Zak Jason

1 week ago | businessinsider.com | Zak Jason |Henry Blodget

At the second annual AI+ Expo in Washington, DC, in early June, war is the word of the day. As a mix of Beltway bureaucrats, military personnel, and Washington's consultant class peruse the expansive Walter E. Washington Convention Center, a Palantir booth showcases its latest in data-collection suites for "warfighters." Lockheed Martin touts the many ways it is implementing AI throughout its weaponry systems.

2 weeks ago | businessinsider.com | Zak Jason |Julia Hornstein |Henry Blodget

Before flying from his home in Pittsburgh to Stanford's annual gathering of incoming freshmen in late April, Sebastian Tan downloaded what might be the top book on Silicon Valley's required reading list: "Zero to One," Peter Thiel's treatise on building the future. It's "probably the best book I've read, and I've only read a few pages," Tan tells me over FaceTime.

2 weeks ago | businessinsider.com | Zak Jason |Amanda Hoover |Henry Blodget

All good buddy comedies come to an end. For President Donald Trump and first friend "Uncle Elon" Musk, theirs wrapped up with the same explosive fanfare upon which it started. But now their shared enthusiasm for cutting government waste has morphed into animosity for each other so deep and personal that it's become a textbook case study in management gone wrong.

2 weeks ago | businessinsider.com | Zak Jason |Eve Upton-Clark |Henry Blodget

Shaffan Mustafa was laid off for the first time in 2020. Four years later, in January 2024, the software engineer in Ohio was laid off again. Then, in September, he was let go from a contract job. "I wish I could say I didn't have experience with layoffs, but unfortunately, I have a bit too much," he tells me. The first time, he found it depressing. It took him 10 months of scouring job boards and hundreds of unanswered applications before he landed his next role at a local consulting company.

2 weeks ago | businessinsider.com | Zak Jason |Albert Fox Cahn |Henry Blodget

If it weren't for the gallery assistant's haughty, dismissive tone, I probably would never have stolen the painting. To be clear, I'm not normally an art thief. My day jobs are as a civil rights lawyer and a law professor. Visual art is rarely my scene. So when my date invited me to see the Ai Weiwei exhibition in New York's Chelsea neighborhood this past winter, I wasn't exactly thrilled.