• Tesla CEO Elon Musk has had a lot of different cars over the years. 
• His first vehicle was a 1978 BMW 320i — he paid only $1,400 for it. 
• At one point, a McLaren F1 was his daily driver, but he totaled it on Sand Hill Road in Silicon Valley.
• More recently, he's been driving Tesla cars, like Model S and the Cybertruck. He even sent his Tesla Roadster into space. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Elon Musk has had quite the car collection over the years. 

Some got totaled, others inspired certain design elements in the cars Tesla makes today. Either way, each says a little bit about what Musk looks for in a car.

These days, Musk is usually seen cruising around in a Tesla Model S — unless, of course, he takes the upcoming Tesla Cybertruck out for a spin.

Here's a closer look at Musk's car collection over the years. 

Danielle Muoio contributed to an earlier version of this article.

SEE ALSO: Inside the turbulent personal life of Elon Musk, who's dated Hollywood stars, has 5 sons, and may be expecting another baby with musician Grimes

The first car Musk bought was an old 1978 BMW 320i that he got for $1,400.

Musk said in a Forbes video that he bought it in 1994 and fixed it up himself. He had it for two years when one of the wheels fell off, an unfortunate incident that happened when one of his interns from his first company, Zip2, was driving it.

When Musk got an initial bonus for Zip2, the web software company he and his brother cofounded, Musk used the money to buy a 1967 E-Type Jaguar.

Musk explained in the Forbes video that when he was 17 he was given a book of classic convertibles. The convertible he liked best from the book was the Jaguar E-Type, so he told himself if he ever could afford it he would buy one.

When he got an initial bonus check of $40,000 for Zip2, Musk bought the car.

"That one was like a bad girlfriend — it kept breaking down on me and causing me all sorts of trouble," Musk said of the car in the video.

After Musk sold PayPal, he bought a McLaren F1 — which he later totaled.

"I had it for several years and I put 11,000 miles on it and I drove it from LA to San Francisco. I had it as a daily driver," Musk said of his McLaren F1 in an interview with Pando Daily seven years ago.

New, the car sold for nearly a million dollars.

Musk was driving with Peter Thiel, who cofounded PayPal with Musk, in 2000 when he wrecked the car.

Musk was driving with Thiel on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park to see Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist with Sequoia Capital.

In this video, you can see Musk getting his McLaren delivered.

"Peter said 'so what can this do' and like probably on No. 1 on the list of famous last words I said 'watch this.' So I floored it and did a lane change on Sand Hill," Musk said about that day.

Shortly thereafter, Musk hit an embankment, launching his car in the air where it kept rotating "like a discus." When it hit the ground again, the glass and wheels were shredded and the car had suffered massive body damage, as you can see above.

The car wasn't insured.

In 2013, Musk bought the Lotus Esprit submarine car that's used in the James Bond movie "The Spy Who Loved Me." Musk paid $920,000 at auction.

"It was amazing as a little kid in South Africa to watch James Bond in 'The Spy Who Loved Me' drive his Lotus Esprit off a pier, press a button and have it transform into a submarine underwater," Musk said in a statement to Huffington Post.

"I was disappointed to learn that it can't actually transform. What I'm going to do is upgrade it with a Tesla electric powertrain and try to make it transform for real," he continued.

Musk has owned an Audi Q7, which actually inspired him to include falcon wing doors on the Tesla Model S.

Musk said he wanted to make a car where the door could open in tight spaces and allow you to access the third row without putting the second-row seats down.

Accessing that third row easily is a problem Musk said he has had with his Audi Q7, which Forbes saw he owned during a 2012 walkthrough Musk's home.

"The Audi Q7 is particularly horrendous. Even in the best-case scenario, you need to be a dwarf mountain climber to get into the back seat," he said.

In 2007, Musk owned a Hamann BMW M5 sports car, a modified BMW that's slightly wider and has different finishes to look fiercer and more aggressive.

Source: Vanity Fair,TopSpeed

Musk had a Porsche 911 as of 2012.

Source: Forbes

Musk revealed on Twitter in 2017 that a friend gifted him a Ford Model T.

Source: Twitter

Musk obviously drives his own Tesla vehicles too. He owns a Tesla Roadster, but it's not currently parked in his garage — it's in space.

In 2018, SpaceX launched its Falcon Heavy rocket. Inside, Musk parked his own Roadster with an astronaut dummy named "Starman" at the wheel. 

The rocket is orbiting the sun, passing by Venus and Mercury as well — researchers have predicted that the Roadster inside will orbit the sun for the next few million years. Musk said last year that SpaceX could launch another rocket to catch up with the car "in a few years."

Musk said in 2019 that he usually drives a Tesla Model S Performance.

Source: Twitter

He'll occasionally switch it up and drive a Model 3 Performance.

Source: Twitter

And if he's with his kids, he'll take a Model X.

Source: Twitter

In December, Musk was spotted driving to dinner in Malibu, California, in Tesla's new Cybertruck.

Source: Business Insider

• The gaming chat app Discord and food delivery platform Postmates appeared to be among the apps that experienced an outage Friday.
• The outage appears to have been caused by problems with Cloudflare, a cloud networking platform that supports many major websites and apps.
• Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted a tweet detailing how the company traced the outage to a router in Atlanta.
• Cloudflare has since implemented a fix to the outage.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Twitter users began to notice some apps and websites, including those of food delivery service Postmates, were down Friday.

Discord, a group chat app, tweeted Friday that "users are currently having trouble disconnecting to Discord due to an upstream internet issue. We've got all engineers on deck investigating the issue."

The outage appears to have been caused by problems with Cloudflare, a cloud technology that supports many websites and apps. Cloudflare tweeted that it was investigating the issue shortly after the outage was reported by some users.

The company's CEO, Matthew Prince, later posted a tweet acknowledging the issue, tracing it back to a router in Atlanta. 

"We isolated the Atlanta router and shut down our backbone, routing traffic across transit providers instead," Prince said on Twitter. "There was some congestion that caused slow performance on some links as the logging caught up. Everything is restored now and we're looking into the root cause."

The company implemented a fix Friday evening and said it is "monitoring the results."

A Facebook bug caused a similar outage last week, with Spotify and Tinder among the apps that crashed for many users. The issue was traced to a glitch with Facebook's software developer kit, or SDK, that is embedded in some of those apps. The problem was later resolved.

Join the conversation about this story »

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• Apple is expected to release a new Apple Watch in 2020, as it's done every year since 2015.
• The biggest new addition to this year's watch is expected to be sleep tracking, a feature that would help Apple catch up to rivals like Fitbit and Samsung.
• Otherwise, the next Apple Watch, which is expected to be called the Series 6, is rumored to come with faster performance and better water resistance. 
• Here's what else we know.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple has released a new smartwatch every year since 2015, and there's a good chance 2020 will be no different.

While last year's Apple Watch brought improvements like an always-on display and a built-in compass, the biggest update expected to arrive on Apple's popular smartwatch in 2020 is support for sleep tracking.

That seems more certain now that Apple has announced a new Sleep app for the Apple Watch, which will be part of the company's new watch software update coming in the fall. The app will display a sleep analysis chart showing your sleeping pattern for the week, and leverages the Apple Watch's accelerometer to gather movement data that can be used to tell whether you're awake or asleep. 

An early 2019 Bloomberg report said that Apple could be rolling out sleep tracking features to its 2020 Apple Watch. It's unclear, however, if the new Sleep software is the extent of Apple's new sleep tracking functionality or if the company is planning to add new hardware to its future watch to further expand these capabilities. 

Built-in sleep tracking has been the one major feature the Apple Watch was lacking compared to rivals like Fitbit, which Google agreed to acquire for $2.1 billion, and Samsung. Previously, Apple Watch owners needed to download a third-party app to measure sleep.

Adding such a feature — and improving the Apple Watch's battery life to go along with it — could further establish Apple's stronghold on the smartwatch market. Apple was the top wearable device maker as of the first quarter of 2020, according to The International Data Corporation, claiming 29.3% of the market, followed by Xiaomi, Samsung, Huawei, and Fitbit. 

Here's a look at everything we're expecting to see from Apple's next smartwatch. 

SEE ALSO: There's a 'Pro' version of every major Apple gadget except for the Apple Watch. It's time for that to change.

Apple will probably call it the Apple Watch Series 6.

If Apple sticks with the branding it's used since 2016, we can expect its next smartwatch to be called the Apple Watch Series 6. 

The watch will probably be released in September.

Apple typically debuts its new Apple Watch alongside its refreshed iPhones in September, so it seems plausible that the company may take a similar approach this year. In years past, Apple has revealed the new watch on stage during its fall keynote and launched the device in stores later in September, usually roughly 10 days after the launch event. 

Apple just launched a sleep tracking app for the Apple Watch, hinting that perhaps more sleep-oriented features are coming in the next model.

Apple is said to have been testing sleep tracking for the Apple Watch at its campus as of early 2019, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. It's unclear if this means the next Apple Watch will have additional sleep tracking features based on new hardware that extend beyond what will be available in watchOS 7's new Sleep app. 

One thing it will need to keep up with rivals, however, is better battery life. Fitbit devices last for multiple days without requiring a charge, making it easy to wear them overnight without worrying about them running out of juice the next day. The Apple Watch, comparatively, typically needs to be charged every night.  

Along with showing how much you've slept in the past week and monitoring the time you've spent asleep in the new Sleep app, the watch will also remind you to charge it when the battery dips below 30% in watchOS 7. 

The next Apple Watch may be able to monitor blood-oxygen levels, too.

Apple's next-generation smartwatch may be able to measure blood-oxygen saturation, a feature that Fitbit rolled out to some of its devices earlier this year, as 9to5Mac reported after finding references to the capability in Apple's code. 

With this feature, the watch would be able to notify users when their blood-oxygen saturation falls below a certain level, and the alerts would look similar to the heart-rate notifications currently available on the Apple Watch. 

It's unclear if this feature will only be available in the Series 6 or if it would be capable of working on older watches as well. 

It will probably look very similar to the Apple Watch Series 5 and Series 4.

It doesn't sound like Apple is planning any major design changes for its next iteration of the Apple Watch, according to gadget leaker and YouTube host Jon Prosser. 

