Despite blackouts, logistical and other major challenges in 2022, the business community is working together to adapt, solve problems and exploit new opportunities.

China has sought to position itself as neutral over the conflict but has offered diplomatic backing to its strategic ally Russia.

Brazilian soccer icon Pele, regarded by many aficionados as the greatest ever, was also an opponent of Russia’s war against Ukraine. He leaves behind a great legacy both on and off the field.

Map showing the distance from Redmond, Oregon, to Denver International Airport.

Grace Dean/Insider via Google Maps

• A couple said they drove for 18 hours to catch a flight after their Southwest one was canceled.
• “There’s no amount of money they could give us to make us fly Southwest again,” Alex Kain told CNBC.
• Scheduling chaos left crew stranded but the airline plans to resume “normal operations” from Friday.

A couple says they ended up driving for 18 hours on Christmas Eve to catch a last-minute flight after their Southwest flight from Denver was canceled amid the travel chaos.

Alex Kain told CNBC that the flight he and his girlfriend were meant to take from Denver to Seattle was canceled at 2 a.m. They decided instead to hire a rental car and drive more than 1,100 miles to an airport in Redmond, Oregon, which offers multiple flights a day to Seattle, to catch an Alaska Airlines flight, he said.

“There’s no amount of money they could give us to make us fly Southwest again,” Kain told the outlet.

The last-minute change of plan ended up costing the couple up to $3,000, Kain estimated. They told CNBC that they planned to request reimbursement to cover the hotels, rental car, gas, and replacement flight.

Some passengers were stranded over Christmas as the bitter winter storm that ripped through the US last week caused major disruptions to air travel across the country. Southwest took much longer to resume normal operations than other airlines. This has stemmed largely from issues with its scheduling tools, including problems getting crew to where they needed to be to operate flights.

Piles of unclaimed luggage build up at the Southwest Airlines baggage claim LAX on December 28.

Christina House/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

The Dallas-based airline canceled 71% of its schedule – or 2,909 flights – on Monday, according to flight-tracking site FlightAware. The airline also said it would operate roughly one-third of its regular schedule for the “next several days.”

On Thursday, Southwest cut 57% of its flights, per FlightAware data, compared with 5% at Frontier, the US airline with the second-highest percentage of flights canceled that day.

But Southwest plans to resume “normal operations with minimal disruptions” from Friday. As of 6 a.m. ET, only 39 flights – less than 1% of its schedule – are set to be cut, according to FlightAware.

“We are encouraged by the progress we’ve made to realign crew, their schedules, and our fleet,” the airline said in a statement on Thursday. The carrier has asked corporate employees to volunteer for eight-hour shifts helping with crew scheduling rather than carrying out their normal duties, Insider reported.

A union representing Southwest staff has blamed the airline for the chaos, saying that “outdated” scheduling software meant flight attendants had to rely on manual solutions and phone calls to get accommodation and find out their next routes.

“We have much work ahead of us, including investing in new solutions to manage wide-scale disruptions,” Southwest said Thursday.

Southwest said passengers who experienced cancellations or significant delays between December 24 and January 2 can fill in a form to request a refund of their unused ticket. The airline says it will honor “reasonable requests” for reimbursement for meals, hotel, and alternate transportation. This includes rental cars or tickets on other airlines if passengers email their receipts.

Southwest also said customers booked on flights through January 2 could rebook the same route on new dates within 30 days of their original departure date at no extra charge.

Southwest did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment made outside of normal working hours. 

Have you been affected by current travel disruptions? Or do you work at an airport or for an airline that’s swamped by the chaos? Email this reporter at gdean@insider.com.

Elon Musk took control of Twitter two months ago.

Mateusz Slodkowski/Getty Images

• A new Twitter recruit contacted a former employee to ask how things worked at the company.
• Onboarding training used to take three days but now lasts for 90 minutes, per The New York Times.
• Amid the many changes since Elon Musk took over, some staff now bring their own toilet paper. 

A new recruit at Twitter had to contact a former employee on LinkedIn after onboarding training was slashed, a report said. 

The ex-staffer told The New York Times the worker got in touch to ask how services worked at Twitter because the training had been cut from three days to just 90 minutes.

The training used to include information on compliance with privacy and security agreements with global regulators, three people who spoke on condition of anonymity told the newspaper. 

Elon Musk acquired Twitter on October 27. Since then, he’s cut about 70% of the company’s workforce, brought in some members of his close circle, and Tesla and SpaceX engineers.

