Day: September 10, 2025

• eBay’s CEO wants people to go into their houses to find treasure to sell.
• Jamie Iannone said an average household has around $3,000 to $4,000 worth of stuff that could be sold.
• Collectibles like Pokémon cards or Labubus are particularly hot on the platform now, he said.

Jamie Iannone, the CEO of eBay, says you can turn trash to treasure — and that gold mine may be closer at hand than you think.

Speaking on Yahoo Finance’s Opening Bid podcast, released on Monday, Iannone spoke about how artificial intelligence tools on eBay are helping sellers list more items for sale.

“The whole idea is to unlock what’s in people’s closets and garages and houses,” Iannone said.

“I would like to say the average household has $3,000 to $4000 of stuff that could be sold on eBay, and less than 20% of that is online,” he said to the podcast’s host, Brian Sozzi. “And so, really unlocking all of that amazing inventory.”

He said secondhand items were particularly popular among younger buyers who are invested in sustainability. Iannone added that 40% of the items sold on eBay are used or refurbished.

He held several roles at eBay between 2001 and 2009 before leaving to pursue other roles, like chief operating officer at Walmart. He rejoined eBay as its chief executive in 2020.

In July, the company reported revenue of $2.7 billion in its latest quarter, a 6% increase from the year before. The gross merchandise value of goods sold on its platform was $19.5 billion in that quarter, also up 6%. Its stock is up about 56% in the last year.

A product category Iannone was particularly excited about during the podcast interview was collectibles, which he said was a $10 billion business for the company.

“People are collecting Pokémon cards and trading cards, massive business. Collectibles for us is over $10 billion on the platform,” he said.

To boost that market segment even more, he said eBay has partnered with grading company Professional Sports Authenticator to make it easier for sellers to grade their trading cards.

And now, collectibles like Labubu plush dolls were adding to the collector frenzy on eBay, he said.

“There’s always some kind of interesting trend in pop culture that’s happening on the platform,” Iannone added.

Representatives for eBay did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

I bought an apartment.

As a 28-year-old English major working in journalism, I never thought I’d write that statement at this stage in my life. But I’m part of a curious slice of Gen Z who is tackling one of life’s big challenges: buying property.

I was also given a bit of a boost onto the housing ladder. For one thing, I’m the oldest possible age for my cohort, who were born from 1997 to 2012, or as I’ve started referring to myself, I’m a “geriatric Gen Z.” Thanks to the timing of my birth, a few economic factors worked in my favor: I graduated from college in 2019, was gainfully employed pre-pandemic, and was lucky enough to hold onto my role throughout the turmoil. During that time, I shrank my spending on typical early-20s activities — going out, seeing concerts, etc. — to practically nothing, allowing me to sit on and grow some savings. I was given a raise and promotion as the Great Resignation shook the workforce.

After a while, though, skyrocketing rent prices and inflation caught up to me. So when my landlords at my last apartment raised my rent the most they legally could, I started looking for a way out. An opportunity to buy into an income-restricted building pretty much fell into my lap — a friend of a friend had to move out of state and was selling a unit that came with a few more restrictions than your standard apartment. The unit required someone who made a middle-class income, which is demarcated by the median income in the area based on census estimates, but had enough savings to afford a down payment. As it turns out, that was exactly me.

While Gen Z homebuyers like me are still a very slim share of the market — about 3% of all buyers, per the National Association of Realtors — we’ve already started crafting our own homeownership trends. In particular, we’ve learned from our bedraggled millennial elders who struggled to break into the housing market. It’s no longer first comes love, then comes marriage, and then comes a single-family housing unit to house a baby carriage. Young homebuyers are buying young and single and, hopefully, learning from the fate of millennials.

For me, it’s been an exciting — and scary — shift. I assumed that I’d be spending years covering up illegal holes in the walls that the landlord refused to fix and tearfully saying goodbye to local dogs and neighbors as I bounced from lease to lease around the city. Instead, I’m now pondering the limitless possibilities of making an apartment mine (does anyone have any painting advice?) and creating a more permanent community.

Why I chose homeownership over renting

Over the past few years, I’ve had the classic postgrad experience, rotating through roommates until I was finally able to graduate to living alone — something that I loved but was definitely costly. I admired the few friends I knew who were buying their places. Their mortgages were often cheaper than my rent, and they didn’t have to be at the mercy of New York City’s rental market.

There was no real trigger in my life to push me into homeownership, which is atypical since other big events usually prompt people to buy a place, says Eric Finnigan, the vice president of demographics research at John Burns Research and Consulting. It makes sense: As a family grows through marriage or having a kid, so too does the need for space. Following that logic, Gen Z homeowners should be on a slower route to homeownership than millennials, since Zoomers are taking even longer to get married and have kids. In 1980, the median age for a woman entering her first marriage was 22, and women had their first births at the median age of 22; by 2023, women entered their first marriages at age 28.4 and had their first births at age 27.9.

