TikTok only went dark for half a day before returning for U.S. users after President Trump called for a 75-day suspension of the ban.

But while the company and its suitors (from Kevin O’Leary to Elon Musk to an AI company) try to work something out, in following the law, the short video social media platform is not yet back in app stores.

This means TikTokers, who either deleted the app beforehand or bought a new phone since then, are going cold turkey (or using the desktop version). And several forward-thinking entrepreneurs thought maybe they could make a buck.

The New York Times found some “unlocked with TikTok” listings for thousands—even tens of thousands on resale sites including Poshmark and eBay.

One eBay listing says “iPhone 14 Pro UNLOCKED! W/ TikTok” and is priced at $3,000. (Unlocked iPhone 14s are currently at Walmart and Best Buy for around $300 to $500.)

Poshmark, meanwhile, has an iPhone 13 Pro Max “with TikTok and Capcut” for $3,500.

Some listings are most likely a joke like this “cracked” iPhone on Facebook Marketplace with “TikTok never deleted” for $10,000 (down from its original $30,000).

Still, if anyone is buying the phones at these prices, they’re not admitting it—yet. If you’ve purchased one, please reach out. In the meantime, a new iPhone 16 (without TikTok) starts at $799.

Related: Is TikTok Considering Selling Its U.S. Business to Elon Musk? Here’s What TikTok Says.

Buried within your emails, documents, and data lies a goldmine of insights with the power to 10X your output and double your sales – but it’s fragmented and overwhelming. That’s all about to change. A revolutionary new category of AI tools is emerging, poised to transform how we work, and Google’s Agent Space is leading the charge.

In this video, I’ll demystify this groundbreaking technology, revealing how it acts as a central command center for your business, powered by a team of tireless AI assistants. I’ll also reveal a specific prompt that helped me double the sales in my own business using these very tools.

This is beyond basic automation, this is about creating a team of specialized AI agents that handle your most tedious tasks, from customer support to report generation, all while you focus on growing your business.

Download the free ‘AI Success Kit’ (limited time only). And you’ll also get a free chapter from Ben’s brand new book, ‘The Wolf is at The Door – How to Survive and Thrive in an AI-Driven World.’

If you went back in time and asked composer and musician Mark Mothersbaugh to predict what his biggest moneymaker would be in his nearly 50-year career, he would not have said “Uncontrollable Urge.”

The now 74-year-old musician has composed music for TV shows like “The Fairly OddParents” and “Rugrats” and movies like “Thor: Ragnarok” and “The Lego Movie,” but “Uncontrollable Urge,” a song he wrote in 1978 as a founding member of the band Devo, has turned into his biggest source of income over the past decade.

Mothersbaugh’s wife and manager Anita Greenspan told Rolling Stone earlier this month that the composer makes $1 million per year in royalties on just that one song.

The turning point for “Uncontrollable Urge” was when the MTV comedy clip show Ridiculousness first launched in 2011. The show, which spotlights and reacts to viral Internet comedy videos, features a cover of “Uncontrollable Urge” as its theme song.

Related: How the ‘Oh-Oh-Oh Ozempic’ Commercial Song Made a Musician $1 Million

After over 12 years running on MTV and over 1,500 episodes, Ridiculousness has catapulted “Uncontrollable Urge” to theme song fame. At one point in June 2020, Variety noticed that “Ridiculousness” aired for 113 hours out of MTV’s 168-hour week of programming.

Still, the song’s success came as a surprise to its writer.

“I’ve written so many other songs for films and television shows,” Mothersbaugh told Rolling Stone. “I would’ve been shocked [years ago] if you told me this is the one that would become this prime source of income.”^{Mark Mothersbaugh. Photo by Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images for AFI}

Mothersbaugh wrote “Uncontrollable Urge” as the first track to Devo’s debut album, “Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!” The song was never released as a single and has only earned $150,000 across all time from Spotify streaming royalties. It never made it to the Billboard Hot 100, unlike the 1980s hit “Whip It” from Devo, which peaked at number 14 on the Billboard Hot 100.

