Trump’s tariffs are working on China—at a huge cost to American small business

A new analysis from the JPMorgan Chase Institute reveals that while aggressive trade policies implemented in 2025 have successfully driven a significant wedge between midsize American businesses and Chinese suppliers, the decoupling has come with a staggering price tag for U.S. companies.

The report, titled “Tracking international payments: How are midsize firms reacting to tariffs?” paints a picture of a business sector that is bending but not breaking under historic pressure. According to JPMorgan banking data on financial outflows of firms with revenues between $10 million and $1 billion, the cost of importing goods has skyrocketed—and American companies are bearing the brunt. READ MORE

Sam Altman says the quiet part out loud, confirming some companies are ‘AI washing’ by blaming unrelated layoffs on the technology

As debate continues over AI’s true impact on the labor force, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some companies are engaging in “AI washing” when it comes to layoffs, or falsely attributing workforce reductions to the technology’s impact.

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Altman told CNBC-TV18 at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday. READ MORE

Elon Musk wants to put a satellite catapult on the moon. It's not a new idea

Last week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk advised workers at the newly acquired company xAI that he wants to set up a factory on the moon to build artificial intelligence (AI) satellites. And he called for a colossal catapult on the lunar surface to fling them into space.

"My estimate is that, within two to three years, the lowest-cost way to generate AI compute will be in space," Elon Musk wrote in a Feb. 2 update that announced SpaceX's acquisition of xAI. READ MORE

The Rise of RentAHuman, the Marketplace Where Bots Put People to Work

For centuries, people have catastrophized about robots taking away jobs. On February 1, the paradigm shifted: bots are creating jobs. Now, 518,284 humans—and rapidly counting—are offering their labor to AI agents on a new online marketplace called RentAHuman. There are classifieds to count pigeons in Washington ($30/hour); deliver CBD gummies ($75/hour); play exhibition badminton ($100/hour); and anything else you could possibly imagine that a disembodied agent couldn’t do.

The provocatively-titled platform enables users to connect AI agents like Clawdbot or Claude to its Model Context Protocol server so they can search, book, and pay for humans to carry out tasks in “meatspace.” Think of it like Fiverr, but doing away with the human recruiter and letting autonomous bots do the hiring instead. READ MORE

7 choices that could finally make performance management worth the effort

Performance management is broken. While HR teams and leaders often think their programs work well, many employees don’t. According to PwC’s Workforce Radar study, 97% of HR leaders believe their organizations effectively grow and develop talent, but only 50% of business leaders and 30% of employees agree.

This disconnect exists because each person experiences performance management differently. Employees see a box-checking exercise. HR views it as a development tool. Business leaders use it to manage pay and accountability. The result? Confusing signals, lost trust, and stalled growth in the very capabilities organizations need to compete. READ MORE

42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored

Self-reported employee turnover risk is at its highest point since 2015.

Gallup’s latest measure in May shows half of U.S. employees (51%) are watching or actively seeking a new job, continuing a recent upward trend. While voluntary employee turnover rates have stabilized since the Great Resignation due to cooling economic and job markets, employees’ long-term commitment to their organizations is currently the lowest it has been in nine years. READ MORE

Disciplined Entrepreneurship: What It Really Takes to Build a Business

When founders succeed, they’re often dubbed business prodigies, destined for greatness from day one. However, leaders at the MIT Sloan School of Management assert that successful entrepreneurs are made, not born.

“[Entrepreneurship] is not a science or an algorithm. It’s not art either,” says Bill Aulet, a three-time entrepreneur and MIT professor. “It’s theory and practice. In entrepreneurship, you are always doing something different. So it has to be taught as a craft through the apprenticeship model where you can apply first principles and there are master craftsmen around you to learn from.” READ MORE

How Soon Will AI Take Your Job?

In 1869, a group of Massachusetts reformers persuaded the state to try a simple idea: counting.

