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The most indelible image from Donald Trumps inauguration in January is not the image of the president taking the oath of office without his hand on the Bible. It is not the image of the First Lady scowling under the capacious brim of her hat or the memeified image of Hillary Clinton giggling at Trumps mention of the Gulf of America. It is, of course, the image of the worlds richest and most influential menhenceforth known as the broligarchylined up both literally and figuratively behind Trump. It was a carefully choreographed moment designed to illustrate Trumps strength. But the tableau could also be viewed another way: as a bunch of billionaires who looked scared out of their minds. Just about every man in the lineup had faced off against Trump in his first term: Mark Zuckerberg deemed him too dangerous for Facebook. Jeff Bezos sued him for harboring a personal vendetta that allegedly cost Amazon a $10 billion cloud contract. Tim Cook called Trumps immigrant family separations inhumane and condemned his moral equivalence after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. And when Sundar Pichai protested Trumps ban on immigration from majority Muslim countries, Sergey Brin was right there with him. Even Elon Musk clashed with Trump 1.0 after the president pulled out of the Paris climate accords. Now, all of these men stood side by side on the dais, many of them in what appeared to be a naked act of self-preservation as Trumps retributive and transactional second term took off. So, 100 days in, how have these business leaders been rewarded for their subservience? Why, with tariffs and trials and tanking stock prices, of course. The billionaires have begged and bargained in the Oval Office, theyve kicked millions of dollars Trumps way, and theyve compromised on the values they once professed to hold dear. But while their fates under Trumps second term certainly could have been worsethe president once threatened Zuckerberg, for one, with life in prisonthe president has yet to totally forgive and forget. Take Zuckerberg. As Trump took office, the Meta founder bent over backwards to appease him, very publicly announcing, though not in so many words, that he would make it easier for people to say hateful things about immigrants and trans people on Facebook and Instagram and shelling out $25 million to settle a baseless lawsuit Trump filed after being banned from Facebook. But none of that insulated Zuckerberg from the Federal Trade Commissions ongoing antitrust lawsuit, which seeks to unravel Metas ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp. The same goes for Google, which is currently facing its own antitrust trial, through which the Department of Justice has asked a district court to force the search giant to sell off its valuable Chrome browser. As one Trump ally recently told The New York Times about the Meta case: The president still wants his pound of flesh. Tech leaders fealty also hasnt shielded them from turmoil tied to Trumps so-called Liberation Day tariffs, which briefly sent the global markets into freefall. Meta’s stock price plunged on the fear that advertising would dry up. Amazon got walloped as Trump imposed a 145% tariff on goods from China, tossing a grenade into its global supply chain. Google’s data center expansion plans were poised to suffer, as construction costs were set to skyrocket. Even Apple, which scored a tariff exemption on goods from China, may not be spared forevera possibility the company is preparing for as it scrambles to move iPhone production to India. Trumps so-called reciprocal tariffs are still on hold, but all of these companies are still struggling to find their footing in the face of so much uncertainty. Then theres the relentless assault on the very infrastructure that made the United States a tech powerhouse to begin with. Funding for key research institutions has been gutted, driving scientists overseas. Billions in broadband expansion grants have been held up, stalling projects meant to bring faster internet access to rural America. Trump even said during his joint address to Congress that he wanted to get rid of the CHIPS Act, a rare spot of bipartisan consensus designed to spur the construction of new semiconductor plants through billions of dollars in Congressional funding. (So far, the president seems satisfied placing CHIPS Act programming under a new office that will, he says, strike much better deals.) The war on talent has been just as chilling, as the U.S. government revoked more than 1,500 student visas in recent months, before abruptly reversing course. Already experts have called the crackdown a gift to China, which is eager for U.S.-educated STEM graduates to return home. At this point, its hard to see whats in it for the broligarchs. Thats doubly true for Musk. The cost of aligning himself with Trumpand becoming the chainsaw-wielding face of his government slashing efforthas been particularly steep. His popularity has sunk alongside Teslas profits, as protests of the electric vehicle maker have exploded. And yet, at least Musk is an indisputably true believer in Trumps cause. nlike the others who scrambled to make nice with Trump after election day, Musk spent nearly $300 million to get him and other Republicans elected last November. He recruited fellow investors and software engineers to do his bidding at the Department of Government Efficiency, unleashed AI tools on government databases, and bulldozed the regulatory state that he so loathes. After 100 days, Musk may be the only one standing on the dais who got exactly what he paid for.