“This was the very first song off our first album,” Mothersbaugh told Rolling Stone. “But it’s a nice ironic twist because this was one of the songs we never even made a music video for. And now it’s maybe the most-played song ever on MTV.”

Theme songs are big earners

Mothersbaugh isn’t the only musician to cash in on a lucrative theme song.

Ed Robertson, who wrote the theme song for “The Big Bang Theory,” told Rolling Stone that he has made between seven to ten figures so far in total royalties for the one song from the time the show ran from 2007 to 2019 to its syndications on TBS today.

Related: How TikTok and YouTube Have Changed the Music Industry Forever

Marco Jacobo, who created the theme song for “Abbott Elementary,” told the publication that he had made six figures from the song since the show came out in 2021.

The late musician Allee Willis had a 15% cut of the “I’ll Be There for You” Friends theme song. That cut equals about $700,000 per year for Primary Wave Publishing, the company that now owns the rights to her work, per Rolling Stone.

One industry executive told the publication that network TV pays 15 times more per minute for music than a streaming service like Spotify.

It’s not just shows that pay well — TV advertisement theme songs are lucrative too. The New York Times reports that David Paton, one of the two men who wrote the Billboard Top 10 hit “Magic” in 1974, earns seven figures from the song used in a TV ad for Ozempic.

It’s a new year, and the merry-go-round has started. The strategy is off, the talent isn’t delivering, the pipeline is way off where it should be, and the technology is never delivering.

Sound familiar? Well, it should do. That’s about 80% of the global market right now. So, how do you go about changing that?

As a veteran of go-to-market strategy, I’ve come to understand that the most prolific pressure point in delivering results might be on the bottom line, but make no mistake, your hiring strategy or lack thereof creates it.

People have been the problem since the dawn of time, yet we allow ourselves to blame the tech and not the lack of adoption of the tech, the budget, the lack of business acumen required to deliver with the allocated budget and the pipeline, where we often know the people are underperforming but don’t invest in upskilling or allow the wrong people to remain in place for too long.

So you see, people are the crux of your success — not tech, not budgets, but people, and in 2025, as a founder or business unit lead, you have to be ruthless in hiring and firing decisions. But before you run out and wield the axe, let’s look at how you can track your people to ensure you are on top of how they feel in the workplace.

First, let’s set the metric you are gearing up for here: retention. Your goal is to establish who the best-fit talent for the journey is at this point and how you can further understand and support them. This goes well beyond the obligatory quarterly 1:2:1.

This requires some method of tracking sentiment. In my business, I use HubSpot’s Service Hub for customer success. I quickly learned I could use its Customer Satisfaction Surveys (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) features to track employee engagement. Here’s how I did it.

Related: 3 Ways To Boost Retention Through a Positive Employee and Candidate Experience

Metrics to track employee engagement

1. Average length of employment in months per employee: The length of time talent remains gives insight into the culture. Good talent stays long, great. Bad talent stays long, and it’s not so good.

2. Employee onboarding score: All talent should have defined onboarding and a timeframe. Tracking how the employee concludes their onboarding with a HubSpot workflow/sequence gives a quality score at the company and contributor level.

3. The employee happiness score per month: Using a CSAT survey, you can repurpose this into a monthly happiness score to track the workforce sentiment month on month.

4. The number of HubSpot certifications per employee: As part of the onboarding, you can set tasks to complete relevant certifications and track them over time. Use this for upskilling and tech adoption.

5. Employee NPS (per employee and per team): Use the NPS survey to understand how individual employees feel about the workplace.

6. Total number of employees per month: Use HubSpot to track employee attendance to understand who and how often employees are present.

7. The number of training hours per employee: Track the number of employees’ training hours monthly/yearly from onboarding to continuous education and development.

8. The number of 1:1s completed per employee per quarter: To keep employee development on track, track your leaders by the number of 1:1s held per quarter.

9. The number of sick days per employee per quarter: Track employee sick days through HubSpot. Use a submission form for sick days and a calculation property to add the days and report on that.

