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How to take the Apple hearing test

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

If you own the AirPods Pro 2, you can now take a five-minute hearing test right on your iPhone. With the release of iOS 18.1 and new firmware for the Pro 2, Apple is introducing several new hearing health features — and the hearing test is among them. This will hopefully go a long way in raising awareness about hearing loss and encouraging safer listening practices.
A few notes before you begin. First, intended for those 18 and older, Apple’s hearing test should be taken in a quiet environment where you’ll be able to hear the various tones that are played in each ear. Be aware that iOS 18.1 (or later) and AirPods Pro 2 firmware 7B19 (or later) are required to access the test. And for now, it’s only available in the US and Canada. Apple recommends that people take the test at least once per year, but you’re able to do it as often as you’d like.
If it’s been too long since you’ve seen an audiologist — and that’s true for many people — and you want to check in on your hearing, here’s how to take the Apple hearing test:

While wearing your AirPods Pro 2, open Settings on your iPhone.
Tap on the shortcut to AirPods Pro settings.
Beneath the toggle for switching between transparency mode, adaptive audio, and noise cancellation is a new Hearing Health section. You should see Take a hearing test in blue text. Tap on that.
On the first screen, Apple reminds users that hearing loss is very common and highlights the various hearing assistance capabilities of the AirPods Pro 2, which now include a clinical-grade hearing aid feature. Tap on Get started.
Next, you’ll be asked to confirm that you’re over 18 years old and answer whether you’re currently experiencing allergies, a cold, or infection in your ears or sinuses. Apple also asks whether you’ve been in a loud environment (like a concert or construction site) within the last 24 hours. All of these factors can affect the results of a hearing test and make your results less accurate.
Once you tap Next, Apple runs a quick noise analysis of your current surroundings to make sure it’s quiet enough for the test. If you’re in an area that’s too loud, you won’t be able to proceed.

Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge
You must be somewhere quiet for the hearing test to work.

Once the noise reading is done, Apple then runs a quick ear tip check to verify that you’ve got a good, snug fit and are using the right size of silicone ear tips. You’ll hear a short sample of music while this happens. If either ear doesn’t have a good seal, try the other sizes of tips that came with your AirPods Pro 2. (Note: aftermarket third-party ear tips should not be used for the hearing test.)
At this point, “Do Not Disturb” mode is automatically activated so you won’t have any distractions during the test.
Now, the hearing test actually begins, and your left ear goes first. Apple’s hearing test plays tones at different volumes and frequencies. Each time you hear any of the three-pulse tones, tap on the screen. Some tones can be very faint, so listen carefully. It’s normal to go several seconds without hearing a tone, so don’t let that worry you.

Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge
Listen for any tones and tap the screen when you hear them.

A large circle will animate onscreen throughout the test to confirm that it’s still in progress — even when you’re not hearing tones — and you’ll also notice a round progress indicator that fills up as you complete the test for each ear.
The test takes around five minutes. Once it’s finished, you’ll be presented with the results for each ear. Here, you can see the decibels of hearing loss (dBHL) for each ear, and the test will indicate which of the following five categories you fall into:Little to no loss: up to 25dBHLMild loss: 26–40dBHLModerate loss: 41–60dBHLSevere loss: 61–80dBHLProfound loss: above 80dBHL

Always consult a hearing professional if you have questions or concerns about your Apple hearing test results. You can view the results from any test whenever you’d like from the Health app, where you can also export the audiograms as a pdf.
For many people in the “little to no loss” group, Apple will confirm that the current AirPods tuning is the right match for your results. But in other cases, you’ll be able to enable the new hearing aid feature of the AirPods Pro 2 — and it will use the data from your hearing test for the best performance. It’s important to know that the hearing aid feature is only meant for those with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. If your hearing loss is more severe, you’ll likely want to explore other solutions, such as prescription hearing aids or over-the-counter products.

Image: Samar Haddad / The Verge

A few notes before you begin. First, intended for those 18 and older, Apple’s hearing test should be taken in a quiet environment where you’ll be able to hear the various tones that are played in each ear. Be aware that iOS 18.1 (or later) and AirPods Pro 2 firmware 7B19 (or later) are required to access the test. And for now, it’s only available in the US and Canada. Apple recommends that people take the test at least once per year, but you’re able to do it as often as you’d like.

If it’s been too long since you’ve seen an audiologist — and that’s true for many people — and you want to check in on your hearing, here’s how to take the Apple hearing test:

While wearing your AirPods Pro 2, open Settings on your iPhone.
Tap on the shortcut to AirPods Pro settings.
Beneath the toggle for switching between transparency mode, adaptive audio, and noise cancellation is a new Hearing Health section. You should see Take a hearing test in blue text. Tap on that.
On the first screen, Apple reminds users that hearing loss is very common and highlights the various hearing assistance capabilities of the AirPods Pro 2, which now include a clinical-grade hearing aid feature. Tap on Get started.
Next, you’ll be asked to confirm that you’re over 18 years old and answer whether you’re currently experiencing allergies, a cold, or infection in your ears or sinuses. Apple also asks whether you’ve been in a loud environment (like a concert or construction site) within the last 24 hours. All of these factors can affect the results of a hearing test and make your results less accurate.
Once you tap Next, Apple runs a quick noise analysis of your current surroundings to make sure it’s quiet enough for the test. If you’re in an area that’s too loud, you won’t be able to proceed.

Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge
You must be somewhere quiet for the hearing test to work.

Screenshot: Chris Welch / The Verge
Listen for any tones and tap the screen when you hear them.

A large circle will animate onscreen throughout the test to confirm that it’s still in progress — even when you’re not hearing tones — and you’ll also notice a round progress indicator that fills up as you complete the test for each ear.
The test takes around five minutes. Once it’s finished, you’ll be presented with the results for each ear. Here, you can see the decibels of hearing loss (dBHL) for each ear, and the test will indicate which of the following five categories you fall into:
Little to no loss: up to 25dBHL
Mild loss: 26–40dBHL
Moderate loss: 41–60dBHL
Severe loss: 61–80dBHL
Profound loss: above 80dBHL

For many people in the “little to no loss” group, Apple will confirm that the current AirPods tuning is the right match for your results. But in other cases, you’ll be able to enable the new hearing aid feature of the AirPods Pro 2 — and it will use the data from your hearing test for the best performance. It’s important to know that the hearing aid feature is only meant for those with perceived mild to moderate hearing loss. If your hearing loss is more severe, you’ll likely want to explore other solutions, such as prescription hearing aids or over-the-counter products.

Apple updates the iMac with new colors and an M4 chip

Image: Apple

Apple is updating the iMac with an M4 chip. The new iMac, announced this morning, includes an M4 chip with an 8-core CPU and up to a 10-core GPU. The entry-level model costs $1,299 with two Thunderbolt USB-C 4 ports, while the higher-end models start at $1,499 and have four ports.
It’s also bundled with accessories that now use USB-C charging ports instead of Lightning. Like the prior model, the new iMac has a 24-inch, 4.5K display. However, Apple is offering a new “nano-texture glass option” for $200 extra, which is supposed to help reduce reflections and glare.

Additionally, the iMac’s base RAM has been doubled to 16GB over the prior model, with the ability to configure the higher-end option up to 32GB. Apple’s new iMac also comes with a 12MP webcam, along with new Apple Intelligence features that are starting to roll out today, such as AI-powered writing and editing features and a redesigned Siri.
The updated iMac is available to preorder today, with availability starting on November 8th. It’s available in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There notably isn’t a larger model available, as Apple previously confirmed it had no plans to replace the now-discontinued 27-inch model powered by Intel.

Image: Apple

The new desktop computer from Apple arrives just about a year after the announcement of an M3-powered iMac. The M3 chip was the primary change with that computer; otherwise, it looked just like the M1 iMac from 2021, which arrived with a major redesign. Apple said the M3 model was more than two times faster than the M1 version.
Apple first announced the M4 chip alongside new iPad Pros in May, but the chip hadn’t made the leap to the Mac lineup until now. The M4 chip in the iPad Pro is built with what Apple calls “second-generation” 3nm technology, and the company says the chip has a CPU with up to 10 cores and a 10-core GPU.

The new M4 iMac follows a surprise announcement earlier this month of a new iPad Mini, which was last revised in 2021.

Image: Apple

It’s also bundled with accessories that now use USB-C charging ports instead of Lightning. Like the prior model, the new iMac has a 24-inch, 4.5K display. However, Apple is offering a new “nano-texture glass option” for $200 extra, which is supposed to help reduce reflections and glare.

The updated iMac is available to preorder today, with availability starting on November 8th. It’s available in seven colors: green, yellow, orange, pink, purple, blue, and silver. There notably isn’t a larger model available, as Apple previously confirmed it had no plans to replace the now-discontinued 27-inch model powered by Intel.

Image: Apple

Apple first announced the M4 chip alongside new iPad Pros in May, but the chip hadn’t made the leap to the Mac lineup until now. The M4 chip in the iPad Pro is built with what Apple calls “second-generation” 3nm technology, and the company says the chip has a CPU with up to 10 cores and a 10-core GPU.

The new M4 iMac follows a surprise announcement earlier this month of a new iPad Mini, which was last revised in 2021.

Animal Crossing mobile is getting its new, paid app in December

It’s all smiles until your campsite’s owner doesn’t transfer you over and you get deleted. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The final, microtransaction-free version of Animal Crossing mobile is coming to iOS and Android on December 3rd. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete is set to replace the existing “free-to-start” version of Pocket Camp that first launched in 2017. The complete version will cost $9.99 in the US at first, but once January 30th at 10PM PT rolls around it will cost twice as much at $19.99.
Existing Pocket Camp players who want to port their game data over will have until June 1st, 2025 to do so, via a linked Nintendo account. The original app’s service will cease on November 28th at 7AM PT, so it seems anyone on the fence needs to have their save data linked and prepped for transfer before that. Nintendo has spelled out some of these details in a 12-minute video explainer, which also goes over the existing features that are transferring over and what’s not making the Complete cut.

What’s new for Pocket Camp Complete is the ability to play without a constant internet connection. Players will still be able to visit and trade with friends online, but the new version can be a fully offline experience if desired. Instead of the premium currency of the original game, Leaf Tickets, the complete version will have Leaf Tokens — earned by exchanging Bells or completing goals. Leaf Tokens will be used for buying furniture or speeding up crafting times, so it sounds like the replacement for in-game purchases may be more grinding. And for those that have a stockpile of the old Leaf Tickets, know that they will not be transferred (best to get spending before that Thanksgiving cutoff).
The other big new features for Pocket Camp Complete are in-game Camper Cards that players can customize with their avatars and favorite in-game animals. You can create and trade cards with other players in real life via QR codes. Collecting friends via Camper Cards adds their character to a new mountain location called Whistle Pass, where they may occasionally gift you items and enjoy daily musical performances from K.K. Slider at 7PM. Other members of your friends list who made the transfer to Complete may also appear at Whistle Pass. I assume the others will be quietly raptured and never spoken of again.
Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete can be preordered / pre-registered on iOS and Android now.

It’s all smiles until your campsite’s owner doesn’t transfer you over and you get deleted. | Photo by Amelia Holowaty Krales / The Verge

The final, microtransaction-free version of Animal Crossing mobile is coming to iOS and Android on December 3rd. Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete is set to replace the existing “free-to-start” version of Pocket Camp that first launched in 2017. The complete version will cost $9.99 in the US at first, but once January 30th at 10PM PT rolls around it will cost twice as much at $19.99.

Existing Pocket Camp players who want to port their game data over will have until June 1st, 2025 to do so, via a linked Nintendo account. The original app’s service will cease on November 28th at 7AM PT, so it seems anyone on the fence needs to have their save data linked and prepped for transfer before that. Nintendo has spelled out some of these details in a 12-minute video explainer, which also goes over the existing features that are transferring over and what’s not making the Complete cut.

What’s new for Pocket Camp Complete is the ability to play without a constant internet connection. Players will still be able to visit and trade with friends online, but the new version can be a fully offline experience if desired. Instead of the premium currency of the original game, Leaf Tickets, the complete version will have Leaf Tokens — earned by exchanging Bells or completing goals. Leaf Tokens will be used for buying furniture or speeding up crafting times, so it sounds like the replacement for in-game purchases may be more grinding. And for those that have a stockpile of the old Leaf Tickets, know that they will not be transferred (best to get spending before that Thanksgiving cutoff).

The other big new features for Pocket Camp Complete are in-game Camper Cards that players can customize with their avatars and favorite in-game animals. You can create and trade cards with other players in real life via QR codes. Collecting friends via Camper Cards adds their character to a new mountain location called Whistle Pass, where they may occasionally gift you items and enjoy daily musical performances from K.K. Slider at 7PM. Other members of your friends list who made the transfer to Complete may also appear at Whistle Pass. I assume the others will be quietly raptured and never spoken of again.

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp Complete can be preordered / pre-registered on iOS and Android now.

Apple Intelligence is out today

The iPhone 16 will finally be able to use the AI it was supposedly “built for.” | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple’s AI features are finally starting to appear. Apple Intelligence is launching today on the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, offering features like generative AI-powered writing tools, notification summaries, and a cleanup tool to take distractions out of photos. It’s Apple’s first official step into the AI era, but it’ll be far from its last.
Apple Intelligence has been available in developer and public beta builds of Apple’s operating systems for the past few months, but today marks the first time it’ll be available in the full public OS releases. Even so, the features will still be marked as “beta,” and Apple Intelligence will very much remain a work in progress. Siri gets a new look, but its most consequential new features — like the ability to take action in apps — probably won’t arrive until well into 2025.

In the meantime, Apple has released a very “AI starter kit” set of features. “Writing Tools” will help you summarize notes, change the tone of your messages to make them friendlier or more professional, and turn a wall of text into a list or table. You’ll see AI summaries in notifications and emails, along with a new focus mode that aims to filter out unimportant alerts. The updated Siri is signified by a glowing border around the screen, and it now allows for text input by double-tapping the bottom of the screen. It’s helpful stuff, but we’ve seen a lot of this before, and it’ll hardly represent a seismic shift in how you use your iPhone.
Apple says that more Apple Intelligence features will arrive in December. ChatGPT will be available in Siri; Writing Tools will let you describe the changes you want Apple’s AI to make; and Apple’s AI camera feature — Visual Intelligence — will be able to tell you about objects around you. In the following months, Apple says that it’ll launch Priority Notifications and major upgrades for Siri, including awareness of what’s on your screen and the ability to take action within apps.
The AI future we’ve been promised may still be a long way off, but in the meantime, you can download iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 yourself to start testing out the basics. Apple Intelligence will be available first in US English, with other languages to follow in the coming year. You’ll also need recent Apple hardware to use it, with the feature largely being gated to M-series chips and the very latest iPhones and iPads.
Availability will expand in December to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK, with additional languages coming in April.

The iPhone 16 will finally be able to use the AI it was supposedly “built for.” | Photo: Allison Johnson / The Verge

Apple Intelligence has been available in developer and public beta builds of Apple’s operating systems for the past few months, but today marks the first time it’ll be available in the full public OS releases. Even so, the features will still be marked as “beta,” and Apple Intelligence will very much remain a work in progress. Siri gets a new look, but its most consequential new features — like the ability to take action in apps — probably won’t arrive until well into 2025.

Apple says that more Apple Intelligence features will arrive in December. ChatGPT will be available in Siri; Writing Tools will let you describe the changes you want Apple’s AI to make; and Apple’s AI camera feature — Visual Intelligence — will be able to tell you about objects around you. In the following months, Apple says that it’ll launch Priority Notifications and major upgrades for Siri, including awareness of what’s on your screen and the ability to take action within apps.

The AI future we’ve been promised may still be a long way off, but in the meantime, you can download iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 yourself to start testing out the basics. Apple Intelligence will be available first in US English, with other languages to follow in the coming year. You’ll also need recent Apple hardware to use it, with the feature largely being gated to M-series chips and the very latest iPhones and iPads.

Availability will expand in December to Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the UK, with additional languages coming in April.

Microsoft Teams is getting threads and combined chats and channels

Illustration: The Verge

Microsoft is finally adding threaded conversations to its Microsoft Teams communications app. Threaded conversations in Teams won’t arrive until mid-2025, but ahead of that, Microsoft is also combining its separate chats and channels UI inside Teams into a single view.
I exclusively revealed Microsoft was planning a new chats and channels experience in my Notepad newsletter in August, and Microsoft is now bringing this unified UI to Teams in public preview in November.

Image: Microsoft
The new combined chats and channels view in Microsoft Teams.

“We’ve redesigned the chat and channels experience to simplify your digital workspace by bringing chats, teams, and channels into one place under Chat,” explains Jeff Teper, president of collaborative apps and platforms at Microsoft. “This integrates both chat and channels into your critical workflows, making it easier to access, triage and organize your conversations.”
This new UI fixes one of the big reasons Microsoft Teams sucks for messaging, so you no longer have to flick between separate sections to catch up on messages from groups of people or channels. You’ll be able to configure this new section to keep chats and channels separate or enable custom sections where you can group conversations and projects together.

Image: Microsoft
There are also some new customization features for chats and channels.

There’s also a new favorites section where pinned chats and channels will appear. Microsoft is also adding new controls that let you choose whether to see message previews, all channels in a single list, and time stamps. A new @mentions view will also highlight conversations where you’ve been mentioned directly, whether that’s in direct messages or channels. This new Microsoft Teams UI is coming to both desktop and mobile apps in public preview next month, with updates planned for the iOS and Android versions of Teams.
Threaded conversations will also help improve the chat experience inside of Microsoft Teams. “We are beginning to test threaded conversations with customers this quarter and will expand testing in early 2025, with broad availability expected in mid-2025,” says Teper.

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Illustration: The Verge

I exclusively revealed Microsoft was planning a new chats and channels experience in my Notepad newsletter in August, and Microsoft is now bringing this unified UI to Teams in public preview in November.

Image: Microsoft
The new combined chats and channels view in Microsoft Teams.

This new UI fixes one of the big reasons Microsoft Teams sucks for messaging, so you no longer have to flick between separate sections to catch up on messages from groups of people or channels. You’ll be able to configure this new section to keep chats and channels separate or enable custom sections where you can group conversations and projects together.

Image: Microsoft
There are also some new customization features for chats and channels.

Threaded conversations will also help improve the chat experience inside of Microsoft Teams. “We are beginning to test threaded conversations with customers this quarter and will expand testing in early 2025, with broad availability expected in mid-2025,” says Teper.

Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky on the gospel of Steve Jobs and what founder mode really means

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Airbnb

The Airbnb cofounder discusses being ‘in the details’ and why traditional management is doing it wrong. Today, I’m talking with Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, who is only the second person to be on Decoder three times — the other is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s rare company, and what made this one particularly good is that Brian and I were together in our New York studio for the first time; it’s pretty easy to hear how much looser and more fun the conversation was because we were in the same room.
Brian made a lot of waves earlier this year when he started talking about something called “founder mode” — or at least, when well-known investor Paul Graham wrote a blog post about Brian’s approach to running Airbnb that gave it that name. Founder mode has since become a little bit of a meme, and I was excited to have Brian back on to talk about it and what specifically he thinks it means.