When asked on Twitter about what to expect from the next Apple Watch, Prosser, who correctly reported the iPhone SE's unveil date, said it will look the same as the Series 4.

Apple changed the design of its smartwatch in 2018 with the Series 4, which has a thinner case and a display that's 30% larger compared to the Series 3. It kept this design with the Series 5, and based on Prosser's tweet it seems as if it will do the same for the Series 6.

It'll likely run on a new Apple processor and may offer faster performance.

Apple typically introduces a new processor in each new model of the Apple Watch, as it's done in years past. While there wasn't much of a performance boost when it came to speed between this year's Apple Watch and last year's, Apple said when announcing the Series 4 that it was capable of delivering twice the speed of its predecessor. 

TF International Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who is known for his often accurate predictions about future Apple products, also said he expects the next-generation Apple Watch to offer faster performance, as MacRumors reported. The wireless transmission speeds will also reportedly be faster on the next Apple Watch, says Kuo, which means we may see a boost in Wi-Fi and cellular performance. 

The next Apple Watch may offer better water resistance.

You can already go swimming with the Apple Watch Series 2 or later, but Kuo suggests that the next-generation smartwatch will be more water-resistant than the current generation. He doesn't offer any specifics, however.

The Series 6 will run on the newest software from Apple.

Apple's new smartwatches usually ship with the company's latest software, and there's little reason to believe 2020 will be any different. 

The company unveiled watchOS 7 at its Worldwide Developers Conference last month, its next major software update launching in the fall. In addition to the new Sleep app, the upgrade will bring new features such as the ability to share custom watch faces with others, support for new workout types like dance, and handwashing detection among other new additions. 

• Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk seems to prefer to keep his personal life under wraps. 
• It wasn't until 2017 that he opened up in an intensely candid Rolling Stone profile. Musk discussed topics he usually doesn't, from his breakup with actress Amber Heard to his strained relationship with his father.
• Musk appears to be close with his mother, Maye, his sister, Tosca, and his brother, Kimbal. But he has had a stormy personal life at times as well. He's been divorced three times and his name has been recently dragged into a high-profile lawsuit between Heard and actor Johnny Depp.
• These days, Musk is dating musician Grimes and the couple just had a baby together.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

In 2010, Elon Musk said he would "rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life."

But the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX is a fascinating figure, and over the years, he's opened up here and there about his childhood, his parents, and his relationships.

Musk got uncharacteristically candid for perhaps the first time in an in-depth Rolling Stone interview by Neil Strauss published in November 2017. He spoke of his breakup with ex-girlfriend Amber Heard, expressing his heartbreak over their parting. Musk also touched upon his estranged relationship with his father Errol, calling him a "terrible human being."

These days, Musk is dating the musician Grimes — the pair debuted their relationship in May 2018, and just had their first child together.

Here's a look at Elon Musk's personal life over the years.

SEE ALSO: Tennis superstar Serena Williams and Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian have had a whirlwind few years. Here's how the power couple met, and everything that's happened since.

Born in 1971 in Pretoria, South Africa, Musk was the eldest of three children. His mother Maye Musk is a Canadian model who's appeared on the cover of Time and became a CoverGirl spokesperson at 69. His father Errol is an engineer.

Source: Vanity Fair, Town and Country, Vogue, Forbes

Musk told Rolling Stone he's struggled with loneliness since childhood. "When I was a child, there's one thing I said," Musk said. "'I never want to be alone.'"

Source: Rolling Stone, Business Insider

Overall, Musk's childhood was far from idyllic. He was ruthlessly bullied in school, and even ended up hospitalized after his tormentors shoved him down a staircase. Soon after his parents split in 1980, Musk went to live with his father.

Source: Business Insider, Business Insider

Today, Musk and Errol are estranged. The Tesla CEO told Rolling Stone that his father is "a terrible human being." "You have no idea about how bad," Musk said. "Almost every crime you can possibly think of, he has done."

Source: Rolling Stone

Musk's father, who is in his 70s, made headlines in 2018 when it was revealed that he had a child with his then-30-year-old former stepdaughter Jana Bezuidenhout, whom he's known since she was 4 years old.

Source: Telegraph

Despite this familial rift, Musk is seemingly still close with his brother Kimbal and sister Tosca. All of the Musk siblings seemingly share an entrepreneurial streak. Kimbal is seeking to make the food industry more sustainable and healthy, while Tosca launched the romance film network Passionflix.

Source: CNBC, CNBC, Forbes, CNBC

Musk also seems to have a good relationship with his mother. Vanity Fair reported that he gifted Maye with a green Tesla. She also moved to California in 2013 to be closer to her children and grandchildren.

Source: Vanity Fair

Musk obtained Canadian citizenship through his mother. At the age of 17, he moved to Kingston, Ontario, to attend Queen's University.

Source: Twitter, Esquire

There, he met his first wife, Justine Wilson. Writing in Marie Claire, she recalled that Musk invited her out for ice cream. She decided to stay in to study, but he showed up with "two chocolate-chip ice cream cones dripping down his hands."

Source: Marie Claire

Musk transferred to Wharton, but kept sending Justine roses. They went their separate ways, but reconnected as Musk started working on his first startup and Justine started working on her first novel after graduation. Justine said Musk wooed her by giving her his credit card to buy as many books as she wanted. The pair tied the knot in 2000.

Source: Marie Claire

The couple moved to Los Angeles and had a son named Nevada, whom they lost to SIDS. They ultimately had twins and triplets — five sons in total. Musk said he strives to spend time with his sons. In 2010, he called his children "the love of my life."

Source: Business Insider, Business Insider, Business Insider

The couple split in 2008, and Justine kept her husband's last name for the sake of their kids. After his divorce, the tech mogul began dating actress Talulah Riley.

Source: Bloomberg

While Musk and his first wife became estranged, Justine wrote in Marie Claire that she and Riley ended up getting along very well. She even sent her ex-husband's girlfriend an email saying: "I would rather live out the French-movie version of things, in which the two women become friends and various philosophies are pondered."

Source: Marie Claire

Riley and Musk married in 2010. Two years later, news of their divorce became public when Musk tweeted: "It was an amazing four years. I will love you forever. You will make someone very happy one day" at Riley on Twitter.

Source: Forbes

The couple remarried in 2013. Musk filed for — then withdrew — a second divorce the following year.

Source: POPSugar

In 2016, Riley filed for divorce from Musk, which was finalized in late 2016. The two are still on good terms, however — Riley even made an appearance during Strauss' Rolling Stone profile of Musk. "We still see each other all the time and take care of each other," she told People.

Source: Rolling Stone, People

Musk began dating actress Amber Heard in 2016, but they broke up a year later due to their intense schedules.

Source: The Cut, Rolling Stone

Commenting on one of Heard's Instagram posts, Musk said he and his ex were "still friends, remain close and love one another" and added "who knows what the future holds." He later told Rolling Stone: "I was really in love, and it hurt bad."

Source: Rolling Stone, The Cut

In May 2018, Musk arrived at the annual Costume Institute Gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Grimes, a Canadian musician. At the time, Page Six reported that the pair had been "quietly dating" for a few weeks.

Source: Page Six

Grimes and Musk met over Twitter. Musk was planning to make a joke about artificial intelligence — specifically, about the Rococo Basilisk character in her "Flesh Without Blood" video — and discovered she had beaten him to the punch.

Source: Twitter

Musk later told the Wall Street Journal that he loves Grimes for her "wild fae artistic creativity and hyper intense work ethic."

Source: The Wall Street Journal

In January 2020, Grimes posted a photo to her Instagram and Twitter accounts that showed her pregnant with a fetus Photoshopped on her belly. She later confirmed she was expecting a baby with Musk.

Source: Instagram

On May 4, 2020, Musk announced the birth of their son, who he and Grimes named "X Æ A-Xii Musk," seemingly pronounced "X Ash A-12." "Mom & baby all good," Musk wrote on Twitter.

Source: Business Insider, Business Insider

More recently, Musk has been dragged into an ugly court battle between Heard and her ex-husband, actor Johnny Depp. Musk has denied any involvement with Heard while she was still married, as well as other salacious allegations that have come up during the proceedings.

Source: Page Six

Devoted Health wants to change the way the U.S. takes care of its senior citizens, and it has big plans in its first five years to do just that.

The startup, which has been gathering lots of buzz in the last year, was founded to sell private health insurance plans to U.S. seniors, a market that is growing rapidly as Baby Boomers age.

Using one pitch deck, Devoted Health managed to secure $300 million from investors in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz late last year, with a valuation of $1.8 billion – all before it signed up a single customer.

But the deck also outlined the company's aggressive plans for its first five years. Devoted Health planned to sign up 5,000 members for 2019 and grow that to 103,722 by 2023. It expects to make about $1.2 billion in revenue in 2023 while generating a small net loss.

Here's what else Devoted Health laid out in the pitch deck:

• How the company, in part, plans to make money by owning its own medical group in addition to the insurance operation
• Its plan to take on the healthcare giants in Medicare Advantage
• Why it thinks it can generate better margins than other Medicare Advantage health insurers
• How the company can eclipse 100,000 members
• And more about the company's aggressive five-year plan

BI Prime is publishing dozens of stories like this each and every day. Want to get started by reading the full pitch deck?

>> Download it now FREE

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Elon Musk wants to give you free bitcoin — at least, that's what his Twitter account said on Wednesday.

Don't trust him.

The Tesla founder's account was one of numerous high-profile accounts on the social network that were compromised as part of a remarkable, far-reaching hack that attempted to scam people into sending payments in the bitcoin digital currency.

The hack underscored the vulnerability of social media services like Twitter, which are used by world leaders and government agencies to communicate with the public. The breach was so serious that Twitter was forced to briefly disable all tweeting from verified accounts on Wednesday.

The FBI has launched an investigation into the incident and Congress wants answers from Twitter's management.

As of writing on Friday afternoon, here what we do and don't know about what happened.

Who's been hacked?

Lots of famous people. And some companies.

Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Apple's official account, Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Uber, Wiz Khalifa, Floyd Mayweather, Cash App, MrBeast, XXXTentacion, parody account TheTweetOfGod ... the list goes on and on.

The hackers targeted high-profile accounts that had the potential to spread the scam as far as possible. 

130 accounts were targeted, Twitter said in a statement on Thursday, though not all of them were compromised.

