At the start of 2025, alarms were blaring about the risk of investing in China.
A new protectionist administration was taking over in the US at the same time China’s domestic real estate market was teetering. A possible US ban on TikTok, the popular social media app, imperiled ByteDance, one of the country’s biggest tech companies. American companies seemed to have surged ahead of Chinese rivals in artificial intelligence development.
Twelve months later, and many of the biggest fears appear to be overblown. The Chinese government has focused on stimulating the economy, leading public companies to significantly increase their buybacks. ByteDance sold a majority stake in its US TikTok operations and is now more valuable than ever, with HSG, the venture capital firm formerly known as Sequoia China, valuing the company at between $350 billion and $370 billion recently. And China’s AI scene, led by startup DeepSeek, is keeping pace with Western peers, and Nvidia will be permitted to sell its powerful H200 chips to Chinese companies, the US government said Tuesday.
Hedge funds willing to invest in the country last year were rewarded. Bridgewater, which manages $92 billion across all its strategies, generated a 34.2% return in its China Total Returns fund, a person close to the manager told Business Insider. Tekne Capital, managed by Beeneet Kothari, a onetime lieutenant of billionaire Stanley Druckenmiller, was up more than 50% last year, a person close to the manager said.
Kothari’s $1.5 billion firm is an investor in Chinese companies such as DiDi Global, recruiting firm Kanzhun, and data-center builder GDS, the person said. Kothari told Business Insider in an interview last year that the headwinds facing the country made strong companies very cheap.
According to HSBC’s Hedge Weekly report, funds based in China and investing in the country performed well. $3.4 billion Pinpoint’s China-focused strategy returned more than 24%, while its multistrategy offering, which invests across Asia, was up 11.6%. George Jiang’s long-running Golden China fund made close to 33%, and Epimelis Capital, run by Hutchin Hill and Goldman Sachs veteran Fei Sun, made 35% in its China-centric strategy.
The average China-focused fund was up close to 18%, according to Hedge Fund Research, outpacing the industry average of 10.7%.
Going into 2026, investors will be watching how the volatile relationship between the US and China evolves, especially around trade agreements connected to chips, as well as any indication that China might invade Taiwan.
ByteDance will also be a focus for funds — Tiger Global and Coatue are both backers — as the social media giant continues to grow.
On Saturday, the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers in an NFL playoff game that had everything: a bitter rivalry, an old-school outdoors atmosphere, and a historic comeback (or choke-job, depending on your POV).
It also happened to be a (mostly) streaming-only game. Did you notice? Or care?
I didn’t. Except for about 30 seconds, when I was trying to find out what network was showing the game, and it took me a beat to realize it was on Amazon’s Prime Video. Then I booted up my app and watched the game without any issue. Just like any other NFL game.
In 2026, “Guy doesn’t have a problem watching the Bears/Packers” is a true dog-bites-man story. But that’s why I’m writing about it here: Not very long ago, the idea of streaming a super-high-profile NFL game — and requiring NFL fans to subscribe to a streaming service in order to watch it — would have been a very big deal.
Now it’s a yawner: I was one of 31.6 million people who watched the game, the vast majority of whom streamed it (fans in local markets could use broadcast TV). That’s a streaming record for an NFL game, and it’s more than some other games got last weekend on conventional TV.
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And that tells you just how far sports and streaming have come.
Flash back to 2013, for instance, and the idea of whether the “internet” — a catch-all term that included everything needed to get streaming video onto your screen, from web servers to fiber-optic lines to the router in your house — could support a big NFL game watched by many millions of people was an open question. “Why Web TV Skeptic Mark Cuban Thinks Google Can Make the NFL Work on the Web,” was an ungainly headline I tapped out at the time.
Back then, the NFL and other sports giants were routinely streaming big events like the Super Bowl and World Cup — but only as a sort of secondary outlet for weirdos who didn’t have traditional TV. And anyone who did stream sports had to expect to run into problems, like ESPN did when it streamed a World Cup game in 2014.
