On September 10, Apple used its annual event to announce new iPhones, as it does every year. Starting at $699, the iPhone 11 is the budget option compared to the more decked-out 11 Pro and 11 Pro Max. All three phones are available for preorder now, and will be available for purchase on September 20.

If you're considered a new iPhone and were already planning to splurge on a Pro version, you might be tempted to max-out on the iPhone 11 Pro Max — but you shouldn't. The iPhone 11 Pro has all the best upgrades of the new phones, without some of the downsides that accompany the iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Here's why you should go with the iPhone 11 Pro.

Executive compensation packages have gotten more complicated over time. To take one recent prominent example, Tesla CEO Elon Musk was "paid" around $2.3 billion last year by one valuation method, while actually receiving $0 in guaranteed value.

Indeed, some CEO pay plans are so complicated that a powerful mathematical technique originally developed to understand the behavior of neutrons in an atom bomb explosion is the most effective way to estimate what they are actually worth.

Monte Carlo methods, named for the famous casino, are a class of mathematical techniques for evaluating the possible outcomes of a complicated process that includes some random element. The basic idea in a Monte Carlo problem is to use a computer to simulate the random process many times — often thousands or millions of repetitions — and compare the various outcomes of those simulations.

According to a retrospective article on the development of Monte Carlo methods in the journal Los Alamos Science, Stanislaw Ulam, one of the lead physicists working on the Manhattan Project to develop the first nuclear weapons, took inspiration from analyzing a solitaire card game.

While many card games lend themselves nicely to straightforward direct calculations — calculating the odds of drawing particular poker hands, for example, is a classic exercise in basic probability theory— Ulam realized that trying to directly calculate the probability of a particular solitaire game being winnable in a similar fashion would be difficult or impossible.

That's because drawing a poker hand is a straightforward one-step process of picking up five cards, while evaluating a solitaire game generally involves looking at what happens to an entire card deck over a large number of steps or turns.

Instead of trying to figure out some elaborate formula for understanding the solitaire game, Ulam realized he could instead just play out a large number of solitaire games and count how many games were winnable and how many weren't. If a big enough sample of games is taken, this will give a pretty good estimate of the probability in question, just from repeatedly running iterations of the game.

Neutrons and atom bombs

According to the Los Alamos Science article, Ulam and his Manhattan Project colleague John von Neumann observed that a similar procedure could be used to understand key properties of nuclear reactions. Neutrons behave in complicated ways in a nuclear reactor or atomic bomb, and that behavior has major implications for how powerful the reaction or explosion is.

To get a better understanding of the statistical behavior of neutrons in a nuclear explosion, Ulam and von Neumann used the early computers available to the Manhattan Project to simulate the random behavior of a large number of individual neutrons, averaging that behavior together to better understand the workings of the nuclear reaction. This was a crucial step in the development of nuclear weapons.

From nukes to CEO pay

In the years since the Manhattan Project, Monte Carlo simulation methods have become very common in many branches of science and finance. One of those applications is estimating the value of complex CEO pay packages. Like Ulam's solitaire games and neutron reactions, many modern executive compensation packages involve several variables interacting with each other to determine what a CEO eventually actually gets paid.

In the last several years, it's become increasingly common for CEOs and other top executives at public corporations to have their compensation packages tied to various financial or market performance goals. A CEO might receive some number of shares or stock options based on the company's stock price or profitability on some given date during their tenure.

A recent prominent example is Tesla's 2018 compensation plan for CEO Elon Musk. Under that plan, Musk will receive an enormous grant of stock options in the company if and only if Tesla achieves some extremely ambitious revenue and stock price milestones. The first of the stock price milestones would require the company to more than double its market capitalization to a value of $100 billion. If Tesla hits none of those milestones, Musk receives no compensation under that plan.

As part of its policies on executive pay disclosure, the SEC requires corporations to publish estimates of the current market fair value of compensation packages. But since stock awards like Musk's are conditional on the future development of the company's stock price, that unknown factor needs to be considered.

The solution is to use a Monte Carlo simulation to see what the possible outcomes are for the compensation package. The basic process is laid out in a recent client note from the executive compensation consulting firm Exequity.

Instead of simulating solitaire games or neutrons in a nuclear reaction, the company's future stock price is simulated thousands of times, following a standard random model for how stock prices evolve over time, using data on the stock's historical performance.

For each of those simulated stock price trends, the CEO's net reward is calculated based on the terms of the conditional compensation package. If the CEO receives, say, 1,000 shares if the stock price is over $100 and 2,000 shares for a stock price of $150, each simulation where those thresholds are met is recorded, and the CEO's compensation is estimated based on the simulated stock price.

Finally, the average of all those future simulated rewards is calculated and discounted to reflect its present value, which gives an estimate for how much the CEO's compensation package is worth.

So, the Monte Carlo method — the basic idea of simulating some complex random process many times originally developed for the Manhattan Project — gives us a method for figuring out what CEO pay might actually be worth.

Regular Business Insider readers know that every weekend, I write a take on something Tesla-related. This time around, I'm going to ask for patience as I preface the effort with a short auto-industry history lesson.

The development of the car business in the 20th century followed a predictable pattern: daring innovators gave way to savvy managers. The early days were the Wild West — or Wild Midwest, and the burgeoning industry was located mostly in the middle of the US, with Detroit as its capital — but after World War II and the emergence of a vast American consumer culture, automotive startups morphed into multinational corporations.

Read more: In the battle of the Tesla Model S and the Porsche Taycan, it' s really no contest

The two most important men in this story were Henry Ford, who needs no introduction, and Alfred Sloan, who does. It was Ford who laid the groundwork for the modern auto industry and pioneered both the effective moving assembly line and the idea of mass-market motorized transport with the Model T. The company that bears his name and that's still run in part by his great-grandson, board chairman Bill Ford, remains the No. 2 US car company.

