• A Malibu home once owned by Kanye West is being offered as a fractional real estate asset.
• A new venture allows investors to buy memberships for access and equity in luxury properties.
• The owner of the property hopes to transform West’s former home into a Soho House-like space.

Do you want to own a piece of a home once owned by Kanye West?

Steven “Bo” Belmont is betting that you do.

Belmont, who purchased the Tadao Ando-built home from West for $21 million in 2024, has big plans for this concrete slab in Malibu: turning it into a luxury community space for members in the vein of the Soho House. Belmont wants to let multiple people share in his property by selling paid memberships for access to the space and a share in its equity.

There’s just one complication: West famously gutted the home before selling it.

“The equity in this is built on the finishing of the property,” Belmont told Business Insider. “So when they invest, those dollars go toward just moving that property down the line.”

Fractional real estate’s main purpose is to democratize real estate investing so more people can get in on the action. Belmont is admittedly raising the barrier to entry with his latest venture, Populis, offering not just the potential to make money, but opulent experiences — like hanging out at events in a Tadao Ando-built beach house in Malibu once owned by a famous rapper.

“We made the entry a little bit higher, which tends to cater to more of an accredited investor,” Belmont said. “But as we push through the luxury end of Populis, we will absolutely be spinning one out once we have the bandwidth to accommodate the full democratization of real estate and other goods, other real-world assets.”

Fractional ownership for the wealthy

The Malibu mansion is listed for $12 million by Christie’s International Real Estate SoCal, but that doesn’t tell the entire story.

“This is not a traditional whole-asset sale,” the listing reads. “It is a private, membership-driven opportunity designed for buyers seeking exposure to blue-chip real estate without assuming full ownership, management, or renovation responsibility.”

Belmont, alongside Alexandra Damsker and Matthew Hintz, founded Populis, which is essentially a crowdfunding endeavor to turn “architecturally significant properties” into Soho House-like spaces while also giving investors a chance to make some money.

Belmont isn’t solely in the business of catering to the ultrawealthy investor. His company Belwood Investments caters to the everyday investor looking to participate in luxury real estate flips.

But for a product like the Malibu house, he figured he needed some extra muscle in backing power — enter Populis.

The membership program, which is beginning with the Malibu house, aims to be a “civic movement of architects, artists, and outsiders reclaiming culture’s rarest places,” according to its website.

Through four different membership tiers, investors — after investing anywhere from $15,000 to over $100,000 — gain access to the properties in the form of tours, events, and summits at each.

“There’s the opportunity to socialize and hang out with all of these other investors and meet at these amazing properties,” Belmont said. “There are a lot of these really world-class class amazing properties around the world that we are able to offer to the masses.”

Bringing life to an abandoned home

Kanye West bought the home in 2021 for $57 million, but never lived in it. It’s one of a few properties West has unloaded recently, like one of his ranches in Wyoming. If all goes according to Belmont’s plan, the Malibu home will see life where it hasn’t in years.

As Belmont sees it, the home has value outside West’s involvement. It’s a uniquely built structure right on the Pacific Ocean that plenty of people will want to visit.

“This is not a regular single-family home — this is not even a regular concrete home — this is something completely different,” Belmont said.

• After my fiancé’s sudden death, I became a single mom of twins overnight.
• Grief transformed my priorities, fueling growth in my career and personal life.
• I’ve also found purpose in reimagining the future for myself and my children.

Most of my weekday mornings follow the same script. I pull into the drop-off line outside of my twins’ elementary school, double-check their backpacks and take a sip of my coffee from my bright pink Yeti cup before it cools. But on a rainy November morning, sitting in the slow-moving line of cars, I found myself deep in thought.

Before the doors opened, my twins, 6, reached for my hand, so we could do our quick handshake, a ritual we created to help them walk into kindergarten with confidence and a way to let them know I will be back to get them. My daughter jumped out of the car, quiet and observant, while my son lingered long enough to look back and say, “Have a great day, Mommy!”

As the teachers waved them toward the entrance, I watched their confidence. And in that moment, it hit me. My children had come a long way in the past two-and-a-half years. I had, too.

Losing my fiancé reshaped me

I became a single mother on April 15, 2023, the day my fiancé, the father of my twins, died unexpectedly from complications related to diabetes. He was only 31.

Our twins were just 3 when they stood in front of their daddy’s light blue casket. My memories from that period feel fragmented; grief has a way of blurring the days, weeks, and sometimes whole months.