One of the reasons I love talking to Brian is because he spends so much time specifically obsessing over company structure and decision-making — if you listened to his previous Decoder episodes, you already had a preview of founder mode because Brian radically restructured the company after the covid-19 pandemic to get away from its previous divisional structure and transition into a more functional organization that works from a single roadmap. That allows him to have input on many more decisions.
That’s really what he’s been talking about — that good leaders need to get in the details. You’ll hear him express some disappointment in the idea that founder mode is about micromanagement or pure swagger — and of course, we went back and forth on how much good leaders delegate and trust their teams to make decisions independently of them.
If you’re a Decoder fan, this is the good stuff. Brian and I really got into it here: you’ll hear Brian talk about a wide range of management styles and explain why he still considers himself a student of Steve Jobs. Actually, Steve Jobs comes up a lot in this one — as does Jony Ive, whose new company, LoveFrom, does design work for Airbnb. Don’t worry, I asked about that, too.
On top of all that, we actually started the show by talking about some big Airbnb news — the company just launched something called the Co-Host Network — which is a directory of experienced Airbnb hosts that can run listings for people who just want to make a little extra money renting out their homes without all the hassle.
It’s a big change, effectively creating a new job description for Airbnb’s platform. It also gave me a great opportunity to ask Brian about some of the thorny issues surrounding his company’s approach to running a platform that has many of the same issues as any other platform like YouTube or TikTok but which deals in literal, physical housing.
All of that in an hour, plus more — there’s even an assessment of Tim Cook’s management of Apple in here. Talking to Brian is a ride, but I think I held my own, and I think you’ll really like this one.
Okay, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Brian Chesky, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Welcome back to Decoder.
Thank you for having me again.
You’re only our second third-time guest. The other one is Mark Zuckerberg.
Oh, wow. This is really good company.
And you are in the studio with me. If people are listening, we’re together, which is amazing.
It’s the first time I’ve been in the studio with you, so thank you for having me here.
Actually, the last time you were on it was such a good conversation. We were both in New York, and my brain reinterpreted it as we were together because it was a good conversation.
That’s a sign of a good conversation.
But we were remote.
We were remote in the same city.
But you’re here today, and it’s great. There’s a lot to talk about. Airbnb just had its Winter Release. There’s a bunch of features we should talk about. I’m actually very curious about how you were thinking about hosting, professionalizing hosting, and what that means for the platform.
If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve got to know that I’m going to talk to Brian about “Founder Mode.” The Venn diagram with Decoder and “Founder Mode” is the thesis of our show — those ideas are basically a circle.
That’s good.
Then, I just want to talk about Airbnb generally. You’ve made some org chart changes of your own. But let’s start with the news: the Winter Release. The last time you were on, you actually talked about staggering Airbnb’s releases on one timeline for the whole company, so you get the summer release and then the winter release. What’s the big news in the Winter Release?
So two things. The first thing is we’re introducing something that we call the Co-Host Network. What is this? Let’s give some background. Airbnb is only as good as the number of homes we have, and the more homes we have, the more modulated the prices are on Airbnb, so we need to get a lot more homes. Frankly, we have more than 8 million homes today, but we’d love millions more in addition to the organic homes coming to Airbnb.
So we went out to a lot of prospective hosts, and we asked them — we do this periodically — “Why aren’t you hosting?” Number one, people first say they had no idea the amount of money they can make. It’s a very compelling amount of money you can make; you can make tens of thousands of dollars with an asset you’re already paying for. So we asked, “Well, why aren’t you hosting?” The number one answer people gave us was that they perceived it as being too much work. It’s like, “Well, I have a job, I have kids, I have this, I have that. I don’t know if I can come home, check in guests.” Or maybe it’s, “I live in New York City here, and I have a summer home in Florida, but I can’t be in Florida to check in the guests, so I need help hosting.”
We thought to ourselves, “Okay.” So now if somebody doesn’t have the time, they either make one of two decisions: they don’t host, or they go on Google and they type in “Airbnb property management company,” and they find this third-party property management company. There’s many companies that can manage your Airbnb. The challenge we’ve noticed is the average five-star rating for third-party property managers on Airbnb is about 4.62. It is significantly below the median range review score.
So we thought, “What if we basically put together a whole collection of Airbnb-certified hosts that can manage your Airbnb for you?” We could basically create a marketplace where we match people with homes but don’t have time with the best hosts in Airbnb who want to expand but don’t have a home. These would be people who only manage a few properties, so they’re not going to be managing you and 100 other homes. Maybe three, four, or five other homes. That is what we built. We built a network of co-hosts who will host your property with you, to take care of your home and your guests. The average rating of a co-host is a 4.86, 73 percent are super hosts, and we have 10,000 of them today in 10 countries, including, of course, here in the US.
If anyone’s listening, and they would like to make $20,000 a year with a house they already have and do very minimal work, you can go online. You’ll go to the Co-Host Network, and we’ll match you to the very best person for you. You’ll have some choices, with basically like 80 different factors to match you to the right co-host. Most importantly, where are you located? We want somebody near you. Then, you negotiate the rate. How do you pay them? They take a cut on your bookings, and you decide that cut or you negotiate together. It can be based on whatever service you want. They can do all the hosting for you, or they can do just some of it. It’s totally in your control.
Just to bring it all back, I think this is going to unlock hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, of homes on Airbnb. And I think, most importantly, this is going to unlock more real people — regular people — renting the homes they live in, rather than more furnished, dedicated rentals, which is what a third-party property manager would likely do.
That’s the main thing we announced, but of course, that’s not it. As you know, twice a year, we want to make these big upgrades. We can talk a little bit more, if you want to go into it later, why we do these. Because it’s a different way. We develop software a little more like a hardware company. Instead of just doing this continuous development every hour of every day — we do some of that — we try to have these big, single moments where we bring a lot of upgrades together.
We also have more than 50 upgrades for guests. The basic idea is to make Airbnb a more personalized experience. For decades, if you went to a travel website, whether it’s Expedia, or this or that, you’d have the same exact search experience as someone else. It’s not personalized to you, and we think travel should be more personalized. We have a whole bunch of features and upgrades that really personalize the search experience based on the past bookings you’ve done and what we know about your profile.
So those are the basic things we’ve done: 70 upgrades. The final thing I’ll say is these 70 upgrades are 70 out of 430 upgrades that we’ve made over the last two years. So I think this system of launching has really accelerated product development at Airbnb.
I want to come back to the product development cycle. You do it all very differently, but I want to stay on the Co-Host Network for one second. That is professionalizing a huge portion of Airbnb. I know some professional hosts and management companies who do other properties. Their point of view is, “You’ve got to find us. We’ll market to people who own properties, and then we’ll put you on every platform.” You’re going to do all the discovery of finding a co-host, and then negotiate a cut, and then handling the splits on your platform?
Yes.
Is that to just bring a more professional class of management companies directly into Airbnb?
No. Actually, let me break this down. So, there’s a lot of third-party, professional property management companies. If you’re a third-party company, you don’t want to have a business with just managing five people, building your own website, and building your own demand for five people, for five properties. You tend to need economies of scale, so you’re going to be managing hundreds of properties, even thousands of properties.
If you manage thousands of properties, now you have a whole bunch of employees. Then, you probably have a company name, and your employees probably wear a T-shirt with a company name on the T-shirt. This is basically just a little more of an industrial hospitality experience.
Someone might argue that it’s a little more like a hotel. There can be pluses to that from a service standpoint, but for a lot of people, this is a little bit different than the original ethos of Airbnb of “living like a local.”
Number one, every single co-host is vetted by Airbnb. We go through everyone’s profile. We only allow people who have high ratings in Airbnb to be co-hosts, so these are the very best hosts in Airbnb. Additionally, we bias towards people that manage only a few properties. The reason why is we noticed that the more properties you manage, the lower the five-star rating after a certain scale. There are some property managers who are amazing and defy this, but generally speaking, hospitality is a difficult thing to industrialize. People want a local feel, as compared to Amazon, delivery, or other types of businesses where scale makes the service better. Hospitality at scale often makes the service more challenging.
I think this is maybe an alternative to the extremely professionalized third-party property managers, and in some ways, it kind of moves Airbnb a little closer toward the roots. Again, I think we’re going to bias towards more regular people putting up their real homes, rather than more dedicated rentals. So that’s where we’re going.
Now, just one caveat. If anyone’s listening and they work at or are a third-party property manager, we love the ones guests love. Although the average rating across the board isn’t as high, there are some unbelievable property managers, and we love them.
The last point I’ll just make: it is true property managers are more likely to — you might call it cross-list. They’ll cross-list their inventory on many different platforms. One of the core values of Airbnb is that you come to Airbnb to find something you can’t find anywhere else. If you can find it everywhere else, then we’re just another e-commerce platform, and we’re not adding a lot of value. So the co-hosts on Airbnb are exclusive, and those properties are exclusive to Airbnb.
One of the reasons I always like talking to you is that Airbnb has all of the challenges of… I don’t know, an internet video platform? It’s a platform of suppliers and audiences, but then you’re managing this very physical thing that seems very challenging.
Here’s the thing people don’t realize. Airbnb is a harder business to run than it appears. Apple does not appear to be an easy business because one device is like a miracle in your hand. OpenAI doesn’t appear to be an easy business. But Airbnb does. The reason Airbnb appears to be an easy business is because, at a sub-scale, it is an easy business. If you wanted to just find a home in Croatia, you don’t even need a website. You can just get a friend, and you can get a house.
The part that makes Airbnb hard is that there are 4 million people per night from nearly every country in the world — more countries than Coca-Cola operates in — living together. That’s the part that makes it hard: the scale. And the scale is the only way you can actually do this profitably, or very, very profitably, as well. That’s the part that makes it really difficult.
I remember… I think it was Doug Leone from Sequoia Capital (this was like 10 years ago). He came to my office and he said, “You have the hardest business of any of the Sequoia portfolio companies to run. First of all, you have to have a mobile app, and you need a website.” This is when Uber only had a mobile app. “So you need to be on every platform. You need to be in every country in the world, but you need supply and demand, and they’re not in the same city.” Uber could go one city at a time; they can get riders and drivers in one city. We had to get supply everywhere and demand everywhere, and perfectly match the corridors. It is highly regulated — as regulated as Uber, probably even more regulated in many ways. The hotel commissions and the hotel trade councils are significantly more powerful than the taxi unions. So this is a very, very difficult business.
We’re handling a lot of money through the platform: over $90 billion a year, which is the GDP of Croatia. We have to deal with physical safety, and more types of physical safety than even ridesharing because of a myriad of things. Obviously, there are a lot of accidental issues that can occur. You have to deal with some of the hardest customer service challenges you can imagine. Somebody checks in at 11PM in Paris. They’re from Tokyo, they don’t speak French, and the host isn’t responsive, so they have to call customer service. You start to think about how you have to manage the quality of supply that you don’t actually own or control. But you have to influence the quality, and you’re competing with an alternative supply that has a front desk. By the way, I could keep going on and on…
Or a search problem. People think that Google’s got one of the hardest search problems, and Airbnb’s got a more pedestrian search problem. I’m not saying we have search technology like Google, but here’s the difference: you type something in Google, but when’s the last time you needed to look at a third page of Google? The first five results are the only five results you need. If you’re typing in “Paris” and you need a house, we have 150,000 homes. Suddenly, this is a matching problem, not just a search relevancy problem where there’s just one right answer. So it is a harder business than meets the eye, and that’s just our core business. That doesn’t involve taking this business and expanding the model to new categories and verticals.
One of the reasons that I like the framework of “it’s a platform” when I chat with you is I can just come up with ways that I would game any other platform, and ask how you would solve those problems. So how would I game TikTok? How would I game YouTube? How do bad actors use those platforms? It seems like you have a lot of those same challenges.
It’s a cat and mouse game. It is so challenging. I’ll give you an example of something we found. There was an entire industry of companies that emerged — that we caught, and we stopped them — that were advertising that they can get your bad reviews taken down. They knew how to call customer service, and what to say to get your negative reviews taken down. That became not only a fraudulent activity, it became an industry. There were entire companies built around doing this.
Of course, that is fraudulent, so you have to stop that stuff, but the thing that makes Airbnb so difficult in this way — and probably more difficult than, say, a video platform — is its longer tail. On YouTube, people can game things, but generally, a disproportionate number of views go to certain videos. For Airbnb, that’s not possible. Only one person can stay at the house at a time, or one family can stay at a time. It’s a long tail, and it’s in nearly every country. So, there are a lot of different schemes that can occur.
The reason I brought that up in the context of Co-Host Network is that it seems like professionalizing or certifying that class of user on Airbnb goes a long way toward ending some of the gamification that occurs in the platform.
Hundred percent. To maybe oversimplify one of the trends that we’re doing at Airbnb, we are managing more of the inventory and verifying more of the users at the simplest level. It’s really important to understand the history of where it even came from.
Starting Airbnb was in the context of eBay and Craigslist. In fact, I think when I started Airbnb with my two friends, eBay’s market cap might’ve been higher than Amazon. It wasn’t obvious Amazon was going to be the winner. It kind of really pulled away, but eBay was the marketplace, and Craigslist was how most people found housing. It was completely the Wild West. It pretty much still is today. There was really no management of inventory.
We thought about how the internet is like an immune system, and what you should do is give communities tools to moderate themselves: so flags, reports of suspicious behavior, but, most importantly, a review system. We built this really powerful review system where about two out of three people, after they book an Airbnb, leave a review., and two out of three hosts leave a review. We thought, “Oh, this is great.” It turns out that is necessary, but not sufficient. So over time, we’ve been in the business of managing more and more of the quality ourselves. We’re very hands-on with quality control. Most new services we actually vet and certify ourselves. We think reviews are important, but we don’t want to put the entire burden on the user base.
Again, there’s a lot of ways to game things, so you’ve got to be very hands-on. But the more things you verify, the more things you inspect, the more things you certify, the fewer areas there will be to exploit a company.
Let me put that right next to the platforms. Forgive me, but we’re however many days away from the election, and the thing I see with all of the major social networks right now is that they’re doing less moderation.
Yes.
They’re less interested in verifying things are true or false, or even that people are real and not AI. You just see it all over the place, they’ve taken their hands off. Airbnb’s platform, you’re saying, “We’re doing more, we’re certifying more things.” When you sign up and you want to rent the room in your house while you’re gone on vacation, here’s a list of approved co-hosts. Here’s experiences that we’re designing with professional designers.” Why the difference? Why is it all the other platforms are letting go, and you’re grabbing on tighter?
I have a theory that I’ll share. In our business, it’s obvious what the customer wants. The customer wants more moderation. They just do. I never heard a customer say, “You are controlling the inventory too much. You are removing too many bad listings. You are penalizing hosts that are making me unhappy.” They actually call and say the opposite, like, “How dare you.” They get very upset and personal when a home doesn’t work out, even if it’s not our home. We’re just the platform. So we are consistently held responsible by the customer for the content on our platform. So number one, the customer is expecting this.
Number two, the economic incentives are very clear. This is not an advertising platform where the product and the business model are separate from an aligned interest standpoint — they’re completely connected. You can start to see a bad Airbnb, and people then don’t rebook on Airbnb, they don’t come back. So there’s a really clear economic incentive.
The last thing is Airbnbs are just not that politicized. People just want to have good vacations. You don’t have the myriad of political issues and baggage. I think when it comes to platforms like X, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, it’s not clear what the customer’s asking for. On the one hand, users want veracity of information, but on the other hand, I think they’re very skeptical of the hand that platforms are putting on the product — in our case, they’re not.
I think that we’re going to look back at history, and the platforms that are going to be most successful are going to be the ones that have the greatest truth and veracity of information. And veracity of information starts with, “Are these people real? Are they not real?” I remember emailing [Elon Musk] when he first acquired Twitter, and I gave unsolicited advice, which was that you should verify 100 percent of the users on Twitter. They decided not to do that, and I didn’t even really have a conversation with him.
They did almost the opposite, actually.
Yeah, but I would’ve done that. I would have verified 100 percent of the users. I still think a platform that verifies every single person is a really good idea, and that’s what we do right now. Now, there might be reasons not to verify, like you just want to… I don’t know, maybe people are nervous about verification if they can’t be whistleblowers on platforms?
But again, a lot of the reason people don’t want moderation is they distrust the companies. They believe the companies are politically motivated and they’re putting their thumb on a scale politically for free speech. This becomes an attack vector for politics. I think before you moderate content, you should moderate people. You should moderate not if they should be kicked off the site or allowed on the site, but are these real people? Are they who they say they are, and are they allowed to use pseudonyms or not?
I think in the speech context, there’s quite a long history of debates about anonymity. We can set that aside in the context of Airbnb, but it’s interesting how the platform is expressed in atoms for you and bits for them, which result in very different incentives.
Totally.
The part where you’re taking more control of the experience, because you think that’s perfectly aligned with the customer, at some point do you just end up with a front desk? Are you just running the hotel? It seems like that’s the farthest end of that journey.
I love how you think because it’s good to take logical steps towards that conclusion and ask, “Where do you draw the line?” I think we want to have almost all the benefits of a hotel while retaining the benefits of Airbnb. So let’s just break them down.
The benefit of an Airbnb is that every room and every home is different. There’s no SKUs. Hotels are such commodities that you never see the room you’re booking. You don’t even know the floor you’re booking. You book a hotel room, and you don’t even know the floor you’re on, let alone what view you have. By the way, it doesn’t really matter because they’re kind of all the same, or at least the hotel kind of trains you not to care. That is the definition of commodity. It’s such a commodity that you don’t even have any choice. You just choose the hotel, and you barely choose the room — maybe you choose the tier of the room.
We want every space to be unique. We want every space to be one of a kind. We want our experience to be as personal as possible. Yes, there are more professional managers today than there were 10 years ago, but generally speaking, 90 percent of our hosts are still regular people. We want to feel like when you step into an Airbnb or you travel to a city, you’re living like a local. So those are the things we want to retain.
We really want it to be their home. We don’t want to create an Airbnb aesthetic, right? I’ve been asked, “Why don’t you guys do a deal with IKEA?” Well actually, that’s not really what people want. They don’t really want a standardization of design. They really want, when they’re in Paris, to feel like they’re in Paris. They don’t want to feel the same as they do in Kansas City or somewhere else. But hotels start to feel more similar, especially chain hotels.
But what we do want to do is match the hotel service as much as we can. There isn’t a front desk, but can we create a remote front desk? Can we have more 24/7 support? Can we use AI to level the playing field of the front desk, where AI can be immediate, it can be multilingual, it can adjudicate?
AI at least can be a frontline that can adjudicate disputes between guests and hosts better than a real person. What you can do is you can train it on the corpus of like 100 policies, and then it can look at the last 100,000 times somebody complained about this, and figure out what the most likely resolution was that led to satisfaction for both parties, You can actually train a model to spit out the right answer, and they can either directly spit out the answer as the frontline through the app to the guest and host or, if you do want to talk to a person, it can help the customer service person.
So, I think we want to manage Airbnbs more before they become ours. Not even that it would be a bad business model, but I think it would start to cut into the ethos of feeling like you’re living like a local and being truly authentic.
Where’s the last step of that? Is it just owning the property? Is it taking the booking directly?
I think that there are steps beyond this. The step beyond this that we haven’t gone to is that you have to apply to list on Airbnb. We have certain quality criteria, and if you don’t meet that, then you can’t list on Airbnb. That’s probably where we’re going within our new verticals, which we’re going to launch starting next year. Amazon had this moment where they were just selling books, and then in the late ‘90s, they decided to go just outside books. What’s adjacent to books back in the ‘90s? DVDs and CDs, and then they went further and further. So we’re going to have that Amazon moment.
For the new verticals and categories we’re launching, I believe we’re going to have an apply-to-list model where you have to apply. So we’re starting to have an opinion on quality. That is going to be the next step, and probably the final step. The step beyond that is actually owned and operated, and we don’t own or operate anything except for these promotional listings that people might know of, which are called Icons. We built a 40-foot tall Polly Pocket clamshell. Yes, we own and operate that, but that’s really marketing that generates a lot of views. We’re not really in the business of owning and operating anything.
Going back to this idea that you’ll have some set of people who will apply, I just keep coming back to the history of various platforms. YouTube, for a while, had these things called multi-channel networks, or MCNs. They were like big companies, and they would buy a bunch of popular YouTube channels. They wanted to be preferred suppliers to YouTube.
Interesting.
YouTube decided this was too big of a risk. They didn’t want anyone to have that level of control over YouTube, so they basically killed all the MCNs. There’s books about it now that you can go read. Do you ever foresee yourself as having that kind of supplier on the Airbnb platform? This would be a hosting provider that provides the kind of experience at this level that you can trust, and they’re going to own and operate the actual property.
What we’re probably going to have in the future are more standardized quality tiers. So there’s going to be a standard to list on Airbnb, and then there’s probably going to be — depending upon the vertical — different levels of certification or quality. The quality could be based on their expertise in the real world, or it could be based on what customers are saying on Airbnb. For example, we have this designation, called “guest favorite,” which are 2 million of the best homes in Airbnb based on ratings, reviews, and customer service tickets. So I think we’re going to do more of that and that’s probably where we’re going to go.
I’m interested to see how that plays out.
It’s all going to play out over the next 24 months.
I’ll give you another really dumb example. BuzzFeed designed its entire business on being the best at Facebook. And one day, Facebook was like, “Well, we don’t need you. An army of teenagers will just make Instagram for us every day.” And now, BuzzFeed is whatever business it is.
You can see whatever your tier is — call it the A tier in Nashville — then someone will be like, “We’re just going to dominate the A tier in Nashville, and Airbnb will have to deal with us.” Is that an eventuality you’ve thought about?
I think it’s a little bit different because you don’t have the consolidation of inventory in the same way. Let’s take YouTube. A MrBeast video can get 100 or 200 hundred million views. You can’t have a single Airbnb be that popular, so the entire marketplace is significantly more long tail. We’re in 100,000 cities; no one city represents even 1 percent of our business on Airbnb.
So generally, there has been this move towards a little more consolidation of inventory via professional property managers, but it’s not been that much. Again, for the last four years alone, 90 percent of our hosts are individuals, and that number has remained pretty much unchanged. I think many of the new products and features we’re launching are going to enable more people to allow more long-tail inventory onto the platform. That’s generally where we’re pushing.
Does it benefit Airbnb to have less consolidated inventory on the platform? It probably does because they’re less likely to cross-list. But it would be a bummer if we did that, and it was misaligned with a customer. There’s a chart I’ve put out before that shows the number of properties you manage in your five-star rating, and quite literally, it is a perfectly curved downward slope. The highest-rated Airbnb hosts manage one property. The second-highest manage two, and down to 1,000. There is not one single deviation from one to 1,000.
Wow.
It’s crazy. It doesn’t mean that all people managing 1,000 properties are bad. It just means that most people haven’t figured out how to industrialize hospitality. Let me give you one other argument for why regular people can sometimes work well economically.
If I’m a dedicated rental, I need to build a profit margin because I’m a business. So, I have rent, and I need to be careful about any cost I incur. If we’re in a house, I might have four books, but maybe I won’t have 20 books because books five through 20 are an additional cost I’m putting into my Airbnb. I might have six coffee mugs, but I’m not going to have 10 coffee mugs. I might not have a KitchenAid mixer. These are all costs I have to bear.
If it’s your real house, you might have all this stuff anyway because you live there. You don’t need to charge a daily rate that has a profit margin because this was unsold inventory that you weren’t monetizing, and now you’re monetizing it. It’s another one of the economic dynamics where non-professionals sometimes have an economic advantage over professionals. This is just one example. Their homes are equipped, and the fixed cost is an investment they’ve already incurred. This might be another way of saying it.
Well, I’m very interested to see how Co-Host Network plays out.
Thank you.
When it’s your fourth time [on Decoder], we’ll check in on the platform dynamics.
I cannot wait. I love these conversations, and the thing I appreciate is the depth that you go into.
Well, get ready, because it’s coming now.
Let’s do it.
I said earlier that “I think the founder mode conversation and Decoder questions have pure overlap.”
Yes.
The last time you were on the show, you described re-orging Airbnb. You restructured the company, you went onto this roadmap where you shipped twice a year in big deliveries, and you said, “I got rid of all of these middle managers, and I’m the product manager, and everyone rolls up to me.” And I thought, “Oh, this is-”
Chief product officer.
Chief product officer. And I thought, “This is great. This is what I want out of a Decoder conversation.” Then a year passes, and you give a talk, and I thought, “I’ve seen that talk before. That’s the ‘we don’t have PMs,’ right? I’ve heard this from Brian before.” Then, Paul Graham goes and writes a blog post called “Founder Mode,” and everyone reacts to it. Is there something meaningfully different than the way you have structured Airbnb and founder mode? Am I missing something? Has something changed in that chronology?
I don’t think so. Let me put it this way: it’s not like I’m suddenly running the company differently than a year ago. It’s just that now it has a label, and I think it makes sense to everyone. Let me give a little bit of background on that talk.
You gave the first version of this talk at a Figma conference, right?
Yeah, and the Figma conference was maybe a quarter of what I said. I’ll do the short version because I know we have limited time, but let me give a little background. As you know, from 2009 to 2019, I ran Airbnb the way most tech companies run their companies. I didn’t know how to run it, so I hired people from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies, and they brought their processes with them. We kind of reverted towards the way everyone runs their company. I remember that we were kind of a matrix organization with 1,000 employees, and like almost all matrix organizations, it was hard to get work done.
I’ll give you an example. There was a creative marketing department that would have to create graphics for different teams. Then, we kept hiring subteams that kept asking more and more from the graphics team. It was called the creative group. At some point, the creative group was like a deli, and they had these lines out the window. They just kind of threw their hands up. If you needed anything done, let’s say you were a team and you needed a button designed, or a graphic for a button design, it would be like a three-month waiting list because they were inundated.
So then the team said, “Well, give us our own resources. Give me a dedicated creative person,” and this could also be true for technology, finance, a legal team, any function. And this is when you start to divisionalize the company. Quite literally you’re subdividing it. This is where the general management structure comes from. It makes a lot of sense why this happens.
The problem with that, though, is that once you subdivide the company, the company starts rowing in different directions. Now, you have even more bureaucracy because the groups don’t want to work together. They’re incentivized to work on different things, and they might not be totally compatible anymore. Ten teams can have 10 different tech stacks, and they don’t actually fit together. A local decision that might make sense for your team might not make sense for the company.
The next thing is that these general managers are incentivized, typically, on output goals that you don’t usually run on P&Ls. They run on impact or growth, so they have to advocate for as many resources as possible. This is what we call politics. You’re advocating for yourself. So suddenly, groups start going in many different directions. Because the company’s going in many different directions, oversight becomes more difficult. When oversight gets more difficult, now there’s less accountability. You have people that are crappy, and there’s no consequence, so that makes people feel like it doesn’t matter. This is where complacency sets in. This is, I think, what ends up happening at big companies.
The big thing that I said about founder mode, and this is something I’ve said for four years, is it’s not about… Paul Graham coined it founder mode. I think it’s a good name, I think it’s very catchy. I could not have made something as viral as Paul Graham. But there is a downside to the name. First of all, people don’t know what founder mode is. They think it means swagger. I remember a tweet that said, “I’m going founder mode on this burrito.” I don’t know what that means. I think people think it means the founder swagger: “I don’t give a fuck. I’m going in, I’m kicking ass.” That’s kind of what it turned into, and only founders have that.
That wasn’t the message. If I could summarize founder mode in a couple sentences, it’s about being in the details. It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence. It’s about a leader being in the details. And if you as a leader aren’t in the details, guess what? Your leaders aren’t in the details, and their leaders aren’t in the details. And one day you’re going to wake up, and you have 50-year-olds managing 40-year-olds, managing 30-year-olds, managing people two years out of college doing all the work with no oversight, and you have these four unnecessary layers. You have no experts in the company.
So, the antidote to this is to try to be as functional as possible. We are a functional organization. Functional just means expertise-based, not general management-based. I’m the only non-functional person in the company; all functions roll up to me. I generally think the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company. The most important thing a company does is make a product. If the CEO is not the expert in the product, then why are they the CEO? Said differently, I should not be the CEO of SpaceX. I couldn’t be the chief product officer because I do not understand rocketry. So maybe I’m a good CEO, but I can’t be the chief product officer. There may be some exceptions, but I generally think that’s the case.
Your leaders shouldn’t just be “managers” (and I put managers in quotes), they should also be in the details. If we were a military, like a battalion, the cavalry general should know how to ride a horse. It’s crazy that they don’t. And leaders shouldn’t be fungible. So it’s really about being in the details.
Now, here’s the problem with the narrative being in the details. There’s a term for it, and it’s a pejorative. It’s called micromanager, and everyone’s afraid to be accused of being a micromanager. I had this thought because a lot of founder mode came from me studying Steve Jobs. For 10 years, I was at wit’s end. It wasn’t my first instinct to copy Steve Jobs’ leadership style, it was kind of a last resort. I didn’t copy everything, but I copied a lot of how he organized and ran the company.
A few weeks ago, I had dinner with his son, Reed Jobs, and I remember asking him what Steve’s opinion of micromanagement was. He had such an interesting perspective. He said, “Steve Jobs was in the details.” He would skip levels, many levels, to be in the details, which somebody who goes to Harvard Business School would never do. He said he never felt like he was micromanaging because he was partnering with people on the details. I asked people like Jony Ive and [Hiroki Asai], who worked for Steve, and I said, “Do you feel like Steve Jobs micromanaged you?” And they said, “No, he didn’t.”
I don’t know. Maybe I’m a micromanager, maybe I’m not. I think the distinction is that I remember one time an executive on my team asked, “Is this your decision or is this my decision?” And I remember saying, “It should never be either.” And that’s founder mode: it should never be either. It’s never your decision, it’s never my decision. We’re in it together. If you’re cofounders, whose decision is it? It’s your decision together. It’s the same thing hierarchically with the org chart.
So, that’s really what it means: great leadership is presence, not absence. It’s in the details. What a lot of founders do is they let go of the product, and they abdicate responsibility. Frank Slootman wrote a book called Amp It Up where he basically said, “To turn a company around, the CEO just needs to set the pace of the company.” You set the vision, but more important than the vision, you set the pace, you set the standards. And that’s what founder mode is really about.
By the way, you don’t need to be a founder to do that. You can apply founder mode to government, you can apply founder mode to a nonprofit, to a volunteer organization, to being a sports coach. It just means the leadership is presence in the details, and it’s not about being so-called autocratic because you’re not telling the experts what to do. But you know what they’re doing, and you’re working through, and you’re challenging them. And you should do this because, let’s say you have 10 experts. They might disagree. Finance says this is the best outcome, but that may conflict with legal, which might conflict with product marketing, which represents the customer, which might conflict with engineering, which is the schedule. So, you have to weigh all these trade-offs. That’s why you have to be in the details.
Maybe one other thing before we wrap up.
Oh, we’re far from wrapping up. I just wanted to let you know.
One tidbit I’d like to say about hiring, just as a thought. One of the most important things I do is have an executive team. You could think of them as C-level or SVPs. There’s about seven of them. Then, the next level are VPs, and there’s maybe 30 of them or 40 of them. I don’t really know how many there are.
Something I do that’s different from almost every other CEO in Silicon Valley (but I think [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang basically does this, Steve Jobs did this, Walt Disney did this, and Elon Musk did this) is I treat all the VPs as direct reports. Jensen got rid of the executive team. He just has 40 direct reports. That’s a little unwieldy for me. I’ve gone through that thought experiment of just having the VPs, and I can’t track everything.
But all VPs do a report. They report to me and to their executive, and I am the co-hiring manager. So instead of me hiring an executive, like a CFO who hires their people, I am the co-hiring manager. I do the kickoff, I’m the second interview, and, ultimately, I decide the final compensation for all the top people in the company, not the managers. The managers give recommendations, and I make the final decision. This is just a very practical version of founder mode, of being in the details. You don’t just hire and manage your executives, you skip-level and manage as many people as possible in a dual-reporting relationship.
So, the branding of founder mode has offered you some narrative clarity. It’s clear from the last time when we had a very similar kind of conversation that if I had to pull all of that back into what we’re really describing here, into the Decoder framework, I would say what you were describing is fundamentally “be a functional organization, not a divisional organization.” And that was the big change that you made the last time you were on the show. You’ve since made other changes, right?
Yes.
You just created this new role in the C-suite, chief business officer. You promoted your CFO into that role. Walk me through that. You’re obviously evolving how you’re thinking of the company and the roles within the company inside of this framework. How’d you make that decision?
One thing about functional, and then I’ll answer that question. I don’t think all companies should be functional, but I think they should be as functional as they can get away with. That’s the rule. [Andreessen Horowitz co-founder] Ben Horowitz had this saying: “Give ground grudgingly.” You should give ground grudgingly. All startups start as functional organizations. Steve Jobs said, “I want to be the world’s largest startup,” but he wants to still operate like a startup. So I think you should give ground grudgingly, and that’s the general philosophy.
I just want to say one thing about being a functional organization. There is one very specific downside: The downside of the functional organization is you cannot do disparate things. But here’s something I wanted to spell. It’s not true you can’t do as many things. It’s not true that it would be a slower-run organization. We’ve actually increased product development by being a functional organization, but we’re like one flywheel. We can’t create three other flywheels that are disparate. The only reason I believe a company should divisionalize is so that they could do truly disparate things that have disparate functional expertise. So, if we had a jet engine business, that’s a different functional expertise.
Now let’s go to the business organization. At most companies, there is no function called “business.” Maybe we can also call it revenue — business, revenue, commercial. There’s different names: chief commercial officer, chief business officer, chief revenue officer. They all kind of mean the same thing. The reason most companies don’t have this is because they have general managers, and the general managers play that role. The general managers are the mini-CEO and they own the business, and they usually partner with a finance person. Somewhere between the general manager and finance person, or maybe a data scientist, they’re the business function.
We found that the problem with that is, none of them are really experts in “business.” When I mean business, I mean revenue, the business model, the market size, what are the kind of dynamics of this market? Like with Co-Host, what should we charge? Should this be a free service? Do we take a commission? How does this compare to third-party property management services? Which countries do we roll this out in? What are the economics by country? Is it a standard rate? There’s just a lot of detailed questions one must answer.
So, we decided to create a chief business organization with three functions. One is supply. Supply was always a function at Airbnb, but it was kind of conflated with international and general managers. So we said, “No, no. There are experts in getting supply of homes, experiences, and other things at Airbnb.”
Then, we have a business function, which is quite literally the business counterpart to product marketing. If product marketing is nouveau product management, product marketing would be product management minus program management plus some outbound marketing, and it’s fewer people. That’s all it is. It’s outbound-inbound in one role. They are really thinking about what the customer wants and what the experience should be like, but they’re not in spreadsheets. They’re not business model people.
So they have a counterpart called the “business function.” With Co-Host Network, for example, we had a business person looking at the business model for Co-Host, we had a product marketing person who understands what’s the product, how are we going to market this, and why do people actually want this. Those two people have to go together. One reports to Hiroki — it’s product marketing, it’s more creative. One reports to Dave Stephenson, the former CFO now chief business officer, and they’re really the two parts of the continuum.
Then, you have a supply person. The supply person — based on the business organization, the business model, and the product marketing brief — has to now go get supply. They work with international, the third group in the chief business officer org, to then take that playbook and bring it to all the different countries. And, of course, the product marketing has their own three-legged stool with design and engineering.
But it’s different from other companies where product really directs design. I don’t like that, and I caused a bit of a storm at a Figma conference. Basically, I got taken out of context and people thought I said I fired all the product managers. What actually happened was that I got rid of the classic product management function, I reassigned the most senior product managers to be product marketers, and I reclassified most of the other product managers as program managers.
By the way, most product managers in Silicon Valley aren’t actually product managers. They’re glorified program managers, but they’re not even experts at program management. That’s all they’re doing; They’re making sure the thing ships. That’s program management, that’s not product management. So, this is what we’re doing. It’s a very simple organization, and it’s just a continuation of us being functional.
It’s funny that you say all this. If you asked my CEO, he would tell you that I scream that we should be divisional all the time because I think tech journalism is different from video game journalism and different from sports journalism, which is different from New York Magazine. At the end of the day, we all make one kind of thing, and there’s reasons to have central teams, and there’s reasons to share costs.
Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Okay, if I was in the other kind of organization, something else would be faster, I could make this tradeoff, but there would be a benefit to being in a more divisional structure?”
I think it’s really important to not be dogmatic and say functional is better than divisional, and I think it really depends on industries. In tech companies, functional is generally better because you can leverage shared technologies, everyone can row together, and you get economies of scale. I don’t know if you’re doing that in your business.
Okay, here are the two things — I said one, there’s really two. There’s two benefits to divisional. The first benefit is, you can do disparate things. We talked about that. . I’m just thinking of an absurd thing: we want to create a podcasting division. It would be really hard for the people designing the app and the marketers advertising homes to think about podcasting. Now we want to create a TV series. That’s really, really disparate, so we would struggle to do super-disparate things.
The second downside to a functional organization is that it takes longer to start. Because if you want to just get something going, you need to get everyone organized. But everyone organized has a multi-year roadmap, so they now need to make room on the roadmap. So, for disparate things that you can start quickly, a divisional structure is better. Those, to me, are the primary advantages of a divisional structure. There’s a theoretical third advantage, which is that you can hire so-called entrepreneurial-type people that don’t fit into a functional organization, but that one I don’t agree with. That’s a bit of a rabbit hole, so I won’t go there unless you want to ask about it.
That being said, once you get rowing… think about a bunch of us in a boat, and we’re rowing together. If there are 10 people in 10 boats, they can get going faster and they can go in different directions, but the 10-person boat is going to row faster than 10 one-person boats. So once you get going with the functional organization, what I basically tell people is it’s harder to get something on the roadmap, but if it gets on the roadmap, we put the weight of the company behind it.
I like that constraint. I like the constraint of anyone can’t just do anything because now we’re focused, now we’re prioritized, now we only do things that are differentiated. And the governor is that we only do as many things as I can focus on. That’s what I do. That’s what Steve Jobs did at Apple, and that’s what Walt Disney did at Disney, and that’s what Elon Musk does at Tesla. You only do as many things as the CEO can focus on and manage.
Now, this presumes the CEO is competent, intelligent —
Present.
Present. They understand the business. This doesn’t work if you come from management consulting, and now you’re a general manager who doesn’t really know the domain. That wouldn’t work as well.
You’re setting aside one topic, I’m just setting aside Elon.
Yeah.
I have a lot to say in response to that.
Exactly. Maybe Elon is a bit of a red herring because there’s all the surface-level things about him that are idiosyncratic, and I’m certainly not going to endorse everything he does because I do a lot of things differently.
But I think the commonality of him, Jensen, Steve Jobs, and [Mark Zuckerberg] kind of ebbs and flows. I know Zuck very well, and I think he would say I was a big inspiration for his year of efficiency because I talked about what we did Airbnb.I think those people are pretty close to functional, pretty in the details, they set the pace for the company, and they generally really know what’s going on at their companies.
I want to talk about micromanagement real quick, and then I want to end with decisions, which is the other big Decoder question that I always like talking to you about. You mentioned that it’s toxic, that people don’t like it. You mentioned that founder mode as a brand means people are just acting like jerks of their companies —
It means a lot of swagger, for better or worse, and I don’t think that’s really what it means.
And I actually think it is mostly for worse. I don’t think it is for better, in most cases. You’re outlining a very deep level of management thinking. You’ve thought about these companies a lot, you’ve thought about your own company a lot, and you’ve thought about these trade-offs a lot. There’s a general sense that you should be in the details, to not just hire smart people and let them do whatever they want. I talk to a lot of CEOs on the show, and they’re like, “My secret is that I hire smart people and I let them do whatever they want.”
I ask a lot of CEOs, “How do you make decisions?” I would say one of the most common answers we get is, “It would be best if I wasn’t making so many decisions, if my team was empowered, and all I was doing was breaking the hardest ties or making the biggest, riskiest investment decisions so they weren’t feeling that pressure.”
I totally disagree with that. I think I’ve heard Jeff Bezos say that more recently. He said, “My job is to make as few high-quality decisions as possible,” and I could not disagree more with that. Let’s start by saying that it’s not like I’m right and Jeff Bezos is wrong. When I say it, I’m also saying what Steve Jobs would have said. Was Steve Jobs right or Jeff Bezos right?
The truth is there’s multiple ways to do something. I’m strongly advocating for this way. Funny enough, I’ve talked to many people that were early members at Amazon, and that’s not how Jeff Bezos ran it early on. So, here’s the key thing: I believe you need to hire smart people. The paradox is that I believe most smart people want you involved, they want your partnership. They don’t want you to tell them what to do, but there’s this assumption that control is a zero-sum game. Either I have the power, or you have the power. And I think that’s the flaw.
There’s a scenario where all of us are powerless. It’s called most Fortune 500 companies. And there’s a scenario where I have more power, and therefore you have more power. It’s not like zero-sum, and I’ve wrestled control. I’ve found that the most talented people like my involvement as long as the involvement is constructive, it isn’t me telling them what to do and pushing them. It’s like, “What about this? What about that?” Steve Jobs went to Jony Ive’s design studio every day. He wasn’t telling Jony Ive what to do. He was discussing things, and they were debating and brainstorming, and it was a partnership. I think this is a really, really important framework.
Let me give you one more. Somebody might ask, “Wait, you’re in all the details. How can you be in all the details forever? That seems like it’s not going to scale, and someday you’re going to get tired.” And the answer is they’re right. Here’s what most people do: They hire smart people, and they give them operating freedom. They have no idea if they’re good or not because they’re not engaged enough, and then over time, they start getting signals that the person isn’t good, and then they wrestle back control. Once they get involved, but they haven’t been involved for months or years, suddenly the executive loses their confidence because they’re only involved because they’re not doing well. That’s the beginning of the end, and then you replace them. This happens to every freaking company.
There’s an inverse, and I’ll use an analogy. I’m not a golfer. I’m terrible at golf. I don’t think I’ve ever even shot a hole. I’m terrible. But I did a couple golf lessons once, and I had a golf instructor who literally coached me on every single swing. Thank God I had the golf instructor because if I just went on the golf course on my own and I swung 1,000 times, I would have had a really screwed up swing by the time the golf instructor got involved, and it would take even more work to retrain my swing.
So the golf instructor said, “I’m going to watch you swing thousands of times, and eventually this is muscle memory, and I won’t need to watch your swing over time.” That’s my philosophy. My philosophy is you start in the details. You’re involved in every single thing. You hire great people, and you’re in all their details. Over time, once they develop muscle memory and they prove that they understand the system, then you can gradually let go.
To give you an example: Two years ago, I wanted to write perfect press releases not because I think anyone reads them, but because if you can’t put your ideas down in a clear press release, then you don’t have clear thinking. You don’t know why you’re doing something. Two or three years ago when we did press releases, we’d do as many as 70 revisions. And people said, “This is completely crazy. Are we going to — 10 years from now — do 70 revisions of press releases?” And the answer is no. The most recent press release for the Co-Host Network I probably reviewed three times.
But it was the repetition in the details, that’s how people learned. They were saying, “That’s apprenticeship, you learn.” Even if you hire experts, they’re not experts at your company, they’re not experts at collaborating, they’re not experts in your business. So, it’s about starting in the details and letting go. That’s what I think Jeff Bezos did, even though he said his job is to make only a few high-quality decisions. That’s not what he did in 1999. So that’s kind of my philosophy.
Let’s talk about decisions, actually. This is the other Decoder question.
You’ve been on several times, and I’ve asked you how you make decisions several times. I went back and looked. When you were on this show the last time, I asked, “How do you make decisions?” and you said, “Let me tell you a long story.” It was about various Airbnb controversies where you had to make big decisions. And you said, “I’m going to have to make so many decisions that I went to all my team and I said, ‘Here are our principles. Trust me to use these principles, and this is how I’m going to make decisions.’” Is that still the framework, that everyone just agrees on the core principles?
Pretty much. What I basically said was, “You want to make principal decisions, not business decisions.” Principal decisions are: if I don’t understand the outcome or if I can’t predict it, how do I want to be remembered? What do I think is the right thing to do? That can sound very subjective, but actually, you would have thousands of inputs. So, that’s essentially what I do. It’s kind of interesting because it’s kind of like somebody asking you, “How do you do what you do?” You might not even consciously know how you do what you do.
But what I’m doing is, I am basically making a decision. Somebody once said, “The most important thing leaders do is make decisions.” And it’s probably true. Maybe the most important thing is they hire people, and they assemble the right team. But probably day-to-day, the most important thing they do is make decisions. It’s really important that people understand the criteria off which you’re basing decisions. …
I went to my board and I said, “I’m going to have to make 1,000 decisions. I can’t run every decision by you, so let’s agree on the principles and the framework for which I make all the decisions. Then I’m going to make all the decisions, and if something stands out, I will elevate it to you. I will retroactively show you all the decisions I made. If there’s something that’s huge about the company and one-way door, I will tell you ahead of time. Otherwise, give me authority to make all these decisions.”
That’s what I did with the board. They really liked it because the key to a crisis is speed, and if I have to debate every decision, we’re not moving quickly. It’s like a car chase. Should you turn left or right? Well, most importantly you should turn quickly. So that’s what I did.
Just to go back to the golf swing analogy, the way I run Airbnb is I review all the work — every week, every two weeks, every four weeks, every eight weeks, every 12 weeks. You might ask, “How do you have people do a report? How do they keep two people happy?” And the answer is, we’re all in the same meeting together. I usually have my direct talk first because if I talk, you’ll just agree with me, and then I’ll make the final decision. Most of my final decisions are just agreeing. Ninety percent of time I’m agreeing with what the team says, and 10 percent of the time I’m disagreeing.
If I disagree, I always try to say why. I try to go down my thinking and challenge my first principles. So whenever I make a decision, I try to ask myself, like I did in this conversation, “What are the first principles driving this decision?” Don’t challenge my decision, challenge my first-principle thinking. In other words, here’s my answer, check my math. That’s kind of what I do. So the principles are really, really important to get pre-authorization from a board and to make a lot of fast decisions.
I’m not in a meeting reviewing Co-Host Network with a series of four principles. I’m just intuitively making a decision. “I think we should do X and here’s why, and let me share with you my work and my thinking. What do you think? What about this did I get right or wrong?” The most important thing is to debate the first principles, not the answer.
Does the company know the principles that you use to make decisions? Is that published? Is that a thing you talk about?
There’s not a single list. There are core values. There are strategic differentiators, like the things that you put in your S-1 so people know what you stand for. There are those general things. Actually, here’s another way of saying it. I don’t push decision-making down, I pull decision-making in. I think of the company as one shared consciousness.
This is a story. I think it will be worth it. One time I called Ron Johnson, who worked for Steve Jobs. He ran Apple retail. I remember asking how Steve Jobs ran Apple, and [Ron] said, “Even when Apple was like 20, 30, 40,000 people, he only ever thought of Apple as 100 employees.” That’s why he had this offsite called Top 100. He said his job was to only manage the top 100 people, and they manage everyone else. He never thought about the whole company.
That’s kind of what I do, and maybe it’s even fewer people, like 60 or 70, so I don’t manage all of Airbnb — I manage the top 60 or 70 people. But I’m very engaged. I pull them in, and I create one shared consciousness. If you were to interview every single one of my senior people, I don’t think they would have pithy word-for-word verbatim principles, but they would be able to describe exactly how I think because we’re in so many meetings together.
I remember I was at a group dinner with Scott Forstall one time right before he left Apple. He said he used to spend 35 hours a week with Steve Jobs. Not one-on-one, but he was in every meeting with Steve. So, think about that: 35 hours a week, every single week. That’s thousands of hours. That’s the equivalent. I don’t spend 35 hours a week with most people, but there are many people that spend 10–20 hours a week in a room with me. It’s the same few dozen people going through different meetings, creating one shared consciousness, and being able to finish each other’s sentences.
That’s another version of founder mode: It’s one shared consciousness. So, you can imagine, that’s not disempowering. It requires collaboration. If you want to be a lone wolf or a cowboy, that’s not going to work. If you’re willing to work with other people, you’re actually pretty empowered in this way.
We’ve got to wrap up, but I need to ask you one very important question that I’ve been thinking about this entire time. You’ve mentioned Apple, Steve Jobs, and Jony Ive a bunch of times. I know that Airbnb works closely with LoveFrom, which is Jony Ive’s company. I’m looking at a New York Times article, and it says, “The clients pay LoveFrom as much as $200 million a year.”
That is absolutely not true.
You’re not paying Jony Ive $200 million a year?
No, I’m not going to say what we pay, but that is so not true, and that’s not even close to true.
Okay. You’ve talked about Apple a lot. They don’t have Steve Jobs anymore, they don’t have Jony Ive anymore. They have started a bunch of divisions to do all kinds of other things. Do you think that’s sustainable for them?
No.
You are one of the closest watchers of this company I can think of, and I’m very curious what you think.
Okay. I’ll wrap up with my view on Apple.
I think Tim Cook has done an extraordinary job, especially given the cards he was dealt, right? What alternative was there? Steve died. I don’t know the circumstances, but I think it was that he resigned in August and died in October, only eight weeks later. So there’s only an eight-week window between resignation and he’s not even there. It’s not like Bezos retired, but he’s the executive chair. I think that Tim Cook basically took Apple from $300 million to, whatever, $3 trillion, added more than 90 percent of the market cap, and it’s done very, very well. He’s a great operator.
A couple things to say, though. Number one, just because Tim added $2.7 trillion in market cap and Steve added $300 billion doesn’t mean that Tim did most of the work. He inherited the most valuable product of all time, and there was just really continuing momentum —
The iPhone.
The iPhone, probably the most successful product in the history of capitalism. I don’t think that any other product has generated more profit — maybe not more revenue, but more profit — than the iPhone. The most successful company probably in the history of capitalism, or at least certainly the last 25 years. It’s crazy when you think about it. Then ask yourself a couple other questions. Let’s imagine Steve Jobs didn’t die in 2011, he died in 2005, right when the iPod Video had just launched. Would they have come up with the iPhone? They might have. Would it have been the most successful consumer product of all time? Maybe not. I don’t know who would have done it.
My general philosophy is that Tim was in an incredible period where what they really needed to do was maybe not invent a new product, but take the most successful product of all time and scale it, manufacture it, and make it completely ubiquitous, and he did that. But the technology industry… I mean, the word technology may as well be a synonym for the word change. We’re in the change industry, and it is very, very dangerous to not be constantly changing. If you’re a company that makes devices, the most important thing you need to do is make new tools and make new devices.
I saw a Bloomberg report that said Apple is moving away from launches, and moving more towards services. They’re going more divisional. My unsolicited advice is that whenever Tim decides to retire, the next CEO should also be the chief product officer. I asked people, “Who was the chief product officer at Apple when Steve was alive?” Everyone said, “Steve.” It wasn’t Phil Schiller. Phil Schiller was a great SVP of product marketing, but he wasn’t the chief product officer. That is a product company, and you really want to make sure long-term that a product person is driving the company.
This goes to the very awkward thing that no one wants to talk about. Succession planning is hard because the people that are great product visionaries are typically young. They’re young and they’re less mature. Who wants to put a young, not-super-mature person at the helm of a giant company? Founders are allowed to manage people older than them because they’re the founders. If you’re not the founder, people just don’t want to be managed by somebody younger than them who’s maybe a virtuoso, a wunderkind, but they’re a little immature. The companies don’t want to take that risk, so they bias towards senior, grown-up, functional experts. But typically that function is not the product, and I think that’s a problem.
Satya [Nadella, Microsoft CEO] is more technical. I think that has afforded them more, but he mostly just got them back to Bill Gates’ primacy. I think Apple should go back to having a CEO that’s the chief product officer. I think it should rein the company in and simplify how it operates, but that’s just my opinion.
Would you do that job?
I think Airbnb is the right job for me, and they definitely need somebody who has hardware experience.
Fair enough. Brian, it is always a pleasure talking to you. We’ve got to have you back sooner than a year.
Thank you, Nilay. I love this.

