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• Saimah Chaudhry listed her Smartcar on a rental service on a whim.
• She grew her fleet to more than 50 vehicles and was making hundreds of thousands annually.
• Five years ago, she launched a rental platform focused on electric vehicles.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Saimah Chaudhry, cofounder and chief operating officer of Zevo. It has been edited for length and clarity.

Back in 2015, I was working for a SaaS company that I’d founded. It mostly served clients in the restaurant industry, where my parents and grandparents were both entrepreneurs.

One day, I was meeting with an out-of-town client who was staying in Manhattan Beach. He mentioned he’d rented the BMW he was driving from Relay Ride (which later became the car rental app Turo).

That was the first time I heard of car sharing. I was working from home, and my Smartcar was definitely an underutilized asset. On a whim, I listed it for rent. A grad student at UCLA booked it for three months, and I pretty much never saw that car again — after that, it was always rented.

I quickly got 2 more cars to rent

My day-to-day car use was pretty minimal, but I still needed to drive occasionally. I leased another Smartcar because they were very cheap at the time. I listed that one too, and soon acquired a third car.

At the time, I was about 25. I couldn’t afford to buy real estate to get into the short-term rental market. But renting cars gave me an accessible way to turn an underutilized asset into a productive asset.

My friends and family thought I was crazy, but I loved the business’s efficiency. I began researching what cars were most in demand in greater LA. I bought mid-range luxury cars like Corvettes and BMWs, which were popular with tourists. Before long, I had a fleet of more than 50 cars and was making hundreds of thousands annually.

Maintaining my fleet was challenging

A little more than a year after I started renting, a client offered to buy my SaaS company. It wasn’t a hugely profitable sale, but the timing was good because it allowed me to expand my rental business. I also started a YouTube channel teaching other entrepreneurs how to manage their fleets. That was hard to monetize, so rentals accounted for about 90% of my income.

I learned a lot about operations and logistics. At first, I had cars parked all over my neighborhood in free public parking. Eventually, I leased a small lot. There wasn’t a ton of storage needs, because the cars were always rented out.

The bigger challenge was vehicle maintenance. They took a lot of wear and tear, and I couldn’t always account for when things went wrong.

My company now focuses on renting to gig workers

About five years ago, another owner found me via my YouTube channel. We thought we could do something similar to Turo, but better. We wanted to focus only on electric cars. Not only were they the way of the future, but they also had fewer moving parts and maintenance demands.

We launched Zevo in 2021. Today, our rentals drive about 8 million miles each month.

I love that the business supports entrepreneurs on both sides. The people who own vehicles typically have fleets of five to 250 cars. We work with dealership partners to help them purchase the most in-demand vehicles. On the other side, most of our renters are drivers for the gig economy. They typically take longer-term rentals of about 90 days.

I believe that everyone — even a 25-year-old woman like I was when I started — should be able to play in the asset class. Control of those assets shouldn’t be concentrated just with big tech companies.

I paused from renting my own vehicles while we got Zevo off the ground. I just recently purchased a Tesla to list on the platform, and I’m excited to be back in the game.

• The cult documentary “Cocaine Cowboys” is celebrating its 20th anniversary in November.
• The movie will be re-released for free online and feature AI-enhanced scenes.
• Director Billy Corben and producer Alfred Spellman broke down their thought process exclusively to BI.

Some movies celebrate an anniversary with a glossy Criterion Collection release; others get a multi-city theatrical run. The guys who made “Cocaine Cowboys” are celebrating its 20th anniversary a little differently.

The beloved 2006 documentary, which chronicled how 1970s Miami became the ultraviolent entry point for the illegal drug trade in the US and introduced the world to “Godmother of Cocaine” Griselda Blanco, is getting a free re-release online — with some improvements.

Director Billy Corben used artificial intelligence to sharpen the movie’s look, enhancing many of the still photos featured in the doc with a richer texture. Instead of the former drug cartel members and hitmen simply telling stories on-camera, Corben’s re-release also accompanies them with AI-shot reenactments.

“It still plays unlike any documentary I have seen before; it still has a unique style and pace,” Corben exclusively told Business Insider. “So we wanted a version that we would be proud to show to somebody now. A version that fans could appreciate and respect and enjoy, but also that we could introduce to a whole new generation of people who might have never heard of it, let alone seen it.”

