Month: October 2025

• Eric Allison has steered three generations of flying taxi ventures.
• He led Zee.Aero, the precursor to Larry Page’s Kitty Hawk, before joining Uber’s Elevate division.
• Allison then joined Joby Aviation, where he now serves as the Chief Product Officer.

Eric Allison has been on the front lines of the boom and bust cycles of electric flying cars.

The engineer started in 2010 at a skunkworks called Zee.Aero, which represented Google cofounder Larry Page’s earliest dive into eVTOLs or electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft. Allison became the CEO of the secretive startup in 2015, a few years before it folded into Kitty Hawk, another Page venture led by self-driving car pioneer Sebastian Thrun.

What remains of Kitty Hawk and Zee.Aero largely lives on through Wisk Aero, which was previously a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing. Wisk is now working on autonomous flying taxis as a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boeing.

By 2018, Allison was leading Uber’s Elevate division, trying to bring to life the nascent flying car industry inside a company whose core business was ride-hailing services.

Uber sold its Elevate arm to Joby Aviation in 2020, along with a $75 million investment into the flying car company.

Now, as Joby’s chief product officer, Allison merges his two experiences from an engineering-heavy startup with Zee.Aero, and his platform- and product-centered role at Uber. His goal: Making an Uber-like service using flying cars.

“For me, it was kind of a nice way of putting two big pieces together,” Allison said.

Earlier this month, the company conducted one of its first US public demonstrations of the Joby aircraft for 50,000 attendees of the California International Airshow in Monterey County.

Allison spoke to Business Insider via video call and email about his early bet on eVTOLs and why he believes flying cars are no longer speculative.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve been working on eVTOLS since 2010 with Zee.Aero, right?

I helped to get Zee going in 2010. The team was made up of really sharp engineers who cared about one thing above all else: making something that worked.

I ran engineering for a while and eventually took over running the company. In the early days, Zee and Joby were operating somewhat in parallel. Joby was a scrappy team, and Zee had lots of funding. We were really focused on the engineering — we didn’t do anything public. It was all private, and I think I only gave one external-facing event the entire time I was there.

Everything that Wisk Aero is today is effectively the inheritor of Zee. There’s a through-line from that work to what they’re doing now.

What even drew you to the idea of flying taxis back in 2010? That wasn’t even a buzzword then.

It was more about applying emerging technology trends to flying vehicles. The term people used was “personal air vehicle.” That’s how we initially thought about it. It wasn’t until around 2013 or 2014 that the concept of a four-passenger air taxi really became this dominant model for the industry.

When we started working on this, there was no Uber; iPhones had just come out. But the technology curve was moving fast. Batteries, inverters, and computing power were all improving. In 2010, electric vehicles were just starting to emerge. Tesla’s first Roadster had only been released a few years prior. Those same components — batteries, inverters, and silicon carbide switches — made electric propulsion possible for aircraft.

In some sense, a lot of us were inspired by toys. Model airplanes were transforming thanks to better batteries and motor controllers. It was the same principle, just scaled up. The question was: “Can these technologies be applied to larger aircraft safely?” Joby figured this out early on, and it’s what we’ve been working on for years.

Was there something you believed early on that you no longer believe today?

From day one, we believed electric propulsion could make aircraft quieter, more reliable, and cheaper to operate. We’re doing that now. What’s evolved is the business model, whether this would be a personal aircraft or an air taxi service.

Have you had a moment where you realized this was no longer speculative — that it’s real?

Totally. I had that moment several weeks ago at an event where we were showing some of our technology. We’re no longer convincing people that this is possible.

Going from Zee to Uber is a big shift. What was it like trying to bring this transformative mode of transport to Uber, a massive ride-hailing company?

It was a big shift, but it made a lot of sense. At Uber, the team was small but had a clear and ambitious product vision.

Uber’s focus was not on the hardware, vehicle engineering side of things. We weren’t developing a vehicle. We had some concept vehicles that we developed, but the whole idea was to get others to develop the vehicles. And we provided the overarching business case and the product vision, in a way, of how this could all be woven together into a service that consumers would want to use.

