

ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok is “on track” with its undertaking to have all U.S. user data hosted and overseen by Oracle Corp., as the Chinese tech behemoth struggles to win over critics worried about the national security implications of its hit video app.

TikTok Chief Executive Officer Shou Zi Chew said the American software company has begun a review of TikTok’s source code and is now the default destination for U.S. user data. His team is also developing a European version of this local-hosting initiative, designed to allay fears of sensitive information reaching the Chinese government, with data centers in Ireland and Norway.
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“The Chinese government has actually never asked us for U.S. user data, and we will not provide it even if asked,” the executive, who goes by Shou Chew in the U.S., told Bloomberg Television at the Qatar Economic Forum in Doha on Tuesday. “We will continue to invest to make sure that our data is as safe as possible.”

Read More: What to Know About the TikTok Security Concerns

TikTok has come under fire as American lawmakers rekindled concerns over how the Chinese-owned platform handles user data. ByteDance, the world’s most valuable startup, now faces an intensive national security review and legislation that could ban its signature service in its biggest international market. To address those concerns, TikTok is developing its U.S. and E.U. projects to have user information stored locally, by a local company, and overseen by local staff.

In March, Chew sat through a grueling five-hour hearing at Capitol Hill where lawmakers repeatedly questioned him about TikTok’s Chinese ownership and Beijing’s ability to access the data of millions of Americans. TikTok executives had internally discussed splitting from ByteDance, but Chinese officials said they would oppose a forced sale.

On Tuesday, the TikTok chief reiterated that his team is working with Oracle and the U.S. government and making progress.

TikTok’s 150 million American users appear to be its biggest ally. Last week, Montana’s Republican governor, Greg Gianforte, signed a measure that will prohibit the app’s download beginning next year. Local TikTok creators and viewers protested against the first statewide ban of the app in the U.S., including by suing their government on First Amendment grounds.

Read More: Critics Say Montana’s TikTok Ban Is a Violation of Free Speech. Here’s What to Know

“We believe that the Montana bill that was recently passed is simply unconstitutional,” Chew said. TikTok filed a lawsuit to challenge it in the court, and he’s confident the company will prevail.

Despite the political tension, TikTok hasn’t eased its push on monetization. Having already snatched a big portion of advertising from the likes of Meta Platforms Inc. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google, TikTok is now venturing into live-streaming commerce in places like Southeast Asia and the U.S., following the tried-and-true model of its Chinese sibling Douyin.

ByteDance’s revenue surged more than 30% to surpass $80 billion for 2022, matching the tally at rival Tencent Holdings Ltd. The double-digit growth also topped that of most of the global internet leaders, including Meta and Amazon.com Inc.

Back home, ByteDance joined the likes of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and Tencent to implement unprecedented cost curbs during a year of endless regulatory crackdowns and Covid restrictions. The Beijing company founded about a decade ago curtailed some of its riskier projects — including in gaming and venture investment. Douyin remains its cash cow as the video forum evolved to become an all-in-one app with built-in purchases, online meal delivery and grocery features.

The TikTok owner was valued at around $220 billion in a recent private-market investment by Abu Dhabi AI firm G42, down from the $300 billion that ByteDance set during a September share buyback program.

HELENA, Mont. — Social media company TikTok Inc. filed a lawsuit Monday seeking to overturn Montana’s first-in-the-nation ban on the video sharing app, arguing the law is an unconstitutional violation of free speech rights and is based on “unfounded speculation” that the Chinese government could access users’ data.

The lawsuit by TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, follows one filed last week by five content creators. They made similar arguments including that the state of Montana has no authority to take action on matters of national security. Both lawsuits were filed in federal court in Missoula.

Read More: Critics Say Montana’s TikTok Ban Is a Violation of Free Speech. Here’s What to Know
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Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte signed the bill Wednesday and the content creators’ lawsuit was filed hours later. The law is scheduled to take effect on Jan. 1, but cybersecurity experts say it could be difficult to enforce.

TikTok says it has not shared and would not share U.S. user data with the Chinese government and has taken measures to protect the privacy and security of its users, including storing all U.S. user data in the United States, according to the lawsuit.