The re-release will be streaming for free on CocaineCowboys.com beginning November 13 at 5 p.m. ET.

The goal was to make ‘Cocaine Cowboys’ look like it was released today

The idea to use AI came to Corben and his producing partner Alfred Spellman last fall after the movie’s rights reverted back to the duo’s production company, Ratonkur. They turned to the AI studio New Territory Media to give a facelift to the 4,000-plus shots in the movie, doing everything from enhancing the resolution of the original interview footage and adding new motion graphics to creating entirely new reenactments of events that interview subjects described.

“What we hoped was this would look like a movie that was released in 2026,” Spellman said.

“Cocaine Cowboys” became a cult hit in the late 2000s, which led to Corben releasing a sequel in 2008, “Cocaine Cowboys II: Hustlin’ with the Godmother.” The movies found a second life on streaming, resulting in Corben making the 2021 Netflix docuseries, “Cocaine Cowboys: The Kings of Miami.” The franchise gained interest again in 2024 thanks to the popular Netflix miniseries “Griselda,” which starred Sofia Vergara as The Godmother.

The use of AI has become a hot-button debate in Hollywood, as many fear it will leave humans out of work. Nevertheless, AI usage in Hollywood is increasing: An AI version of the late Val Kilmer recently starred in a movie, and Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney featured an AI version of Elon Musk in his documentary on the richest man in the world, “Musk.”

Corben and Spellman see AI as another tool they can use to tell stories.

“We’re able to scale our style and quality of storytelling in a way that would have been impossible for us to do before,” Spellman said of AI.

“Every month that we worked on this project, it got better,” Corben added. “The only downside of that was resisting the temptation to start all over again.” 

Watch the “Cocaine Cowboys” re-release trailer: 

• US Army troops assigned to a European command fired the new Typhon missile system for the first time in a recent California test.
• The mobile system can launch Tomahawk cruise missiles and SM-6 missiles.
• The Army has already deployed Typhon to the Pacific, where it has drawn China’s ire.

Soldiers from the US Army’s Multi-Domain Command in Europe have fired the Typhon missile system for the first time, a step toward potentially bringing a new long-range strike capability to the European theater.

The mobile, ground-based Typhon system, which is also known as the Army’s Mid-Range Capability, can fire Tomahawk cruise missiles and Standard Missile-6s, giving the service options for striking targets at greater distances.

The weapon has already been deployed in the Indo-Pacific, where its presence has frustrated China. The US and allies have tested the weapon in exercises preparing for a Pacific fight.

On Thursday, Multi-Domain Command – Europe announced its first live-fire of a Tomahawk Land Attack Missile from the newly fielded Typhon system. The test occurred at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake in California last month. It marks the third time Typhon has been fired in the continental US.

Soldiers from 3rd Battalion, 12th Field Artillery Regiment, a long-range precision fires unit within Multi-Domain Command – Europe, carried out the testing. This unit operates one of the Army’s four Typhon batteries, and troops went through five weeks of training to learn how to operate and maintain the system.

“They’re incredibly good at what they do now,” Lt. Col. Derek Bartlett, the battalion commander, said in a press release, adding that he’s now “very comfortable deploying them forward after these five weeks.”

Army leaders said that Typhon would boost US firepower in Europe, adding another layer to the Army’s ability to strike targets across multiple domains.

“Typhon gives me more options as an all-domain fires commander to hold critical targets at risk at greater range and creates opportunities for the Joint Force,” Brig. Gen. Steven Carpenter, head of Multi-Domain Command – Europe, said in remarks shared with Business Insider. “This live-fire demonstrates our Soldiers’ ability to turn a newly fielded system into a credible combat capability that strengthens deterrence and, if required, helps us win.”

Manufactured by defense contractor Lockheed Martin, Typhon is intended to fill a gap in the US arsenal. Its development followed the 2019 US withdrawal from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty over concerns about Russian violations. That particular arms control treaty prohibited nuclear and conventional ground-launched ballistic and cruise missiles with ranges of 500 to 5,000 kilometers.

“We get that range for that combatant commander to give them options and capabilities where they really haven’t had it before from the land force,” Bartlett said in the release.

