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Federal Reserve policymakers announced that they were holding the federal funds rate steady after the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting on Wednesday. The target range remains unchanged at 4.25% to 4.5%.

The last time the FOMC cut rates was at its December meeting, when it lowered the target range by 25 basis points, or 0.25%.

The federal funds rate is the borrowing rate that banks charge each other for loans. A lower rate ripples out to lower borrowing costs on credit cards and personal loans, though banks individually choose how to respond to rate changes. The average credit card interest rate is currently around 21%, while car loan rates for new vehicles are around 6%.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said at a news conference following the FOMC meeting that inflation, which was at an annual rate of 2.4% in March, was still above its 2% target and that the Fed was taking a “wait and see” approach to its monetary policy adjustments.

Related: Core Inflation Is at Its Lowest Level in 4 Years — But Will the Fed Cut Rates? Experts Expect the Agency to ‘Stay Humble and Data-Dependent’

“There’s just so much that we don’t know, I think, and we’re in a good position to wait and see, is the thing,” Powell stated at the news conference. “We don’t have to be in a hurry. The economy is resilient and doing fairly well.”

^{Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images}

Industry experts aren’t surprised. Ed Yardeni, head of Yardeni Research consultancy, told NBC News that the best thing for the Fed to do was to wait and see if inflation or unemployment poses more of a problem down the line.

“The evidence so far is that, for now, it’s likely to be more of a cost problem than a labor market problem,” Yardeni told the outlet.

Related: Are Amazon’s Prices Going Up? Here’s How the Company’s CEO Answered Questions About Tariffs.

Last month, President Donald Trump levied a 10% tariff on all trading partners and a tariff as high as 145% on China that could affect consumer prices.

Powell noted at the news conference that there was “a great deal of uncertainty” about tariff policies and stated that the Fed would carefully monitor the effects of tariffs on inflation and unemployment.

The next meeting is on June 17 and 18, and experts are already expecting the Fed to keep rates steady. Barclays estimates that the Fed will keep rates the same in June and make its first rate cut in July, while Morgan Stanley anticipates no rate cuts this year, per USA Today.

What does the Fed’s decision mean for mortgage rates?

Melissa Cohn, regional vice president of William Raveis Mortgage, told Entrepreneur in an email that she predicts mortgage rates should lower this week because the Fed decided to hold rates steady.

“Mortgage rates will drop a bit this week as bonds have cheered the Fed’s decision to leave rates alone,” Cohn stated.

Cohn also noted that May would be “a very telling month” as the Fed gets a better idea of the impact of tariffs on the economy.

“Now, it’s back to data-watching and, of course, to see where the tariff negotiations end up,” Cohn stated.

“Shark Tank” star Barbara Corcoran, 76, first got a glimpse of her dream home in 1992.

She was running Corcoran Realty at the time and was delivering letters for a messenger service as a side job to help pay her bills. One of her tasks was delivering an envelope to an apartment on the top floor of a building on Fifth Avenue and 97th Street.

When Corcoran entered the apartment, she was impressed by its terrace with views of Central Park. She gave the home’s owner her envelope and told her to call if she ever thought about selling the unit.

“I walked in and saw this green, lush terrace through the French doors, and said to the lady who let me in, ‘If you’re ever going to sell this, would you sell it to me?'” Corcoran told The New York Times in a previous interview.

Related: ‘How Lucky Am I?’: Tour Barbara Corcoran’s $13 Million New York Apartment

More than two decades later, she got a phone call: The home’s owner was ready to sell. Corcoran bought the 4,600-square-foot two-story penthouse apartment for $10 million in 2015 and renovated it for an additional $2 million over the next 18 months.

Now she’s saying goodbye, she says, because of the apartment’s curved staircase—she and her husband, Bill Higgins, 80, a former FBI agent, are finding the steps difficult to navigate. The pair found a new apartment, a single-story penthouse in the same neighborhood of Carnegie Hill, to call home.