Sloan, a more obscure personality, created the modern corporation in General Motors. At its peak in the 1950s, GM controlled half the US car market; it still controls about 20%. (The Germans and Japanese weren't really selling vehicles in the US during the Eisenhower administration.)

Henry Ford. Getty Images

The Utopian Ford vs. the pragmatic Sloan

The key distinction between Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan was that Ford was something of a utopian (and, more troublingly, given to anti-Semitic propaganda) who harbored visionary, paternalistic attitudes toward his workforce and his customers. He believed that his workers should be paid enough to buy the cars they produced, and thereby created a virtuous circle, but he disliked credit and figured that there was no reason to sell Model T's that weren't black.

Sloan, by contrast, thought that the buyer was always right — or at least that the consumer should enjoy abundant choice, and that GM as a corporation should provide it. Some of this was expeditious: GM was created by combining brands — Chevrolet, Buick, Cadillac — so Sloan was simply managing reality as GM's president. But GM has always concentrated on the pull of consumers, rather than Ford's push to deliver singularly great products.

The symbols of the two American giants capture this distinction. Henry Ford's great achievement was the mighty River Rouge factory, where train cars loaded with iron ore pulled up to one end of the plant and finished cars rolled out the other. Sloan's work of genius was GM's organizational chart, the blueprint for American managerial capitalism.

Read more: With a US Department of Justice move against automakers, the Trump administration is now officially antibusiness

Alfred Sloan.Wikimedia Commons

OK, history lesson over. Now let's see how history repeats itself

The two biggest names in the electric car realm are Tesla CEO Elon Musk (obviously) and a guy you probably haven't heard of, RJ Scaringe, who leads Rivian, a startup electric SUV and pickup-truck maker. In my cycles-of-history framework, Musk is Ford and Scaringe is Sloan. (There's some irony here, by the way, as Ford has invested $500 million in Rivian, while Tesla hasn't seen a major automaker take a stake since Daimler and Toyota bought equity prior to Tesla's 2010 IPO.)

The big difference between Musk and Scaringe is that Musk, the visionary, wants nothing to do with the legacy auto industry anymore, while Scaringe is running Rivian sort of like a junior OEM. When I saw the photo below, of Scaringe and Bill Ford after the Ford investment was announced, I speculated that I was looking at Ford's next CEO.

Scaringe with Ford Chairman Bill Ford. Ford

Like Henry Ford, Musk is preoccupied with the manufacturing process — Tesla's Gigafactories, in Musk's view, are more important than Tesla's cars. They're the "machine that builds the machine," and Musk would like them to become radically automated.

Why Rivian is more like a traditional automaker than Tesla

Scaringe — like Sloan, an MIT engineering grad — is creating an electric automaker that's designed to reach the consumer; he's not trying to reinvent manufacturing. To achieve that, he wants everything to do with the legacy auto industry. Where Sloan had his org chart, Scaringe has partnerships and deals, all intended to make Rivian vehicles easier to manufacture, sell, and service. His most recent investment, of $350 million from Cox Automotive, is representative. (Ford and Amazon have also kicked in, giving Rivian a $2 billion total.)

Cox owns Kelley Blue Book and Autotrader, among other properties. These entities are designed to facilitate the car buying and leasing process and are heavily organized around the consumer. By investing in Rivian, they're getting a piece of the future, the chance to integrate sales not just of EVs, but of SUVs and pickups, the most popular vehicles in the lucrative US market. Rivian is getting a huge pipeline to buyers from the deal.

In the history of the car business, Ford is seen as stubborn and idealistic while Sloan is considered adaptable and pragmatic. Of course, both Ford and GM are still around, so it's not clear that Ford's vision lost out to Sloan's technocracy. Musk likes to note that Ford and Tesla are the only two American car makers that haven't gone bankrupt.

But Ford did have to recruit a cadre of number-crunching efficiency experts after World War II — the so-called "Whiz Kids" who had brought statistical analysis to the war effort — to modernize its business. Nonetheless, Ford has often been home to outside-the-box thinkers, from the brash Lee Iacocca to the former Boeing exec Alan Mulally, who rescued Ford from insolvency before the financial crisis. GM continues to embrace the skilled manager, although in current CEO Mary Barra the company has been making tough call after tough call on issues that the pre-bankruptcy GM had endlessly postponed, such as selling the perennially money-losing European division, Opel.

See also: Apply here to attend IGNITION: Transportation, an event focused on the future of transportation, in San Francisco on October 22.

A contest of engineers

Elon Musk shows off one of this vehicles, with help from a robot. Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

Interestingly, with Musk and Scaringe we also have a contest of engineers. Or more accurately, technologists, as Musk's background is in physics while Scaringe has a PhD in mechanical engineering. Don't interpret that as meaning Scaringe is a superior engineer; Musk likely knows more about electric-vehicle design than most people in the business. But while the auto industry is full of engineers in leadership roles, Musk likes to express engineering in a way that's wonky and unique (as well as sort of irritatingly didactic at times). Scaringe is more low-key. But in Scaringe, Musk has a potential rival who can actually out-engineer him, something he hasn't really had to deal with up to this point.

What we don't have with Musk and Scaringe is a contest of celebrities. Musk is world-famous, the basis for the "Iron Man" Tony Stark character — a real-life billionaire and occasional playboy (Musk gets around, but he also has five kids). Scaringe is unknown outside the car business, and not even that well-known in it. I've been covering cars for over a decade and I'd never heard of him prior to about a year ago.

But obviously, even if you know nothing about cars, you're probably familiar with Henry Ford, while Alfred Sloan might ring a bell only if you live in the New York area and are aware of the Sloan Kettering medical centers or the Sloan Foundation's philanthropy.