Cut to today, and streaming is just a way we watch some football games now. Amazon pays a gazillion dollars a year to show one game a week during the regular season; Netflix has paid up to show a couple games on Christmas Day. A new deal the NFL struck with Disney last year will give the league the opportunity to sell even more games to digital players.
And two years ago, the league passed another new threshold by moving one of its most valuable assets — a playoff game — to Comcast’s Peacock streamer, where it was only available to paid subscribers. That one generated a ton of complaints from people who said they didn’t want to pay another service to watch an NFL game — along with millions of sign-ups for Peacock, which showed they would.
The NFL is not ditching TV for streaming anytime soon. For many people, watching NFL games is the main reason to watch TV, and that gives the league a ton of leverage to extract ever-increasing fees from the likes of NBC and CBS. So they will almost certainly keep the majority of their games on old-time TV for the foreseeable future. But they’re going to sell them to streaming platforms too — because they’ll pay up to get them, and you’ll pay, too.
Do you enjoy sorting through numbers and executives answering questions with lots of spin? If so, you’re in for a treat.
Earnings season is back, and the big banks kick things off. JPMorgan leads the way on Tuesday, followed by Bank of America and Citi on Wednesday. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley bring us home on Thursday.
BI’s Reed Alexander previews the four biggest things to watch from Wall Street this earnings season. From dealmaking’s rebound to credit risks to AI (of course), there’s a lot to unpack this week.
Banks are a valuable group to open with. Their lending and dealmaking capabilities, coupled with their deep ties to consumers, put them at the epicenter of the business world. Their earnings reports are as much about themselves as the wider economy.
January earnings are also unique since they include a year-end recap. And what a year 2025 was …
A volatile first half was followed by stocks (including banks) hitting record highs by year-end despite ongoing talk of an AI bubble. Bank executives are likely to discuss maintaining that strong momentum in 2026.
There’s also a wild card to consider this earnings season.
President Donald Trump has made it clear he’s on a mission to address affordability, and sometimes that includes targeting specific companies.
Last week, Trump issued warnings against the defense sector and institutional investors in the residential housing market. While the threats lacked specific details, they were strong enough to catch investors’ attention.
Trump also said he’d be talking more about affordability in the coming weeks, including during his speech next week at Davos.
That could be a net positive for banks. A healthy consumer is typically good for them. But with no clarity on how Trump might approach improving affordability, it’s tough to say.
Meanwhile, other industries will need to remain on their toes in case they’re the next target on Trump’s affordability crusade. And even if they feel like the problem Trump is addressing isn’t necessarily applicable to them, the market might not care anyway.
Michael Burry, the investor made famous by “The Big Short,” says the era of Big Tech turning relatively small investments into huge profits is ending.
And he says AI is to blame.
In a recent Substack exchange with tech podcaster Dwarkesh Patel, Burry said the most important metric AI industry investors should be watching isn’t revenue growth, hiring, or even market size, but return on invested capital, or ROIC.
ROIC is a measure of how efficiently a company turns the money it puts into its business into profit.
“The measure to beat all measures is return on invested capital (ROIC), and ROIC was very high at these software companies. Now that they are becoming capital-intensive hardware companies, ROIC is sure to fall, and this will pressure shares in the long run,” Burry wrote.
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AI, Burry said, is pushing companies like Microsoft, Google, and Meta away from their historically asset-light software models and toward a far more capital-intensive future defined by data centers, chips, and energy.
Even if AI expands Big Tech’s addressable market, he said, falling ROIC could pressure stock prices for years to come.
Burry rose to fame after his bet against the mid-2000s housing boom was chronicled in “The Big Short.” Outside the occasional cryptic social media post, Burry, for a long time, spoke publicly only rarely.
That changed late last year when he closed his hedge fund to outside cash and began writing financial analysis on Substack.
Perhaps most notably, he has recently compared the AI boom to the late-1990s dot-com bubble, calling OpenAI the “Netscape of our time.” Netscape’s IPO marked the beginning of dot-com hype in 1995. Five years later, the bubble burst.
