Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said some top talent will have a lot of “leverage.”
Kimberly White/Getty Images for TechCrunch
An audience at a top AI conference in San Francisco was asked what startup they would short.
Perplexity, an AI search browser trying to take on Google, landed at the top of the list.
There was little disagreement at the conference that we are in an AI bubble.
In a city obsessed with betting on the next big thing, the Cerebral Valley AI Conference turned that instinct inward. Before panels featuring AI heavyweights like Anthropic and xAI wrapped up on Wednesday, founders and investors in the audience were asked a question that Silicon Valley rarely says out loud: Which billion-dollar AI startup would you bet against?
The crowd’s verdict? Search startup Perplexity topped the list of companies most likely to fall, followed by OpenAI — a surprising second place for the poster child of the AI boom.
The informal survey, conducted by organizer and independent journalist Eric Newcomer, of more than 300 attendees, underscored what many insiders are whispering: that even as AI money floods the Valley, confidence in its biggest players is starting to crack.
A survey at the 2025 Cerebral Valley AI Summit.
Ben Bergman/BI
Any unscientific, anonymous survey should be taken with a heavy dose of skepticism. Still, it was revealing because while plenty of VCs and founders at this conference and elsewhere talk about an AI bubble, they are usually too polite to name names. Unlike public markets, private investors do not actually short companies, and it is considered bad form in Silicon Valley to speak negatively in public about a startup without a verified reason.
To anyone who follows Silicon Valley, Perplexity, an AI search browser trying to take on Google, landing at the top of the list is not surprising.
Perplexity has become the poster child of what some see as an AI bubble because it’s raising back-to-back funding rounds every few months and seeing voracious investor demand at valuations from $14 billion to as high as $50 billion, Business Insider recently reported.
Asked to comment on the Cerebral Valley survey, Perplexity spokesman Jesse Dwyer replied in an email: “Geeze, it sounds more like the judgmental valley conference.”
OpenAI landing second on the list might be a bit more surprising because it’s seen as the clear consumer winner of the AI revolution.
Still, its ballooning valuation and trillions of infrastructure spending have spooked some investors. (OpenAI didn’t respond to a request for comment.)
“How can a company with $13 billion in revenues make $1.4 trillion of spend commitments?” Gerstner asked Altman.
“If you want to sell your shares, I’ll find you a buyer,” Altman said in response to Gerstner’s question. “Enough.”
Altman has a point. Lest you think everyone is trying to dump their OpenAI and Perplexity shares, those companies both appeared on the other side of the trade in another survey question asking which company you would bet on.
One thing on which there was little disagreement is that we are in a bubble, but that is not necessarily something to be worried about.
“I think every technology cycle, by definition, is a bubble,” Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman said onstage. “And the real question is, what are the enduring companies and how big will they be?”
On the same panel, solo VC Elad Gil compared the current bubble to the dotcom bust of the late 1990s.
“There’s going to be a few dozen things that become massive, a handful that will be truly outsize generational things, and then everything else is going to go away in one form or another,” Gil said.
Whether Perplexity will be the next Google or Altavista is what investors like Gil and Fushman are paid to predict.
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced on Friday that he plans to retire in January.
Ethan Miller/Getty Images
Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced Friday that he plans to retire in January after 12 years on the job.
Retail leader turnover is nearly 80% higher than in 2024, an executive coaching firm found.
CEO turnover is lower outside the retail sector, as the industry faces high tariffs and labor costs.
When Walmart CEO Doug McMillon announced Friday that he plans to retire in January after 12 years on the job, he joined a growing wave of retail executives stepping down during a record year of turnover.
Retail leader turnover is up 79% year over year, according to a report released by the business and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which included an analysis of executive departures through September.
Between January and September 2025, 43 retail CEOs had left their posts, compared to 24 CEO exits recorded during the same timeframe in 2024. The firm’s findings were published on November 4, before McMillon announced his resignation.
McMillon will be succeeded on February 1 by John Furner, the head of Walmart’s US division.
Other high-profile retail CEOs who have left their posts this year include former Kroger CEO Rodney McMullen, who Business Insider previously reported resigned in March after an investigation into his “personal conduct,” as well as former Kohl’s CEO Ashley Buchanan, who was fired in May, just months after being appointed to the role, after investigators found he had given favorable business deals to a close acquaintence.
