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Some ships are sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. Others are turning around. Here’s what ‘completely open’ looks like for now.

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Iran announced Friday morning that the Strait of Hormuz is open for maritime traffic, and mid-afternoon data showed that commercial vessels were passing through the strategic waterway, though only a small number.

Friday evening, a large group of vessels sailed toward the strait but inexplicably turned away, ship-tracking data shows, raising questions about the status of this critical chokepoint.

Opening the strait has been a central demand since the start of a fragile ceasefire earlier this month and amid the ongoing negotiations between Washington and Tehran.

Seyed Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister, said in a statement on social media Friday that “the passage for all commercial vessels through Strait of Hormuz is declared completely open for the remaining period of ceasefire, on the coordinated route as already announced by Ports and Maritime Organization of the Islamic Rep. of Iran.” The announcement follows a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon.

Iran’s coordinated route appears to refer to previously released guidance that takes ships through the northern part of the waterway closest to Iran, which has said that the route was determined by security needs. Separate from Iranian considerations, US forces have been working to establish safe passage in the strait, where mines continue to represent a potential threat.

Shipping organizations have had mixed reactions. Some welcomed the news as a positive signal, while others urged caution. It is unclear how much has changed with Friday’s announcement from Iran.

President Donald Trump acknowledged Iran’s Friday statement in a Truth Social post, writing that “Iran has just announced that the Strait of Iran is fully open and ready for passage.” The market reaction to the announcement saw stocks climb higher and oil fall.

The strategic Strait of Hormuz is a narrow chokepoint linking the Persian Gulf to the Gulf of Oman and a major artery for global shipments of oil and natural gas.

MarineTraffic data from Friday afternoon showed that just over half a dozen commercial vessels had transited the strait since the announcement.

Data from KPler, a real-time trade intelligence platform, showed that eight commercial vessels had crossed as of 2 pm EST Friday compared to five on Thursday. The data refers to commercial fleets of crude tankers, LPG, LNG, and dry bulk vessels. Containerships are not included in the count. But by the evening, new data showed ships were turning back.

The limited number of ships that have gone through is a fraction of the pre-war normal. Before the war, the strait saw an average of over 120 transits daily.

Earlier in the week, days before the announcement on the strait, US Navy warships set up a blockade of Iranian ships and ports. Trump said the blockade will remain in effect until Washington and Tehran reach a deal to end the war.

US Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has highlighted the role of the Navy’s Arleigh Burke-class destroyers in the blockade during a briefing Thursday but didn’t specify numbers involved.

Dozens of surveillance aircraft, refueling planes, and drones are also involved in the blockade. US Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle East, said Friday that 19 vessels have turned around to comply with blockade restrictions since it began on Monday.

The US set up the blockade amid a tenuous ceasefire between the US and Iran, which was reached after more than a month of war. US military leaders have asserted that American forces remain poised to resume combat operations should the negotiations fail.


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I’m turning 40, and people keep asking why I don’t have children. I have a lot of reasons.

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I always felt like I disappointed my mother. Her lifelong wish was to become a grandmother, but having children was never high on my priority list.

When she died unexpectedly, I was 35 and struggling financially and mentally.

Her death threw my life into even more chaos — and not being a mother helped me survive it.

As I approach 40, I get asked, “Why don’t you just have a baby?” more and more often.

Although well-meaning, the question reduces a complex, private decision to small talk — as though my ambitions, finances, mental health, and grief matter less than my reproductive function.

What I witnessed growing up shaped my decision not to have children

Growing up, I watched my mother work six days a week running her esthetician business while doing all of the cooking, cleaning, and childcare at home. She was so busy being a working wife and mother to two kids that she put off many of her dreams until retirement.

She loved her work and continued tinting eyelashes and applying gel nails for her clients until the pandemic forced her to retire at 68. The prospect of enjoying her retirement kept her going through the UK’s lockdowns — but she died just a few months after restrictions were lifted.

Watching her sacrifice so much time — only to run out of it — shaped how I think about my own life.

Career and financial instability made survival my priority

At 32, I left a stable career in humanitarian aid to pursue my creative ambitions. It didn’t go well at first, but by my mid-30s, I felt like I was finally getting somewhere with my fledgling freelance writing business.

My partner was also out of work at the time, which only intensified the pressure. When we went shopping at our local market, we bought discounted bags of vegetables, and I crossed my fingers that my card payment would go through.

Every day, I struggled with the shame and sometimes-crippling anxiety and depression brought on by prolonged financial hardship.

At a time when many of our friends were having babies, we were simply trying to stay afloat. And since my partner (who’s 17 years my senior) has never wanted children, they weren’t in our plans.

Grief put my life on hold for five years

Then, in October 2021, my world fell apart. My mother and I were close, and I was unprepared for the heartbreak of losing her so suddenly — especially as the pandemic had kept us apart for so long.

Grief consumed me, making it difficult to work, and I mostly lived off the little savings I had scraped together.

Within a year, I landed a remote role at a marketing agency that gave me the stability I needed to start rebuilding my life. When I was made redundant at the end of 2024, not having a child to support gave me time to think about what to do next without additional pressure.