What were the challenges and the hardest part of running Elevate inside Uber?

The hardest part was holding a clear, ambitious vision for a technology most people thought was still science fiction. The tech was real, but the world wasn’t quite ready to believe it. We had to cast a vision that felt tangible and make people see how it could actually fit into their daily lives. That was both the most challenging and the most exciting part.

Like anything, there were pros and cons. But overall, the Elevate experience was really good. Uber had a lot of credibility in transportation, and that helped us build the vision and bring people together. The Elevate Summits we ran were pivotal — they catalyzed the industry. I think they helped spur the overall amount of investment and excitement that pushed eVTOL technology forward.

Can you paint me a vivid picture of what a Joby trip will look like for a customer?

Think of someone in lower Manhattan or the West Side of Manhattan who’s traveling for business.

Maybe he’s running late, maybe he just wants to have a seamless, stress-free experience going to the airport on a Delta flight.

They open the Uber app and, instead of selecting UberX or Uber Black, they choose the Joby option directly within the Uber app. A car takes them to the West 30th Street heliport. The system sequences arrivals so that a few passengers arrive together. They all flow through a lounge, where we also operate the Blade service Joby recently acquired, and board the aircraft. In seven minutes, after an amazing view and stress-free experience, you land right near the terminal at JFK and walk right in to go through security and get on your flight.

It’s seamless and stress-free. You can experience a version of this through Blade in New York, but helicopters are more expensive to operate.

Some people are still skeptical. We’ve seen cycles of hype and disappointment. Why is this moment different?

We’ve been doing the hard work for a long time. And flying is a way of proving that it’s here, it’s happening, and that it’s working.

The recent airshow is a good example. Showing people makes this a lot more real, and there’s a shift from something that’s a little science fiction to something that’s tangible.

Now it’s a matter of when it will be available to start flying in it.

You’ve been at this for 15 years now. What would make you feel that you’ve finished your job or accomplished your mission?

I’ll be excited about the first passenger, but I’ll be really excited for our 100,000th passenger. And honestly, even then, I probably won’t stop. There’s always another boundary to push and another horizon to chase. That’s the fun of it.

• I lived in New York for eight years, but moving to Colombia felt like a breath of fresh air.
• My dollar stretches further in South America.
• I’ve moved internationally before, and the decision came easily to me.

When I first moved to New York in 2017, I drank the Kool-Aid: work hard, play hard. I had just finished university and another journalism internship in Vienna, and flew across the Atlantic with one suitcase and my résumé in hand. It felt like a scene from a movie.

For eight years, I lived a Sex and the City lifestyle on a budget: strutting down the streets in high heels, heading to my first corporate job with fire and hope in my heart. I left for a scrappy PR agency, of which I’m now the Vice President. I also kept writing — not at a chic desk facing the window like Carrie Bradshaw, but in bed. My first apartment didn’t have a living room.

• Jamie Dimon’s concern over “cockroaches” in credit has spawned a debate about private credit.
• While some industry watchers sound the alarm on the booming industry, others are more sanguine.
• Many industry leaders defended private credit this week following Dimon’s comments.

This week, the world’s leading financial institutions were acting like bad roommates. All it took was one multibillion-dollar “cockroach” for everyone to start pointing fingers and assigning blame.

Two years ago, Blackstone’s President Jon Gray said private credit was in a “golden moment,” and it has since become the hottest corner of Wall Street. There have always been private credit critics, but a deluge of digs from industry watchers turned the spotlight back on the so-called shadow lenders, challenging their shining narrative and raising uncomfortable questions about potential contagions.

It kicked off on Tuesday, when Jamie Dimon, Wall Street’s bluntest banking billionaire, said something he “probably shouldn’t say,” about the bankruptcies of auto parts giant First Brands and subprime auto lender Tricolor during JPMorgan Chase’s earnings call.