Burry’s hedge fund, Scion Asset Management, has made large bets against Nvidia and Palantir Technologies, two darlings of the AI era, according to a regulatory filing released in September last year.
Leading AI companies, like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, are spending big to build out the infrastructure they need to support their energy- and data-intensive chatbots and other AI applications. Debt and equity investors have lined up to back these projects.
So far, however, those companies have not shown significant profit returns on their AI products, leading investors like Burry to sound the alarm that AI is a bubble on the verge of bursting.
Agreed. And still, return on investment will continue to fall, almost all AI companies will go bankrupt, and much of the AI spending will be written off. Will it be the Panic of 2026? 2027? Does not have to be. https://t.co/VBWjh26vnc
“At some point, this spending on the AI buildout has to have a return on investment higher than the cost of that investment, or there is just no economic value added,” Burry wrote in the Substack post.
At 25 years old, Molly Graham was thriving in Facebook’s HR department when a senior executive urged her to transfer out of her stable role and help build a mobile phone instead.
She took the risk — and it could have derailed her career.
But Graham, who later became a C-suite executive at some of America’s biggest companies and philanthropies, now views that risky bet as one of the most important moves she ever made.
“It just felt like falling off a cliff,” Graham, now the founder of Glue Club, said in a recent interview on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast. “Taking risks, accepting the terrible fall and that experience of falling has been more than worth it.”
Graham described the experience as part of what she calls the “J-curve” — a career trajectory where a risky move leads to an initial drop before eventually producing outsized gains. Visually, she describes it as standing on a ledge, stepping off, sinking briefly, and then rising far higher than where you started — just like the shape of the letter J.
The concept, which she has also written about in her Lessons Substack, challenges the idea of a steady career ladder that steadily moves up and to the right.
Instead of climbing rung by rung with promotions every two to five years, Graham argues that some of the most valuable professional growth comes from jumping into roles you aren’t ready for and surviving any setbacks.
Graham’s own J-curve began when billionaire investor and “All-in” podcast host Chamath Palihapitiya, then Facebook’s vice president of growth, recruited her to help develop a smartphone, encouraging her to make the move by sketching out the J-shaped trajectory on a whiteboard.
He brought her on despite her having no experience in product development, dropping her into rooms filled with engineers and phone specialists with deep subject matter expertise. She recalled feeling like an “idiot” for much of her first six months.
Molly Graham, the former Facebook and Google executive and writer of the Lessons Substack.
Molly Graham
At her midyear review, Palihapitiya delivered what Graham called the worst performance evaluation she had ever received. But the new experience eventually expanded her expertise.
“Slowly, I remember I had been doing all these trips to Taiwan because we were actually working on hardware and I, at some point, came back from Taiwan and I like drew on a whiteboard for him the layout of a mobile phone, trying to explain to him kind of like why something he wanted to do was not possible,” Graham said. “And I so vividly remember walking out of that meeting being like, ‘Oh like I actually know things.’ And slowly then over the following three years I became an expert in mobile.”
Palihapitiya did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment.
“The phone itself was a giant failure — a massive, costly failure for Facebook,” Graham told Rachitsky on the podcast. “But it was not a failure for me.”
She credits the experience with teaching her that she could operate far outside her comfort zone — a lesson that later helped her take on senior leadership roles, including serving as COO of Quip, which Salesforce acquired for $750 million, and overseeing operations at the $7.4 billion Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
The J-curve, Graham said, is especially common at fast-moving companies like Meta, Alphabet, Nvidia, and SpaceX, where leaders value employees who are willing to take big risks early and learn quickly. In those environments, proving adaptability can matter more than checking every qualification box.
Not everyone supported Graham’s decision at the time. She said Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, then the number two at the tech giant, advised against the move — as did her father.
“When wiser, more experienced people questioned the job offer, it definitely made me pause,” Graham told Business Insider in a follow-up email. “But my gut felt really strongly that I needed to take the risk.”
