Under a new “reasonable house rules and requests” policy announced Oct. 20, Airbnb hosts generally can no longer ask guests to “complete tasks that require significant effort or time, or would typically be performed by a cleaner.” The company names three examples: stripping the bed, taking trash offsite, and washing and putting away dishes. The policy applies worldwide to reservations booked on or after Nov. 20, 2026. Existing bookings aren’t affected.

The change targets one of travelers’ most persistent complaints about the platform: paying a cleaning fee, then being handed a chore list anyway. CEO Brian Chesky acknowledged the frustration in 2022, saying checkout tasks should be reasonable. What’s new is a written policy with enforcement.

What Airbnb’s new rules actually ban

Hosts now choose from seven standard house rules. These cover maximum overnight guests, quiet hours, events, pets, smoking and vaping, commercial photography, and locking up at checkout. Anything beyond those counts as a “request.” Guests must follow house rules but are only encouraged to honor requests.

Lighter requests are still allowed, including asking guests to leave dishes in the sink, gather used towels, and sort trash and recycling. Airbnb says local circumstances can justify exceptions. Examples include requiring animal-proof trash bins in bear country or shorter showers during drought restrictions.

The policy goes beyond chores. Hosts must disclose all rules and requests in a designated section of the listing before booking. They can’t add new ones later through messages, signs in the home, or in person. Hosts also may not impose their own fines or penalties on guests; Airbnb points them instead to AirCover, its host damage-protection program. They can’t restrict access to advertised features, and any fee for an advertised feature must be included in the price shown at booking. Separate contracts are limited to situations such as legal or homeowners association requirements.

Requests that break the policy will be flagged in the listing editor, and hosts can appeal. If a violation persists, Airbnb may issue warnings, post a notice on the listing alerting guests, or reduce the listing’s visibility in search results.

Guests aren’t completely off the hook. Airbnb’s ground rules still require them to follow house rules, and the company says it may impose consequences for repeated or severe violations. It also says guests shouldn’t leave a listing in a condition that requires excessive or deep cleaning.

“House rules help guests understand what hosts expect, but we’ve heard from our community that they can be confusing, onerous, and hard to manage,” an Airbnb spokesperson said in a statement. “So we’ve redesigned them to make them easier to discover and clearer to set, alongside a new policy that keeps requests reasonable, with no surprises.”

Hosts push back with a petition and a blackout

The backlash was quick. A Change.org petition urging Airbnb to reverse the restriction has topped 10,000 signatures, up from the more than 5,000 CBS News reported days earlier. “These are not professional cleaning duties,” the petition argues. Some hosts are planning a booking blackout on Nov. 20, the day the policy takes effect, by closing their calendars. Others have threatened to leave the platform, remove kitchen access, or raise prices.

“Seems those Millennial loonies at Airbnb have [completely] lost the plot,” one host wrote on Reddit. “It seems they are taking ‘Stay like at home’ a bit too far.”

Another predicted guests would pay for it in reviews: “Just wait until guests start getting 3-star reviews instead of a 5-star review they would have gotten if only they’d taken 20 minutes to wash their pile of dishes.”

Not every host is opposed. “As a 13-year host and [long-time] guest, I think it’s wild that people add chores,” one wrote. A former host said hosts “have brought this on themselves with increasingly long and crazy demands and increasingly high cleaning fees,” calling the new rules “a reasonable way to curb that while still maintaining basic cleanliness/decency.”

Guests say it’s long overdue

Travelers have mostly cheered. “If I don’t have to clean dishes in a budget hotel with a kitchen suite, then an Airbnb…I shouldn’t have to clean either,” one guest wrote on Reddit.

“Hosts brought this upon themselves,” another said. “They charge high cleaning fees and still expect guests to do all the major cleaning. Customers complained, and now hosts are acting like they’re the victims.”

Some commenters say chore lists had already pushed them back to hotels. That raises the question of whether the new rules can win back travelers who left Airbnb over fees and hassle.

Many observers expect hosts to pass the extra work on to guests. Airbnb does not cap cleaning fees, and since April 2025, hosts have been able to fold them into the total price instead of listing them separately. Some hosts have already said they will hire more cleaning help and raise rates to cover it. If many do, the policy could make an already pricey platform even more expensive, undercutting the affordability complaints it was meant to address.

A business that keeps growing

The fight comes as Airbnb is posting some of its strongest results in years. In the second quarter, revenue rose 17% year over year to $3.6 billion, and the company raised its full-year outlook. Airbnb, which started in 2007 with air mattresses on a San Francisco apartment floor, now counts more than 5 million hosts and more than 2.5 billion guest arrivals all-time.

Airbnb has rewritten host rules under pressure before, including its 2019 crackdown on parties and nuisance guests. This time the test is whether the hosts who supply its homes accept the new rules or follow through on their threats to walk away.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Roughly a sixth of the U.S. agricultural workforce comes to the country temporarily to do jobs their employers say they otherwise can’t fill. Most harvest labor-intensive crops, such as melons, apples, and tomatoes, that machines can’t easily pick. They arrive on H-2A visas, which allow U.S. employers to hire foreign nationals for seasonal work if they can demonstrate that U.S. workers are unable or unwilling to fill the roles.