Corcoran told The New York Times on Tuesday that she has listed her penthouse for sale for $12 million, slightly lower than what she spent buying and renovating it, but a “fair price” in her estimation. Monthly maintenance fees cost around $11,000.

Related: ‘Better Negotiation Position’: Barbara Corcoran Says Do These 2 Things When Asking For a Raise at Work

The apartment has five bedrooms, five full baths, and two half baths. Corcoran completely revamped the space to include features like a library with a wood-burning fireplace, a butler’s pantry, and a full kitchen off the terrace.

“The apartment is laid out like a multilevel jewel box,” Corcoran broker Scott Stewart, who is co-listing the apartment, told The Times.

Corcoran has previously been enthusiastic about her love of the duplex apartment. In a 2022 interview with TikTok star Caleb Simpson, Corcoran said she sat in the apartment’s kitchen every day and thought to herself, “How lucky am I?”

“Never ever did I think I would have such a pretty kitchen,” Corcoran told Simpson.

@calebwsimpson @barbara.corcoran ♬ Sunroof – Nicky Youre & dazy

Corcoran has recently lost a home due to fires. She revealed in January that fires in LA had destroyed her $800,000 mobile home in Tahitian Terrace Mobile Home Park.

Corcoran previously disclosed that she makes about $4.5 million a year from her investments, including profits she has made as a “Shark Tank” investor for 16 years. The millionaire sold her real estate company, The Corcoran Group, for $66 million in 2001 and has since closed 650 deals on “Shark Tank.”

Related: ‘I’m the Best Boss I’ve Ever Met’: Barbara Corcoran Says It Takes One Principle to Be a Good Boss

Months after publicly stating its intention to shake up its corporate structure, OpenAI has reversed course and decided that its nonprofit arm will keep controlling its for-profit business.

According to an OpenAI blog post published Monday, the company’s board of directors decided that OpenAI will continue to rely on the oversight and control of its nonprofit division moving forward.

“OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit,” OpenAI board chairman Bret Taylor wrote in the blog post. “Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit.”

The company’s for-profit LLC, which has lived under the nonprofit since 2019 and will continue doing so, will become a public benefit corporation (PBC). A PBC is a for-profit business that must consider the public good in addition to profit in its decisions. The nonprofit division of OpenAI will control and be the biggest shareholder in the PBC.

“Our mission remains the same,” Taylor noted. OpenAI’s mission is “to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.”

Related: Everyone Wants to Buy Google’s Chrome Browser — Including OpenAI, According to a Top ChatGPT Executive

In December, OpenAI publicly indicated in a blog post that it was thinking about making its for-profit section a PBC, but one that had complete control over OpenAI’s operations and business. The non-profit side would not oversee the for-profit, but would instead be in charge of charitable initiatives.

Taylor wrote on Monday that OpenAI chose to reverse course and have the nonprofit retain control over the for-profit business after talking to civic leaders and with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California.

More than 30 civic leaders, former OpenAI staffers, and Nobel laureates delivered letters to the offices of the attorneys general last month to ask that they stop OpenAI’s effort to break from its non-profit governance.

^{OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photographer: Nathan Laine/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

OpenAI has recently been embroiled in a legal battle with Elon Musk, who helped co-found the company and left in early 2018 following a failed bid to take it over. Musk has since filed lawsuits against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of breaking OpenAI’s founding agreement and working to maximize profits for Microsoft instead of humanity as a whole. Microsoft has invested close to $14 billion in OpenAI.

Musk even led an unsolicited offer to buy OpenAI for $97.4 billion in February, which Altman quickly shot down on X. As of press time, Musk had yet to comment.

Related: OpenAI Is Creating AI to Do ‘All the Things That Software Engineers Hate to Do’

OpenAI started as a nonprofit in 2015 and transitioned to a “capped profit” company in 2019, meaning that the company’s profits were limited to a certain amount, with excess profits given to the nonprofit parent organization. The for-profit arm raised $1 billion from Microsoft in 2019, alongside a $100 million initial fundraising round.