Photo illustration by The Verge / Photo: Airbnb

The Airbnb cofounder discusses being ‘in the details’ and why traditional management is doing it wrong.

Today, I’m talking with Airbnb cofounder and CEO Brian Chesky, who is only the second person to be on Decoder three times — the other is Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. It’s rare company, and what made this one particularly good is that Brian and I were together in our New York studio for the first time; it’s pretty easy to hear how much looser and more fun the conversation was because we were in the same room.

Brian made a lot of waves earlier this year when he started talking about something called “founder mode” — or at least, when well-known investor Paul Graham wrote a blog post about Brian’s approach to running Airbnb that gave it that name. Founder mode has since become a little bit of a meme, and I was excited to have Brian back on to talk about it and what specifically he thinks it means.

One of the reasons I love talking to Brian is because he spends so much time specifically obsessing over company structure and decision-making — if you listened to his previous Decoder episodes, you already had a preview of founder mode because Brian radically restructured the company after the covid-19 pandemic to get away from its previous divisional structure and transition into a more functional organization that works from a single roadmap. That allows him to have input on many more decisions.

That’s really what he’s been talking about — that good leaders need to get in the details. You’ll hear him express some disappointment in the idea that founder mode is about micromanagement or pure swagger — and of course, we went back and forth on how much good leaders delegate and trust their teams to make decisions independently of them.

If you’re a Decoder fan, this is the good stuff. Brian and I really got into it here: you’ll hear Brian talk about a wide range of management styles and explain why he still considers himself a student of Steve Jobs. Actually, Steve Jobs comes up a lot in this one — as does Jony Ive, whose new company, LoveFrom, does design work for Airbnb. Don’t worry, I asked about that, too.

On top of all that, we actually started the show by talking about some big Airbnb news — the company just launched something called the Co-Host Network — which is a directory of experienced Airbnb hosts that can run listings for people who just want to make a little extra money renting out their homes without all the hassle.

It’s a big change, effectively creating a new job description for Airbnb’s platform. It also gave me a great opportunity to ask Brian about some of the thorny issues surrounding his company’s approach to running a platform that has many of the same issues as any other platform like YouTube or TikTok but which deals in literal, physical housing.

All of that in an hour, plus more — there’s even an assessment of Tim Cook’s management of Apple in here. Talking to Brian is a ride, but I think I held my own, and I think you’ll really like this one.

Okay, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky. Here we go.

This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Brian Chesky, you’re the co-founder and CEO of Airbnb. Welcome back to Decoder.

Thank you for having me again.

You’re only our second third-time guest. The other one is Mark Zuckerberg.

Oh, wow. This is really good company.

And you are in the studio with me. If people are listening, we’re together, which is amazing.

It’s the first time I’ve been in the studio with you, so thank you for having me here.

Actually, the last time you were on it was such a good conversation. We were both in New York, and my brain reinterpreted it as we were together because it was a good conversation.

That’s a sign of a good conversation.

But we were remote.

We were remote in the same city.

But you’re here today, and it’s great. There’s a lot to talk about. Airbnb just had its Winter Release. There’s a bunch of features we should talk about. I’m actually very curious about how you were thinking about hosting, professionalizing hosting, and what that means for the platform.

If you’re a Decoder listener, you’ve got to know that I’m going to talk to Brian about “Founder Mode.” The Venn diagram with Decoder and “Founder Mode” is the thesis of our show — those ideas are basically a circle.

That’s good.

Then, I just want to talk about Airbnb generally. You’ve made some org chart changes of your own. But let’s start with the news: the Winter Release. The last time you were on, you actually talked about staggering Airbnb’s releases on one timeline for the whole company, so you get the summer release and then the winter release. What’s the big news in the Winter Release?

So two things. The first thing is we’re introducing something that we call the Co-Host Network. What is this? Let’s give some background. Airbnb is only as good as the number of homes we have, and the more homes we have, the more modulated the prices are on Airbnb, so we need to get a lot more homes. Frankly, we have more than 8 million homes today, but we’d love millions more in addition to the organic homes coming to Airbnb.

So we went out to a lot of prospective hosts, and we asked them — we do this periodically — “Why aren’t you hosting?” Number one, people first say they had no idea the amount of money they can make. It’s a very compelling amount of money you can make; you can make tens of thousands of dollars with an asset you’re already paying for. So we asked, “Well, why aren’t you hosting?” The number one answer people gave us was that they perceived it as being too much work. It’s like, “Well, I have a job, I have kids, I have this, I have that. I don’t know if I can come home, check in guests.” Or maybe it’s, “I live in New York City here, and I have a summer home in Florida, but I can’t be in Florida to check in the guests, so I need help hosting.”

We thought to ourselves, “Okay.” So now if somebody doesn’t have the time, they either make one of two decisions: they don’t host, or they go on Google and they type in “Airbnb property management company,” and they find this third-party property management company. There’s many companies that can manage your Airbnb. The challenge we’ve noticed is the average five-star rating for third-party property managers on Airbnb is about 4.62. It is significantly below the median range review score.

So we thought, “What if we basically put together a whole collection of Airbnb-certified hosts that can manage your Airbnb for you?” We could basically create a marketplace where we match people with homes but don’t have time with the best hosts in Airbnb who want to expand but don’t have a home. These would be people who only manage a few properties, so they’re not going to be managing you and 100 other homes. Maybe three, four, or five other homes. That is what we built. We built a network of co-hosts who will host your property with you, to take care of your home and your guests. The average rating of a co-host is a 4.86, 73 percent are super hosts, and we have 10,000 of them today in 10 countries, including, of course, here in the US.

If anyone’s listening, and they would like to make $20,000 a year with a house they already have and do very minimal work, you can go online. You’ll go to the Co-Host Network, and we’ll match you to the very best person for you. You’ll have some choices, with basically like 80 different factors to match you to the right co-host. Most importantly, where are you located? We want somebody near you. Then, you negotiate the rate. How do you pay them? They take a cut on your bookings, and you decide that cut or you negotiate together. It can be based on whatever service you want. They can do all the hosting for you, or they can do just some of it. It’s totally in your control.

Just to bring it all back, I think this is going to unlock hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, of homes on Airbnb. And I think, most importantly, this is going to unlock more real people — regular people — renting the homes they live in, rather than more furnished, dedicated rentals, which is what a third-party property manager would likely do.

That’s the main thing we announced, but of course, that’s not it. As you know, twice a year, we want to make these big upgrades. We can talk a little bit more, if you want to go into it later, why we do these. Because it’s a different way. We develop software a little more like a hardware company. Instead of just doing this continuous development every hour of every day — we do some of that — we try to have these big, single moments where we bring a lot of upgrades together.

We also have more than 50 upgrades for guests. The basic idea is to make Airbnb a more personalized experience. For decades, if you went to a travel website, whether it’s Expedia, or this or that, you’d have the same exact search experience as someone else. It’s not personalized to you, and we think travel should be more personalized. We have a whole bunch of features and upgrades that really personalize the search experience based on the past bookings you’ve done and what we know about your profile.

So those are the basic things we’ve done: 70 upgrades. The final thing I’ll say is these 70 upgrades are 70 out of 430 upgrades that we’ve made over the last two years. So I think this system of launching has really accelerated product development at Airbnb.

I want to come back to the product development cycle. You do it all very differently, but I want to stay on the Co-Host Network for one second. That is professionalizing a huge portion of Airbnb. I know some professional hosts and management companies who do other properties. Their point of view is, “You’ve got to find us. We’ll market to people who own properties, and then we’ll put you on every platform.” You’re going to do all the discovery of finding a co-host, and then negotiate a cut, and then handling the splits on your platform?

Yes.

Is that to just bring a more professional class of management companies directly into Airbnb?

No. Actually, let me break this down. So, there’s a lot of third-party, professional property management companies. If you’re a third-party company, you don’t want to have a business with just managing five people, building your own website, and building your own demand for five people, for five properties. You tend to need economies of scale, so you’re going to be managing hundreds of properties, even thousands of properties.

If you manage thousands of properties, now you have a whole bunch of employees. Then, you probably have a company name, and your employees probably wear a T-shirt with a company name on the T-shirt. This is basically just a little more of an industrial hospitality experience.

Someone might argue that it’s a little more like a hotel. There can be pluses to that from a service standpoint, but for a lot of people, this is a little bit different than the original ethos of Airbnb of “living like a local.”