Now, nearly five years after my mother died, I finally have the strength to pursue the dreams I started chasing years ago.

I’m building a life that feels right for me

Last year, my nephew was born — the grandchild my mother never got to meet.

I can’t deny that watching my brother become a father made me wonder what parenthood might be like. But while I adore my nephew, loving him doesn’t make me yearn for the upheaval motherhood would bring. And without my mom to share in that chapter of life, I simply don’t feel the pull.

As I enter my 40s, I don’t feel like I’m “missing out”. Being child-free helped me survive the darkest time of my life — and gave me the chance to rebuild on my own terms.




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Ashley Stewart Business Insider

Amazon execs say layoffs are part of turning the company into the ‘world’s largest startup’

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Internal memos from Amazon executives explained the company’s decision to lay off 16,000 corporate workers as necessary to become the “world’s largest startup,” according to the messages viewed by Business Insider.

“Our ambition is to be the world’s largest startup,” Amazon executives wrote in two such memos viewed by Business Insider. “That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation — which requires us to continue evolving how we’re structured.”

The “world’s largest startup” has become a common refrain under Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who repeatedly referenced the company’s ability to operate like a startup in his latest shareholder letter.

The memos viewed by Business Insider, written by Amazon Web Services vice president Prasad Kalyanaraman and senior vice president Colleen Aubrey, include other similarities, providing insight into how Amazon likely directed its top executives to communicate about the layoffs:

  • Notifications within the teams in the US and Canada have been completed.
  • Identical language stating, “Please take care of yourselves and each other,” and that “the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential support.”
  • Acknowledging that changes are difficult and ending with a forward-looking statement about what remaining teams can accomplish.

Greg Pearson, another AWS VP, also addressed layoffs in a memo and urged staff to “use technology to simplify work,” Business Insider previously reported. Amazon also shared more information for laid-off employees in an FAQ and emails from Amazon HR chief Beth Galetti.

Internal Slack messages viewed by Business Insider suggest affected teams include those within the company’s AWS cloud unit, such as the AI cloud service Bedrock, the cloud data warehouse service Redshift, and the ProServe consulting team, as well as retail business teams such as the Prime subscription service and the last-mile Delivery Experience team.

Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Read the memos below:

Prasad Kalyanaraman, VP of AWS Infrastructure:

Team,
I want to provide an update on the organizational changes that Beth Galetti shared in her A to Z post earlier today. As Beth noted, these decisions are part of our ongoing effort to position the organization for the future while staying nimble and focused on delivering for our customers. Our ambition is to be the world’s largest startup. That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation—which requires us to continue evolving our structure.
The notifications to impacted colleagues in our organization who are based in the U.S. and Canada, have now been completed. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representatives and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees.
First and foremost, I want to thank the impacted colleagues who have worked tirelessly for our customers. I want to acknowledge that changes like this can be hard on our entire team. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization for future success. Changes like these are difficult, especially when they affect colleagues we value. These decisions don’t diminish what we’ve built together; rather, they’re about positioning us to sustain and extend that impact as we continue to build the foundation for the future.
I also want to recognize what our team has accomplished this past year as we’ve made tremendous progress on scaling to meet unprecedented customer demand. These results reflect the talent, dedication, and collaboration across the breadth of our very diverse organization that must work together seamlessly — and those are qualities that will remain our foundation as we move forward.
Please take care of yourselves and each other. Remember that the Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential support.
Thank you for your resilience and continued focus on delivering for our customers. I’m confident in our team’s ability to navigate this transition and emerge stronger.
I’m looking forward to what we’ll accomplish together in the months ahead.
Prasad

Colleen Aubrey, SVP of Applied AI Solutions:

Hi,
I wanted to follow up on Beth Galetti’s post about organizational changes to A to Z earlier today. As Beth noted, this is a continuation of the work we’ve been doing for more than a year to strengthen the company by reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy, so that we can move faster for customers. Our ambition is to be the world’s largest startup. That means doubling down on a culture of ownership, speed, and experimentation—which requires us to continue evolving how we’re structured.
Our organization plays a critical role in putting AI to work for our customers, transforming how companies deliver value to their customers, and these changes will help us sharpen our focus. I’ve seen how this team innovates and collaborates to solve real-world business challenges through applied Al. These strengths will be essential as we move forward with focus and clarity.
The notifications to impacted colleagues in our organization who are based in the U.S., Canada, and Costa Rica have now been completed. In other regions, we are following local processes, which may include time for consultation with employee representative bodies and possibly result in longer timelines to communicate with impacted employees. Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success. Please take care of yourselves and each other. The Employee Assistance Program (EAP) is available 24/7 for free and confidential support.
Thank you for your continued focus on delivering for our customers. I’m confident in our team’s ability to navigate this transition and emerge stronger, and I am positive that we’ll accomplish great things together in the months ahead.
Colleen

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OpenAI is turning to the court of public opinion in its battle with Elon Musk

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OpenAI is turning to the court of public opinion as it wages a legal battle with Elon Musk.