Growers have leaned harder on the program as the domestic farm labor pool shrinks and immigration enforcement tightens. H-2A certifications have climbed every year since 2012, reaching a record 398,258 positions in fiscal 2025.

That growth has come with persistent problems. Between fiscal 2018 and 2023, the Labor Department found violations in 84% of its investigations of H-2A employers, most commonly involving pay, according to a 2024 Government Accountability Office report. In an extreme case, federal prosecutors in Georgia in 2021 charged 24 people with running a trafficking operation that exploited dozens of H-2A workers in conditions they described as “modern-day slavery.” At least two workers died as a result of the conditions.

How the wage floor fell

Historically, guest workers’ pay has been tightly controlled to ensure that domestic workers’ wages aren’t undercut. Based on its own findings that a lower floor could depress U.S. farmworkers’ pay, the Labor Department set the H-2A minimum at the average farmworker wage in each state or region, using the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Farm Labor Survey.

That changed last year. In August 2025, the USDA discontinued the Farm Labor Survey. Then, on Oct. 2, the Labor Department issued an interim final rule that relies instead on a Bureau of Labor Statistics survey of mostly nonfarm employers. The rule split H-2A jobs into two pay tiers, with entry-level wages set at roughly the 17th percentile of pay, a tier the department expected 92% of jobs to fall into. It also cut wages further to offset the housing employers must provide to H-2A workers.

In California, the minimum H-2A wage fell from $19.97 an hour to the state minimum wage of $16.90. The Labor Department estimated the new calculation would shift about $2.46 billion a year from workers to employers.

Among the employers that applied to hire workers under the new rates was the Trump Organization. About two months after the rule took effect, it sought 36 H-2A workers for its Virginia winery at a pay rate nearly $2 an hour below what it had previously offered, Forbes reported.

The ruling

The United Farm Workers union, the UFW Foundation, and 18 farmworkers sued over the rule last November. On Aug. 26, U.S. District Judge Kirk Sherriff of the Eastern District of California sided with the plaintiffs. Sherriff found that by setting pay for most H-2A workers “well below the relevant market wages,” the department had failed to reasonably consider whether the rule met its legal duty to protect U.S. workers. He also found the department had improperly skipped public comment.

Rather than throwing out the rule immediately, which could have left the program without wage rates, Sherriff left it in place and told the department to promptly develop a replacement. The Labor Department then sent employers a notice on Sept. 2 warning that they may owe workers the difference between the current rates and the new ones, once a revised formula is in place.

When the department asked for up to six months to write a new rule, Sherriff balked. In an Oct. 2 order, he set a Dec. 30 deadline and ruled that the current rule will expire that day either way.

“For over a year, farm workers have been working for illegal wages that are so drastic that workers cannot afford the rising costs of rent, groceries, gas, medications, and other basic needs for survival,” Erica Lomeli Corcoran, CEO of the UFW Foundation, said in a statement after the deadline was set.

The National Council of Agricultural Employers, a trade group that backed the rule, criticized the ruling.

“The Department’s IFR [interim final rule] provided long-overdue stability against runaway wage mandates,” John Hollay, the group’s president and CEO, said in an announcement for a webinar about the decision. “Striking down the IFR has reopened that wound and throws American agriculture and our rural communities back into financial and existential instability.”

What comes next

The Labor Department must report its progress to the court every three weeks until it issues a new rule. In its first report, filed Oct. 22, the department said it was consulting with the USDA and the Department of Homeland Security, and that while it still objects to the deadline, it would try to meet it, Capital Press reported. [VERIFY: The department has said it opposes requiring back pay.]

Whether growers will owe back pay, and how much, won’t be decided until the new rates are set. The UFW has said it will push for higher wages to apply retroactively.

California isn’t waiting. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law last month, AB 2646, that sets a $19.75 hourly minimum for H-2A workers and the local employees working alongside them, starting Jan. 1.

Meanwhile, demand for guest workers keeps climbing. H-2A certifications in the first half of fiscal 2026 ran nearly 17% ahead of the year before, putting the program on track for a record. Whatever the Labor Department settles on by Dec. 30 will set pay for hundreds of thousands of workers heading into 2027.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“As I learned years ago, you can take two different kinds of hikes on the trails around Jackson Hole,” Warsh opened with. “I can sum up my hikes with former Vice Chairman Don Kohn in two words: I survived. These steely marathon death marches revealed a side of Don I wasn’t ready for.”

“There’s another kind of hike—one I associate with Chairman Ben Bernanke, my old colleague. With Ben, it’s a much more leisurely pace, an easy stroll along the wandering trails at the Rockefeller Preserve. So before setting out, do a wellness check and ask yourself: ‘Is this a Kohn day or a Bernanke day?'”

Kohn had been largely unaware that he would be featured so prominently in the speech, he told Fortune.

Warsh had approached him moments before taking the stage to say he hoped he didn’t mind the reference—a little humor, Kohn believed, to break the tension. He added: “I thought the whole speech was very good and moved in a constructive way, laid out some principles … and then, importantly, discussed the economic situation, which he had refused to do in July.”

Kohn had been largely unaware that he would be featured so prominently in the speech, he told Fortune.