That instinct, she said, ultimately helped her discover what kind of work she didn’t want to do, and where her strengths lay. She didn’t want to sift through mock ups of hardware design and argue about a button’s placement. Instead, she sharpened her management skills and prepared to help lead large organizations.
“The much more fun careers are like jumping off cliffs,” Graham told Rachitsky. “They can take you to places that you never could have imagined.”
The US executed targeted, large-scale attacks in Venezuela’s capital city, Caracas, overnight.
President Donald Trump said Saturday American forces struck the country’s military, turned off the lights in the city, and captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, for prosecution in New York.
The assault news has raised big questions. Here’s what we know right now.
What did the US military just do in Venezuela?
The US carried out strikes in Venezuela early on Saturday.
Luis JAIMES / AFP
Early Saturday morning, Trump revealed on Truth Social that the US military carried out a “large-scale attack against Venezuela” and that the leader had been captured and taken out of the country.
The US president didn’t seek Congressional approval prior to the mission. Congress, however, was notified afterward.
Trump told Fox News he watched the capture of Maduro play out in real time from a room inside his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida alongside military generals.
“I was told by real military people that there’s no other country on Earth that can do such a maneuver,” he shared during a phone interview with Fox News. “If you would have seen what happened, I mean, I watched it literally, like I was watching a television show.”
Trump said the raid was “extremely complex,” more so than the Midnight Hammer operation against Iran’s nuclear sites conducted last year. Maduro and his wife were taken to the Wasp-class amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima.
Trump said US assets involved included land, air, and sea, including a “massive number” of aircraft and troops. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine said the apprehension mission, called Absolute Resolve, was based on months of intelligence-gathering, including watching Maduro’s patterns of life, and involved all elements of the joint force, from space and cyber assets to traditional combat forces.
The assault involved 150 aircraft — fighter jets, bombers, electronic warfare planes, intelligence and surveillance aircraft, and helicopters and rotary aircraft — that provided “layered effects” to clear the way for the interdiction force to slip in with the “element of surprise” into downtown Caracas. Fighters and different drones covered the extraction.
There were no US personnel or equipment losses, Trump said; however, he did say that troops were hit, along with a helicopter that he said was hit “pretty hard.” Caine said the US responded to hostile fire with “overwhelming” force.
What has the Trump administration been saying about why this is necessary?
The US military has built up a massive force presence in the Caribbean in recent months, including aircraft at an airport in Puerto Rico.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP
Tensions have been rising for months between Venezuela’s Maduro regime and the Trump administration, which has ramped up its rhetoric while increasing military action nearby.
The US has blamed Venezuela for pushing deadly drugs into the country, as well as using its oil industry, which the Trump administration says the US built and intends to take back, to fund narco-terrorism and other criminal activities.
The administration has labeled cartels and the Maduro regime terrorist organizations. Trump has also called Maduro an illegitimate leader.
What’s been happening in the lead-up to this assault?
Trump said a US helicopter took fire during the operation in Venezuela.
Miguel J. Rodriguez Carrillo / AFP
The US has been launching attacks against alleged drug trafficking boats since September 2025, with over 100 people killed and others missing or captured.
A massive US force presence, including warships and combat aircraft, has been in the Caribbean to combat narcotics trafficking and pressure Venezuela for months.
More recently, US forces began executing a blockade of oil tankers out of Venezuela in an effort to enforce American oil sanctions, hurting a key Venezuelan export and straining its economy.
Maduro’s government said that the purpose of the US attack on Venezuela was to “seize Venezuela’s strategic resources, particularly its oil and minerals, in an attempt to forcibly break the nation’s political independence.”
How unusual is this?
A destroyed air defense unit at a Venezuelan military base.
Leonardo Fernandez Viloria/REUTERS
The US has removed the leaders of sovereign states in the past. For instance, during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or Operation Iraqi Freedom, it captured Saddam Hussein after the Bush administration asserted the Iraqi president had weapons of mass destruction. Hussein was later convicted for crimes against humanity by an Iraqi court and executed in December 2006.