However, I learned very quickly that grief doesn’t stop life from moving forward.

In the year that followed, I underwent a significant transformation. Loss clarified my priorities. It forced me to look directly at the future I needed to build. Not later, but now.

As my business grew, so did my commitment to the work

My freelance writing business — something I had nurtured for over 10 years — began to grow. I wrote late into the night after my twins fell asleep, telling stories about Detroit’s resilience, the complexity of motherhood, and the intimate corners of grief for a variety of outlets.

Those nights of “burning the midnight oil,” became reminders that forward motion was still possible.

That clarity carried me into March 2024, where I began a new career on public relations team at a university, a team I had collaborated with a couple years prior for freelance assignments. It was an alignment. I was stepping into PR with the storytelling foundation I’d been building in journalism behind the scenes for years.

Two months later, while settling into that new role, I received a Society of Professional Journalists award for a feature I wrote while planning my fiancé’s funeral. That recognition wasn’t about timing. It was validation for me. Proof that my voice still held power, even during some of the hardest days of my life.

Creating a scholarship in my fiancé’s honor helped me rebuild with purpose

In the spring of 2024, a year after his passing, I established a scholarship in my fiancé’s honor at our alma mater, awarded annually to a graduating senior heading to college.

The scholarship wasn’t about memoralizing grief, it was about ensuring his name stood for something bigger than loss. Creating it gave me a purpose at a time when everything else felt unsteady, allowing me to turn our pain to a path forward for someone else.

A new beginning — for all of us — came about

Then came another milestone, one that made his absence feel sharper than before.

This fall, on my twins’ first day of kindergarten, I stood among parents taking photos as my children explored their classroom, checking cubbies and searching for new friends outside of each other. While they were beginning school, I was beginning something new, too. I had my first day of graduate school.

People often ask me, “How do you balance everything — single motherhood, graduate school, a new career, freelancing, grief?”

But balance isn’t what carried us. Ambition did. Rebuilding did. And many nights of silent prayers.

Today, as I prepare for my final exams and wrap up my assignments for 2025, my twins are settling deeper into their school year — bringing home art projects, forming friendships, and rediscovering joy. They are healing. And so am I.

Grief rewired by ambition. My children shaped it. And the life we are building now is not built on balance, but on steady, intentional work of becoming.

• The author found that displaying family photos creates a sense of warmth and boosts mood at home.
• Growing up without family photos inspired her to fill her adult home with cherished memories.
• Displaying photographs has become a meaningful and affordable way to foster connection and happiness.

I grew up with my father, who never had photos developed and framed. When I spent time at friends’ houses, I envied the warmth that family photos brought to their homes. Very early on, I knew I wanted my adult home to be more like that.

I saw the value in displaying photographs of loved ones and happy memories, and I craved it. By middle school, I started buying disposable cameras with my babysitting money and taking pictures when I hung out with friends.

I noticed the positive effect that photos had on my mood very quickly

I didn’t have my own adult home yet, but I put pictures of my friends and me along the border of my bedroom mirror and regularly switched out my favorite photos in my school binder cover. I was searching for ways to create my own little spaces in the world, filled with memories that made me feel better. No matter what kind of mood I was in, whenever I saw those pictures, I felt loved.

By the time I was in high school and college, I was the one making copies of photos for friends. I noticed how exuberant my best friends would become when I gave them a photo of us being silly or just having a good time together. Before digital cameras and smartphones, looking at new pictures that had just been developed was really exciting for us.

Photographs allowed me to make a home on a small budget

When I had my son in my 20s, I knew I wanted to create a warm home, filled with photographs for him to see everywhere. As a single parent, photographs have been an inexpensive yet extremely effective way to make our home feel like a home. He has always loved it when I get new pictures to put up on the fridge or have framed.

It makes me really happy that I did this one simple thing differently from my dad, because I’ve seen it make an impact on my son’s life. I can see his face light up when he looks at certain pictures that are displayed, even ones that have been on the wall his entire life.

At 12, he’s now decorating his room in the same way I once did, pinning pictures of his friends up on the corkboards in his bedroom.

Pictures of my family help me always see what matters

Now that I’ve remarried, there are a lot of pictures of us together as a family or of just my husband and me.

It’s really hard to stay mad at my husband when I walk past a picture of us on our honeymoon, and it’s even more difficult to be upset with my son when I see a picture of him as a baby. It helps me see him as that baby again, who needs just as much love and support from me now as he did then. And when I see my husband and me so happy and in love, it makes me want to hang on to that and not take it for granted.