Warsh had approached him moments before taking the stage to say he hoped he didn’t mind the reference—a little humor, Kohn believed, to break the tension. He added: “I thought the whole speech was very good and moved in a constructive way, laid out some principles … and then, importantly, discussed the economic situation, which he had refused to do in July.”

“That was a mistake, and he’s a very smart guy—he recognized his error, and he corrected it, so I was very encouraged by the nuanced discussion.”

Markets—particularly Treasuries—shifted uncomfortably, with yields rising, following the July Federal Open Market Committee meeting, in part because Warsh had remained firmly against sharing any forward guidance.

A matter of weeks later—Warsh’s 100th day in the role, to be exact—analysts and economists were steadied by the insights Warsh shared at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City’s annual conference. The speech included observations that were hawkish on inflation, mindful of the real economy, and posed questions about the promise of artificial intelligence.

This, too, was a well-timed shift in perspective on Warsh’s behalf, noted Kohn. Skeptics are concerned that Warsh has too much faith in AI and the potential boon it may offer to monetary policy. But Kohn countered: “He was right to say there are a bunch of questions here … I thought it was much more constructive than the way he had been talking about AI before.”

Fed watchers remain concerned about how determinedly Warsh will stick to the beliefs he expressed before and during his early days back at the central bank. Claudia Sahm, creator of the famed Sahm Recession Indicator, previously told Fortune she was so surprised by Warsh’s definitiveness on forward guidance that she nearly “fell out of her chair.”

Kohn suggests Warsh’s first six months on the job have demonstrated to markets that he is willing to adjust: “I’ve been encouraged that he’s learned, but I’m not surprised.”

Kohn said he had initially been disappointed in Warsh’s stern rebuffs for outlook insights, saying: “He had such a firm view on this ‘no forward guidance’ that he was kind of using that to avoid talking about the economy, because he realized if he talked about the economy and inflation, people would pick up where he expected rates to go—even if he didn’t say anything about where he expected rates to go.”

The Fed veteran added: “And then I was encouraged and very, very pleased with the Jackson Hole speech because he recognized he really owed it to the institution, to the markets, to the Congress, to his accountability, to say more, and he did it.”

Beginning hikes

As market tools rapidly digested the contents of Warsh’s speech in a bid to define the path of monetary policy, inquisitive investors may have questioned why Warsh chose to open his speech with talk of a hike—though in the distinctly literal sense, rather than the monetary.

Kohn suggests his hikes’ reputation may have been somewhat embellished. Remembering a trek through Paintbrush Canyon with Warsh and Carney as comfortable enough that the three were talking throughout, he told Fortune: “We had an extended discussion, as I remember, of inflation targets, nominal GDP targets—it was intellectual as well as physical exercise.”

Warsh at the time was on the Fed’s Board of Governors before leaving in 2011, while Carney served as Governor of the Bank of Canada between 2008 and 2013, when he became Governor of the Bank of England.

Kohn said his hikes’ reputation may be somewhat embellished. Remembering a trek through Paintbrush Canyon with Warsh and Carney as comfortable enough that the three were talking throughout, he told Fortune: “We had an extended discussion, as I remember, of inflation targets, nominal GDP targets—it was intellectual as well as physical exercise.”

Away from the conference rooms, Kohn said, the hikes offered a chance to trade ideas with counterparts at other central banks in a more relaxed, less guarded setting. “I remember any number of hikes over the years with lots of different people in which we had terrific conversations—particularly with people from other central banks [about] ‘How did you handle that issue? What do you think of the paper we just heard?’ That kind of thing.

“The hiking … was an important chance to trade ideas, find out what’s going on inside another central bank, what they’re thinking about. It’s a good forum for an open discussion of sometimes difficult issues.”  

If Kohn’s hike is an (inadvertent) “death march” and Bernanke’s is a pleasant stroll, what does a path set by Warsh look like? “He came in with some fixed ideas, and he has adapted as he’s surveyed—as he’s walked through the landscape,” said Kohn. “Being inside has given him full insight into what was actually going on in the institution, and what the resources were, and how his fellow policymakers thought, what the staff was doing, what research was going on.”

“I guess he’s adapted as he’s learned—I would hope everybody would do that.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“The day I sold MicroSolutions, I took off my watch and I said, ‘I’m never going to wear a watch again because that means I’m working on somebody else’s time,’” Cuban said on a recent episode of The Diary of a CEO podcast with Steven Bartlett. He made about $2 million from selling that software company in 1990—a move that launched him on his path to major career success. 

Cuban, 68, is now worth an estimated $10.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. But he told Bartlett that getting that rich was never really the goal.

“I just thought I hated being broke,” Cuban said. “I wanted to control my own destiny. That was a big thing, and I wanted to be able to control my own time.”

His parents never had that option, he said: “They always were obligated to somebody else. They had to show up at work.” 

The former Shark Tank star has relaxed his watch rule now, sporting an Apple Watch these days for the data. But the idea behind the rule does still extend to how he dresses.

“Why I won’t wear a tie? Swag isn’t how you dress,” Cuban said. “Swag is being able to tell somebody else how they dress.”