Instead, Finnigan says, Gen Z’s homebuying rate is fairly similar to millennials’ when they were the same age. “It is surprising to me that homeownership among Gen Z is as high as it is,” Finnigan says.

I’m part of a growing trend: Single homebuyers

My generation’s willingness to get into the market alone means that being a single 28-year-old who is experiencing none of those major life events (though I am very open to all of them in the future!) doesn’t make me an anomaly but rather part of a growing trend. Jessica Lautz, the deputy chief economist and vice president of research at NAR, tells me Gen Z is largely entering the housing market as single buyers. NAR data shows that 30% of 18- to 25-year-old buyers are single women, the highest share among all age groups, and 17% are single men. In 2021, just 16% of homebuyers ages 22 to 30 were single women. More broadly, just 16.8% of first-time homebuyers from 1991-1993 were single women.

Unless there are some very dramatic and sudden changes in circumstances over here, I won’t be marrying anytime in the near future. I didn’t want that to limit my financial journey, though. I was already spending a whole lot of money on rent for my cat and me, and it increasingly felt like it just wasn’t worth it to live in a situation where I could be priced out of my home by a rent increase. Besides, I was being a bit of a follower — all of my friends who had already bought had done so as single women. I did, however, worry that buying alone could signal to my family that I was throwing in the towel and embracing spinsterhood. Instead, my parents and grandparents were impressed and excited — all of them had also gotten tearful calls from me about rent in New York and the capriciousness of landlords, so I think the idea of opting out of the rental rat race was encouraging. After all, if we Gen Zers can’t find stability in the tumultuous world of modern dating, maybe it’s coming in the form of homeownership.

Thomas Nowak, 27, still hasn’t found the right partner, but that didn’t stop him from falling in love with his rental condo in St. Louis. When he moved in, he immediately became enamored with the neighborhood and the architecture of the unit itself.

“I told myself the day that I started renting it that if it ever came up for sale, I would buy it. No questions asked,” he says.

His roommate’s lease was set to end in May, and Nowak considered taking on the lease for the whole place by himself. Then the thought again crossed his mind:, Why not just try buying it? He approached his landlord, who was, coincidentally, already considering selling it. About four months later, he had the keys officially in hand as a homeowner.

The whole experience has already made him think about how he’ll handle his next move. “When I am ready to sell it, I’m going to have a contingency that I’m only going to sell to a first-time homebuyer,” he says, “I don’t want for first-time homebuyers to feel like they can’t compete.”

Besides our solo journeys, Nowak and I are also part of another emergent trend among Gen Z homebuyers: smaller homes. Across all age buckets in NAR’s 2025 report, 18- to 25-year-olds were the least likely to buy a detached single-family home, though that was still the most popular type of home. Fourteen percent of this age group bought townhouses or rowhouses, compared with 7% of all buyers.

“Gen Zers are the most likely generation to purchase a condo or a townhouse in comparison to a single-family home, which makes a lot of sense, especially as a single buyer,” Lautz says. Interestingly, Lautz says Gen Zers are just as likely to buy in a small town as they are in an urban area. Those heading to small towns may want space to grow into, or they may just want to seize the opportunity to get on a housing rung out in the suburbs.

That’s not to say that homebuying is a breeze for most Gen Zers. Chen Zhao, the head of economics research at Redfin, tells me younger buyers are facing serious headwinds, especially when it comes to affordability.

As of 2022, the home-price-to-income ratio for single-family homes reached a record high, according to a 2024 analysis from the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University. To get a more granular picture, I also looked at the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data from 2023, homing in on Americans ages 18 to 27. Gen Zers who filled out the survey for their household — meaning they most likely weren’t living with parents or paying their rents or mortgages — reported paying just under $1,538 in monthly gross rent on average. Those in owner-occupied units paid just under $1,600 in total owner costs.

Subsequently, there are still very real inequities in who in the younger generation can buy a home. As Zhao notes, in a Redfin survey conducted in May, nearly a quarter of young Americans who had bought a home recently said they used family money to help fund their down payments; in 2019, 18% of millennials surveyed said they used cash gifts from their families to fund down payments, but that grew to 23% by 2023.

“For many people, especially younger people, buying a home just seems like so out of reach right now,” Zhao says. “But there are also enough young people who either have family help or have well-paying enough jobs that they are able to get into the housing market.”

I did not have family help with my down payment (though I did receive some assistance paying for assessment costs). I took on the burden of the down payment, buying a lawyer, and so on, completely independently. I did have a few advantages: Since I found the place through a friend of a friend, neither of us needed to hire a real estate agent, which helped bring down costs quite a bit. I also, blessedly, didn’t have to get in a bidding war or shop around. And, since I was a first-time homeowner in New York, I was able to get a decent rate on my mortgage, and I didn’t have to deal with private mortgage insurance, which is often levied against homebuyers putting down smaller down payments.