The Army has already been putting those capabilities to the test in the Pacific.

Typhon was first deployed overseas in April 2024 in the Philippines amid a joint exercise between Manila and Washington. At the time, US Army Pacific called it a “landmark deployment.”

In July 2025, during the Talisman Sabre exercise, the US Army fired the Typhon system for the first time west of the international date line in the Pacific, launching a Standard Missile-6 toward a maritime target. The missile successfully struck and sank the target.

Earlier this week, Maj. Gen. Bernard Harrington, head of the 7th Infantry Division, Multi-Domain Command – Pacific, told audiences at the Association of the United States Army’s exhibition in Washington, DC, that Typhon has maintained a forward presence in the region for around 30 consecutive months.

“And really what that allows us to do is not only train and share lessons on that equipment, but it also allows us to learn about how to operate in the environment,” Harrington said.

“How do you sustain in the environment? How do you protect those types of systems in the environment? How do you connect sensors to shooters? And to be able to do that persistently forward and persistently with our ally in the Philippines, and our partners, is incredibly important,” he added.

Typhon’s presence in the Indo-Pacific has repeatedly irritated Beijing. In 2024, Lin Jian, a spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, called the deployment “a move to turn back the wheel of history,” adding that “it gravely threatens regional countries’ security, incites geopolitical confrontation, and has aroused high vigilance and concerns of countries in the region.”

The Chinese military’s Rocket Force notably maintains a very substantial missile arsenal that includes medium- and intermediate-range systems that put US assets and bases, as well as allies and partners, at risk.

• Anthropic’s revenue growth slowed in the third quarter.
• Some of its revenue has come from rivals distilling Anthropic models.
• Cracking down on distillation may have dented revenue growth recently.

Anthropic’s revenue growth slowed in the third quarter, disappointing some investors as the AI startup prepares to go public.

There’s an intriguing explanation for at least part of the slowdown: The company may be getting better at stopping rivals from stealing its AI secrets.

Anthropic generated $16.8 billion in revenue during the third quarter, my colleague Stephen Council reported on Wednesday. While that’s impressive growth by almost any standard, it’s a slowdown from earlier in the year.

Here’s where things get interesting.

Anthropic told prospective investors this week that 5% to 7% of its revenue comes from something called distillation, The Information reported.

This is when rival AI developers use Anthropic’s Claude models to help train their own competing systems.

One way to do this is to create thousands of Anthropic accounts and bombard Claude with carefully chosen questions. The rivals collect the answers and use them to teach their own AI models how to perform similar tasks.

All these “distillation” accounts and questions generate revenue for Anthropic, even though the customers are effectively trying to copy its technology.

Anthropic has repeatedly accused Chinese AI companies of doing this and has been cracking down on the practice. And lately, the company has said this effort has been successful.

That creates an unusual problem: Anthropic’s success in protecting its technology could be hurting its reported revenue growth.

It also raises questions about whether some of the company’s spectacular growth earlier this year was artificially boosted by rivals paying to copy its models. It’s unclear how much of the recent slowdown can be attributed to the crackdown.

Indeed, the company told investors this week that revenue from distillation is expected to decline further, according to The Information.

There’s a precedent for this in the tech industry.

When Twitter went public, investors closely watched its user growth. Some accounts were bots rather than actual people, complicating the numbers investors used to judge the company’s health.

Twitter disclosed estimates of fake and automated accounts in its regulatory filings, giving investors more information to assess its growth. The result was that user growth numbers came down.

Anthropic could face a similar challenge as it prepares for an IPO that could value the company at $1.5 trillion or more.

The important distinction is that a decline in distillation-related revenue doesn’t necessarily mean Anthropic’s underlying business is weakening. It could simply mean fewer rivals are paying to exploit its technology.

Of course, competition and other factors could also be slowing growth.

But investors will need to separate genuine customer demand from revenue generated by companies trying to copy Anthropic’s AI.

Sometimes losing customers isn’t such a bad thing.

I asked Anthropic about this on Wednesday and didn’t hear back by Thursday morning.

Sign up for the AI Insider newsletter here. Reach out to me via email at abarr@businessinsider.com

• Anthropic is opening its doors to independent AI safety evaluators from METR.
• It’s the first time a frontier AI company has done so.
• Dario Amodei pledged last month to take the step.