Iron Man Musk.Jurvetson / Flickr

The historical comparisons aren't perfect. Musk is a creature of Silicon Valley and its embrace of risk-taking, rapid-iteration, launch-now-and-debug-later ethos. He's been compared with Steve Jobs. The business dynamics of the tech industry in the early 21st century are not the same as the car business in the early 20th. Scaringe, meanwhile, has just begun to hit his stride, after almost a decade of developing and pivoting Rivian. He seems fresher because Rivian missed out on the EV-startup surge of the 2010s — a fortunate thing, as most of those startups, save for Tesla, have vanished. Scaringe is a creature of the next wave, which entails a lot more cooperation with Detroit and recognizes that building vehicles at scale is extremely difficult.

Prior to Scaringe, Musk's main rival was often seen as Henrik Fisker, a car designer who founded Fisker Automotive, which went out of business in 2013 (Fisker himself had resigned by then, and the automaker's decline was due to bottlenecks with its battery supplier and the unfortunate destruction of a load of cars in Hurricane Sandy). If anything, Fisker was a more flamboyant and compelling personality that Musk; I've talked to him on several occassions, and his talents as a raconteur are formidable. He's currently engaged in a wide range of projects, from building a supercar to resuscitating electric mobility with a new company, Fisker, Inc.

Read more: The spectacular story of Ferrari's 7-decade journey from an upstart racing team to a $30 billion-dollar luxury brand

The fox and the hedgehog

Tesla's being built. Tesla

To borrow a famous analysis from the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, Fisker is a fox to Scaringe's hedgehog (according to Berlin, referencing from an early distinction in ancient Greek literature, the fox knows many things, while the hedgehog concentrates on one). Musk, too, is a fox, engaged with space exploration, tunneling, and artificial intelligence.

At first glance, Henry Ford might seem hedgehog-like, but in my view, he was probably a fox, or perhaps a fox-hedgehog hybrid (as was the novelist Leo Tolstoy, by Berlin's reading). Foxes function well as entrepreneurs, even though they might be single-mindedly devoted to their companies and their missions; Ford started two failed enterprises before the Ford Motor Company — and maybe even three, depending on how you assess his fortunes.

Sloan, meanwhile, found his glory in melding GM with the American consumer, and in a larger sense, postwar life. The definite GM quote didn't come from Sloan, but he enabled the automaker's World War II-era president, Charles Erwin Wilson, to tell Congress during his confirmation hearings to become Eisenhower's Secretary of Defense, that he could make a decision that would place GM and the US in conflict because "I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa."

We're now watching this business narrative of the 20th century repeated in the 21st. Ultimately, this is important because the gestational electric-vehicle industry needs big personalities to sustain and grow it. The first decade has been a mixed bag, with Tesla stumbling through a decade of infrequent profits and serial controversies while the major automakers approach a market that's still quite weak, with halting steps.

Ford and GM are both producing electric cars, but we really need the new Ford and new GM. In Tesla and Rivian we could have not just that, but the leaders who can do for EVs what Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan did for internal combustion.

This time last year, it looked like Apple seemed to be getting out of the luxury watch game when it quietly discontinued its most expensive Apple Watch, the Apple Watch Edition.

The ultra-high-end 18-karat-gold Apple Watch Editions, which cost upwards of $10,000, were spotted on celebrities including Kanye West and Beyoncé after they were introduced in 2015. That model was discontinued after only one year.

The following year, Apple replaced gold with ceramic, and lowered the price to a still-expensive $1,250. But that watch, too, was discontinued in 2018. Last year's Apple Watch Series 4 only came in stainless steel and aluminum, and started at a more affordable $399. (Apple didn't totally forget about ceramic, though: Every Series 4 Watch came with a ceramic back plate, as part of the watch's improved cardiac monitors.)

Read more: Here's how the new $400 Apple Watch Series 5 compares to last year's model

Now, only one year later, Apple has announced that the Series 5 Watch will come 4 finishes: aluminum, stainless steel, ceramic, and titanium, with the two latter finishes being Edition watches.

The ceramic watches will be available in 40 mm and 44 mm case sizes and priced at $1,299 and $1,349. The titanium finish is a first for Apple Watches, and starts at $799.

Apple didn't say why it brought back the Edition watch this year, but according to Apple, the ceramic finish is more than four times as hard as stainless steel and won't scratch easily.

We'll have to wait and see how the ceramic models fare this time around, but let's hope they live up to that promise, since they still cost three times as much as the entry-level aluminum finishes.

SoftBank, which is WeWork's biggest backer, has also become an increasingly important customer of the commercial real-estate company.

The Japanese conglomerate accounted for 2% of WeWork's revenue in the first 6 months of this year, according to documents the latter filed in preparation for its planned public offering. That portion was up from just 1% for all of last year and nearly 0% in 2017.

The company also counts Rhône Group, another one of its investors, as a customer. But Rhône accounted for a much smaller portion of WeWork's revenue.

"We have entered into membership agreements and/or other agreements relating to the provision of Powered by We solutions with SoftBank entities and affiliates of the Rhône Group," WeWork said in its IPO paperwork. "We believe that all such arrangements have been entered into in the ordinary course of business and have been conducted on an arm's-length basis."

WeWork's Powered by We service involves building out and managing office space that other companies own or have leased.

SoftBank declined to comment. Representatives of WeWork did not respond to an email seeking comment. Rhône Group did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.

In the first six months of this year, SoftBank paid WeWork $28.2 million for leases and other services, according to WeWork's IPO filing. For all of last year, the Japanese company paid WeWork $18.8 million for such services, according to the filing. In 2017 and 2016, SoftBank paid the real estate company about $200,000 and $100,000, respectively.

The ramp-up in WeWork's SoftBank revenue followed SoftBank's investment in the company. SoftBank took its first stake in WeWork in an August 2017 funding round, according to PitchBook. It has invested $10.65 billion in total in WeWork and is reportedly planning on buying another $750 million worth of its stock in the IPO.