While Musk and OpenAI prepare to head to a high-stakes jury trial in April, the two are duking it out online over what exactly happened when Musk split ways with the AI startup he helped cofound.

Musk has been using recently unsealed court documents to attack his rival in posts on his social media platform, X. On Friday, OpenAI published a blog titled “The truth Elon left out.”

The blog, which provided commentary alongside excerpts from several court documents, alleges that Musk wanted “full control” of OpenAI, “since he’d been burned by not having it in the past,” and that OpenAI’s leadership was surprised when Musk suggested having his kids control AGI or artificial general intelligence during conversations about succession planning.

The statements are aimed at the heart of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI.

Musk is suing OpenAI’s key leaders, including CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman, over allegations that the AI company misled him by shifting away from its core mission to remain a nonprofit. Musk said he donated $38 million to OpenAI when it was a nonprofit.

The startup, since its 2015 founding, operated as a nonprofit-controlled organization with a for-profit operating arm. It completed its transition to a for-profit public benefit corporation in October 2025.

Representatives for Musk and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Last Tuesday, more than 100 documents related to the suit were unsealed, including diary entries from Brockman, which were obtained during the discovery process.

In one of the entries that was highlighted, Brockman appeared to write about his misgivings about pushing Musk out of OpenAI and committing to a nonprofit-only entity.

“Cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit,” the entry from the court documents said. “Don’t want to say that we’re committed. If three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”

It was Brockman’s diary entries that US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers cited in a recent ruling, in which she determined Musk had enough evidence that he’d been misled to take the case to trial.




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‘Big Short’ investor Michael Burry says AI is turning Big Tech into a worse business

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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.

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.

“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.




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Lou Gerstner, the former IBM chief credited with turning the company around, has died at 83

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Lou Gerstner, the former CEO of IBM who led the company through one of the most consequential turnarounds in corporate history, died on Saturday at the age of 83, the company said.

Gerstner ran IBM from 1993 to 2002, arriving at a time when the company was under severe pressure, and its future was in doubt. IBM was losing money, the tech industry was shifting rapidly, and there was widespread expectation that the company would be broken up.

Instead, Gerstner chose to keep IBM together. He pushed the company to organize around customer needs rather than internal divisions, helping reposition IBM as a provider of integrated technology and services for large enterprises. That decision became central to IBM’s recovery and renewed relevance.

Gerstner also drove cultural change inside the company. He emphasized direct decision-making, accountability, and execution, while insisting that innovation mattered only if it translated into real value for clients. The approach marked a sharp break from IBM’s inward-looking habits that had taken hold before his arrival, IBM said in its announcement of Gerstner’s death.

His tenure included painful restructuring. IBM abandoned long-standing traditions, including its decades-long “cradle to grave” no-layoff policy, as it sought to stabilize its finances and compete more aggressively. Many credit those moves, along with Gerstner’s strategic focus, with saving the company from collapse.

Before joining IBM, Gerstner built a high-profile career in corporate America. He was a partner at McKinsey & Company, later served as president of American Express, and was CEO of RJR Nabisco. After leaving IBM, he chaired the Carlyle Group and focused on philanthropy, particularly in education and biomedical research.

A native of Long Island, New York, Gerstner earned a degree from Dartmouth College and an MBA from Harvard. IBM said it plans to hold a celebration of his legacy in the new year.

This story was written using Business Insider’s AI tools and edited by a Business Insider editor.




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Kate Winslet says turning 50 changed how she defines success

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Kate Winslet turned 50 this year and says her definition of success has changed.

Speaking to Newsweek in an interview released on Tuesday, the “Titanic” actor spoke about aging and what it’s been like to reach this milestone in her life.

“I think that women get more interesting as we grow older. I think that we’re more involved in life. We have so much more experience,” Winslet told Newsweek.

She added that turning 50 “feels fantastic” and that she’s looking forward to what the coming years will bring.

“When we grow up, and we think about what we want to be when we’re older, I never imagined any of this,” Winslet said.

As a result, she said she has come to view success in a very different way.

“Success, actually, for me more these days is more about pulling it off, being a decent person. You know, being able to take care of people, having time for friends, also learning how to be OK with not being busy all the time,” she said.

Winslet said there’s value in learning to slow down.

“I think it’s important to remind ourselves that sometimes being OK just in stillness and in our own company,” she said.

She said she doesn’t know how to meditate, but it’s something she should learn.

Winslet isn’t the only Hollywood star who has reflected on how turning 50 has changed her perspective.

During a “Today” show appearance in November 2024, Lauren Sánchez Bezos said she didn’t think she would have so much to look forward to in life after turning 50.

“When I was 20, I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, life is over at 50.’ Let me tell you: It is not, ladies. It is not over,” she said.

In January, Chelsea Handler told Parade that she was feeling “pretty into myself” as she turned 50.

“My life is exactly what I hoped it would be — it’s more than I hoped it would be. I had no idea what the possibilities were or that I could live a life like this and feel so free,” Handler said.




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