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One of the ‘Finest Boys in Finance’ no longer works at PwC

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  • Demarre Johnson, 23, appeared in a viral photo shoot published by Interview magazine last week.
  • PwC on Friday confirmed Johnson had left the company, saying he departed in mid-February.
  • A person familiar with the matter told Business Insider his exit wasn’t related to the magazine pictorial.

One of the “finest boys in finance” — whose splashy magazine spread last week was the talk of Wall Street — is no longer with his firm.

In a statement to Business Insider, PwC confirmed that former associate Demarre Johnson is “no longer an employee and left the firm in mid-February.”

Johnson went viral last week after he and three junior bankers were featured in designer clothing in an Interview magazine photo shoot published March 4. A person familiar with the matter said his departure was not related to his magazine appearance.

The 23-year-old, who spoke with Business Insider twice after the magazine story, didn’t comment when a reporter reached him on Friday.

The Babson College graduate talked to Business Insider last week about being chosen for the spread, saying he knew it would make headlines because “controversy sells.”

“My initial reaction was, ‘Oh, they’re going to clown us because we think we’re pretty,'” Johnson said. “That’s exactly what happened.”

The photo shoot generated instant discourse among Wall Street insiders who took to social media to vent about the stereotypes they said it portrayed and the unofficial rules it broke — including not outshining your bosses.

Bankers buzzed about whether the participants — who also worked at Goldman Sachs and Barclays — got approval from their employers before going in front of the cameras. Goldman said that “media relations did not approve these interviews.” The other firms didn’t comment at the time.

Johnson, who has a vibrant social media presence, said on Monday that he’s been careful about social media posts he’s made about his job. “If I built the multibillion-dollar bank business, I would hate if one of my associates formed my company’s image with one video,” he told Business Insider.

Other participants in the shoot have avoided the spotlight since its release, but Johnson reposted feedback about the story on his social channels.

“I’m viral on twitter,” he said in one post, with four crying emojis.




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Chong Ming Lee, Junior News Reporter at Business Insider's Singapore bureau.

China’s smartest students used to chase tech and finance jobs. Now, they’re choosing manufacturing.

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For years, China’s top graduates chased jobs in finance and tech. Now, many are heading into manufacturing and energy instead.

Employment data from Tsinghua University — one of China’s top tertiary institutions — published on its website on Tuesday shows the number of graduates entering the manufacturing and energy sectors rose 19.1% year over year for the class of 2025.

Top employers for this year’s Tsinghua graduates include Huawei, BYD, State Grid Corporation of China, and China National Nuclear Corporation, the university said.

Huawei is a global telecom equipment giant, while BYD is one of the world’s biggest electric-vehicle makers. State Grid runs China’s power grid, and China National Nuclear Corporation leads its nuclear industry.

The share of Tsinghua graduates entering the manufacturing and energy sectors has grown for six consecutive years, according to the university. Tsinghua said last year that the number of Class of 2024 graduates joining those sectors rose 11% year on year.

Often compared with MIT or Stanford, Tsinghua is widely viewed as China’s top engineering university and a key pipeline for talent entering the country’s tech and industrial giants.

The trend is not limited to China’s most elite university. At Huazhong University of Science and Technology, 2025 graduate employment statistics published in January showed about 2,000 graduates entering the information-technology sector and about 1,500 moving into manufacturing, compared with just around 300 entering finance and 240 joining construction.

The share of Chinese graduates entering manufacturing rose from 17.9% in 2020 to 22.5% in 2024, according to South China Morning Post, citing a report by MyCOS Institute, a consultancy focused on China’s education.

China’s advanced manufacturing sector gains prestige

Experts told Business Insider that several factors are driving more graduates toward manufacturing and energy jobs.

China’s industrial sectors, especially semiconductors, electric vehicles, batteries, and renewable energy, have become “highly technology-intensive and now demand top engineering talent,” said Fu Fangjian, associate professor of finance at Singapore Management University.

Many young graduates now see them as “opportunities to work on cutting-edge technologies rather than traditional factory work,” he said, adding that these jobs can offer “very competitive” salaries.

Experts say the nature of manufacturing jobs has evolved as China upgrades its industrial base.

Sectors such as electric vehicles, power equipment, and nuclear energy now require expertise in engineering, data science, and systems integration, said Zhao Litao, a senior research fellow with the East Asian Institute at the National University of Singapore.

“‘Hardware’ and advanced manufacturing are no longer seen as low-skill industries but as high-tech innovation sectors involving robotics, semiconductors, advanced materials, and industrial AI,” Fu said.

As a result, advanced manufacturing is increasingly viewed as a frontier technology sector rather than a blue-collar industry, said Zhao, who researches China’s social policy.

Highly technical engineering or research roles in this sector “carry considerable prestige among engineering students,” he added.

Tech and finance jobs lose their shine

For years, many of China’s top graduates gravitated toward internet platforms and finance, drawn by rapid growth and high pay.

But hiring in the platform economy has slowed, while tighter regulation has added more uncertainty, said Fu.

“At the same time, investment attention has shifted toward HALO sectors —hardware, industrial technology, and energy— redirecting both capital and talent,” he added.

China’s job market has long been challenging for young graduates entering the workforce.

In December, the unemployment rate for people aged 16 to 24 — excluding students — stood at 16.5%, according to data released by the National Bureau of Statistics in January. By comparison, unemployment was 6.9% for those aged 25 to 29 and 3.9% for workers aged 30 to 59.