How did they get hacked?

The hackers got access to Twitter's internal tools, then used them to wreak havoc. 

Late Wednesday evening, Twitter said it had uncovered "what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools." Those with access to those tools, "ostensibly Twitter employees," have the ability to reset email addresses associated with accounts, as TechCrunch reported.

What do the hacked messages look like?

Like this:

What steps has Twitter taken in response?

As the hack escalated, Twitter took the unprecedented step on Wednesday of blocking all verified accounts from tweeting temporarily, as it worked to secure its services.

It has also locked the affected accounts until their owners can satisfactorily identify themselves and take back control. Its data download feature has also been temporarily disabled.

"We have also been taking aggressive steps to secure our systems while our investigations are ongoing," Twitter said on Thursday. "We're still in the process of assessing longer-term steps that we may take and will share more details as soon as we can."

CEO Jack Dorsey also chimed in on the incident in a tweet on Wednesday evening, calling it a "tough day for us at Twitter." He wrote: "We all feel terrible this happened. We're diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."

What's the scam?

Generally, the compromised accounts posted a tweet saying they're feeling generous (or some other similar motivation), and falsely claiming that if people send them bitcoin to their address, they'll resend them double back. 

Should I send them bitcoin?

No.

Who's behind the hack?

The identity of the hacker(s) are still unknown, but more details are slowly coming to light. 

In a New York Times report on Friday, individuals who claimed to be involved alleged that a figure going by the name "Kirk" first gained access to the internal Twitter tools and then told others about it. He is purported to have obtained login details to the tools from an internal Twitter Slack channel he gained access to.

"Kirk" began by selling access to coveted "OG" usernames, before things escalated to the bitcoin scam that attracted international attention.

Were any countries involved? 

People are not currently suggesting that the hack was the work of a nation state, as some previous attacks on tech companies and digital infrastructure have been. Well-respected cybersecurity reporter Brian Krebs reported that at least one of the figures involved may have been a 21-year-old man from Liverpool, England — though there has yet to be any official confirmation, arrests, or attribution from Twitter or other authorities. 

What was the fallout?

A lot of people are demanding answers. 

The FBI is investigating, as is New York state, and Congress wants a briefing from Twitter about what went down. Meanwhile, the company is still trying to understand the full extent of the damage, and repair user trust that was damaged by the most extensive (known) hack in its history.

Got a tip? Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (robaeprice@protonmail.com), standard email (rprice@businessinsider.com), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by standard email only, please.

SEE ALSO: Meet the 25 power players at Instagram who are deciding the future of the wildly popular Facebook-owned app

Join the conversation about this story »

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This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. This report is exclusively available to enterprise subscribers. To learn more about getting access to this report, email Senior Account Executive Jeff Jordan at jjordan@businessinsider.com, or check to see if your company already has access.

Although competition in the US wireless carrier market remains fierce, the price war among the Big Four US carriers — Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Sprint — began to cool over the past year.

In an attempt to avoid further competition on price, carriers began shifting their focus to adding value to their mobile plans with new offerings to differentiate from the competition. This helped average revenue per user (ARPU) start to stabilize across all carriers in Q1 2018, after declining over the last two years.

The Big Four have now begun reshuffling their unlimited plans to lure subscribers by providing more options. This strategy has been unrolling in two flavors: introducing new, expensive unlimited plan tiers loaded with an array of features and choices, while also catering to price-sensitive customers with more affordable plans that strip away extra perks like free digital content and international coverage. As a result, a new battleground is emerging, with differentiation now coming down to the value loaded in their mobile plans.

Looking forward, the US carrier market will see competitive pressure pick up due to a number of trends: 

• The US smartphone market is creeping toward saturation. Penetration in the US hit 85% in 2018, up from 82% in 2017 and 77% in 2016.
• eSIM technology is making it easier for consumers to switch carriers. eSIM technology is a nonphysical SIM card slot that pairs with the physical SIM card to enable dual-SIM functionality — allowing customers to switch carriers without changing to a different SIM card or device.
• And cable mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs) are edging in on US carriers' share of wireless adds. Cable MVNOs, such as Comcast's Xfinity Mobile and Charter's Spectrum Mobile, are expected to snag roughly 50% of total wireless customer net adds, or about 2.2 million subscribers, by 2020.

All of this means fostering loyalty and winning over new subscribers is more important than ever for the Big Four, making it crucial for these mobile carriers to understand consumer sentiment around their services.

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence uses consumer survey data from our proprietary panel, collected during 2017 and 2018, to evaluate which features are most important to consumers when selecting a mobile provider, as well as to determine which features would convince them to switch to the competition. It contains insights that can help telecoms guide strategic investment and marketing decisions to win and retain customers in this increasingly competitive space.

The companies mentioned in the report are: AT&T, Amazon, Apple, Charter, Comcast, Hulu, Netflix, Pandora, Sprint, T-Mobile, Tidal, and Verizon.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• T-Mobile came out on top again, outpacing the rest of the Big Four US carriers on value, loyalty, and satisfaction. T-Mobile customers want to see coverage improvements, though. 
• Verizon customers don't see much more value in its offerings than a year ago.
• AT&T was the only carrier to show declines in all capacities. 
• Sprint is still a good deal, but it doesn't offer much else.
• When it comes to features, subscribers still value the basics most. However, demand for international coverage is growing.
• 5G is the next major battleground for the Big Four, and the winner of the 5G race has the potential to leap ahead in customer volumes. 

 In full, the report:

• Determines the features that are most important to consumers when selecting a mobile provider.  
• Identifies which features are nice to have or essential in consumers' willingness to switch carriers. 
• Examines consumers' feelings on emerging technologies and trends in the mobile industry, such as 5G, new network-connected devices, and the T-Mobile-Sprint merger.

SEE ALSO: 5G in the IoT: How the next generation of wireless technology will transform the IoT

Join the conversation about this story »

• Former Apple design chief Sir Jony Ive is the current chancellor of the Royal College of Art, a prestigious art and design institution based in London.
• He has just curated a collection for the RCA's annual graduate show, held this year online for the first time thanks to disruption caused by the pandemic.
• Ive's curated collection, "Optimistic, Singular and New", comprises work from graduate creatives across the fields of architecture, arts and humanities, communications, and design.
• Check out some of Ive's picks below.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Jony Ive, the influential Apple designer who stepped down from the company in 2019, is helping foster a new generation of artistic and creative talent.

In 2017, Ive was appointed chancellor of the Royal College of Art (RCA), a prestigious London institution for art and design whose alumni includes the painter David Hockney, architect Thomas Heatherwick, and designer and engineer James Dyson.

Ive has been a huge influence on everyday technology, having designed the iPhone, iPod, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch, and left Apple last year to pursue his own projects.

This week, the RCA launched its 2020 graduate show online for the first time thanks to disruption by the pandemic — including a collection curated by the former Apple designer.

Business Insider picked out a selection of work from Ive's curated artists below. You can also see the full collection here.

Jony Ive's collection is called 'Optimistic, Singular and New'

Ive notes that the RCA's graduates will have had to contend with the pandemic, saying: "There is a clarity and boldness that perhaps speaks to the absence of familiar tools or the usual distractions."

He continues: "To reconsider fundamental approaches to their work at a time of complete chaos and uncertainty demonstrates a remarkable drive and resolve and is ultimately a victory for creativity in its many areas of practice. This is a particular body of work that I believe will be regarded as significant in the future."

Read on for a selection of artists and their work from the 'Optimistic, Singular and New' collection.

Rosa Whiteley's 'In the Pink'

Architecture student Rosa Whiteley says her work "addresses the longstanding phenomena of pink death clouds that periodically dominate the arctic atmosphere."

'The toxic and metallic footprints of the death clouds onto the ground have created dead zones, dead forests, dead lakes, dead taxa, and dead people.'

Check out Whiteley's full project.

Taewon Park's 'Multi-Bang'

'Bang' is the Korean word for room. According to Park: "Bang-culture in Seoul, Korea has expanded and diversified due to a higher demand for housing and Korean gaming culture." Park's work explores alternative ways to design high-rises.

Check out Park's full project.

Anabel Garcia-Kurland's 'Reclaiming Idleness; the filter bubble effect'

Garcia-Kurland says of her project: "This project unravels a personal trajectory of online identity triggered by the discovery of unintentionally offering of all intimate data dating back to 2013.

"Through extraction of my own data the project investigates moments in my life which have been influenced by algorithms."

See the full project here.

Jonny Ryley's 'The Refectory: An Urban Monastery'

Ryley says of his project: "Within 'The Urban Monastery', I have focussed on themes of reflection, of contemplation, and of peace, asking how someone can have an encounter of something bigger than themselves upon experiencing a space."

Check out Ryley's project.

Alex Boyce's 'Oljevegen: The Oil Road'

Boyce describes his project: "Oljevegen: The Oil Road, is a critical examination and response to the relationship between landscape, traditional culture, and the emergence of infrastructure along Norway's western coast."

Check out the full project.

Ping Mu's 'Cyberspace Odyssey'

Ping Mu tried to capture the "cognitive alienation" of the pandemic, noting that the constant glow of screens has replaced the experience of going outside and being in nature. Ping Mu writes: "[I] projected my behaviour onto an ape. She wanders in a mixed space of reality, dreams and cyberspace. She is sometimes anxious, sometimes lonely, sometimes angry, like a trapped animal under house arrest in a modern prison."

Blanca Rivera Fernandez's 'Dedalyx'

Healthcare designer Blanca Rivera Fernandez conceived skin-like thimbles to be worn on the fingers. The idea is that surgeons wear the device, allow their movements to be monitored, and trainees can then learn from them.

"By using the thimbles, the trainee can mimic the surgeon's hands movements unlimited times while receiving real-time feedback," she says. "This fact allows the user to know where and how to improve the movements to avoid tissue damage, for instance."

Check out the full project here.

Lydia Pettit's 'I Picked at the Wall Next to my Bed'

Pettit explores living with PTSD, using painting, textiles, and embroidery to explore trauma, the body, and mental illness.

"My work uses self portraiture to show the mirrored effect of looking into trauma, looking into yourself, and accepting the embrace of recovery," she writes.

Check out Pettit's work here.

