Happy Friday is ranked as one of the worst ways to begin an email and it is also one of the worst ways to end a piece of correspondence.
While Happy Friday may seem like a friendly send-off to colleagues as they approach the weekend, it can easily offend for many reasons.
Here are three excellent reasons never to use this expression.
#1: IT CAN BE ANNOYING
This expression may be used by people who are trying to lift the spirits of a colleague or make the recipient feel relieved that the workweek is coming to an end.
But your colleague may be involved in working hard to complete an assignment, or be involved in a project that needs to get done. If so, your Happy Friday will be irritating. His or her reaction might be to feel this writer knows little about the pressures of work or completing assignments.
According to a study a full 69% of employees say their mental health has worsened over the past year, so theres a good chance your colleague is not having a happy Friday.
#2 IT CAN BE INSENSITIVE
Beginning or ending your email with Happy Friday presumes that everyone is having a great day. But how do you know?
I get emails from people I dont even know wishing me a Happy Friday. I was in the hospital when a few of these came, and I was not having a happy time. It is presumptuous to wish someone a happy day when she could be sick, tired, or overworked.
In such cases, the words Happy Friday will only deepen the recipients misery. According to a study by the American Psychological Association, half of adults in the United States reported feelings of emotional disconnection, isolation from others (54%), left out (50%), or lacking companionship (50%).
So wishing someone Happy Friday may elicit a deeper sense of loneliness, with the recipient feeling bad to be left out of the happiness circle.
#3 IT IS A CLICHÉ
If you are still tempted to use this expression, dont succumb to that temptation because it is a cliché that gives rise to other clichés.
In some of the emails I get Happy Friday is followed by wishing you a lovely weekend and hoping you had a great week, and hoping you are well.
Happy Friday also gives rise to Happy Monday, Happy Tuesday, or Happy [any day of the week, or any season].
I am much more likely to read and respond to emails that dont begin or end with this awful expression. Give it up!
Instead, you might begin your correspondence by mentioning your last communication with that person. For example say thank you for following up with me or I loved your thoughts about . . . . And conclude with action, such as Ill look forward to hearing from you regarding next steps. In short, use your opening and closing to frame the subject matter of the correspondence.
Year-end giving can be a moment of reflection, but for businesses and philanthropy alike, it should also include looking forward and asking the question, whats next?
One throughline from this past year is uncertainty. Uncertainty has rewritten how we work, live, and lead. Yet, one thing that still holds true is we share a responsibility to keep systems strong so no one is left behind, especially children.
Ive seen firsthand how instability isnt just economic, its deeply human. Ive seen it in a mother whose babys survival depended on something as small as a packet of therapeutic food. In that moment, you understand that systems created as large scale solutions change lives.
GO DEEPER ON PURPOSE
Purpose has become one of the most overused words in business, but the leaders who will define whats next are treating it differently. Theyre going deeper.
The smartest changemakers are cutting through tokenistic giving and refocusing on whats core to their mission. Theyre aligning personal and corporate philanthropy not around optics, but around outcomes that truly matter like health, equity, sustainability, and opportunity.
STRENGTHEN WHATS STABLE, TO WITHSTAND WHATS NOT
If recent years have taught us anything, its that the systems we depend on are only as strong as the most vulnerable people within them.
Business leaders understand this intuitively. A 2024 survey showed that 45% of global CEOs expect significant business model disruption within three years. Social trust and resilience are key to future competitiveness. Trusted companies can be worth up to four times more than their competitors and 89% of business leaders identified resilience as a major priority in their organizational strategy.
Put simply, future-proofing your business means building stronger systems that will support future generations. Your future workforce, customers, and investors are todays children and adolescents. When children thrive, societies stabilize and markets follow.
NOT JUST A NUMBER
When global supply chains break down, its not just balance sheets that suffer; the livelihoods of entire communities feel the impact. Too often, those disruptions get reduced to numbers on a page like drops in GDP and productivity losses, but whats really at stake is livelihoods.
And sometimes the clearest illustration of why stability matters comes down to a single moment.
When I was a new mom, I met a Sudanese mother in a refugee camp in Ethiopia near the Sudan border. The woman was holding her baby, who was severely underweight but just beginning to show signs of alertness. She was feeding her child a small packet of ready-to-use therapeutic food, a peanut-based paste that treats severe acute malnutrition. Its a simple, scalable solution with life-changing impact.
Malnutrition remains one of the most pressing yet solvable challenges in global health. Addressing it requires the kind of smart, forward-leaning, systems-level innovation UNICEF and its partners are scaling across the world.
MAKE GENEROSITY A YEAR-ROUND STRATEGY
Uncertainty shouldnt stop you from leading or giving.
Support from the private sector can be pivotal for nonprofits, but the greatest impact requires relationships, not just transactions. It requires companies that cocreate with nonprofits, sharing expertise, networks, and long-term commitment to help unlock lasting and innovative solutions.
WHATS NEXT
The future will be shaped by those who act now. Heres how to do that.
Invest in stability. Give toward systems that protect children and strengthen communities. These are the same systems your business relies on for a stable workforce, market, and future.
Collaborate with intention. Align your business and your values. Strategic giving builds trust, reinforces brand purpose, and connects you with the partners and consumers who share it.
Give forward. Treat generosity as leadership strategy. Its how you future-proof impact for your company, your community, and the world your business depends on.