“When you see one cockroach, there’s probably more,” Dimon said, after the bank disclosed a $170 million loss related to Tricolor.

And even though Dimon clarified that Tricolor, a company that offered financing for used cars to customers with limited or no credit history, is not typically what one would consider private credit (and may even involve fraud) and that there are “early signs” that there may be “some excess” in this 15-year credit bull market more broadly, many of the biggest private credit players took the comments from their longtime critic personally.

Blue Owl co-CEO Marc Lipschultz suggested that the focus on private credit may be a result of some people in the industry having their own “meaningful, parochial interests” to protect in the face of private credit’s growing popularity, which is eating their lunch.

“Blackstone’s market cap exceeds the market cap of most financial institutions in the world today,” he said at the CAIS Alternative Investment Summit conference. “It’s not as if that’s not coming from someone, and of course, those people don’t like it.”

When the interviewer, Bloomberg TV’s Dani Burger, suggested “those people” might be Dimon, Lipschultz smirked. He suggested that the focus on private credit in these cases is an “odd kind of fear-mongering.”

The pile on

On Thursday, two regional banks, Zion Bancorp and Western Alliance, revealed losses in their own lending books, which has added to fears that the credit ecosystem might be under threat.

And critiques of private credit continued to pile up from there.

A study by business school academics at Johns Hopkins and UC Irvine claimed the industry’s returns are “illusory” and fail to beat the market, or make the lack of liquidity worthwhile. And at the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting, the organization’s head, Kristalina Georgieva, told reporters that the significant growth of non-bank lending has her organization “urging more attention to the non-bank financial institutions,” which are less regulated than banks.

“You are asking the question that keeps me awake every so often at night,” she said.

Jeff Hooke, an adjunct instructor at Hopkins, told Business Insider that his study doesn’t suggest that private credit is about to cause a crisis, but it’s not favorable to the industry’s narrative either.

“I don’t see a few bankruptcies as a prelude to contagion,” Hooke said. “What my colleagues and I concluded is simply that the value that private credit claims for its asset class is simply not there.”

The golden age of private credit

Private credit, shorthand for non-bank lenders that have moved in to offer the loans that banks stopped underwriting after the Great Financial Crisis, has grown immensely since the bottom of the crisis.

They’re not just competing with banks on risky loans, but also writing multi-billion-dollar loans to investment-grade clients, a practice known as direct lending. Already booming before interest rates began to rise in 2022, the segment became the star of the investment world, offering high returns while banks pulled back.

Some of the private equity industry’s most famous firms now actually manage more debt than private equity, with Blackstone managing $407 billion in non-real estate credit and $389 billion in private equity as of Q2 of this year. Apollo is even more lopsided, with $690 billion in credit assets and $150 billion in equity strategies. It’s gone from a sleepier sidekick of the private equity investment world to a destination career for many future Wall Streeters.

In a report titled “Has the Golden Age of Private Credit Lost its Shine?”, private market investors Hamilton Lane asked whether the good days are over. Its analysis suggested that there’s still “room to run” in the golden age, but the fact that they have to answer concerns shows that questions abound.

Glenn Schorr, an analyst for Evercore who covers JPMorgan and large alternative investing firms, said that a few bankruptcies are not the same as an impending financial crisis, and that some people may have “misread” Jamie’s comments.

“Every indication from bank commentary, from alternative asset firms’ commentary, and from Moody’s head of private credit, tells you that we’re not seeing signs of a turn in credit,” Schorr said.

“Make no mistake about it, that does not mean there will be zero loss,” he added. “If defaults go up 1% to 2%, one person might say ‘big deal — 2% defaults are low’. Other people can say defaults have doubled.”

Coming to the defense of private debt

When Apollo CEO Marc Rowan was asked at a conference on Tuesday about the two bankruptcies, he said that it “does not surprise” him that there are some “late-cycle accidents.” He suggested that the “competitive market” may have led some to take “shortcuts.”

Rowan implied that this may be a sign of where the market stands, rather than a sign of any imminent concerns about the overall public or private credit markets. Other executives were more explicit in defending private credit.