A former manager told The Times he’d seen documents showing the automaker had billed Twitter for some of its workers’ services as if they were contractors.

One of the latest additions to Musk’s team is one of his right-hand men, Omead Afshar, per the report. He supervised the construction of Tesla’s factory in Austin, Texas, and is now a vice-president at SpaceX, Bloomberg reported. 

Amid the latest changes at the company, four current and former employees told The New York Times that some workers now bring their own paper toilet after the company cut janitorial services. They also said that the stench of leftover takeout food and body odor has taken over the company’s San Francisco offices.

Afshar, Twitter, and Tesla didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment from Insider. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin (center) and press secretary Dmitry Pekov (l) at the Eurasian Economic Summit in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on November 9, 2022.

Contributor/Getty Images

• Putin continues to be isolated and has no plan for the war in Ukraine, The Washington Post reported.
• Putin’s inner circle is getting increasingly frustrated with him, sources told The Post.
• Much of Russia’s elite are losing faith with Putin and fear there is no way out, the sources said.

Vladimir Putin’s inner circle is frustrated because they feel that the Russian president is unsure of what to do next with the war in Ukraine, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Several sources told The Post they believe that Putin does not have a plan for how to continue the full-scale invasion, which was launched just over 10 months ago.

“There is huge frustration among the people around him,” an unnamed Russian billionaire, who is in contact with top-ranking officials in the Kremlin, told The Post. “He clearly doesn’t know what to do.”

As Russia continues to struggle in Ukraine, Putin has retreated from the public eye. He recently canceled his annual State of the Nation address, usually held on New Year’s Eve.

The address typically involves a speech to Russia’s Federal Assembly, followed by an hours-long press conference with hundreds of journalists from across the country. 

The Institute for the Study of War (ISW) cited the lack of a positive agenda as one of the reasons for the cancellation of the address, though Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov hinted that it will likely be held early in the new year instead.

Sources told The Post that Putin postponing the address was another sign that he has no plan for the war in Ukraine.

“In the address, there should be a plan. But there is no plan. I think they just don’t know what to say,” the billionaire said, according to The Post.

He added that Putin is increasingly isolated: “He doesn’t like speaking with people anyway. He has a very narrow circle, and now it has gotten narrower still.”

Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told The Post that many in Russia’s elite are starting to lose faith in their leader because he is “incapable of giving answers to questions.”

“The elite does not know what to believe, and they fear to think about tomorrow,” Stanovaya told The Post. “To a large degree, there is the feeling that there is no way out, that the situation is irreparable, that they are totally dependent on one person.”

One Russian official, who was not named, told The Post: “How can [Putin] tell us everything is going to plan, when we are already in the 10th month of the war, and we were told it was only going to take a few days.”

The official added that Putin’s only tactic right now appears to be urging the West and Ukraine to begin peace talks, something which he did most recently on Christmas Day.

“But,” the official told The Post, Putin is willing to talk “only on his terms.”

Russia’s army has struggled since its invasion of Ukraine, with widespread reports and intelligence updates highlighting poor training and low morale among its troops.

Despite this, former Western diplomats and government officials told Reuters as recently as October that Putin’s grip on power has remained firm.

Traders.

Reuters

• US asset prices aren’t yet reflecting the risk a recession poses to companies, a leading strategist says.
• Cyclical or heavily indebted businesses could struggle in a downturn, Simplify’s Michael Green said.
• Green touted high-quality companies with big and steady profits, and little need for financing, as likely winners in 2023.

US investors have punished growth stocks such as  Tesla and Meta this year, but they’re yet to sour on other assets that could suffer if a recession hits, a leading strategist has warned.

“We have largely seen a correction on the basis of the high-flying, richly valued names,” Michael Green, chief strategist at Simplify Asset Management, told Yahoo Finance on Thursday.

“We’re not seeing any indication that markets are really trying to price in a recession per se by letting the more cyclical or more levered components of the market really deteriorate,” he continued.

In other words, companies with sizeable debts could struggle to refinance or repay them as interest rates rise and liquidity dries up, while businesses that are sensitive to the health of the wider economy could also run into trouble in a downturn. Yet their stock prices and credit spreads don’t yet reflect those risks, in Green’s view.

Green suggested that stocks have retreated this year largely because investors have rebalanced their portfolios, not because of recession fears. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes have driven down bond prices, spurring some investors to sell equities to maintain their preferred ratio of stocks to bonds, he explained.