10. Percentage of employees attaining personal development goals: Add new goals to employee onboarding workflows and track the number of completed tasks.

11. Average time to fill open positions: Track the time it takes to fill open positions, from posting a job on the company website to taking it down or tracking it as filled using a CRM “date from” and “date to” property.

12. The ratio of internal promotions to external hires: Track the number of employees promoted compared to those hired externally to assess how well the organization nurtures talent internally.

13. Number of employees in key roles: Track hiring for key roles and the length of time they remain unfilled and filled to see how talent in those roles consistently performs.

14. Average response time to employee queries or concerns: Using an internal ticketing pipeline, track employee responses to queries or concerns by open ticket time.

15. Internal job application rate: The rate of internal applicants for advertised roles is tracked by applications, contributors and the number of opportunities individuals apply for.

16. Employee peer recognition rates: Use a customized CSAT or NPS survey to allow employees to recognize and rate their peers.

17. Employee work-life balance score: Use an NPS to track quarterly work-life balance and score teams, business units and the broader organization.

18. Percentage of employees meeting strategic KPIs for organizational goals or business objectives: Use the “tasks” functionality in the Service Hub to track employees’ achievement of goals and objectives and report on the number and timeframe achieved.

19. Total number of customer interactions per employee: Track the monthly sales, marketing and customer service activities on a per-rep basis.

20. Number of vacation days taken per employee per month: Track the number of holidays taken per month and correlate that against the team’s performance.

Related: How to Support Employees and Improve Retention With a Strong Company Culture

There you have it. Using tools commonly adopted in the workplace, including your CRM, your marketing, sales and services tech, you can correlate company performance against your employee engagement and see how it affects your overall results.

In my opinion, a great working culture is critical to your long-term success, and people are the backbone of the results. Focus on how they feel and behave; your go-to-market strategy may just perform somersaults this year.

Walmart store managers can now earn up to $620,000 per year in total compensation, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Walmart is increasing the pay of market managers, or regional store managers in charge of about a dozen Walmart stores, to a total compensation of $420,000 to $620,000 this year. These managers earned $320,000 to $570,000 last year, resulting in a possible pay increase of up to $100,000.

A Walmart spokesperson specified to the Journal that the minimum base pay for market managers has increased from $130,000 to $160,000 a year, while the maximum has remained the same at $260,000 per year.

Related: ‘We Need Panic Buttons’: Some Walmart Employees Begin Wearing Body Cameras

The additional layers of compensation come from stock grants, which have increased to $100,000 a year from $75,000 last year, and potential annual bonuses, which are now up to 100% of base pay from 90% last year. Walmart began offering store managers stock grants last year.

In a video posted on Linkedin last year first announcing that store managers would receive annual stock grants, Walmart’s U.S. president and CEO John Furner emphasized the critical part Walmart store managers play at the company.

“A Walmart store manager is running a multimillion-dollar business and managing hundreds of people,” Furner said. “We ask our managers to own their roles and act like owners.”

Related: Walmart to Lay Off Hundreds of Employees, Relocate Remote Workers Back to the Office

Walmart Reduces Pay for Other Employees

Meanwhile, Walmart is reducing perks in other areas, including reducing overall pay for some staff and cutting back on remote work.

In September, the retailer gave thousands of office staff new titles and pay packages, reducing stock awards for 2,000 workers.

In May, Walmart announced that hundreds of remote workers would be mandated back to the office at the retailer’s headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, and other hubs around the country.

Walmart employees pushed back on the return-to-office plan, expressing concerns about childcare, life in another state, and their partner’s jobs also being affected. Some even chose to quit, with the most high-profile resignation being the chief technology officer of Sam’s Club.

Walmart had around 1.6 million U.S. employees at the end of fiscal year 2024.

Related: Sam’s Club Exec Would Rather Quit Than Move to Arkansas

Fitness trends come and go, but Crunch Fitness has managed to build a brand that’s both enduring and innovative. Ranked #32 on Entrepreneur‘s 2025 Franchise 500 and #1 in the health and wellness category, Crunch is redefining what it means to get fit with an inclusive, high-energy environment designed to keep members coming back.

