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Oracle's rough quarter just erased $25 billion from Larry Ellison's fortune.Andrew Harnik/Getty ImagesLarry Ellison took a $25 billion hit to his net worth after Oracle shares plunged.This marks one of the biggest single-day wealth drops in 2025.Ellison briefly took the top spot as the world's richest person in September.Larry Ellison just took a $25 billion hit to his net worth.The Oracle cofounder saw billions wiped off his fortune on Thursday, according to estimates on Bloomberg's Billionaire Index, after the software giant's shares fell by more than 11% on weaker-than-expected earnings results.The hit brought Ellison's net worth down to $258 billion, per the Index, marking one of the biggest single-day wealth drops of 2025.Other billionaires suffered steeper or similar losses in April: Elon Musk lost $35 billion in just three days, and Mark Zuckerberg shed about $24 billion as Trump's tariff plans sparked fears of retaliation and recession.Earlier this year, Ellison briefly took the crown of world's richest person, overtaking Musk in September when Oracle shares surged as much as 43% due to a strong forecast for its cloud business.Oracle missed Wall Street's revenue expectations in its most recent earnings results, which were reported on Wednesday. Shares fell more than 11% in after-hours trading, extending a slide that began in October as investors questioned the company's breakneck spending on artificial intelligence infrastructure.Despite missing estimates, revenue was up 14% year-over-year during the quarter. But that wasn't enough to calm concerns over the scale and cost of its expansion.Those worries dominated Wednesday's call with analysts.Clay Magouyrk, Oracle's co-CEO, pushed back on fears that the company might need more than $100 billion to build out its data centers — a figure some analysts had floated."We expect we will need less, if not substantially less, money raised than that," he said, adding that Oracle's debt remains "investment-grade."Even after Thursday's plunge, the Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows that Ellison's net worth still remains ahead of most tech titans, including Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.Read the original article on Business Insider

It's hard to stop a curious legal associate from pasting a draft into a free, browser-based chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini.Didem Mente/Anadolu via Getty ImagesLaw firms can't stop lawyers from tinkering with chatbots, so they're adding hallucination detectors.Tools like Clearbrief scan legal drafts for the fake cases and facts that AI tools sometimes invent.Courts are catching more bogus citations in legal filings every day.Law firm Cozen O'Connor has a rule against using publicly available chatbots to draft legal filings. But after a judge penalized two of its lawyers for citing fake cases, the firm is adding some extra protection: an AI hallucination detector.Cozen O'Connor is now testing software, made by a startup called Clearbrief, that scans legal briefs for made-up facts and produces a report. Think spell-check, except instead of flagging typos, it spots the fictional cases and citations that generative tools sometimes invent."You have to be pragmatic," said Kristina Bakardjiev, the Cozen O'Connor partner tasked with harnessing technology to serve lawyers and their clients. She said lawyers will play around with chatbots whether the tools are authorized or not.Stung by embarrassing AI hallucinations, the legal field has adopted bans on general-use chatbots and AI assistants. But it's hard to stop a curious associate from pasting a draft into a free, browser-based chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Now law firms and legal tech companies are scrambling to lower the risk of bogus citations and catch those that sneak through before they land in front of a judge.Two of Cozen O'Connor's defense lawyers in September admitted they had filed a document riddled with fake cases after one of them used ChatGPT to draft it, against firm policy. A Nevada district court judge gave the firm a choice: remove the lawyers from the case and pay $2,500 in sanctions each, or have the pair write to their former law school deans and bar authorities explaining the fiasco and offering to speak in seminars on topics like "professional conduct."Both lawyers went with option No. 2. Cozen also fired the lawyer who had used ChatGPT.Earlier this year, Damien Charlotin, a legal data analyst and consultant, began tracking cases in which a court had discovered hallucinated content in a legal filing. Charlotin tallied 120 cases between April 2023 and May 2025. By December, his count had hit 660, with the rate of new cases accelerating to four or five per day.The number of documented cases remains small relative to the total volume of legal filings, Charlotin said. Most cases in his database involved self-represented litigants or lawyers from small or solo firms. When large firms were involved, the hallucinations often slipped in through the work of junior staff, paralegals, experts, or consultants, or through processes like formatting footnotes, Charlotin said.Hallucinated content is causing headaches in other professions, too. In October, consulting firm Deloitte agreed to pay a partial refund to the Australian government for a $290,000 report after officials found it was peppered with allegedly AI-generated errors.Straying from the walled gardenAI hallucinations are hard to eliminate because they're baked into the way chatbots work. Large language models are trained to predict the word that is most likely to come next, given the words before it.Michael Dahn, a senior vice president at Thomson Reuters who leads global product teams for legal-research service Westlaw, says the model makers can't get hallucinations to zero for answering open-ended questions about the world. However, companies can dramatically reduce their risk by forcing a large language model to cite from a specific data set, like a corpus of case law and treatises. The model can still mismatch or overlook content, but wholesale fabrications are far less likely.Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis are selling that…