Anthropic is giving a team of six independent evaluators company hardware, office space, and access to internal tools so they can more thoroughly vet the AI giant’s unreleased models and agents.

In a blog post on Thursday, the Claude maker said it chose six evaluators from METR, the research group perhaps best known for its report on OpenAI’s Hugging Face agent breach, to receive “employee-like access” at Anthropic.

“We want to be publicly accountable for the decisions we’re making,” Anthropic said in its blog post. “We aim to close the gap between what evaluators understand about a frontier AI company’s systems and what the company itself understands.”

The choice to set the evaluators up at Anthropic fulfills a promise first made by CEO Dario Amodei last month, when he published a lengthy essay calling on frontier AI companies to slow down in the wake of the Hugging Face breach.

“Anthropic is unilaterally committing to this step now,” Amodei said at the time of embedding safety evaluators.

Reacting to Amodei’s essay, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company would also embed evaluators, though that hasn’t happened yet. Anthropic’s Thursday disclosure marks the first time a frontier AI company has taken the step.

Within the last year, a steady drumbeat of incidents in which rogue AI agents break free from their guardrails and wreak havoc on the wider internet has spurred calls for action from politicians and tech CEOs alike.

Most recently, an Anthropic agent submitted an erroneous tip for an unsolved murder in Philadelphia, and another agent submitted 20 visa applications on a US government website, according to published reports.

In its blog post on Thursday, Anthropic said the evaluators have free rein to publish their findings, with a couple of caveats prohibiting the METR team from disclosing customer data, model architecture, and attorney-client privileged information.

Anthropic also said it holds the right to require METR to redact information. “METR is free to characterize our redactions publicly, and say whether it believes the redactions were justified, as long as it does so without revealing the redacted information,” Anthropic said.

The access does not extend to the wider METR team.

The six chosen researchers, whose names were not immediately published on Thursday, will be “siloed” from the wider METR team.

“Embedded evaluation gives a few qualified people working under Anthropic’s security standards a close view of how we operate,” Anthropic said. “It’s not a way for other organizations to obtain our information, or that of our customers and partners.”

METR did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Thursday.

• Netflix shares have struggled amid slower engagement growth and intensifying competition.
• The paid streaming leader laid off about 1,000 on Wednesday, its biggest round of cuts in years.
• Here are reasons Wall Street is uneasy about Netflix’s outlook.

Netflix is in a slump — and it’s not just because you can’t find a hot new show to watch.

The streaming titan’s shares are down 42% in the last 12 months and have been nearly cut in half from their all-time high last summer. Netflix had its biggest round of layoffs in four years on Wednesday, cutting about 1,000 employees, roughly 6% of the company.

So, what’s going wrong?

Netflix’s viewership growth has slowed as free competitors like YouTube gain momentum, and initiatives like games and podcasts have yet to become breakout hits. Add in the company’s surprise bid for Warner Bros., which it later abandoned, and some investors are feeling on edge.

Co-CEOs Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters said in a memo that entertaining the world “requires us to be disciplined about where we prioritize our people and resources” but added that the company is still on track to reach its financial goals this year.

Many of Netflix’s struggles aren’t unique to the “Stranger Things” maker, which disrupted Hollywood by pioneering paid TV streaming and has a major influence over culture.

“Even the top streaming companies are not immune to stagnation and financial difficulties,” said Ross Benes, a media analyst at EMARKETER, Business Insider’s sister company.

Other entertainment giants like Disney and NBCUniversal have turned to layoffs recently.

Here are five of the biggest challenges facing Netflix right now.

1. Engagement growth is slowing

Although Netflix is still growing revenue at a healthy pace while generating billions in profits, Wall Street is concerned about its viewership trends.

Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos told Bloomberg at an event last month that “we’re not growing as fast as I want us to, and we’re working on making that move faster.”

Netflix grew global viewing hours by 2% year over year to 97 billion in the first half of 2026. The streaming giant also announced last quarter that it would share its engagement report only once a year, down from twice a year.

When announcing the move, Netflix told investors that “engagement is not just the quantity of view hours, but also refers to the quality and variety of our offering.”

