Day: July 23, 2025

• Real estate billionaire Jeff Greene expects a “huge boom” for house prices if interest rates fall.
• The real estate billionaire told BI the US economy looks solid but is on a dangerous track.
• Greene rang the alarm on the ballooning national debt and said deficit spending is unsustainable.

Interest rates are holding back a “huge boom” in the housing market, billionaire real estate developer Jeff Greene told Business Insider.

In a wide-ranging interview, the Florida-based property tycoon said that prospective home buyers and sellers were “waiting for rates to come down.” The annual interest on a 10-year, fixed-rate mortgage is still close to 7%, a sharp increase from below 3% four years ago.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said earlier this month that tariff-related uncertainty was the main reason the central bank hadn’t cut rates since December. Mortgage rates closely track the Fed’s benchmark rate.

“If rates come down, we’ll have a huge boom in housing prices,” Greene told BI.

A reduction in rates would likely result in more houses on the market, as homeowners who took out long-term mortgages at low rates would then be willing to refinance and move home, Greene said.

“People have locked in loans for any number of years into the future, and so they’re not going to give up those houses” before rates fall, he said.

Increased supply could help first-time buyers get on the housing ladder, Greene said. It’s “always been difficult” for young people to buy a home as they’re competing against older people with deeper pockets, he said, but it’s “particularly hard now” when rates are high and there are fewer homes for sale.

A ‘downward spiral’

Greene said that federal spending, quantitative easing, low interest rates, and other forms of government stimulus have underpinned US economic growth for decades.

“The economy’s been running on printed money for a long time; it’s not a secret,” he said. “We’ve just printed money and given it to people.”

President Donald Trump’s recently passed “Big Beautiful Bill” is likely to “keep the party going” and stave off an economic slowdown, Greene said.

Greene said Trump struck him as someone who would negotiate deals so his tariffs wouldn’t cause “huge dislocations in the economy.”

So far, the market seems to agree, and that outlook likely explains why stocks are at record highs, Greene said.

But he warned about the rising national debt, and the US government’s growing interest costs.

“We’ve just kicked the can down the road for however many more years,” he said. “You can drive 130 miles an hour down the road and have no accident, but at some point, somebody’s going to pull out in front of you and you’re going to die,” he added.

Greene also said that “throwing our immigrants out of the country” was unwise when America has an ageing population, with an increasing proportion of people living on Social Security.

“We’re kind of in a downward spiral,” Greene said of the demographic challenges and mounting debt.

• The Coldplay kiss cam video shows how fast someone’s 15 seconds of fame can ricochet around the world.
• The clip caught a tech CEO and his head of HR embracing and led to the chief’s resignation
• Here’s a play-by-play of how the scandal unfolded — and why it caught so much attention.

By now, we’ve all seen the Coldplay kiss cam fiasco.

What happened in the hours and days afterward is a case study in how fast someone’s 15 seconds of fame (or infamy) can truly ricochet around the world.

A tech CEO and his HR head were caught embracing on the jumbotron at Gillette Stadium. They looked horrified and quickly untangled, with the woman turning away and the man dodging the camera. Front man Chris Martin suggested they could be having an affair.

The fleeting moment — a fraction of a nightly segment during which Martin addresses various members of the audience — stuck with some concertgoers. In the early morning hours following the show, at least a few took to the internet to post about it.

A Reddit user who said they attended the show asked if anyone else was wondering about the couple. One TikTok user said Martin had caught “a couple having an affair” at the show, and another said that they were “constantly refreshing the TikTok search in hopes that someone recorded the couple caught red-handed at the Coldplay concert tonight.”

They were in luck. Grace Springer, who had fewer than 15,000 TikTok followers at the time, had been recording in the hopes of landing on the jumbotron herself and capturing the moment.

Shortly before 1 a.m. ET on Thursday, she posted a 15-second clip on TikTok captioned “trouble in paradise??”

“In the moment when I filmed it, I didn’t think much of it,” Springer, who didn’t respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said during an interview on the British daytime program “This Morning.” “But it wasn’t until after the concert, where I was debriefing the moment with my friends, and I said, ‘Let’s review the footage, let’s see if it really looks that bad.’ And I think it does.”