Satish Malhotra, CEO of The Container Store, resigned in March after the company’s restructuring. Vivek Sankaran, CEO of Albertsons, retired in May, following the company’s merger attempt with Kroger. Target CEO Brian Cornell announced in August that he plans to retire in February.
CEO turnover is lower outside the retail sector, with September marking the fourth consecutive month in which CEO exits across industries were lower than in the corresponding month one year earlier, according to the Challenger report.
Leaders in the retail industry are facing increased pressure to perform as the sector navigates high tariffs, rising labor costs, and shifting consumer behavior, leading to slowing sales.
With several retail leaders announcing retirements effective early next year, the sector’s leadership shake-up shows little sign of slowing heading into 2026.
Rachel-Jean Firchau raised the idea of a prenup to her now-husband. Their agreement covers the couple’s separate social media brands.
Abigail Varney for BI
Kamila Staryga’s husband asked her to marry him years after their chance meeting in Golden Gate Park. She said yes. Later, he popped another question: Would she get a prenup?
Staryga, the founder of a reproductive health startup, Rita Health, didn’t take offense. “I’m a super-high risk profile,” she says matter-of-factly, and legal contracts are part of her daily reality. “You don’t write a contract for good times,” she says. “You write them for when stuff goes south.”
For Staryga and her husband, cash isn’t the only asset at stake. He works at a leading artificial intelligence company. Both receive part of their compensation in stock options. But where Staryga’s equity is a bet on the future, his is already a winning lottery ticket.
Kamila Staryga runs a startup and receives part of her compensation in the form of stock options.
Cayce Clifford for BI
Prenups go with death and taxes on the list of things no one wants to discuss, and yet, they’re having a moment. Surveys suggest they’re on the rise. On TikTok, lawyers and money influencers cast them as basic financial planning. For ultra-public couples like Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, attorneys dissect who-gets-what in a divorce with ESPN-level draft-night energy.
Monica Mazzei, chair of Buchalter’s family law group, calls it “the Kardashian effect”: The public interest in their prenups helped ease taboos. Family law attorney Susan Scherman has a slightly darker explanation for millennials and Gen Z signing prenups: “Their attitude toward marriage is, ‘Look, the statistics are against us, so let’s just go in and do the best we can.'”
Survey data suggests more couples are proposing prenups. Fifteen years ago, a Harris Poll survey of 2,000 married or engaged adults in the United States found that just 3% had signed a prenup. In 2023, Harris Poll and Axios reran the survey, albeit with a smaller sample; the share jumped to about 20%. Rates were even higher among millennials (47%) and Gen Z (41%).
The climb tracks a shift in how younger Americans think about marriage. Some of them grew up during the peak divorce rates of the eighties and nineties. They wait longer to say “I do,” then marry with careers, mortgages, and other assets worth protecting: social media handles, bitcoin, frozen embryos, and Labubus. Which is why, more than ever, they’re saying, “We want prenup!”
It also helps that tech has made getting a prenup easier than filing a joint tax return. Staryga and her husband used First, a TurboTax-style prenup service. It walked them through a questionnaire and let each bring in a lawyer to review the draft before signing. First’s no-frills prenups start at $599. The company has raised $4.3 million in venture capital to expand.
Kamila Staryga and her husband used First, a TurboTax-style prenup service.
Cayce Clifford for BI
For Staryga, getting a prenup was a natural choice. Being a tech founder, she’s accustomed to signing contracts online. She’s also part of a generation that expects on-demand everything.
“We bought a Tesla on a website,” she reasoned. Why not a prenup?
Historically, prenups were the province of the ultrawealthy, pushed by parents to protect family money. One attorney described a photographer-client who deferred to parents on every term in their prenup because a mega-million-dollar inheritance loomed. Lois Liberman, a partner in Blank Rome’s renowned family law practice, has a name for this cohort: “the lucky sperm club.”
That world hasn’t vanished. The children of boomers and older generations are staring down a record wealth transfer — about $100 trillion by 2048. But the fastest growth is among self-made couples, lawyers in New York and San Francisco say. They’re building their fortunes faster than their parents did, as the housing and stock markets surge and float their net worths higher.