Investors are worried that slowing engagement growth could hurt Netflix’s ability to retain customers and persuade them to pay more, though the streamer has an industry-low cancellation rate.

Engagement is also “the golden compass for advertisers” since higher usage helps them reach broader audiences, said Brandon Katz, an analyst at Greenlight Analytics. If Netflix keeps growing viewership, it could charge advertisers higher rates.

The lack of a new breakout hit is also troubling for Netflix analysts. “Stranger Things,” the platform’s biggest show ever, ended last year, and the streamer needs to find new franchises and buzzy hits that can replace it.

“Entertainment is an inherently subjective and streaky industry,” Katz said.

2. Competition is heating up from free streamers and social media

While Netflix is still leading its paid peers in viewership and profits, free streaming services like YouTube, Tubi, and The Roku Channel are gaining popularity, especially among younger audiences.

YouTube’s viewership share on US TVs was 14.2% in July — nearly double Netflix’s 7.8% share, according to Nielsen.

Roku’s free streamer and Tubi are also formidable competitors with shares of 2.9% and 2%, respectively. These no-cost services have grown as paid streamers like Netflix have raised their prices.

Netflix is considering starting a free offering in some markets, co-CEO Greg Peters has said.

Then there’s the popularity of social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram, which are hoovering up viewership hours.

Netflix is looking to counter social-media foes by investing in video podcasts and creators to increase engagement and connect with younger viewers without breaking the bank.

“With pressure mounting, Netflix will look to turn the tide by getting a boost from low-cost content,” Benes said.

3. The Wall Street narrative soured after Netflix’s failed bid for Warner Bros.

Netflix spooked some shareholders by making an $82.7 billion bid for the Warner Bros. studio and streaming assets. Paramount Skydance eventually bought the whole company.

Although adding HBO Max and the Warner Bros. studio could have given Netflix a boost, investors worried that its leaders had run out of ideas for growth since Netflix hasn’t historically turned to major dealmaking. Besides that narrative, shareholders were concerned about Netflix taking on a massive debt load and going through a complex integration process, Katz said.

Even though Netflix pocketed a $2.8 billion breakup fee when the deal fell apart, the stock never fully recovered.

4. Games and podcasts haven’t become runaway hits

Netflix has made major pushes into games and podcasts, though neither has been a game changer so far.

The streamer shut down a pair of game studios this summer and laid off some staffers in October 2024 as well.

Netflix hasn’t shared many details about how its games or podcasts are performing. The company said in its July shareholder letter that it had successfully launched games like “FIFA World Cup: Launch Edition” and “Unhinged,” and that the kids app Netflix Playground tripled its daily user count, but it didn’t specify how much time those games generated.

Neither games nor podcasts were on last quarter’s engagement report. If either were a substantial hit, company leadership would likely want to share specific metrics of their success to investors eager to see new growth areas.

Games are “not a bad idea” but likely are “not going to get any subs,” said Alan Wolk, a media analyst at research firm TVREV. He added that it “remains to be seen if people will start watching podcasts on Netflix,” saying the streamer should adjust its mobile app interface to improve the experience.

Still, podcasts are a cheap way to expand into verticals like news and are also “laundry folding programming” that can form habits, Katz said.

5. Sports rights are expensive and tied up

Another way Netflix is trying to boost engagement is investing in live sports — including NFL games on Christmas Day and the day before Thanksgiving, the MLB Home Run Derby, and one-off events like a boxing match between Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua.

While Netflix executives have said these events drive subscriptions at an unusually high rate, sports rights are also increasingly expensive due to bidding wars between TV networks like ESPN and tech giants like Amazon and YouTube.

Live sports are an effective acquisition tool and can help Netflix scale its budding advertising business.

“Sports are the last vestige of the monoculture and where they can reach all the people who never otherwise see ads,” Wolk said.

However, sports aren’t cheap and offer little to no replay value, making them more of a temporary fix for engagement than a long-term driver of viewership.

Netflix also has to be creative with its sports investments since most of the marquee rights — from the main NFL packages to the NBA, college football, NFL, and international soccer — are tied up for years. The streamer did secure live rights to the Women’s World Cup in 2027 and 2031, which it hopes will capture the cultural zeitgeist.