A lack of evidence that Hussein’s regime had weapons of mass destruction led to criticisms against the Bush administration’s motives.
Much earlier, Panamanian military dictator Manual Noriega was also a target of American military forces during the US invasion of Panama from December 1989 to January 1990, partially prompted by his attempt to annul the results of the 1989 Panamanian general election. US courts had charged Noriega with drug smuggling and money laundering, and the Panamanian official was captured in January 1990 and taken to Miami, where he was convicted on most of the charges.
Both Noriega and Maduro were heads of state indicted by US federal courts, they were accused of using state power to facilitate drug trafficking, and the US could argue in both cases those actions taken against them were law enforcement.
The US has also conducted military action to kill prominent foreign figures. Exactly six years ago, US military personnel successfully assassinated Qasem Soleimani, a senior Iranian military officer, in a drone strike in Baghdad.
The US designated Soleimani a terrorist in 2005. In response to Soleimani’s assassination in January 2020, Iran launched missiles against US military bases in Iraq, injuring 110 US troops.
What’s happening now?
Maduro and his wife have been indicted in New York, and Trump said the US will be involved in the next steps for the Venezuelan government.
Carlos Jasso/Reuters
Maduro and his wife are on their way to New York. Pamela Bondi, US attorney general, said that Maduro had been charged with narco-terrorism conspiracy, cocaine importation conspiracy, and possession of machine guns and destructive devices, as well as conspiracy against the US.
“They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts,” Bondi said on X.
On Saturday morning, Trump posted a picture of Maduro in custody on Truth Social. The photo showed Maduro aboard USS Iwo Jima.
Venezuelan president Maduro in custody on the USS Iwo Jima.
Truth Social
By law, Venezuelan vice president Delcy Rodríguez should assume power in Maduro’s absence. But Trump said the US would “run the country” until a “safe, proper” election can occur.
The president also added that US oil companies would be returning to Venezuela.
In the grocery store, people tried to make sense of my family — how these Black, Hispanic, and white children all belonged to the same woman.
The insatiably curious strangers would stop my mother to comment on her “beautiful family,” hoping she’d explain us. She never did.
I love that she never felt she owed anyone an explanation for her children.
It started with just three of us — my biological brother, sister, and me — your average American, blue-collar family. But when my parents decided to foster kids, our world expanded.
From then on, our sibling count fluctuated. Usually, we had between four and six kids in our home. Over the years, my parents adopted five of my foster siblings, bringing our total to eight.
Growing up as the oldest in a family built through foster care and adoption shaped me in ways I didn’t understand, but I feel them everywhere now.
Not fitting in taught me empathy
We didn’t fit the box of a “nice little American family.” My younger siblings might’ve been too young to notice people’s stares, but I wasn’t. I saw the disapproving looks when my 2-year-old foster sister dumped a carton of eggs onto the grocery store floor or melted down in the cereal aisle.
It was humbling to feel different. To feel like you were “that family.” The one that stood out for the wrong reasons.
In hindsight, it taught me empathy at an early age. To this day, I try to be aware when others feel they aren’t fitting in or measuring up to some impossible standard. I want people to feel like they can be their imperfect selves around me.
I learned that just because something hurts doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing
People often told my mother, “Oh, I could never foster. I’d get too attached. My heart would break if they went home. “
My mother hated these comments. Her heart shattered every time we got a call that one of our siblings was leaving. She loved those children like her own — and then they were gone, often returning to situations that didn’t feel stable. She was powerless to stop it and grieved hard.
People don’t want to foster because it’ll be painful when the children leave, but my mother taught me that you let your heart hurt if it means you can help the hurting.
In a big family, we learned to pull our weight
I vaguely remember doing chores before my foster siblings arrived — but I vividly remember chores after. Suddenly, my mom was overwhelmed, and helping became non-negotiable. At 11, I was in charge of my 1- and 2-year-old sisters’ bedtime routine. By 12, I was the family dishwasher, and by 17, the laundress. And, of course, I babysat.