Prenups aren’t recorded in any central registry, so there’s little hard data on who uses them or why, said Elizabeth Carter, a professor at Louisiana State University Law and a practicing attorney. Her research suggests that the rise isn’t only about soaring assets, but also about who’s earning them.
Women are more likely than ever to be the household breadwinner. More own homes, hold college degrees, and run teams. In that light, the legal document that once shielded dynastic wealth now protects dual xf, which is why, more often, she’s the one asking for it.
You can’t handshake your way into a marriage and expect that to protect you.Rachel-Jean Firchau
Social media director Kate Winick found love at 34. Before she swiped right on her husband, she’d spent a decade growing her savings working in media, then at Peloton.
“That nest egg was really important to me,” she says. She and her husband used a mediator to sort out the terms of their prenup before hiring separate lawyers. “I think we both felt like the goal was to walk out whole, not to walk out at an advantage or make a profit,” says Winick, now married three years.
In certain corners of tech and finance, prenup lawyers travel by referral. Mazzei, based in San Francisco, recalled a Google employee who, when he inquired about a prenup, said her name was on “a list.” Staryga says many of her husband’s coworkers advised him to get a prenup.
The comp mix drives it, says Michael Calogero, a partner of Cohen Clair Lans Greifer & Simpson. For startup workers, their pay is often equity-heavy. If the company hits, the windfall can be significant. And if it doesn’t, they’ll move on to the next thing. “Even if they don’t have tremendous wealth,” he says, “they’re hoping maybe one day they will and planning for that.”
Earlier this year, Rachel-Jean Firchau, 32, who recently moved to Australia, raised the idea of a prenup to her then-fiancé. She’d been the primary earner for five years, working in ad-agency sales, and they’d just decided she would quit to build her travel-and-lifestyle blog full-time, betting that a brand with more than 20,000 Instagram followers could become a dream job.
The couple pushed the paperwork to the last minute — it was “not as cute” as choosing wedding favors and her reception outfit change. They used First, filling out questionnaires over a Trader Joe’s dinner and later signing from their studio apartment with a notary on video.
The prenup says Firchau owns her brand’s intellectual property and keeps it if they divorce. “You can’t handshake your way into a marriage,” she says, “and expect that to protect you.”
Rachel-Jean Firchau was the household breadwinner before signing a prenup.
Abigail Varney for BI
It’s not just social media handles that younger couples want to safeguard. Clauses now cover pets and sometimes the pet’s TikTok, if there’s real revenue tied to it. Libby Leffler, First’s founder and CEO, says she’s seen it all: sneakers, handbags, game consoles, patents, and crypto art.
Mazzei says she includes embryos on her standard asset questionnaire. She says pre-marriage embryos come up “more than you would think.” One thing a prenup can’t settle: child custody or support. Courts decide those later, under a “best interests of the child” standard.
Once the assets are sorted, couples start writing rules. The hottest example is the infidelity clause, which defines cheating and sets a financial penalty.
HelloPrenup, a four-year-old platform that produces tens of thousands of agreements a year, says that about one-third of prenups generated on its platform have an infidelity clause. The average penalty is about $165,000. First is seeing more inbound inquiries, too.
Lawyers, though, are unimpressed. Cheating is notoriously hard to prove in court, creating a “mini trial within a trial,” says Lidio Duval, a family law attorney at Aronson Mayefsky & Sloan in New York. Enforceability of infidelity clauses is a patchwork. In pure no-fault states, courts often refuse clauses that insinuate fault. California generally won’t enforce them at all.
Where they are allowed, the language has to be surgical, especially for open relationships. HelloPrenup founder Julia Rodgers has seen clauses that read more like a Feeld bio than a legal contract: sex with a third party is fine, “so long as the spouse is in the same room.”
It’s a different scene from nearly a decade ago when my then-fiancé looked aghast at my suggestion that we hire a lawyer to draft a prenup. He’d inherited a tidy sum from his grandmother, and I wanted to spare him the guilt of asking me to sign one. Plus, if we were ever to divorce, I didn’t need the money. We were both pulling in six figures and carried no debts.