Then the algorithm did its thing, pushing the video onto For You pages the world over.

The TikTok spread like wildfire.

It didn’t take long for internet sleuths to identify the pair as Andy Byron, the then-CEO of tech upstart Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, Astronomer’s head of HR. Their names came up in the comments of Springer’s TikTok video, though it was unclear who was the first to recognize them because the platform doesn’t display the timestamp of comments.

By 3 a.m., two hours after Springer posted the video, people were starting to look them up by name, according to data from Google Trends, which monitors search volume.

The story had changed from an awkward interaction to a corporate scandal.

Soon, people all over the world — from Ireland to Singapore — would know their names.

“It’s really sort of as we’re waking up into the day on the 17th, where we see it start to spread,” Molly Dwyer, the head of insights for social media monitoring company Peak Metrics, told Business Insider.

The amateur internet sleuths then deployed their talents to find the pair’s social profiles and those of Byron’s wife. Commenters began bombarding Byron and Cabot’s profiles, as well as those of Astronomer, which had turned off the ability to comment on posts across channels by Thursday afternoon

Meme accounts had a heyday.

“That’s sort of the bread and butter of clickbait content — laughing at people’s poor decisions — and the fact that then it plays into an anti-corporate element just further fanned the flames,” Dwyer said. He noted that there has been an uptick in interest in content that is opposed to CEOs. “It was sort of a perfect storm of things that are really viral on social media right now, all coming together.”

Storyful, a social-media research company, used ticket stubs and raw footage from Springer to corroborate she was at the concert, according to John Hall, an editor for the site. One by one, mainstream news organizations around the world started covering the story.

The online chatter kicked into high gear later on Thursday. Peak Metrics tracked 30,000 X posts in the 11 a.m. hour. Byron’s name had been Googled more than 2 million times by that afternoon, and more than $65,000 was traded on Polymarket about his chances of remaining as CEO and predictions about his marital status.

Brands like Netflix and Nando’s jumped in, posting reactions to the clip or commenting on Springer’s videos on social media. Think pieces about the surveillance state, sachenfreude, corporate America, and Coldplay proliferated.

The saga shows how quickly a single moment can take on a life of its own in the social media age — a lesson others have learned before.

While it seemed everyone had something to say, the pair at the center of it all stayed silent. (A fake apology from Byron that quoted the Coldplay song “Fix You” spread on Thursday afternoon before the company said it wasn’t real.)

Astronomer, a then little-known data startup, broke the silence on Friday with a statement that said the board was investigating the matter. Later that day, Byron was placed on leave. By Saturday, he’d resigned, and one of the company’s cofounders, Pete DeJoy, had taken his place.

The company found a silver lining in the scandal.

“The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies—let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world—ever encounter,” DeJoy wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. “The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name.”

As with any viral moment, the attention was fleeting — and one that must’ve caught Coldplay off guard, too.

“We’d like to say hello to some of you in the crowd,” Martin said on Saturday, when the band took the stage for the first time since Wednesday’s concert.

Then a warning: “We’re going to use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. If you haven’t done your makeup, do your makeup now.”

• Former NFL player James Develin has kept up a full-time exercise schedule since retiring.
• To stay in shape at 37, he does challenges, such as the Navy SEAL event with swimming, push-ups, and pull-ups.
• His daily routine incudes three workouts and more than 200 grams of protein.

When James Develin retired from the NFL in 2020 after seven seasons (and three Super Bowl wins) with the New England Patriots, it wasn’t long before he started looking for the next big challenge.

To stay in elite athlete shape after retirement, Develin knew he needed some structure to replace the typical training cycle of the NFL and giving him something to work toward.

That meant a marathon and, most recently, a Navy SEAL-style open water swim — grueling events to inspire his multiple workouts a day.

“I didn’t have a season to start preparing for, so it was a little bit harder to put myself through two-a-days and three-a-days,” Develin told Business Insider.

As a 37-year-old father of four, Develin is conscious about retaining his strength in a sustainable way. He shared his daily routine with Business Insider — a regimen of running, swimming, and lifting, along with a high-protein diet worthy of his NFL days.