Olivia Sterling 'Colouring In'

Sterling's 'Colouring In' range is, she writes, "influenced by children's colouring books fused with infographic imagery in order to further bring emphasis to marginalisation and the absurdity of discrimination."

Check out Sterling's body of work here.

Marcela Baltarete's 'MARCEL/A - A journey of digital introspection and relief - Part II'

3D modeller and animator Marcela Baltarete says their work is a kind of therapy, a distancing from the experiences of gender dysphoria and illness.

They write: "They approach their work in a therapeutic way, while portraying the idea of rejection and acceptance of certain anatomical parts through animated extrusions that signify their own body's discomfort but also investigate the possibility for self-acceptance and reconciliation of mind and body."

Check out Baltarete's work here.

Benjamin Mehigan's 'A Golden State'

In his series, Mehigan pays homage to the photo book, presenting modern-day California in the context of the ravaging of wildfires.

He writes: "There is no single readable prose but rather a multiplicity of layers that intersect and overlap, representing and critiquing the State and it's ecological crisis as a complex catastrophe of systematic subtexts: insufficient governance; inappropriate policy; dangerous material culture and architectural indulgence."

See Mehigan's work here.

• IndieBio founder Arvind Gupta joined VC firm Mayfield as a partner on Wednesday. He will continue investing in biotech startups at Mayfield, but he is also planning to focus on an area he calls "planetary health."
• At the biotech accelerator IndieBio, Gupta helped founders, primarily scientists and academics, get their young companies off the ground by establishing resilient business models.
• That skill set will come in handy with sustainability startups as well, Gupta told Business Insider, even as green technology has fallen out of favor with other investors after major investment misfires in the early 2000s.
• According to Ursheet Parikh, with whom Gupta will work at Mayfield, the "hype cycle" around healthcare and sustainability technology startups will help create more resilient business models and ultimately lead to better investment opportunities.
• Both Parikh and Gupta told Business Insider that investing in these two areas is the right thing to do as an extension of Mayfield's new "conscious capital" initiative that aims to advance equality in several areas within the broader venture capital and tech industries.
• Click here for more BI Prime stories.

Two of the biggest crises facing humanity today — the coronavirus pandemic and the climate crisis — also represent two of the biggest opportunities, if investors have more than just profit in mind.

Healthcare and sustainability technology haven't always been hot VC deals. The businesses typically require lots of cash upfront to cover heady expenses related to hardware production, research costs, or a combination of both. They rarely deliver the kind of returns on investment that the typical enterprise software startup can reap for investors. But with both industries at the forefront during the crises, some investors are willing to overlook the less-than-ideal unit economics for the potential positive impacts these companies could have on humanity.

"I bet my career that climate change is real and if you don't believe that, it's the wrong fit," Mayfield partner Arvind Gupta told Business Insider. "If you don't believe the data, that health and lifespan going down for the first time in a first-world country is not a sign that something is deeply and fundamentally broken, I think you are not willing to believe what you are seeing."

As Mayfield's newest partner, Gupta is planning to co-lead the 50-year-old firm's growing health investing arm by considering what he calls "planetary health" in addition to more traditional human health.

"Beyond the typical venture capital success measures is the additional metric of affecting billions of people's lives around the world," Gupta told Business Insider. "These huge pools of capital to redeploy to opportunities that can make our children's world better rather than make a quick dollar on an application that may not be around in that typical venture timeframe."

Gupta's comfort with long-term investments stems from his background at biotech startup accelerator IndieBio, he said. There, he worked closely with academics and scientists who were in the early days of building a company based on compelling technology or research breakthroughs.

"We helped them derisk the technology and helped scientists figure out how to build a business around the technology they are developing," Gupta said. "We graduated companies that are real companies, not science projects."

IndieBio graduates' success, and thus IndieBio's, is a stark contrast to the "green tech" misfire of the early 2000s. Many VC firms at the time invested massive amounts of money in unproven tech with large overhead and operating costs. Many of those companies went under in the 2001 crash, taking their investors' funding with them.

"After the first bubble, the world tends to be more measured and investors do more diligence, which is good for the ecosystem," Mayfield partner Ursheet Parikh told Business Insider. "Planetary health is part of the sustainability hype cycle, and will there be another hype cycle? Probably, but we will have great companies on the other side."

Parikh has helped Mayfield develop a new "conscious capital" initiative, along with managing director Navin Chaddha and Mayfield's other partners. It seeks to look beyond financial returns when investing in companies that may have the potential for adding to the public good, Parikh said. Luckily for Parikh and Gupta, that includes the firm's focus on biotechnology and sustainability, the areas in which both partners are focused.

"Conscious capital is where I would like to place my time and energy for the next three decades of the working life I have left because I can measure my life through my children," Gupta said. "Will they say 'thank you' for being a great dad but also for helping build companies that made a difference in our world? That's my only measure of success."

SEE ALSO: Clearbanc just launched a valuation tool that its cofounders are calling a credit score for startups. Here's what entrepreneurs need to know before signing up.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Here's what it's like to travel during the coronavirus outbreak

• Apple's iOS 14 update brings major updates like new home screen widgets and the App Library, but it also brings a bunch of small yet useful features.
• These updates span various parts of the operating system including Siri, Health, Memojis, and much more.
• iOS 14 is still in beta, which means it isn't finished and not every feature is available.
• The full version will be released in the fall, and it's usually timed to Apple's next big iPhone launch.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Apple's iOS 14 update will feel like a dramatic change for iPhone owners— mostly because they'll be able to change the home screen layout by adding widgets to it for the first time. Plus, Apple is also launching a new way to use app features without installing a full app through App Clips — which as its name implies lets you use just a slice of an app when needed.

But aside from these larger changes, iOS 14 is also filled with less noticeable features that bring small but appreciated improvements across the camera, Siri, Memojis, and much more. 

The update is launching this fall and will be compatible with the iPhone 6S and later, including the original and new iPhone SE. Apple hasn't shared a specific launch date for the final version of the software, but it usually rolls out in September to coincide with the company's new iPhone launch.

Since the software is currently in beta, some features, like App Clips, aren't ready yet because developers have yet to optimize their apps. Similarly, the App Store doesn't seem to be updated to reflect the expanded privacy information Apple is requiring that developers disclose on their App Store listings. 

Still, after spending a full week with the software, here are eight new features that I've come to appreciate. 

SEE ALSO: In a rare move from Apple, the new iPhone 12 could be cheaper than most other 5G phones

Siri doesn't take up the entire screen anymore.

Siri is far less intrusive in iOS 14. Rather than occupying the entire screen when summoned, Siri now appears as a tiny glowing orb near the bottom of the screen, making it easier to ask a quick question without disrupting whatever you were previously doing on your phone. 

The iPhone can now tell me which apps I'm copy-and-pasting from.

Apple is also making it easier to make sure you're copy-and-pasting the right content from your clipboard. When you paste text, you'll see a small message near the top of the screen telling you which app you've pasted from.

More importantly, however, the feature could serve as a privacy measure for indicating when apps might be unknowingly accessing your iPhone's clipboard. Reddit and LinkedIn were found to be doing just that and have since updated their apps to stop this practice.

There are more Memoji sticker options to choose from and you can customize your Memoji with a mask.

I only really use Memoji in sticker form, which is why I was particularly excited to see some new sticker options in iOS 14. 

Memoji stickers are exactly what they sound like — emoji that are meant to look like you. Apple added Memoji sticker packs last year in iOS 13 and has now added more options in iOS 14, including a fist bump Memoji.

You can also customize your Memoji with new features like a face mask.

My iPhone can tell me if the doorbell is ringing or if my cat is meowing.

Apple is also adding some new accessibility features in iOS 14, one of which being the ability to set up Sound Recognition. 

This feature enables your iPhone to listen up for certain sounds, such as shouting, police sirens, pets, and water running so that it can alert you accordingly. Although it's an accessibility-oriented feature, I could imagine it being useful during instances in which I may not hear the doorbell — such as when I'm wearing noise cancelling headphones, for example.

I've noticed it working well in practice so far; as shown in the screenshot above, I received a notification telling me that my cat may have been trying to get my attention in the middle of the night.

It's also gotten better at reminding me when it's time to go to bed.

Apple wants to help you set a healthy sleep goal and stick to it in iOS 14. When the update rolls out, you'll be able to set a sleep goal and create a sleep schedule designed to help you achieve that goal.

Apple has offered a Bedtime mode that dims the display and hides notifications on the lock screen until the morning for years. With iOS 14, however, Apple has folded this into the Sleep section of Health app and added more controls for managing a sleep schedule and setting goals. 

I have mine set to kick into bedtime mode 45 minutes before my scheduled sleep time, which prompts my iPhone to dim the lock screen and displays a nice message wishing me a restful sleep.   

Recording indicators show when the microphone or camera is being used.

Apple also wants to provide more transparency about when the microphone and camera are being used. You'll now see a tiny colored dot near the top of the screen when the microphone or camera is being used. In the screenshot above, for example, you'll notice that there's a green dot in the top right corner to show that the camera is in use. 

Selfies now look like your mirror image instead of being flipped.

You may notice when taking a selfie that the result doesn't look quite the way it appeared in your iPhone's viewfinder. That's about to change in iOS 14, as there's a new setting that enables your iPhone to snap a selfie that looks like your mirror image.

Just navigate to Settings > Camera > Mirror Front Camera. 

It's much easier to set alarms.

If you set dozens of alarms like I do, you're probably very familiar with the process of scrolling through the number picker to set the minute and hour.

Thankfully, Apple is moving to a more convenient method for setting alarms in iOS 14. Rather than requiring you to scroll to find the right number, your iPhone will just pull up the number pad so that you can type it in. 

• The last time I went car shopping, I drove home a Toyota RAV4 hybrid.
• But I seriously considered a Tesla Model 3.
• I should be in the market again in the next year or so, and this time around, I've already made my decision: I'm buying a used Tesla Model S from the 2012-13 period.
• Here's why I want to be the proud owner of an "old" Tesla.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Last year, I had to buy a new car, in a rush. At the time, I was very much in the thrall of the Tesla Model 3 and seriously considered purchasing one. But for a variety of reasons, I ended up with a certified pre-owned Toyota RAV4 hybrid, and despite a few dents and dings, I've been quite happy (full disclosure: I already owned a CPO Toyota Prius).