Read this:Venture investors still aren't sure what to make of SoftBank's $100 billion Vision Fund. Depending on who you ask, they're either rooting for it, or gleeful that it's struggling with WeWork and Uber.

Ron Fisher, SoftBank's vice chairman, sits on WeWork's board of directors.

Meanwhile, Rhône Group paid WeWork $1.3 million in all of 2018 and $1.1 million in the first half of this year for leases and other services.

Rhône is a partner with WeWork in a real estate venture designed to acquire buildings that WeWork will lease out to customers. Its cofounder, Steven Langman, is a WeWork director.

WeWork has come under fire for its long list of so-called related-party transactions, which are deals involving employees, executives, investors, or other people that could create conflicts of interest. The company has hired relatives of CEO Adam Neumann, given Neuman numerous large loans, and rented space in buildings he partially owned. WeWork also reportedly struck deals with the family members of other top executives, including hiring the parents of Vice Chair Michael Goss as real-estate brokers for a lease in Miami.

The coworking giant has struggled to line up investors for its public offering. Potential investors are reportedly worried about these related-party transactions, its valuation, business model, and potential resilience in an economic downturn.

WeWork is reportedly considering going public with a market capitalization of $10 billion. SoftBank valued the company at $47 billion in January when it made its most recent investment in WeWork.

Got a tip about SoftBank or WeWork? Contact this reporter via email at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., message him on Twitter @troywolv, or send him a secure message through Signal at 415.515.5594. You can also contact Business Insider securely via SecureDrop.

When a Tesla Model 3 carrying Kristian Henderson and her family slammed into a guardrail on the Interstate 95 median in suburban Maryland this summer, the vehicle's side airbags didn't deploy, according to the victims' attorney.

The George Washington University professor was rendered comatose by the impact, causing her serious brain damage, while her son in the back seat also suffered severe injuries, their lawyer, Ted Leopold of Cohen Milstein, said.

Many of those injuries could have been prevented if the airbag had functioned as designed, Leopold said, alleging that Tesla hasn't made the investigation any easier. The attorney sent a routine preservation letter to Tesla in August, but he said the company has yet to get back to him. The family is considering filing a lawsuit if the electric-car maker doesn't respond, he said.

Cohen Milstein "This case will be, to my knowledge, the first case like this against Tesla," Leopold said in an interview. "They certainly have promoted their expertise in the IT area, and I'll be curious from a safety perspective how strong they are and how their development in that area has been."

"These are routine cases for Ford, General Motors, and others," he said.

A Tesla representative said the company did, in fact, respond and was waiting for more information from the victim's lawyer.

Leopold also pointed to documents revealed last month by PlainSite that showed that the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration had warned Tesla to tone down its language with regard to safety. The agency sent a cease-and-desist letter in October after CEO Elon Musk said there was "no safer car in the world" than a Tesla, according to the documents.

"The fact that they self-promote that it's safe when the government told them they can't do that, first-blush indication is that on this vehicle, the safety mechanisms failed," Leopold said.

A Tesla representative declined to comment on the record for this story but said airbags weren't necessarily designed to fire in all circumstances, depending on the crash, according to NHTSA. The representative also pointed to Tesla's five-star crash rating and a blog post saying that the company's vehicles were "engineered to be the safest cars in the world."

Leopold said that marketing effort was exactly why getting ahold of the crash data should be easy.

"Tesla has the ability to monitor their vehicles out on the roadway. Unlike Ford or General Motors or Toyota, Tesla seems to have that ability. Who owns that data? Is it our client? Is it Tesla? Certainly we're going to seek it, and they should voluntarily provide it to us," he said.

Disney chief executive Bob Iger has stepped down from his position on Apple's board of directors, as the tech giant confirmed the launch plans for its video-streaming platform this week.

Iger's resignation was noted in an SEC filing that was released to the public on Friday. The filing was originally made this Tuesday, the same day as Apple's product event, where the company revealed more information about its subscription streaming service, Apple TV Plus.

The Disney chief exec had served on Apple's board since 2011. His presence on the board, however, had become increasingly complicated as of late as Apple's sluggish hardware business forced it to consider alternative revenue streams, like a subscription news service and Netflix-competitor.

Disney itself recently announced a streaming service of its own in April — Disney Plus — further entangling Iger's commitments.

As the New York Times noted, Iger told reporters earlier this year that he would step out of the room when the board started discussing Apple's plans for a streaming service. Iger said, however, that because Apple's business was mostly focused on hardware, he wouldn't have to step out for very long.

Amid Tuesday's news that Apple TV Plus will launch on November 1st and cost $5 per month, apparently Iger decided it was time to step down.

"I have the utmost respect for Tim Cook, his team at Apple and for my fellow board members," Iger said in the statement, first published by the Times. "Apple is one of the world's most admired companies, known for the quality and integrity of its products and its people, and I am forever grateful to have served as a member of the company's board."

Read more: Apple TV Plus is a 'major shot across the bow' to Netflix and Disney. Here's what Wall Street is saying about Apple's streaming ambitions.

Apple responded to Iger's departure in a statement obtained by the Times: "More than anything, Bob is our friend. He leads with his heart, and he has always been generous with his time and advice. While we will greatly miss his contributions as a board member, we respect his decision, and we have every expectation that our relationship with both Bob and Disney will continue far into the future."

Iger's decision to leave isn't the first time a high-powered executive stepped down from Apple's board over potential conflicts of interest.

Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, used to sit down at the table with Steve Jobs as a member of Apple's board. But as the two company's businesses increasingly converged — namely, as competition between iOS and Android heated up — Schmidt said the situation became too awkward and ultimately, he decided to resign.