In November 2022, OpenAI launched its AI chatbot ChatGPT, which was used by 500 million global weekly users as of March, up from 400 million in February.

OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round in March, the biggest private tech deal ever, which valued the company at $300 billion.

Small businesses spend between $10,000 and $49,000 per year on technology, including software, according to a CompTIA survey. Too often, this spending is on an inefficient mix of services and platforms.

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Warren Buffett has spent the last 60 years of his storied career at the helm of Berkshire Hathaway. On Saturday, he announced his tenure as CEO was coming to a close.

The 94-year-old investing legend made the announcement during the company’s annual shareholder meeting in Omaha, Nebraska. “The time has arrived,” Buffett said. He confirmed that Greg Abel, long seen as his likely successor, is expected to assume the role of CEO once he steps down.

“It feels like the right moment for Greg to take over leadership of the company at the end of this year,” Buffett said.

Related: ‘Keep Your Head When All About You Are Losing Theirs’: Here’s Warren Buffett’s Classic Advice As Stock Market Plunges on Tariff Announcement

Buffett revealed that aside from his children, the rest of Berkshire’s board—including Abel—had not been informed ahead of time. He admitted the announcement came as a surprise even to them. “Greg doesn’t know I’m saying this right now,” Buffett told the crowd.

While he will relinquish the top executive role, Buffett indicated he will still be available in an advisory capacity when needed.

Related: I Work With Warren Buffett. He’s Probably the Smartest Person in the World — Here’s the Best Advice He’s Given Me.

Buffett’s departure marks the end of a transformative era. Under his leadership, Berkshire Hathaway evolved from a struggling textile manufacturer into one of the largest and most diverse conglomerates in the United States. As of May 2025, the company has a market cap of nearly $1.2 trillion.

Buffett is personally worth nearly $170 billion, per Bloomberg, and is the largest shareholder of Berkshire Hathaway.

This is a breaking news story. Check back for updates.

Most entrepreneurs are still using AI to save time—but the smartest ones are using it to make money, scale their business, and replace entire departments with digital agents. This isn’t about ChatGPT or surface-level hacks. It’s about using AI Agents—your 24/7 Phantom Workforce—to run key parts of your business while you sleep. In this video, I’ll show you the 4 most powerful AI agents I use to save 20+ hours per week, boost revenue, and scale operations without hiring a single employee.

What You’ll Learn:

• Revenue Agent: Turn AI into your best-performing sales rep. Discover how tools like Zapier’s Outreach Agent and Salesforce Sales AI can automate lead research, qualification, and follow-ups—so you never miss a sale again.

• AI Executive Assistant: Inbox overloaded? Calendar a mess? Learn how to reclaim your time with tools like Motion, Reclaim, and Superhuman—AI agents that handle scheduling, approvals, and admin chaos so you can focus on growth.

• Workflow Agent: Sick of explaining the same SOPs to every new VA? Use tools like Scribehow to auto-document your processes and delegate work in minutes—not hours. Perfect for solopreneurs scaling without the stress.

• Pulse Agent: This is your always-on marketing analyst. I’ll show you how to use tools like Google AI Studio to analyze, test, and improve your content strategy—before you waste time launching a flop.

These are the exact tools I use to automate key parts of my business and free up my time—and I’ll walk you through each one, step by step.

Download the free ‘AI Success Kit’ (limited time only). And you’ll also get a free chapter from Ben’s brand new book, ‘The Wolf is at The Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.’

Starbucks has found that removing human labor in favor of machines doesn’t work for the company — so now the coffee chain is hiring old-fashioned human baristas at thousands of stores.

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol stated in a call with investors earlier this week that the company’s effort to reduce headcount over the past few years and replace humans with machines had backfired: Advanced machinery proved to be an inadequate substitute for human labor.

“Over the last couple of years, we’ve actually been removing labor from the stores, I think with the hope that equipment could offset the removal of the labor,” Niccol said on the call, per The Guardian. “What we’re finding is that wasn’t an accurate assumption with what played out.”