The Second Industrial Revolution was belching its way through New England, teaching mill and factory owners a lesson most M.B.A. students now learn in their first semester: that efficiency gains tend to come from somewhere, and that somewhere is usually somebody else. The new machines weren’t just spinning cotton or shaping steel. They were operating at speeds that the human body—an elegant piece of engineering designed over millions of years for entirely different purposes—simply wasn’t built to match. The owners knew this, just as they knew that there’s a limit to how much misery people are willing to tolerate before they start setting fire to things. READ MORE

57 Infuriating Examples Of "Enshittification" That Prove Everything Is Just Getting Worse All The Time, Unfortunately

You may have been hearing this word tossed around over the last year: enshittification. According to Merriam-Webster, it's "when a digital platform is made worse for users, in order to increase profits." However, it's colloquially come to describe more than just apps, platforms, or sites. It seems like everything these days is declining in quality just so those at the top can make a buck. Even worse, companies often frame it as "innovation" or pretend like the changes are a good thing. READ MORE

The IRS is cracking down on a type of income earned by millions of people. Here's how to prevent a letter from Uncle Sam

The Internal Revenue Service is cracking down on a specific category of income that many Americans are increasingly reliant on: side hustles.

As of 2025, roughly 27% of American workers had some form of side income, according to a Bankrate survey (1). However, for many of these side hustlers the income generated from these gigs is negligible. In 2025, the median hustler earned just $200 a month. READ MORE

Deepfakes in the talent pool: How AI is reshaping hiring

An executive in my professional network recently updated their LinkedIn profile with this message:

“Friends, if you received an email from me about an opportunity with my organization, you didn’t. My corporate email address has been deepfaked.”

Deepfaking involves using AI to generate convincing false communications (such as in the case of my LinkedIn friend)—emails, voice recordings, even videos—that mimic a real individual. These communications appear so authentic that they can bypass human skepticism, fooling even the tech-savviest among us. READ MORE

Amazon’s layoff leak: What went wrong?

After news broke last week that another round of mass layoffs was impending at Amazon, employees were waiting for the hammer to drop. Late Tuesday night, it did—seemingly by accident.

An assistant to the vice president of AWS Solutions reportedly inadvertently sent a calendar invite to a handful of employees for a “Project Dawn” meeting—referencing the name of the company’s stated efforts to enhance efficiency—with an accompanying message about job cuts. The event was quickly cancelled. READ MORE

Musk’s fantasy for a future where work is optional just got more real

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has made no secret of his robot-powered fantasies for the future. Within the next couple of decades, work will be optional due to the widespread proliferation of AI and automation, he has predicted. Gone will be the need for retirement savings, as money will be irrelevant. Instead, Musk sees a world of robots outnumbering humans, providing healthcare and other services for their organic counterparts. READ MORE

Elon Musk is betting Tesla’s future isn’t about cars at all

Tesla dominated the electric vehicle industry by the mid-2010s with sleek, fast cars that helped combat the public perception that EVs were severely limited by short ranges.

Now the company – and its controversial CEO, Elon Musk – face stiffer competition and political headwinds. Its EV sales fell by a record 9% in 2025, amid increasing rivalry from China and the expiration of the US EV sales tax credit. READ MORE

Forget the four-day workweek: CEO of the world’s largest workspace provider says it’s not coming, despite what Bill Gates and Elon Musk predict

Billionaire Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon, Nvidia’s boss Jensen Huang and Elon Musk have all made the same prediction in recent years: The workweek is about to shrink. Automation will take over routine tasks, they argue, freeing workers’ time and pushing a four-day week toward becoming standard. Gates has even floated the idea of a two-day workweek.

But Mark Dixon, CEO and founder of International Workplace Group (IWG) CEO isn’t buying it. From his vantage point, running the world’s largest flexible office provider—with more than 8 million users across 122 countries and 85% of the Fortune 500 among its customers—the math doesn’t add up. READ MORE