Every day was a lesson in teamwork and helping out. Not just for me, but for my siblings, too. Many of us who grew up in that house went on to pursue entrepreneurship. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
If there’s something good, better get it before it’s gone
Scarcity mindset is real when you grow up with so many siblings. Act fast, or there won’t be anything left. Even now as an adult, I have to remind myself not to overfill my plate or worry about something running out. It took me a long time to learn to savor things and not worry about the sense of “not enough.”
Still, that mindset made me scrappy, which has come in handy over the years. When I was young and first married, we needed extra money. I began buying and selling furniture on Craigslist and renting out our home on Airbnb. My book club once voted me “most likely to survive the Hunger Games.”
The demands of parenting didn’t surprise me
My friends used to talk dreamily about their future families. I didn’t. I knew what snot-nosed temper tantrums looked like. For a long time, I wasn’t even sure I wanted kids.
Eventually, I changed my mind and became a mother. Sometimes, helicopter parents ask me how I’m so chill with my kids. Coming from a big family, I’m not worried about a little chaos. Balls and tricycles in the house? Sure. Stomp around in the mud and puddles? Go right ahead. Running around in a diaper? You do you.
In a big family, there’s always room for one more at the table
I love our loud, boisterous family gatherings — my seven siblings, their spouses, nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. It’s wonderful chaos.
Whenever I ask to bring a lonely neighbor or another family along, my mom always says the same thing: “Of course! I’ll make sure we have enough chairs.”
That’s my favorite part of belonging to a big family — when you have so many, what’s a few more?
The US just escalated its clash with Europe over tech regulation.
The State Department said it has barred five Europeans, including the EU’s former Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton and four members of digital campaign groups, from entering the country over what it called “censorship” of tech platforms.
The visa bans were met with backlash from European leaders on X, who accused Washington of intimidation and political overreach.
The dispute centers on the EU’s Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act, which imposes obligations on major tech platforms — many of which are based in the US — to police content and curb anti-competitive behavior. Companies in breach of it can be fined up to 6% of their global annual revenue.
In a post on X late Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department would block leading figures of what he called “the global censorship-industrial complex” from entering the US.
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“For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose,” Rubio wrote. “The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.”
For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose. The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship.
In follow-up posts on Tuesday, Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, named Breton among the five European individuals sanctioned, accusing him of using the EU’s Digital Services Act to pressure Elon Musk and X during his tenure as commissioner for the internal market.
She also named Imran Ahmed of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, Clare Melford of the Global Disinformation Index, and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, accusing them of pressuring US platforms over online speech. None of the four campaigners immediately responded to a Business Insider request for comment.
Rubio added that the US was “ready and willing to expand this list” unless officials reversed course, framing the move as a defense of free expression and US sovereignty.
European backlash
The back-and-forth has largely played out on X, a platform that was hit with a $140 million fine earlier this month for breaching the Digital Services Act.
Breton responded in Tuesday X post by invoking McCarthy-era politics, asking, “Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back?”
He added, “To our American friends: ‘Censorship isn’t where you think it is.'”
French President Emmanuel Macron also condemned the visa restrictions, describing them in a Wednesday X post as coercive measures aimed at undermining Europe’s digital sovereignty.
“The rules governing the European Union’s digital space are not meant to be determined outside Europe,” he said.
The European Commission “strongly” condemned the US decision, adding that the EU has the sovereign right to regulate its digital market and would seek clarification from US authorities.
Is McCarthy’s witch hunt back? 🧹
As a reminder: 90% of the European Parliament — our democratically elected body — and all 27 Member States unanimously voted the DSA 🇪🇺
To our American friends: “Censorship isn’t where you think it is.”
“Freedom of speech is the foundation of our strong and vibrant European democracy,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen wrote on X on Wednesday. “We are proud of it. We will protect it.”