With a pair of teenagers in my house, I'm probably looking at acquiring a few more sets of wheels in the coming years, and I've already made up my mind about what the next vehicle will be: an early Tesla Model S.

It's about time. I've covered Tesla since the years when the carmaker was barely selling any cars at all — just the original Roadster. Since then, I've sampled everything the company has produced, excluding the very new Model Y crossover. 

And while the Roadster is my favorite and always will be, I'm a professional automotive journalist and don't need to actually own an impractical two-seater; I get to test at least half a dozen of them every year anyway. And over a decade ago, I possessed first-generation Mazda Miata and scratched that itch.

So it's going to be Model S, ideally a 2012 or 2013 iteration. Here's why:

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The Model S was Tesla's first "clean sheet," designed-from-scratch, all-electric car. Here's the current version, which got a design update in 2016.

It was the first real styling upgrade since the vehicle's launch in 2012. The big change was the elimination of the "nose cone" on the front end, a sort of fake grille.

Here's what the nose cone looked like in action.

I am a nose-cone fan! I've gotten used to the "grille-less" new design and understand the logic: electric cars don't inhale air and don't need grilles. But I just think it looks better than the cone-less Model S.

The Model S made Tesla and CEO Elon Musk proud. It firmly established the then-tiny company as the premier manufacturer of luxury EVs.

Admittedly, my favorite Tesla remains the first one I ever drove: the original Roadster. But that car was impractical (if a lot of fun), and it wasn't all-Tesla, based as it was on a Lotus chassis.

Read about my drive in my favorite Tesla ever.

Of course, if I actually owned one, I could say that I drive an earthbound version of the only production car that's currently in orbit.

As some readers know, I'm a hybrid enthusiast. I own a 2011 Toyota Prius.

Read about my devotion to the Prius.

And a 2017 Toyota RAV4 hybrid.

My RAV4 has suffered a few indignities since I bought it, but I've fixed them myself and thus far the crossover has been a joy.

Here's how I fixed the damage with a cheap roll of tape.

BUT I'll be investing in some new wheels in the next few years and I've already made up my mind: It's Model S or bust!

I just adore the car and think that it would be ideal for my suburban lifestyle. I don;'t want a red one, however. I want blue.

As it turns out, I've driven the very car I want to buy, a 2013-vintage, single-motor Model S. This particular version was a "Performance" trim level

I later drove a dual-motor version of the car. For my money, the single-motor is fine, and I prefer the driving dynamics.

The Model S was designed by Franz von Holzhausen, and the car lover in me wants to own some of his work. I think he's among the most influential designers of all time.

Read about Von Holzhausen's contribution to Tesla.

I also like that Tesla Model S's were, and are, made in California — at a factory near San Francisco.

The early examples of the Model S endured some production snafus, but because the car uses a lot of aluminum in its construction, it's held up incredibly well. I check out old Model S cars all the time, and even in the Northeast, most look almost new.

When it comes to owning any Tesla, access to the company's worldwide Supercharger network is a boon. Tesla now bills for access, but early customers could use these fast-charging outpost for free. You can fully recharge in about an hour.

Read about why Tesla's Supercharger network is a competitive advantage.

That said, this process does requires an adjustment. You can refuel a gas-powered vehicle to an equivalent Tesla Model S range in five minutes.

Tesla discourages it, but many Tesla sales and service locations have Superchargers on site.

Tesla also has a network of partners who provide slower, level 2 charging at various destinations and in parking structures. This level can help an owner top off with enough electrons to get to a Supercharger location.

Tesla will also help an owner install a dedicated level 2 charger at home.

And in a pinch, an owner can use their Tesla-supplied cable to plug into 240-volt of 110/20-volt power. The latter is really slow, however: around one mile of range per hour.

I think the Model 3 might be one of the best cars money can buy right now, and before I got the RAV4, I seriously considered getting a 3.

Read about the Model 3's brilliance.

Older Model S cars also tend to hold their value. In my shopping for a 2012-2013 car, I'm often seeing $30-35,000 asking prices, with some examples near $40,000. Low-mileage cars are between $40-$50,000.

Contrast with my 1998 Saab 900S, a car that I loved but that eventually depreciated to the junk yard. Cost me $6,000 to buy, sold for about $300.

The interior of the Model S isn't what anyone would call excessively luxurious, but it is a study in well-thought-out minimalism, and the seats are rather comfortable.

The back seats are also quite roomy. Plenty of room for three passengers.

I wasn't initially a fan of the massive central touchscreen, which controls many vehicle functions, but after experiencing it half a dozen times, I've come to appreciate the technology.

You really can't beat the Model S for cargo capacity. While its has plenty of room under the rear hatch ...

... It also has a front trunk, or "frunk," where a gas engine would be on a traditional car. This give the Model S the cargo capacity of an SUV.

What about the Autopilot semi-self-driving feature on an older Model S? I don't much care. When I drive a Tesla, I enjoy being behind the wheel so much that having the most current version of the hardware doesn't affect my thinking.

Say hello to my next car! Frankly, I'm going to love saying that I have a "old Tesla!"

• The C-Mask from Donut Robotics can translate and transcribe speech and connect to bluetooth.
• When the coronavirus hit, the company pivoted from its primary robot design to developing masks.
• They are set to ship in September, and cost about $40.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The coronavirus made masks a must-have item for leaving home, and Japanese company Donut Robotics gave them an upgrade. The robotics company pivoted from designs for airport travelers to integrating those same functions into face masks.

Experts have cautioned people to wear masks, whether they have COVID-19 symptoms or not, and say that masks significantly reduce an infected person's ability to spread the virus. A downside, though, is that they make communication more difficult.

A mouth covering naturally muffles speech, and they also make lip-reading and following expressions difficult or impossible. With both transcription and translation capabilities, the C-Mask could be a solution to that problem, especially if masks are going to be part of everyday life for the foreseeable future. 

Here's how Donut Robotics made them work.

Donut Robotics had a contract with Haneda Airport in Tokyo to sell robot translators and guides, like this robot, called Cinnamon.

Source: Reuters

When COVID-19 hit, the team quickly worked to use its technology in a relevant way. "We worked hard for years to develop a robot and we have used that technology to create a product that responds to how the coronavirus has reshaped society," CEO Taisuke Ono told Reuters.

The mask connects to a smartphone app over Bluetooth, where it can then transcribe speech, be used for calls, or translate Japanese into eight different languages.

The name comes from the Five Cs on Donut Robotics' website:

 1.Clear voice

2. Connect with smartphone

3. Cool design

4. Clean material

5. Combat coronavirus.

It took Donut Robotics' designers only about a month to adapt the technology from the translator robot into the mask.

The C-Mask is worn over a typical face mask, which holds up the smart mask with its straps.

The first 5,000 C-Masks will ship in Japan in September.

The company also has plans to sell in Europe, the US, and China, and has received international attention since it was featured by Reuters.

Ono also said that he hopes to make money from subscriptions to the translation app.

• "Down to Earth" and "The Baby-Sitters Club" are some of Netflix's most popular shows this week. 
• Netflix introduced daily top lists of the most popular titles on the streaming service in February.
• Streaming search engine Reelgood keeps track of the lists and provides Business Insider with a rundown of the week's most popular TV shows on Netflix.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Zac Efron's new Netflix series is a hit. The travel show, "Down to Earth," follows Efron around the world with a health expert.

Netflix introduced daily top 10 lists of its most viewed movies and TV shows in February (it counts a view if an account watches at least two minutes of a title).

Every week, the streaming search engine Reelgood compiles for Business Insider a list of which TV shows have been most prominent on Netflix's daily lists that week. 

Other Netflix originals — from "Unsolved Mysteries" to "The Baby-Sitters Club" — continued to be popular with viewers this week. Only one series, "The Office," wasn't a Netflix original this week. 

SEE ALSO: The top 9 movies on Netflix this week, from 'The Old Guard' to 'Only'

9. "Floor Is Lava" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Teams compete to navigate rooms flooded with lava by leaping from chairs, hanging from curtains and swinging from chandeliers. Yes, really."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 86%

What critics said: "If you're looking for a summer distraction, it doesn't get much more mindlessly distracting than this. But depending on the size of your house, maybe don't try it at home." — NBC News Think (season 1)

8. "The Office" (NBC, 2005-2013)

Description: "This hit comedy chronicles the foibles of disgruntled office workers — led by deluded boss Michael Scott — at the Dunder Mifflin paper company."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 81%

What critics said: "The Office has seemed lost, particularly by devoting substantial time to world-building Dwight's beet farm, a remnant of a failed spin-off effort." — NPR (season 9)

7. "The Business of Drugs" (Netflix original, 2020)

Description: "To understand the origins and true impact of the business of drugs, a former CIA analyst investigates the economics of six illicit substances."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: "Settles into the nitty-gritty of the ins and outs of the cocaine trade, tosses in a few op-ed assertions, a handful of whopper statistics and some fascinating firsthand accounts." — Decider 

6. "The Baby-Sitters Club" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Ann M. Martin's beloved books get a modern update in this series that follows a group of girlfriends and their homegrown babysitting business."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 100%

What critics said: "There are plenty of happy-go-lucky characters on TV. But rarely do we see the nuance of joy — the struggle to achieve it, the idea that someone else might be left out of it — portrayed so expertly, let alone told in stories about children." — USA Today (season 1)

5. "Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich" (Netflix original, 2020)

Description: "Stories from survivors fuel this docuseries examining how convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein used his wealth and power to carry out his abuses."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 81%

What critics said: "Filthy Rich is a good enough starting point if you know little about Jeffrey Epstein, but it doesn't crack anything open. The best thing the documentary does is let you hear from the survivors directly." — Slate

4. "The Epic Tales of Captain Underpants in Space" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Best friends George and Harold — along with their classmates and tyrannical principal — are recruited for a mysterious mission in outer space."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: N/A

What critics said: N/A

3. "Warrior Nun" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "After waking up in a morgue, an orphaned teen discovers she now possesses superpowers as the chosen Halo-Bearer for a secret sect of demon-hunting nuns." 