Cuban, formerly the majority owner of the NBA Dallas Mavericks, also has more casual business practices. He prefers emails over phone calls, which he says gives him more time to put together a thoughtful response. And in a 2016 Q&A with behavior change tech company Thrive Global, he described his best life hack as skipping meetings and calls altogether unless someone is handing him a check. He said that habit saves him hours each day.

How Mark Cuban’s history shaped his habits

Cuban’s drive for success started well before he had billions on paper. He was raised by a working-class family outside Pittsburgh, and he told Bartlett he was the “fat kid” in school who would do almost anything for attention. He once wore a shirt to class with profanity on it, and another time ripped a pair of jeans from the hem up to his hip and stapled them back together. 

Even with that attention-grabbing, most of his classmates didn’t remember him once he became famous. Someone even circled the wrong photo of him in his high school yearbook, he told Bartlett.

But that insecurity fueled him, he said, because he wanted to “prove people wrong. Enrolling at Indiana University felt like a fresh start for him—and that’s where he covered his junior-year costs by running a chain letter out of his dorm.

After graduating, Cuban moved to Dallas and sold software until his boss fired him. That pushed him to launch MicroSolutions, which he sold in 1990 for $6 million, but he didn’t reinvest the windfall. 

“I did the exact opposite,” Cuban told Bartlett. He bought a lifetime pass on American Airlines, and he said his mission was to “get as f-cked up as possible with as many people as possible in as many countries as possible, and just enjoy.”

Even more money came later on after Cuban started Broadcast.com and sold it to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion in stock. That pushed Cuban’s net worth over the $1 billion mark. 

That deal “changed everything,” Cuban said. “Because it meant instead of hustling and worrying about what came next, I got to do whatever the f-ck I wanted to do, and that was the beauty of the whole thing.”

That freedom let him buy the Dallas Mavericks in 2000 for $285 million.

“Never in a million years would have crossed my mind that I would own an NBA team,” Cuban said on the Diary of a CEO podcast. He later sold the majority stake in late 2023 in a deal with $3.5 billion. Today, Cuban is focused on Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs, which he started in 2022. The company sells generic and select brand-name prescriptions directly to consumers and health care providers, eliminating pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) that tend to inflate retail drug prices. 

While Cuban is sitting on a massive fortune, he said money only goes so far. 

“If you’re miserable when you’re poor, good chance you’re gonna be miserable when you’re rich,” Cuban said. “Money can’t change who you are.”

Still, “I like being rich a whole lot more than I like being broke,” he added. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama told a crowd at the Cleveland Public Auditorium on Saturday. In the three days since, Trump, the White House’s official X account, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have fired back; the chain’s longtime designer has weighed in; and the Cheesecake Factory has reported record quarterly revenue.

Obama was in Ohio campaigning for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, who faces Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is trying to unseat Republican Sen. Jon Husted, ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. He spent much of the speech hammering the administration over the war with Iran and the rising cost of living before turning to Trump’s aesthetic choices on Pennsylvania Avenue.

“He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. The guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? Everything—more gold,” Obama said before delivering the punchline.

The ballroom, rising where the East Wing stood until its demolition last October, is being funded largely by private donors, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Lockheed Martin, as Fortune has reported. Trump has put the project’s cost at up to $400 million, double the initial estimate, while a contractor’s internal estimate reviewed by the Washington Post put it at $600 million.

Trump and his administration pile on

Trump responded Monday. “For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before flying to a campaign stop in Mississippi. “Guys like Obama don’t see it. You don’t see dirt. He doesn’t see filth. He doesn’t see broken ornaments on a building.”

At a rally in Corinth, Miss., that night, Trump defended the chain, calling it a successful company and saying Obama “doesn’t like successful companies.” He also dismissed the renovation spending as “peanuts.”

The White House’s official X account joined in with a mock Cheesecake Factory menu touting administration policies, with items like “The Border Security Special” and “The American Energy Feast.” “Since we’re talking about The Cheesecake Factory, the only thing bigger than the menu is the list of President Trump’s accomplishments,” the post read. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told USA Today that “no other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.”

Bessent went a step further, eating lunch Monday at a Cheesecake Factory near the White House. Afterward, he told a Fox Business reporter, “This is the man who built the museum [that] looks like Darth Vader’s tomb,” an apparent reference to the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Online, Trump supporters and fans of the chain cast Obama’s comment as snobbish and elitist. “The coastal elites hate Americana,” writer Evan Barker posted on X. “They might think they are ‘too good’ for the Cheesecake Factory, or find the decor to be tacky, but most regular Americans don’t.”

Obama’s defenders: The chain is famously over the top

Others argued the backlash missed the point. MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough called the Republican response “stupid” and hypocritical given Trump’s own rhetoric. “It’s embarrassing,” he said.

Democratic policy adviser Alex Jacquez posted that the Cheesecake Factory, “an establishment I love,” is “so infamously gaudy and over-the-top the designer regularly gives interviews about it.” He shared a screenshot from a 2017 Eater article in which the chain’s longtime designer, Rick McCormack, said, “If I try to describe to you what it looks like, you’d probably think it was one of the most horrible-looking places around.”

“Pod Save America” host Jon Favreau made a similar point, asking whether Americans who see the chain as a special-occasion splurge also think “the restaurant’s design is so beautiful that the president should copy it for the White House.”