Gérard Araud, France’s former ambassador to the US, said the dispute reflects a deeper rupture, writing on X that “the West” no longer exists and that Europe is now alone in defending its interests and values.
Daniel Fried, a former US ambassador to Poland and longtime US sanctions official, told Business Insider he could not recall a precedent for Washington imposing visa bans on a former European official in retaliation for policy decisions made in the course of their duties.
Similarly, Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, a senior fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel, told Business Insider that he could not recall any historical precedent for the move, describing the visa bans as largely symbolic and unlikely to trigger meaningful retaliation.
Musk in the middle
The dispute has been years in the making — and Musk X has often been at the center of it.
Breton repeatedly clashed with Musk after he bought Twitter in 2022 and pledged to loosen moderation in the name of free speech.
As the then-internal market commissioner, Breton warned that X could face fines or even be barred from the European Union if it failed to comply with EU law, later overseeing a formal investigation into the platform regarding disinformation and content moderation.
Those confrontations turned X into a symbol of the broader transatlantic fight over who sets the rules for online speech — a conflict that has now spilled from regulation into geopolitics.
Nike CEO Elliott Hill inherited an uphill battle when he took over at the sports giant in October 2024.
Since then, Hill has made changes — both big and small — to the company as part of its turnaround strategy. After retiring from Nike in 2020, the former president of consumer and marketplace returned to guide the company amid declining sales, sluggish growth, and increased pressure from upstart rivals.
During the quarter preceding Hill’s start, Nike’s revenue declined 10% year over year to $11.6 billion, following flat growth in the 2024 fiscal year. Nike shares jumped about 8% on the day Hill’s appointment was announced in September.
The Nike veteran didn’t waste time launching his strategy when he took the helm, reevaluating the existing practices and adjusting them as needed.
“We lost our obsession with sport,” Hill said on a December 2024 earnings call. “Moving forward, we will lead with sport and put the athlete at the center of every decision.”
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Last week, during the company’s most recent quarter, Hill told investors that the comeback “won’t be a straight line.”
Here’s what Hill has been up to in 2025.
Hill kick-started his turnaround plan
Nike’s “win now” strategy — Hill described it on last week’s earnings call as Nike’s “immediate response to our biggest challenges and opportunities” — focuses on five key areas: culture, product, marketing, marketplace, and in-person presence.
The plan leans on a sports-driven reset that has “realigned” about 8,000 employees around its core sports categories, the company said. Those categories include running, basketball, football, and training, as well as sportswear.
The idea is to put the athlete “at the center of everything that we do,” Hill said in a March earnings call.
The running category is leading the effort and reflects the direction Hill is steering the company. Nike said its running business grew by more than 20% last quarter, which ended in November, marking the second consecutive period of comparable growth.
Nike’s senior leadership team got a revamp
Hill shook up Nike’s leadership this year.
In May, he restructured its consumer, product, and brand leadership to focus on three areas: consumer and sport, marketing, and product creation. As part of that overhaul, Nike’s former president of consumer, product, and brand retired, and Hill promoted four other Nike insiders to senior roles reporting to him: president of Nike (Amy Montagne), chief innovation, design, and product officer (Phil McCartney), chief marketing officer (Nicole Graham), and chief growth initiatives officer (Tom Clarke).
Hill also hired a new communications chief this year, Michael Gonda.
And he made another round of changes in December, eliminating the roles of chief technology officer and chief commercial officer. At the same time, Nike established the role of chief operating officer, which reports to Hill. The new job’s function is to “integrate technology more seamlessly into our sport offense,” Hill said in a note to employees that Nike released publicly. Venkatesh Alagirisamy, a 20-year veteran of Nike, transitioned into the role on December 8.
As part of the shake-up, general managers in all regions now report directly to Hill.
“It’s clear how important it is to stay closely connected to what’s happening on the ground, from intern to CEO, and every role I’ve held in between, I’ve felt that way,” Hill said on last week’s earnings call.
