Insider Today: Luxury Airbnboom

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Welcome back to our Sunday edition, a roundup of some of our top stories of the last week. I hope you're enjoying some well-deserved rest — or if you have a ton of unwanted gifts to return in person this weekend, good luck with those lines in stores.

We're skipping the dispatch today while we take a bit of time off ourselves, so let's get right to this week's reads.

On the agenda today:

• Elon Musk's private jets made 355 flights this year. Here's where they went.
• Suchir Balaji's mom talks about his life, death, and disillusionment with OpenAI.
• In the fallout of the Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni saga, crisis PR faces a reckoning.
• Luxury vacation rentals are the real winners of the Airbnboom.

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A year of Elon Musk's private jet travels

The private jets of the world's wealthiest man spent a lot of time in the air in 2024. BI used jet-tracking data to chart the 335 flights Musk's private jets have taken so far this year.

The results help show how extensively Musk has burrowed into Trumpworld and, alongside his coming advisory role to the new White House and millions of dollars in donations, provides another window into his growing political involvement.

Here's where Musk's private jets traveled in 2024.

BI interviews mom of OpenAI whistleblower

Former OpenAI employee Suchir Balaji made waves when he spoke against the startup, discussing how it might be breaking copyright laws.

In November, the young engineer was found dead. The tragedy struck a chord, stoking conspiracy theories, grief, and debate. What do we lose when AI models gain? In an exclusive interview with BI, Balaji's mother offered clues.

Read the full interview.

PR's image problem

Blake Lively's bombshell lawsuit against her "It Ends With Us" costar Justin Baldoni thrust crisis PR into the spotlight. Lively accused Baldoni, his publicist, and a crisis PR expert of smearing her in the press in retaliation for harassment complaints.

Details from the legal complaint offer a peek behind the curtain at the public relations industry. It's also giving the profession a bad rap, experts told BI.

An industry in crisis.

Leading luxury

Travelers are spending less on cheap Airbnbs. But high-end vacation rentals are booming, and that taste for luxury is pushing the short-term rental market to new heights.

And as demand booms, Airbnb's competitors are entering the fray. Some of them boast personalized experiences and 24/7 customer care — for up to thousands of dollars per night.

Hotels are out; luxe rentals are in.

This week's quote:

"My mindset has always been, look, I'll set a really high bar, but I'll not let the microevents or little things take away too much energy. That's made me better at my job."

— Aamanh Sehdev, a 28-year-old who went from summer intern to McKinsey partner in 7 years.

More of this week's top reads:

• It's extremely rare for prisoners to win lawsuits on Eighth Amendment claims.
• The 'godfather of EVs' explains why China is winning the race to go electric — and why hybrids are a 'fool's errand'.
• Paying off student-loan debt and traveling the world: How the overemployed use their extra earnings.
• Skipping college and switching jobs: What older Americans regret about their careers.
• Where the richest people in the world spend the December holidays.
• 25 top stocks to buy for up to 97% upside heading into 2025: UBS
• Internal document: AWS has planned lower spending on ZT Systems, a data-center-gear maker being acquired by AMD.

• Netflix streamed two NFL games and got a TV-sized audience.

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  The Insider Today team: Dan DeFrancesco, deputy editor and anchor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in Chicago. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York.