A serial entrepreneur who's sold a company to eBay and cofounded a men's healthcare startup says he's on track to be a billionaire.

Jack Abraham, the 33-year-old founder and managing partner of the venture-capital firm Atomic, wrote a response to a Quora question asking users about their net worths. He said he was a millionaire who's made a few hundred million dollars and is on track to be a billionaire "by my mid to late 30s." He has since deleted his post from Quora.

Atomic founder Jack Abraham. Jack Abraham "For my age, in the 'self-made' category I am probably between 1 in 1M or 1 in 10M (top 100- 1,000 globally self made for my age, possibly among even fewer)," Abraham said in the since deleted post. "At the rate of growth of the value of the equity I have there is a good chance that I'll become a billionaire by my mid to late 30s."

The post went on to discuss the pitfalls that can come with financial success and why happiness does not always correlate with a higher net worth.

Through Atomic, Abraham has backed and cofounded companies including the men's health startup Hims, which has raised $197 million to date, and the coliving company Bungalow. Before his work with Atomic, Abraham sold a startup to eBay for $75 million. Abraham references those investments in the post, saying he's made a few hundred million dollars by his early 30s.

Read more: You Can Explain eBay's $50 Billion Turnaround With Just This One Crazy Story

Abraham said in an emailed statement to Business Insider that he initially wrote the post to help explain the trade-offs that come with wealth.

"As a society we are obsessed with wealth as a cure for all ails but in my experience wealth does not drive happiness and in fact can negate it in non-intuitive ways," Abraham said. "I wrote the post to share my experience but it was intended for a small audience and to help anyone who might be considering trade offs of how they choose to live their lives."

Abraham decided to take down the post after it began going viral.

"I took it down as its reach started growing, as I really prefer to keep a low profile and keep my head down, focused on building companies and solving meaningful problems that impact people's lives," Abraham said.

Abraham's father was the CEO and cofounder of Comscore, and Abraham started working for him when he was in his teens, Business Insider's Nicholas Carlson previously reported. While studying at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Abraham started the e-commerce firm Milo, which he later sold to eBay.

He now says he's started 14 companies, according to his profile on LinkedIn.

"For context on my background, my dad immigrated to the US to get his PhD at MIT without a dollar to his name and we grew up poor," Abraham told Business Insider in the email. "We climbed to the middle and upper middle class before my dad became an entrepreneur and 'made it'. I've seen life from all levels of wealth and believe I have a unique perspective on its pros and cons as a result."

WeWork's public offering is off to a rocky start, and it hasn't even listed its shares yet.

Concerns around the coworking startup's governance, real estate holdings, succession plan, employee retention, and questionable patent purchases have spooked potential investors. WeWork has amended its SEC filings twice already to address several of those concerns, but it might not be enough.

According to a Reuters report, WeWork will target a $10 billion valuation for its IPO, drastically lower than the $47 billion valuation it last fetched in private markets. A $10 billion public valuation would be only slightly above the total amount of funding WeWork has taken in as a private company: about $8.39 billion since 2011, according to Pitchbook data.

Read More: WeWork's IPO filing will reportedly be revealed as soon as next week, giving us our best look yet at its business

It's a striking turn of events for WeWork, which has experienced a meteoric rise since its founding in 2010 by CEO Adam Neumann, his wife Rebekah Neumann, and Miguel McKelvey. The New York-based startup leases office space to other startups and has expanded to more than 100 cities in 29 countries — a turbo-charged expansion plan that has required WeWork to continually raise capital as it burns through billions of dollars.

Until now, even the savviest investors, from venture capital firms to mutual funds to Japan's SoftBank, were eager to pump money into WeWork, driving up its stratospheric valuation. But in this case, what goes up appears to be coming down.

Here's the definitive history of WeWork's valuation ahead of its much anticipated public offering:

Like all Apple devices, the Apple Watch is known for its sleek, minimalist design, which consists of a rectangular case with rounded edges, a single dial, and a single button.

To add personal style to the Watch, many different bands are available, from a rubberized "Sport Band," to classic leather, to a stylish stainless steel wristband.

Now, with the Apple Watch Studio, Apple Watch owners can customize their devices before they even buy it.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Apple Watch Series 4 (From $429 at Best Buy)

What the Apple Watch Studio is

In the past, if you wanted to choose a unique band for your Apple Watch, you had to buy the watch and then pay for a new band separately, swapping it in for the wristband that came with the purchase. With the advent of the Apple Watch Studio, customers can now custom design a watch and band before they buy it.

The Apple Watch Studio can be used through the Apple Store app or on Apple's website, and Apple will soon offer an in-person version of the studio at Apple Stores. Customers can choose from two case sizes (40 and 44 millimeters), four different case types, and four different types of band, which come in several colors.

All told, the Apple Watch Studio offers enough different combinations that you could create more than a thousand unique Apple Watches.

You can customize your Apple Watch in thousands of ways. Steven John/Business Insider

And if you're using the Apple Store app, or customizing your Watch on the website, you'll be able to preview what your Watch will look like before you buy.

MoviePass will shut down on Saturday, its parent company, Helios and Matheson Analytics, announced on Friday.

Helios and Matheson said efforts to recapitalize the embattled movie-ticket subscription service had "not been successful to date" and that it was "unable to predict if or when the MoviePass service will continue."

MoviePass surged in popularity in 2017 after Helios and Matheson bought the service and drastically lowered the price. But it burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and failed to find a business model that didn't lead to massive losses.

During MoviePass' collapse, CEO Mitch Lowe locked some subscribers out of their accounts and used other tactics to try and keep the company running, according to multiple inside sources who Business Insider spoke with during a four-month investigation into the company's practices, which was published in August.

MoviePass, along with Moviefone and MoviePass Films, which are all owned by Helios and Matheson, will be up for sale, the company said on Friday.