By the time Niccol joined Starbucks in September 2024, the company had been testing out human staff increases at just a handful of locations. Niccol broadened the effort this year to include 3,000 locations of the coffee chain’s 40,000 stores globally.

Related: ‘We’re Not Effective’: Starbucks CEO Tells Corporate Employees to ‘Own Whether or Not This Place Grows’

Niccol stated that new technology alone doesn’t cut it. Starbucks needed to adequately staff stores and allow employees access to new equipment to deliver a better customer experience.

“Equipment doesn’t solve the customer experience that we need to provide, but rather staffing the stores and deploying with this technology behind it does,” Niccol said on the call.

Niccol noted that increasing staff would entail higher costs but asserted that “some growth” for the company would accompany the move.

^{Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol. Photo by Kevin Sullivan/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images}

The move to hire new baristas is part of Niccol’s plan to turn Starbucks around after five consecutive quarters of declining sales. Starbucks reported on Tuesday that same-store sales dropped 1% in the first quarter of 2025, falling short of Wall Street expectations.

Related: It’s Pay-to-Stay at Starbucks As the Coffeehouse Reverses Its Open Door Policy

Niccol reassured investors on the call that though the financial results proved “disappointing,” Starbucks was “really showing a lot of signs of progress” internally. For example, the average time to deliver in-store orders had declined by an average of two minutes during the quarter, he said.

Niccol’s plan to turn around Starbucks includes limiting the number of items customers can order through mobile, adding ceramic mugs for in-store orders, cutting 30% of the menu, writing customers’ names down with Sharpies on their cups, and asking baristas to make orders in under four minutes. Starting May 12, Starbucks will also require baristas to dress uniformly in a solid black top and khaki, black, or blue denim bottoms.

Starbucks operates 16,941 stores in the U.S. and has 211,000 U.S. employees. The company’s stock was down about 11% year-to-date at the time of writing.

Most people feel personally and emotionally connected to the small businesses in their communities, but they underestimate how widespread small businesses are on a broader scale.

That’s according to a new report released Wednesday by digital marketing and automation platform Constant Contact. The report gathered responses from over 8,000 people in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Only 19% of U.S. respondents correctly identified that there were 33 million small businesses in the U.S. Many respondents underestimated the number “by millions,” the report noted. Meanwhile, more than two in five Americans said they would feel “devastated” if their favorite small business closed.

Related: ‘Applications Are Surging’: Small Business Administration Reports Significant Growth in Loan Approvals

Constant Contact CEO Frank Vella said the numbers showed most consumers have “a blind spot” in their awareness of the number of small businesses that exist.

Vella told Entrepreneur in an email that small businesses create a “personal” relationship with their customers. Customers aren’t just buying a product or service, they’re building a relationship.

According to the report, the most popular types of small businesses globally were restaurants, bakeries, grocery stores, retail shops, locally-owned franchises, and personal care or wellness businesses.

“Many of us feel a personal connection to our favorite local businesses, but our research shows a significant awareness gap regarding the prevalence of these businesses,” Vella said. “Failing to recognize small businesses and their critical role in our communities and economies creates a blind spot, which makes it easy to overlook their impact.”

Related: Small Business Owners Are Taking 3 Creative Actions to Achieve Their Goals, According to a New Report

On a global scale, 40% of consumers said they visit a small business at least once a week, and over 80% agreed that small businesses positively affect their lives.

Customers said they supported small businesses because they enjoyed the quality of products and services, the personal customer service, and the local impact. They also said they chose to shop at small businesses because of the sense of community these establishments provided.

Another small business survey released last month from Goldman Sachs found that most small business owners in the U.S. (69%) are optimistic about the financial health of their businesses, and 78% plan to grow their businesses this year. Of the 1,188 businesses surveyed, nearly half (46%) said they expected to create new jobs this year.

Duolingo is adopting an “AI-first” approach to its business, and the language learning platform will reduce its reliance on human contract workers as it assigns AI their responsibilities.