Alyssa Powell/BIBrick-and-mortar business has long been the foundation of real estate — figuratively and literally. But as the industry adapts to new technologies and rapidly changing market conditions, new leaders are stepping in to meet unique new challenges.Each year, Business Insider highlights up-and-coming agents, architects, founders, and other figures making an outsize impact in real estate. The process starts with nominations from CEOs, company presidents, and managing partners. To be considered, nominees must be US-based, under 40, and stand out from their peers. Business Insider's editors make the final selections.This year's class of rising stars comes from a wide array of backgrounds, with prior expertise in everything from construction and marketing to private equity. From making real estate investing more attainable to developing 500-square-foot homes to fit in your backyard, they're addressing some of the industry's biggest challenges head-on.Meet Business Insider's 18 Rising Stars of Real Estate for 2025. Tarek Afifi, 28Corporate finance and investor relations manager, Better Home & FinanceTarek Afifi, the corporate finance and investor relations manager at Better Home & Finance.Photo Courtesy of Tarek AfifiTarek Afifi said his secret to success is his deep belief in the American dream.The 28-year-old, who serves as the corporate finance and investor relations manager at Better Home & Finance, said he gets satisfaction from shaping investors' perception of the online mortgage lender — and helping the company's hard work get reflected in its stock price.He attributes his success to how deeply he believes in Better's mission, and said the idea of helping Americans buy a home brings him satisfaction."Everyone wants to own equity in a home that they can live in, but also, build wealth off of," he said. "What really attracted me to it, I think, is the fact that it really is applicable to all walks of life," he said of buying a home.Better shares have soared more than 400% since April of last year, around the time Afifi joined the company. That's due to investor optimism on the company's future earnings growth, as well as a surge of interest in the stock after the hedge funder Eric Jackson made a high-profile bet on the company.Better reported a net loss of $27 million in the second quarter, down from a $40 million net loss in the first quarter. Its funded loan volume for the quarter also rose to $1.2 billion, up 38% for the quarter.Afifi is optimistic about the direction of the residential real estate market over the next year. He expects refinance and mortgage activity to bloom in 2026 as the Fed continues to cut interest rates."Everyone's kind of positioning themselves for the refi rally," he said. "So it's a symbiotic relationship and I think that it's something we're all looking forward to seeing."Maria Barrios, 35Executive director of operations and CFO, The National Association of Hispanic Real Estate ProfessionalsPhoto Courtesy of Maria BarriosThe rate of Hispanic homeownership rose to a record 49.5% in 2023. Maria Barrios wants to make that statistic even higher.As the executive director of operations and chief financial officer of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals (NAHREP), Barrios is central to the nonprofit's mission to promote homeownership and expand access to credit in the Hispanic community through education and advocacy. As of 2025, the organization has 85 chapters nationwide, with an additional 30 in development and nearly 58,000 active members."While our mission is to promote sustainable Hispanic homeownership, we're about much more than that," Barrios told Business Insider. "We understand that homeownership isn't the end goal for Hispanics; it's just the beginning of their financial journey."Barrios has played a key role in…

Barak Turovsky was Chief AI Officer at General Motors.Barak TurovskyAs General Motors' first chief AI officer, Barak Turovsky hired talent and mapped organizational change.The CAIO role is growing in popularity as companies look to effectively implement AI tools.Turovsky compared being CAIO to being a master chef, who needs to make sure all parts of a restaurant run smoothly.This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Barak Turovsky, the former Chief AI Officer at General Motors, based in Silicon Valley. He also held executive roles at Google and Cisco. The following has been edited for length and clarity.I have worked on AI and LLMs since 2014 — way before they became the hottest thing on Earth.I'm an ex-Google AI exec who led the first scaled deployment of LLMs and Deep Neural Networks with Google Translate. I also worked as the Chief Product and Technology Officer at a computer vision AI startup, and as the VP of AI at Cisco.General Motors approached me for the Chief AI Officer role while I was at Cisco, and it felt like a great crash course on using AI to develop physical products. The role no longer exists because I left after GM restructured its software and AI organization; however, until November, I reported to the head of software engineering, who reported to the CEO.Some people ask, "Do you really need a dedicated AI officer?"Let's ignore the title because you can call it different names, but I do believe successful AI implementation requires someone in leadership to drive that change, as well as commitment from the top.Functional business leaders, such as the CTO or CIO, may have little or no understanding of AI. If you want to integrate AI on a software level, you need someone with a different kind of expertise.Traditional large companies have powerful executives who want to own the