Number one, every single co-host is vetted by Airbnb. We go through everyone’s profile. We only allow people who have high ratings in Airbnb to be co-hosts, so these are the very best hosts in Airbnb. Additionally, we bias towards people that manage only a few properties. The reason why is we noticed that the more properties you manage, the lower the five-star rating after a certain scale. There are some property managers who are amazing and defy this, but generally speaking, hospitality is a difficult thing to industrialize. People want a local feel, as compared to Amazon, delivery, or other types of businesses where scale makes the service better. Hospitality at scale often makes the service more challenging.

I think this is maybe an alternative to the extremely professionalized third-party property managers, and in some ways, it kind of moves Airbnb a little closer toward the roots. Again, I think we’re going to bias towards more regular people putting up their real homes, rather than more dedicated rentals. So that’s where we’re going.

Now, just one caveat. If anyone’s listening and they work at or are a third-party property manager, we love the ones guests love. Although the average rating across the board isn’t as high, there are some unbelievable property managers, and we love them.

The last point I’ll just make: it is true property managers are more likely to — you might call it cross-list. They’ll cross-list their inventory on many different platforms. One of the core values of Airbnb is that you come to Airbnb to find something you can’t find anywhere else. If you can find it everywhere else, then we’re just another e-commerce platform, and we’re not adding a lot of value. So the co-hosts on Airbnb are exclusive, and those properties are exclusive to Airbnb.

One of the reasons I always like talking to you is that Airbnb has all of the challenges of… I don’t know, an internet video platform? It’s a platform of suppliers and audiences, but then you’re managing this very physical thing that seems very challenging.

Here’s the thing people don’t realize. Airbnb is a harder business to run than it appears. Apple does not appear to be an easy business because one device is like a miracle in your hand. OpenAI doesn’t appear to be an easy business. But Airbnb does. The reason Airbnb appears to be an easy business is because, at a sub-scale, it is an easy business. If you wanted to just find a home in Croatia, you don’t even need a website. You can just get a friend, and you can get a house.

The part that makes Airbnb hard is that there are 4 million people per night from nearly every country in the world — more countries than Coca-Cola operates in — living together. That’s the part that makes it hard: the scale. And the scale is the only way you can actually do this profitably, or very, very profitably, as well. That’s the part that makes it really difficult.

I remember… I think it was Doug Leone from Sequoia Capital (this was like 10 years ago). He came to my office and he said, “You have the hardest business of any of the Sequoia portfolio companies to run. First of all, you have to have a mobile app, and you need a website.” This is when Uber only had a mobile app. “So you need to be on every platform. You need to be in every country in the world, but you need supply and demand, and they’re not in the same city.” Uber could go one city at a time; they can get riders and drivers in one city. We had to get supply everywhere and demand everywhere, and perfectly match the corridors. It is highly regulated — as regulated as Uber, probably even more regulated in many ways. The hotel commissions and the hotel trade councils are significantly more powerful than the taxi unions. So this is a very, very difficult business.

We’re handling a lot of money through the platform: over $90 billion a year, which is the GDP of Croatia. We have to deal with physical safety, and more types of physical safety than even ridesharing because of a myriad of things. Obviously, there are a lot of accidental issues that can occur. You have to deal with some of the hardest customer service challenges you can imagine. Somebody checks in at 11PM in Paris. They’re from Tokyo, they don’t speak French, and the host isn’t responsive, so they have to call customer service. You start to think about how you have to manage the quality of supply that you don’t actually own or control. But you have to influence the quality, and you’re competing with an alternative supply that has a front desk. By the way, I could keep going on and on…

Or a search problem. People think that Google’s got one of the hardest search problems, and Airbnb’s got a more pedestrian search problem. I’m not saying we have search technology like Google, but here’s the difference: you type something in Google, but when’s the last time you needed to look at a third page of Google? The first five results are the only five results you need. If you’re typing in “Paris” and you need a house, we have 150,000 homes. Suddenly, this is a matching problem, not just a search relevancy problem where there’s just one right answer. So it is a harder business than meets the eye, and that’s just our core business. That doesn’t involve taking this business and expanding the model to new categories and verticals.

One of the reasons that I like the framework of “it’s a platform” when I chat with you is I can just come up with ways that I would game any other platform, and ask how you would solve those problems. So how would I game TikTok? How would I game YouTube? How do bad actors use those platforms? It seems like you have a lot of those same challenges.

It’s a cat and mouse game. It is so challenging. I’ll give you an example of something we found. There was an entire industry of companies that emerged — that we caught, and we stopped them — that were advertising that they can get your bad reviews taken down. They knew how to call customer service, and what to say to get your negative reviews taken down. That became not only a fraudulent activity, it became an industry. There were entire companies built around doing this.

Of course, that is fraudulent, so you have to stop that stuff, but the thing that makes Airbnb so difficult in this way — and probably more difficult than, say, a video platform — is its longer tail. On YouTube, people can game things, but generally, a disproportionate number of views go to certain videos. For Airbnb, that’s not possible. Only one person can stay at the house at a time, or one family can stay at a time. It’s a long tail, and it’s in nearly every country. So, there are a lot of different schemes that can occur.

The reason I brought that up in the context of Co-Host Network is that it seems like professionalizing or certifying that class of user on Airbnb goes a long way toward ending some of the gamification that occurs in the platform.

Hundred percent. To maybe oversimplify one of the trends that we’re doing at Airbnb, we are managing more of the inventory and verifying more of the users at the simplest level. It’s really important to understand the history of where it even came from.

Starting Airbnb was in the context of eBay and Craigslist. In fact, I think when I started Airbnb with my two friends, eBay’s market cap might’ve been higher than Amazon. It wasn’t obvious Amazon was going to be the winner. It kind of really pulled away, but eBay was the marketplace, and Craigslist was how most people found housing. It was completely the Wild West. It pretty much still is today. There was really no management of inventory.

We thought about how the internet is like an immune system, and what you should do is give communities tools to moderate themselves: so flags, reports of suspicious behavior, but, most importantly, a review system. We built this really powerful review system where about two out of three people, after they book an Airbnb, leave a review., and two out of three hosts leave a review. We thought, “Oh, this is great.” It turns out that is necessary, but not sufficient. So over time, we’ve been in the business of managing more and more of the quality ourselves. We’re very hands-on with quality control. Most new services we actually vet and certify ourselves. We think reviews are important, but we don’t want to put the entire burden on the user base.

Again, there’s a lot of ways to game things, so you’ve got to be very hands-on. But the more things you verify, the more things you inspect, the more things you certify, the fewer areas there will be to exploit a company.

Let me put that right next to the platforms. Forgive me, but we’re however many days away from the election, and the thing I see with all of the major social networks right now is that they’re doing less moderation.

Yes.

They’re less interested in verifying things are true or false, or even that people are real and not AI. You just see it all over the place, they’ve taken their hands off. Airbnb’s platform, you’re saying, “We’re doing more, we’re certifying more things.” When you sign up and you want to rent the room in your house while you’re gone on vacation, here’s a list of approved co-hosts. Here’s experiences that we’re designing with professional designers.” Why the difference? Why is it all the other platforms are letting go, and you’re grabbing on tighter?

I have a theory that I’ll share. In our business, it’s obvious what the customer wants. The customer wants more moderation. They just do. I never heard a customer say, “You are controlling the inventory too much. You are removing too many bad listings. You are penalizing hosts that are making me unhappy.” They actually call and say the opposite, like, “How dare you.” They get very upset and personal when a home doesn’t work out, even if it’s not our home. We’re just the platform. So we are consistently held responsible by the customer for the content on our platform. So number one, the customer is expecting this.

Number two, the economic incentives are very clear. This is not an advertising platform where the product and the business model are separate from an aligned interest standpoint — they’re completely connected. You can start to see a bad Airbnb, and people then don’t rebook on Airbnb, they don’t come back. So there’s a really clear economic incentive.

The last thing is Airbnbs are just not that politicized. People just want to have good vacations. You don’t have the myriad of political issues and baggage. I think when it comes to platforms like X, YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, it’s not clear what the customer’s asking for. On the one hand, users want veracity of information, but on the other hand, I think they’re very skeptical of the hand that platforms are putting on the product — in our case, they’re not.

I think that we’re going to look back at history, and the platforms that are going to be most successful are going to be the ones that have the greatest truth and veracity of information. And veracity of information starts with, “Are these people real? Are they not real?” I remember emailing [Elon Musk] when he first acquired Twitter, and I gave unsolicited advice, which was that you should verify 100 percent of the users on Twitter. They decided not to do that, and I didn’t even really have a conversation with him.

They did almost the opposite, actually.

Yeah, but I would’ve done that. I would have verified 100 percent of the users. I still think a platform that verifies every single person is a really good idea, and that’s what we do right now. Now, there might be reasons not to verify, like you just want to… I don’t know, maybe people are nervous about verification if they can’t be whistleblowers on platforms?

But again, a lot of the reason people don’t want moderation is they distrust the companies. They believe the companies are politically motivated and they’re putting their thumb on a scale politically for free speech. This becomes an attack vector for politics. I think before you moderate content, you should moderate people. You should moderate not if they should be kicked off the site or allowed on the site, but are these real people? Are they who they say they are, and are they allowed to use pseudonyms or not?

I think in the speech context, there’s quite a long history of debates about anonymity. We can set that aside in the context of Airbnb, but it’s interesting how the platform is expressed in atoms for you and bits for them, which result in very different incentives.

Totally.

The part where you’re taking more control of the experience, because you think that’s perfectly aligned with the customer, at some point do you just end up with a front desk? Are you just running the hotel? It seems like that’s the farthest end of that journey.

I love how you think because it’s good to take logical steps towards that conclusion and ask, “Where do you draw the line?” I think we want to have almost all the benefits of a hotel while retaining the benefits of Airbnb. So let’s just break them down.

The benefit of an Airbnb is that every room and every home is different. There’s no SKUs. Hotels are such commodities that you never see the room you’re booking. You don’t even know the floor you’re booking. You book a hotel room, and you don’t even know the floor you’re on, let alone what view you have. By the way, it doesn’t really matter because they’re kind of all the same, or at least the hotel kind of trains you not to care. That is the definition of commodity. It’s such a commodity that you don’t even have any choice. You just choose the hotel, and you barely choose the room — maybe you choose the tier of the room.

We want every space to be unique. We want every space to be one of a kind. We want our experience to be as personal as possible. Yes, there are more professional managers today than there were 10 years ago, but generally speaking, 90 percent of our hosts are still regular people. We want to feel like when you step into an Airbnb or you travel to a city, you’re living like a local. So those are the things we want to retain.

We really want it to be their home. We don’t want to create an Airbnb aesthetic, right? I’ve been asked, “Why don’t you guys do a deal with IKEA?” Well actually, that’s not really what people want. They don’t really want a standardization of design. They really want, when they’re in Paris, to feel like they’re in Paris. They don’t want to feel the same as they do in Kansas City or somewhere else. But hotels start to feel more similar, especially chain hotels.

But what we do want to do is match the hotel service as much as we can. There isn’t a front desk, but can we create a remote front desk? Can we have more 24/7 support? Can we use AI to level the playing field of the front desk, where AI can be immediate, it can be multilingual, it can adjudicate?

AI at least can be a frontline that can adjudicate disputes between guests and hosts better than a real person. What you can do is you can train it on the corpus of like 100 policies, and then it can look at the last 100,000 times somebody complained about this, and figure out what the most likely resolution was that led to satisfaction for both parties, You can actually train a model to spit out the right answer, and they can either directly spit out the answer as the frontline through the app to the guest and host or, if you do want to talk to a person, it can help the customer service person.

So, I think we want to manage Airbnbs more before they become ours. Not even that it would be a bad business model, but I think it would start to cut into the ethos of feeling like you’re living like a local and being truly authentic.

Where’s the last step of that? Is it just owning the property? Is it taking the booking directly?

I think that there are steps beyond this. The step beyond this that we haven’t gone to is that you have to apply to list on Airbnb. We have certain quality criteria, and if you don’t meet that, then you can’t list on Airbnb. That’s probably where we’re going within our new verticals, which we’re going to launch starting next year. Amazon had this moment where they were just selling books, and then in the late ‘90s, they decided to go just outside books. What’s adjacent to books back in the ‘90s? DVDs and CDs, and then they went further and further. So we’re going to have that Amazon moment.

For the new verticals and categories we’re launching, I believe we’re going to have an apply-to-list model where you have to apply. So we’re starting to have an opinion on quality. That is going to be the next step, and probably the final step. The step beyond that is actually owned and operated, and we don’t own or operate anything except for these promotional listings that people might know of, which are called Icons. We built a 40-foot tall Polly Pocket clamshell. Yes, we own and operate that, but that’s really marketing that generates a lot of views. We’re not really in the business of owning and operating anything.

Going back to this idea that you’ll have some set of people who will apply, I just keep coming back to the history of various platforms. YouTube, for a while, had these things called multi-channel networks, or MCNs. They were like big companies, and they would buy a bunch of popular YouTube channels. They wanted to be preferred suppliers to YouTube.

Interesting.

YouTube decided this was too big of a risk. They didn’t want anyone to have that level of control over YouTube, so they basically killed all the MCNs. There’s books about it now that you can go read. Do you ever foresee yourself as having that kind of supplier on the Airbnb platform? This would be a hosting provider that provides the kind of experience at this level that you can trust, and they’re going to own and operate the actual property.

What we’re probably going to have in the future are more standardized quality tiers. So there’s going to be a standard to list on Airbnb, and then there’s probably going to be — depending upon the vertical — different levels of certification or quality. The quality could be based on their expertise in the real world, or it could be based on what customers are saying on Airbnb. For example, we have this designation, called “guest favorite,” which are 2 million of the best homes in Airbnb based on ratings, reviews, and customer service tickets. So I think we’re going to do more of that and that’s probably where we’re going to go.

I’m interested to see how that plays out.

It’s all going to play out over the next 24 months.

I’ll give you another really dumb example. BuzzFeed designed its entire business on being the best at Facebook. And one day, Facebook was like, “Well, we don’t need you. An army of teenagers will just make Instagram for us every day.” And now, BuzzFeed is whatever business it is.

You can see whatever your tier is — call it the A tier in Nashville — then someone will be like, “We’re just going to dominate the A tier in Nashville, and Airbnb will have to deal with us.” Is that an eventuality you’ve thought about?

I think it’s a little bit different because you don’t have the consolidation of inventory in the same way. Let’s take YouTube. A MrBeast video can get 100 or 200 hundred million views. You can’t have a single Airbnb be that popular, so the entire marketplace is significantly more long tail. We’re in 100,000 cities; no one city represents even 1 percent of our business on Airbnb.

So generally, there has been this move towards a little more consolidation of inventory via professional property managers, but it’s not been that much. Again, for the last four years alone, 90 percent of our hosts are individuals, and that number has remained pretty much unchanged. I think many of the new products and features we’re launching are going to enable more people to allow more long-tail inventory onto the platform. That’s generally where we’re pushing.

Does it benefit Airbnb to have less consolidated inventory on the platform? It probably does because they’re less likely to cross-list. But it would be a bummer if we did that, and it was misaligned with a customer. There’s a chart I’ve put out before that shows the number of properties you manage in your five-star rating, and quite literally, it is a perfectly curved downward slope. The highest-rated Airbnb hosts manage one property. The second-highest manage two, and down to 1,000. There is not one single deviation from one to 1,000.

Wow.

It’s crazy. It doesn’t mean that all people managing 1,000 properties are bad. It just means that most people haven’t figured out how to industrialize hospitality. Let me give you one other argument for why regular people can sometimes work well economically.

If I’m a dedicated rental, I need to build a profit margin because I’m a business. So, I have rent, and I need to be careful about any cost I incur. If we’re in a house, I might have four books, but maybe I won’t have 20 books because books five through 20 are an additional cost I’m putting into my Airbnb. I might have six coffee mugs, but I’m not going to have 10 coffee mugs. I might not have a KitchenAid mixer. These are all costs I have to bear.

If it’s your real house, you might have all this stuff anyway because you live there. You don’t need to charge a daily rate that has a profit margin because this was unsold inventory that you weren’t monetizing, and now you’re monetizing it. It’s another one of the economic dynamics where non-professionals sometimes have an economic advantage over professionals. This is just one example. Their homes are equipped, and the fixed cost is an investment they’ve already incurred. This might be another way of saying it.

Well, I’m very interested to see how Co-Host Network plays out.

Thank you.

When it’s your fourth time [on Decoder], we’ll check in on the platform dynamics.

I cannot wait. I love these conversations, and the thing I appreciate is the depth that you go into.

Well, get ready, because it’s coming now.

Let’s do it.

I said earlier that “I think the founder mode conversation and Decoder questions have pure overlap.”

Yes.

The last time you were on the show, you described re-orging Airbnb. You restructured the company, you went onto this roadmap where you shipped twice a year in big deliveries, and you said, “I got rid of all of these middle managers, and I’m the product manager, and everyone rolls up to me.” And I thought, “Oh, this is-”

Chief product officer.

Chief product officer. And I thought, “This is great. This is what I want out of a Decoder conversation.” Then a year passes, and you give a talk, and I thought, “I’ve seen that talk before. That’s the ‘we don’t have PMs,’ right? I’ve heard this from Brian before.” Then, Paul Graham goes and writes a blog post called “Founder Mode,” and everyone reacts to it. Is there something meaningfully different than the way you have structured Airbnb and founder mode? Am I missing something? Has something changed in that chronology?

I don’t think so. Let me put it this way: it’s not like I’m suddenly running the company differently than a year ago. It’s just that now it has a label, and I think it makes sense to everyone. Let me give a little bit of background on that talk.

You gave the first version of this talk at a Figma conference, right?

Yeah, and the Figma conference was maybe a quarter of what I said. I’ll do the short version because I know we have limited time, but let me give a little background. As you know, from 2009 to 2019, I ran Airbnb the way most tech companies run their companies. I didn’t know how to run it, so I hired people from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and other companies, and they brought their processes with them. We kind of reverted towards the way everyone runs their company. I remember that we were kind of a matrix organization with 1,000 employees, and like almost all matrix organizations, it was hard to get work done.

I’ll give you an example. There was a creative marketing department that would have to create graphics for different teams. Then, we kept hiring subteams that kept asking more and more from the graphics team. It was called the creative group. At some point, the creative group was like a deli, and they had these lines out the window. They just kind of threw their hands up. If you needed anything done, let’s say you were a team and you needed a button designed, or a graphic for a button design, it would be like a three-month waiting list because they were inundated.

So then the team said, “Well, give us our own resources. Give me a dedicated creative person,” and this could also be true for technology, finance, a legal team, any function. And this is when you start to divisionalize the company. Quite literally you’re subdividing it. This is where the general management structure comes from. It makes a lot of sense why this happens.

The problem with that, though, is that once you subdivide the company, the company starts rowing in different directions. Now, you have even more bureaucracy because the groups don’t want to work together. They’re incentivized to work on different things, and they might not be totally compatible anymore. Ten teams can have 10 different tech stacks, and they don’t actually fit together. A local decision that might make sense for your team might not make sense for the company.

The next thing is that these general managers are incentivized, typically, on output goals that you don’t usually run on P&Ls. They run on impact or growth, so they have to advocate for as many resources as possible. This is what we call politics. You’re advocating for yourself. So suddenly, groups start going in many different directions. Because the company’s going in many different directions, oversight becomes more difficult. When oversight gets more difficult, now there’s less accountability. You have people that are crappy, and there’s no consequence, so that makes people feel like it doesn’t matter. This is where complacency sets in. This is, I think, what ends up happening at big companies.

The big thing that I said about founder mode, and this is something I’ve said for four years, is it’s not about… Paul Graham coined it founder mode. I think it’s a good name, I think it’s very catchy. I could not have made something as viral as Paul Graham. But there is a downside to the name. First of all, people don’t know what founder mode is. They think it means swagger. I remember a tweet that said, “I’m going founder mode on this burrito.” I don’t know what that means. I think people think it means the founder swagger: “I don’t give a fuck. I’m going in, I’m kicking ass.” That’s kind of what it turned into, and only founders have that.

That wasn’t the message. If I could summarize founder mode in a couple sentences, it’s about being in the details. It’s that great leadership is presence, not absence. It’s about a leader being in the details. And if you as a leader aren’t in the details, guess what? Your leaders aren’t in the details, and their leaders aren’t in the details. And one day you’re going to wake up, and you have 50-year-olds managing 40-year-olds, managing 30-year-olds, managing people two years out of college doing all the work with no oversight, and you have these four unnecessary layers. You have no experts in the company.

So, the antidote to this is to try to be as functional as possible. We are a functional organization. Functional just means expertise-based, not general management-based. I’m the only non-functional person in the company; all functions roll up to me. I generally think the CEO should be the chief product officer of the company. The most important thing a company does is make a product. If the CEO is not the expert in the product, then why are they the CEO? Said differently, I should not be the CEO of SpaceX. I couldn’t be the chief product officer because I do not understand rocketry. So maybe I’m a good CEO, but I can’t be the chief product officer. There may be some exceptions, but I generally think that’s the case.

Your leaders shouldn’t just be “managers” (and I put managers in quotes), they should also be in the details. If we were a military, like a battalion, the cavalry general should know how to ride a horse. It’s crazy that they don’t. And leaders shouldn’t be fungible. So it’s really about being in the details.

Now, here’s the problem with the narrative being in the details. There’s a term for it, and it’s a pejorative. It’s called micromanager, and everyone’s afraid to be accused of being a micromanager. I had this thought because a lot of founder mode came from me studying Steve Jobs. For 10 years, I was at wit’s end. It wasn’t my first instinct to copy Steve Jobs’ leadership style, it was kind of a last resort. I didn’t copy everything, but I copied a lot of how he organized and ran the company.

A few weeks ago, I had dinner with his son, Reed Jobs, and I remember asking him what Steve’s opinion of micromanagement was. He had such an interesting perspective. He said, “Steve Jobs was in the details.” He would skip levels, many levels, to be in the details, which somebody who goes to Harvard Business School would never do. He said he never felt like he was micromanaging because he was partnering with people on the details. I asked people like Jony Ive and [Hiroki Asai], who worked for Steve, and I said, “Do you feel like Steve Jobs micromanaged you?” And they said, “No, he didn’t.”

I don’t know. Maybe I’m a micromanager, maybe I’m not. I think the distinction is that I remember one time an executive on my team asked, “Is this your decision or is this my decision?” And I remember saying, “It should never be either.” And that’s founder mode: it should never be either. It’s never your decision, it’s never my decision. We’re in it together. If you’re cofounders, whose decision is it? It’s your decision together. It’s the same thing hierarchically with the org chart.

So, that’s really what it means: great leadership is presence, not absence. It’s in the details. What a lot of founders do is they let go of the product, and they abdicate responsibility. Frank Slootman wrote a book called Amp It Up where he basically said, “To turn a company around, the CEO just needs to set the pace of the company.” You set the vision, but more important than the vision, you set the pace, you set the standards. And that’s what founder mode is really about.

By the way, you don’t need to be a founder to do that. You can apply founder mode to government, you can apply founder mode to a nonprofit, to a volunteer organization, to being a sports coach. It just means the leadership is presence in the details, and it’s not about being so-called autocratic because you’re not telling the experts what to do. But you know what they’re doing, and you’re working through, and you’re challenging them. And you should do this because, let’s say you have 10 experts. They might disagree. Finance says this is the best outcome, but that may conflict with legal, which might conflict with product marketing, which represents the customer, which might conflict with engineering, which is the schedule. So, you have to weigh all these trade-offs. That’s why you have to be in the details.

Maybe one other thing before we wrap up.

Oh, we’re far from wrapping up. I just wanted to let you know.

One tidbit I’d like to say about hiring, just as a thought. One of the most important things I do is have an executive team. You could think of them as C-level or SVPs. There’s about seven of them. Then, the next level are VPs, and there’s maybe 30 of them or 40 of them. I don’t really know how many there are.

Something I do that’s different from almost every other CEO in Silicon Valley (but I think [Nvidia CEO] Jensen Huang basically does this, Steve Jobs did this, Walt Disney did this, and Elon Musk did this) is I treat all the VPs as direct reports. Jensen got rid of the executive team. He just has 40 direct reports. That’s a little unwieldy for me. I’ve gone through that thought experiment of just having the VPs, and I can’t track everything.

But all VPs do a report. They report to me and to their executive, and I am the co-hiring manager. So instead of me hiring an executive, like a CFO who hires their people, I am the co-hiring manager. I do the kickoff, I’m the second interview, and, ultimately, I decide the final compensation for all the top people in the company, not the managers. The managers give recommendations, and I make the final decision. This is just a very practical version of founder mode, of being in the details. You don’t just hire and manage your executives, you skip-level and manage as many people as possible in a dual-reporting relationship.

So, the branding of founder mode has offered you some narrative clarity. It’s clear from the last time when we had a very similar kind of conversation that if I had to pull all of that back into what we’re really describing here, into the Decoder framework, I would say what you were describing is fundamentally “be a functional organization, not a divisional organization.” And that was the big change that you made the last time you were on the show. You’ve since made other changes, right?

Yes.

You just created this new role in the C-suite, chief business officer. You promoted your CFO into that role. Walk me through that. You’re obviously evolving how you’re thinking of the company and the roles within the company inside of this framework. How’d you make that decision?

One thing about functional, and then I’ll answer that question. I don’t think all companies should be functional, but I think they should be as functional as they can get away with. That’s the rule. [Andreessen Horowitz co-founder] Ben Horowitz had this saying: “Give ground grudgingly.” You should give ground grudgingly. All startups start as functional organizations. Steve Jobs said, “I want to be the world’s largest startup,” but he wants to still operate like a startup. So I think you should give ground grudgingly, and that’s the general philosophy.

I just want to say one thing about being a functional organization. There is one very specific downside: The downside of the functional organization is you cannot do disparate things. But here’s something I wanted to spell. It’s not true you can’t do as many things. It’s not true that it would be a slower-run organization. We’ve actually increased product development by being a functional organization, but we’re like one flywheel. We can’t create three other flywheels that are disparate. The only reason I believe a company should divisionalize is so that they could do truly disparate things that have disparate functional expertise. So, if we had a jet engine business, that’s a different functional expertise.

Now let’s go to the business organization. At most companies, there is no function called “business.” Maybe we can also call it revenue — business, revenue, commercial. There’s different names: chief commercial officer, chief business officer, chief revenue officer. They all kind of mean the same thing. The reason most companies don’t have this is because they have general managers, and the general managers play that role. The general managers are the mini-CEO and they own the business, and they usually partner with a finance person. Somewhere between the general manager and finance person, or maybe a data scientist, they’re the business function.