In a memo to employees on Monday, Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn detailed the company’s official “AI-first” stance.

“AI is already changing how work gets done,” Ahn wrote in an email publicly shared through Duolingo’s LinkedIn account. “When there’s a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait.”

As part of its AI-first strategy, Duolingo will shift workloads from contractors to AI and “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” per the email. The company will also reward AI use in hiring new employees and in performance reviews of existing employees. Teams will additionally only be permitted to hire new members if the group cannot automate the work.

Related: ‘Make Chess as Accessible as Possible’: Duolingo’s Next Move Is Teaching Users How to Play Chess

Duolingo has eliminated contract workers in favor of AI before. Last year, the company cut 10% of its contractors after reportedly deciding to use AI for translations.

However, Ahn reassured staff in the email that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees,” and that being AI-first wasn’t about “replacing” workers with AI but about allowing existing employees to focus on creative work and problem-solving over repetitive tasks. The company said that it would support staff with full-time staff training, mentorship, and AI tools.

^{Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn. Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images}

Ahn also explained why Duolingo was choosing to go all-in on AI now. He stated in the email that Duolingo bet big on mobile in 2012, focusing on creating a mobile-first app at a time when mobile apps were primarily companions for full-fledged websites. The move worked out well: Duolingo’s app won the 2013 iPhone App of the Year with 10 million downloads and grew organically after that. Now, Duolingo has over 500 million registered users.

“This time the platform shift is AI,” he wrote in the email.

Related: ‘Get 100X the Work Done’: Shopify CEO Tells Employees to Try AI to Get Work Done Before Asking for More Human Workers

Duolingo is focusing on AI by using it to create content and power features like Video Call, which Duolingo introduced in September. Video Call allows learners to practice speaking in their target language through a video chat with an AI character named Lily.

Duolingo isn’t the first company to recently announce an AI-first strategy. Earlier this month, Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke told all employees in a memo that “using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify.” Lutke told Shopify staff that they should maximize what they could do with AI before asking for more resources or additional human employees.

He also said that Shopify would add AI use questions to its performance and peer reviews.

Duolingo had a market capitalization of over $17 billion at the time of writing.

A mid-level Google employee made $331,894 in 2024, a 5% increase from the median salary of $315,531 in 2023, per a new filing submitted by Google’s parent company, Alphabet, to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

The figure aligns with compensation at other tech giants in recent years. At Meta, for example, the median pay for employees in 2023 was $379,000 a year.

The filing further showed that Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai received total annual compensation of $10,725,043 last year, about 32 times more than the median employee. Pichai received a nearly $2 million raise from the $8,802,824 he made in 2023.

^{Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Photo by Klaudia Radecka/NurPhoto via Getty Images}

The bulk of Pichai’s compensation came from the “All Other Compensation” category, besides his $2,015,385 base salary and $405,630 in stock awards.

The remaining $8,304,028 included Pichai’s personal security costs, which climbed 22% from the $6,775,631 Google paid in 2023 to $8,267,123 in 2024. The category also included his retirement plan and use of company aircraft or cars.

Related: Google CEO Sundar Pichai Says ‘You’ll Be Surprised’ By How Google Search Changes in 2025

“Due to Sundar’s significant public profile, Alphabet provides him with security protection,” Alphabet’s 2025 proxy statement reads. “In 2024, Sundar’s security arrangements included residential security and consultation fees, security monitoring services, car and driver services, and personal security during all travel.”

Alphabet called Pichai’s personal security expenses “reasonable, appropriate, necessary and in the best interests of Alphabet and its stockholders.”

Other tech CEOs also have seven or eight-figure security costs. For example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s $27.2 million total compensation in 2024 included a $14 million pre-tax security allowance. Meanwhile, Nvidia spent nearly $2.5 million in 2024 on CEO Jensen Huang’s security costs.

Related: Here’s How Much 8 CEOs Made in 2024, From JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon to Disney’s Bob Iger