• Overall Franchise 500 rank: 32
• Number of units: 458
• Change in units: +30.1% over 3 years
• Initial investment: $918,000-$6,700,000

Related: Considering franchise ownership? Get started now to find your personalized list of franchises that match your lifestyle, interests and budget.

Founded in 1989, Crunch Fitness combines a welcoming atmosphere with cutting-edge workouts and amenities. Its “No Judgments” philosophy allows it to appeal to a broad audience of fitness enthusiasts. Whether it’s group fitness classes, personal training or premium equipment, Crunch offers something for everyone — and all at an affordable price point.

The global fitness industry is valued at more than $260 billion, and Crunch Fitness thrives in this competitive market. With more than 400 locations in the U.S., Australia, Canada, Costa Rica, Portugal, Puerto Rico and Spain, the brand has become a standout franchise opportunity for entrepreneurs. It’s easy to see why: Crunch provides franchisees with extensive training, operational support and marketing tools, empowering them to build successful businesses.

Related: See Which Brands Topped Entrepreneur‘s 46th Annual Franchise 500

Crunch’s ability to stay ahead of fitness trends also contributes to its success. From innovative class offerings to its HIIT Zone training program, the brand consistently finds ways to engage members and deliver value. Additionally, its focus on technology, including mobile apps and virtual training, keeps it competitive in an increasingly digital fitness landscape.

For entrepreneurs passionate about health and wellness, Crunch Fitness offers a proven business model that combines health, inclusivity and scalability. Whether you’re new to franchising or an experienced operator, Crunch’s vibrant community and strong support system make it a smart investment in the fitness industry.

Related: Here’s how we determined our annual Franchise 500 ranking and what we learned from the data.

News of layoffs has seemed nonstop in January, with CNN, Citigroup, and Microsoft all cutting roles this week alone. Usually, these notices are pretty standard—heavy on the legal wording, and light on the cartoons.

But that wasn’t the case at Stripe, a payments software company that laid off 300 employees on Monday. Some employees in the various roles affected (product, operations, engineering) were notified by an illustration of a cartoon duck, Business Insider reports. The dates on the termination notices were also incorrect.

Related: ‘We Will Have Job Eliminations’: Starbucks CEO Announces Corporate Layoffs Will Begin Soon

The illustration was sent as a PDF attachment and said, “US-Non-California Duck.” Business Insider received a picture of the yellow duck from employees on a Blind chat.

“The comms to those laid off were flubbed completely,” one employee reportedly wrote.

Software company Stripe laid off 300 employees this week and mysteriously and confusingly included a photo of a duck in the email that notified workers they’d been let go.

While this was clearly a preventable gaffe, the far bigger one was ##Stripe telling 300 human beings they’d… pic.twitter.com/oeIIWhkwOu

— Mark C. Crowley (@MarkCCrowley) January 23, 2025

A Stripe representative told Business Insider that follow-up emails went out to affected employees.

“I apologize for the error and any confusion it caused,” wrote Rob McIntosh, the company’s chief people officer. “Corrected and full notifications have since been sent to all impacted Stripes.”

Related: Citigroup Eliminated More Jobs This Week. Here Are the Roles Affected.

Stripe is valued at $70 billion in the private markets, per CNBC.

Despite the cuts, McIntosh said the company is “not slowing down hiring” and expects to increase its workforce by 17% this year to 10,000.

Have you ever made a mistake in business that you wish didn’t happen? The truth is that every business owner must face failure at some point, but problems don’t have to be pointless.

In fact, some mistakes lead to incredible success! Take the Post-it, for example. In the process of trying to create a super-strong bonding agent, Dr. Spencer Silver at 3M produced the opposite — a super weak adhesive that could easily separate from anything. Silver dedicated himself to discovering a use for this, and it led to incredible wealth and success.

What if you took your mistake and turned it into gold, too? That’s exactly what I did last year.