As you take a moment of gratitude during this holiday season, give to whats urgent now and what will define whats next.
Michele Walsh is executive vice president and chief philanthropy officer of UNICEF USA.
OpenAI on Thursday released its answer to Googles impressive Gemini 3 Pro modelGPT-5.2and by the looks of some head-to-head benchmark test scores, it looks like a winner. The new model took the highest score on a number of benchmark tests covering coding, math, science, tool use, and vision. (Benchmarks should, of course, be combined with real-world use to tell the whole story. But still . . .)
OpenAI says GPT-5.2, which is a reasoning model, achieved expert-level performance scores on its own GDPval benchmark, which evaluates performance on 44 real professional tasks including things like spreadsheet creation, document drafting, presentation building, and more.
GPT-5.2 topped Gemini 3 Pro on the SWE-Bench Pro benchmark (software engineering tasks) with a score of 55.6% (versus Gemini 3 Pros 43.3%). It achieved an 86.2% on the ARC-AGI-1 abstract reasoning benchmark, compared to Gemini 3 Pros 75% score. It scored a 92.4% on the GPQA Diamond benchmark (science questions), compared with Gemini 3 Pros 91.9% score.
The new model comes in three variants. GPT-5.2 Instant is good for seeking information and how-tos, skill-building and study, and career guidance. GPT-5.2 Thinking is good for harder professional tasks like spreadsheet formatting and slideshow creation. GPT-5.2 Pro, the company says, takes longer to generate answers but is its smartest and most trustworthy model for generating accurate answers in complex domains like programming.
For the many developers that are now developing agents, OpenAI says GPT-5.2 with reasoning is its strongest offering yet, bringing significant improvements across general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision.OpenAI reportedly pushed to release GPT-5.2 before the end of the year so that it could counter the release of Googles Gemini 3. The company released GPT-5 in August, heralding it as the next major leap forward in its AI research. GPT-5 was a system of models, using a router to direct the right queries to specialized models. Its referring to GPT-5.2 as a unified system that automatically chooses how to respond based on task complexity.
The GPT-5.2 models increased capacity for processing and reasoning about multi-modal input (audio, video, images, text, etc.) is significant, because Google Gemini 3 does this very well. For example, the new model was asked to analyze the features of an image of a circuit board and then identify and label all the small components. OpenAI says GPT-5.2 did this with far more detail and accuracy than its earlier GPT-5.1 model could. When reasoning is introduced, the model may be able to diagnose problems in mechanical systems by recognizing the visual signs.
All three variants of GPT-5.2 are available in ChatGPT today, starting with paid subscribers and available to developers through the API. Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, says its bringing GPT-5.2 to Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio users worldwide today.
In related news, OpenAI also announced that it had struck a licensing deal with Disney that will allow Sora 2 users to use Disney characters in images they generate and share using the app. In addition, Disney will make a $1-billion equity investment in OpenAI, with an option to purchase more equity in the future.
A quiet shift is reshaping the trajectory of wealth in America, but it isnt happening in the boardrooms of Wall Street or the halls of Silicon Valley. Its unfolding in neighborhoods, driveways, and home offices across the country, powered by teachers, software engineers, nurses, military families, and small-business owners who never expected to become real estate investors at all.
As the cofounder and CEO of a rental technology company that supports independent property owners (and as an investor myself), I see this transformation every day. What starts as an unexpected ownership moment often turns into a thoughtful plan for long-term financial stability.
Many investors simply kept a first home when they moved for work. Some inherited a property from aging parents. Others bought a place for a college-age child and discovered the economics made surprising sense. While these beginnings may have been accidental, rental owners are discovering that, with support from intelligent technologies, theyre able to operate it with a level of clarity, confidence, and professionalism.
They are becoming strategic wealth builders and redefining what small-scale investing looks like in America. And theyre doing it with intention: leaning on smart systems rather than putting in extra hours, to operate their investments with the kind of discipline, insight, and confidence historically attributed only to large institutional players.
THE RISE OF THE MODERN, SMALL-SCALE INVESTOR
Across the country, independent property owners are already operating with a sophistication level once limited to professional firms. Theyre using technology to streamline operations, reduce friction, and gain clarity. What once required a stack of paperwork and late-night phone calls now lives inside simple, reliable systems that elevate the investors role from administrator to strategist.
Smart investors are no longer scaling effort; theyre scaling insight, spending more time understanding the story the numbers telland less time performing the manual tasks that used to consume nights and weekends.
This shift is happening every day, in homes someone once lived in, inherited, or never intended to treat as a business. These properties are becoming the foundation of long-term financial wellbeing because their owners are operating with intention, clarity, and professional-level structure.
A NEW PATH TO FINANCIAL FREEDOM
What stands out to me is how everyday investors are redefining the American dream itself.
Financial freedom is no longer tied exclusively to stock options, venture bets, or legacy wealth. Its being built one smart, well-run property at a time by people who value resilience over speculation. And because investors are managing their assets with data and systemsrather than instinct alonetheyre achieving a stability that once seemed to be reserved for much larger players.
Small investors now own more than 90% of single-family rental housing in the United Statesa sign of just how central theyve become to the countrys housing infrastructure. This isnt a fringe pocket of the market or a niche economic group. Its one of the most significant forces shaping communities and stabilizing local economies.