“What’s interesting is both of those were bank-led processes,” Blackstone’s Gray said at the same conference. He said he does not think “this was a canary in the coal mine.” The firm is reporting results next week and may expand on this further then.

Also at CAIS, Carlyle Group CEO Harvey Schwartz noted that neither bankruptcies are related to “what you think of as direct lending or the traditional private credit market.”

And while the big publicly traded alternative investment providers have taken a beating due to credit concerns, banks have had their own set of woes.

Jefferies, which holds debt tied to First Brands, saw its stock slump as questions mounted on what went wrong — though it clawed back some ground Friday.

Zions Bancorp dropped 11% Thursday after revealing a $50 million loss on two commercial loans, and Western Alliance slid 10% after disclosing a lawsuit alleging a fraudulent credit line to Cantor Group V LLC. Both stocks have since recovered.

To hear the private credit industry tell it, there aren’t nearly as many cockroaches in their own loan books.

“We’ve been a little surprised by the First Brands, Tricolor sell-off and buzz because when we look at our credit portfolios, we actually see pretty healthy portfolios relative to almost any metric that you can look at,” Kipp deVeer, co-president of Ares, said during a panel at CAIS.

Maybe shadow banks aren’t so shadowy after all, they said.

“Private markets get referred to often as sort of like the shadow,” Carlyle’s Schwartz said during his panel. “I’ve never seen a shadow this bright ever in the history of time.”

This summer, organizers said more than 5 million people participated in No Kings protests against President Trump. Organizers say they expect an even bigger turnout this time around.

You may think the mind peaks in your 20s. The data says otherwise. A new open-access analysis in the journal Intelligence reports that overall psychological functioning tends to crest in late midlife, with many adults hitting their best all-around stride near age 60. The research, led by Gilles…

• Classic handbags from a select few designers tend to hold their value best.
• Styles from Hermès and Louis Vuitton were among the most purchased on luxury retailer Fashionphile this year.
• Here are three bags to buy that will have lasting appeal on the secondary market.

Sometimes when you get the bag, you are also, literally, getting the bag.

The secondhand market is a bright spot for luxury. The global resale market is growing three times as fast as the firsthand market and is expected to reach as high as $360 billion by 2030 — up from between $210 billion and $220 billion today — according to a report by BCG and Vestiaire Collective released this month.

Handbags reliably drive luxury secondhand sales. The nearly 8,000 respondents to BCG and Vestaire’s survey said that an average of 40% of their handbags were purchased secondhand — an outsize share, given that, on average, 28% of their total closets were purchased secondhand.

“A classic handbag is a classic handbag is a classic handbag,” Lara Osborn, the SVP of merchandising and fulfillment at luxury secondhand retailer Fashionphile, told Business Insider. She said that bags tend to be more evergreen in style than clothing or shoes, handle wear better, and are generally one-size-fits-all.

They also tend to hold their value, something customers are “now trained to think about,” Osborn said.

Many seek out handbags with original packaging — down to the tissue paper — and authentication materials, knowing that will make it easier to resell them down the line, she said.

According to the BCG and Vestaire survey, 41% of secondhand sellers offload their pieces to recover residual value, and 62% sell so they can shop more.

While a select few handbags can be resold at a price higher than their retail value — marking a true return on investment — most customers, Osborn said, aren’t looking for that when they “invest” in a bag.

A shopping win is “when you can buy, use, and enjoy it, and sell it at some point and get a big portion of your money back,” she said. “You own a piece of capital that you can apply to something else; it’s money in your closet, sitting and waiting to be spent.”

The bags most likely to retain their value are also among Fashionphile’s top-selling. These are generally considered “safe styles” and “heritage icons,” according to Fashionphile’s 2025 Ultra-Luxury Resale Report.”

“The appetite is just for timeless, classic,” Osborn said. “I’m not going to look out of place carrying this in a year, two years, three years.”

These are three of Fashionphile’s top-selling evergreen bags that will add capital to your closet.