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• Jack Nekhala’s Bed Scrunchie sales faced a major hit after Amazon deactivated his seller account.
• Nekhala says the loss left the founders in debt, yet he still shops on Amazon several times a week.
• The habit bothers him more than he can explain.

Jack Nekhala has every reason to stop shopping on Amazon.

His company, Bed Scrunchie, generated about $4.5 million in 2024 and was on track for more, Nekhala said. However, Amazon deactivated its seller account just before the holidays that year, cutting off its biggest sales channel.

“Once the collapse happened through Amazon, it basically collapsed the entire business,” Nekhala told Business Insider for our So Expensive video series.

That makes his next admission harder to say.

“I still shop on Amazon,” Nekhala said. “I have a daughter. She needs bikes. She needs a scooter, she needs all sorts, she needs different things. And that’s the place we go to.”

He said he shops on Amazon two to three times a week and sometimes has several orders in a single day.

The habit bothers him more than he can explain, he said. “Continuing to shop there feels like being forced to sit down to dinner with the institution that upended your life.”

The account shutdown, he said, left him and his business partner carrying debt and trying to rebuild the financial security they had spent nearly 20 years creating for their young families. “My life has not been the same,” he said.

For Nekhala, his Amazon shopping habit reflects how deeply the online marketplace has become embedded in everyday life. In a recent survey of shoppers across the US and Europe, 75% of consumers said they buy from Amazon at least once a month.

“I do not shop there because I have forgiven what happened. I shop there because Amazon has made itself so convenient and embedded in everyday life that even people who feel harmed by it continue to depend on it,” Nekhala said.

“It’s crazy,” he added of his own shopping habits. “It’s really incredible what they’ve accomplished.”

Amazon became the default

The appeal of Amazon isn’t just price. It’s the convenience, Nekhala said.

Amazon already has his payment information, shipping addresses, and purchase history. Adding one more item to an order is often easier than creating an account somewhere else, he said.

“They remove all the friction,” Michael Nusinkis, Nekhala’s business partner, said.

“I think you just have this muscle memory. I need to buy something — Amazon,” Nusinkis added.

The founders saw that same behavior from their own customers.

Before Amazon deactivated their seller account, the pair aired a national television infomercial directing viewers to a website where they could buy the Bed Scrunchie directly for $39.99.

On Amazon, the product sold for $44.95. And they said Amazon sales of the item consistently spiked whenever the infomercial aired.

“All advertising roads lead back to Amazon,” Nekhala said.

Nekhala said customers would likely discover the product on television or the company’s website, then go to Amazon to compare options, read reviews, and buy it—even at a higher price.

Surveys suggest up to three-quarters of Amazon shoppers start their product searches there.

Even after losing their account, the business couldn’t leave Amazon

After months of disputes with Amazon, including allegations that the company had infringed its own patent and violated Amazon’s review policies, Nekhala and Nusinkis lost their seller account. The founders dispute both allegations.

They now sell Bed Scrunchie to a third-party distributor, which keeps it available on Amazon for $49.99. Nekhala estimates that Amazon still accounts for 70% to 80% of the company’s sales.

That means shoppers may see the Bed Scrunchie name on Amazon without realizing they are buying from a reseller—not the small business that created it, he said.

“Amazon shut out the people who invented and built the product, yet the product remains on its platform at a higher price,” Nekhala added. “That contradiction is what makes continuing to shop there so painful.”

Nekhala said the company would rather sell the product for less on its own website. But he believes Amazon’s pricing policies make that difficult: Listing it more cheaply elsewhere, he said, could mean the product loses visibility or prominent placement on Amazon.

As a result, he said, sellers keep prices in line across retailers, even when it means customers pay more.

That’s one of the practices at the center of a lawsuit California’s attorney general filed against Amazon, alleging it pressures brands and third-party sellers to raise prices at competing retailers so Amazon isn’t undercut.

In a statement to Business Insider, Amazon says its goal is to protect customers from overpaying and maintain trust in its marketplace by comparing prices with other reputable retailers. If a product is listed for less elsewhere, Amazon says it may choose not to prominently feature that offer, though it remains available for purchase. Amazon also argues California’s case relies on a handful of emails taken out of context and says the challenged practices are common retail negotiations designed to deliver “low prices, vast selection, and unmatched convenience” for customers.