WHEN ACCIDENTAL INVESTORS BECOME INTENTIONAL OPERATORS
When the operational burden lifts, strategy takes its place. Thats exactly whats happening as more independent investors adopt smart systems.
Accidental investors are building predictable experiences for their residents, strengthening the predictability of their own financial outcomes. Rent collection is a good example. Smart operators are using automated reminders and autopay to keep cash flow consistent, and the impact is striking. Our data shows that residents enrolled in autopay pay on time 99% of the time, compared with 88% for those not using it, giving investors far clearer monthly stability.
Maintenance coordination is often the most dreaded part of owning a rental property, but smart investors are already turning it into one of the most manageable systems. Shared portals with in-app chats keep everything organized, and residents submit issues the moment they notice them (often with a photo or quick video) so investors understand whats happening before a small problem becomes a big one. Work orders stay orderly, responses stay timely, and the entire process remains calm and predictable on both sides.
This level of operational clarity matches the professionalism that accidental investors bring from their careers. Whether someone is balancing shift work, teaching classes, running a business, or logging into a late-night deployment, the systems supporting their properties keep everything moving smoothly so they can stay focused on the bigger picture.
Accidental investors are discovering that thoughtful, system-supported management creates opportunities that simply werent available when everything depended on manual effort. Theyre building stability in a way that fits into their lives.
DEMOCRATIZE WEALTH CREATION
What stands out most is how accessible this path has become. With the right tools, even one well-managed property can serve as the foundation for long-term financial wellbeing. And as these investors gain confidence, many expand their portfolios.
This approach is democratizing real estate investing. Its giving more Americans the chance to build multigenerational stability without needing to become full-time operators or navigate complex financial strategies. Its turning ordinary life events into opportunities for resilience.
THE NEXT ERA OF THE AMERICAN DREAM
The next era of American wealth is being built quietly and steadily. Its unfolding in spare bedrooms, inherited duplexes, starter homes, and small multifamily buildings. Its being shaped by everyday investors who are thoughtful, organized, and forward-looking.
These are people who might never describe themselves as real estate people, yet are operating their investments with impressive savvy. They are wealth builders who are transforming accidental beginnings into intentional, long-term advantage, creating financial stability that grows with them, supports their families, and strengthens their neighborhoods.
The shift isnt loud, but its powerful. And its redefining the American dream for new generations.
Ryan Barone is cofounder and CEO of RentRedi.
Every company is racing to modernize. Theres a sense that if you arent adopting new technology fast enough, youre already behind. From AI and automation to digital platforms, the list keeps growing. Leaders make big investments, employees sit through onboarding sessions, and for a few weeks, excitement fills the air. Then the momentum fades.
Dashboards sit idle. Pilots stall. The return on investment never arrives.
We see it all the time. On the factory floor, operators are juggling a dozen tools that dont talk to each other. Managers chase data that doesnt reflect whats really happening. Teams try to keep up with systems meant to help them but instead end up slowing them down. In moments like that, its clear that transformation isnt just about technologyits about people.
TRANSFORMATION STARTS WITH CLARITY
Real transformation begins with clarity. A tool must serve a defined purpose, be anchored to measurable outcomes, and be designed around the people who use it. True impact happens when its tied to measurable business goals and shaped around the people who actually use it.
Together as the CEO and the customer strategy lead of Squint, a manufacturing AI startup, we spend our days in our customers factories, walking the floor with production managers, maintenance crews, and line operators. We see firsthand how new systems can either make work smoother or create new friction.
Over time, weve noticed a pattern: Too many teams start with the tool instead of the goal. They adopt technology because it looks impressive, not because theyve defined what success should look like.
Implementation should always begin with two simple questions:
What problem are we solving?
How will we know when weve solved it?
At one food and beverage manufacturer we worked with, the operations team made a single smart decision. They tied their rollout to a company-wide goal of reducing downtime. That clarity changed everything. Instead of running scattered pilots across departments, they focused on the process that mattered most: unplanned line stoppages in their packaging area. Within weeks, operators were using the new system to run machines more smoothly, and technicians were diagnosing problems faster. Downtime dropped noticeably.
The transformation didnt come from the tool itself, but from the focus and from the people. Once the team anchored implementation to a business priority, adoption took care of itself. People didnt have to be convinced to use it; they saw its value immediately.
On another visit, we met with a maintenance team that was struggling because they spent half their time walking between the floor and a back office just to check paper manuals. The tech couldnt solve any real problems until what was getting in peoples way was defined. Once they could access that information digitally, troubleshooting time dropped dramatically. More importantly, the team wanted to use the new system because it solved a problem that actually mattered to them.
If people dont find value in a tool, no amount of training or policy will make it work. But when technology removes friction from their day, adoption becomes natural.
Thats what good implementation does. It removes friction and gives people back the focus they need for the work that matters most.
KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER IS CRITICAL TO IMPLEMENTATION
The last piece of effective implementation is knowledge transfer. Every organization has experts whose know-how keeps things running, but much of that knowledge exists only in their heads. When those people retire or move on, it disappears. Implementation should include ways to capture and share what they know so the organization continues to learn. Weve seen companies build training systems around their most experienced workers, turning decades of individual experience into company-wide capability.
Thats when technology stops being a project and starts becoming a culture, one that learns, adapts, and grows as its people do.
