SpaceX is about to launch its first people to orbit and, in the process, resurrect human spaceflight from America.

Though SpaceX's flight is experimental, the two astronauts scheduled to pilot it say they accept the risks and are ready to fly.

The rocket company, founded by Elon Musk in 2002, has worked for nearly a decade with NASA to design, build, and fly a new seven-seat spaceship called Crew Dragon. NASA's hope with its more than $3.1 billion effort is to once again launch astronauts from US soil — an ability the agency lost in July 2011 when it retired its last space shuttle.

NASA picked the seasoned astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley to pilot the mission, called Demo-2. If all goes according to plan, the duo should lift off atop a Falcon 9 rocket at 4:33 p.m. ET on Wednesday from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida.

But as NASA, SpaceX, and the astronauts themselves have made abundantly clear, Demo-2 is not only an experimental crewed test flight but the first of a brand-new spaceship in nearly 40 years.

"We're going to stay hungry until Bob and Doug come home," Kathy Lueders, who manages the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, said during a press briefing on Friday. "Our teams are scouring and thinking of every single risk that's out there, and we've worked our butt off to buy down the ones we know of, and we'll continue to look — and continue to buy them down — until we bring them home."

On Saturday, NASA told Business Insider just how risky it believed the flight would be, sharing two key risk estimates that the crew's mission would fail or that they'd be killed.

The chance of mission failure is about 4.5 times that of crew death

NASA's Commercial Crew Program requires providers like SpaceX and Boeing, which is also developing a new spaceship (called the CST-100 Starliner), to meet a raft of safety requirements before flying any astronauts.

Among that checklist, loss-of-crew and loss-of-mission stand out.

LOC is the chance of the crew dying in a phase of the mission. Historically, NASA's space shuttle had a LOC of about 1 in 68: The program launched 135 missions, but two (Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003) ended in tragedy, each killing seven astronauts.

LOM is the chance a mission might go awry — as Boeing's Starliner spaceship did during an uncrewed test flight in December (software errors were to blame) — but not leave the crew dead.

SpaceX's crew-risk number is 1 in 276 and its mission-risk number is 1 in 60, NASA told Business Insider in an email on Saturday. SpaceX did not respond to Business Insider's request for comment.

The risk to the mission is therefore consodered about 4.5 times the risk to the crew. This is in part because of SpaceX's work on its emergency-abort system, which in January proved it could fly the Crew Dragon spaceship to safety and away from a doomed Falcon 9 rocket. But SpaceX has also worked to limit the risk that space junk, asteroid and comet dust, and other debris might jeopardize a mission, both through additional spacecraft shielding work and a process to photograph the ship before it departs the ISS.

"You're flying at high speed in space and there are micrometeorites and debris out there. That's what we worry about the most, frankly," Leroy Chiao, a former NASA astronaut who launched to space four times, told Business Insider. "That's why all spacecraft have shielding, but of course if you get a big enough hit, the shields are not going to protect you."

The LOC number for SpaceX's coming mission is better than the Commercial Crew Program's requirement of 1 in 270 for the entire mission. (The LOC number must be better than 1 in 500 for launch and 1 in 500 for landing.) Its LOM number also beats the program's 1-in-55 requirement set in 2010.

That's why NASA, following a two-day safety review on Friday, indicated Crew Dragon was well on its way toward earning full approval to fly astronauts and private passengers after Demo-2.

"Today's review and the interim human rating certification went a long way to certifying the system for crewed flight," Stephen Jurczyk, NASA's associate administrator, said during a press briefing.

'We're really comfortable with it'

For their part, Behnken and Hurley have accepted the risk calculated by NASA and SpaceX.

"I think we're really comfortable with it," Behnken told Business Insider just after the safety review for Demo-2 finished Friday.

Behnken added that, by he and Hurley working with SpaceX on Crew Dragon for roughly five years, they'd gained more insight into the ways the mission could fail "than any crew has in recent history, just in terms of understanding the different scenarios that are at play."

The astronauts also pointed out that LOC and LOM numbers were more like tools to track safety improvements during a development program rather than ultimate checkboxes.

"Whenever we hear those numbers, we dig a little bit deeper than just what the overall statistics might imply," Behnken said. "Those numbers are best used as you kind of compare different ways of doing things or hardware changes that you might pursue."