My mistake in 2024 went under my radar. I didn’t even notice it until I started doing some digging.

You see, I have always had a strict internal rule that our postcard promotion has to go out every single week without fail. Even my team in manufacturing knows this! When I started PostcardMania, the number was 1000 postcards a week — then 2,500. It was working, but in order to increase it to 5,000 pieces, I had to cut my own pay … so I did!

It really paid off, so over time, we continued to increase that number up to 205,000 in 2023. Then, in October of last year, I saw our top-line revenue from new clients wasn’t growing as fast as it had in previous years. I talked to my Vice President of Sales, and she stated the obvious: “How about we mail more postcards?”

We pulled a report and found that, at some point, our weekly cards dropped from 205,000 a week to 195,000. We immediately pushed it back up, and within a month, our growth was back on track.

We just increased it to 260,000 postcards per week, and I’m excited to see what happens in 2025. This year, we are over $1 million over last year in revenue from brand-new clients.

Here are three takeaways I learned from my 2024 mistake.

Related: 3 Marketing Blind Spots That Are Holding You Back (and How to Fix Them)

Never forget the tried-and-true marketing tactics that worked in the past

I’ve built my business on the concept that direct mail works, and thousands of small business owners I’ve helped know this truth, too. But I still lost sight of my best marketing tactic. Even though the error was a 5% cut in postcard quantity, it was enough to cost my business revenue.

This moment was huge for me — I needed to practice what I preach! If we increase our postcard mailings, we increase our top line without fail.

It’s easy to get swept up in the trendiest marketing platforms or tactics today, but never forget your own marketing truths.

What worked for you in the past? It could even be something as simple as referrals and launching a marketing plan that rewards your customers or clients if they refer your business to a friend.

Take a deep dive into your history and see what you find.

Look at your top line to figure out where your new customers are coming from

Yes, you need to look into your past to remember where your customers came from back then, but you also need to know where your new customers are coming from now.

While there is value in looking at your bottom line, I actually look at the top line first to see what is bringing the most revenue into my business.

New customers show you exactly where the new money is coming from, and then you can expand on your biggest growth drivers to bring in more revenue.

Once we have our top-line growth moving in the right direction, I add in efficiencies to maximize profitability from that growth. If you do the same, the sky is the limit with your future success.

Related: The End-of-the-Year Marketing Checklist That Helped Triple Our Annual Revenue Growth

Be willing to invest more in your marketing to grow your business

This is my second-greatest marketing mantra of all time: You need to market like crazy to grow.

This is because when you want to grow, you have to be willing to spend more. How and where you spend that extra money isn’t an exact science. You have to test different tactics and track results to figure that part out for yourself. But this part is an exact science because cutting back will always cripple your gains. Instead, market as much as you can.

Coming into the final stretch of the year, I decided to take my own advice and increase our marketing spend because I saw that our revenue numbers were not on track to hit their targets.

We added about $100,000 to the last six weeks of the year with the goal of achieving another million. It’s mostly going to direct mail, but we’re also increasing other areas as well.

It’s an expensive decision. Will it get us that extra million? I feel confident it will — even if I don’t see that extra million until January. Increasing my marketing spend has always worked in the past, so I expect it to pay off again.

So, do yourself a favor and learn from your mistakes like me. Heck, write them down on a Post-it to remind yourself! Turn those “failures” into gold.

Related: I Made These 3 Big Mistakes When Starting a Business — Here’s What I Learned From Them

President Trump and a host of tech leaders (Softbank’s Masayoshi Son, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Oracle‘s Larry Ellison) teamed up to announce “Stargate” on Tuesday, an AI mega-project that includes a $500 billion investment in AI infrastructure to build data centers in the U.S.

“Stargate will be building the physical and virtual infrastructure to power the next generation of advancements in AI,” Trump said at the announcement. “And this will include the construction of colossal data centers.”

One tech titan who wasn’t a part of the reveal was Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk—though he did make his voice heard.

In a series of late-night posts on X responding to OpenAI, the new DOGE leader criticized the plan and claimed the funding isn’t really there.