Across the board, it is clear that people-first, problem-centered implementation is the real differentiator. The organizations that win dont just buy tools; they implement them strategically, tie them to measurable goals, and design them around their people.
Because great technology doesnt replace people; it amplifies them. And in the end, technology doesnt transform companies. People do.
Devin Bhushan is the CEO and founder of Squint and Carolina Lago Pena Maia is the customer strategy lead at Squint
Early in my career, I learned a valuable lesson that has stayed front and center. I was working for a company struggling to meet its marks. We were doing fine, but not knocking it out of the park. I walked into a quarterly business review, confident in our marketing metrics. We were hitting or surpassing every KPI, and I presented our achievements with pride. My CEO made a statement that stopped me in my tracks: Marketing success means nothing unless the company as a whole is winning.
That moment was a turning point. In our focus on metrics, its easy to overlook what really matters. Its a lesson I was grateful to learn early and one I believe every leader should embrace.
THE POWER OF MEASURING WHAT MATTERS MOST
As business, and particularly marketing professionals, metrics are drilled into us. Its what we were taught, so it would be predictable for me to operate like that. Dont get me wrong, metrics still matter. But they arent the only thing that matters.The problem with a laser focus on your individual departments goals is that it tends to be myopic, focused only on your stats. We track what’s measurable. We celebrate what’s improving. We report on what highlights our teams productivity. However, it’s easy to optimize for your own scorecard without checking whether those scores are driving company growth.
The harder work is asking whether we’re moving the needle on the larger business goals and aligning your metrics to that.
Unfortunately, your department dashboard can show improvement while the company and customers need something different. Your team can hit targets while overall revenue needs a different kind of support.
My CEOs feedback helped me see this gap. Marketing wins that don’t translate to business wins are just activity, and this insight applies to all areas of the business. Fortunately for me, this CEO knew that I was early in my career and provided me with a teachable moment.
MY APPROACH NOW
Since that conversation, I’ve changed what my team measures and how we define success. Every initiative has to answer two questions: How does this support overall company growth and health? And how does this help our customers?
Not just “how does this improve our brand score” or “how does this boost engagement?” Those might indicate progress, but they’re not the end goal. Business impact is the goal.
This means:
Throwing support behind products customers will actually buy
Building brand equity that translates into customer preference and pricing power
Improving customer experience in ways that drive retention and expansion
Creating demand that converts to revenue
4 WAYS TO ALIGN METRICS WITH BUSINESS GOALS
If you lead any function, here are four things to consider to better align your efforts with business outcomes. See if any of these resonate with you:
Start with company goals. What three to five outcomes would make your CEO and board happy this year? Revenue growth? Customer retention? Market share? Margin improvement? Build your metrics from there.
Connect your work to those outcomes. Draw clear lines between your initiatives and company business goals. If you can’t make that connection, you have an opportunity to refocus.
Celebrate progress, not victory. Improving KPIs shows progress. That’s worth acknowledging. But it’s not the finish line.
Make your metrics achievable, with room for growth. The best metrics show you where you’re creating value and where you have room to improve. They help you make better decisions about where to focus your efforts.
WHY BUSINESS ALIGNMENT CREATES BETTER RESULTS
When you tie your success to your companys success, several things happen.
You make better decisions about what to prioritize. You have clearer opportunities for collaboration with other departments, reducing silos. You create more customer value. You build stronger cases for resources because you’re speaking business impact language.
HOW MY TEAM OPERATES TODAY
When my team presents quarterly results now, we start with how the business is performing. Then we show how our work has contributed, or the opportunities for improvement. It connects our work to what matters. It helps us focus (or refocus) on creating real value rather than just checking boxes.
The CEO was right. Marketing success means nothing unless the company as a whole is winning. But here’s the good news: When you align your metrics with business goals, everyone wins more often.
Melissa Puls is chief marketing officer and SVP of customer success and renewals at Ivanti.
The battle for Warner Brothers Discovery got hotter this week as Paramount launched a hostile bid of $108.4 billion for the company, topping Netflixs agreement last week to pay nearly $83 billion for the companys streaming and studio assets.
Its the largest M&A deal of 2025 and rightfully will receive tough scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe. The ultimate price for Warner Brothers Discovery will certainly factor heavily into who wins the fight, especially with investors, and there could be additional bidders and proposals.
For sure, an acquisition by Netflix of one of the oldest Hollywood studios, Warner Brothers, and its HBO Max streaming service would have ripple effects across the industry, though not in the way critics contend.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren called it an anti-monopoly nightmare that would harm consumers and American workers. Actress Jane Fonda, who’s appeared in successful Netflix shows and movies, called it catastrophic. Titanic Director James Cameron declared it a disaster. Roy Price, the former head of rival Amazon Studios, penned a New York Times editorial proclaiming the end of Hollywood.
Such histrionics forget how Netflix already slowly yet systematically reordered the global entertainment industry over the last 25 years through a strategy of addition, not subtraction. By innovating from the margins, Netflix challenged outdated models, rewarded risk-takers, and gave consumers more control for better value. In doing so, it created countless opportunities for all stakeholders.
Traditional antitrust reviews focus on market share and whether the resulting combination has the power to harm consumers and competitors alike. Key will be how narrowly or broadly antitrust authorities define the market. For example, will they evaluate the deal solely on streaming TV services, all TV including broadcast and cable, or all entertainment options including games, music, etc. But even in the narrowest of interpretations, a Netflix-HBO combination would still face steep competition from well-funded rivals such as Disney, Amazon, Comcast, Apple, and Paramount.