We found that the problem with that is, none of them are really experts in “business.” When I mean business, I mean revenue, the business model, the market size, what are the kind of dynamics of this market? Like with Co-Host, what should we charge? Should this be a free service? Do we take a commission? How does this compare to third-party property management services? Which countries do we roll this out in? What are the economics by country? Is it a standard rate? There’s just a lot of detailed questions one must answer.

So, we decided to create a chief business organization with three functions. One is supply. Supply was always a function at Airbnb, but it was kind of conflated with international and general managers. So we said, “No, no. There are experts in getting supply of homes, experiences, and other things at Airbnb.”

Then, we have a business function, which is quite literally the business counterpart to product marketing. If product marketing is nouveau product management, product marketing would be product management minus program management plus some outbound marketing, and it’s fewer people. That’s all it is. It’s outbound-inbound in one role. They are really thinking about what the customer wants and what the experience should be like, but they’re not in spreadsheets. They’re not business model people.

So they have a counterpart called the “business function.” With Co-Host Network, for example, we had a business person looking at the business model for Co-Host, we had a product marketing person who understands what’s the product, how are we going to market this, and why do people actually want this. Those two people have to go together. One reports to Hiroki — it’s product marketing, it’s more creative. One reports to Dave Stephenson, the former CFO now chief business officer, and they’re really the two parts of the continuum.

Then, you have a supply person. The supply person — based on the business organization, the business model, and the product marketing brief — has to now go get supply. They work with international, the third group in the chief business officer org, to then take that playbook and bring it to all the different countries. And, of course, the product marketing has their own three-legged stool with design and engineering.

But it’s different from other companies where product really directs design. I don’t like that, and I caused a bit of a storm at a Figma conference. Basically, I got taken out of context and people thought I said I fired all the product managers. What actually happened was that I got rid of the classic product management function, I reassigned the most senior product managers to be product marketers, and I reclassified most of the other product managers as program managers.

By the way, most product managers in Silicon Valley aren’t actually product managers. They’re glorified program managers, but they’re not even experts at program management. That’s all they’re doing; They’re making sure the thing ships. That’s program management, that’s not product management. So, this is what we’re doing. It’s a very simple organization, and it’s just a continuation of us being functional.

It’s funny that you say all this. If you asked my CEO, he would tell you that I scream that we should be divisional all the time because I think tech journalism is different from video game journalism and different from sports journalism, which is different from New York Magazine. At the end of the day, we all make one kind of thing, and there’s reasons to have central teams, and there’s reasons to share costs.

Do you ever find yourself thinking, “Okay, if I was in the other kind of organization, something else would be faster, I could make this tradeoff, but there would be a benefit to being in a more divisional structure?”

I think it’s really important to not be dogmatic and say functional is better than divisional, and I think it really depends on industries. In tech companies, functional is generally better because you can leverage shared technologies, everyone can row together, and you get economies of scale. I don’t know if you’re doing that in your business.

Okay, here are the two things — I said one, there’s really two. There’s two benefits to divisional. The first benefit is, you can do disparate things. We talked about that. . I’m just thinking of an absurd thing: we want to create a podcasting division. It would be really hard for the people designing the app and the marketers advertising homes to think about podcasting. Now we want to create a TV series. That’s really, really disparate, so we would struggle to do super-disparate things.

The second downside to a functional organization is that it takes longer to start. Because if you want to just get something going, you need to get everyone organized. But everyone organized has a multi-year roadmap, so they now need to make room on the roadmap. So, for disparate things that you can start quickly, a divisional structure is better. Those, to me, are the primary advantages of a divisional structure. There’s a theoretical third advantage, which is that you can hire so-called entrepreneurial-type people that don’t fit into a functional organization, but that one I don’t agree with. That’s a bit of a rabbit hole, so I won’t go there unless you want to ask about it.

That being said, once you get rowing… think about a bunch of us in a boat, and we’re rowing together. If there are 10 people in 10 boats, they can get going faster and they can go in different directions, but the 10-person boat is going to row faster than 10 one-person boats. So once you get going with the functional organization, what I basically tell people is it’s harder to get something on the roadmap, but if it gets on the roadmap, we put the weight of the company behind it.

I like that constraint. I like the constraint of anyone can’t just do anything because now we’re focused, now we’re prioritized, now we only do things that are differentiated. And the governor is that we only do as many things as I can focus on. That’s what I do. That’s what Steve Jobs did at Apple, and that’s what Walt Disney did at Disney, and that’s what Elon Musk does at Tesla. You only do as many things as the CEO can focus on and manage.

Now, this presumes the CEO is competent, intelligent —

Present.

Present. They understand the business. This doesn’t work if you come from management consulting, and now you’re a general manager who doesn’t really know the domain. That wouldn’t work as well.

You’re setting aside one topic, I’m just setting aside Elon.

Yeah.

I have a lot to say in response to that.

Exactly. Maybe Elon is a bit of a red herring because there’s all the surface-level things about him that are idiosyncratic, and I’m certainly not going to endorse everything he does because I do a lot of things differently.

But I think the commonality of him, Jensen, Steve Jobs, and [Mark Zuckerberg] kind of ebbs and flows. I know Zuck very well, and I think he would say I was a big inspiration for his year of efficiency because I talked about what we did Airbnb.I think those people are pretty close to functional, pretty in the details, they set the pace for the company, and they generally really know what’s going on at their companies.

I want to talk about micromanagement real quick, and then I want to end with decisions, which is the other big Decoder question that I always like talking to you about. You mentioned that it’s toxic, that people don’t like it. You mentioned that founder mode as a brand means people are just acting like jerks of their companies —

It means a lot of swagger, for better or worse, and I don’t think that’s really what it means.

And I actually think it is mostly for worse. I don’t think it is for better, in most cases. You’re outlining a very deep level of management thinking. You’ve thought about these companies a lot, you’ve thought about your own company a lot, and you’ve thought about these trade-offs a lot. There’s a general sense that you should be in the details, to not just hire smart people and let them do whatever they want. I talk to a lot of CEOs on the show, and they’re like, “My secret is that I hire smart people and I let them do whatever they want.”

I ask a lot of CEOs, “How do you make decisions?” I would say one of the most common answers we get is, “It would be best if I wasn’t making so many decisions, if my team was empowered, and all I was doing was breaking the hardest ties or making the biggest, riskiest investment decisions so they weren’t feeling that pressure.”

I totally disagree with that. I think I’ve heard Jeff Bezos say that more recently. He said, “My job is to make as few high-quality decisions as possible,” and I could not disagree more with that. Let’s start by saying that it’s not like I’m right and Jeff Bezos is wrong. When I say it, I’m also saying what Steve Jobs would have said. Was Steve Jobs right or Jeff Bezos right?

The truth is there’s multiple ways to do something. I’m strongly advocating for this way. Funny enough, I’ve talked to many people that were early members at Amazon, and that’s not how Jeff Bezos ran it early on. So, here’s the key thing: I believe you need to hire smart people. The paradox is that I believe most smart people want you involved, they want your partnership. They don’t want you to tell them what to do, but there’s this assumption that control is a zero-sum game. Either I have the power, or you have the power. And I think that’s the flaw.

There’s a scenario where all of us are powerless. It’s called most Fortune 500 companies. And there’s a scenario where I have more power, and therefore you have more power. It’s not like zero-sum, and I’ve wrestled control. I’ve found that the most talented people like my involvement as long as the involvement is constructive, it isn’t me telling them what to do and pushing them. It’s like, “What about this? What about that?” Steve Jobs went to Jony Ive’s design studio every day. He wasn’t telling Jony Ive what to do. He was discussing things, and they were debating and brainstorming, and it was a partnership. I think this is a really, really important framework.

Let me give you one more. Somebody might ask, “Wait, you’re in all the details. How can you be in all the details forever? That seems like it’s not going to scale, and someday you’re going to get tired.” And the answer is they’re right. Here’s what most people do: They hire smart people, and they give them operating freedom. They have no idea if they’re good or not because they’re not engaged enough, and then over time, they start getting signals that the person isn’t good, and then they wrestle back control. Once they get involved, but they haven’t been involved for months or years, suddenly the executive loses their confidence because they’re only involved because they’re not doing well. That’s the beginning of the end, and then you replace them. This happens to every freaking company.

There’s an inverse, and I’ll use an analogy. I’m not a golfer. I’m terrible at golf. I don’t think I’ve ever even shot a hole. I’m terrible. But I did a couple golf lessons once, and I had a golf instructor who literally coached me on every single swing. Thank God I had the golf instructor because if I just went on the golf course on my own and I swung 1,000 times, I would have had a really screwed up swing by the time the golf instructor got involved, and it would take even more work to retrain my swing.

So the golf instructor said, “I’m going to watch you swing thousands of times, and eventually this is muscle memory, and I won’t need to watch your swing over time.” That’s my philosophy. My philosophy is you start in the details. You’re involved in every single thing. You hire great people, and you’re in all their details. Over time, once they develop muscle memory and they prove that they understand the system, then you can gradually let go.

To give you an example: Two years ago, I wanted to write perfect press releases not because I think anyone reads them, but because if you can’t put your ideas down in a clear press release, then you don’t have clear thinking. You don’t know why you’re doing something. Two or three years ago when we did press releases, we’d do as many as 70 revisions. And people said, “This is completely crazy. Are we going to — 10 years from now — do 70 revisions of press releases?” And the answer is no. The most recent press release for the Co-Host Network I probably reviewed three times.

But it was the repetition in the details, that’s how people learned. They were saying, “That’s apprenticeship, you learn.” Even if you hire experts, they’re not experts at your company, they’re not experts at collaborating, they’re not experts in your business. So, it’s about starting in the details and letting go. That’s what I think Jeff Bezos did, even though he said his job is to make only a few high-quality decisions. That’s not what he did in 1999. So that’s kind of my philosophy.

Let’s talk about decisions, actually. This is the other Decoder question.

You’ve been on several times, and I’ve asked you how you make decisions several times. I went back and looked. When you were on this show the last time, I asked, “How do you make decisions?” and you said, “Let me tell you a long story.” It was about various Airbnb controversies where you had to make big decisions. And you said, “I’m going to have to make so many decisions that I went to all my team and I said, ‘Here are our principles. Trust me to use these principles, and this is how I’m going to make decisions.’” Is that still the framework, that everyone just agrees on the core principles?

Pretty much. What I basically said was, “You want to make principal decisions, not business decisions.” Principal decisions are: if I don’t understand the outcome or if I can’t predict it, how do I want to be remembered? What do I think is the right thing to do? That can sound very subjective, but actually, you would have thousands of inputs. So, that’s essentially what I do. It’s kind of interesting because it’s kind of like somebody asking you, “How do you do what you do?” You might not even consciously know how you do what you do.

But what I’m doing is, I am basically making a decision. Somebody once said, “The most important thing leaders do is make decisions.” And it’s probably true. Maybe the most important thing is they hire people, and they assemble the right team. But probably day-to-day, the most important thing they do is make decisions. It’s really important that people understand the criteria off which you’re basing decisions. …

I went to my board and I said, “I’m going to have to make 1,000 decisions. I can’t run every decision by you, so let’s agree on the principles and the framework for which I make all the decisions. Then I’m going to make all the decisions, and if something stands out, I will elevate it to you. I will retroactively show you all the decisions I made. If there’s something that’s huge about the company and one-way door, I will tell you ahead of time. Otherwise, give me authority to make all these decisions.”

That’s what I did with the board. They really liked it because the key to a crisis is speed, and if I have to debate every decision, we’re not moving quickly. It’s like a car chase. Should you turn left or right? Well, most importantly you should turn quickly. So that’s what I did.

Just to go back to the golf swing analogy, the way I run Airbnb is I review all the work — every week, every two weeks, every four weeks, every eight weeks, every 12 weeks. You might ask, “How do you have people do a report? How do they keep two people happy?” And the answer is, we’re all in the same meeting together. I usually have my direct talk first because if I talk, you’ll just agree with me, and then I’ll make the final decision. Most of my final decisions are just agreeing. Ninety percent of time I’m agreeing with what the team says, and 10 percent of the time I’m disagreeing.

If I disagree, I always try to say why. I try to go down my thinking and challenge my first principles. So whenever I make a decision, I try to ask myself, like I did in this conversation, “What are the first principles driving this decision?” Don’t challenge my decision, challenge my first-principle thinking. In other words, here’s my answer, check my math. That’s kind of what I do. So the principles are really, really important to get pre-authorization from a board and to make a lot of fast decisions.

I’m not in a meeting reviewing Co-Host Network with a series of four principles. I’m just intuitively making a decision. “I think we should do X and here’s why, and let me share with you my work and my thinking. What do you think? What about this did I get right or wrong?” The most important thing is to debate the first principles, not the answer.

Does the company know the principles that you use to make decisions? Is that published? Is that a thing you talk about?

There’s not a single list. There are core values. There are strategic differentiators, like the things that you put in your S-1 so people know what you stand for. There are those general things. Actually, here’s another way of saying it. I don’t push decision-making down, I pull decision-making in. I think of the company as one shared consciousness.

This is a story. I think it will be worth it. One time I called Ron Johnson, who worked for Steve Jobs. He ran Apple retail. I remember asking how Steve Jobs ran Apple, and [Ron] said, “Even when Apple was like 20, 30, 40,000 people, he only ever thought of Apple as 100 employees.” That’s why he had this offsite called Top 100. He said his job was to only manage the top 100 people, and they manage everyone else. He never thought about the whole company.

That’s kind of what I do, and maybe it’s even fewer people, like 60 or 70, so I don’t manage all of Airbnb — I manage the top 60 or 70 people. But I’m very engaged. I pull them in, and I create one shared consciousness. If you were to interview every single one of my senior people, I don’t think they would have pithy word-for-word verbatim principles, but they would be able to describe exactly how I think because we’re in so many meetings together.

I remember I was at a group dinner with Scott Forstall one time right before he left Apple. He said he used to spend 35 hours a week with Steve Jobs. Not one-on-one, but he was in every meeting with Steve. So, think about that: 35 hours a week, every single week. That’s thousands of hours. That’s the equivalent. I don’t spend 35 hours a week with most people, but there are many people that spend 10–20 hours a week in a room with me. It’s the same few dozen people going through different meetings, creating one shared consciousness, and being able to finish each other’s sentences.

That’s another version of founder mode: It’s one shared consciousness. So, you can imagine, that’s not disempowering. It requires collaboration. If you want to be a lone wolf or a cowboy, that’s not going to work. If you’re willing to work with other people, you’re actually pretty empowered in this way.

We’ve got to wrap up, but I need to ask you one very important question that I’ve been thinking about this entire time. You’ve mentioned Apple, Steve Jobs, and Jony Ive a bunch of times. I know that Airbnb works closely with LoveFrom, which is Jony Ive’s company. I’m looking at a New York Times article, and it says, “The clients pay LoveFrom as much as $200 million a year.”

That is absolutely not true.

You’re not paying Jony Ive $200 million a year?

No, I’m not going to say what we pay, but that is so not true, and that’s not even close to true.

Okay. You’ve talked about Apple a lot. They don’t have Steve Jobs anymore, they don’t have Jony Ive anymore. They have started a bunch of divisions to do all kinds of other things. Do you think that’s sustainable for them?

No.

You are one of the closest watchers of this company I can think of, and I’m very curious what you think.

Okay. I’ll wrap up with my view on Apple.

I think Tim Cook has done an extraordinary job, especially given the cards he was dealt, right? What alternative was there? Steve died. I don’t know the circumstances, but I think it was that he resigned in August and died in October, only eight weeks later. So there’s only an eight-week window between resignation and he’s not even there. It’s not like Bezos retired, but he’s the executive chair. I think that Tim Cook basically took Apple from $300 million to, whatever, $3 trillion, added more than 90 percent of the market cap, and it’s done very, very well. He’s a great operator.

A couple things to say, though. Number one, just because Tim added $2.7 trillion in market cap and Steve added $300 billion doesn’t mean that Tim did most of the work. He inherited the most valuable product of all time, and there was just really continuing momentum —

The iPhone.

The iPhone, probably the most successful product in the history of capitalism. I don’t think that any other product has generated more profit — maybe not more revenue, but more profit — than the iPhone. The most successful company probably in the history of capitalism, or at least certainly the last 25 years. It’s crazy when you think about it. Then ask yourself a couple other questions. Let’s imagine Steve Jobs didn’t die in 2011, he died in 2005, right when the iPod Video had just launched. Would they have come up with the iPhone? They might have. Would it have been the most successful consumer product of all time? Maybe not. I don’t know who would have done it.

My general philosophy is that Tim was in an incredible period where what they really needed to do was maybe not invent a new product, but take the most successful product of all time and scale it, manufacture it, and make it completely ubiquitous, and he did that. But the technology industry… I mean, the word technology may as well be a synonym for the word change. We’re in the change industry, and it is very, very dangerous to not be constantly changing. If you’re a company that makes devices, the most important thing you need to do is make new tools and make new devices.

I saw a Bloomberg report that said Apple is moving away from launches, and moving more towards services. They’re going more divisional. My unsolicited advice is that whenever Tim decides to retire, the next CEO should also be the chief product officer. I asked people, “Who was the chief product officer at Apple when Steve was alive?” Everyone said, “Steve.” It wasn’t Phil Schiller. Phil Schiller was a great SVP of product marketing, but he wasn’t the chief product officer. That is a product company, and you really want to make sure long-term that a product person is driving the company.

This goes to the very awkward thing that no one wants to talk about. Succession planning is hard because the people that are great product visionaries are typically young. They’re young and they’re less mature. Who wants to put a young, not-super-mature person at the helm of a giant company? Founders are allowed to manage people older than them because they’re the founders. If you’re not the founder, people just don’t want to be managed by somebody younger than them who’s maybe a virtuoso, a wunderkind, but they’re a little immature. The companies don’t want to take that risk, so they bias towards senior, grown-up, functional experts. But typically that function is not the product, and I think that’s a problem.

Satya [Nadella, Microsoft CEO] is more technical. I think that has afforded them more, but he mostly just got them back to Bill Gates’ primacy. I think Apple should go back to having a CEO that’s the chief product officer. I think it should rein the company in and simplify how it operates, but that’s just my opinion.

Would you do that job?

I think Airbnb is the right job for me, and they definitely need somebody who has hardware experience.

Fair enough. Brian, it is always a pleasure talking to you. We’ve got to have you back sooner than a year.

Thank you, Nilay. I love this.

Netflix is making it easier to bookmark and share your favorite parts of a show

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

Netflix is launching a new feature called “Moments” that lets you save and share bookmarks to a specific spot in a show or movie. The feature seems like it could be a very useful way to share parts of something you’re watching with friends or on social media.
To capture a moment, tap on the screen while you’re watching something on Netflix to see the various menu options, then tap on the new “Moments” button to pop up a new menu, and then tap the save button. From the Moments menu, you can also see other Moments you’ve saved for that show or movie and share Moments to various apps. You can also copy a link to the Moment to your clipboard.

Netflix gave me early access to the feature, so I used it to make a moment of the best scene in Lost — spoiler warning, obviously — which is perhaps the most Jay Peters thing to do.
It’s all pretty easy to use, and I think a lot of people are going to be sharing links to their favorite scenes with their group chats or to their social networks. I could also see Moments being widely used as a personal bookmarking tool. Instead of scouring YouTube to find the exact clip of a certain moment in a show you want to rewatch, you could just watch it from your personal library of saved clips.
If you do end up being a frequent user of Moments, it sounds like you probably won’t have to worry about having too many of them. “The number of Moments you can save depends on the length of the content,” spokesperson Dorian Rosenburg tells The Verge. “However, there’s plenty of space to save your favorite Moments, so most members won’t need to worry about a limit when it comes to saving across multiple shows and movies.”
The ability to make Moments is launching globally on iOS today, and it will arrive in the “coming weeks” on Android. Netflix currently doesn’t have plans to bring the feature to the web or TVs, Rosenburg says. But in its blog post about the news, Netflix says that “Moments will hopefully expand in the future, offering even more ways for members to use and enjoy the feature.”

Illustration by Nick Barclay / The Verge

To capture a moment, tap on the screen while you’re watching something on Netflix to see the various menu options, then tap on the new “Moments” button to pop up a new menu, and then tap the save button. From the Moments menu, you can also see other Moments you’ve saved for that show or movie and share Moments to various apps. You can also copy a link to the Moment to your clipboard.

Netflix gave me early access to the feature, so I used it to make a moment of the best scene in Lost — spoiler warning, obviously — which is perhaps the most Jay Peters thing to do.

It’s all pretty easy to use, and I think a lot of people are going to be sharing links to their favorite scenes with their group chats or to their social networks. I could also see Moments being widely used as a personal bookmarking tool. Instead of scouring YouTube to find the exact clip of a certain moment in a show you want to rewatch, you could just watch it from your personal library of saved clips.

If you do end up being a frequent user of Moments, it sounds like you probably won’t have to worry about having too many of them. “The number of Moments you can save depends on the length of the content,” spokesperson Dorian Rosenburg tells The Verge. “However, there’s plenty of space to save your favorite Moments, so most members won’t need to worry about a limit when it comes to saving across multiple shows and movies.”

The ability to make Moments is launching globally on iOS today, and it will arrive in the “coming weeks” on Android. Netflix currently doesn’t have plans to bring the feature to the web or TVs, Rosenburg says. But in its blog post about the news, Netflix says that “Moments will hopefully expand in the future, offering even more ways for members to use and enjoy the feature.”

The grievance-driven blueprint for the next Trump administration

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

The Verge’s guide to Project 2025. For the better part of this year, Project 2025 has been a catchall among Democrats for the threat former President Donald Trump poses to American society. The more than 900-page Mandate for Leadership, crafted by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, is a sprawling and often contradictory mix of ideas from more than 100 organizations. It’s tied together not by unified policy predictions but by a series of preoccupations: China; “wokeness”; climate denialism; and a commitment to gutting or abolishing federal agencies. It includes plans that would remake America’s approach to technology, but like many things in the document, its authors can’t exactly agree on how.
Trump has attempted to distance himself from the policy plan, but it’s tied to him by numerous threads. His running mate, JD Vance, is friends with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, and Vance even wrote the introduction to Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light. (The book’s publication, initially slated for September, was postponed until after the election.) And some of Project 2025’s chapters were written by Trump’s own former administration officials, including FCC commissioner Brendan Carr and Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.
If Trump is elected, it’s highly likely that some of Project 2025’s ideas would be implemented — we just don’t know which ones. The most provocative proposals, like banning pornography, are prominently highlighted but never explained. Authors, in turn, recommend fighting and embracing tech companies. “I don’t think I’ve encountered a single person in America who agrees with 100 percent,” Roberts said at the Reboot Conference in San Francisco in September. “It’s like the menu at the Cheesecake Factory.”
Much of what’s on the menu is notably less delicious. We’re not going to break down every piece of Project 2025 here — you can find more general guides at CBS News, which showed how many of Project 2025’s policy recommendations match Trump’s own; ProPublica, which obtained secret training videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy; and The New York Times, which interviewed several former Trump officials involved in the creation of Project 2025. Instead, we’re taking a look at how its recommendations would affect tech at every level, from how companies can hire foreign workers to the social media platforms we use every day.
Though there are some contradictions between and within chapters — signs of fissures or points of contention among the dozens of participating organizations — Project 2025 does, in the end, amount to a coherent vision. The document calls for a radical expansion of government power to punish conservatives’ enemies in tech, oust potential dissenters within the federal bureaucracy, and enforce right-wing wish list items like mass deportations and a national abortion ban. All of this would be combined with mass deregulation and the defunding of social services and federal agencies that contribute to the public welfare. Project 2025’s authors want small government for social goods — but big government for retribution.