I’m on the right side of ‘the Gen Z divide’

My affordability picture is also better thanks to a timing quirk that my fellow “geriatric Gen Z” homebuyers and I accidentally took advantage of: We ended up on the right side of the Gen Z divide. Those of us who graduated right before the pandemic, or into the booming job market of 2021 and 2022, benefited from high pay, the Great Resignation, and low interest rates, which allowed companies to pour spending into hiring and perks.

“What we’ve found is that Gen Z, if they’re employed and they live in their own homes, so conditional on those two things, they’re better paid today than previous generations were at their life stage,” Finnigan says, adding: “Gen Z who are employed today are actually doing better than previous generations.”

Others right at the Gen Z/millennial cutoff are doing better on the income side of the income-mortgage-payment equation as well. Nowak, for instance, has both a full-time job in recruiting and a side hustle in car detailing, helping shore up his finances. I was able to save up enough for my down payment through a combination of not having student-loan debt to pay off, low living costs during the pandemic era, and guaranteed wage increases that were bargained for by my union. Cynthia Turcot, a 28-year-old in Texas who works in aviation, also took a similar approach in saving to independently buy her townhouse in the central Dallas area. She budgeted intensely and purposefully chose to live with a roommate in a lower-cost-of-living complex.

“Since I work in aviation, prior to the pandemic, I was traveling almost every weekend with my benefits. And of course that comes with additional added costs,” Turcot said. “During the pandemic, I really slowed down from all of that, obviously, just to keep myself safe. So that really helped me bump up my savings quite a bit.”

Both Turcot and Nowak tell me homeownership came with a few unforeseen challenges — things like dealing with assessments, homeowners association approvals, or surprise bills are all new and not very pleasant experiences. For me, I had to go through the rigorous co-op approval process to buy my place and to prove that I was earning within the accepted income bounds. There were many stress tears shed. But every day that I wake up in an apartment that’s mine, where the rent won’t randomly increase to untenable levels or a landlord won’t bother to fix a problem that I could tackle myself, makes it worth it. Maybe that’s the new American dream.

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Juliana Kaplan is a senior labor and inequality reporter on Business Insider’s economy team.

The national debate around crime and law-and-order politics has largely focused on America’s biggest cities in blue states: Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, as well as the federal government’s backyard of Washington DC.

• Elon Musk left the White House DOGE office in May.
• The Tesla and SpaceX CEO said he hasn’t been to Washington since then.
• “That was a hell of a side quest,” Musk said of his time in government.

Elon Musk said he has not visited Washington, D.C., since stepping down from his role at the White House DOGE office.

“I haven’t been to D.C. since May. That was a hell of a side quest,” Musk said during an interview at the All-In Summit.

The All-In Summit, which featured other business leaders such as Mark Cuban, took place in Los Angeles from September 7 to September 9. A recording of Musk’s interview was uploaded to the “All-In Podcast” YouTube channel on Tuesday.

“The government is basically unfixable,” Musk said when asked about the lessons he learnt from running DOGE.

“If you look at our national debt, which is insanely high, the interest payments exceed the War Department budget,” Musk added. “So, if AI and robots don’t solve our national debt, we are toast.”

Musk and the White House did not respond to requests for comment from Business Insider.

Musk was a huge backer of President Donald Trump during the latter’s 2024 election campaign. The Tesla and SpaceX CEO spent at least $277 million supporting Trump and other GOP candidates.

After Trump was elected, Musk joined the Trump administration as a special government employee, leading DOGE. Musk continued to run his businesses while working in government. His 130-day stint as a special government employee ended in May.

In January, Musk was optimistic about what he could accomplish with DOGE. He told political strategist Mark Penn during a livestream on X that DOGE had a “good shot” at saving $1 trillion.

The government is “a very target-rich environment for saving money,” Musk told Penn.

“It’s like being in a room full of targets. Like, you could close your eyes, and you can’t miss,” he said.

It is unclear just how much money DOGE saved for the federal government. In April, Musk said the cost cutting outfit was on track to cut nearly $150 billion in spending for the 2026 fiscal year.

In June, Musk’s relationship with the president imploded publicly after they posted heated messages to each other on X and Truth Social, respectively.

Musk took aim at Trump’s signature tax bill, calling it a “MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK.” He also took credit for Trump’s victory in the 2024 presidential election.

“Such ingratitude,” Musk wrote in an X post on June 5.

Trump had earlier threatened to cancel the government’s contracts with Musk’s businesses, but has since taken a more conciliatory tone with Musk.

Last week, Trump said during an interview on “The Scott Jennings Show” that Musk was a “good man.”

“He’s got 80% super genius, and then 20% he’s got some problems. And when he works out the 20%, he’ll be great,” Trump said of Musk.

The incident marks the first time the NATO member has directly engaged Russian assets in its airspace since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.