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 72%

What critics said: "When it picks up a full head of steam, as it does in the final couple of episodes during a mission to the Vatican, you can easily see Warrior Nun running and running." — Guardian (season 1)

2. "Unsolved Mysteries" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Real cases of perplexing disappearances, shocking murders and paranormal encounters fuel this gripping revival of the iconic documentary series."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 74%

What critics said: "The Netflix format allows each case to have its own 45-50 minute installment, unlike the original series, which usually crammed four or more shorter segments into a single episode." — io9

1. "Down to Earth with Zac Efron" (Netflix original, 2020-present)

Description: "Actor Zac Efron journeys around the world with wellness expert Darin Olien in a travel show that explores healthy, sustainable ways to live."

Rotten Tomatoes critic score: 57%

What critics said: "Here's the craziest part: By the end of the show, I was kind of envious of Zac Efron. His worldview is so refreshing, so free of the kind of forced irony you see from a lot of people on television." — Uproxx (season 1)

• Danielle Strachman, the cofounder and general partner of 1517 Fund and a founding member of the Thiel Fellowship, says that she looks for founders who are "crazy awesome," not "crazy."
• The venture capitalist connected with an aspiring founder on Twitter, who was passionate but came off as "pretty nuts," so she offered him some advice. 
• She said that founders "should put together a narrative and story that is exciting and sounds believable and doable" so that VCs can recognize what actually exists. 
• For a venture capitalist to take an idea seriously, it has to exist outside of an aspiring founder's head, Strachman said. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

When fledgling founders seek out advice from seasoned venture capitalists, it's not unusual for them to strike up a conversation on Twitter. And many VCs, who often list their Twitter handles and LinkedIn accounts publicly but keep their email addresses private, seem to enjoy giving advice on the Twittersphere. 

And Danielle Strachman, the cofounder and general partner of 1517 Fund and a founding member of the Thiel Fellowship, is one of them. 

On Friday, the experienced venture capitalist offered some advice for aspiring founders. She tweeted, "Made a connection off Twitter recently with a young man who is super passionate and pumped, but also not putting their best foot forward. Here's a little on how to showcase yourself as crazy awesome over just crazy."

Along with the tweet, Strachmann included a Loom video that summarized her call with the young man on Twitter. 

In the Loom video, Strachmann said that the young entrepreneur was working on a hardware technology and had sent her an initial email that she described as "kind of weird."

"I couldn't really tell what existed and what didn't," she added.

The VC, whose firm prioritizes working with dropouts, college students, and those who never attended college, felt that the initial email was "off-putting," even though the aspiring entrepreneur was so passionate about what he was building.

On their Zoom call, the young entrepreneur went on about his failed applications and rejections. And about 15-20 minutes into the conversation, Strachmann decided to tell him something he needed to know — that he came off "as crazy" and seemed "pretty nuts." 

But there are two types of crazy, she told him.

There are also "crazy awesome people" who have a big vision, and "can put together a narrative and story that is exciting and sounds believable and doable,'' she added as encouragement.

"Crazy awesome" people have usually done something to solidify their ideas, such as sketching out a roadmap for their project or developing a prototype.

For a venture capitalist to take an idea seriously, it has to exist, in one way or another, outside of an aspiring founder's head, Strachmann said. VCs are less likely to reject ideas from founders who have demonstrated that their idea can sell, or who have outlined a "path to execution," Business Insider's Shana Lebowitz and Jennifer Ortakales have previously reported. And founders who are trying to raise funds for a project should, at the very least, prepare a flawless pitch deck.

But when founders come off as "just crazy," or when they have no concrete ideas to share, they're more likely to face rejection from VCs, Strachmann said.

"If you're crazy awesome, I want to hear from you," she said, towards the end of the Loom video. "If you're crazy, I might want to hear from you, too.''

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Pathologists debunk 13 coronavirus myths

• Twitter gave an update late on Friday on its investigation into the highly visible hack of dozens of verified accounts on Wednesday.
• Twitter said 130 accounts were targeted, of which 45 had their passwords reset and tweets sent by the hackers.
• Up to eight accounts also had their data fully downloaded by the hackers. None were Verified accounts, the company said.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The hackers who hijacked dozens of high-profile Twitter accounts this week may have had a second, less visible purpose.

The hack took place on Wednesday when the hackers successfully gained access to accounts belonging to public figures, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Kim Kardashian, as well as some company accounts like Apple and Uber.

Hijacking these accounts, the hackers tweeted out a Bitcoin scam, asking followers to send Bitcoin to a specific wallet address and promising to send back double the amount.

Twitter said on Friday that it believed 130 accounts were affected by the hack, and that only a "small subset" actually tweeted anything.

Later that same day in a blog post, Twitter offered some more detail.

"As of now, we know that they accessed tools only available to our internal support teams to target 130 Twitter accounts. For 45 of those accounts, the attackers were able to initiate a password reset, login to the account, and send Tweets," Twitter said.

But sending tweets to a Bitcoin scam doesn't appear to have been the hackers' only objective.

Out of the 130 compromised accounts, Twitter says up to eight had their data fully downloaded by the hackers using the "Your Twitter Data" tool, allowing users to download all the data relating to their account, including their private messages.

Twitter said none of these eight accounts were verified, suggesting they may not have been any of the high-profile celebrity or company accounts that tweeted links to the Bitcoin scam. However, some of the hijacked accounts were popular but unverified accounts (e.g. the popular @TheTweetOfGod).

Twitter gave no details on which accounts these were or what they might have in common. Numerous reports have linked the attack with a community of hackers obsessed with so-called "OG" accounts with super-short Twitter handles.

Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs reported that hours before the Bitcoin links started being tweeted on Wednesday, a handful of OG accounts, including "@6," were also hijacked.

How did they do it

Twitter also provided more detail about how the hackers managed to crack into its systems.

Twitter said the hackers had managed to gain access to an internal company tool using a "coordinated social engineering attack," on Wednesday. Social engineering is a term which means hackers manipulate, trick, or convince their target to hand over access to a system, rather than technically hacking.

"The attackers successfully manipulated a small number of employees and used their credentials to access Twitter's internal systems, including getting through our two-factor protections," Twitter said in its Friday blog. It did not say how the employees were manipulated. On Thursday, Motherboard reported that a source who took part in the hack claimed the attackers paid a Twitter employee.

In its blog, the company said it would be implementing extra training to guard against social engineering.

Twitter says it is still investigating the attack and is working with law enforcement. The FBI is looking into the hack.

The company said it is also restoring access to the account holders who were locked out while it sought to reestablish control of the situation. At least one affected account appears to have gone back to its owner, as Tesla's Elon Musk started tweeting again late on Friday.

SEE ALSO: Twitter says 'social engineering' led to the massive hack that targeted high-profile accounts like Barack Obama and Jeff Bezos. Here's what the technique involves and how to avoid it.

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NOW WATCH: Pathologists debunk 13 coronavirus myths

• Laundry startup Washboard garnered media mockery in 2014 for saying it would sell quarters for coin-operated laundry machines at a 35-50% markup. It shuttered after six days.
• But now, as more stores and customers turn to debit and credit payments to mitigate the spread of coronavirus, there's a nationwide coin shortage that has people scrambling for change to do their laundry.
• Washboard cofounder Caleb Brown says he doesn't plan on bringing the service back, despite people telling him 'they would love to see it come back.'
• Meanwhile, mom-and-pop laundromats are pivoting to mobile payments or debit card and credit card payments, according to the Coin Laundry Association. 
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

There's a grainy, 28-second, vertically-shot Youtube video from 2014 of a guy named Charlie Pizza raving about a hot new startup called Washboard. The startup promised to mail customers $20 in quarters for coin-operated laundry machines for the low price of $26.99 per month. 

Charlie Pizza, of course, isn't real — the video was a marketing stunt for the company that mailed customers quarters at a 35% markup (or a 50% markup, if they chose to get $10 in quarters for $14.99).

In 2014, while analysts scratched their heads as Silicon Valley pumped $1.5 million into Yo, an app that texted people "yo", the company's cofounder, Caleb Brown, put Washboard on Product Hunt, a website where people can upvote new products or services they're interested in. Washboard quickly made its way to the front page.

"We're having fun. I didn't think it would get upvoted that high," Brown said. "I thought maybe we would get two customers."

The startup went viral and Washboard received widespread media scrutiny— and general mockery — during the company's brief six-day run.

Pittsburgh-based software developer Brown says that he and his cofounder Shaun Chapman shut down the service because its payment processor, Stripe, said that Washboard violated its terms of service (it doesn't allow money orders), and finding another one wasn't worth the energy. 

Now, however, the company's core idea of a coin subscription service looks newly viable. The US faces a nationwide coin shortage as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, as people are discouraged from using cash in stores, and many businesses that do accept cash are asking for exact change to limit contact between customers and clerks. People desperate to do laundry are driving to friends' places to exchange cash for coins,asking their parents to mail quarters, or relying on a stockpile from their employer. 

Brown has heard from more than a dozen people asking him to bring the service back, he tells Business Insider. 

"People have told me many times in the last months that they would love to see it come back," Brown said. "Someone just like a month ago said, 'This is so ahead of its time.'"

Unfortunately for Washboard's wistful admirers, Brown doesn't plan on bringing back the service back anytime soon. "While I do believe Washboard solved a real problem for real people, I didn't think there was really an opportunity to grow Washboard beyond quarter delivery," Brown wrote in 2014 when he and Chapman shut down the service. Brown, who currently works at a developer staffing startup called X-Team, isn't interested in a relaunch even if  quarters are newly valuable because of the pandemic.

The coronavirus crisis-spurred shortage means that the 30,000 coin laundromats in the US are taking a hit, according to Brian Wallace, the CEO of the Coin Laundry Association. While plenty are equipped with coin machines, many of them are low on funds or even empty, leaving mom-and-pop laundromats to pivot to mobile payments, or debit card and credit card payments. 

Wallace says that 89% of laundromats offer coin payments, while 59% of those offer it has their only payment method.

Coin payment is still the most popular method for laundromat owners because it's the cheapest. Any laundry-specific payment apps that aim to make profit, he said, would take away from the laundromat's already-scant profit.

Washboard never had the chance to garner much profit of its own. Only 41 people signed up for the subscription service before it shut-down — Washboard made approximately $1.50 for every order, bringing them to a measly $60 in profit by the end of the week. 