The Chinese tech sector has been trimming headcount in recent years as companies focus on cutting costs and improving efficiency.

Alibaba’s workforce has shrunk by more than half, from about 250,000 full-time employees in March 2022 to about 124,000 in March 2025, according to a report by Chinese financial news outlet Caixin.

Baidu’s workforce stood at 35,900 at the end of 2024, down 21.1% from its peak in 2021, the report in August added.

Meanwhile, demand in manufacturing remains strong. A government manufacturing talent development plan projected that nearly 30 million skilled manufacturing jobs could go unfilled by 2025.

“China is the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles, batteries, and solar equipment, and these sectors require a large technical workforce,” said Zhao.

Government policy has also helped reshape the job landscape, experts said.

Over the past decade, China has prioritised strategic sectors such as electric vehicles, renewable energy, power equipment, and advanced materials through industrial policies, research programmes, and large-scale investment, said Zhao.

“These sectors have therefore become major employers of engineering graduates,” he added.

Universities, research institutes, and state-supported firms are aligned with these national priorities, which encourages more talented graduates to enter these fields, Fu said.




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Bank employees, rejoice: 60% of finance CEOs don’t see head count shrinking because of AI

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  • Of the 240 financial CEOs EY surveyed, only 28% see AI reducing head count in 2026.
  • Nearly half of the CEOs said AI is the most critical factor in their company’s ability to adapt.
  • Some Wall Street leaders have said AI will eliminate some roles, but ultimately increase head count.

Banks’ analyst classes probably won’t swap fresh-faced college grads for bots — at least not this year.

Some 60% of the 240 financial services CEOs that EY surveyed for its Quarterly CEO Outlook Survey said they think investing in AI will maintain or even increase their current head count in 2026. Only 28% of those surveyed predicted head count would drop this year.

Leaders at some of the biggest banks, including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, have said that they’re resisting hiring growth where it makes sense to prioritize efficiency. They, along with some other bulge-bracket leads, have predicted that AI could grow head count in the long run, though. Still, some roles are becoming obsolete: Citi CEO Jane Fraser said in a recent internal memo that some jobs “will no longer be required” as AI advances.

For their part, the financial services CEOs that EY surveyed are similarly bullish about AI’s capacity to transform the workplace, and nearly half see AI and digital investment as the most important factor in their companies’ ability to thrive and adapt this year.

Around a quarter said their AI initiatives have significantly beaten expectations, and 57% said they’ve shown results faster than expected. Just more than half said they expect the biggest transformations to come from generative AI.

When it comes to hiring for AI talent — itself a highly competitive market — 87% of CEOs in EY’s survey are optimistic about their ability to attract and keep talent in 2026. The question of returns on the AI investment, for talent and in general, also seems top of mind for the financial services leaders. Seventy-six percent of boards in the survey said they’ll review transformation ROI metrics as often as financial results.

Firms of all sizes are being asked to justify their AI spends, as analysts and investors begin to wonder whether the sometimes billion-dollar bets will show up on balance sheets.




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Thibault

China’s AI push is about spreading economic gains, not enriching tech giants, a finance CEO says

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Open source — that might be the clearest signal of how China wants artificial intelligence to reshape its economy.

Hisham Alrayes, the group CEO of Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group, said China is prioritizing open models and broad deployment to spread AI’s gains across the economy, instead of funneling them to a few tech giants.

Speaking at a Davos panel on China’s “AI+ Economy” strategy on Wednesday, Alrayes said the country’s approach reflects a fundamentally different economic philosophy.

“You look at the open structure of the China AI philosophy — then you have the non-open structure,” Alrayes said. “That signals that the benefit they want to see is to trickle down into the economy, into the companies.”

Open source as economic strategy

China’s most prominent AI breakout, DeepSeek, reflects that philosophy.

It mostly uses open-source models that have drawn global attention, in contrast to many large US language models that remain closed and proprietary, reaping the benefits of tightly controlled commercial ecosystems.

Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has said that a key reason behind DeepSeek’s success is its open-source model, which, he said, can outperform proprietary models in terms of efficiency and innovation by building on shared research.

Meanwhile, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that China’s open-source AI models could gain an edge globally because they’re free, making them more attractive than costly proprietary US systems for governments and countries that can’t afford closed models.

Similarly, Alrayes said, China — in pursuing the open model — is aiming for affordability and scale.

“It’s not the benefit of that company, of that product, the return of that individual. It’s not an individual — it’s an economy,” Alrayes said.

That philosophy is reflected in China’s national “AI Plus” action plan, which prioritizes diffusion, said fellow panelist Gong Ke, executive director of the Chinese Institute for New Generation AI Development Strategies at Nankai University.

The policy, he said, focuses on embedding AI across manufacturing, healthcare, finance, education, and other sectors, rather than on breakthroughs such as artificial general intelligence.

He added that the plan sets explicit adoption targets, with AI agents and intelligent terminals expected to reach 70% penetration by 2027 and 90% by 2030.

AI as infrastructure, not a profit engine

Alrayes said China’s open-source tilt ultimately reflects a broader goal: making AI an economic utility rather than a profit center for a small group of companies.

“China is looking to create value throughout the economy, very clear, with very specific objectives across the economy,” he said. “Not just as a benefit to those companies. This is the difference in the philosophy.”




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