benefits of scaling AI, but not necessarily the responsibility. Therefore, someone with deep AI knowledge is needed to direct the traffic.I like to use a restaurant analogy to break it down.A CAIO is like a master chef at a restaurantThe analogy is based on three primary resources that create products, or dishes. The first resource includes the kitchen equipment, or the AI infrastructure and models necessary to build AI solutions.The next can be thought of as the ingredients. It's the data or internal assets used to train and run AI solutions. The last one is talent, or the restaurant staff. You need expertise at different levels — busboys, short-order cooks, sous chefs, and master chefs for the really gourmet restaurants.The complexity of creating the final product depends on the company's needs, specifically whether the restaurant needs to prepare the food internally. For very advanced, cutting-edge models, which can be thought of as the main course at a gourmet restaurant, companies often need to develop their own AI solutions because standard versions may not perform the required functions.Think of the CAIO as the master chef. They need to make sure all the different pieces run smoothly. If you are in an industry that requires cutting-edge solutions, you also need to spend a lot of time making sure that the hardest output — a.k.a. the main dish — comes out just right.The hardest and most important part of the job is securing top talent. Vendors will tell you that their toaster ovens can pop out a French soufflé in 15 minutes. Yet your ingredients will consistently arrive late, of dubious quality, and in incorrect amounts. Your customers will come in, declare they are hungry and want to eat the whole menu, and then leave mid-meal without paying.What CAIOs should doThe specifics of each role vary. At GM, I worked on a cutting-edge area because AI for physical products, like cars, is largely untouched and getting a lot of traction.There are three buckets of what a chief AI officer should do. First is AI talent management. I focused a lot on hiring a top-tier team,…

Getty Images; Alyssa Powell/BITech job seekers faced a tough market in 2025 amid layoffs and slow hiring.Cuts at Big Tech firms like Amazon and Microsoft helped fuel fierce competition.Business Insider asked tech job seekers about their challenges — and how some overcame them.When Mody Khan lost his job at Microsoft last December, he was hopeful he'd bounce back quickly. But the tech job market had other ideas.Now, a year later, he's still looking. Despite a five-year run at Microsoft as a cloud solution architect, he said, even landing interviews has been a struggle."I've been constantly applying, and I've had interviews, but I've been turned down everywhere," said Khan, who is in his 50s and lives in Texas. In the meantime, he's exhausted his rainy day fund and fallen behind on his mortgage payments. He's now worried he could lose his home."I had savings, and I've depleted almost all of it," he said. "I'm in a very tight spot."Over the past year, I've spoken with more than 20 tech professionals for Business Insider stories who, like Khan, were struggling to find work. Many were affected by layoffs intended to right-size overhiring during the pandemic and streamline operations. US tech companies have announced roughly 154,000 layoffs through November, according to Challenger, a 17% increase from the prior year and the most of any sector. Big Tech giants like Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Tesla each announced plans in recent years to cut at least 10,000 employees.While much of the broader labor market has been marked by slow hiring, it's been cushioned by low levels of firing — but not in tech. The job market has been particularly challenging for tech professionals, who are competing not only with a growing pool of laid-off workers but also with recent college graduates and employed tech professionals looking to switch roles. At the same time, the rise of AI tools like ChatGPT and application bots has made it easier for candidates to submit hundreds of applications, overwhelming some employers and making it harder for top applicants to stand out from the crowd.This surge in demand for tech roles has coincided with a decline in the supply of available openings. After peaking in 2022 following a pandemic-era hiring spree, tech job postings on Indeed are down 33% from their levels in early 2020. The roles that remain are taking longer for companies to fill, and, amid economic uncertainty and the early effects of AI adoption, US businesses are now hiring at one of the slowest rates since 2013.window.addEventListener("message",function(a){if(void 0!==a.data["datawrapper-height"]){var e=document.querySelectorAll("iframe");for(var t in a.data["datawrapper-height"])for(var r,i=0;r=e[i];i++)if(r.contentWindow===a.source){var d=a.data["datawrapper-height"][t]+"px";r.style.height=d}}});To succeed in the 2025 tech job market, some candidates believe they need to be close to the perfect candidate. As Khan put it, "It feels like recruiters are looking for Superman." Throughout the year, Business Insider has spoken with people who've worked at some of the world's most high-profile companies and found themselves at a corporate crossroads — whether due to a layoff, resignation, job search, or shifting workplace expectations.Share your story by filling out this form, contacting this reporter via email at jzinkula@businessinsider.com, or via Signal at jzinkula.29. Read more on the topic:They got laid off from the Microsoft country club and dumped into a brutal job marketHow laid-off Amazon workers are coping with the shock and planning their next career movesI was laid off by LinkedIn, so I spent 3 months writing a 112k-word novel. I don't regret it, but now I'm struggling to find work.A laid-off Accenture manager has been job hunting for 21 months. Recruiters keep telling him he's too expensive.I was laid off by Intel…