• “Saturday Night Live” took on Kevin O’Leary and his data center.
• “These things shouldn’t be anywhere. That’s why I’m building one in Utah,” Johnson’s O’Leary said.
• The real O’Leary is backing a giant data center project spanning over 20,000 acres.

AI data centers got the “Weekend Update” treatment on “Saturday Night Live” this week.

Comedian James Austin Johnson portrayed “Shark Tank” investor Kevin O’Leary on the sketch comedy show, during which he addressed the dispute over the real O’Leary’s proposed data center in Utah, known as the Stratos Project.

“It’s very simple. All I want is to buy up 40,000 acres of God’s untouched splendor and replace it with a very loud computer that steals your job,” Johnson’s O’Leary said. “Is it going to take up precious water? Absolutely. Is it going to provide a necessary service? Who’s to say? But on the flip side, it’s going to make me a tremendous amount of money, and I think that’s great.”

The “SNL” version of O’Leary said he understood that some Americans were concerned about data centers near their homes. (An actual May Gallup poll found that over half of American surveyors opposed constructing AI data centers in their local area.)

“These things are terrible and shouldn’t be anywhere. That’s why I’m building one in Utah,” he said.

Data centers are a contentious issue in the United States.

Leading tech companies rely on AI data centers to power their systems and products. Supporters say they’ll create new jobs, bolster the economy, and help the US defeat China in the race to control the global AI market.

Residents in the places where they are being built, however, are often much less excited about them.

The Utah project, backed by O’Leary Digital, has drawn criticism from many local residents over concerns that the data center could strain local resources and worsen the environment. Some residents are also upset over what they consider a lack of transparency from O’Leary and local leaders. Critics of the Stratos Project have staged protests, created petitions, and taken legal action to stop its construction.

O’Leary scaled back the data center’s size from about 40,000 to just over 20,000 acres after public pushback. He has said he remains undeterred, though.

“There are bumps in the road. There’s litigation. There’s misinformation. There’s propaganda. You name it. But if you know what you’re doing is right, you make it, you get there,” O’Leary told Business Insider in June. “Persevere.”

During a May interview on Fox News, O’Leary said said some critics of the project have ties to the Chinese Communist Party, a claim he later walked back. A Utah advocacy group that has publicly opposed the project filed a defamation lawsuit against Fox News and O’Leary in July.

On “Saturday Night Live,” Johnson’s O’Leary acknowledged the incident.

“I made the mildly inflammatory claim that every single person in Utah who opposes me is a paid communist super agent from China. Was I wrong? Perhaps. But just because they’re not, doesn’t mean they aren’t,” he said.

He added, “I’m going to make the future go away. And we’re doing just that in Utah.”

• Alexandr Wang said his prolific X posting is part of a broader effort to make Meta cool again.
• The 29-year-old has filled his feed with memes about Muse, the company’s AI agent.
• Wang said his posts “made an impact” on the growth of Muse.

Alexandr Wang said he had trouble focusing during recent Meta meetings.

On his mind: New memes to post about the company’s popular new AI assistant.

“I would just like think of a meme and I’d be like ‘Oh God, I have to get this out,'” Wang said in a recent interview with podcaster David Senra, adding that his coworkers were “somewhat surprised” at the buzz his posts were generating.

“It actually made an impact on growth,” he said of the posts, “which is kind of hilarious.”

Much has been said about Meta’s chief AI officer and his chaotic X feed, which the 29-year-old has crammed with occasionally off-color yet invariably eccentric references to Muse, Meta’s personal AI assistant that sent the company’s stock soaring and redefined the market for AI tools.

In his interview with Senra, though, Wang said that his often spur-of-the-moment posts served a broader goal — to make Meta “cool again.”

“Despite having like these incredible pieces of cultural software like Instagram and Facebook, historically, Meta was not cool,” he said. “I remembered that the internet rewards risk.”

After launching on September 8, Muse shot to the top of Apple’s app store 10 days later, surpassing ChatGPT. Meta says Muse can help users research, fill out forms, buy items online, book restaurant reservations, find a dog sitter, and connect with services such as email, calendars, Spotify, Instagram, and OpenTable.