They don’t actually have the money

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 22, 2025

“They don’t actually have the money,” Musk wrote, adding in a follow-up post that he has it “on good authority” that “SoftBank has well under $10B secured.”

Altman, who cofounded OpenAI with Elon Musk (before he left the company in 2018), responded that Musk is “wrong” and then invited him to see the site when it is underway, as the first data center is being built in Texas, where Musk’s companies are based.

“This is great for the country,” Altman wrote. “I realize what is great for the country isn’t always what’s optimal for your companies, but in your new role, I hope you’ll mostly put [America] first.”

Related: Elon Musk Accuses ChatGPT-Maker OpenAI of Being a ‘Market-Paralyzing Gorgon’: Lawsuit

Trump touted the plan during his announcement Tuesday.

“I think it’s going to be something that’s very special. It’ll lead to something that could be the biggest of all,” Trump said.

Musk and Altman have been trading insults for some time. In March 2024, Musk sued Altman and other OpenAI cofounders, accusing the company of breaking its founding agreement.

Since then, there’s been lots of back and forth— both in the courts and on social media.

Related: How Do Billionaires Become Best Friends? They Launch Rockets on the Same Day. That’s What Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Did.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon says he no longer has any hard feelings toward Elon Musk after lawsuits between the bank and Musk-led Tesla previously interfered with their relationship.

“He came to one of our conferences, he and I had a nice, long chat,” Dimon said at the World Economic Forum’s annual event in Davos, Switzerland. “We’ve settled some of our differences.”

Dimon told CNBC that “Elon and I have hugged it out,” with the timing of the reconciliation unclear. JPMorgan sued Tesla in 2021 over a dispute over a stock warrant deal. Both companies dropped their claims in November after reaching a settlement agreement.

Related: JPMorgan Shuts Down Internal Message Board Comments After Employees React to Return-to-Office Mandate

Dimon and Musk’s relationship has been fraught with litigation. The issue stemmed from Musk’s 2018 tweet saying he could take Tesla private at a share price of $420 with “funding secured,” and a 2014 contract that allowed Tesla to sell stock warrants to JPMorgan so the bank could buy shares of the company at a set “strike” price. If Tesla’s stock traded above the strike price, Tesla would owe JPMorgan money in the form of shares or cash.

JPMorgan accused Tesla of breaking its contract, and Tesla countersued in January 2022.

^{Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan. Photographer: Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

After announcing at Davos that the two have repaired their relationship, Dimon then praised Musk, calling him “our Einstein” and wishing him “the best” in his efforts to lead the new Department of Government Efficiency, which President Donald Trump created by executive order on Monday. The new department is tasked with downsizing the U.S. government and cutting government spending.

“I think it is completely rational for someone to look at our government and say it’s been ineffective,” Dimon told CNBC.

Now, at the World Economic Forum, Dimon says that he would “like to be helpful” to Musk and his companies.

Dimon Calls U.S. Stock Market ‘Inflated’

Dimon also told CNBC that U.S. stock market prices were “kind of inflated” and were “in the top 10% or 15%” of their historical value.

“You need really good outcomes to justify those prices,” Dimon said.

U.S. stocks were among the world’s most high-performing stocks last year, caused by a strong U.S. economy, a strong labor market, and robust consumer spending, according to Investopedia.

JPMorgan is the biggest American bank, with $3.3 trillion in assets.

Related: JPMorgan Will Reportedly Follow Amazon, Walmart With Strict Return-to-Office Policy

Dimon on Tariffs: ‘Get Over It’

Dimon also said that the tariffs Trump could impose on foreign countries could have pros that outweigh the cons — mainly that they could promote American interests at the bargaining table with other countries.

Global fund managers have expressed concerns that tariffs could lead to higher inflation. But Dimon says that even if inflation does rise, the national security benefits outweigh it.

“If it’s a little inflationary, but it’s good for national security, so be it,” Dimon told CNBC. “I mean, get over it. National security trumps a little bit more inflation.”