Some lawmakers, the FBI and officials at other agencies are concerned that the video-sharing app could be used to allow the Chinese government to access information on U.S. citizens or push pro-Beijing misinformation that could influence the public.

Read More: Why the FBI Is Concerned About TikTok

Chinese law compels Chinese companies to share data with the government for whatever purposes it deems to involve national security. TikTok says this has never happened.

“The Chinese Communist Party is using TikTok as a tool to spy on Americans by collecting personal information, keystrokes, and even the locations of its users — and by extension, people without TikTok who affiliate with users may have information about themselves shared without even knowing it,” Emily Flower, a spokesperson for the Montana Department of Justice, said in a statement.

“We expected legal challenges and are fully prepared to defend the law that helps protect Montanans’ privacy and security,” she wrote

The federal government and about half the U.S. states, including Montana, have banned TikTok from government-owned devices.

Read More: Why the U.S. and Other Countries Want to Ban or Restrict TikTok

Montana’s new law prohibits downloads of TikTok in the state. It would fine any “entity” — an app store or TikTok — $10,000 per day for each time someone “is offered the ability” to access the social media platform or download the app. The penalties would not apply to users.

Chatter about a TikTok ban has been around since 2020, when then-President Donald Trump attempted to bar the company from operating in the U.S. through an executive order that was halted in federal courts. Congress has also considered banning the app over security concerns.

When many companies were trying to get rid of their office space to save money during the pandemic, the architecture and design firm NBBJ was doing the opposite.

It took over the former offices of the clothing company Eileen Fisher in the Flatiron district of New York City and started ripping out walls and creating a 28,000 square foot “living lab”—a space where the company could test what type of design and layout works best for hybrid work. The idea wasn’t to force NBBJ employees into the office five days a week, but instead to create a place for hybrid work where people would actually want to come, despite the long commutes typical in the New York area. NBBJ could then take what worked and use that as the basis for designing offices for their clients also looking towards the hybrid future.
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“We’re in the early stages of a deep recognition that the workplace needs to be different,” says Steve McConnell, NBBJ’s managing partner and board chair, who spearheaded the redesign.

The Flatiron space, which opened in November, feels like a mix between an office and a social club, with conference rooms giving off living room vibes, thanks to their homey bookshelves and couches; a lab where employees can look at tiny models of buildings the company is designing; green carpets throughout that feel like forest meadows; and rotating art projects on screens stretching towards the high ceilings. It’s nearly twice as big as the company’s former office space, and with its natural light and dark green tones, seems to communicate more “cool Airbnb” than “office.”

The commercial real estate market is still in the dumps, with office occupancy at around 50% of pre-pandemic levels in the 10 largest U.S. cities, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks unique card swipes in office buildings. Many companies are now battling workers over whether return to office will be a requirement and how many days will be mandatory, including Amazon, the Walt Disney Company, and the New York Times. But now that the Biden Administration has declared the pandemic officially over, some companies are ready to declare hybrid work the new reality and are redesigning their offices accordingly—taking advantage of low prices and desperate landlords and creating spaces in which employees might actually want to work.

“We’re never going to force people back into the office, but we feel a sense of responsibility to build an office space that is delightful,” says Holly Barbacovi, the head of human resources at the video game maker Bungie, which is nearly finished building its new office space in Bellevue, Wash. During the pandemic, Bungie decided to allow for fully remote work; today, the company is expanding its square footage from 80,000 to 200,000.

Such hybrid workplaces appear to be the future of corporate offices. Though 42% of companies had a full-time in-office policy in the second quarter of 2023, that’s down from 49% in the first quarter of the year, according to the Flex Index, a database of surveys and publicly available information that tracks the return-to-office policies of more than 4,000 companies. Further, around 30% of companies now allow for hybrid work, up from 20% in the first quarter, the report finds.

“I think a lot of employers are reenvisioning their offices to be better shared offices, less places you go into to do heads-down work,” says Robert Sadow, the CEO and co-founder of Scoop Technologies, which puts out the Flex Index. This is happening more in certain companies than others, of course—around 63% of companies with fewer than 500 employees are fully flexible, according to the Flex Index, compared to just 13% of companies with more than 50,000 employees.