"The concept truly isn't any different from Venmo," Brown said. "We weren't making crazy money."

Venmo charges a 3% transaction fee for credit cards, which, on the surface is a far cry from Washboard's markup on change. But the startup's efforts were high and the margins were low: Brown had to open a separate bank account, buy hundreds of dollars in quarters, and manually count money and mail coins to customers.

The shipping was free for users but "of course there's no such thing as free shipping," Brown said.

Brown and Chapman actually pulled in far more money after they decided to shut down the site: The domain sold for $1,300.

Now, while companies have pivoted to delivering groceries and conducting virtual doctor visits during the pandemic, laundry remains one of those chores that still require in-person visits for many people across America. And while plenty of coin-operated laundromats have adopted social distancing measures, coins are still hard to come by. Customers can try to get change at their local bank or at stores, but may leave empty-handed because of the limited supply. The problem harkens back to one of the only YouTube comments left on the original Charlie Pizza video:

"lol, but you had to wait 2 days to get the quarters and that is plenty of time to get to the bank," Jacqueline Marsh commented.

"It's plenty of time to get to the bank but you still have to go to the bank," Brown responded. "And that, my friend, is the real problem."

See also: Code collaboration startup Sourcegraph raised $28 million and plans to double its headcount during the pandemic. Here's why companies like Amazon and Tinder love its developer tools.

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NOW WATCH: Inside London during COVID-19 lockdown

• A massive, humiliating hack this week targeted some of Twitter's most important users like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Jeff Bezos. But President Donald Trump's hyperactive Twitter account was spared.
• Trump's account may have been given extra protection from Twitter's end after a rogue employee temporarily deactivated the president's personal handle in 2017.
• The White House also has layers and layers of protection in place to keep Trump's communications safe, even though he reportedly often uses an unsecure phone.
• That said, former government officials and cybersecurity experts agreed that Trump being targeted in a bitcoin scam is the least of his concerns.
• "The question is, what has happened before that went under the radar?" said one former intelligence contractor. "How many tweets could have gone out, or could go out in the future, that just don't catch people's eye?"
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On July 15, Twitter's never-ending stream of hot takes, outrage, and GIFs came to a screeching halt.

Instead, everyone's attention fixed on the accounts of some of the world's wealthiest and most powerful figures who were posting identical messages asking followers to send bitcoin payments to fight the spread of COVID-19, and promising to return a larger sum.

The tweets were quickly determined to be a cryptocurrency scam. They also seemed to be coming from everywhere — from former President Barack Obama and former Vice President Joe Biden, to billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, and even from celebrities like Kanye West and Kim Kardashian West.

But one figure remained conspicuously absent from those targeted: President Donald Trump, one of Twitter's most prolific users.

Trump's personal Twitter handle, @realdonaldtrump, has more than 80 million followers. And as the president of the United States, a tweet sent from Trump's account has the power to ignite more than just a Twitter war.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany assured the public afterward that Trump's account was "not jeopardized" in the attacks. Still, considering the implications to national security and beyond, the brazen and far-reaching nature of this week's bitcoin scam renewed concerns about what, if anything, is keeping the president's social media from being hacked.

'This is really like any social media manager's worst nightmare'

For about 11 minutes on November 3, 2017, @realDonaldTrump disappeared from the internet. A temporary contractor named Bahtiyar Duysak had flipped the switch on his last day on the job as he was walking out the door, TechCrunch reported at the time.

In the aftermath, Twitter announced that it had "implemented safeguards to prevent this from happening again" but declined to elaborate, citing security matters.

After this week's hack, an anonymous administration official and a Twitter employee confirmed to the New York Times that Trump's account had extra security measures placed on it after past incidents; separately, a senior intelligence official told the Times that his account is now under a special "lock and key."

A former White House aide also also told Insider that Trump's devices are secured and protected. But that may not have stopped this week's hackers from targeting Trump if they really wanted to.

Twitter's investigation into the matter found that the hackers had direct access to the company's own internal tools. Twitter said the breach occurred through a "coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."

In a social engineering attack, hackers trick an employee into handing over vital access or data. Motherboard reported, however, that in this case, the attackers may have bribed an employee.

Business Insider previously reported that this level of access may have allowed the hackers to obtain email credentials directly through Twitter's tools.

The approach would bypass the usual safety measures on high profile accounts, such as two-factor authentication and specially protected devices, said Alex Wall, a former member of Obama's social media team who was also director of social media for Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign. And it wouldn't matter which top-secret device the accounts were kept on, or whether the phones were hidden in a lockbox.

"This is really like any social media manager's worst nightmare, where you put on two factor, none of your devices themselves were compromised, you received no notification and suddenly your principal is tweeting about bitcoin," Wall said. "And there's nothing you can do to stop it."

David Kris, a founding partner at the consulting firm Culper Partners, said Wednesday's Twitter breach should be a wake-up call for the company as well.

"Hopefully Twitter added a security layer or two internally and put the keys to that layer in a very small number of hands," said Kris, who formerly served as head of the Justice Department's national security division. "While it's not necessarily feasible at scale, you can do lots of stuff bespoke, and they should."

As far as why Trump wasn't targeted, "it comes back to the motivation of the attacker," said Karim Hijazi, CEO of the cyberintelligence firm Prevailion.

Almost all the scam tweets that were sent out were uniform and bitcoin-related. "It wouldn't be entirely absurd, for instance, that Elon Musk would put something like that out. It's a little more unbelievable" that Trump would do the same, Hijazi said. "So it's possible that the absurdity of the tweet was not a good fit."

Moreover, he said, if the hackers actually had blasted out a tweet from Trump's account, "that would have been a heavy hit. That is a monster move and very, very brazen, and I think anyone, even a nation-state actor on the other side, if that's what's behind this, would have to think twice about doing that."

Trump is surrounded by a digital fortress — but there may be weak links

There are also additional measures implemented from the president's end to protect him from malicious cyberactivity.

For one, there are no geolocating capabilities on the phone used by the president.

When Obama came into office, "he was a big fan of texting," said Douglas Smith, who served as assistant secretary of homeland security under Obama.

"The compromise was that the White House Communications Agency, in coordination with the Secret Service, provided Obama with a highly secure device that was on a closed loop, it was point-to-point, and you couldn't randomly get to it," Smith said. "That allowed him to stay in touch with his closest confidants."

In 2018, the Times reported that Trump used an unsecured iPhone to tweet and communicate with friends and allies. The president denied the story.

However, even if Trump does use an unsecured phone, as president, he is still "under a bigger umbrella," said Larry Johnson, the former CEO of CyberSponse who used to serve in the US Secret Service. "The White House Office of Communications, the White House Communications Agency, they all have a gateway and their own private network that monitors anything coming in or going out."

Moreover, the president is on a White House provided Wi-Fi network at all times, even when he's on the road.

"So not only does he have more people monitoring his communications, but even the network he's on, whether or not he's using a secure device, is a mesh network," Johnson said. "Anywhere he goes, it's like a bubble that goes over him, monitoring communications, both inbound and outbound."

The White House also has "honeypots" on inbound communications which capture threats coming to the president, whether it's to his e-mail, Twitter or Facebook account, or his phone. And it can geo-locate and track down the IP address of anyone coming into the network "fairly easily when they control it like that," Johnson said.

There are also standard operating procedures in place that prompt high-level officials to swap out their passwords after a certain number of days.

"When I was at the federal government, the policy for your official account was that every 60 days or so, or on a fairly regular basis you were required to completely change your password on all of your official stuff, and you were absolutely forbidden from having social media accounts or anything else on your official device," Smith said.

'The perfect confluence of a cyberattack coupled with a really powerful disinformation campaign'

Former government officials and intelligence veterans said, however, that Trump being targeted in a bitcoin scam is the least of his concerns.

"The cybersecurity community agrees that this looks like a false flag operation to test whether this could be done," said Hijazi, who has also served as an intelligence community contractor. "It seems the whole bitcoin play was a little bit of a side angle."

"This was the perfect confluence of a cyberattack coupled with a really powerful disinformation campaign," he said. While in this case, the disinformation looks like a "smash and grab cybercrime play," the bigger concern is whether the same thing could happen again with a more subversive narrative.

"The idea here is, can you change public opinion, can you shift tides in one fell swoop through these accounts that were accessed?" Hijazi said.

He added: "And the question is, what has happened before that went under the radar? How many tweets could have gone out, or could go out in the future, that just don't catch people's eye? This showed that something like Twitter, with the security in place there, is susceptible to being compromised — and when I say security, I mean the people that are trusted to take control of these environments — which is really concerning."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: What makes 'Parasite' so shocking is the twist that happens in a 10-minute sequence

• More money is flowing into the autonomous-vehicle industry than ever.
• As the technology evolves, that money is going to fewer companies.
• The coronavirus is likely to accelerate the industry's trend toward consolidation.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The autonomous vehicle industry is consolidating, and the space that once frothed over with huge investments has settled into a steady simmer. 

With many autonomous-vehicle companies years away from bringing in meaningful revenues, investors are getting more discerning about where they place their bets. While the amount of money flowing into the industry has risen in each of the past seven years— and likely will this year, as well — the number of companies cashing those checks seems to have peaked. In 2018, a record 163 AV companies landed investments. Last year, that number dropped to 150. So far in 2020, it's just 72. And the financial havoc wreaked by the coronavirus is likely to accelerate the winnowing trend.

Below are the 10 autonomous driving startups that have raised the most money to date, according to Pitchbook's data, as well as the research company's summary of what distinguishes each company from its competitors — and why investors think it's a smart bet.

SEE ALSO: These 2 charts show how Tesla's skyrocketing stock has become divorced from the rest of the auto industry

10. PlusAI

• Total capital raised: $200 million
• Most recent valuation: $1 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of self-driving technology designed for large-scale autonomous commercial fleets. The company's technology uses artificial intelligence, computer vision, sensor technology, and deep learning to operate autonomous vehicles, enabling truck and freight companies to increase truck utilization and profitability."

9. Dynamic Map Platform

• Total capital raised: $218.5 million
• Most recent valuation: N/A

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of a 3D-map data-management technology for autonomous driving. The company's three-dimensional map data offers automated driving and safe-driving support system, enabling clients to reduce traffic accidents, support mobility for people with transportation limitations, and alleviate congestion to reduce the environmental burden with the realization of autonomous driving."