Helios and Matheson's "board of directors has formed a strategic review committee, composed entirely of the company's independent directors, to identify, review, and explore all strategic and financial alternatives for the company, including a sale of the company in its entirety," the company said.

This announcement came as Business Insider waited for comment from Helios and Matheson on a story that detailed the company's attempts to sell MoviePass and Moviefone and its continued layoffs.

The Friday before the Labor Day holiday weekend, the Moviefone editor Drew Taylor sent out an email to the site's freelancers informing them that "effective immediately all freelancing is suspended." The email, obtained by Business Insider, went on to say that Moviefone would make sure "everybody gets paid what they're owed as soon as possible," but multiple sources said some freelancers had not been paid for months.

To read Business Insider's inside look at what's been going on recently at MoviePass and Moviefone, read our full story on Business Insider Prime.

SoftBank plans to up its stake in WeWork in the latter's planned initial public offering, even as the money-losing commercial real-estate giant is struggling to attract other investors, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

The Japanese conglomerate, which oversees the $100 billion Vision Fund, plans to buy at least $750 million worth of WeWork shares in its IPO, The Journal reported. That would represent around a quarter of all the shares the coworking company plans to sell in the offering, in which it is expected to raise at least $3 billion.

With the move, SoftBank would increase its total investment in WeWork by about 7%, assuming it doesn't sell any shares in the offering, pushing it to beyond $11 billion. To date, the conglomerate has invested $10.65 billion in WeWork and its subsidiaries, according to WeWork's public offering document.

SoftBank representatives did not return a call seeking comment. WeWork representatives did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Read this: WeWork and Uber are giving SoftBank a black eye, but that doesn't mean Vision Fund II is in trouble, experts say

Earlier Friday, WeWork announced in updated offering filings that it is revamping its corporate governance, cutting in half the number of votes CEO Adam Neumann will get for his shares from 20 each to 10 each, and committing to having a board in which the majority of directors are independent.

Also, the company is now considering going public with a market capitalization of as little as $10 billion. In January, SoftBank privately valued WeWork at $47 billion, when it made a follow-on investment in the company. Earlier this week, the company was talking about a potential market capitalization at IPO of $15 billion to $20 billion.

The company has reportedly faced pushback from the public investors it is trying to woo, thanks to concerns about its governance, valuation, business model, and potential vulnerability in a recession.

Softbank has reportedly encouraged WeWork to not go forward with its IPO.

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Helios and Matheson Analytics is looking to sell its two key properties, the movie-ticket-subscription app MoviePass and the movie-ticket site Moviefone, multiple sources close to the company told Business Insider.

And in the meantime, the company has been cleaning house. Layoffs have been happening for weeks, the sources said.

Some MoviePass staffers gave their two-week notice this week, and multiple people were laid off and given no severance package, one source said. Business Insider reported last month that MoviePass had laid off about one-third of its staff, including its two-person exhibitor-relations team, which was responsible for building relationships between MoviePass and movie theaters.

MoviePass also laid off the staffer in charge of its social media in June, multiple sources said. The last posts on the company's Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages were on June 30.

Helios and Matheson did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

Things aren't any better over at Moviefone.

Moviefone was known best in the 1990s as an automated phone service that would tell you when and where any movie was playing in theaters. At its height in 1999, when it became an online-ticketing presence, the site was bought by AOL for $388 million.

But with the emergence of Fandango and Atom Tickets, Moviefone became known more for its movie and TV editorial content.

Verizon's Oath sold Moviefone to Helios and Matheson for $1 million in April 2018. At the time, Helios and Matheson characterized the site as an asset in building its relationships with theaters and movie studios for MoviePass, as well as another space for advertising revenue. But like many ideas at MoviePass, that never fully materialized.

The Friday before the Labor Day holiday weekend, the Moviefone editor Drew Taylor sent out an email to the site's freelancers informing them that "effective immediately all freelancing is suspended." The email, obtained by Business Insider, went on to say that Moviefone would make sure "everybody gets paid what they're owed as soon as possible," but multiple sources said some freelancers had not been paid for months.

Read more: "Ford v Ferrari" director describes what type of movies Disney wants from Fox going forward

The layoffs and suspension of freelancers come after a roller-coaster few years for MoviePass staff.

MoviePass surged in popularity in 2017 after Helios and Matheson bought the service and drastically lowered the price. But it burned through hundreds of millions of dollars and failed to find a business model that didn't lead to massive losses. In February, Helios and Matheson was delisted from the Nasdaq composite after trading below $1 for months.

During MoviePass' collapse, CEO Mitch Lowe locked some subscribers out of their accounts and used other tactics to try and keep the company running, according to multiple inside sources who Business Insider spoke with during a four-month investigation into the company's practices, which was published in August.

On July 4, MoviePass shut down, citing "technical problems." The service had gradually come back online for some subscribers, but on Friday, several current subscribers told Business Insider that their MoviePass accounts had gone back offline in the past few days.

Rebekah Paltrow Neumann once wanted to be an actress, she told Fast Company. Later, she became a certified yoga instructor.

She went on to become the chief brand and impact officer of The We Company, which filed to go public in August. However, investor pushback has led WeWork to strip back her influence over the company, including removing her from succession planning in the event of the death of her husband, CEO Adam Neumann, and banning her and members of her family from serving on the board, a document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission September 13 shows.

Paltrow Neumann cofounded the company — originally known by its most famous business, WeWork — alongside her husband, Adam Neumann, and Miguel McKelvey in 2010. She was also an early employee at the first coworking company Adam Neumann and McKelvey founded, Greendesk, according to Fast Company.

Read more: Before he was a billionaire, WeWork CEO Adam Neumann was broke. Here's the NYC building where he and his wife lived in a tiny apartment before he built a $47 billion company

Ahead of The We Company's initial public offering, Paltrow Neumann has turned her attention to WeGrow, the private primary school run by the company.