McCormack, the chain’s former vice president of design, has now weighed in himself, and he isn’t siding with Obama. He told CNN the restaurants look nothing like Trump’s White House and that he found the comparison “a little bit sad” given the challenges facing the country, calling it “the pettiness of politics.”

Decor aside, Americans keep showing up

Whatever voters think of the decor, they keep filling the booths. The company reported Tuesday that third-quarter revenue rose 14% to a record $1.03 billion, up from $907.2 million a year earlier. Comparable sales at Cheesecake Factory restaurants jumped 15.2%, and adjusted earnings of $1.02 a share topped Wall Street’s forecasts. The company opened six restaurants in the quarter and still expects to open as many as 26 this year.

“The Cheesecake Factory has long enjoyed tremendous brand affinity across generations, and its ability to attract younger guests reinforces the enduring appeal and relevance of our namesake concept,” chairman and CEO David Overton said in the release, which credited “significant engagement across social media” for part of the sales growth.

The results extend a remarkable run for a casual-dining chain at a time when many restaurants are struggling. As Fortune has reported, sit-down chains like the Cheesecake Factory and Chili’s have been winning over diners as fast-food prices climb. The stock has more than doubled this year and hit an all-time high of $118.63 earlier this month. The company is also a fixture on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list, where it has appeared 13 years running.

Shares rose about 1.6% to $110.13 on Monday, the first trading day after Obama’s remark, then fell 1.5% to $108.47 on Tuesday ahead of the after-the-bell earnings report. They slipped further in after-hours trading.

The Cheesecake Factory has not commented publicly on Obama’s remark, and the topic did not come up on the company’s earnings call. The company did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

And it’s all because when he was 12 years old, his mom once mocked his writing ambitions. Connie Zastoupil was at her wits’ end after teachers told her he wasn’t concentrating on the lesson—and he’s still punishing her decades later.

Speaking on The Moment podcast with host Brian Koppelman, Tarantino previously revealed: “My mom always had a hard time about my scholastic non-ability,” adding that she “was b–ching at me” about writing screenplays. 

“And then in the middle of her little tirade, she said, ‘Oh, and by the way, this little ‘writing career,’ with the finger quotes and everything. This little ‘writing career’ that you’re doing? That s— is over.'”

That last line there prompted the “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” director to make a promise to himself that he’s still holding onto today—and that vow is currently going viral years later on social media.

“When she said that to me in that sarcastic way, I was in my head and I go, ‘OK lady, when I become a successful writer, you will never see one penny from my success. There will be no house for you. There’s no vacation for you, no Elvis Cadillac for mommy. You get nothing because you said that.’”

And he’s stuck to it, with one exception. Tarantino said he’s still never bought his mother a house or a car, though “I helped her out of a jam with the IRS.”

Tarantino went on to write and direct Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, Django Unchained, cementing his status as one of Hollywood’s most successful filmmakers in Hollywood—and has earned millions in the process. His mother, who is a 75-year-old nurse living in Tennessee, hasn’t seen any of it.

Tarantino grew up with a teen mom who let him drop out of school at 15

Koppelman urged Tarantino to forget his vow, because his moms jab might have helped fuel his drive to succeed, as opposed to hindering it, by pushing him to prove her wrong. But he was having none of it: “Remember: There are consequences for your sarcastic tone about what’s meaningful to them,” Tarantino said.

His mother may have mocked his writing, but she also had a hand in making him the filmmaker he is today.

She was just 16 when she gave birth to him in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963. His father, an aspiring actor named Tony Tarantino, left before he was born, and she raised her son while working double shifts as a nurse. 

After moving to Los Angeles, she let him watch far more than most kids. Her then-husband, musician Curtis Zastoupil, took him to film screenings, and she allowed him to see grown-up films like Carnal Knowledge and Deliverance.

By 14, he’d written a screenplay called Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit. And by 16, she allowed him to drop out of highschool, as long as he got a job.

He became an usher at a Torrance cinema, then spent five years working at the video store Video Archives, soaking up every film on the shelves—and the rest is history. “When people ask me if I went to film school, I tell them, ‘No, I went to films,’” Tarantino once told Rolling Stones. 

Tarantino’s best money advice: ‘Don’t become an employee of your house’

Tarantino isn’t just stingy with his mother. He’s also living in the same home since 1996—and he didn’t splash out on the LA mansion until long after he could afford it.

And he even warned fellow Hollywood director Eli Roth to be careful not to get trapped by the lifestyle that comes with success.

“‘Don’t buy a house as soon as you’re successful, hold on to your money,’ Tarantino told Roth, advising him to wait “until you can afford to completely pay for it outright.”

Many in the industry use their first million-dollar paycheck to get a mortgage, Roth told Fortune. “But you basically become an employee of your house. So every decision that you make becomes, ‘Can I pay my mortgage?’ Not, ‘Is this best for my career?’

Tarantino told Roth that he waited years before purchasing his current home for exactly that reason: “He goes, ‘I didn’t buy a house until Jackie Brown. Everyone else thought I was going to buy one after Pulp Fiction. I waited because I didn’t want to get stuck being an employee of my house—and then I didn’t have to worry about it.”