These pictures of different times in our lives don’t just make us happier, but they are powerful reminders of what’s most important. There’s a part of me that’s sad for not having experienced that when I was growing up, but I’m also relieved that I learned how to do it for myself and my family as an adult. My son loves photos just as much as I do, and so I know he’ll grow up to display them in his own spaces. It’s such a simple yet important thing he’s going to be able to do for himself and his loved ones, and that makes me really happy.

• Business Insider spoke with three perfume experts about the best fragrances to wear for winter.
• Gourmand scents are still popular, and heady, musky fragrances are great for cold weather.
• Perfumers also recommend leaning into brooding, dramatic, dark-academia vibes this winter.

When the chill sets in and you find yourself swapping lightweight sweaters and trench coats for bulky jackets, don’t forget to give your fragrance shelf a seasonal refresh, too.

Winter fragrances often lean richer, warmer, and more enveloping — think amber, spice, woods, and heady florals that wrap around you like a cozy, knitted blanket.

Business Insider spoke with three perfumers about which scents they love for winter and why. From narcotic florals to warm ambers, here’s what they said about their seasonal favorites.

Warm yourself up with amber.

Amber fragrances provide some coziness in cold weather.

Dana Schmitt, New York City-based perfumer at the fragrance company Givaudan, said that one of her longtime favorites is Chanel Coromandel, a soft yet luxurious scent. It’s a plush, amber perfume anchored by patchouli and frankincense.

Another staple she recommends is REPLICA’s Jazz Club, a classic scent built on rich, spicy, and woody notes.

It evokes the feeling of settling into a dim jazz lounge on a chilly winter night in the city — making it perfect for a romantic date night.

Just like in the fall, gourmand scents continue to stay popular.

Gourmands — including vanilla, caramel, and honey — are just so cozy for winter, bringing warmth and comfort when the temperatures drop.

Bryson Ammons, New York City-based perfumer and founder of The Alloy Studio, likes to push the category a bit further by incorporating a bit of spice.

He really enjoys Amphora Parfum Honeycakes, a sweet yet savory scent that feels both nostalgic and surprising. “It’s like a spiced coffee — a very sticky, syrupy fragrance,” he said.

For something more amber-forward but still gourmand, Schmitt points to Mugler Angel Eau de Parfum, a sweet, praline scent that also features signature notes of patchouli and bergamot.

Narcotic, headier scents are the way to go.

Winters can be cold. When it’s under 30 degrees, New York City-based independent perfumer Asia Grant likes leaning into narcotic, smooth fragrances that feel like wrapping yourself in cashmere and tucking into a dim, cozy library.

Rich musks and heady florals really come alive in cold weather, and also add a brooding, dark-academia vibe that pairs well with chunky sweaters and penny loafers.

Grant recommends Dominique Ropion’s Carnal Flower, an intoxicating, full-bodied fragrance that features notes of melon, tuberose, and white musk.

Because it’s so highly concentrated, she often likes layering it with lighter, fresher scents to balance it out.

Brighten up the chilly weather with citrusy scents.

Lemons, oranges, limes, and grapefruits might make you think “summer,” but they’re technically winter-blooming fruits, which makes them a natural fit for cold-weather fragrances, said Ammons.

They also add a bit of brightness and zing to the chillier months.

Bring the outdoors in with a fresh, woodsier scent.

Although spicy and ambery scents are a given for winter, Ammons likes to shake things up with fresh, woodsy one. Think: light florals, clean laundry, freshly-fallen snow, and a wisp of smoke.

One of his go-tos is Aesop’s Rozu Eau De Parfum, which pairs notes of rose and bergamot with sandalwood and musk.

“There’s something clean and kind of chic about it,” Ammons said.

• The Netflix-Warner Bros. Discovery deal would be one of the biggest ever in the media industry.
• WBD CEO David Zaslav told employees not to worry in a town hall on Friday afternoon.
• “Netflix is an exceptional company” with “a great, sustainable future,” Zaslav said.

Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav presented an upbeat take on the company’s new mega-merger with Netflix during a Friday all-hands with employees.

“This is a big day for Warner Bros.,” Zaslav said at a company global town hall, a recording of which was obtained by Business Insider.

Netflix plans to buy the Warner Bros. studio and streaming assets in an industry-shaking $72 billion deal, the companies announced on Friday. WBD’s TV networks like CNN and TNT will be part of a spinoff in mid-2026, as the media conglomerate had originally planned.