Neumann declined to comment through a WeWork representative.

Keep reading for a look at the life of Rebekah Paltrow Neumann.

Apple has announced a new Research app for the Apple Watch, designed to allow US Apple Watch owners to participate in health research studies. The app was revealed at the Apple Event on September 10, where new products like the iPhone 11, Apple Watch Series 5, and Apple TV+ were also unveiled.

The Apple Research App will gather health and movement information from each participant's Apple Watch, and send it to Apple to be studied.

The goal of the app is to allow users interested in participating in health studies to play a role in health research easily and privately, simply by wearing the Apple Watch.

At the event, Apple said the app will collect data without personal information, so it won't be possible to associate specific users with the medical data being collected.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

Apple Watch Series 4 (From $379 at Best Buy)

What each Apple Research study involves

As an example of the kind of work the Research app can accomplish, three studies were announced at the event:

The Apple Research app will allow you to enroll in studies and track your data. Apple

This initiative — both the app and the associated studies — is an extension of the work Apple has already done to market the Apple Watch as a health device. In 2017, for example, Apple conducted its expansive Apple Heart Study that included more than 400,000 participants.

The app will be available for download later this year, though Apple has not specified a release date.

The House Judiciary Committee is investigating whether Apple's restrictive policies around allowing third-party repairs to its devices, and its algorithms for search rankings in the App Store, constitute a violation of antitrust law.

The committee sent a letter to Apple on Friday requesting a trove of documents on the company's practices, as well as certain internal communications at the company. Issues mentioned in the letter include Apple's "restrictions on third-party repairs" of its devices, the App Store algorithm for search result rankings, and Apple's policies on permitting apps to use payment systems other than Apple Pay.

A New York Times analysis this week found that App Store rankings disproportionately promoted Apple's own apps, shunting competitors' apps further down in search results. Apple denied that this was intentional, arguing that its apps appeared higher in search simply because they were more popular.

The letter sent by the congressional probe Friday is the latest development in the committee's bipartisan antitrust investigation into tech giants announced in June. As part of the same inquiry, the committee also sent similar letters to Facebook and Google parent company Alphabet on Friday requesting information on how the companies dominate online advertising.

Apple has long held tight control over the market for repairs on its own devices, but has recently taken steps to loosen those restrictions. Last month, it began selling iPhone parts to some independent repair companies — but, importantly, it still does not sell parts directly to customers.

Tech giants are facing increasing scrutiny, even as the congressional probe ramps up. Earlier this week, 50 state attorneys general announced a joint investigation into the control Facebook and Google hold over search and digital advertising.

"Today's document requests are an important milestone in this investigation as we work to obtain the information that our Members need to make this determination," House Judiciary Antitrust Chairman David Cicilline, D-R.I., told Politico on Friday.

In an effort to avoid exposing young gamers to gambling, lawmakers in the United Kingdom say that video game makers should avoid selling loot boxes and other randomized microtransactions for real world money, and allow gamers to earn those rewards through playtime instead.

A lengthy report published earlier this week by the UK Parliament's Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee examined the relationship between video games, gambling, and addictive behavior. The report gathers years worth of data and testimony from industry professionals and offers several recommendations for new research and regulations.

Read more: EA doubled down on loot boxes in games during a hearing with UK lawmakers, comparing them to Kinder Eggs and saying they're 'actually quite ethical'

Though the DCMS committee said it "struggled to get clear answers and useful information" from the gaming industry, it made clear policy suggestions to make companies accept more responsibility for how their games impact players. The report acknowledges that there's still much more research to be done on the relationship between video games and gambling, but the committee recommends pre-emptive action to protect children from potentially predatory practices.

Lawmakers around the world have been adopting new methods to regulate video games as the industry adopts new business models. Many of the world's most popular video games are free to play, but they can earn billions through small microtransactions that charge players for extra content. Those microtransactions can offer anything from cosmetic items and unlockable characters to extra lives and level skips.

As controversy mounts, major video game publishers have been slowly moving away from loot boxes and adopting new strategies for microtransactions. However, the use of loot boxes in some of the world's most popular games has launched a global conversation about the monetization methods used in video games.

Modern technology has pretty much eliminated the need to write things down with pen and paper.

While you used to have to fill a heavy address book with the names, addresses, and phone numbers of your friends, family, and colleagues, these days your iPhone's Contacts app can do that for you.

Unfortunately, the process of storing your contacts' information on your device isn't always foolproof.

Sometimes iCloud errors or even syncing issues between your iPhone and email account can cause some contacts to be duplicated on your phone.

Thankfully, this issue has an easy fix that shouldn't take more than a couple of seconds to take care of. Here's how to do it.

Check out the products mentioned in this article:

iPhone XS (From $999.99 at Best Buy)

How to delete duplicate contacts on your iPhone

1. On your iPhone's home screen, locate the Contacts app icon and tap to open. Alternately, you could tap your Phone app, which appears as a phone inside a green box, and use the Contacts tab at the bottom of your screen to access this list.

Scroll through your contacts until you find the duplicate. Jennifer Still/Business Insider

2. Scroll through your list of contacts until you find the duplicate entry you wish to delete and tap to open.

3. On your contact's information screen, tap the Edit button in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.

4. Scroll down to the bottom of the screen to find the Delete Contact option. Tap this to delete the contact. A small pop-up will appear asking you to confirm your wish to delete this contact. Tap Delete Contact again to complete the action.

Select Delete Contact at the bottom. Jennifer Still/Business Insider

It's that simple. The duplicate contact will be gone and you should only have one entry for it in your phone.

Following months of anticipation, Apple is finally launching its video streaming service, Apple TV+, which will compete head on with existing services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, and HBO Now.

Apple TV+ will cost $5 per month when it debuts on November 1.