Some companies are completely rethinking the idea of a permanent office, says Prithwiraj Choudhury, a professor at Harvard Business School who has been studying remote work for years. Some startups are deciding that the purpose of an office is really to socialize, and they’re allowing employees to work from anywhere, and then picking a place for people to meet occasionally throughout the year to get to know each other.

A company called Zapier, for example, has company retreats where it invites all workers to spend a few days in-person with their colleagues; the company pays for flights, accommodation, and food, and organizes ways for people in different departments to get to know each other. Gitlab, which Choudhury says is one of the world’s largest remote companies, with 1,300 employees, allows employees to be fully remote but has at least one offsite meetup around the world each year.

New companies are forming to meet the needs of businesses looking for alternative workplaces; for example, there’s Radious, an Airbnb-type app which allows people to rent out extra space in their homes to remote workers, and Project Pair, which helps Bay Area companies share hybrid office space.

“There’s a whole new generation of companies that are organizing work in a very different way,” Choudhury says.

How to Fix Work

Even before the pandemic, many companies accepted that the office was broken. The open floor-plan offices that seemed like such a good idea a few years ago had become noisy places where workers were having trouble focusing. In 2019, people spent an average of 47 seconds on a given screen before switching to another, down from 2.5 minutes in 2004, according to research from Gloria Mark, an informatics professor at the University of California, Irvine. Some companies were even moving to four-day work weeks to try and give employees more focus time.

Read more: The COVID-19 Pandemic Upended the Office. It’s Time to Radically Rethink How We Work

Before the pandemic, one architect, David Dewane, came up with the idea for a utopian office where employees had room to socialize but also do the kind of deep work needed for many knowledge jobs—he called it the Eudaimonia machine, for the Greek word that denotes a state of flourishing and prosperity. His design had a gallery where workers would see material that would inspire them and remind them of the purpose of their work; a salon where they could socialize and have conversations, a library where they could do research; an office where they could do expenses and “light work;” and then an isolated room for deep work where they could focus. Today, Dewane is working with a design firm called Geniant to help companies figure out the best office space for their mix of workers.

“The old workplace is performative, what we are trying to get to now is places where your space is enabling you to do your jobs at a higher level,” he says.

What NBBJ has found so far is that the new office needs to be a place where people can gather, socialize, and be inspired. Not a place where they come to sit under fluorescent lights in conference rooms and long for home. Despite the NBBJ office’s large size, there still aren’t enough individual desks for every employee; designers assume that people will want to also sit at long tables where they can spread out papers, or at couches or comfy chairs.

“If you’re coming back to the office, you’re not coming back to sit at a desk—you’re coming back to collaborate. So we worked out these areas and zones where people could really come in and collectively work together,” says Suzanne Carlson, senior corporate market director at NBBJ. Carlson’s preferred space: the Living Room, which has a dark green carpet, a comfy gray couch with blankets, a coffee table, and a big TV for Zoom calls. “If you work with leaders in a conference room and then do a wrap up in the living room, the intimacy and quality of sharing and openness shifts,” she says. “Space matters.”

Zach Russell, Bungie’s senior director of employee experience, says he wants to make the office a place “where people want to come versus where they have to come.” Bungie hopes its new offices will help people have the type of accidental “collisions” that help companies be more innovative and also lead to more workplace satisfaction. Work stations are on the outside of the office, and when people get a cup of coffee or go to the bathroom, they have to move to the center of the office, where they run into other people. There are also some wide-open spaces with couches and seating areas where people can hold Zoom calls or play video games—and throughout, there are life-sized figures from some of the company’s most popular games.

The company recently held an event at its new office space, and it proved so popular that some remote workers mentioned the idea of relocating to be closer to the beating heartbeat of the company, says Barbacovi. Now, Bungie has launched a new policy allowing workers a relocation budget should they want to relocate to Bellevue now or in the future.

Flexibility is the most important piece

Of course, many companies haven’t changed their offices at all. They’re still deciding exactly what their working arrangements will look like and if they can get people to come back into the office. The risk of a recession is also making some companies hesitant to spend money on new digs.

But the pandemic has changed the way office design will happen, when it does happen, going forward. “With the complete disruption to society and significance of the pandemic—it’s well understood that these kinds of cataclysmic events accelerate change,” says McConnell, with NBBJ.