The app marked Meta’s first successful breakthrough in AI tech, after its Llama and Spark LLM models failed to find niches already filled by widely used models from OpenAI and Anthropic.

With Muse, Meta found a largely untapped gold mine — though competing AI agents from OpenClaw and Instinct already existed in Silicon Valley circles. Muse, however, had the advantage of coming from a popular company with several billion potential customers already signed up on Instagram and Facebook.

And the internet, weary of staid pronouncements from CEOs who were perhaps once cool but are now entering their 40s (Mark Zuckerberg is 42), welcomed the boundless energy of a young executive newly endowed with power in the AI era.

“It was a lot of fun,” Wang said. “There were like a few tweets where I just didn’t think that much about it and just said, ‘Fuck it, post.'”

Business Insider wants to know, by the way, how you’re using personal AI agents. Take our survey below!

• I loved being in the marching band in high school.
• I didn’t love the practice that was forced on me from a young age, and neither did my husband.
• We waited until our three kids asked about music lessons instead of forcing them on them.

Some of my favorite high school memories involve music. I played flute in the marching band, and I still remember traveling with my friends to perform at Disneyland in our senior year. Those trips were fun, and the friends I made in band class are the only high school friends I still keep in touch with.

But getting there involved years of music lessons that I didn’t exactly choose.

I started piano lessons in fourth grade, which meant giving up after-school hours when I’d much rather have been doing almost anything else. Eventually, I switched to flute and continued playing through high school. By then, I was good enough to enjoy being in the marching band, but years of being told to practice left me with mixed feelings about music.

My husband had a similar experience with the viola. He spent countless hours practicing an instrument because his parents wanted him to. Today, decades later, he doesn’t play it.

Neither of us wanted to repeat that experience with our own kids.

We decided not to sign them up

When our kids reached the age when many of their friends were starting piano, violin, or other music lessons, we took a different approach.

We didn’t say no to music. We simply didn’t volunteer them for it.

If they wanted to learn an instrument, we told them we would support them. But we weren’t going to spend hundreds of dollars on lessons and then spend the next several years nagging them to practice something they never asked to do.

It wasn’t always easy to stick to that philosophy. As a parent, it’s tempting to look at all the activities other kids are doing and wonder whether you’re supposed to be signing your kids up, too.

Music seemed particularly important. I knew firsthand how much kids could get out of being part of a band or orchestra. I also knew that learning an instrument can teach discipline and give kids an outlet for creativity. I didn’t think those benefits required us to force it on them.

Eventually, they came to us

Then something interesting happened: They asked about music lessons.

My daughter eventually decided she wanted to take acoustic guitar lessons. Later, my sons got interested in music, too, signing up for electric guitar and drumming.

Because they chose these activities themselves, the dynamic was completely different from what I remembered from childhood.

I’m not hovering over a piano bench telling someone to practice scales. I’m not threatening to take away screen time because someone hasn’t picked up a guitar.

They know they have to practice to get better, and they’re more invested because the decision to play was theirs.

I get to enjoy the show

The biggest surprise has been how much more enjoyable music is for me as a parent.

Instead of being the kid who is being told to practice, I’m the mom sitting in the audience with my phone out, waiting for the performance to start so I can record them.

I get to cheer when they nail a song and encourage them when they don’t. I get to listen to them practice “Johnny B. Goode” in their bedrooms and watch their confidence grow.

And because they chose this for themselves, their accomplishments feel like theirs.

Maybe that’s what I was really trying to give my kids by taking music lessons off the parental to-do list: not necessarily a childhood without instruments, but one where they get to decide what they want to become good at.

After spending my childhood being told to practice, I’ve found that one of my favorite parts of parenting is not having to be the practice police.

• Taylor Swift’s “The Life of a Showgirl” has yielded three No. 1 songs on the Billboard Hot 100.
• It’s the first female album since Swift’s own “1989” to achieve the feat.
• The Beatles, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, and Rihanna also have multiple albums on the list.

Thanks to “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore,” Taylor Swift has added another rare achievement to her resumé.

