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In today’s big story, we’re looking at some of the top business stories from the past year.
What’s on deck:
But first, back to business.
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2023 wasn’t exactly business as usual.
An economy grappling with high interest rates and inflation meant plenty of businesses had to buckle down. Several major US companies made deep job cuts in the first half of the year.
Employee-employer relations took center stage, as unions for auto workers, UPS drivers, and Hollywood writers and actors went on strike. A broader conversation about the efficacy of the 40-hour workweek — and ways to upend it to improve workers’ happiness — also took place.
The ties between universities and businesses garnered attention in 2023 following Hamas’ attacks on Israel. Some executives’ anger over universities’ responses to the war highlighted the tension between Wall Street and the elite institutions.
I asked Shona Ghosh, Business Insider’s deputy executive editor for business in the UK, for five of the top stories from her team. Check them out below, along with some thoughts from Shona about what made them stand out.
MediaMath seemed destined for a $1B fairy-tale exit. Instead, most early investors got nothing.
Lara O’Reilly reported deeply on the decline of MediaMath, an adtech giant that seemed destined to make its investors, employees, and founders rich with a $1 billion exit. Instead, the company sold to private equity, leaving almost nothing on the table. It’s a business fairy-tale gone wrong.
Barbie is the star of the summer’s hottest blockbuster. The much-hyped movie is the pinnacle of a 60-year history filled with rejections, lawsuits, and controversies for the world’s most iconic doll.
Greta Gerwig tapped into the world’s need for something — anything — fun after the pandemic years with her loopy, fun take on Barbie. Did you know Barbie’s sometimes-controversial inventor was a woman, Ruth Handler, and her iconic toy would make her fabulously wealthy? Grace Dean delved into the history of Barbie.
GoStudent, the $3 billion edtech darling, scaled fast and partied hard. The result was a mess.
Tasmin Lockwood and Riddhi Kanetkar uncovered shocking incidents at GoStudent, the $3 billion SoftBank-backed tutoring platform that links up children with private tutors online. One father seeking a tutor for his daughter found one GoStudent candidate had been fired from his school for exchanging nudes with a female pupil. The company says it’s a different, better operation today.
Finland is the world’s happiest country, but Finns say we’re confusing happiness for something else
Finland is the world’s happiest country. But, as Bea Nolan discovered when she visited, Finns are pretty annoyed by this perception. They are happy, they said, just not in the way you think.
Ex-Facebook and DeepMind employees in talks to raise sizable initial funding round to build OpenAI rival
Everyone wants to find (and fund) the next ChatGPT. To that end, Europe’s venture capitalists are in a mad dash to back any continental company that could rival OpenAI — and they think they’ve found it. Callum Burroughs broke the news that former Meta and Google DeepMind employees set up Mistral AI, which produces its own large language models. It’s already worth $2 billion.
A millionaire obsessed with reversing his age shares what he eats for lunch and dessert. Bryan Johnson, who spends as much as $2 million a year on his supposedly age-reversing regimen, packs on the veggies for lunch and opts for his own version of a pudding for dessert.
The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Diamond Naga Siu, senior reporter, in San Diego. Hallam Bullock, editor, in London. Jordan Parker Erb, editor, in New York. Hayley Hudson, director, in Edinburgh. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York.
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