The Fed has approved seven hikes this year, lifting its benchmark rate from almost zero in March to over 4% today. The US central bank’s goal is to beat back inflation, which surged to a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, and remained above 7% in November.

Higher rates can cool the pace of price increases by deterring spending, borrowing, and hiring. However, they can also pull down asset prices, hammer companies’ profits by eroding demand and drying up financing, and drag economies into recession.

Green, a portfolio manager at Simplify, touted high-quality companies with large and stable profit margins, and minimal need to refinance or tap credit markets, as likely winners in 2023.

Read more: ‘2023 is going to be one of the greatest years to invest’: A millennial who achieved financial independence at age 30 shares his top investing advice as we head into the new year

Happy Friday, folks! I’m Jordan Parker Erb. Before we begin, I have some ~professional news~ to share. 

There won’t be a newsletter on Monday (we’ll be off figuring out what 2023 is) and then Tuesday’s edition … will be my last! I’ll be moving into a different role at Insider, and Diamond Naga Siu, a senior reporter on our tech analysis team, will be taking over the newsletter.

I’ll be back in your inboxes on Tuesday to say goodbye — so hold onto your tissues until then.

For now, we’ve got a lot to cover, including more of the year’s top stories. From burnout among open-source developers to the downfall of Andreessen Horowitz’s buzzy tech publication, Future, it’s a packed edition. 

Let’s get to it.

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If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Download Insider’s app here.

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Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

1. Could TikTok vanish from the US? Amid security and privacy concerns, there’s a renewed push for TikTok to sell its US operations, and government bans on the app are raising questions about a full ban for consumers in the United States. We broke down how TikTok could avoid a ban.

2. These are Microsoft’s most significant departures and hires of 2022. The company’s most significant departures include executives who resigned following Insider’s reports on misconduct allegations. Microsoft also made some notable hires, like ex-Amazon Web Services executive Teresa Carlson. See who joined and left Microsoft this year.

3. An Insider reporter asked ChatGPT to write her cover letters. The writer gave the bot some real job descriptions, then sent the cover letters to hiring managers — both of whom said they’d have given her an interview, but that the letters lacked personality. See what hiring managers said about the AI cover letters.

4. An anonymous worker describes cheating on an exam to boost their career in the tech industry. The worker told Insider that they used “exam dumps” to pass technical certifications, and that the answers were easy to find online with a quick Google search. But even though it gave them an advantage, they now see it as harmful — they explain why.

5. Here’s how European VCs are advising their founders ahead of a looming recession. We asked investors from firms like Lightspeed, Balderton, and Kiko Ventures what they’re advising their portfolios. From focusing on the long-term vision to watching their runway, here’s the advice they shared.

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More top reads from 2022:

Marianne Ayala/Insider

6. Open-source developers are burning out — and it’s putting the entire internet at risk. The internet and many of the world’s largest companies rely on open-source software, which is built by developers who make little to no money. This year, developers told us that they’re fed up, and some are quitting and even sabotaging their own projects. Why that’s bad news for the rest of the internet.

7. Intuit gave most Mailchimp employees a 10% raise this year. But morale remains low. Despite the 10% raise, doled out in April, Mailchimp employees told Insider that people nonetheless felt belittled and were quitting in droves. Inside the attrition at Mailchimp.

8. Following Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian software developers used code to inspire, launch attacks, and defend their country. Insider talked to Ukrainian developers about how they were mounting a defense both online and off, from attacking Russian websites and creating bots to combat disinformation to picking up artillery. How eight developers fought back. 

9. Eighteen years after news-aggregator website Digg, Kevin Rose is staking his redemption on a new kind of media company. Rose, an early internet entrepreneur, founded a members-only club, called Proof, for people who buy and sell one-of-a-kind art on the blockchain — a move that put him back on top as a pioneer of the new-new internet. Inside Rose’s meteoric resurgence.

10. Earlier this year, Andreessen Horowitz’s buzzy tech publication Future shut down. The publication from prestigious venture capital firm a16z was supposed to be the next big thing in media. But a year and a half later, the publication is dead in the water. A look at what happened.

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Curated by Jordan Parker Erb in New York. (Feedback or tips? Email jerb@insider.com or tweet @jordanparkererb.) Edited by Hallam Bullock (tweet @hallam_bullock) in London.

A Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives committee was poised to release six years of former President Donald Trump’s tax returns to the public on Friday in an extraordinary move days before Republicans take control of the chamber.