But at the Apple event on September 10, the company announced that if you buy any new iPhone, iPad, Apple TV, or Mac computer, you automatically get one year of the service for free.

In addition, the Apple TV+ subscription can be shared among up to six family members at no additional cost.

What you get in an Apple TV+ subscription

Apple TV+ will be ad-free, all content will be available for streaming on demand, and content can be downloaded locally so you can watch it offline if you know you will be somewhere without internet access.

The service will be available via an app on iOS devices, of course, but Apple also announced that it will be available on "select Samsung smart TVs," and it will come to other streaming devices and TVs in the future.

Even after a one-year free trial, Apple TV+ is going to be significantly less expensive than Netflix (which offers a $9 per month plan, but the most popular tier is $13 per month).

One reason Apple's streaming service is priced so affordably is that there's going to be relatively little content available at launch — unlike Netflix, Apple has made no mention of licensing any TV shows or movies for its new service.

Oprah Winfrey leads a famous cast of talent featured in new Apple TV+ original content. Apple

Instead, Apple has announced details about their slate of original content, with star-studded talent featuring the likes of Oprah Winfrey, Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon, and more.

Yusaku Maezawa, a key investor in SpaceX's next-generation rocket system, called Starship, plans to sell a 30% stake in his online fashion-retail company, Zozo, to Yahoo Japan.

As part of the $3.7 billion tender offer, Maezawa will resign as CEO of Zozo, receive about $2.3 billion in cash, and maintain a 6% stake in the company he founded, according to Forbes.

Yusaku Maezawa with a Starship model and SpaceX spacesuit helmet on October 9.Koji Sasahara/AP PhotoMaezawa spoke about the deal during an emotional two-hour-long press conference on Thursday. Although he raised misgivings about how he managed the company in recent years, saying he regretted mistakes that hurt the company's bottom line, Forbes reported that he rationalized his departure in another and far more personal way: a need to prepare for his 2023 flight around the moon inside Starship.

Maezawa also indicated he'd fly on a less ambitious space mission before SpaceX's privately funded circumlunar voyage.

"Training to go into space will to take up much of my time," Maezawa said, according to Forbes.

Maezawa first announced his bid for a weeklong Starship flight around the moon during a September 2018 presentation about the launch system by Elon Musk, SpaceX's founder and CEO. (It was then called Big Falcon Rocket, but it has since been redesigned and renamed Starship; however, the craft's core goals and capabilities are similar.)

The fashion mogul, who is also an avid collector of art, named his experimental mission #dearMoon. He plans to handpick a crew that includes a "painter, musician, film director," and other artists, and maybe a couple of astronauts, to "inspire the dreamer within each of us" with the trip.

When a reporter asked Musk about his possible participation in the #dearMoon mission, he said (seemingly half-seriously), "maybe we'll both be on it."

Starhopper — SpaceX's first Mars Starship prototype — hovers over its launchpad during a test flight in Boca Chica, Texas, on August 27.Trevor Mahlmann/Reuters

If Starship is realized as envisioned by Musk, it will be a roughly 400-foot-tall two-stage steel-bodied vehicle. It'd also be the world's largest, most powerful, and paradoxically most affordable launch system because — unlike any orbital-class rockets today — it'd be fully reusable.

Musk said he may beat NASA back to the lunar surface with Starship and launch the first humans to Mars with the system, perhaps 100 at a time. Musk is also dreaming up an even larger version of Starship, the scale of which stretches the imagination.

Read more: SpaceX is eyeing these 9 places on Mars for landing its first Starship rocket missions

Musk said in September 2018 that it'd cost between $2 billion and $10 billion to develop Starship into an operational system, and that Maezawa's contributions are all going directly toward that goal.

"He's paying a lot of money that would help with the ship and its booster," Musk said. "He's ultimately paying for the average citizen to travel to other planets."

Maezawa would not disclose at the time how much he's paying SpaceX, or on what schedule. However — after tweeting in May that he has "no money" because he uses it all "immediately" — the fashion tycoon's new influx of cash may help SpaceX realize Starship in the absence of government funding.

An illustration of SpaceX's upcoming Starship spaceship (left), Super Heavy rocket booster (right), and an integrated Starship-Super Heavy launch system (center).© Kimi Talvitie"Progress is accelerating," Musk tweeted in August, later adding that it's moving along "exponentially."

SpaceX has two development sites for Starship: one in Boca Chica, Texas, and a second in Cocoa, Florida. So far, most of the work has occurred at the Texas launch site, where SpaceX started to build its first prototype, called Starhopper, in 2018.

The vehicle was a test bed to prove SpaceX's new Raptor rocket engines worked on a flying vehicle. It performed a few short test launches, or "hops," in April and July, then made its last experimental launch from Texas in August. That final flight took Starhopper about 490 feet (150 meters) into the air before it landed on a nearby concrete pad.

SpaceX is now pushing to complete two bigger, roughly 180-foot-tall (55 meter), prototypes, called Starship Mk 1 and Mk 2 in Texas and Florida, respectively. Each should be capable of orbiting Earth to prove out and refine launch, reentry, and landing-system technologies.

Newly released FAA documents refer to this part of Starship's development program as "Phase 3." As part of that phase, Musk tweeted on August 28 that SpaceX would try launching Starship Mk 1 about 12.4 miles (20 kilometers) above Texas in October before the company attempts an orbital launch "shortly thereafter."

Musk added that he would provide an update on the overall Starship development program on September 28. Previously, he said he would deliver that presentation from Boca Chica — possibly to do so with a fitting backdrop.

"Starship Mk 1 will be fully assembled by that time," he said.

SpaceX representatives did not immediately respond to Business Insider's request for comment about Maezawa's latest remarks, the #dearMoon mission, or overall on the Starship development program.

This story has been updated.