Before the pandemic, for example, NBBJ didn’t spend too much time talking about whether companies were hybrid when they were designing their offices. Now, the firm always starts by asking companies what their real estate strategy is and if they want to have a physical space in the future, and what their workforce strategy is and whether people will be hybrid.

Read More: Why Return to Office Policies Spell Trouble for Working Moms

Though companies have different ideas about what a hybrid workspace looks like, there’s one thing that ties many of these spaces together: they are flexible, changeable, and may look different in a year or two.

The shoe company Brooks started looking for commercial office space in 2020—Tom Ross, the firm’s vice president of finance, jokes that he was the only person in Seattle looking for office space at the time. The company decided it didn’t want to just have people come in now and again, but that it wanted an office where people could collaborate frequently in person. But Brooks learned from the pandemic that things could unexpectedly change again, so the company is working with NBBJ to make the office as flexible as possible. And indeed, furniture, if designed correctly, can be moved easily, as can walls, says Ross. “We designed it in a way that we can make relatively quick and inexpensive changes if we need to so that we’re not bound to a specific design,” he says.

NBBJ’s new offices—the living lab—are flexible too. Walls can be moved and furniture taken apart so a room becomes a gathering space or a seating area easily. The desks and chairs are the first New York office iteration of the Vitra Comma flexible furniture system, designed in 2022 to allow companies to easily assemble and disassemble desks and shelves like scaffolding. There are art installations that change over time, and projects that the company is working on are laid out in the open, in a way that welcomes feedback from colleagues. “We want this to be hackable, flexible, if people come back in two months it will look different,” says John Gunn, corporate practice lead with NBBJ.

There’s one thing that companies like NBBJ can’t change when they redesign new offices: housing prices, the factor that has driven so many workers to live far away and not want to weather long commutes to the office. But Gunn and NBBJ say they hope that they can design offices that will make people want to come in, even if they have long commutes. Gunn, for example, lives in Beacon, which is a two-hour commute, one way, from the new offices. He’s in just about every day.

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Stacey Abrams has twice been the Democratic candidate for Governor in Georgia (unsuccessfully), founded FairFight Action to increase voter registration, and is currently the Senior Counsel to Rewiring America, a nonprofit that seeks to switch all households to using electricity. She was recently appointed as an endowed chair at Howard University. And she’s found time to write at least 12 books.

One could be forgiven for expecting her books to be policy-heavy. And yes, she has written a lot on tax law, but she also writes genre fiction, both under her own name and the pen-name Selena Montgomery. Her newest book, Rogue Justice, is the the second in a series of legal thrillers about feisty Supreme Court clerk Avery Keene, an impeached President, a suspicious FBI agent and a shadowy character who knows how to work the levers of the U.S. government.
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Abrams talked to TIME about the role fiction has played in her life, voting rights and whether she will run for political office again.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

People who only know your political career may not know that you’ve written four bestsellers, including at least one legal thriller and eight romantic suspense novels. You have so much to do. Why write?

I do not remember a time when writing and reading weren’t important to me. My mom was a college librarian, and I used to nap among the stacks. Writing has never been far from what I do or who I am.

I wrote my first attempt a novel when I was 12. It was called The Diary of Angst. I was a very, very obnoxious 12 year old who was just assailed by all the travails of the world. Novels have always been a part of how I think about writing. During law school, I wrote two things that got published: my first romantic suspense novel and an essay on the operational dissonance of the unrelated business income tax exemption.

Do you find novels a useful way to critique politics?

For me, the novel is a way to tackle complicated conversations, to address questions that intrigue me or pique me. You didn’t enter Rogue Justice necessarily knowing you wanted to know about the power grid or about the FISA court, but I hope when you’re done, you have answers, and you also have new questions.

Did the writing of the novel lead you towards accepting the position at Rewiring America?

I’d say that it informed why I understood the importance of the issue. This was one of those happy coincidences. After the campaign the opportunity for Rewiring came up and I thought, well, I now know much more about electrification than most people would realize… Although, you know, I thought I’d be doing something else after the election.

Your book involves a massive leak of data. Do you see any similarities with the massive data leak we are living through?