Roth took the advice to heart. After Hostel, which cost $3.8 million and made $80 million, “all I could hear was Quentin’s words in my head,” he said. He kept renting and didn’t buy a house until he was 35, in 2007. “If I was stuck as an employee of my house, I would have had to take some directing job that I wouldn’t want to do, and then I would have missed the opportunity of a lifetime.”

It’s a mantra shared by Warren Buffett, who still lives in the Omaha house he bought for $31,500 in 1958.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Analysts have been poring over Anthropic’s filing this week, and so far are already expecting OpenAI’s version to tell a different financial story. Specifically, it could have two potential advantages over Anthropic. The first is in the revenue growth rate. Second, is the diversity of the business, specifically OpenAI’s consumer business.

Anthropic’s revenue growth slows as OpenAI picks up speed. But what about margins?

In the first six months of 2026, Anthropic’s revenue hit $16.3 billion, a 1,300% year-over-year increase—just five years after its founding in 2021. That’s the fastest growth rate among multiple other eye-popping growth rates the company has seen in recent years. In 2023, Anthropic’s revenue was $41 million, and in 2024 it grew 841% to $386 million. in 2025, its revenue jumped again to $4.6 billion, up 1,088%.

“A company hitting this kind of scale this quickly is unprecedented,” Aman Verjee, General Partner and Founder of Practical Venture Capital, told Fortune. Others we spoke to called it “stunning” and “extraordinary.” The consensus is the growth rate is potentially historic.

But investors—and Anthropic itself—don’t expect the trend to continue. “We do not expect our revenue will continue to grow at comparable rates, and we cannot assure you that it will continue to grow at all,” Anthropic’s S-1 reads. The company attributes its ultra-fast growth rate to “early-stage adoption dynamics, the nascency of the AI market, and rapid initial customer expansion,” and notes that it “may not be sustainable over time, and may decline significantly and more rapidly than we anticipate” as the market matures.

We’re already seeing evidence of that slowing. Although the S-1 does not include Anthropic’s third-quarter results, it mentions that revenue was 86-times its Q4 2024 revenue—a sneaky detail spotted by Fortune‘s AI editor Jeremy Kahn. Since Q4 2024 revenue was $197 million, that implies its Q3 2026 revenue was roughly $16.9 billion. That’s a 47% quarter-on-quarter increase from Q2 to Q3, a sharp drop from its 132% increase between the fourth quarter of 2025 and Q1 2026, and then a 144% increase between Q1 and Q2 2026.

OpenAI’s revenue growth, meanwhile, seems to be picking up steam (from what we can surmise from leaks and executive comments), and sources are expecting its S-1 will reveal accelerating growth on the top line. In August, its CFO Sarah Friar told investors the company now makes more money on enterprise customers than consumers, CNBC reported. Perhaps more concerningly for Anthropic, software engineers are increasingly using OpenAI’s models after a series of price cuts have made them among the most affordable on the market, The Information reported this week.

Anthropic is not going down without a fight. Seemingly in response to OpenAI’s traction with developers, Anthropic has also been cutting costs and offering promotional discounts. Meanwhile, it’s signing up for billion-dollar compute deals that may not pay off, as Fortune‘s Jeremy Kahn and Sebastian Herrera reported. Is the AI business a race to the bottom, with thinning margins for both companies?

“Extraordinary revenue growth doesn’t necessarily trend into extra extraordinary investment returns,” Jonathan Tower, the Founder and Managing Partner of the venture firm Catapult, told Fortune. “My broader concern is that investors are confusing the magnitude of the AI opportunity with the profitability of its participants. AI could become the most consequential technology of our lifetime and still produce some of the most spectacular investment losses of our generation.”

Once considered a weakness, OpenAI’s consumer business could prove a major strength

Ironically, even though OpenAI has been racing to catch up to Anthropic’s enterprise business for the bulk of this year, the investors we spoke to believe its consumer business could prove a hidden strength.

OpenAI has a “strong consumer brand and presence,” Verjee said. That’s an “advantage” that could translate into higher margins, Tower added.

One consumer-centric revenue stream OpenAI has also been working hard to increase is its advertising platform. This month it reported it has 100,000 advertisers signed up to serve ads in ChatGPT. This week, it debuted another ad format, featuring multiple images, as it continues to evolve its offerings.

Another unique, consumer-facing advantage for OpenAI could be its forthcoming family of hardware devices, crafted by the legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive. OpenAI has promised to disclose more details by the end of the year. These devices could extend consumers’ relationships with ChatGPT into the physical world, entrenching them in an Apple-like ecosystem of AI assistants.

Anthropic knows its consumer business is a weakness, and potentially a blind spot its competitors could exploit to get ahead. The S-1 references unnamed competitors with “stronger consumer-facing businesses, larger consumer user bases, more established brands, broader distribution, or deeper customer relationships.” Those companies could leverage those relationships to build their enterprise businesses, in order to “compete more effectively with us,” Anthropic says.

Yet Anthropic doesn’t plan to go toe-to-toe with its competitors in the consumer business, which it says “would require significant time and resources beyond our current plans.”