Federal Trade Commission
Authored by: Adam Candeub, a professor of law at Michigan State University. Candeub served as the acting assistant secretary of commerce for telecommunications and information under Trump. From 2020 to 2021, he was the deputy associate attorney general in Trump’s Department of Justice.
Project 2025’s FTC guidelines are perhaps the clearest example of conservative ambivalence toward tech. The section doesn’t actually offer a set of policy proposals. Instead, it outlines two diametrically opposed approaches: one where the Trump administration fiercely enforces antitrust law to break up monopolies; and another where it does barely anything at all.
In the enforcement route, Project 2025 suggests using the FTC to rein in major corporations, especially big tech companies. It puts forward the European Union’s “less friendly regulatory environment” as a good model, possibly referring to EU laws like the Digital Markets Act, which have forced tech companies to make major hardware and software changes to their products. It encourages the FTC to partner with state attorneys general to scrutinize or block hospital, supermarket, and big tech mergers. And it recommends that the FTC look into whether social media platforms’ advertising to and contract-making with children constitute unfair trade practices.
While there’s overlap with Democratic antitrust priorities here, there’s also a focus on clearly partisan concerns. The chapter suggests investigating whether social media platforms censored political speech in collusion with the government, following up on probes by the Republican-led House of Representatives and Republican state attorneys general. (Hunter Biden’s laptop, unsurprisingly, gets a mention.) You’ll also see references to issues like the “de-banking” of controversial figures, which the Trump family has cited as an inspiration for its mysterious crypto platform. “We are witnessing in today’s markets the use of economic power — often market and perhaps even monopoly power — to undermine democratic institutions and civil society,” the chapter claims.
Each of these points is contradicted by a long-standing conservative counterpoint: the government should let the market regulate itself. If the FTC regulates how children use internet platforms, for example, it could undermine conservatives’ calls for “parental empowerment on education or vaccines.” Expanding cooperation between the FTC and state attorneys general could “tie middle America to big progressive government.”
Ultimately, though, the chapter seems to favor intervention. Conservatives “cannot unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda,” it warns, even if their goal is to do away with the regulatory state.
Federal Communications Commission
Authored by: Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission who was appointed by Trump in 2017.
Much of this chapter focuses on “reining in” major tech companies. Carr proposes a host of policies, including eliminating certain immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and “clarifying” that Section 230’s key 26 words should only be used in cases about platforms failing to remove illegal material posted by users, not as a broader shield for moderation decisions.
Carr’s real concern is with social media platforms’ alleged suppression of conservative speech. The chapter suggests requiring “Big Tech” to follow net neutrality-like rules similar to those for broadband providers, like disclosure on practices such as blocking and prioritizing content. Platforms should also be required to “offer a transparent appeals process” when user content is taken down.
The chapter also suggests that the FCC regulatory power should be expanded with “fundamental Section 230 reforms” that let it regulate how online platforms moderate content — or, in Carr’s words, “no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech.” Carr describes Texas’ HB 20 — the law that forbids platforms from removing, demonetizing, or downlinking posts based on “viewpoint,” which set the stage for NetChoice v. Paxton — as a possible model for federal legislation.
As companies must stop “censoring” conservative speech, they’re supposed to restrict children from accessing certain social media platforms. Carr quickly notes that these views “are not shared uniformly by all conservatives,” but as is the case in other chapters, the notion of expanding government powers to punish right-wing opponents ends up winning out over a more laissez-faire approach.
Congress should also require big tech to pay into the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which helps fund broadband access in rural communities and is currently funded by broadband providers. It’s another example of Project 2025’s movement away from Reagan-era “small government” conservatives in favor of punishing disfavored targets with more regulation.
The chapter also recommends that the FCC and White House work together to free additional airwaves for commercial wireless services and generally do more to “move spectrum into the commercial marketplace.” Carr also recommends that the government build out internet infrastructure on federally owned land. The latter, however, can’t be accomplished by the FCC alone, and Carr notes that it would require working with the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, among other agencies. The chapter also recommends that the FCC more quickly review and approve applications to launch new satellites, specifically for the purposes of supporting StarLink, Kuiper, and similar efforts.
And then there’s China. One of the primary recommendations is that the FCC “address TikTok’s threat to national security.” (Congress has, since the time the Mandate for Leadership was published, done just that by attempting to ban the app unless it divests from its parent company, ByteDance; whether the courts will let that happen remains to be seen.) Others include creating a more regular process to review entities “with ties to the CCP’s surveillance state” and stopping US entities “from indirectly contributing to China’s AI goals.”
Financial regulatory agencies
Authored by: David R. Burton, a senior research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation; and Robert Bowes, a senior adviser to the assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump and former adviser to Trump aide Stephen Miller.
While other sections are often ambivalent about government regulation, this chapter straightforwardly suggests giving major concessions to cryptocurrency and loosening restrictions on who can invest in private companies.
Anyone who’s been following Trump’s attempts to court the crypto community should know what’s coming here. There are a host of recommendations for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which the authors say has “chosen regulation by enforcement” for cryptocurrency. The biggest change would be redefining digital assets as commodities, instead of securities, so they’re no longer regulated by the SEC.
The chapter also recommends making private capital raising less restrictive by changing a rule known as Regulation D. Under Regulation D, companies can raise unlimited funds for securities from an unlimited number of “accredited investors,” with no disclosure needed to the SEC. “Accredited investors” must currently have a salary of $200,000 (or $300,000 combined with their spouse) or a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence. As of 2022, more than 24 million American households met these requirements. Project 2025 recommends broadening these qualifications or eliminating them altogether.
In practice, this would let anyone invest in any private company, not just — as the rule stands today — companies on the public market. To go public, companies have to meet certain requirements and file a registration statement with the SEC, where they’re subject to reporting requirements. In exchange, they currently get access to a much broader pool of potential investors. Eliminating the accredited investor requirement would effectively allow companies to skirt the requirements of going public — and the oversight they’re subject to afterward.
Department of Commerce
Authored by: Thomas F. Gilman, the director of ACLJ Action, a conservative organization affiliated with the American Center for Law and Justice. Gilman was the chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration of the US Department of Commerce under Trump.
This sprawling chapter touches on nearly every major Project 2025 theme, from fears of China to the “alarm industry” of federal climate monitoring. Like practically every other section, it recommends expanding the federal government’s reach if it will advance conservative interests and doing away with any agencies that don’t.
In keeping with the goal of dismantling federal bureaucracies, this chapter suggests doing away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which it says should be privatized or placed under the control of states and territories. Other agencies, like the National Weather Service (NWS) and Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, would be severely downsized. (In a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times, Steven R. Smith, the CEO of AccuWeather — which Project 2025 suggested could replace the NWS — said AccuWeather’s forecast engine partly relies on NOAA data.) These agencies provide the data used in weather forecasts accessed by millions of Americans each day and also give the public crucial information about impending hurricanes, heatwaves, and other natural disasters and extreme weather events.
The Republican libertarian wing may get its goal of privatizing federal agencies, but most of this chapter argues for more — not less — government interference in the market. Noting that China has made significant advances in semiconductor design, aerospace technologies, and other crucial industries, it recommends new rules to prevent tech transfer to foreign adversaries. It also suggests an executive order expanding the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to restrict exports of Americans’ data. And it opposes intellectual property waivers for “cutting-edge technologies” like covid-19 vaccines — which an earlier chapter says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shouldn’t encourage people to get — through international agreements. These waivers, which were hotly debated for years following the onset of the pandemic, give low- and middle-income countries access to life-saving immunizations, though advocates say more needs to be done to achieve global vaccine equity.
The chapter also suggests adding certain app providers — including WeChat, TikTok, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance — to the entity list, which would prevent the apps from issuing program updates in the US, effectively making them nonoperational. The Heritage Foundation apparently didn’t get the memo that Trump loves TikTok now.
Department of Transportation
Authored by: Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.
Unlike other chapters that are openly antagonistic toward tech companies, this chapter suggests partnering with the private sector to “revolutionize travel.” There’s an emphasis on private transportation over public transportation — not just in terms of opposing government funding for mass transit but also supporting ridehailing apps, self-driving vehicles, and micromobility, which only gets a passing mention in the chapter but likely refers to e-bikes and electric scooters.
Current policies, the document says, “strangle the development of new technologies” like drones. Instead, the DOT should encourage the use of small aircraft for air taxis or for quiet vertical flights. It should also push for a shift to digital or remote control towers for planes, letting flights be managed “anywhere from anywhere.”
Department of the Treasury
Authored by: William L. Walton, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation and the founder and chair of the private equity firm Rappahannock Ventures LLC; Stephen Moore, a visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation; and David R. Burton, a senior research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.
Under Project 2025, the US would effectively abandon its commitment to stopping climate change. The chapter suggests getting rid of the department’s Climate Hub office and withdrawing from international climate change agreements, including the Paris agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Instead of focusing on clean energy or climate change-resilient infrastructure, the chapter suggests that the government should invest in domestic energy, especially oil and gas.
Like several other sections, this chapter takes aim at “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. As part of Project 2025’s plan to gut the federal workforce, it suggests identifying all Treasury officials who have participated in DEI initiatives, publishing their communications about DEI, and firing anyone who participated in DEI initiatives “without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds.”
Department of Health and Human Services
Authored by: Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation and former director of its DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, who served as the director of the HHS’s Office of Civil Rights under Trump.
The bottom line: Project 2025 would limit the government’s ability to do basic health governance while setting up a surveillance state for pet conservative issues like abortion and gender-affirming care for trans people.
Much of the HHS chapter focuses on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s response to covid-19, which the author characterizes as near totalitarian. The chapter recommends barring the CDC from saying that children should be masked or vaccinated against any illness and says that the CDC should be investigated for “colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during Covid.” The author also suggests moving several CDC programs — including the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment project, which researches vaccine safety — to the Food and Drug Administration.
Unsurprisingly, abortion would be severely restricted. Under Project 2025, the FDA would reverse the approval of pills that facilitate medication abortions, which the document calls the “single greatest threat to unborn children.” The FDA would also eliminate policies allowing people to order abortion pills by mail or online. As the CDC would stop encouraging vaccinations — which some conservatives believe infringe on bodily autonomy — the agency would increase its surveillance and recordkeeping of abortions and maternal mortality. This includes a recommendation that the HHS “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds” to force states to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.”
A separate study, through the National Institutes of Health, is recommended to investigate the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions,” i.e., gender-affirming care. The report also recommends using AI to detect Medicaid fraud, which costs the US an estimated $100 billion a year and is typically perpetrated by healthcare providers, not individual beneficiaries of public healthcare.
Department of Homeland Security
Authored by: Ken Cuccinelli, who served in various capacities under Trump, including as the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services and, later, the “senior official performing the duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.”
Perhaps counterintuitively given Republicans’ laser focus on the US border, Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Homeland Security. The goal, though, is to replace it with the Border Security and Immigration Agency, a new, more draconian, and less accountable immigration enforcement apparatus.
The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized, and the Coast Guard would be moved to either the Department of Defense or the Department of Justice. Dismantling the DHS almost certainly won’t happen — it would require an act of Congress, and lawmakers haven’t passed an immigration bill in decades.
Project 2025 doesn’t just recommend more stringent restrictions on unauthorized immigration; it also lays out a vision of severely restricted legal immigration. It recommends scrapping the family-based immigration system that has been in place since 1965 and replacing it with a “merit-based system that rewards high-skilled aliens.” Other suggestions include eliminating the diversity visa lottery and altering the work visa system. This, too, would largely require congressional action.
As it prioritizes “merit-based” immigration to the US, the chapter proposes limiting foreign students’ ability to study here. In a move that (unlike much of this chapter) could be accomplished through executive action, it proposes ending what it calls Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “cozy deference to educational institutions,” i.e., the issuing of student visas to most foreign students admitted to US universities. It also calls to “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations” — implicitly, China.
Intelligence community
Authored by: Dustin J. Carmack, Meta’s director of public policy for the Southern and Southeastern US. Carmack, a former research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was the chief of staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Trump from 2020 to 2021.
Concerns about China are far more explicit in this chapter, which looks at the “vast, intricate bureaucracy of intelligence agencies within the federal government.” The chapter raises the threat of Chinese (and to a lesser extent, Russian) espionage, online influence campaigns, and “legitimate businesses serving as collection platforms,” a possible allusion to TikTok. The Mandate for Leadership recommends amending Executive Order 12333 — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and, among other things, authorizes mass data collection for intelligence purposes to address the threats the US and its allies face “in cyberspace.”
But the chapter also claims intelligence agencies have dedicated far too much time to surveilling the former president, which allegedly proves a “shocking extent of politicization” among the agencies and the officials who lead them. (Its evidence includes the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials ahead of the 2020 US presidential election claiming that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was likely a Russian information operation.) The author calls for an investigation into “past politicization and abuses of intelligence information.”
The chapter also recommends that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the controversial law allowing warrantless wiretapping that was reauthorized earlier this year — be reformed with “strong provisions to protect against partisanship,” pointing to the use of FISA to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as part of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. There is little mention of how these vast surveillance powers affect regular people. In fact, the chapter notes that an independent review found that Section 702 surveillance powers were “not abused,” though it does recommend that Congress review further reports to determine whether any FISA reforms are needed.
Buried amid all these claims, it also recommends the Department of Defense examine the possibility of joint satellite and space programs with “potential allied nations” to counter the threat posed by Russia and China. Additionally, it suggests agencies spy on the space programs of foreign adversaries and collect more data on adversaries’ potential threats to US space programs.
Media agencies
Authored by: Mora Namdar, a former State Department official who worked as a senior policy adviser and acting assistant secretary of state in consular affairs under Trump; and Mike Gonzalez, a former journalist and current senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.
These agencies aren’t as consequential as juggernauts like the FTC, but the usual slash-and-burn recommendations apply. Project 2025 encourages undercutting the Open Technology Fund, a subagency within the US Agency for Global Media dedicated to protecting free speech around the world that has funded open-source projects like Signal. It calls the OTF a “wasteful and redundant boondoggle” that makes “small, insubstantial donations to much larger messaging applications and technology to bolster its unsubstantiated claims” and — contra its name and stated mission — suggests it fund closed-source technology instead.
The chapter also notes that there is “vast concern” about the vulnerability of undersea cable trunks that power the internet and says that major global conflict could cause widespread damage to these cables, potentially leading to long-lasting power outages. There is no mention of what can be done to prevent this, though the chapter does say that the US Agency for Global Media’s shortwave radio capabilities could help carry broadcasts and maintain communication in areas where online traffic is limited or restricted.

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

The Verge’s guide to Project 2025.

For the better part of this year, Project 2025 has been a catchall among Democrats for the threat former President Donald Trump poses to American society. The more than 900-page Mandate for Leadership, crafted by conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation, is a sprawling and often contradictory mix of ideas from more than 100 organizations. It’s tied together not by unified policy predictions but by a series of preoccupations: China; “wokeness”; climate denialism; and a commitment to gutting or abolishing federal agencies. It includes plans that would remake America’s approach to technology, but like many things in the document, its authors can’t exactly agree on how.

Trump has attempted to distance himself from the policy plan, but it’s tied to him by numerous threads. His running mate, JD Vance, is friends with Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, and Vance even wrote the introduction to Roberts’ forthcoming book, Dawn’s Early Light. (The book’s publication, initially slated for September, was postponed until after the election.) And some of Project 2025’s chapters were written by Trump’s own former administration officials, including FCC commissioner Brendan Carr and Department of Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli.

If Trump is elected, it’s highly likely that some of Project 2025’s ideas would be implemented — we just don’t know which ones. The most provocative proposals, like banning pornography, are prominently highlighted but never explained. Authors, in turn, recommend fighting and embracing tech companies. “I don’t think I’ve encountered a single person in America who agrees with 100 percent,” Roberts said at the Reboot Conference in San Francisco in September. “It’s like the menu at the Cheesecake Factory.”

Much of what’s on the menu is notably less delicious. We’re not going to break down every piece of Project 2025 here — you can find more general guides at CBS News, which showed how many of Project 2025’s policy recommendations match Trump’s own; ProPublica, which obtained secret training videos created for Project 2025’s Presidential Administration Academy; and The New York Times, which interviewed several former Trump officials involved in the creation of Project 2025. Instead, we’re taking a look at how its recommendations would affect tech at every level, from how companies can hire foreign workers to the social media platforms we use every day.

Though there are some contradictions between and within chapters — signs of fissures or points of contention among the dozens of participating organizations — Project 2025 does, in the end, amount to a coherent vision. The document calls for a radical expansion of government power to punish conservatives’ enemies in tech, oust potential dissenters within the federal bureaucracy, and enforce right-wing wish list items like mass deportations and a national abortion ban. All of this would be combined with mass deregulation and the defunding of social services and federal agencies that contribute to the public welfare. Project 2025’s authors want small government for social goods — but big government for retribution.

Federal Trade Commission

Authored by: Adam Candeub, a professor of law at Michigan State University. Candeub served as the acting assistant secretary of commerce for telecommunications and information under Trump. From 2020 to 2021, he was the deputy associate attorney general in Trump’s Department of Justice.

Project 2025’s FTC guidelines are perhaps the clearest example of conservative ambivalence toward tech. The section doesn’t actually offer a set of policy proposals. Instead, it outlines two diametrically opposed approaches: one where the Trump administration fiercely enforces antitrust law to break up monopolies; and another where it does barely anything at all.

In the enforcement route, Project 2025 suggests using the FTC to rein in major corporations, especially big tech companies. It puts forward the European Union’s “less friendly regulatory environment” as a good model, possibly referring to EU laws like the Digital Markets Act, which have forced tech companies to make major hardware and software changes to their products. It encourages the FTC to partner with state attorneys general to scrutinize or block hospital, supermarket, and big tech mergers. And it recommends that the FTC look into whether social media platforms’ advertising to and contract-making with children constitute unfair trade practices.

While there’s overlap with Democratic antitrust priorities here, there’s also a focus on clearly partisan concerns. The chapter suggests investigating whether social media platforms censored political speech in collusion with the government, following up on probes by the Republican-led House of Representatives and Republican state attorneys general. (Hunter Biden’s laptop, unsurprisingly, gets a mention.) You’ll also see references to issues like the “de-banking” of controversial figures, which the Trump family has cited as an inspiration for its mysterious crypto platform. “We are witnessing in today’s markets the use of economic power — often market and perhaps even monopoly power — to undermine democratic institutions and civil society,” the chapter claims.

Each of these points is contradicted by a long-standing conservative counterpoint: the government should let the market regulate itself. If the FTC regulates how children use internet platforms, for example, it could undermine conservatives’ calls for “parental empowerment on education or vaccines.” Expanding cooperation between the FTC and state attorneys general could “tie middle America to big progressive government.”

Ultimately, though, the chapter seems to favor intervention. Conservatives “cannot unilaterally disarm and fail to use the power of government to further a conservative agenda,” it warns, even if their goal is to do away with the regulatory state.

Federal Communications Commission

Authored by: Brendan Carr, a member of the Federal Communications Commission who was appointed by Trump in 2017.

Much of this chapter focuses on “reining in” major tech companies. Carr proposes a host of policies, including eliminating certain immunities under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act and “clarifying” that Section 230’s key 26 words should only be used in cases about platforms failing to remove illegal material posted by users, not as a broader shield for moderation decisions.

Carr’s real concern is with social media platforms’ alleged suppression of conservative speech. The chapter suggests requiring “Big Tech” to follow net neutrality-like rules similar to those for broadband providers, like disclosure on practices such as blocking and prioritizing content. Platforms should also be required to “offer a transparent appeals process” when user content is taken down.

The chapter also suggests that the FCC regulatory power should be expanded with “fundamental Section 230 reforms” that let it regulate how online platforms moderate content — or, in Carr’s words, “no longer have carte blanche to censor protected speech.” Carr describes Texas’ HB 20 — the law that forbids platforms from removing, demonetizing, or downlinking posts based on “viewpoint,” which set the stage for NetChoice v. Paxton — as a possible model for federal legislation.

As companies must stop “censoring” conservative speech, they’re supposed to restrict children from accessing certain social media platforms. Carr quickly notes that these views “are not shared uniformly by all conservatives,” but as is the case in other chapters, the notion of expanding government powers to punish right-wing opponents ends up winning out over a more laissez-faire approach.

Congress should also require big tech to pay into the FCC’s Universal Service Fund, which helps fund broadband access in rural communities and is currently funded by broadband providers. It’s another example of Project 2025’s movement away from Reagan-era “small government” conservatives in favor of punishing disfavored targets with more regulation.

The chapter also recommends that the FCC and White House work together to free additional airwaves for commercial wireless services and generally do more to “move spectrum into the commercial marketplace.” Carr also recommends that the government build out internet infrastructure on federally owned land. The latter, however, can’t be accomplished by the FCC alone, and Carr notes that it would require working with the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service, among other agencies. The chapter also recommends that the FCC more quickly review and approve applications to launch new satellites, specifically for the purposes of supporting StarLink, Kuiper, and similar efforts.

And then there’s China. One of the primary recommendations is that the FCC “address TikTok’s threat to national security.” (Congress has, since the time the Mandate for Leadership was published, done just that by attempting to ban the app unless it divests from its parent company, ByteDance; whether the courts will let that happen remains to be seen.) Others include creating a more regular process to review entities “with ties to the CCP’s surveillance state” and stopping US entities “from indirectly contributing to China’s AI goals.”

Financial regulatory agencies

Authored by: David R. Burton, a senior research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation; and Robert Bowes, a senior adviser to the assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under Trump and former adviser to Trump aide Stephen Miller.

While other sections are often ambivalent about government regulation, this chapter straightforwardly suggests giving major concessions to cryptocurrency and loosening restrictions on who can invest in private companies.

Anyone who’s been following Trump’s attempts to court the crypto community should know what’s coming here. There are a host of recommendations for the Securities and Exchange Commission, which the authors say has “chosen regulation by enforcement” for cryptocurrency. The biggest change would be redefining digital assets as commodities, instead of securities, so they’re no longer regulated by the SEC.

The chapter also recommends making private capital raising less restrictive by changing a rule known as Regulation D. Under Regulation D, companies can raise unlimited funds for securities from an unlimited number of “accredited investors,” with no disclosure needed to the SEC. “Accredited investors” must currently have a salary of $200,000 (or $300,000 combined with their spouse) or a net worth of at least $1 million, excluding their primary residence. As of 2022, more than 24 million American households met these requirements. Project 2025 recommends broadening these qualifications or eliminating them altogether.

In practice, this would let anyone invest in any private company, not just — as the rule stands today — companies on the public market. To go public, companies have to meet certain requirements and file a registration statement with the SEC, where they’re subject to reporting requirements. In exchange, they currently get access to a much broader pool of potential investors. Eliminating the accredited investor requirement would effectively allow companies to skirt the requirements of going public — and the oversight they’re subject to afterward.

Department of Commerce

Authored by: Thomas F. Gilman, the director of ACLJ Action, a conservative organization affiliated with the American Center for Law and Justice. Gilman was the chief financial officer and assistant secretary for administration of the US Department of Commerce under Trump.

This sprawling chapter touches on nearly every major Project 2025 theme, from fears of China to the “alarm industry” of federal climate monitoring. Like practically every other section, it recommends expanding the federal government’s reach if it will advance conservative interests and doing away with any agencies that don’t.

In keeping with the goal of dismantling federal bureaucracies, this chapter suggests doing away with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which it says should be privatized or placed under the control of states and territories. Other agencies, like the National Weather Service (NWS) and Office of Oceanic and Atmospheric Research, would be severely downsized. (In a statement provided to the Los Angeles Times, Steven R. Smith, the CEO of AccuWeather — which Project 2025 suggested could replace the NWS — said AccuWeather’s forecast engine partly relies on NOAA data.) These agencies provide the data used in weather forecasts accessed by millions of Americans each day and also give the public crucial information about impending hurricanes, heatwaves, and other natural disasters and extreme weather events.

The Republican libertarian wing may get its goal of privatizing federal agencies, but most of this chapter argues for more — not less — government interference in the market. Noting that China has made significant advances in semiconductor design, aerospace technologies, and other crucial industries, it recommends new rules to prevent tech transfer to foreign adversaries. It also suggests an executive order expanding the Export Control Reform Act of 2018 to restrict exports of Americans’ data. And it opposes intellectual property waivers for “cutting-edge technologies” like covid-19 vaccines — which an earlier chapter says the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shouldn’t encourage people to get — through international agreements. These waivers, which were hotly debated for years following the onset of the pandemic, give low- and middle-income countries access to life-saving immunizations, though advocates say more needs to be done to achieve global vaccine equity.

The chapter also suggests adding certain app providers — including WeChat, TikTok, and TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance — to the entity list, which would prevent the apps from issuing program updates in the US, effectively making them nonoperational. The Heritage Foundation apparently didn’t get the memo that Trump loves TikTok now.

Department of Transportation

Authored by: Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.

Unlike other chapters that are openly antagonistic toward tech companies, this chapter suggests partnering with the private sector to “revolutionize travel.” There’s an emphasis on private transportation over public transportation — not just in terms of opposing government funding for mass transit but also supporting ridehailing apps, self-driving vehicles, and micromobility, which only gets a passing mention in the chapter but likely refers to e-bikes and electric scooters.

Current policies, the document says, “strangle the development of new technologies” like drones. Instead, the DOT should encourage the use of small aircraft for air taxis or for quiet vertical flights. It should also push for a shift to digital or remote control towers for planes, letting flights be managed “anywhere from anywhere.”

Department of the Treasury

Authored by: William L. Walton, a trustee of the Heritage Foundation and the founder and chair of the private equity firm Rappahannock Ventures LLC; Stephen Moore, a visiting fellow in economics at the Heritage Foundation; and David R. Burton, a senior research fellow in economic policy at the Heritage Foundation.

Under Project 2025, the US would effectively abandon its commitment to stopping climate change. The chapter suggests getting rid of the department’s Climate Hub office and withdrawing from international climate change agreements, including the Paris agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Instead of focusing on clean energy or climate change-resilient infrastructure, the chapter suggests that the government should invest in domestic energy, especially oil and gas.

Like several other sections, this chapter takes aim at “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs. As part of Project 2025’s plan to gut the federal workforce, it suggests identifying all Treasury officials who have participated in DEI initiatives, publishing their communications about DEI, and firing anyone who participated in DEI initiatives “without objecting on constitutional or moral grounds.”

Department of Health and Human Services

Authored by: Roger Severino, a vice president at the Heritage Foundation and former director of its DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society, who served as the director of the HHS’s Office of Civil Rights under Trump.

The bottom line: Project 2025 would limit the government’s ability to do basic health governance while setting up a surveillance state for pet conservative issues like abortion and gender-affirming care for trans people.

Much of the HHS chapter focuses on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s response to covid-19, which the author characterizes as near totalitarian. The chapter recommends barring the CDC from saying that children should be masked or vaccinated against any illness and says that the CDC should be investigated for “colluding with Big Tech to censor dissenting opinions during Covid.” The author also suggests moving several CDC programs — including the Clinical Immunization Safety Assessment project, which researches vaccine safety — to the Food and Drug Administration.

Unsurprisingly, abortion would be severely restricted. Under Project 2025, the FDA would reverse the approval of pills that facilitate medication abortions, which the document calls the “single greatest threat to unborn children.” The FDA would also eliminate policies allowing people to order abortion pills by mail or online. As the CDC would stop encouraging vaccinations — which some conservatives believe infringe on bodily autonomy — the agency would increase its surveillance and recordkeeping of abortions and maternal mortality. This includes a recommendation that the HHS “use every available tool, including the cutting of funds” to force states to report “exactly how many abortions take place within its borders.”

A separate study, through the National Institutes of Health, is recommended to investigate the “short-term and long-term negative effects of cross-sex interventions,” i.e., gender-affirming care. The report also recommends using AI to detect Medicaid fraud, which costs the US an estimated $100 billion a year and is typically perpetrated by healthcare providers, not individual beneficiaries of public healthcare.

Department of Homeland Security

Authored by: Ken Cuccinelli, who served in various capacities under Trump, including as the director of US Citizenship and Immigration Services and, later, the “senior official performing the duties of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security.”

Perhaps counterintuitively given Republicans’ laser focus on the US border, Project 2025 recommends abolishing the Department of Homeland Security. The goal, though, is to replace it with the Border Security and Immigration Agency, a new, more draconian, and less accountable immigration enforcement apparatus.

The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) would be privatized, and the Coast Guard would be moved to either the Department of Defense or the Department of Justice. Dismantling the DHS almost certainly won’t happen — it would require an act of Congress, and lawmakers haven’t passed an immigration bill in decades.

Project 2025 doesn’t just recommend more stringent restrictions on unauthorized immigration; it also lays out a vision of severely restricted legal immigration. It recommends scrapping the family-based immigration system that has been in place since 1965 and replacing it with a “merit-based system that rewards high-skilled aliens.” Other suggestions include eliminating the diversity visa lottery and altering the work visa system. This, too, would largely require congressional action.

As it prioritizes “merit-based” immigration to the US, the chapter proposes limiting foreign students’ ability to study here. In a move that (unlike much of this chapter) could be accomplished through executive action, it proposes ending what it calls Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “cozy deference to educational institutions,” i.e., the issuing of student visas to most foreign students admitted to US universities. It also calls to “eliminate or significantly reduce the number of visas issued to foreign students from enemy nations” — implicitly, China.