From NFL training to Navy SEAL swims

Less than a year after retiring from pro football, Develin took on distance running, completing his first Boston Marathon in 2021.

In 2023, Develin met an even more ambitious match for his athletic aspirations when his father-in-law signed up for the Navy SEAL Foundation NYC SEAL Swim. The annual fundraiser is held honor of veterans and lives lost in the September 11, 2001 attacks.

“I can run, I can lift, I can do all that stuff, but swimming was not my forte and it still isn’t. It’s been fun to push my own personal limits,” he said.

The event combines strenuous open water swimming through the turbulent waters of the Hudson with multiple rounds of push-ups and pull-ups, scenic views of the Statue of Liberty, and a race to the finish at the World Trade Center.

The SEAL Swim requires grit, endurance, and discipline to complete. Develin decided to join in, despite limited swimming experience and only a month to prepare.

“It’s such a great patriotic event, but it’s also a great test of one’s physical prowess, so it checks a lot of boxes for me,” Develin said.

There’s no secret to training for the SEAL swim besides hours and hours of work in the water, according to Develin.

“I just started swimming as much as I could every single day. Through the soreness, through the rain days, the day I don’t want to do it,” he said.

Develin, who lives on the Jersey Shore with his wife and four kids, practices in a pool as well as the nearby bay to get experience managing the unpredictability of open water.

His daily routine: Three workouts and 250 grams of protein

Develin works out daily for around two or three hours a day, split between shorter sessions of cardio, swimming, and weightlifting to allow him to spend time with his family, too.

“I need to sweat before I can really get on with the rest of my day,” he said. “I don’t really feel like a day was productive unless I get some sort of workout in.”

Here’s a typical day in his routine.

• Wake up around 5:30 a.m.
• Hydrate first thing in the morning with a tall glass of water.
• Supplements: Develin said he goes through phases of trying supplements to find what works, and currently takes amino acids and NAD+ which help with energy and recovery.
• A morning smoothie provides some protein first thing in the morning.
• A cardio workout is first on the agenda, typically a long run.
• After his workout, Develin wakes up his kids and gets them ready for the day before sitting down to breakfast of high-protein staples such as eggs.
• For a midday workout Develin hits the gym to lift weights for 45 minutes, sometime between 11 am and 2 p.m.
• Lunch is often a casual, on-the-go option like sandwiches.
• Often Develin fits in an evening workout to practice swimming, if he can find the time
• For dinner, Develin gets to sit down and “live a little” since his wife is Italian and loves to cook. The evening meal is often pasta with homemade sauce and more protein (like chicken or beef).
• Develin is in bed by 10:30 p.m. most nights to get a solid seven hours of sleep.

In total, he aims to eat more than 200 grams of protein daily, about a gram of protein per pound of body weight, to help maintain muscle and strength.

In the NFL, Develin’s job was to absorb and deliver tremendous amounts of force as a fullback.

“You have to go out there and be ready for impact constantly,” he said.

He’s kept the same mindset of pushing himself ever since, aiming to stave off aging with constant movement and new challenges, even when his body is a little slower to bounce back than it used to be.

“I recover eventually. It just might take a little bit longer now than it did when I was 30, but I just keep grinding,” Develin said. “It’s good for your endurance, it’s good for your mental fortitude, and that’s what works for me.”

• Sarah Teng joined TikTok as an intern during a hiring freeze in December 2020.
• She transitioned from a technical product specialist to a product marketing manager.
• Teng left TikTok in June 2024, before the app’s brief shutdown in January 2025.

This as-told-to essay is based on an interview with Sarah Teng, a former global product marketing manager for TikTok. It has been edited for length and clarity

When I first started working for TikTok in December 2020, it was so new in the US that it was pretty rare to meet another person who worked there. I joined while doing an MSc in Information Technology & Management at the University of Texas at Austin.

I’d completed two summer internships at Accenture. I enjoyed it, but it was very corporate, and I felt my personality was more suited to something more casual in the tech space.

TikTok was a much better fit for me.