When I asked, his face collapsed as if I’d just slid divorce papers across the table. “I’m not counting on us needing one,” he said, part-statement, part-question.
My chest tightened. “Me neither,” I said before dropping the subject.
My husband heard “prenup” and pictured a trip to a law office with a cold receptionist and a candy bowl on the conference table. The new version of that scene looks different — a couch, two laptops open, and a list of prompts nudging couples toward the hard questions while they still like each other.
That’s the spirit Winick and her husband brought to their prenup. Winick, who describes herself as “reasonably feisty,” knows the version of herself that shows up when she’s stressed, tired, or, “God forbid, hungry.” They chose a prenup so that their best selves could set rules for their worst days. “We’re going to guard each other against even the possibility that we will do things out of anger and hurt,” she says.
Seen that way, a prenup isn’t a hedge against love, but a buffer against our worst impulses.
Melia Russell is a senior correspondent with Business Insider, covering the intersection of law and technology.
Security, migration and the rise of hard-line rhetoric mark a deeply polarised election in Chile. Between candidates of ideological extremes and a climate of fear of organised crime, Chileans go to the polls this Sunday in elections that could reshape the country’s political direction.
Duncan Ivison, president of Manchester University, says government’s 6% surcharge plan will ‘hurt the sector’
A levy on tuition fees paid by international students is “wrong”, will “hurt the sector” and is “not in the long-term interests” of the UK, according to the vice-chancellor of one of the country’s leading universities.
Duncan Ivison, who took over as president and vice-chancellor of the University of Manchester (UoM) last year, was speaking ahead of the budget later this month when the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, is expected to flesh out her plans for the proposed 6% surcharge.
For years, we were told American regulators were going to rein in Google CEO Sundar Pichai and his fellow big tech bosses. That didn’t happen.
Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
Google is preparing to unveil Gemini 3.0, its next major AI model.
It could cement Google’s turnaround and put the company firmly back on top in the AI race.
Some AI enthusiasts are convinced Gemini 3 is already out in the wild.
Google’s next big AI rollout is imminent. It could cement a turnaround that’s been three years in the making.
Gemini 3.0, the company’s next large language model, is expected to drop very soon. Company employees are teasing it. CEO Sundar Pichai has said it will be out by the end of the year. Brace for impact.
Anticipation has reached fever pitch on X and in various Discord channels, where AI truthers are convinced Gemini 3 is already out in the wild. Google has a history of testing its models semi-secretly, so this might not be a total conspiracy.
But it’s not just them. Gemini 3 is the name on lips across the AI industry, which is waiting to see what Google pulls out of the hat. Expectations are high that Gemini 3 will be better at coding and multimedia generation (a better version of Nano Banana, Google’s viral image tool, is expected to be part of the new model).
Since ChatGPT’s launch in late 2022, the narrative surrounding Google has been one of a sleepy incumbent playing catch-up. There was truth to that. Facing its first existential threat in a long time, Google quickly pivoted teams in an effort to push generative AI into many of its top products.
To catch up, Google has tapped its “full-stack” advantage: It not only builds the models, but also has distribution channels through its products, plus infrastructure from its cloud business.
That’s how Google has largely stayed out of the increasingly tangled web of AI companies that are tapping each other for help and fueling fears of a bubble.
Google also has a huge open goal in front of it. OpenAI’s highly anticipated ChatGPT 5 landed this year with more of a fizz than a bang. Was it simply a signal that AI was hitting its “boring” era? Or did OpenAI no longer have the juice?
If Gemini 3 is a smash hit — and right now, insiders tell Business Insider that the new model is extremely impressive — then it could give Google a shot at taking the top spot, a position it has been vying to reclaim since the generative AI boom began.
That would be a bad scenario for OpenAI, which doesn’t have the stack Google has and has so far stayed ahead in the race thanks largely to a first-mover advantage and many industry alliances.
Google still has a brand problem to solve. ChatGPT is still the “Kleenex” of AI — the first name that often springs to mind when talking about the technology. It is to chatbots what “Google” became to online search.
It’s also got a lot of catching up to do with OpenAI for users. Google said its Gemini app has hit 650 million monthly active users, while ChatGPT has about 800 million weekly active users.