Release of Trump’s returns for 2015 to 2020 will cap a multi-year battle between the former Republican president and Democratic lawmakers.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richard Neal requested the returns in 2019, arguing that Congress needed to see them to determine if legislation on presidential returns was needed.

Trump, who took office in 2017, was the first presidential candidate in decades who did not release his taxes, and he sued the committee in an effort to keep them private. The Supreme Court ruled in November in the committee’s favor.

In a report last week, the committee outlined its findings from its examination of the documents, saying the IRS broke its own rules by not auditing Trump for three out of four years while he was president.
Details released by the panel showed Trump paid no income tax in 2020, his final full year in office, despite millions of dollars in earnings from his sprawling business empire.

The records show Trump’s income and tax liability fluctuated dramatically from 2015 through 2020, during his first presidential bid and subsequent term in office. They show that Trump and his wife Melania claimed large deductions and losses and paid little or no income tax in several of those years.

Democrats were on a tight timeline to find a way to handle the returns once they obtained them, given that Republicans will take control of the House on Jan. 3 after winning a slim margin in November’s midterm elections.

Republicans have decried the quest for the tax returns as politically motivated.

The Democrat-controlled House passed a bill before it left on its winter recess that would mandate the IRS to complete audits of presidents’ tax filings within 90 days of their inauguration.

Related Galleries:

NEW YORK (Reuters) – Just over half of the 50 U.S. states are exhibiting signs of slowing economic activity, breaching a key threshold that often signals a recession is in the offing, new research from the St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank report said.

That report, released Wednesday, followed another report from the San Francisco Fed from earlier in the week that also delved into the rising prospect that the U.S. economy may fall into recession at some point in coming months.

The St. Louis Fed said in its report that if 26 states have falling activity within their borders, that offers “reasonable confidence” that the nation as a whole will fall into a recession.

Right now, the bank said that as measured by Philadelphia Fed data tracking the performance of individual states, 27 had declining activity in October. That’s enough to point to a looming downturn while standing short of the numbers that have been seen ahead of some other recessions. The authors noted that 35 states suffered declines ahead of the short and sharp recession seen in the spring of 2020, for example.

Meanwhile, a San Francisco Fed report, released Tuesday, observed that changes in the unemployment rate can also signal a downturn is on the way, in a signal that offers more near-term predictive value than the closely-watched bond market yield curve.

The paper’s authors said that the unemployment rate bottoms out and begins to move higher ahead of recession in a highly reliable pattern. When this shift occurs the unemployment rate is signaling the onset of recession in about eight months, the paper said.

The paper acknowledged its findings are akin to those of the Sahm Rule, named for former Fed economist Claudia Sahm, who pioneered work linking a rise in the jobless rate to economic downturns. The San Francisco Fed research, written by bank economist Thomas Mertens, said its innovation is to make the jobless rate change a forward-looking indicator.

Unlike the St. Louis Fed state data that is tipping toward a recession projection, the U.S. jobless rate has thus far remained fairly stable, and after bottoming at 3.5% in September, it held at 3.7% in both October and November.

The San Francisco Fed paper noted that the Fed, as of its December forecasts, sees the unemployment rate rising next year amid its campaign of aggressive rate hikes aimed at cooling high levels of inflation. In 2023, the Fed sees the jobless rate jumping up to 4.6% in a year where it sees only modest levels of overall growth.

If the Fed’s forecast comes to pass, “such an increase would trigger a recession prediction based on the unemployment rate,” the paper said. “Under this view, low unemployment can lead to a heightened probability of recession when the unemployment rate is expected to rise.”

Tim Duy, chief economist with SGH Macro Advisors, said he believes that to achieve what the Fed wants on the inflation front, the economy would likely “lose roughly two million jobs, which would be a recession like 1991 or 2001.”

Anxiety over the prospect of the economy falling into recession has been driven by the Fed’s forceful actions on inflation. Many critics contend that the central bank is focusing too much on inflation and not enough on keeping Americans employed. Central bank officials have countered that without a return to price stability, the economy will struggle to meet its full potential.

What’s more, in the press conference following the most recent Federal Open Market Committee meeting earlier this month, central bank leader Jerome Powell said that he didn’t view the current Fed outlook as a recession prediction given the expectation growth will remain positive. But he added much remains uncertain.

“I don’t think anyone knows whether we’re going to have a recession or not and, if we do, whether it’s going to be a deep one or not. It’s just, it’s not knowable,” Powell said.