WBD’s town hall on Friday afternoon at 1:30 pm ET seemed designed to answer employees’ questions and assuage any fears about the Netflix deal. Zaslav also sent a memo to staffers, several of whom told BI they were worried about their job security as the company undergoes another major deal. That’s especially true because Netflix has its own top-tier tech that could render some of WBD’s obsolete.

“The intention is, they want to keep most people,” Zaslav said of Netflix on the call.

WBD CFO Gunnar Wiedenfels, who will lead Discovery Global after it’s spun off from the main company, said on the call that while the WBD as the world knows it will come to an end, he’s excited for the future.

“It’s an emotional day, I think, for all of us,” Wiedenfels said.

What WBD execs said about the split, bidding war, and sale

Early on the call, Zaslav acknowledged that WBD and its employees had gone through a slew of changes since he engineered a merger between WarnerMedia and Discovery in 2021.

“In the end, we’ve gotten a lot more right than we’ve gotten wrong,” Zaslav said.

The WBD CEO reiterated that the company had planned to split itself before Paramount expressed its interest with an unsolicited offer. As a public company, Zaslav explained that it was executives’ duties to get the best possible offer.

“Our No. 1 focus is to drive shareholder value,” Zaslav said.

As Netflix, Paramount Skydance, and Comcast put forth offers, Zaslav said that the bidding war got noisy.

“It was more public than we would have liked,” Zaslav said of the bidding process.

WBD employees should be flattered by the interest from Netflix and other companies, Zaslav said.

“They wanted to figure out how to get into business with all of you,” Zaslav said of WBD’s suitors. He also said there may be more noise ahead, so “put your seatbelts on.”

In the end, WBD executives told employees that they took the best offer on the table.

“Netflix is an exceptional company,” Zaslav said. “I think it has a great, sustainable future.”

As Netflix incorporates HBO Max content, Zaslav said that “more people will be getting nourished” by HBO and Warner Bros. content.

Netflix execs also explained their views on the deal

After announcing its blockbuster deal on Friday, Netflix also moved to answer questions from Wall Street analysts, investors, employees, movie-theater owners, and government regulators.

Here’s what Greg Peters, the Netflix co-CEO, said about the deal on a call with analysts: “This acquisition will allow us to significantly expand our production capacity in the United States and keep investing in original content over the long term. That means more opportunities for creative talent; it means more jobs created across the entire entertainment industry.”

This story is developing and will be updated.

• A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter.
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OpenAI spread itself too thin, and CEO Sam Altman knows it.

His “Code Red” to employees this week marks a reset: Focus on improving ChatGPT, and pause lower-priority initiatives. The most striking pause is advertising. Why delay such a lucrative opportunity at a moment when OpenAI’s finances face intense scrutiny?

Because in tech, nothing matters more than users.

Google built its Search empire on this principle. Every query and click fed a feedback loop: user behavior informed ranking systems, which improved results, which attracted more users. Over time, that loop became an impenetrable moat. Competing with it has proven nearly impossible.

ChatGPT occupies a similar position for AI assistants. Nearly a billion people now interact with it weekly, giving OpenAI an unmatched new window into human intent, curiosity, and decision-making. Each prompt and reply can be fed back into model training, evaluations, and reinforcement learning to strengthen what is arguably the world’s most powerful AI feedback loop.

Altman’s Code Red aims to protect that advantage. If ChatGPT becomes more useful, people will use it more, which strengthens the loop, which improves the product again — a compounding cycle that could make ChatGPT as unassailable in AI answers as Google is in search.

But that dominance is no longer assured. Google’s Gemini 3 rollout has lured new users. If ChatGPT’s quality slips or feels cluttered, defecting to Google becomes easier. Introducing ads now risks exactly that. Even mildly irritated users could view ads as one annoyance too many.

For now, OpenAI is betting on new model releases to reaccelerate ChatGPT’s growth. Ads can wait, but not forever. Generative AI is expensive to run, more so than Search or social networks. OpenAI has already committed to spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure to serve ChatGPT at a global scale. At some point, those bills will force the company to monetize more aggressively.

If OpenAI manages to build even half of Google’s Search ads business in an AI-native form, it could generate roughly $50 billion in annual profit. That’s one way to fund its colossal ambitions.

But that future depends on the strength of today’s feedback loop. For now, the priority is clear: make ChatGPT undeniably better, pull more users in, and keep the flywheel spinning. Ads can come later. User growth can’t wait.

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com.