The deluxe edition of Swift’s 12th album added four new songs to the tracklist, including “Patient Zero,” which debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 — becoming the album’s third song to reach the chart’s summit, following “The Fate of Ophelia” and “Opalite.”

Since Billboard launched the Hot 100 in 1958 as the definitive all-genre singles chart in the US, only 33 albums have spawned three or more No. 1 hits (not counting greatest-hits compilations).

Counting songs that were released later on deluxe editions and reissues, Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream” holds the all-time record with six No. 1 songs, followed by Michael Jackson’s “Bad” with five.

This elite group of musical blockbusters seems to be getting more exclusive over time: Only 12 of the qualifying albums were released in the 21st century. “The Life of a Showgirl” is the first female album to achieve the feat in over a decade, since Swift’s own “1989” in 2014.

All 33 albums are listed below in chronological order.

1. “Where Did Our Love Go” by The Supremes

No. 1 songs: “Where Did Our Love Go,” “Baby Love,” “Come See About Me”

2. “Help!” by The Beatles

No. 1 songs: “Help!,” “Ticket to Ride,” “Yesterday”*

*Included on the original UK release of “Help!” and later included on the US-exclusive release of “Yesterday and Today”

3. “Magical Mystery Tour” by The Beatles

No. 1 songs: “Penny Lane,” “All You Need Is Love,” “Hello Goodbye”

3. “Let It Be” by The Beatles

No. 1 songs: “Let It Be,” “The Long and Winding Road,” “Get Back”

4. The “Saturday Night Fever” soundtrack

No. 1 songs: “How Deep Is Your Love,” “Stayin’ Alive,” “Night Fever,” “If I Can’t Have You”

5. “Spirits Having Flown” by the Bee Gees

No. 1 songs: “Tragedy,” “Too Much Heaven,” “Love You Inside Out”

6. “Make It Big” by Wham!

No. 1 songs: “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go,” “Everything She Wants,” “Careless Whisper”

7. “Whitney Houston” by Whitney Houston

No. 1 songs: “Saving All My Love For You,” “How Will I Know,” “Greatest Love Of All”

8. “True Blue” by Madonna

No. 1 songs: “Papa Don’t Preach,” “Live to Tell,” “Open Your Heart”

9. “Whitney” by Whitney Houston

No. 1 songs: “I Wanna Dance with Somebody (Who Loves Me),” “Didn’t We Almost Have It All,” “So Emotional,” “Where Do Broken Hearts Go”

10. “Bad” by Michael Jackson

No. 1 songs: “Bad,” “The Way You Make Me Feel,” “Man in the Mirror,” “I Just Can’t Stop Loving You,” “Dirty Diana”

11. “Faith” by George Michael

No. 1 songs: “Faith,” “Father Figure,” “One More Try,” “Monkey”

12. “Forever Your Girl” by Paula Abdul

No. 1 songs: “Opposites Attract,” “Forever Your Girl,” “Straight Up,” “Cold Hearted”

13. “Girl You Know It’s True” by Milli Vanilli

No. 1 songs: “Baby Don’t Forget My Number,” “Blame It On The Rain,” “Girl I’m Gonna Miss You”

14. “Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation 1814” by Janet Jackson

No. 1 songs: “Miss You Much,” “Love Will Never Do (Without You),” “Escapade,” “Black Cat”

15. “Wilson Phillips” by Wilson Phillips

No. 1 songs: “Hold On,” “Release Me,” “You’re in Love”

16. “Mariah Carey” by Mariah Carey

No. 1 songs: “Vision of Love,” “I Don’t Wanna Cry,” “Someday,” “Love Takes Time”

17. “Daydream” by Mariah Carey

No. 1 songs: “Fantasy,” “One Sweet Day,” “Always Be My Baby”

18. “The Boy Is Mine” by Monica

No. 1 songs: “The Boy Is Mine,” “The First Night,” “Angel of Mine”

19. “Christina Aguilera” by Christina Aguilera

No. 1 songs: “Genie in a Bottle,” “What a Girl Wants,” “Come on Over Baby (All I Want is You)”

20. “Confessions” by Usher

No. 1 songs: “Yeah!,” “Confessions Part II,” “Burn,” “My Boo”*

*Included on the special-edition reissue of “Confessions”