I do. I think we have entered an age when the aggregation of information and the incredible speed with which technology allows us to access it, and the sheer volume of it we can amass, makes us vulnerable. And I think we have to stop being surprised by leaks. Instead, we have to anticipate that they’re going to happen. Part of what I’m investigating in this book is where there are vulnerabilities.

You don’t worry that writing novels will make people take you less seriously?

Politics is about meeting people where they are and setting a vision for where you can go. I love storytelling. And I think that there’s very little in our society that levels the playing field more than a good novel does. It’s just a different part of how we have conversations and how we investigate our world.

Has your increased understanding of cybercrime given you sympathy for people who don’t trust computerized ballot counting?

Of course. We have to recognize that trust is earned not given. And part of my responsibility on the civic side is to work hard to make certain that we can and do trust our systems. The Dominion lawsuit mattered because it’s not simply a question or defaming a company; you’re also attacking a process that is embedded in how we have elections. Our fundamental responsibility is not only ensuring access, but validating the trust that people place in our democracy.

Read More: Dominion CEO Predicts ‘Business Ultimately Goes to Zero’ Because of 2020 Election Lies

Are you satisfied with how much change you’ve been able to bring to Georgia’s electoral system?

I think we’ve made improvements. Unfortunately, even this year, we saw the state continue to retrench on voter suppression and make it more difficult for people to participate. My worry is that we think that because there’s no massive disaster, that that means there is no fault. Democracy is fragile and that is why I will continue to be engaged in defending it, even if it is watching a community lose their last access to voting because they shut down a precinct in a community without public transit. When no one can reach the voting place, does it really exist?

You started your career as a tax attorney. If you could change one part of the tax code, what would you change?

Immediately I would lift the exemptions. Right now our tax code gives privilege to communities who already enjoy it. Multibillion dollar companies pay nothing, and the janitor who cleans the floor of one of those companies pays an extraordinary sum of their income. I would right-size it so that we all pay our fair share.

Do you want to run for governor again?

I will always be involved in politics and I may run again, but that’s not my focus right now. One of the reasons writing this novel was so important to me is I wrote it as I was planning to run for office. I do not see a separation between being a writer and being in politics and running a business. In my mind, they’re all of a piece, a very complicated piece, but that’s why God created novels. So you can tell multiple stories all at once.

Interesting that you put novels on God. Was that on the eighth day?

My mother was a librarian. So clearly, there was a lot of intentionality there.

You might have thought that by the end of May, with the pandemic officially over, people would be getting back to the office. But a new report suggests that the share of workers in-office full time is actually shrinking as hybrid work is growing.

The share of people in the office full time dropped to 42% in the second quarter of 2023, down from 49% in the first quarter, according to The Flex Report, which collects insights from more than 4,000 companies employing more than 100 million people globally. Meanwhile, the share of offices with hybrid work arrangements hit 30% in the quarter, up from 20% the previous quarter.
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“It certainly looks like hybrid is gaining share,” says Robert Sadow, the CEO and co-founder of Scoop Technologies, which puts out the Flex report. “There’s an adoption cycle like any other technology—you have early adopters and laggards.”

Work is moving toward what Sadow calls “structured hybrid,” in which there are a set number of days that people are required to come into the office. The average minimum days required is 2.53, with both two days and three days being popular, he says. Tuesday is the most popular day required, followed by Wednesday and Thursday. Few offices require a Friday presence, and only 24% require a Monday presence.

Of course, not all companies are going to accept that they can’t get employees to return to offices for which they have to keep paying rent. Both Twitter and Tesla require full-time office attendance, and Apple is reportedly tracking employee attendance and threatening action against staff who don’t come in. Workers at Disney are required to go into the office four days a week, though thousands signed a petition protesting the policy.

Opponents argue that return to office policies disadvantage people of color and women who are discriminated against in person, and make life more challenging for working parents who don’t want to waste hours commuting and can’t afford space near the office in today’s housing market.

The Flex Report suggests that workplace flexibility differs dramatically depending on the company’s industry, size, and location. Nearly two in three companies that have fewer than 500 employees are fully flexible, meaning employees can be remote if they want. By contrast, only 13% of companies with more than 50,000 employees are fully flexible, though 66% do allow for structured hybrid work.