Intelligence community

Authored by: Dustin J. Carmack, Meta’s director of public policy for the Southern and Southeastern US. Carmack, a former research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, was the chief of staff for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence under Trump from 2020 to 2021.

Concerns about China are far more explicit in this chapter, which looks at the “vast, intricate bureaucracy of intelligence agencies within the federal government.” The chapter raises the threat of Chinese (and to a lesser extent, Russian) espionage, online influence campaigns, and “legitimate businesses serving as collection platforms,” a possible allusion to TikTok. The Mandate for Leadership recommends amending Executive Order 12333 — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 and, among other things, authorizes mass data collection for intelligence purposes to address the threats the US and its allies face “in cyberspace.”

But the chapter also claims intelligence agencies have dedicated far too much time to surveilling the former president, which allegedly proves a “shocking extent of politicization” among the agencies and the officials who lead them. (Its evidence includes the letter signed by 51 former intelligence officials ahead of the 2020 US presidential election claiming that the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop was likely a Russian information operation.) The author calls for an investigation into “past politicization and abuses of intelligence information.”

The chapter also recommends that Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — the controversial law allowing warrantless wiretapping that was reauthorized earlier this year — be reformed with “strong provisions to protect against partisanship,” pointing to the use of FISA to surveil former Trump campaign associate Carter Page as part of the FBI’s investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia. There is little mention of how these vast surveillance powers affect regular people. In fact, the chapter notes that an independent review found that Section 702 surveillance powers were “not abused,” though it does recommend that Congress review further reports to determine whether any FISA reforms are needed.

Buried amid all these claims, it also recommends the Department of Defense examine the possibility of joint satellite and space programs with “potential allied nations” to counter the threat posed by Russia and China. Additionally, it suggests agencies spy on the space programs of foreign adversaries and collect more data on adversaries’ potential threats to US space programs.

Media agencies

Authored by: Mora Namdar, a former State Department official who worked as a senior policy adviser and acting assistant secretary of state in consular affairs under Trump; and Mike Gonzalez, a former journalist and current senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

These agencies aren’t as consequential as juggernauts like the FTC, but the usual slash-and-burn recommendations apply. Project 2025 encourages undercutting the Open Technology Fund, a subagency within the US Agency for Global Media dedicated to protecting free speech around the world that has funded open-source projects like Signal. It calls the OTF a “wasteful and redundant boondoggle” that makes “small, insubstantial donations to much larger messaging applications and technology to bolster its unsubstantiated claims” and — contra its name and stated mission — suggests it fund closed-source technology instead.

The chapter also notes that there is “vast concern” about the vulnerability of undersea cable trunks that power the internet and says that major global conflict could cause widespread damage to these cables, potentially leading to long-lasting power outages. There is no mention of what can be done to prevent this, though the chapter does say that the US Agency for Global Media’s shortwave radio capabilities could help carry broadcasts and maintain communication in areas where online traffic is limited or restricted.

The pragmatist’s guide to the 2024 presidential election

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Your vote matters. Here’s how it will change the future. It’s easy to look at a gridlocked legislature or unpredictable judicial decisions and feel like American presidential elections don’t matter. What’s the point of getting someone in the White House if they can’t get legislation on their desk to sign or veto and courts can shut down their every move? Politicians always break their promises, goes the cynical — and often reasonable — grumble. Why pay attention in the first place?
In many respects, the president is a figurehead, but the office of the presidency is a job with a concrete description and very specific levers of power that connect to many of the areas The Verge covers. For these issues and more, whoever wins on November 5th will set a direct course for the next four years and perhaps longer.
Most significantly, the president appoints executive branch personnel, such as heads of independent agencies, who then go on to set and enforce policy on antitrust, broadband, and climate change. There’s a direct chain of cause and effect between Joe Biden taking office and the Federal Trade Commission forcing gyms to let you cancel your membership, because Biden appointed a specific person known to be tough on consumer protections; similarly, Republican control of the Federal Communications Commission under former President Donald Trump resulted in the end of federal net neutrality rules, while Democratic control of the FCC under Biden resulted in a revival.
Of course, the return of net neutrality is on hold because of conservative judges, and that’s yet another explicit power the president has — they nominate judges to federal courts, a power that has lasting repercussions for every area The Verge covers. (Incidentally, that click-to-cancel rule has also been challenged in court.) Other specific powers encompass pardons, immigration, and foreign policy, including everything from war to international trade and tariffs.
Trump or Harris will help determine the future of EVs, ecological disasters, and internet access
There are also more nebulous powers that the president holds. Although the White House does not control the budget — that’s a power reserved for Congress — the president submits a budget proposal for the executive branch, which impacts the federal government’s priorities in a given year. And even though the president does not make laws, they will nevertheless play a big role in what kind of laws will pass — or will at least attempt to pass — in Congress.
As president, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will help determine the future of electric vehicles, ecological disasters, and internet infrastructure in the US and, in some cases, the whole world. They’ll shape how Silicon Valley holds and wields power over consumers. More broadly, they’ll play a role in whether the government can address these kinds of questions at all.
Neither Trump nor Harris has detailed everything they’ll do in office. Harris hasn’t said whether she’ll keep key figures like FTC Chair Lina Khan. Parsing Trump’s myriad long-winded and contradictory statements is a job unto itself. And there are lingering questions about how closely Trump could hew to Project 2025: a technically unrelated series of recommendations by the Heritage Foundation that’s linked strongly to Trump’s own campaign. The proposals in Project 2025 could gut or eliminate parts of the system we have now.
By the same token, neither candidate’s previous terms in office are a precise blueprint for their future plans. Harris obviously wasn’t the key decision-maker in the Biden administration. Trump is expected to dramatically weaken the institutions that checked his power during his first term, stopping actions that ranged from a sweeping immigration ban to an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. If we’re looking for clues about the direction of a Harris or Trump administration, though, the candidates’ own words, past actions, and track records as elected officials are reasonable guideposts.
The topics below aren’t the only ones that matter to Verge authors and readers. But they’re pressing issues that will determine what kinds of stories you’ll be reading here in the coming years as a direct result of whoever takes office in January 2025.

Climate change

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Harris: “We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue. And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” – presidential debate, September 10th, 2024
Trump: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one, one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right? The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming, because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power, and we have to not allow anything to happen with stupid people like Biden.” – interview on X with Elon Musk, August 13th, 2024
The president’s powers
The president appoints key regulatory personnel, including the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and has the power to place scientists or skeptics in key leadership roles. The president also proposes annual budgets for these agencies.
Trump could gut key agencies responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions
As the world’s leading oil and gas producer and the biggest historical polluter of carbon dioxide emissions, America’s diplomatic cooperation, as well as actual action or inaction on climate change, has global consequences. The president has the authority to make treaties for the United States, giving them control over whether the country joins international agreements on climate change such as the Paris agreement. Should the US stay in the Paris agreement, the next administration will be tasked with submitting an updated climate action plan by early next year.
The next administration will also be tasked with continuing the distribution of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was passed in 2022. The IRA includes $369 billion in spending on clean energy and climate action, which is expected to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.
The candidates’ track records
The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations in the US and isolated the country from global climate negotiations. Trump weakened rules meant to rein in pollution from power plants and transportation, the two sectors that produce the most greenhouse gas emissions in the US. He put fossil fuel lobbyists in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency and stacked the US Supreme Court with justices whose deregulatory agenda has made it harder for federal agencies to crack down on pollution.
Trump has said that he would “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” He has also said he’d withdraw the US from the landmark Paris agreement, which he briefly did during his first term in office. If Trump follows the recommendations in Project 2025, he could gut key agencies responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions and studying the effects of climate change so that there are tools in place, like updated flood maps, to help Americans adapt.
Harris’ environmental track record precedes her term as vice president, stretching back to lawsuits she filed to hold polluters accountable as California’s attorney general. She’s been relatively mum about climate change on the campaign trail, however, as she courts key swing states. That includes Pennsylvania, which produces more gas than any other state aside from Texas — much of which comes from fracking. As California’s attorney general, Harris filed suit against the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking but now says she would not support a ban on fracking as president.
The Biden administration has pledged to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution by at least 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade under the Paris climate accord. The keystone legislation that gets the US most of the way there is the IRA. Harris has regularly touted her role in helping pass the IRA as well as the legislation’s success in creating jobs and boosting energy production.
Antitrust

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Harris: “As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers” – 2024 campaign site
Trump: “Google has been very bad. They’ve been very irresponsible and I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down because I don’t think Congress is going to take it, I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.” – interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, August 2nd, 2024
The president’s powers
The White House nominates two of the country’s most important antitrust watchdogs: the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division (currently Jonathan Kanter); and the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (currently Lina Khan). Not only can they launch investigations and file lawsuits against individual tech companies but they can also shape broader regulatory guidelines, like the rules for when a merger should be blocked. Any federal judges who oversee an antitrust lawsuit are also presidentially appointed — albeit, obviously, not all by the current president.
That said, these officials must be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office. Agency policies can be changed by a future administration. And Congress would have to pass new laws to change the fundamentals of antitrust law, like the much-criticized “consumer harm” standard.
The candidates’ track records
The Trump administration made some efforts to attack tech giants. Following a general investigation of several companies, Trump’s FTC and DOJ, respectively, sued Facebook (now Meta) and Google in late 2020. But the Trump administration’s antitrust work was frequently mixed up with Trump’s personal anger at the supposed liberal bias of tech companies, which produced confounding results like a demand that agencies rewrite speech law. During this election cycle, he’s promised to prosecute Google for “only” showing “bad stories” about him.
Trump said he would go after Google for showing “bad stories” about him
Biden’s appointment of Khan and Kanter put two of big tech’s biggest critics in high-level government positions. Kanter’s DOJ argued the Google search antitrust suit filed under Trump, leading to arguably Google’s biggest US legal defeat. The DOJ and FTC also filed numerous suits against a range of tech companies, including a DOJ complaint against Google’s ad tech dominance, an FTC monopoly suit against Amazon, and (failed) attempts to stop acquisitions by Microsoft and Meta. The administration has gone after tech-adjacent businesses like Live Nation-Ticketmaster and signaled stricter merger scrutiny as well.
Harris hasn’t signaled how closely she would hew to Biden’s path here — including whether she’ll keep Khan around. She was relatively quiet on antitrust during her time as a senator. But with several of the cases above still brewing, it’s an issue she likely won’t be able to avoid.
Net neutrality

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Harris: Harris has not spoken recently on net neutrality.
Trump: Trump has not spoken recently on net neutrality.
The president’s powers
The Federal Communications Commission has five commissioners, including one chair. Each must be appointed by a president and confirmed by the Senate, but then goes on to serve a term of five years. The chair usually resigns when there is a new president, who then appoints someone of their own choosing. A maximum of three commissioners may come from the same party.
The very recent history of the FCC is a good indication of what would happen
The math-minded will understand what these rules mean, generally: when the president is a Democrat, the FCC is 3-2 in favor of Democrats; under a Republican, the commission is 3-2 in favor of Republicans.
The FCC does many things, but most importantly, the FCC makes regulations that affect internet service providers, telecoms, and how broadband access subsidies are used. The most famous among these regulations: net neutrality.
The candidates’ track records
While neither candidate has spoken directly to the issue of net neutrality during this campaign, due to the structure of the agency, the very recent history of the FCC is a good indication of what would happen under either candidate.
Almost immediately after Trump’s election in 2016, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai signaled a strong interest in overturning the net neutrality rule that was established during the Obama administration. Trump tapped him to become the new FCC chair, and the rest is history. Despite the policy’s enormous popularity among ordinary people, in late 2017 the FCC voted 3-2 along party lines to kill net neutrality.
When Biden became president, Pai — as is tradition — resigned his seat, and Biden appointed Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel as the new chair. He also nominated the legendary open internet advocate Gigi Sohn as a third Democratic commissioner. The Senate stalled on Sohn’s appointment, ultimately managing to kill her nomination. The FCC remained deadlocked until 2023, when Anna Gomez was sworn in. In April of this year, the FCC finally voted — 3-2, along party lines — to restore net neutrality.
At the moment, the net neutrality rule is on hold, blocked by an appeals court as a direct result of a Supreme Court decision this summer. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court’s conservative supermajority, which is stacked with Trump-nominated justices, overturned longstanding precedent and kneecapped regulatory agencies like the FCC.
Electric vehicles

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Harris: “Millions of children ride on diesel school buses daily, breathing toxic fumes that can harm their health. This week, we announced nearly $1 billion to fund electric and low-emission school buses across the nation—an investment in our children, their health, and their education.” – tweet, January 12th, 2024
Trump: “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration.” – speech at the Republican National Convention, July 19th, 2024
Trump: “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice.” – speech at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, August 3rd, 2024
The president’s powers
One of the main ways the executive branch can influence the kind of car you buy is through tailpipe rules. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates how much pollution the auto industry is allowed to spew into the atmosphere. By setting tighter limits, the agency can effectively force the industry to sell more environmentally friendly vehicles — or risk paying steep fines for noncompliance.
The executive branch can also incentivize consumers by offering tax credits to bring down the cost of vehicles that are pricier but produce less pollution. It can spend taxpayer money on building out the EV charging infrastructure and investing in other alternative fuel sources like hydrogen. And it can offer tax breaks to manufacturers to retrofit factories for battery production.
It can also do the opposite of all of that: loosen pollution rules; eliminate favorable tax breaks; and slow roll (or cancel) infrastructure improvements. Doing so would send an enormous signal to automakers that they can keep polluting as usual.
The candidates’ track records
When he was president, Trump did everything in his power to forestall the inevitable rise of electric vehicles. He rolled back regulations passed under the Obama administration to force automakers to produce less-polluting vehicles. He tried to revoke California’s authority to set its own emissions standards. And he championed a plan to rewrite the tax code to eliminate credits for EV purchases.
EV sales took off like a rocket before eventually flatlining
And yet EVs continued to sell at record numbers, an indication that market forces were having more influence over consumer demands than Trump’s policy decisions. When Biden took office, most of those efforts were reversed. But even before the Biden administration could pass its first EV-friendly policy, EV sales took off like a rocket before eventually flatlining.
Still, the Biden administration saw EVs as a crucial piece of its plan to fight climate change. Biden directed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass new tailpipe emission standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2032. He passed new tax credits for EVs that were made in North America or by its trade partners, using parts and battery components sourced from the same allies. He poured billions of dollars into EV charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing, and he did the same for trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles.
Harris has promised to keep most of Biden’s policies in place, but she has responded to criticism from Trump that she would “force” consumers to buy expensive EVs by vowing to never ban gas car sales.
Crypto regulation

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Harris: “She’s going to support policies that ensure that emerging technologies and that sort of industry can continue to grow.” – statement from senior campaign adviser Brian Nelson to Bloomberg, August 21st, 2024
Trump: “If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It’s going to be. It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon — as we say, it’s going to the moon — I want America to be the nation that leads the way.” – 2024 Bitcoin Conference speech, July 27th, 2024
Trump: “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chair.” – 2024 Bitcoin Conference speech, July 27th, 2024
The president’s powers
The main thing a president does to create policy is appoint personnel. When it comes to crypto policy, the key role is that of the chair of the SEC, who is currently the much-embattled Gary Gensler. Trump has promised to fire Gensler “on day one” and install someone more friendly to crypto, such as Robinhood’s Dan Gallagher.
Whether the president can actually “fire” Gensler is a more complicated legal question than one would think. But regardless, Trump probably would not actually be firing Gensler. By tradition, an outgoing president directs political appointees like Gensler to submit their resignation sometime between Election Day and mid-December, leaving the next president the choice to accept that resignation and install their own pick. (Trump broke with that tradition in 2020, refusing to send out a call for resignations until the day after the January 6th insurrection.)
Harris hasn’t been especially clear about what she’ll do, but her campaign adviser, Brian Nelson, was involved in a Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposal that raised crypto industry hackles.
The candidates’ track records
Though Trump is now courting crypto enthusiasts, he oversaw policies during his term in office that were often hostile to the emerging tech. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” Trump tweeted in 2019, in what the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance called a “thunderous” denunciation.
Harris served as the VP of an administration the crypto community has largely perceived as hostile
His SEC didn’t publish much guidance, although he did nominate commissioner Hester Peirce, known to some as “crypto mom.” What the Trump-era SEC did do, though, was say that US securities laws might apply to token sales and then create a new cyber unit for monitoring initial coin offerings, among other things. It also went after celebrities who’d endorsed ICOs, including DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather. It rejected outright an attempted Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, or ETF, and requested that some companies withdraw their applications. (A Bitcoin ETF was finally approved under Gary Gensler’s SEC earlier this year.) It sued Kik and Telegram over token sales. Oh, and the SEC also initiated the Ripple Labs case.
Meanwhile, FinCEN proposed new rules for crypto and gave a shortened time period for response — which was extended after industry outcry. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published guidance for stablecoins. And most controversially, SEC official William Hinman said that, in his opinion, Ethereum isn’t a security.
Harris’ record on crypto is thinner. Though she’s served as the VP of an administration the crypto community has largely perceived as hostile, she’s signaled that she’s willing to reset policy. Harris recently said she would support a “regulatory framework” for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets to protect buyers.
Abortion

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Harris: “And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.” – remarks at the Democratic National Convention, August 22nd, 2024
Trump: “When I’m reelected, I will continue to fight against the demented late-term abortionists in the Democrat Party who believe in unlimited abortion on demand and even executing babies after birth.” – speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, June 22nd, 2024
The president’s powers
The most impactful thing either candidate can do is sign whatever legislation comes out of Congress — either codifying access to abortion as laid out in Roe v. Wade or mandating a federal abortion ban. Harris has said she supports eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe. Trump has suggested he’d sign a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks, though he’s also said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban and believes that the issue should be left up to the states.
Even if Congress doesn’t pass legislation on abortion, the president still has discretion over the Food and Drug Administration, which can work to make birth control pills, other contraceptives, and abortion medication more or less available. Under Trump, the FDA could reverse regulations allowing pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of the pills used for medication abortions. Trump’s allies — including the Heritage Foundation, the primary architect of Project 2025 — have floated the idea of using the Comstock Act to ban the shipping of mifepristone and misoprostol, which would effectively ban medication abortion everywhere in the country. Trump has not publicly commented on whether he’d do this.
The candidates’ track records
The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade during Biden’s term, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Trump’s nomination of three justices during his last term.
Trump instated domestic and global gag rules to organizations that support abortion
During his term, Trump reinstated and expanded a global gag rule on abortion that prevented international organizations from getting US funding if they provide abortion services or refer patients for abortions — even if those services are provided with the organizations’ own funds. Trump also implemented a domestic gag rule prohibiting taxpayer-funded clinics from making abortion referrals. The rule also forbade clinics that get federal money from sharing space with abortion providers.
Under Biden’s administration, the FDA has allowed pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of the pills used for medication abortions. The Biden administration also required federal agencies to issue guidance to ensure that FDA-approved contraceptive medications are available for free under the Affordable Care Act.
After Roe was overturned, the Biden administration directed the Pentagon to pay for service members’ travel for abortion care. Biden also issued regulations strengthening privacy protections for people who seek abortions, specifically designed to protect women living in states where abortion is illegal who travel elsewhere for the procedure.
As California attorney general, Harris signed onto a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold reproductive rights. She also co-sponsored a law that required “crisis pregnancy centers,” which try to steer women away from abortion information, to clarify that they are not licensed medical facilities. The Supreme Court later granted an injunction blocking the law, ruling it was likely unconstitutional.
AI

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Harris: “Federal agencies have a distinct responsibility to identify and manage AI risks because of the role they play in our society, and the public must have confidence that the agencies will protect their rights and safety.” – VP Fact Sheet, March 28th, 2024
Trump: “We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.” – 2024 Republican Party platform
The president’s powers
The president can write executive orders laying out guidance for the government’s use of AI, requiring federal agencies to set standards for artificially generated content, among other things.
The president also directs the military, which is increasingly reliant on AI-powered defense tech
If Harris is elected, it’s likely that the White House’s AI policy will remain consistent with that of Biden’s, who has worked with major companies to limit bad behavior without actually putting hard policies in place. Harris’ allies have told The New York Times that her stance toward tech regulation will likely be similar to what we’ve seen over the past four years. Trump, on the other hand, plans to revoke Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, which lays out regulations around generative AI. He may issue AI-related orders of his own, some of which have already been drafted by his allies.
As the commander in chief, the president also directs the military, which is increasingly reliant on AI-powered defense tech. The America First Policy Institute, led by several Trump-era administration officials, reportedly wrote an executive order to launch a series of “Manhattan Projects” for new military technologies and create “industry-led” agencies to evaluate AI models. One section of the framework is titled “Make America First in AI.” According to The Washington Post, which reviewed the documents, these policies will likely benefit tech companies that already have contracts with the Pentagon, including Anduril, Scale, and the data-mining firm Palantir.
The candidates’ track records
In 2019, Trump signed the “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” executive order. The order called for a “concerted effort” to promote AI and a “sustained investment” in AI research and development initiatives, but critics noted that it didn’t allocate any federal funding toward these initiatives. A separate executive order issued in 2020 established guidance for federal agency adoption of AI.
Trump’s budget plan for fiscal 2021 boosted funding for nondefense AI research and development. Shortly before Trump’s term ended in January 2021, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy established a National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office.
The Biden-Harris administration has balanced AI adoption with regulation. The administration has required federal agencies to hire chief AI officers, and in 2023, the National Science Foundation and 10 other federal agencies partnered with AI developers focused on democratizing access to research. Earlier this year, Biden and Harris met with CEOs of several companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — to discuss AI. The conversation reportedly focused on energy usage, the capacities of grids and data centers, and semiconductor manufacturing.
The TikTok ban

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Harris: “We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok.” – interview on This Week on ABC, March 24th, 2024
Trump: “For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump! The other side’s closing it up. But I’m now a big star on TikTok. We even have TikTok check, and we’re setting records. We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s gonna close it up, so if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump.” – video on Truth Social, September 4th, 2024
The president’s powers
It’s not actually clear what anyone can do here, because we’re still waiting for a key court decision. Thanks to a law signed by Biden earlier this year, TikTok could be just months away from a ban if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it. But an appeals court is currently deliberating on whether this violates the First Amendment rights of ByteDance and TikTok users. If it does, the odds of anyone meaningfully banning TikTok — or issuing other hugely punitive measures to encourage a ByteDance spinoff — are low.
The president is responsible for determining what counts as a successful divestiture
If US courts uphold the law, ByteDance will be on the hook for either a sale or a ban, but the incoming administration will have options to shape that process. The president is responsible for determining what counts as a successful divestiture, and the attorney general can enforce civil penalties against American platforms that allow TikTok to operate if it’s banned. The bill also allows for pursuing action against other large social networks owned by foreign adversaries — although the category is clearly designed to mainly include TikTok.
The candidates’ track records
The TikTok ban is actually Trump’s idea, from back in 2020. As president, he attempted to block TikTok from the US via a series of executive orders, targeting not only TikTok but also WeChat and other Chinese apps. His efforts were largely stymied by courts, however, and the orders were immediately reversed by Biden. He’s warmed to TikTok since then (possibly because he’s learned he’s popular on it), but given his overall focus on limiting China’s power, it’s not clear whether that’s a lasting change.
The Biden administration, conversely, ended Trump’s ban effort but later supported a divest-or-ban law. For now, Harris herself is among the various politicians who have used TikTok for campaigning while expressing national security concerns about it. She joined TikTok in July.
Online speech

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Harris: “I applaud the Senate for passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act today. This bipartisan legislation will help protect children’s mental health, safety, and privacy online.” – tweet, July 30th, 2024
Trump: “If Big Tech persists, in coordination with the mainstream media, we must immediately strip them of their Section 230 protections. When government granted these protections, they created a monster!” – speech at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, October 15th, 2020
The president’s powers
Regulating how kids can use social media and changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — two of the biggest recent speech issues on the table — depend on Congress passing legislation. The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act’s (KOSPA) tortured legislative history is evidence that that’s not easy. On top of that, courts are dealing with a slew of lawsuits that could render parts of KOSPA unconstitutional, and the First Amendment is set up to make speech regulation very difficult to implement.
Agencies are barred from outright punishing companies for speech they dislike
The White House and federal agencies can apply more subtle pressures, however. An administration can contact social network operators privately or publicly to suggest certain moderation decisions, and the president can direct agencies (primarily the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate companies’ behavior — although they’re barred from outright punishing companies for speech they dislike, which would constitute jawboning. Presidents also appoint the judges who decide complicated speech lawsuits.
The candidates’ track records
Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA, the first Section 230 carveout in decades, aimed at restricting sex work content. (On top of direct negative effects for sex workers, you can thank it for the demise of Craigslist personals.) He made an abortive attempt to hollow out Section 230 further via executive order, but it was quickly revoked by Biden. He frequently accused tech companies of anti-conservative bias in areas like content moderation, implicitly threatening antitrust investigations as payback for perceived slights. When it comes to broader free speech issues, he’s called to strip broadcast licenses from TV stations over stories he disliked, and he’s attempted to do drastic things like deploy the military on protestors.
Harris has been a longtime proponent of limiting Section 230, part of a long-running focus on “online predators” like sex traffickers. She was one of FOSTA-SESTA’s numerous cosponsors while in the Senate, and she was among a group of attorneys general who asked Congress for a carveout like it back in 2013. (The amendment was supposed to facilitate taking down Backpage.com, which Harris would play an instrumental role in shuttering.) Harris later said she supported decriminalizing sex work — a position she may or may not still hold. But she’s gone on to support bills like the EARN IT Act, so her support for Section 230 limits may not have waned.
Beyond 230, the Biden administration was accused of social media jawboning in the case Murthy v. Missouri, which went all the way to the Supreme Court before Biden scored a victory. Harris, however, wasn’t a central player in this saga.
Additional reporting from Jasmine Arielle Ting

Image: Mr.Nelson design for The Verge / Getty Images

Your vote matters. Here’s how it will change the future.

It’s easy to look at a gridlocked legislature or unpredictable judicial decisions and feel like American presidential elections don’t matter. What’s the point of getting someone in the White House if they can’t get legislation on their desk to sign or veto and courts can shut down their every move? Politicians always break their promises, goes the cynical — and often reasonable — grumble. Why pay attention in the first place?

In many respects, the president is a figurehead, but the office of the presidency is a job with a concrete description and very specific levers of power that connect to many of the areas The Verge covers. For these issues and more, whoever wins on November 5th will set a direct course for the next four years and perhaps longer.