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E-Commerce
Former Tinder CEO Renate Nyborg launched Meeno less than two years ago with the intention of it being an AI chatbot that helped users through relationship issues. Now, the company is pivoting to focus on teaching predominantly male users how to connect romantically with women through interactions with voice-based AI characters. [Male loneliness] is a problem thats been getting worse for 30 years, Nyborg tells Fast Company. I never thought that this was something we could just go and snap our fingers and [fix]. The first iteration of Meeno, Nyborg says, allowed the company to prove that it could build something that appealed to men. She says the original platform, which will still be available on the Meeno app, attracted over half of its 100,000-user makeup as men. But they wanted it to yield faster results, and rapid developments to OpenAIs Whisper API and other technologies in the past few months meant it could rapidly decrease the amount of time its AI needed to offer insights. Users, she says, could get benefits within minutes instead of over three to four weeks thanks to the OpenAI advancements. The new Meeno is entirely web based, meaning it’s not going to be hosted on an app store. Users will go to the site, take a brief voice survey, and then get insights into how they present themselves. They’ll then make an account and go through fake scenarios, such as being prompted to talk to a woman while waiting in line at a pizza place. Users who want to go through more scenarios each day can pay $19 a month for a premium subscription. Think of it, she says, like Duolingo for dating. As part of its pivot, Meeno is raising a seed extension, with $2.7 million committed in the past few weeks. (The name, by the way, is a nod to Platos Meno writings.) The key to the platform, Nyborg says, was making it audio based so that it shows a clear intention of getting out of the house and interacting with people in the real world. A Pew Research Center survey from January found that while men and women report roughly equal rates of feeling lonely all or most of the time, men aren’t reaching out to their networks for help as much as women are. Nyborg says she and her investors have been testing out the product in the mornings, often feeling more confident in their conversations later in the day because they were warmed up. “Maybe someone pays you a surprise compliment, based on the band T-shirt that you’re wearing, which has happened to me, and what I’ve realized about myself is because I’m an introvert, if I’ve just left the house and I haven’t spoken to anyone, I’ve realized I can be a bit standoffish or aggressive,” Nyborg says. “And again, people are usually just trying to be nice and it can really make someone’s day doing that.”
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E-Commerce
Some places are simply nicer to walk through than others. Compare a tree-lined path along the Seine in Paris to the side of a six-lane highway in Tallahassee, Florida, and the differences are obvious. But what exactly makes a place walkable is a matter of some debate. Those of the urbanist persuasion might point to a place’s density or mix of land uses. Platforms like Walk Score might favor accessibility, proximity, and travel times. One person might want to have a café within walking distance, while another might want the safety of working streetlights. Conditions are varied, and uneven. To better understand what exactly makes a place walkable, the architecture firm Perkins Eastman turned to a novel form of data analysis. In a new study, the firm combined qualitative pedestrian preference surveys, visual streetscape imagery from Google Street View, artificial intelligence, and computer vision to identify the specific type and mix of urban design elements that most influence people’s walking habits. Focusing specifically on older adults, the study is a window into the ways cities enable pedestrian activity, and how they can encourage more. [Image: Perkins Eastman] What the walkability study found is that people prefer to walk in places with a higher proportion of several basic streetscape elements, including benches, shade trees, sidewalks, and crosswalks. When those elements are provided in combination with one anotherplentiful benches and crosswalks, for examplepeople are likely to walk even more. [Image: Perkins Eastman] The study was based in the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, where a decennial survey collects detailed information from more than 100,000 pedestrians about the experience of walking through this part of the city. This survey data was analyzed alongside Google Street View imagery of the district to see what streetscape elements were predominant in places people reported being most likely to walk. This analysis led to a set of urban design guidelines that suggest ways of making more spaces more walkable. [Image: Perkins Eastman] The resulting study, Are these streets made for walking?: How visual AI can inform urban walkability for older adults, was led by Haozhou Yang, a student at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design who was a design and wellness research fellow at Perkins Eastman from 2023 to 2024. He says most previous walkability studies rely on zoomed-out data from geographic information systems (GIS), inferring walkability from data points like the existence of sidewalks or a neighborhood’s proximity to retail. They’re not from the human perspective, Yang says. This [study] really puts the elements people encounter every day at the front. [Image: Perkins Eastman] Google Street View offered Yang a deep pool of data about the real world conditions experienced by pedestrians in Hong Kong. His study used 32,512 images from Google Street View, separated throughout the district at 10-meter intervals. Machine learning techniques then broke each image down to identify individual streetscape objects within the frame and how much space they accounted for. One image might show tree canopy covering roughly half the image and sidewalk making up about a quarter. Other images show benches and walls. Still others highlight crosswalks and how much space is dedicated to car traffic. With new AI computer vision, we can really understand the quantifiable amount of those elements in the open environment, Yang says. By focusing in on seven categories of streetscape elementssidewalks, streetlights, trees, crosswalks, benches, walls, and windowsYang and collaborators from Perkins Eastman were able to draw correlations between the presence and combination of those elements in places with high rates of pedestrian activity. These correlations then informed a set of urban design guidelines developed by Perkins Eastman’s senior living team. These guidelines include combining street furniture with greenery and open space, pairing crosswalks with improved street lighting, and increasing the social interactivity of a space by having more benches in areas with a higher amount of street-facing windows, balconies, and patios. The study draws these connections through the lens o improving walking conditions for older adults, with the health and social benefits that come from being more mobile and independent. But the implications of the research are much broader, according to Perkins Eastman senior living principal Alejandro Giraldo. These are things that are universal design,” Giraldo says. “It’s not just addressing the seniors. It absolutely will, but it’s also addressing people with mobility issues or children. Yang says that even though the data in this study is from Hong Kong, AI enables the model to be tuned or tweaked to the conditions in other cities, informing what might improve the walkability of that stretch along the Seine River or the side of that highway in Tallahassee. Although there might be some cultural differences and context-related differences, the model can be applied to other cities, Yang says. For Perkins Eastman, which has designed senior living projects for more than 40 years, the designers are already looking at ways of integrating these findings into current and future projects and improving conditions for older adults. You want to find the differentiatoras a community, as a developer group, as a residentof what is making me live here, Giraldo says. To change the perception of aging is very critical for us. Demonstrating these tools allow us to create a more sensitive communities.
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E-Commerce
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