21. “FutureSex/LoveSounds” by Justin Timberlake

No. 1 songs: “SexyBack,” “My Love,” “What Goes Around…Comes Around”

22. “The Dutchess” by Fergie

No. 1 songs: “London Bridge,” “Glamorous,” “Big Girls Don’t Cry”

23. “Good Girl Gone Bad” by Rihanna

No. 1 songs: “Umbrella,” “Disturbia,”* “Take a Bow”*

*Included on the reissue “Good Girl Gone Bad: Reloaded”

24. “The E.N.D.” by The Black Eyed Peas

No. 1 songs: “Boom Boom Pow,” “Imma Be,” “I Gotta Feeling”

25. “Teenage Dream” by Katy Perry

No. 1 songs: “Teenage Dream,” “Last Friday Night (T.G.I.F.),” “California Gurls,” “Firework,” “E.T.,” “Part of Me”*

*Included on the reissue “Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection”

26. “Loud” by Rihanna

No. 1 songs: “S&M,” “What’s My Name?,” “Only Girl (In The World)”

27. “21” by Adele

No. 1 songs: “Rolling in the Deep,” “Set Fire to the Rain,” “Someone Like You”

28. “1989” by Taylor Swift

No. 1 songs: “Blank Space,” “Shake It Off,” “Bad Blood,” “Is It Over Now? (Taylor’s Version) [From the Vault]”*

*Included on the rerecorded album “1989 (Taylor’s Version)”

29. “Purpose” by Justin Bieber

No. 1 songs: “What Do You Mean?,” “Sorry,” “Love Yourself”

30. “Scorpion” by Drake

No. 1 songs: “God’s Plan,” “Nice for What,” “In My Feelings”

31. “After Hours” by The Weeknd

No. 1 songs: “Heartless,” “Blinding Lights,” “Save Your Tears”

32. “The Life of a Showgirl” by Taylor Swift

No. 1 songs: “The Fate of Ophelia,” “Opalite,” “Patient Zero”*

*Included on the deluxe edition “The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore”

• Trump called those who don’t adopt the term Super Intelligence “the enemy.”
• Marc Benioff said Salesforce’s AIForce platform is becoming SIForce.
• Elon Musk also pledged to rename SpaceXAI as SpaceXSI.

Donald Trump wants two letters scrubbed from the tech industry’s vocabulary, and some executives are already reaching for replacements.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said Friday that his company’s AIForce platform is getting a new name.

“The era of Super Intelligence is here. AIForce is officially SIForce,” Benioff wrote on X.

The announcement follows Elon Musk’s pledge Sunday to rename SpaceXAI to SpaceXSI, giving Trump’s campaign to replace “artificial intelligence” with “super intelligence” traction beyond Washington. The company’s X account has already been changed.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has also made the switch, referring to the tech as “Super Intelligence” in an X post about AI model containment and governance on Saturday. While Nadella has used the term “superintelligence” in the past, this was the first time he used it as two words — and capitalized.

Salesforce’s change concerns its agent platform, rather than the company’s corporate name.

Trump, meanwhile, is turning his terminology preference into a test.

“The White House considers anyone that uses the term, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ as opposed to the highly accepted new and more accurate term, ‘Super Intelligence,’ THE ENEMY!” Trump wrote on Truth Social on Thursday.

The warning escalates a push Trump formalized in a September 29 executive order directing federal agencies to substitute “Super Intelligence” and “SI” for “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI” in official communications, websites, reports, and policy documents, to the extent permitted by law.

Private companies aren’t required by the order to follow suit. But Benioff’s announcement and Musk’s proposed rebrand show how the president’s preferred language is making its way into corporate branding.

The administration’s argument is that AI has outgrown its name. The executive order says today’s systems increasingly amplify human creativity and that “Super Intelligence” better captures their potential.

The rebranding push complicates matters for companies whose names include AI, and raises questions over what counts as superintelligence. The term generally describes systems far more capable than humans across a broad range of tasks, and renaming existing products doesn’t establish that they meet that threshold.

OpenAI, Scale AI, Character AI, and Resolve AI did not respond to requests for comment.