And this merger review will have the added intrigue of President Trump already making clear hell be directly involved in deciding which offer gets approved despite his son-in-law Jared Kushner partially funding Paramounts bid.
With all that said, Paramount has already mounted an aggressive roadshow for Warner Brothers Discovery investors to convince them to pledge their shares. That means Netflix too will need to woo investors, regulators, and politicians in what will undoubtedly be its biggest publicity tour ever. And the strongest argument it can make lies in its very own story.
Full disclosure: I led Netflix corporate communications team from 2014 to 2017, know the company deeply, and remain a shareholder. I also led PR for other corporate mergers including Xeroxs hostile bid for HP until the effort was scrapped due to the pandemic. I served as lead antitrust reporter at Bloomberg News during the late 1990s.
The Netflix Narrative
Today many people look at Netflix and see an entertainment behemoth valued at more than $400 billion with a lot of market power. But it didnt start out that way and its success certainly wasnt assured.
In its most fundamental sense, Netflix epitomizes the American Dream. Not because it became big, but because it began small and showed how ordinary people with a better idea and a lot of grit could up-end well-entrenched industries. Netflix demonstrated when you level the playing field and bet on people instead of institutions, you unleash possibility that couldnt previously be imagined.
Netflix has been underestimated at every turn, perhaps even this latest one. In the early days, banks turned it down for financing, Blockbuster Video executives laughed them out of the room and former Time Warner CEO Jeff Bewkes famously dismissed the company as the equivalent of the Albanian army, suggesting it was no threat at all.
Netflix didnt succeed by manipulating government loopholes or seeking regulatory protections to fend off competition. It identified a compelling need in the marketplace, analyzed how new technologies could solve it, and got to work building an alternative. It took risks, learned, pivoted, and kept moving, leaving no aspect of the entertainment experience untouched.
Candidly, it would be hard to overstate the many ways Netflixs very existence benefited consumers, the entire entertainment ecosystem as well as adjacent markets such as consumer electronics, telecom, tech, marketing, language translation, and more.
From the start with mail-order DVDs and then as a streaming platform, Netflix put consumers and their pain points at the heart of its decision-making. For example, I recall numerous meetings where we discussed whether price increases should go into effect for inactive accounts. (Short answer: No. In fact, I believe Netflix is now cancelling inactive accounts rather than continuing to charge people.) It partnered wherever possible even with would-be competitors to simplify, expand, and enhance the entertainment experience.
When Netflix launched original streaming content in 2012-2013, the company didnt just usher in a new Golden Age of TV. They changed everything from how content was made, released and experienced within the broader ecosystem. How?
Here are just a few ways:
It broke the scarcity model of appointment TV and movie windows, exponentially increasing the number of stories told as well as the formats, frequency and topics. Its increasing content budgets forced rivals to do the same, putting billions more into the creative community than previously existed. This year alone, Netflix is expected to spend $18 billion on content for a global audience topping 300 million. Many of its hits including Stranger Things, Squid Games, and Orange is the New Black never would have found a home or as large an audience on traditional networks. By broadening the pool of creators and reducing risk, Netflix also has been able to save beloved shows including most recently Sesame Street as well as launching unknown talent and reigniting careers of others. (Looking at you, Jane Fonda.)
By releasing all episodes of a TV show at once, Netflix didnt just create binge-watching. It disintermediated traditional distribution methods that frustrated consumers and restructured the entire entertainment business. Cable bundles eroded, theaters needed to rethink exclusive agreements, studios launched their own streaming apps, and direct-to-consumer models stopped being where you dumped content that bombed at the box office. Consumers were able to decide on what schedule to watch shows and whether theyd prefer to see something in a theater or on the couch at home. And instead of having to pay for each movie or show separately, Netflix provided an enormous portfolio of content for a flat monthly fee.
Beyond content, Netflix transformed the entire entertainment experience from end to end. By insisting on effortless viewing for consumers, Netflix accelerated entire industries, from Smart TVs and mobile devices to cloud computing and AI. In Los Gatos, labs tested and rated TVs, devices, and even internet service providerscalling out ISPs that throttled speeds to protect cable monopoliesand shared those ratings publicly so consumers could choose accordingy. Engineers built advanced compression technology to reduce mobile data overages and deliver high-quality streaming even on limited bandwidth. To build its OpenConnect Network, Netflix invested more than $1 billion to deploy some 17,000 servers in 158 countries that prepositioned popular titles close to viewers. This eliminated buffering (Who could forget that spinning circle from the early days?), reduced global internet congestion, and saved ISPs billions in transit costs. By aggressively distributing 4K and HDR content at scale, it sped adoption of Ultra HD, reshaping consumer demand and pushing the entire hardware industry toward higher-quality images.
And while the company has been bringing the worlds stories to the world, it has invested heavily in the country where it got its start. As if knowing it would need to make this case at some point, Netflix posted a Made in America document on its website back in April of this year, highlighting the ways it benefits America. According to the document, it has contributed $125 billion to the US economy from 20202024, hired more than 140,000 cast and crew members, worked with over 550+ U.S. production companies, and filmed more than 900 titles across all 50 states.