“The timing of the IPO benefits Anthropic by allowing it to raise the most, the earliest, and to benefit from persistent equity market enthusiasm,” James Gellert, Executive Chairman at the financial intelligence company RapidRatings told Fortune. The success of Anthropic’s public offering could be among the biggest factors in OpenAI’s future success—for better or worse.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The National Retail Federation expects Americans to spend a record $13.5 billion on Halloween this year, up from $13.1 billion a year prior. But even so, economic pressures are making some cut costs. A separate survey of 2,000 U.S. adults from LendingTree found 61% are skipping on candy, costumes, and decor because of economic uncertainty. 

Meanwhile, nearly one in four (24%) Halloween celebrators expect to go into debt for the holiday. Gen Zers are the most likely to anticipate borrowing (43%), followed by parents with children under 18 (40%), and millennials (35%).

“Gas prices are up, food prices remain elevated, there’s lots of uncertainty, so I think what people are doing is trying to really make the best of it,” Neil Saunders, managing director and retail analyst at GlobalData, told Fortune. “There’s definitely a prioritization of spending for these little indulgent moments.”

That instinct to preserve some special purchases in spite of pressure from higher prices reflects a kind of little treat economy, when consumers splurge on smaller pleasures even if they’re squeezed by costs. Saunders said Halloween spending is an example of a tradeoff where people forgo buying “more disposable” things like skulls and pumpkin decor to spend on purchases with greater emotional value, such as costumes for their children.

“It’s really important to make the kids feel good, so that’s an area where consumers will often splash out a bit,” he said. 

Parents are among the biggest Halloween spenders. Those with children under 18 expect to shell out an average of $269 on Halloween this year, compared with $162 across all groups, per LendingTree. And 58% of parents expect to spend more than they did last year, compared with 52% of Gen Zers and 49% of millennials.

Younger consumers are also embracing spending despite financial constraints. Gen Z consumers in particular are known to indulge in “treat culture,” making room in their budgets for jewelry, clothing, snacks, and beverages even as they struggle to build savings. Social media could be turbocharging the spending. LendingTree found that 43% of respondents said it led them to spend more on Halloween than they otherwise would, including nearly three in four (74%) Gen Zers, who can be prone to financial FOMO. 

The younger the consumer, the more likely they borrow money for Halloween as well: 43% of Gen Zers and 35% of millennials expect to do so, compared to 14% of Gen Xers and 2% of baby boomers, per LendingTree. More than half (51%) of those who have previously gone into debt for Halloween said they regretted overspending, citing pressure to keep up with the Joneses and higher-than-expected prices. 

Using budget tricks to keep the treats

Yet, NRF’s record $13.5 billion spending forecast doesn’t mean the average person is splurging. NRF expects consumers to spend $115.14 per person, up just 69 cents from last year. LendingTree’s survey found that Halloween enjoyers expect to spend an average of $162, down 16% from $192 last year.

They’re also finding ways to stretch their budgets without giving up Halloween spending altogether. LendingTree found that 85% are taking at least one step to save money, with some purchasing fewer Halloween items and others setting spending limits. 

They’re also getting an earlier start. Nearly half (48%) of Gen Z respondents began shopping in September, according to PwC’s survey of 2,028 adults. Across generations, 49% of consumers began Halloween shopping in September or earlier, compared with 34% a decade ago, according to NRF. 

NRF also found discount stores are also the top destination for Halloween purchases with 39% of shoppers planning to visit, followed by specialty stores like Spirit Halloween. 

“Consumers continue to make Halloween a spending priority, but they are also approaching the season with affordability in mind,” Allison Zeller, NRF’s vice president of industry and consumer insights, said. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“With or without the CLARITY Act, entering the U.S. market is part of our company’s long-term strategy,” Gracy Chen, CEO of Bitget, the world’s sixth-largest crypto exchange by trading volume, tells Fortune. “We are heading towards it, little by little.”

Hopes to pass the CLARITY Act died last month, following concerns by U.S. Senate Democrats over potential conflicts-of-interest, specifically that President Donald Trump and other senior government officials may stand to profit via personal cryptocurrency ventures. The CLARITY Act failed to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a Senate filibuster.

Still, in Chen’s view, the CLARITY Act’s failure doesn’t undermine an increasingly crypto-friendly regime in the U.S. “Since early 2025, the general vibe around crypto regulation [in the U.S.] has been much more friendly,” she says.

Bitget plans to launch a U.S. website next year, with a small local team already applying for licenses. Chen travels to the U.S. roughly quarterly to meet regulators and partners.

“It’s a market that I think has long-term value,” she explains. “Short-term, I’m aware that we need to invest a lot. We’re not rushing ourselves—we have our pace.”

Recovering from a $388 million hack

The expansion push comes as Bitget is still rebuilding trust after the September hack, in which hackers stole nearly $388 million from the exchange through vulnerabilities in third-party products. It’s the largest hack in the crypto industry by far this year. 

“Some users decided to leave the platform. It’s not a big number—it’s not significant—but they’re people that I want to win back,” Chen says. “Asset security is their number one concern.”

The exchange has since rebuilt and revoked all the credentials involved in the incident, reviewed the third-party vulnerabilities that let the hackers in, and shared incident details with outside investigators, including Mandiant and SlowMist, so the industry can learn from the attack. It is also leaning on AI in its cybersecurity work.