My professor connected me to someone who worked at TikTok

I was then connected to a recruiter on TikTok’s HR team. She explained to me she was hiring for an intern position that would start immediately. Since my master’s classes were online and this role was part-time and remote, I was able to juggle them both.

I was interviewed by a hiring manager and someone I could be working with. I passed the interview and agreed to work 20 to 30 hours a week for an hourly fee.

When I joined, Trump had just brought the idea of banning TikTok to life. TikTok was on a hiring freeze, but they could hire interns. I was excited about getting the job, as it’s a very cool, trendy company to work at.

TikTok sent me a huge welcome package

I received a pair of TikTok embroidered Allbirds wool running shoes, a Parkland backpack, sweatshirts, a branded beach towel, a Bluetooth speaker, and an Owala water bottle.

The office in Austin had around 600 employees. Everyone worked remotely. It was weird joining the company and not meeting anyone face-to-face.

For my online orientation, I watched videos, read many internal documents, and was given a timeline of what would be achievable during my internship.

As time went on, I evolved in my role

I started as a technical product specialist for the ads department. I troubleshooted issues for small businesses buying ads on TikTok. If there was a product bug, I escalated it to the product manager to get it solved.

I was on a team of five, but everyone else was a product marketing manager. I started to become interested in their role, and so my coworkers took me under their wing and taught me how to do their jobs.

By the end of my internship, I was probably doing 50% of my hired role and 50% product marketing work.

I asked my manager if I could interview for a full-time position as a product marketing manager

The company was growing and needed more product marketing managers. I also asked if I could work from the New York office.

I didn’t need to live in New York, as I’d still be working remotely, and the New York office was under construction, but I wanted the experience.

I interviewed and was offered the job. I moved to New York in August 2021 and rented an apartment with one of my college friends.

I became a product marketing manager for ads

I worked with the product manager to ensure that all of our products were ready to go to market. I learned a lot, and I learned quickly.

If it were a launch, we’d recruit our target customers and do research with them to ensure that the product was on the right track. If the products were already live, I’d work with customers to understand their pain points and find out how we could improve the existing product.

One product I helped launch was Video Insights, which shared how much engagement you had at each point in your video.

I visited the office for the first time in October 2022

The view of the New York skyline from the office was amazing. During the winter months, when the sun would set early, it was the ultimate place to watch sunsets.

The walls were decorated with cool murals and neon artwork by local artists. The kitchen was filled with free snacks like Kit-Kats, Cup Noodles, and coffee.

Over two years, the office changed dramatically

They built a giant amphitheatre, the famed pink corridor, the gender neutral bathroom with its fit check mosaic, and an entertainment room with games for when creators visited.

There were yoga lessons for staff, and speakers visited often. I listened to comedian Zarna Garg and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew. I also joined many wine and pizza nights.

We went through at least one, if not multiple, reorganizations each year

One of these reorganizations involved dissolving my team, and we were moved to other teams in January 2022. I moved onto a global team.

I traveled to Europe for a three-week business trip, visiting offices in London, Paris, and Berlin. I also visited the ByteDance campus in Shanghai.

My job was similar, but the product managers I was now working with were based in China. Due to the time zones, it was tough to maintain consistency.

Late-night meetings would pop up, and if I wasn’t online when everyone else woke at night, it would make me stressed.

By October 2023, we were asked to work in the office three days a week

I’d now reached a point where I was sharing tips and tricks with new staff, and I met with summer interns who reached out for coffee chats.

In March 2024, there were congressional hearings to see where Congress stood on TikTok. That was when a lot of people internally felt like maybe we should look around, so that’s when I started to think about trying to find another job.

The shutdown was in January 2025

TikTok was only banned for 12 hours, but I had left in June 2024.

The previous summer, I met someone in an airport lounge who worked in tech. He ended up being the cofounder of Californian software company Emerge Tools. I now work for them remotely.

I miss the people I worked with at TikTok a lot. I’d grown with them as an organization from such an early time, and I felt like I had a lot of ownership and impact on the work that I did.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with TikTok and am grateful for the opportunities I had there.

The students’ families will have an opportunity to address the court, and many hope for answers to one major question about the brutal case: What was the motive?