Day: August 3, 2025

• This post originally appeared in the BI Today newsletter.
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Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. Gen-who? Gen Xers are often excluded from generational conversations. We’ve played into this, too. In the past year alone, BI has published 166 stories about Gen Z, 123 about millennials, 97 stories about boomers — and only 34 about the “forgotten generation.” Sorry, Gen X!

On the agenda today:

• The story behind Blackstone’s viral barricaded office photo.
• Inside the million-dollar tree war that’s brewing among New England’s elite.
• Starbucks’ new office is a 5-minute drive from the CEO’s home.
• Internal guidelines reveal how much Microsoft pays new hires.

But first: The debate of the summer.

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This week’s dispatch

The hottest cocktail of the season is …

This summer’s battle for beverage supremacy isn’t your typical cocktail clash.

In one corner, there’s the Hugo Spritz. It’s a mixture of prosecco and club soda. The addition of elderflower liqueur makes this sweet, low-ABV drink stand out. This Aperol Spritz successor is all over TikTok. Yelp queries and Google searches for it have jumped.

In the other is the Spaghett: a brash, no-frills concoction born for the dive bar. It consists of Miller High Life beer, a splash of Aperol, and a lemon. It’s cheap and quickly becoming a cult classic: Google Trends and bar tabs alike show it gaining real traction.

So, which is better? And which should be crowned drink of the summer?

BI’s Emily Stewart sees the Spaghett as more than a quirky cocktail. She says it has broader economic ramifications, specifically as a potential recession indicator.

“Trading down from an Aperol Spritz to a Spaghett usually puts a few bills back in your pocket,” she writes. “And swapping a basic beer for a Spaghett won’t break the bank — especially when the beer was budget-friendly to begin with.”

Yet our colleague Callie Ahlgrim says we shouldn’t underestimate the compelling visual the Hugo Spritz evokes, particularly in the social-media era. She said the drink is “perfectly engineered for virality.”

So, what’ll it be: elegance in a glass, or a buzzy, beer hack that doubles as an economic signal?

This season’s drink of choice says as much about your vibe as it does your wallet.

What do you think? Email us your thoughts at today@businessinsider.com — and check out Emily and Callie’s video on the debate.

Behind the Blackstone photo

Following the deadly New York City office shooting that cut four victims’ lives short, a haunting image of a furniture barricade at Blackstone’s headquarters became emblematic of the tragedy.

One person familiar with the matter told BI that Blackstone employees moved quickly and worked together to pile everything up, including a refrigerator. Employees also barricaded themselves inside closets, bathrooms, and conference rooms, another person familiar with the matter said, with some hunkering down until 10 p.m. when authorities cleared the building.

“It was a long day.”

Also read:

• Real estate industry mourns, grapples with questions about the future of office security

Trouble in the trees

In New England’s most exclusive coastal enclaves, neighbors are feuding over ocean views — and cutting down each other’s trees to get to them.

The timber wars don’t come cheap. Cases of unauthorized chopping and poisoning, known as “timber trespass,” have sparked bitter legal feuds among the wealthy and sometimes resulted in seven-figure payouts.

Splintered paradise.

The 5-minute commute

Starbucks’ newest office is a 4,624-square-foot space just minutes from CEO Brian Niccol’s Southern California home. It’s 1,200 miles away from the company’s headquarters in Seattle, where corporate employees are under a four-day return-to-office order.

The California office, nicknamed “Project Sunshine,” was part of Niccol’s compensation package, built so he wouldn’t have to commute across states daily.

Views of the Pacific coast.

Also read:

• Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol says price changes are a last resort in coffee chain turnaround

Microsoft’s pay guidelines, revealed

The company’s internal pay guidelines obtained by BI’s Ashley Stewart shed light on how much the tech giant generally offers new hires, including pay ranges for engineers and researchers in the US.

Microsoft’s pay documents include a carve-out for competitive situations, though. Recruiters can seek approval for higher offers for exceptional candidates.

Breaking down pay by levels.

Also read:

• How much do tech employees make? See salary data from top tech companies.

This week’s quote:

“It really is the case that if you give people more bedrooms in their apartments, they’re more interested in having children.”

— Lyman Stone, a coauthor of a recent report by the Institute for Family Studies, on why the real estate market is driving down the birth rate.

More of this week’s top reads:

• Sex sells. So does outrage. Sydney Sweeney’s “great jeans” ads cash in on both.
• Was Jeffrey Epstein a spy? There’s nothing about that in the Epstein files, sources say.
• I went to Figma’s IPO. It turned Wall Street into a literal block party.
• Parents of college kids are getting unhinged in their group chats.
• I’m a career coach. Applying for jobs should be the last step in your job hunt process.
• CNBC’s “The Profit” ended with legal acrimony and an $11 million payout. Its host is now back on TV.

• Inside the $10 billion boom in psychedelic medicine.

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  The BI Today team: Steve Russolillo, chief news editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.

• CEO Eli Rubel has founded multiple companies and said he’s conducted around 500 interviews.
• Rubel shares his interview strategy and how he landed on “what gives you energy and what takes it away?”
• He said the way candidates respond is almost always directly related to what he sees in performance.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Eli Rubel, a 37-year-old Denver-based serial entrepreneur and CEO of Profit Labs. His identification has been verified by Business Insider. This story has been edited for length and clarity.

At any given time, I employ between 40 and 50 people on a full-time basis. I’ve probably interviewed around 500 people.

I created my first company, an enterprise contract management software in 2010, and sold that business in 2014.

Next, I bought a commerce business, spent four years turning it around, and sold it. Then, in 2019 I started a marketing agency called Matter Made, and in 2022, I started a second agency called No Boring Design. Today I still own both of those businesses but I have talented leaders run them. I just started a third agency called Profit Labs, which is a bookkeeping and accounting firm for agency owners.

It took a lot of reps to figure out what felt like a genuine interview process for me. Now, I can trace every one of my best and worst hires back to this single interview question.

My go-to interview question has evolved

Originally I used to ask candidates, “have you heard of the zones of genius?” Most people hadn’t heard of it at the time. I think it’s more popular now and it’s the concept that everybody has a zone of excellence, competence, and incompetence. So I would ask them “Can you walk me through your zones?”

I discovered that the problem with the zone of genius question was that if you say zone of incompetence, people are on the defensive. They may think that they need to be careful about what they say because they’re in an interview.

It’s still one of my favorite questions but it evolved into the question that I eventually got to, which is, “what gives you energy and what takes away energy in a working environment?”

People tend to answer the question honestly

That one question has made or saved me more money than any ATS or hiring tool I’ve ever used.

When it’s framed like that, it feels like you’re an ally by asking the question. It’s kind of like, “hey, I’m here to protect you from the things that don’t that take away your energy.” So I think people are just much more at ease and authentic when they answer the question.

There is no right or wrong answer because ultimately I’m looking to figure out if this person is going to be well-aligned for the role. I don’t want them to be a bad fit just as much as they don’t want to be.

For example, if they’re interviewing for a facing account manager role and they answer the question by saying, “I love dealing with people and that gives me energy, and what takes it away is when a client pushes back on an idea that I share,” that would be a huge flag for me.

That tells me this person is not right for an account manager role because they’re going to get their ideas shot down all the time. It’s a red flag as it relates to this role, but it’s not a bad thing in general.

Maybe there’s another role that is better for them, though. If I know what their skill set is, I can find a place for them where they’re not pitching ideas to clients that are going to get shot down, but they can still leverage their skill of dealing with people.

It’s almost always the case that whatever they responded to the question is directly related to what I later see in manager feedback or in performance reviews.