“Human beings have a limit: we get tired and we need to sleep,” Chen argues. “But AI can read code more easily and at a larger scale… so we’re using it in our monitoring, and in our defenses against fraud and money laundering.”

The CEO is also putting boots on the ground to assuage her clients’ fears. “The incident is something that [our users have] brought up a lot,” Chen admits. “This afternoon, right after this interview, I’m going to visit an institutional client at their office—hopefully, we can clear those concerns.”

She acknowledges that the crypto industry as a whole remains “very targeted by hackers”, but says the recent accident reaffirmed her view that exchanges have to learn to protect users from financial losses in the event of a potential breach. 

Bitget launched a protection fund in 2022 to safeguard user assets against extreme market events or security breaches not caused by user misconduct. The exchange drew on the fund after the hack to cover compromised wallets, then topped it back up using more than $300 million from its own reserves.

“I’m sad that we needed to use it, but I’m so glad that we had this protection fund, to assure users that a hack like this can be totally borne by the platform,” she says.

Thailand next, then an IPO

The recent hack hasn’t stopped Bitget in its tracks. On Oct. 20, the exchange announced it would be entering Thailand via a planned acquisition of Bangkok-based digital asset exchange GMO-Z.com Cryptonomics, and Chen says it’s also eyeing other Southeast Asian markets like Indonesia and Vietnam. 

“Many jurisdictions in Southeast Asia have rolled out crypto-related regulations 2025 and 2026,” she says. “For Asia in general, if there are good licensing schemes and partners, we’re interested in at least having a chat.”

Still, she’s not interested in either Singapore or Hong Kong, two Asian financial centers that have tried at times to win over crypto companies. “Singapore is a relatively small market, and compliance cost is pretty high,” Chen says.

Chen is also looking to take Bitget public, with an IPO planned within the next five years.

“I would say tian shi, di li, ren he,” Chen concludes, citing a Chinese idiom for the right timing, the right place, and the right people. “We need good conditions and a crypto-friendly environment in order to function.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

This risk, disclosed by Anthropic Monday, comes as the Trump administration has tried to restrict the number of non-Americans working for companies in the U.S. Although Anthropic did not mention President Trump or the administration directly in the context of immigration policies, the risk brings renewed attention to concerns by companies that cutting back on foreign workers will make the American AI industry less competitive as it struggles for AI dominance with countries like China.

The AI company, which is preparing for a potential $2 trillion IPO as early as next month, made clear in its prospectus that good talent gives it an edge.

“Talent is one of our most important advantages, and maintaining our talent density requires retaining exceptional people and recruiting world-class talent, including researchers and engineers, who share our mission,” the company wrote.

At the same time, U.S. immigration policy could be an obstacle to recruiting the best people, it said.

“Changes to immigration policies that restrain the flow of professional and technical talent, including but not limited to U.S. immigration policies, may inhibit our ability to recruit and retain highly qualified employees. If we are unable to effectively manage the foregoing risks, our prospects, business, financial condition, and results of operations could be adversely affected,” the company wrote in its S-1.

Anthropic’s notice to investors comes as President Trump has attempted to restrict U.S. employers’ access to foreign workers. In September last year, the administration introduced a $100,000 fee for certain petitions under the H-1B program, which applies to highly skilled workers in specialty occupations. A federal judge in Massachusetts vacated the policy change in June, contradicting a previous order by another judge upholding the fee hike. The Trump administration has appealed the ruling. Court orders continue to block collection of the fee.

Beyond the $100,000 fee, the administration has also ordered more scrutiny of companies laying off American workers. 

When it announced the $100,000 fee last year, the administration said it was meant to “address the abuse of the program, stop the undercutting of wages, and protect our national security.” 

Still, companies and trade groups have pushed back on the administration’s argument that higher visa fees will benefit American workers. 

TechNet, a trade association whose members include Anthropic, Amazon, Google, and Meta, last month urged U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to withdraw a separate proposed $103,265 fee on H-1B applications. 

The group argued access to skilled foreign workers helps its members recruit and retain talent and maintain U.S. competitiveness. The proposed fee would apply in addition to the $100,000 fee the Trump administration previously announced, if it survives court challenges

“TechNet’s member companies depend on a skilled workforce to develop technologies, expand U.S. operations, and create opportunities for American workers,” the letter read.

Anthropic itself has previously advocated for expanding access to skilled worker visas. In a 2023 letter to the Department of Homeland Security and USCIS, the company wrote that it had successfully used the H-1B visa program to fill some positions “requiring advanced skills.”

“Hiring exceptionally skilled artificial intelligence experts remains challenging due to the domestic shortage of qualified STEM workers and limitations of the H-1B system,” the letter read.

Hiring highly specialized employees is increasingly important for the company given how it is expanding its data center footprint as the demand for its AI products grows. The company said in its S-1 filing that it has “limited experience in managing such data center infrastructure projects at scale,” and would need to hire people with relevant experience to succeed in this area.

At the same time, Anthropic also said it uses its own technology to expand without increasing headcount proportionally. 

It said it increased its revenue per employee to more than $6.6 million for the previous 12 months ending in September, a 371% increase from the $1.4 million revenue per employee for the 12 months before September 2025.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com