Netflix attracted more than 300 million subscribers by building the worlds most powerful global distribution platform and ensuring its content is easy to access and enjoyable to watch. Its not in the companys business interests to horde content made by Warner Brothers and nothing in its history would suggest such an approach.
As for the theater owners expressing concern, their stiff-arming of Netflix led the company to buy its own theaters in L.A. and NYC to premiere movies so they could be awards eligible. This combination may finally force them to face societys viewing evolution and up their game to attract more theatergoers.
Chief Salesperson
Both co-CEOs at NetflixTed Sarandos and Greg Petersare impressive. But if Netflixs corporate story is one of the American Dream, its the same for Teds personal one.
I often thought Ted must wake up every day and say pinch me. Because nothing about his childhood would make anyone think hed be in the lofty position he is today at the top of an industry he deeply and thoroughly loves.
One of five children, he grew up in a working class, Greek-American family in Phoenix, where he often recalled watching videotaped soap operas and other shows with the whole family gathered round. He dropped out of college after two years and worked at the local video store near his home. It was after he began climbing the ranks at video rental companies that Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings reached out and sold him on the idea of joining Netflix.
The rest, as they say, is history. As the chief content officer prior to co-CEO, Ted was the main driver behind the companys move into original programming. Through a combination of passion, charm, and high intuition, he built the companys credibility in a clubby industry that long looked askance at outsiders.
Not only did his American Dream unfold alongside Netflixs, hes a highly skilled communicator, who connects with people in a very human way through personal storytelling and warmth. And with critics concerned about how Netflixs tech pedigree might change old Hollywood, Teds love for all things and people Tinsel Town oozes from every pore.
Netflix Everywhere
When we launched Netflix globally in early 2016, we used #NetflixEverywhere to mark the moment. That edict has never been more appropriate and necessary in the battle for Warner Brothers Discovery.
Netflix will need to actively tell its story to every audience on repeat for the next 1218 months or, as weve already seen, risk having its many detractors push unflattering and perhaps even untrue counternarratives.
Media interviews, major business and investor conferences, and congressional meetings all provide the opportunity to remind decision-makers and would-be critics that success itself isnt a problem if it was obtained fairly and by serving customers better than others. Its not like other companies didnt have ample time to beat Netflix at their own game over the last 1015 years.
And no one loves a come-from-behind story better than the guy in the Oval Office.
As we enter the 2025 home stretch, Bitcoin is once again down, dipping below $90,000 on Thursday, following the Federal Reserve’s highly anticipated interest rate cut by 25 basis points on December 10.
So why is crypto taking a hit, even when markets are up?
Why Bitcoin is faltering
One reason for Bitcoin’s drop after the rate cut is that traders had already fully priced in the cut ahead of the Fed’s announcement.
Unlike stocks, bitcoin is already in a bear market, where bad news gets accentuated and good news ignored, Michael Terpin, author of Bitcoin Supercycle, told Fast Company. Since the 25 basis point cut was already built in, bitcoin traders particularly ETF investors experiencing their first bear market were looking for more and pressed the sell button.”
Some other reasons for the sell off: Traders took a long term look at the macro economic environment ahead and got spooked, plus fear of increased inflation in 2026, according to analysts who spoke to Decrypt.
On midday Thursday, at the time of this writing, the digital cryptocurrency (BTC) was trading down over 2%. Its part of an overall decline in the crypto market that also saw closely watched digital asset XRP (XRP-USD) fall about 3%, hovering around $2 per token on Thursday, while Ethereum (ETH-USD) was down over 5% and was trading at $3,223 at the time of this writing.
Crypto, equities continue to decouple
Meanwhile, the stock market continues to experience gains (the S&P 500 is up over 16% this year), decoupling from Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies which continue to strugglemarking the first time the crypto and stock markets have split since 2014, Bloomberg reported.
“For most of its history, Bitcoin has been decoupled from stocks. Its only in recent years that it mimicked tech stocks during risk-on to risk-off swings,” Terpin explained. “Bitcoin follows a four-year cycle, while stock market cycles prior to the money printing bonanza of the pandemic have been ten year cycles ending in 1929, 1989. 1999-2000, and 2009.”
The Architects of AI were named Time’s person of the year Thursday, with the magazine citing 2025 as when the potential of artificial intelligence roared into view with no turning back.
For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIMEs 2025 Person of the Year, Time said in a social media post.
The magazine was deliberate in selecting people the individuals who imagined, designed, and built AI rather than the technology itself, though there would have been some precedent for that.
Weve named not just individuals but also groups, more women than our founders could have imagined (though still not enough), and, on rare occasions, a concept: the endangered Earth, in 1988, or the personal computer, in 1982, wrote Sam Jacobs, the editor-in-chief, in an explanation of the choice. The drama surrounding the selection of the PC over Apples Steve Jobs later became the stuff of books and a movie.
One of the cover images resembling the Lunch Atop a Skyscraper photograph from the 1930s shows eight tech leaders sitting on the beam: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, the CEO of Googles DeepMind division Demis Hassabis, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, who launched her own startup World Labs last year.
Another cover image shows scaffolding surrounding the giant letters AI made to look like computer componentry.
Five of the eight people selected Musk, Zuckerberg, Huang, Altman and Su are already billionaires with a collective fortune of $870 billion, based on the latest estimates compiled by Forbes magazine. Much of the wealth has been accumulated during the past three years of AI fever.