States in the west and northeast parts of the U.S. have the highest share of companies that are fully flexible, with Oregon, Washington, and Colorado topping the list; Arkansas, Alabama and Louisiana had the highest share of companies that are full time in the office.

There are other signs, in addition to the Flex Report, that five-days-a-week return to office plans are not succeeding. The share of days worked from home, at around 30%, appears to have stabilized at about five times what it was before the pandemic, according to research by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who studies remote work. That could be a good thing for both employees and employers: One Bloom study found that people who worked from home were more productive and one-third less likely to quit than those who didn’t.

Office occupancy in the top 10 most populous U.S. cities was just 49.9% of pre-pandemic levels the first week of May, according to data from Kastle Systems, which tracks keycard swipes across 2,600 buildings. One result of that trend is that consumer spending has plummeted in center cities in places like New York, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C.—meanwhile, home values in exurbs and suburbs have continued to surge.

The commercial real estate market hasn’t completely tanked yet because many companies are signed into long-term leases. What’s more, the format of structured hybrid work means they can’t dramatically shrink their spaces yet. If every employee comes in three days a week, but they’re the same three days a week, the company still needs the same amount of space as it did before the pandemic. It’s just paying for empty office space on certain days of the week.

Bloom expects the share of people working from home more frequently to only trend upward as technology advances. With better video calls, augmented reality, and virtual reality, there may start to be less of a difference from working in an office and being at home, he says. Office occupancy rates may go up to 55%, he says, but he predicts they’ll start trending down again by the end of 2024.

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It almost goes without saying that the most important business story of the year has been and will continue to be rising interest rates and their ripple effects. This is a big topic with wide-reaching implications that we’re yet to understand fully. In this column, I want to touch on how interest rates will affect perhaps the most obvious climate-related capital investment: renewable energy.

On the surface, higher interest rates are really bad news for renewable energy investment. The reasoning is pretty simple: clean energy technologies like wind and solar require developers to borrow a lot of capital up front to build projects. Higher interest rates make it more costly to borrow that money and in turn can significantly increase the cost of a project. On the flip side, the cost of electricity generated by conventional sources—namely gas and coal—depends largely on the cost of the fuel rather than the cost of building the project in the first place.
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To understand the cost of generating electricity over the lifetime of a plant, energy experts often refer to what’s known as the levelized cost of electricity, or LCOE. That figure gives an average of what it will cost to produce electricity in today’s terms incorporating everything from construction to fuel to financing fees. A 2020 analysis from the International Energy Agency shows that a 5% rise in interest rates would increase the levelized cost of electricity from a natural gas plant natural gas plant only marginally while it could increase the cost of electricity from wind and solar by a third.

This dynamic made renewable energy an especially appealing investment in recent years. Borrowing money was cheap as the Federal Reserve maintained interest rates near zero. And, at the same time, the cost of generating wind and solar power fell dramatically thanks to technology improvements while fossil fuel prices were volatile, creating havoc for the companies purchasing electricity.

The higher-interest rate environment is now complicating the picture. After decades of sharp declines, the levelized cost of wind and solar is rising for the first time, according to an April report from Lazard, a financial services firm. In 2021, the average levelized cost of electricity was $38 per megawatt hour for utility-scale solar; this year, the cost has spiked to $60. Wind, too, has seen a similar increase.

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But it’s not all bad news for clean energy. Gas remains slightly more expensive, according to Lazard. And if you factor in the subsidies for producing renewable energy contained in the Inflation Reduction Act, the price of utility-scale solar and onshore wind energy could fall as low as zero despite the interest-rate headwinds.

Moreover, as fossil fuel prices are expected to remain volatile in the years and decades to come as geopolitical tensions over energy continue, more than half of new electricity demand through 2025 is expected to be met by low-carbon sources, according to a report from the IEA.

Many large companies are continuing to recognize the value of doubling down on clean energy despite the headwinds. Long-term agreements to buy clean electricity can lock in prices, removing volatility. The Clean Energy Buyers Alliance tracked nearly 150 deals last year from large corporations making long-term agreements to buy renewable energy to power their operations. Those deals amount to nearly 17 gigawatts of renewable energy, enough to power approximately 12 million homes.

For those pushing for a full throttle transition to renewable energy, it’s a promising sign, but the true test will come in the months to come as the new interest rate environment really settles in.