He began mending relationships with wholesale partners
Hill said Nike’s ties with wholesalers such as Foot Locker and Dick’s Sporting Goods had frayed amid its aggressive shift toward direct-to-consumer sales.
Since Hill’s return, he said he’s been mending those relationships. For example, Nike is back on Amazon and has struck partnerships with smaller retailers, such as Urban Outfitters and Aritzia.
Nike’s wholesale revenues increased 8% year over year to $7.5 billion during its most recent quarter, which ended November 30.
Hill pulled back on promotions and raised prices
Hill said that Nike would strive to provide a more “elevated” experience for consumers, speaking in a January interview with Fortune. He said Nike had become “too promotional” on its own site.
“Being premium also means full price,” Hill told Fortune. “We’ll focus on promotions during traditional retail moments, not at the consistent levels we are today.”
He said in March that Nike Digital, which includes its website and app,ran zero promotions in North America in January and February, down from over 30 during the same months in 2024. The cutback on promotions came alongside “surgical” price increases Nike made to mitigate tariffs in 2025.
He gave the House of Innovation concept store a makeover
The House of Innovation is Nike’s six-floor flagship store.
Jordan Hart/Business Insider
Nike’s 68,000-square-foot House of Innovation is the blueprint for its stores. It’s a six-story flagship store that opened in 2018, showcasing the company’s most advanced products. The first floor is dedicated to running, and the rest of the sprawling store is organized by sport, gender, and age.
Hill has frequently pointed to the revamped store in his first year as a model for Nike’s move to sports-driven retail layouts.
“It’s an immersive sport experience, and the refresh has already led to double-digit revenue increases,” Hill told investors in September.
Nike did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
By our fifth wedding anniversary, my husband and I had moved twice for his job. We were in our 20s and excited for new experiences. It was easy to embrace the chaos of moving then.
When a third opportunity to relocate was presented, the choice wasn’t so easy anymore. Our family had grown; we now had a baby to consider. This move would take us from Houston to California, a place we’d barely visited. The whole idea felt exciting, but what would it be like to move halfway across the country with a baby in tow?
Having a baby made us think differently about moving
We asked ourselves what advice we’d give our child if she were an adult making this decision. We realized we’d encourage her to take the chance, so we decided we would, too.
My husband’s employer provided us with a moving company to pack, load, and transport our belongings. Unfortunately, the truck had a blowout on I-10 and was delayed, so when we arrived in California, we were without many of the comforts that make life with a baby easier for longer than we’d planned.
The beginning was rough, but it worked out. We embraced having mountains and beaches close by, but what we couldn’t embrace was the cost of living. To afford to live where we were, I’d need to go back to work. However, we’d created a little obstacle; I was pregnant. We didn’t know if we could afford to live in California with our expanding family, but we knew of a place we could afford.
The author worried that moving with young children could be difficult.
Courtesy of Candy Mickels Mejia
When our family changed, our reason to move changed
Two and a half years after we arrived in California, we were on the move again. This relocation took us back to Houston. Thankfully, my husband’s company provided moving assistance once more.
Moving while pregnant and with a 3-year-old was exhausting, but we settled into our new house and our new life. Once we hit the milestone of two and a half years in our home, we celebrated.
A few months later, my husband was asked to consider applying for another opportunity. The position was outside the United States, and if he applied, it would mean we were OK with moving abroad. But were we?
For our move to California, we’d asked ourselves what advice we’d give our children. Now the question was: what life did we want to give our children?
We decided to give our children roots instead of adventures
Despite the benefits and experiences that come with living as expatriates, providing our children with stable and predictable childhoods was a bigger priority for us. We chose to have our adventures during school vacations instead of having an adventure-based life.
My husband did not apply for that overseas position and chose not to apply to any other jobs that would require us to relocate. We’ve now been in our second Houston house for 16 years. Moving was fun for a while, but we’re thankful we were able to stay in one place after the fun wore off.
And if our children ever ask us for advice on moving, will we stick with our original, hypothetical answer? I think we would.