It made sense for Time to anoint AI because 2025 was the year that it shifted from a novel technology explored by early adopters to one where a critical mass of consumers see it as part of their mainstream lives, Thomas Husson, principal analyst at research firm Forrester, said by email.
The magazine noted AI company CEOs’ attendance at President Donald Trump’s inauguration this year at the Capitol as a herald for the prominence of the sector.
This was the year when artificial intelligences full potential roared into view, and when it became clear that there will be no turning back or opting out, Jacobs wrote.
Some experts expressed caution over the AI boom and the race to develop increasingly powerful systems.
Leading AI companies are working feverishly to replace humans in every facet of life, and theyre not being shy about it, said Anthony Aguirre, executive director of the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which works on AI safety issues. The impact on our society could be catastrophic if there are no guardrails protecting whats human, and most important to us.
AI was a leading contender for the top slot, according to prediction markets, along with Huang and Altman. Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope whose election this year followed the death of Pope Francis, was also considered a contender, with Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani topping lists as well.
After winning his second bid for the White House, Trump was named 2024’s person of the year by the magazine, succeeding Taylor Swift, who was the 2023 person of the year.
The magazine was bought by Marc Benioff in 2018. Benioff, one of the co-founders of cloud-computing firm Salesforce, has called AI probably the most important technological wave of his lifetime. He has repeatedly said he doesn’t get involved in Time’s editorial decisions.
The magazine’s selection dates from 1927, when its editors have picked the person they say most shaped headlines over the previous 12 months.
Mike Catalini, Associated Press
Associated Press writers Matt O’Brien, Kelvin Chan, and Michael Liedtke contributed to this article.
This fall, President Trump took aim at the H-1B visa, in a move that has been telegraphed for years amid criticism that the program diverts jobs away from American workers. In September, Trump announced that new applications for the work visa would now be subject to a $100,000 feea bold attempt to curtail excessive use of the H-1B program.
The H-1B program, which was established through the Immigration Act of 1990, has been widely embraced by tech employers to enable hiring skilled talent from abroad, with companies like Amazon and Meta sponsoring thousands of H-1B workers every year. While H-1B workers hail from dozens of countries, an outsized portion of themabout 80%are hired from India and China. But the program has also repeatedly come under fire due to claims that it outsources jobs and undercuts wages by paying foreign workers below market rate.
Trumps proclamation has sparked confusion as employers have scrambled to figure out how the fee would reshape their hiring and recruitment plansand which workers would be subject to it. For the big tech companies that are among the most avid users of the H-1B visa, a $100,000 fee is not a huge price to pay.
But lawyers say many companies that use the visa more sparingly are now unable to shoulder the steep cost of hiring H-1B workers.
What we’re seeing is the $100,000 fee is not just impacting small employers who are like, we can’t pay that, says immigration lawyer Sandra Feist, who works with many people who are seeking an H-1B visa. No employer that I have spoken withand that includes very large organizations and large universitieshas said it’s worth it. This impact is being felt across all sizes of companies and institutions. In fact, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a major business lobbying group, has filed a lawsuit challenging the fee, deeming it unlawful and cost-prohibitive for employers seeking to hire H-1B workers.
Feist says several companies she works with that typically enter the H-1B lottery on an annual basis are reevaluating their hiring strategy and planning to sit it out next year. In many cases, the muddled rollout of the fee and the lack of clarity on exceptions has created a chilling effect that is discouraging employers from sponsoring foreign workers altogether, even if they already have a visa.
There are a lot of instances where this fee does apply and is prohibitive, but there are also many circumstances where this fee would not apply based on the current guidance that we’ve received, Feist says. But employers are so fearful of the uncertainty and volatility around immigration.
How the fee is impacting employers
The same logic has influenced how early and mid-stage startups are approaching hiring at the moment, according to Sophie Alcorn, an immigration lawyer who works with tech startups and founders. A significant portion of H-1B visas are held by people who came to the U.S. as students and simply changed their immigration status.
But many founders are now hesitant to hire foreign nationals, even if they have already obtained a work visa or are currently authorized to work in the U.S.
A lot of small businesses just don’t have the resources or information to understand that if those people are maintaining valid status in the U.S., then the $100,000 fee would not apply to them, Alcorn says, citing the example of speaking with a recent graduate who had three job offers revoked when their immigration status was disclosed. (This person was authorized to work without restriction for the year ahead.)
H-1B workers can often play a significant role at small companies and startups, where they might be the sole person hired with their particular skillset, Alcorn says.
Due to the visa fee, however, Alcorn has found that startups are steering clear of those workers and opting instead to hire people who have secured the O-1 visa. (That visa does not have to be tied to the employer, and is awarded to people who possess extraordinary ability in their field. It can offer more flexibility and job mobility than the H-1B, particularly in fields that rely on freelance or contract work.) But this can deny opportunities to workers who dont have the qualifications they might need to secure an O-1. A lot of the really brilliant, talented engineers are not famous and don’t have a public profile, she adds. Many of them are not PhD researchers. They’re often very scrappy individuals with a lot of work experience.
The $100,000 fee is supposed to only apply to new applicationsbut existing H-1B workers are feeling the effects of it all the same. While H-1B workers can transfer their visa status if they find a new job, the restrictions of the visa can leave people in a precarious limbo if they get laid off. H-1B workers who lose their jobs are granted a 60-day grace period to find new employment and retain their visa status. In this job market, however, its no small feat for workers to land a new role within that timeframe.