8. WeRide

• Total capital raised: $237 million
• Most recent valuation: $593 million

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of fully-autonomous vehicles designed to deliver a safe, robust, and convenient MaaS (mobility as a service) to the public. The company's vehicles use deep learning to deliver full automation that operates without human intervention by using a combination of lidar, cameras, and radar sensors along with artificial intelligence to perceive the driving environment, enabling users to navigate the quickest and safest path to the final destination."

7. Innoviz Technologies

• Total capital raised: $264 million
• Most recent valuation: $575 million

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of remote-sensing sensors and systems designed to offer accurate mapping and localization. The company's system offers smart three-dimensional remote sensing for fully autonomous vehicles, as well as provides real-time three-dimensional images of the vehicle's surroundings, enabling vehicle owners to integrate the sensor systems seamlessly into any vehicle for accurate mapping."

6. Quanergy

• Total capital raised: $325.1 million
• Most recent valuation: $2.3 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of solid-state sensors designed to offer smart sensing services for self-driving cars. The company's sensors help in real-time capture and processing of high-definition mapping data, as well as help in object detection, tracking and classification, enabling clients to access sensing systems that benefit from advanced artificial-intelligence perception software thereby improving safety and efficiency in industries."

5. TuSimple

• Total capital raised: $407.9 million
• Most recent valuation: $1.2 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of self-driving technology intended to improve the safety and efficiency of the trucking industry. The company offers self-driving trucks with an array of cameras to scan the surrounding environment with the help of high-precision visual positioning and multi-sensor integration system, enabling clients to increase safety, decrease transportation costs, and reduce carbon emissions."

4. Pony.ai

• Total capital raised: $726 million
• Most recent valuation: $3 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of an autonomous-driving technology intended for the manufacturing of automated vehicles. The company's platform leverages artificial intelligence and algorithms to accurately perceive the vehicle's surroundings in order to predict surrounding driver's actions and maneuver the vehicle accordingly, enabling vehicle companies to improve their car functionality and safety in an efficient manner."

3. Aurora Innovation

• Total capital raised: $765.6 million
• Most recent valuation: $3.1 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of an autonomous car technology designed to create self-driving cars. The company's technology uses advanced machine-learning software and hardware to power self driving cars by leveraging a combination of camera, radar, and lidar, enabling clients to make roads safer and improve access to mobility."

2. Nuro

• Total capital raised: $1 billion
• Most recent valuation: $2.7 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of a suite of robotics designed to make life easier. The company's robotics include an autonomous vehicle which helps to transport goods quickly, safely, and affordably."

1. Argo AI

• Total capital raised: $2.6 billion
• Most recent valuation: $7.3 billion

What the company does (according to Pitchbook): "Developer of artificial-intelligence software designed to offer self-driving technology. The company's artificial-intelligence technology helps to tackle robotics and artificial intelligence for self-driving vehicles, enabling its users to avail effective self-driving technology."

• Read more:
• The CEO of the Amazon-backed self-driving car startup Aurora explains why testing its tech on a computer is better than testing it in the real world
• A cofounder of the Softbank-funded startup Nuro reveals how the company plans to make money off its self-driving delivery robots without charging any fees
• A top industry executive says there are 3 major players in autonomous vehicles, and Waymo, the most talked-about company in the business, isn't one of them
• Experts rank Tesla, Waymo and 16 other power players in the world of self-driving cars

• People are spending more time on TikTok daily in the US than on Instagram.
• The data, from financial services firm Cowen, illustrates the video-sharing app's meteoric rise.
• It found that in Q2 of 2020, people who used TikTok were spending an average of 41 minutes daily, while Instagram users were spending 33 minutes on that app.
• However, TikTok is now under threat, with the Trump administration considering banning it or forcing it to separate itself from its Chinese parent company.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

The US government is on the warpath against TikTok, and is considering banning it entirely. But the app's American users feel very differently.

People now spend more time on average using the red-hot video sharing app than Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat — and only marginally less than Facebook.

That's according to a new survey by financial services firm Cowen, which routinely surveys how thousands of American consumers use various mobile apps. The survey found that in the second quarter of 2020, users of TikTok spent an average of 41 minutes a day on the app.

Instagram users spent 31 minutes on that app, meanwhile, while Twitter saw 29 minutes, and Facebook enjoyed 45 minutes, Cowen said in a recent research note to clients.

TikTok's high engagement time — which jumped from 37 minutes in the first three months of 2020 — illustrates just how popular the app is among its users, and why established American firms view the Chinese challenger as a significant threat.

This data does not show how popular an app is overall, or how many people use it compared its rivals. It shows how much time people who do use a given app are spending on it each day, on average — a vital indicator as to the loyalty of its users, and how compelling its content is. 

Cowen's survey comprised around 2,500 US consumers, and was conducted in May 2020.

Owned by Chinese tech firm ByteDance, TikTok has become a cultural phenomenon over the past two years in the US — spawning a new generation of memes, viral challenges, dance crazes, and more.

In doing so, it has become one of the first major new challengers to Facebook in years, which has long dominated the social media space through the US through its stable of apps (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger) bolstered by acquisitions, its aggressive cloning of competitors, and the beneficial network effects of its ubiquity.

But TikTok's position as cultural darling is under siege, with the Trump administration mulling a ban on the service, or forcing it to separate from its Chinese parent company, amid purported security concerns.

We'll get a better idea of whether TikTok's popularity is cutting into Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Snap as the companies report their quarterly earnings reports over the coming weeks. 

For now, TikTok's engagement numbers are very good news for the company. It can only hope they aren't fleeting.

Do you work at Facebook or TikTok? Contact Business Insider reporter Rob Price via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1 650-636-6268), encrypted email (robaeprice@protonmail.com), standard email (rprice@businessinsider.com), Telegram/Wickr/WeChat (robaeprice), or Twitter DM (@robaeprice). We can keep sources anonymous. Use a non-work device to reach out. PR pitches by standard email only, please.

SEE ALSO: Big Tech salaries revealed: How much Apple, Tesla, Amazon, and 10 other tech giants pay their workers, from engineers to salespeople

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• Coworking and commercial real estate landlords in urban markets have an elevator problem, industry experts say.
• Thanks to the coronavirus pandemic, few workers want to be crammed in elevators heading to the top floors with strangers and few employers want to expose them to such risk, the experts told Business Insider.
• Such concerns could give added impetus to allowing employees even after the pandemic passes to work from home or work from satellite offices in the suburbs, they said.
• The elevator worries could fade if the epidemic passes soon or could be accommodated by scheduling systems, they said.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Many commercials real estate companies — traditional landlords and coworking providers alike — have an elevator problem, industry experts say.

No, the lifts aren't stuck between floors or forcing workers to wait interminable moments to get a ride to their floor. Instead, the problem has to do with the danger of crowding into elevators with strangers for long rides to the upper floors of high rises during a pandemic, the experts told Business Insider.

And the problem could help spur some significant changes in the industry, they said. "People don't want to deal with elevators and tall buildings if they don't have to," said Tom Smith, a cofounder of Truss, an online office space marketplace.

Employees aren't eager to pack into elevators while the coronavirus epidemic still rages, Smith and other experts said. And corporate tenants aren't eager to expose their employees to such situations.

Some buildings have started to institute scheduling systems to spread elevator usage out over time, said Julie Whelan, head of occupier research for the Americas for real estate giant CBRE. But other buildings aren't well-equipped to do that, she said.

"Elevators are absolutely a sticking point right now," Whelan said.

The suburbs are looking more attractive

Even before the COVID crisis, there was already growing demand for flexible office space outside of central business districts and closer to the less urban or even suburban places where many office workers live, Whelan and others said. Such offices are often in lower-rise buildings or on the lower floors of mid-rise towers, they said.

The pandemic forced many corporations to allow their employees to work from home or other locations far from their primary offices. The general success of remote work during the crisis is likely to spur many companies to support employees working from home or from offices near their homes after the epidemic passes, the experts said.

The elevator issue makes suburban office space even more attractive and is likely to add to pressure on employers to look for such accommodations, the experts said. Employees can access such offices by taking the stairs or just walking into them without having to go to a higher floor at all. They don't have to worry about cramming into an elevator or waiting for their appointed time to ride one.

Being forced to wait for an elevator in a high-rise to "is going to frustrate people, because that adds to the commute time to your physical space," said Charlie Morris, leader of the US flexible office solutions practice at commercial real estate brokerage Avison Young. "Those people will most likely say, 'I'd rather just work from home or work from near home versus going and doing that.'"

Unfortunately for many of the top coworking providers such as WeWork, their office spaces are primarily located in dense urban areas, not out in the suburbs. Such companies have already seen a sharp drop in occupancy at their mostly downtown towers, thanks to the pandemic.

Memories are short

To be sure, it's not certain that the elevator issue will have such long-lasting effects. Josh Freed, CEO of Proximity, a company that offers software and services that help coworking providers manage their spaces, is optimistic that scheduling systems for elevators will address the problem. People will just need to adjust their behavior and expectations, he said.

"The elevator question is ... just going to end up being a solvable problem," Freed said.

Others make historical comparisons. In the immediate wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, few people wanted to work in the top floors of skyscrapers. But office workers eventually returned to such spaces.

If the US starts to get the pandemic under control soon or a vaccine is developed in the near-term, the concerns about elevators could likewise soon fade.

People's memories are short," Whelan said. "And I think it really depends on how long we're stuck in this challenging time."

Got a tip the coworking market? Contact Troy Wolverton via email at twolverton@businessinsider.com, message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

• Read more about the coworking market and remote work:
• The flex office space will never be the same. Here's how companies like Convene and Industrious are getting creative to win over remote workers.
• These far-flung US regions could become the next big startup hubs as techies abandon Silicon Valley and embrace remote work
• WeWork and other coworking offices will likely need to configure roomier spaces in a post-pandemic environment, as occupancy levels already start to slide
• Co-working spaces like WeWork are offering rent relief to retain tenants in the pandemic, but occupancy levels are already down 10 to 15 percentage points and things may get much worse

SEE ALSO: The coronavirus is a 'nuclear bomb' for companies like WeWork. 10 real-estate insiders lay out the future of flex-office, and how employers are preparing now.

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