Most significantly, the president appoints executive branch personnel, such as heads of independent agencies, who then go on to set and enforce policy on antitrust, broadband, and climate change. There’s a direct chain of cause and effect between Joe Biden taking office and the Federal Trade Commission forcing gyms to let you cancel your membership, because Biden appointed a specific person known to be tough on consumer protections; similarly, Republican control of the Federal Communications Commission under former President Donald Trump resulted in the end of federal net neutrality rules, while Democratic control of the FCC under Biden resulted in a revival.

Of course, the return of net neutrality is on hold because of conservative judges, and that’s yet another explicit power the president has — they nominate judges to federal courts, a power that has lasting repercussions for every area The Verge covers. (Incidentally, that click-to-cancel rule has also been challenged in court.) Other specific powers encompass pardons, immigration, and foreign policy, including everything from war to international trade and tariffs.

Trump or Harris will help determine the future of EVs, ecological disasters, and internet access

There are also more nebulous powers that the president holds. Although the White House does not control the budget — that’s a power reserved for Congress — the president submits a budget proposal for the executive branch, which impacts the federal government’s priorities in a given year. And even though the president does not make laws, they will nevertheless play a big role in what kind of laws will pass — or will at least attempt to pass — in Congress.

As president, Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will help determine the future of electric vehicles, ecological disasters, and internet infrastructure in the US and, in some cases, the whole world. They’ll shape how Silicon Valley holds and wields power over consumers. More broadly, they’ll play a role in whether the government can address these kinds of questions at all.

Neither Trump nor Harris has detailed everything they’ll do in office. Harris hasn’t said whether she’ll keep key figures like FTC Chair Lina Khan. Parsing Trump’s myriad long-winded and contradictory statements is a job unto itself. And there are lingering questions about how closely Trump could hew to Project 2025: a technically unrelated series of recommendations by the Heritage Foundation that’s linked strongly to Trump’s own campaign. The proposals in Project 2025 could gut or eliminate parts of the system we have now.

By the same token, neither candidate’s previous terms in office are a precise blueprint for their future plans. Harris obviously wasn’t the key decision-maker in the Biden administration. Trump is expected to dramatically weaken the institutions that checked his power during his first term, stopping actions that ranged from a sweeping immigration ban to an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results. If we’re looking for clues about the direction of a Harris or Trump administration, though, the candidates’ own words, past actions, and track records as elected officials are reasonable guideposts.

The topics below aren’t the only ones that matter to Verge authors and readers. But they’re pressing issues that will determine what kinds of stories you’ll be reading here in the coming years as a direct result of whoever takes office in January 2025.

Climate change

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Harris: “We know that we can actually deal with this issue. The young people of America care deeply about this issue. And I am proud that as vice president over the last four years, we have invested $1 trillion in a clean energy economy while we have also increased domestic gas production to historic levels.” – presidential debate, September 10th, 2024

Trump: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one, one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years. The big — and you’ll have more oceanfront property, right? The biggest threat is not that. The biggest threat is nuclear warming, because we have five countries now that have significant nuclear power, and we have to not allow anything to happen with stupid people like Biden.” – interview on X with Elon Musk, August 13th, 2024

The president’s powers

The president appoints key regulatory personnel, including the heads of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and has the power to place scientists or skeptics in key leadership roles. The president also proposes annual budgets for these agencies.

Trump could gut key agencies responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions

As the world’s leading oil and gas producer and the biggest historical polluter of carbon dioxide emissions, America’s diplomatic cooperation, as well as actual action or inaction on climate change, has global consequences. The president has the authority to make treaties for the United States, giving them control over whether the country joins international agreements on climate change such as the Paris agreement. Should the US stay in the Paris agreement, the next administration will be tasked with submitting an updated climate action plan by early next year.

The next administration will also be tasked with continuing the distribution of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which was passed in 2022. The IRA includes $369 billion in spending on clean energy and climate action, which is expected to cut US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 40 percent by 2030.

The candidates’ track records

The Trump administration rolled back more than 100 environmental regulations in the US and isolated the country from global climate negotiations. Trump weakened rules meant to rein in pollution from power plants and transportation, the two sectors that produce the most greenhouse gas emissions in the US. He put fossil fuel lobbyists in charge of the Environmental Protection Agency and stacked the US Supreme Court with justices whose deregulatory agenda has made it harder for federal agencies to crack down on pollution.

Trump has said that he would “rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.” He has also said he’d withdraw the US from the landmark Paris agreement, which he briefly did during his first term in office. If Trump follows the recommendations in Project 2025, he could gut key agencies responsible for regulating greenhouse gas emissions and studying the effects of climate change so that there are tools in place, like updated flood maps, to help Americans adapt.

Harris’ environmental track record precedes her term as vice president, stretching back to lawsuits she filed to hold polluters accountable as California’s attorney general. She’s been relatively mum about climate change on the campaign trail, however, as she courts key swing states. That includes Pennsylvania, which produces more gas than any other state aside from Texas — much of which comes from fracking. As California’s attorney general, Harris filed suit against the Obama administration to stop offshore fracking but now says she would not support a ban on fracking as president.

The Biden administration has pledged to reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas pollution by at least 50 percent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade under the Paris climate accord. The keystone legislation that gets the US most of the way there is the IRA. Harris has regularly touted her role in helping pass the IRA as well as the legislation’s success in creating jobs and boosting energy production.

Antitrust

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Harris: “As President, she will direct her Administration to crack down on anti-competitive practices that let big corporations jack up prices and undermine the competition that allows all businesses to thrive while keeping prices low for consumers” – 2024 campaign site

Trump: “Google has been very bad. They’ve been very irresponsible and I have a feeling Google is going to be close to shut down because I don’t think Congress is going to take it, I really don’t think so. Google has to be careful.” – interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, August 2nd, 2024

The president’s powers

The White House nominates two of the country’s most important antitrust watchdogs: the assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s antitrust division (currently Jonathan Kanter); and the chair of the Federal Trade Commission (currently Lina Khan). Not only can they launch investigations and file lawsuits against individual tech companies but they can also shape broader regulatory guidelines, like the rules for when a merger should be blocked. Any federal judges who oversee an antitrust lawsuit are also presidentially appointed — albeit, obviously, not all by the current president.

That said, these officials must be confirmed by the Senate before they can take office. Agency policies can be changed by a future administration. And Congress would have to pass new laws to change the fundamentals of antitrust law, like the much-criticized “consumer harm” standard.

The candidates’ track records

The Trump administration made some efforts to attack tech giants. Following a general investigation of several companies, Trump’s FTC and DOJ, respectively, sued Facebook (now Meta) and Google in late 2020. But the Trump administration’s antitrust work was frequently mixed up with Trump’s personal anger at the supposed liberal bias of tech companies, which produced confounding results like a demand that agencies rewrite speech law. During this election cycle, he’s promised to prosecute Google for “only” showing “bad stories” about him.

Trump said he would go after Google for showing “bad stories” about him

Biden’s appointment of Khan and Kanter put two of big tech’s biggest critics in high-level government positions. Kanter’s DOJ argued the Google search antitrust suit filed under Trump, leading to arguably Google’s biggest US legal defeat. The DOJ and FTC also filed numerous suits against a range of tech companies, including a DOJ complaint against Google’s ad tech dominance, an FTC monopoly suit against Amazon, and (failed) attempts to stop acquisitions by Microsoft and Meta. The administration has gone after tech-adjacent businesses like Live Nation-Ticketmaster and signaled stricter merger scrutiny as well.

Harris hasn’t signaled how closely she would hew to Biden’s path here — including whether she’ll keep Khan around. She was relatively quiet on antitrust during her time as a senator. But with several of the cases above still brewing, it’s an issue she likely won’t be able to avoid.

Net neutrality

Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Harris: Harris has not spoken recently on net neutrality.

Trump: Trump has not spoken recently on net neutrality.

The president’s powers

The Federal Communications Commission has five commissioners, including one chair. Each must be appointed by a president and confirmed by the Senate, but then goes on to serve a term of five years. The chair usually resigns when there is a new president, who then appoints someone of their own choosing. A maximum of three commissioners may come from the same party.

The very recent history of the FCC is a good indication of what would happen

The math-minded will understand what these rules mean, generally: when the president is a Democrat, the FCC is 3-2 in favor of Democrats; under a Republican, the commission is 3-2 in favor of Republicans.

The FCC does many things, but most importantly, the FCC makes regulations that affect internet service providers, telecoms, and how broadband access subsidies are used. The most famous among these regulations: net neutrality.

The candidates’ track records

While neither candidate has spoken directly to the issue of net neutrality during this campaign, due to the structure of the agency, the very recent history of the FCC is a good indication of what would happen under either candidate.

Almost immediately after Trump’s election in 2016, FCC commissioner Ajit Pai signaled a strong interest in overturning the net neutrality rule that was established during the Obama administration. Trump tapped him to become the new FCC chair, and the rest is history. Despite the policy’s enormous popularity among ordinary people, in late 2017 the FCC voted 3-2 along party lines to kill net neutrality.

When Biden became president, Pai — as is tradition — resigned his seat, and Biden appointed Democrat Jessica Rosenworcel as the new chair. He also nominated the legendary open internet advocate Gigi Sohn as a third Democratic commissioner. The Senate stalled on Sohn’s appointment, ultimately managing to kill her nomination. The FCC remained deadlocked until 2023, when Anna Gomez was sworn in. In April of this year, the FCC finally voted — 3-2, along party lines — to restore net neutrality.

At the moment, the net neutrality rule is on hold, blocked by an appeals court as a direct result of a Supreme Court decision this summer. In Loper Bright v. Raimondo, the court’s conservative supermajority, which is stacked with Trump-nominated justices, overturned longstanding precedent and kneecapped regulatory agencies like the FCC.

Electric vehicles

Image: Hugo Herrera / The Verge

Harris: “Millions of children ride on diesel school buses daily, breathing toxic fumes that can harm their health. This week, we announced nearly $1 billion to fund electric and low-emission school buses across the nation—an investment in our children, their health, and their education.” – tweet, January 12th, 2024

Trump: “I will end the electric vehicle mandate on day one, thereby saving the US auto industry from complete obliteration.” – speech at the Republican National Convention, July 19th, 2024

Trump: “I’m for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice.” – speech at a rally in Atlanta, Georgia, August 3rd, 2024

The president’s powers

One of the main ways the executive branch can influence the kind of car you buy is through tailpipe rules. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates how much pollution the auto industry is allowed to spew into the atmosphere. By setting tighter limits, the agency can effectively force the industry to sell more environmentally friendly vehicles — or risk paying steep fines for noncompliance.

The executive branch can also incentivize consumers by offering tax credits to bring down the cost of vehicles that are pricier but produce less pollution. It can spend taxpayer money on building out the EV charging infrastructure and investing in other alternative fuel sources like hydrogen. And it can offer tax breaks to manufacturers to retrofit factories for battery production.

It can also do the opposite of all of that: loosen pollution rules; eliminate favorable tax breaks; and slow roll (or cancel) infrastructure improvements. Doing so would send an enormous signal to automakers that they can keep polluting as usual.

The candidates’ track records

When he was president, Trump did everything in his power to forestall the inevitable rise of electric vehicles. He rolled back regulations passed under the Obama administration to force automakers to produce less-polluting vehicles. He tried to revoke California’s authority to set its own emissions standards. And he championed a plan to rewrite the tax code to eliminate credits for EV purchases.

EV sales took off like a rocket before eventually flatlining

And yet EVs continued to sell at record numbers, an indication that market forces were having more influence over consumer demands than Trump’s policy decisions. When Biden took office, most of those efforts were reversed. But even before the Biden administration could pass its first EV-friendly policy, EV sales took off like a rocket before eventually flatlining.

Still, the Biden administration saw EVs as a crucial piece of its plan to fight climate change. Biden directed the Environmental Protection Agency to pass new tailpipe emission standards to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 55 percent by 2032. He passed new tax credits for EVs that were made in North America or by its trade partners, using parts and battery components sourced from the same allies. He poured billions of dollars into EV charging infrastructure and battery manufacturing, and he did the same for trucks and other heavy-duty vehicles.

Harris has promised to keep most of Biden’s policies in place, but she has responded to criticism from Trump that she would “force” consumers to buy expensive EVs by vowing to never ban gas car sales.

Crypto regulation

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Harris: “She’s going to support policies that ensure that emerging technologies and that sort of industry can continue to grow.” – statement from senior campaign adviser Brian Nelson to Bloomberg, August 21st, 2024

Trump: “If crypto is going to define the future, I want it to be mined, minted, and made in the USA. It’s going to be. It’s not going to be made anywhere else. And if Bitcoin is going to the moon — as we say, it’s going to the moon — I want America to be the nation that leads the way.” – 2024 Bitcoin Conference speech, July 27th, 2024

Trump: “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler and appoint a new SEC chair.” – 2024 Bitcoin Conference speech, July 27th, 2024

The president’s powers

The main thing a president does to create policy is appoint personnel. When it comes to crypto policy, the key role is that of the chair of the SEC, who is currently the much-embattled Gary Gensler. Trump has promised to fire Gensler “on day one” and install someone more friendly to crypto, such as Robinhood’s Dan Gallagher.

Whether the president can actually “fire” Gensler is a more complicated legal question than one would think. But regardless, Trump probably would not actually be firing Gensler. By tradition, an outgoing president directs political appointees like Gensler to submit their resignation sometime between Election Day and mid-December, leaving the next president the choice to accept that resignation and install their own pick. (Trump broke with that tradition in 2020, refusing to send out a call for resignations until the day after the January 6th insurrection.)

Harris hasn’t been especially clear about what she’ll do, but her campaign adviser, Brian Nelson, was involved in a Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) proposal that raised crypto industry hackles.

The candidates’ track records

Though Trump is now courting crypto enthusiasts, he oversaw policies during his term in office that were often hostile to the emerging tech. “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity,” Trump tweeted in 2019, in what the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance called a “thunderous” denunciation.

Harris served as the VP of an administration the crypto community has largely perceived as hostile

His SEC didn’t publish much guidance, although he did nominate commissioner Hester Peirce, known to some as “crypto mom.” What the Trump-era SEC did do, though, was say that US securities laws might apply to token sales and then create a new cyber unit for monitoring initial coin offerings, among other things. It also went after celebrities who’d endorsed ICOs, including DJ Khaled and Floyd Mayweather. It rejected outright an attempted Bitcoin exchange-traded fund, or ETF, and requested that some companies withdraw their applications. (A Bitcoin ETF was finally approved under Gary Gensler’s SEC earlier this year.) It sued Kik and Telegram over token sales. Oh, and the SEC also initiated the Ripple Labs case.

Meanwhile, FinCEN proposed new rules for crypto and gave a shortened time period for response — which was extended after industry outcry. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency published guidance for stablecoins. And most controversially, SEC official William Hinman said that, in his opinion, Ethereum isn’t a security.

Harris’ record on crypto is thinner. Though she’s served as the VP of an administration the crypto community has largely perceived as hostile, she’s signaled that she’s willing to reset policy. Harris recently said she would support a “regulatory framework” for cryptocurrencies and other digital assets to protect buyers.

Abortion

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos via Getty Images

Harris: “And when Congress passes a bill to restore reproductive freedom, as president of the United States, I will proudly sign it into law.” – remarks at the Democratic National Convention, August 22nd, 2024

Trump: “When I’m reelected, I will continue to fight against the demented late-term abortionists in the Democrat Party who believe in unlimited abortion on demand and even executing babies after birth.” – speech at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference, June 22nd, 2024

The president’s powers

The most impactful thing either candidate can do is sign whatever legislation comes out of Congress — either codifying access to abortion as laid out in Roe v. Wade or mandating a federal abortion ban. Harris has said she supports eliminating the filibuster to codify Roe. Trump has suggested he’d sign a bill banning abortion after 15 weeks, though he’s also said he wouldn’t sign a national abortion ban and believes that the issue should be left up to the states.

Even if Congress doesn’t pass legislation on abortion, the president still has discretion over the Food and Drug Administration, which can work to make birth control pills, other contraceptives, and abortion medication more or less available. Under Trump, the FDA could reverse regulations allowing pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of the pills used for medication abortions. Trump’s allies — including the Heritage Foundation, the primary architect of Project 2025 — have floated the idea of using the Comstock Act to ban the shipping of mifepristone and misoprostol, which would effectively ban medication abortion everywhere in the country. Trump has not publicly commented on whether he’d do this.

The candidates’ track records

The Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade during Biden’s term, but it wouldn’t have been possible without Trump’s nomination of three justices during his last term.

Trump instated domestic and global gag rules to organizations that support abortion

During his term, Trump reinstated and expanded a global gag rule on abortion that prevented international organizations from getting US funding if they provide abortion services or refer patients for abortions — even if those services are provided with the organizations’ own funds. Trump also implemented a domestic gag rule prohibiting taxpayer-funded clinics from making abortion referrals. The rule also forbade clinics that get federal money from sharing space with abortion providers.

Under Biden’s administration, the FDA has allowed pharmacies to dispense mifepristone, one of the pills used for medication abortions. The Biden administration also required federal agencies to issue guidance to ensure that FDA-approved contraceptive medications are available for free under the Affordable Care Act.

After Roe was overturned, the Biden administration directed the Pentagon to pay for service members’ travel for abortion care. Biden also issued regulations strengthening privacy protections for people who seek abortions, specifically designed to protect women living in states where abortion is illegal who travel elsewhere for the procedure.

As California attorney general, Harris signed onto a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold reproductive rights. She also co-sponsored a law that required “crisis pregnancy centers,” which try to steer women away from abortion information, to clarify that they are not licensed medical facilities. The Supreme Court later granted an injunction blocking the law, ruling it was likely unconstitutional.

AI

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photos from Getty Images

Harris: “Federal agencies have a distinct responsibility to identify and manage AI risks because of the role they play in our society, and the public must have confidence that the agencies will protect their rights and safety.” – VP Fact Sheet, March 28th, 2024

Trump: “We will repeal Joe Biden’s dangerous Executive Order that hinders AI Innovation, and imposes Radical Leftwing ideas on the development of this technology. In its place, Republicans support AI Development rooted in Free Speech and Human Flourishing.” – 2024 Republican Party platform

The president’s powers

The president can write executive orders laying out guidance for the government’s use of AI, requiring federal agencies to set standards for artificially generated content, among other things.

The president also directs the military, which is increasingly reliant on AI-powered defense tech

If Harris is elected, it’s likely that the White House’s AI policy will remain consistent with that of Biden’s, who has worked with major companies to limit bad behavior without actually putting hard policies in place. Harris’ allies have told The New York Times that her stance toward tech regulation will likely be similar to what we’ve seen over the past four years. Trump, on the other hand, plans to revoke Biden’s executive order on artificial intelligence, which lays out regulations around generative AI. He may issue AI-related orders of his own, some of which have already been drafted by his allies.

As the commander in chief, the president also directs the military, which is increasingly reliant on AI-powered defense tech. The America First Policy Institute, led by several Trump-era administration officials, reportedly wrote an executive order to launch a series of “Manhattan Projects” for new military technologies and create “industry-led” agencies to evaluate AI models. One section of the framework is titled “Make America First in AI.” According to The Washington Post, which reviewed the documents, these policies will likely benefit tech companies that already have contracts with the Pentagon, including Anduril, Scale, and the data-mining firm Palantir.

The candidates’ track records

In 2019, Trump signed the “Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” executive order. The order called for a “concerted effort” to promote AI and a “sustained investment” in AI research and development initiatives, but critics noted that it didn’t allocate any federal funding toward these initiatives. A separate executive order issued in 2020 established guidance for federal agency adoption of AI.

Trump’s budget plan for fiscal 2021 boosted funding for nondefense AI research and development. Shortly before Trump’s term ended in January 2021, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy established a National Artificial Intelligence Initiative Office.

The Biden-Harris administration has balanced AI adoption with regulation. The administration has required federal agencies to hire chief AI officers, and in 2023, the National Science Foundation and 10 other federal agencies partnered with AI developers focused on democratizing access to research. Earlier this year, Biden and Harris met with CEOs of several companies — including OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — to discuss AI. The conversation reportedly focused on energy usage, the capacities of grids and data centers, and semiconductor manufacturing.

The TikTok ban

Illustration by Cath Virginia / The Verge | Photo from Getty Images

Harris: “We need to deal with the owner, and we have national security concerns about the owner of TikTok, but we have no intention to ban TikTok.” – interview on This Week on ABC, March 24th, 2024

Trump: “For all of those that want to save TikTok in America, vote for Trump! The other side’s closing it up. But I’m now a big star on TikTok. We even have TikTok check, and we’re setting records. We’re not doing anything with TikTok, but the other side’s gonna close it up, so if you like TikTok, go out and vote for Trump.” – video on Truth Social, September 4th, 2024

The president’s powers

It’s not actually clear what anyone can do here, because we’re still waiting for a key court decision. Thanks to a law signed by Biden earlier this year, TikTok could be just months away from a ban if its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, doesn’t sell it. But an appeals court is currently deliberating on whether this violates the First Amendment rights of ByteDance and TikTok users. If it does, the odds of anyone meaningfully banning TikTok — or issuing other hugely punitive measures to encourage a ByteDance spinoff — are low.

The president is responsible for determining what counts as a successful divestiture

If US courts uphold the law, ByteDance will be on the hook for either a sale or a ban, but the incoming administration will have options to shape that process. The president is responsible for determining what counts as a successful divestiture, and the attorney general can enforce civil penalties against American platforms that allow TikTok to operate if it’s banned. The bill also allows for pursuing action against other large social networks owned by foreign adversaries — although the category is clearly designed to mainly include TikTok.

The candidates’ track records

The TikTok ban is actually Trump’s idea, from back in 2020. As president, he attempted to block TikTok from the US via a series of executive orders, targeting not only TikTok but also WeChat and other Chinese apps. His efforts were largely stymied by courts, however, and the orders were immediately reversed by Biden. He’s warmed to TikTok since then (possibly because he’s learned he’s popular on it), but given his overall focus on limiting China’s power, it’s not clear whether that’s a lasting change.

The Biden administration, conversely, ended Trump’s ban effort but later supported a divest-or-ban law. For now, Harris herself is among the various politicians who have used TikTok for campaigning while expressing national security concerns about it. She joined TikTok in July.

Online speech

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge; Getty Images

Harris: “I applaud the Senate for passing the Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act today. This bipartisan legislation will help protect children’s mental health, safety, and privacy online.” – tweet, July 30th, 2024

Trump: “If Big Tech persists, in coordination with the mainstream media, we must immediately strip them of their Section 230 protections. When government granted these protections, they created a monster!” – speech at a rally in Greenville, North Carolina, October 15th, 2020

The president’s powers

Regulating how kids can use social media and changing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act — two of the biggest recent speech issues on the table — depend on Congress passing legislation. The Kids Online Safety and Privacy Act’s (KOSPA) tortured legislative history is evidence that that’s not easy. On top of that, courts are dealing with a slew of lawsuits that could render parts of KOSPA unconstitutional, and the First Amendment is set up to make speech regulation very difficult to implement.

Agencies are barred from outright punishing companies for speech they dislike

The White House and federal agencies can apply more subtle pressures, however. An administration can contact social network operators privately or publicly to suggest certain moderation decisions, and the president can direct agencies (primarily the Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission) to investigate companies’ behavior — although they’re barred from outright punishing companies for speech they dislike, which would constitute jawboning. Presidents also appoint the judges who decide complicated speech lawsuits.

The candidates’ track records

Trump signed FOSTA-SESTA, the first Section 230 carveout in decades, aimed at restricting sex work content. (On top of direct negative effects for sex workers, you can thank it for the demise of Craigslist personals.) He made an abortive attempt to hollow out Section 230 further via executive order, but it was quickly revoked by Biden. He frequently accused tech companies of anti-conservative bias in areas like content moderation, implicitly threatening antitrust investigations as payback for perceived slights. When it comes to broader free speech issues, he’s called to strip broadcast licenses from TV stations over stories he disliked, and he’s attempted to do drastic things like deploy the military on protestors.

Harris has been a longtime proponent of limiting Section 230, part of a long-running focus on “online predators” like sex traffickers. She was one of FOSTA-SESTA’s numerous cosponsors while in the Senate, and she was among a group of attorneys general who asked Congress for a carveout like it back in 2013. (The amendment was supposed to facilitate taking down Backpage.com, which Harris would play an instrumental role in shuttering.) Harris later said she supported decriminalizing sex work — a position she may or may not still hold. But she’s gone on to support bills like the EARN IT Act, so her support for Section 230 limits may not have waned.

Beyond 230, the Biden administration was accused of social media jawboning in the case Murthy v. Missouri, which went all the way to the Supreme Court before Biden scored a victory. Harris, however, wasn’t a central player in this saga.

Additional reporting from Jasmine Arielle Ting

All the news from Apple’s ‘week’ of Mac announcements

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Apple’s unusual approach to an October event is skipping the event and just announcing some forthcoming announcements. New Macs are coming. Apple has teased a “week” of announcements around the Mac starting on Monday, October 28th. And after months of leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what’s in the cards.
Apple is likely to overhaul much of its Mac line with M4 chips, after launching the M4 series in the iPad Pro back in May. The MacBook Pro and iMac are expected to get spec bumps featuring the chip, while the Mac Mini is reported to be in line for a full redesign — its first in over a decade. Alongside the new Macs, a refreshed Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad with USB-C ports are likely to arrive, too.
The public release of Apple Intelligence is also expected this week. That would bring AI features to the Mac as well as the iPhone and iPad.
There’s no formal product event this time around. Instead, it’s likely Apple will share the news through press releases each morning. The only question now is whether they’ll come all at once on Monday or be spaced out throughout the full week.

Image: Cath Virginia / The Verge

Apple’s unusual approach to an October event is skipping the event and just announcing some forthcoming announcements.

New Macs are coming. Apple has teased a “week” of announcements around the Mac starting on Monday, October 28th. And after months of leaks, we have a pretty good idea of what’s in the cards.

Apple is likely to overhaul much of its Mac line with M4 chips, after launching the M4 series in the iPad Pro back in May. The MacBook Pro and iMac are expected to get spec bumps featuring the chip, while the Mac Mini is reported to be in line for a full redesign — its first in over a decade. Alongside the new Macs, a refreshed Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad with USB-C ports are likely to arrive, too.

The public release of Apple Intelligence is also expected this week. That would bring AI features to the Mac as well as the iPhone and iPad.

There’s no formal product event this time around. Instead, it’s likely Apple will share the news through press releases each morning. The only question now is whether they’ll come all at once on Monday or be spaced out throughout the full week.

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