Sharadha Kodem, an immigration lawyer who represents many H-1B workers, says that with the $100,000 fee in place, employers may be forced to pay up if they want to hire an H-1B worker but are unable to do so within 60 days. If a worker has to leave the country in the interim, their new employer risks being saddled with the $100,000 fee when they return with a new visa, Kodem says.
What this means for foreign workers
For aspiring H-1B workersbe it students or refugees with temporary status protecting them from deportationthe fee has thrown a wrench in their future plans.
The Trump administration has claimed that the $100,000 fee will not be levied on current H-1B workers or recent graduates who are seeking to change their status and switch to an H-1B visa. But their guidance also notes that the fee will be imposed if a worker is deemed ineligible for a change of status or extension. This vague language gives the administration broad discretion to determine who is eligible for a change of status, Feist saysand whether they will be slapped with a $100,000 bill. A recent Washington Post report found that foreign workers are already facing greater scrutinyand denialswhen they apply for work visas, including the H-1B.
Its not just tech workers or H-1B visa aspirants from India and China who are impacted by stringent policies like this one. Im working with a costume designer from Ukraine, and our plan was to file in the lottery this spring, Feist says. I’ll have to revisit that in light of the $100,000 fee. Feist is working with several people from Ukraine who have temporary protected status, for whom securing an H-1B would have been their best chance at staing in the U.S. If the administration has the final say on whether the fee should be waived, they could arbitrarily foist it on applicants from certain countries, Feist says.
The general hope is that, as the administration sees what a chilling effect this has on employers who are seeking essential workers that they can’t find in the U.S. workforce, that they will slowly narrow the scope of the fee and perhaps provide more clear guidance, she adds. Our hope is that the administration sees the light.
Why this does not address H-1B abuses
The Trump administration has framed this fee as a ploy to discourage companies from abusing the H-1B program or using it to source cheaper labor. In practice, however, the fee seems to be making it more difficult for companies to use the program the way it was originally conceived: to recruit highly skilled talent that they cant find stateside.
Meanwhile, for the leading tech companies that routinely file thousands of H-1B petitions to sponsor workers from abroad, $100,000 amounts to the equivalent of a paltry rounding errorand hardly qualifies as an obstacle. Those companies will likely face less competition for H-1B approvals, as the fee deters many employers from applying at all.
This is benefiting the exact employers that [the administration says] they are targeting, Feist says. It is only very large companies that over rely upon H-1B and sponsor tens of thousands of them each year that will benefit from this. And normal employers who are hiring an ophthalmologist or a teacher or a therapist or an architectthey will be disadvantaged.
The debate over the H-1B program dates back decades, with people on both sides of the aisle calling for reform long before President Trump assumed office.
One of the key critiques of the program has been that deep-pocketed companies can effectively game the lottery by flooding it with applicationsand that certain companies use the H-1B visa to undercut wages. The H-1B program has wage requirements but offers four different wage levels, and some research indicates that many workers are being paid at the lowest wage levels, which are supposed to be reserved for entry-level jobs. (Other research has found that employers are by and large paying market rate.) The backlog of green card applications also leaves many H-1B workers without a legitimate path to citizenship, forcing them to spend decades in the U.S. on a visa that is tied to their employment.
Daniel Costa, the director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, says that employers who pay lower wages to H-1B workerswhich typically includes outsourcing and staffing firms like Infosys, Cognizant, and Tatastill benefit from the program, even if they are now saddled with the $100,000 fee.
They’re multi-billion dollar companies, and they get a lot of wage savings from using the program, he says. So [the fee] is not very well-targeted, and it could have unintended effects. And it just doesnt get at the heart of what’s wrong with the H-1B program.
What could actually reform the H-1B program
The new fee fails to reform the H-1B program in a meaningful way, and it seems even Trump is of two minds about the role of this visa. Even as Trump has cracked down on legal immigration, he has touted the value of H-1B. In a Fox News interview last monthnot long after he introduced the $100,000 feeTrump said the U.S. workforce lacked certain talents and needed the H-1B visa to bring over highly skilled workers. “You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, Im going to put you into a factory and were going to make missiles, he added.
There are changes to the H-1B program that could move the needle, though its not clear whether those efforts will actually target the companies that lean heavily on the H-1B visa.
The Trump administration is putting forth proposals that would likely amend the lottery system and prioritize applications for H-1B petitions that are at a higher wage levelin other words, give more weight to jobs that pay better. In theory, this could help prevent tech companies and outsourcing firms from exploiting the lottery system, while also ensuring H-1B workers are paid fairly.
But some lawyers argue that it would simply reinforce the advantage held by tech firms, who can afford to pay higher wages, and make it more difficult for other applicants to land an H-1B visa if overall wages are depressed in their sector. The Labor Department has also stepped up enforcement of the H-1B program through an initiative called Project Firewall, which is intended to investigate potential abuses of the H-1B visa, including but not limited to wage theft.
Still, as Costa points out, the threat of enforcement may not be a deterrent for billion-dollar employers that have come to rely on the H-1B visa.
Companies get disbarred from the program very, very rarely, he says. If the penalty is mostly just recovering back wages, then you’re just paying what you owed that worker anyway.