Lueders told Air & Space Magazine in 2018 that improving the numbers required tradeoffs: "You can say, 'Yes I would love to have tons of MMOD shielding'" — protection against micrometeoroids and orbital debris — "but if that makes the vehicle so heavy I have to add another booster, well guess what? Adding another booster adds more risk too."

Chiao said pushing too hard for safer numbers could cause a spaceflight program to spiral into never launching at all.

"What's the right balance?" Chiao said. "You can make your vehicle virtually impossible to build and operate, but on the other hand, you don't want to be cavalier about things."

Both LOC and LOM are modeled via computers that, whenever possible, lean on real flight data. For example, SpaceX has launched its latest Falcon 9 rocket dozens of times, generating measurements that can be fed into simulations. SpaceX has also completed a full (though uncrewed) test flight of its new Crew Dragon vehicle and about 20 flights of its Cargo Dragon, too.

"Its evolution has become more and more safe as it's been operated, and that's something that we really do appreciate," Behnken said. "It's just remarkable to see all the other missions that have contributed to the human spaceflight program by, in some sense, being a test mission for us before we had the chance to fly on the Falcon 9."

An "urban flight" could take off from the San Francisco Bay Area due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But some tech workers rooted in San Francisco may not be headed too far, according to one new study.

Data analytics firm Moody found that San Jose, about 50 miles to the south, is among the best-poised cities in the US to welcome an influx of residents fleeing crowded areas in a post-coronavirus future as The Mercury News reports. The firm analyzed the top 100 metro areas in the US that have well-educated and widely distributed populations. Joining San Jose on the list is Durham and Raleigh in North Carolina, Salt Lake City, and Boise, Idaho.

The pandemic has caused many to rethink their urban lifestyles in expensive cities as employers increasingly embrace work from home policies. Some are also skittish about remaining in dense environments that have proven to be the perfect breeding ground for the spread of an infectious disease such as COVID-19.

The researchers behind the Moody study suggest that less dense areas with established professional sectors could benefit from the expected exodus away from crowded cities, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, as The Mercury News points out.

It's worth noting that many of the same issues that have plagued San Francisco — such as a housing shortage and a subsequent rise in living costs — are also present in San Jose. But the South Bay city is much less dense than its cousin to the north.

About 881,000 residents live in San Francisco's 49 square miles, compared to a little over 1 million in San Jose's 180 square miles. More than 17,000 residents live in each square mile of San Francisco compared to 5,300 in San Jose, as The Mercury News notes.

San Francisco is a city of walkers and cyclists. San Jose is more suburban-like and car-friendly.

"Silicon Valley is nobody's idea of an up-and-coming area," the study's author, Adam Kamins, told Forbes. "But there is a notable contrast between the San Jose metro area, with its sprawling tech campuses, and tightly packed San Francisco."

 Many who work in the South Bay have opted for apartments in San Francisco to be closer to the city's desirable amenities like museums and a colorful restaurant scene. Tech companies have turned to private shuttles to ferry employees from their urban apartments to the sprawling corporate campuses in the heart of the Valley.

Some firms have looked past the Valley and into San Francisco to set up shop to cater to a young workforce. Salesforce, with its 61-floor, gleaming glass skyscraper, is an example of that. Twitter and Uber did the same, leading the charge on big tech's foray into San Francisco by planting their headquarters in the city's mid-Market neighborhood around 2011.

San Jose, according to the study, may be a desirable city to relocate to, but other surveys suggest that tech workers want to leave the Bay Area altogether. As Business Insider's Rob Price reports, social networking site Blind conducted a survey of thousands of techies in the region, two-thirds of which said they would consider leaving the Bay Area if their employer allowed them to permanently work remotely.

Tech employees were already growing weary of life in the expensive region, and droves of workers had begun taking off for cheaper cities, including Austin, Texas.

Fast-growing cities with burgeoning tech hubs will also likely continue to grow moving forward, as Forbes reports.

Technology can help health officials rapidly tell someone they may have been exposed to COVID-19. Today the Exposure Notification API we created with @Google is available to help public health agencies make their COVID-19 apps effective while protecting user privacy.

— Tim Cook (@tim_cook) May 20, 2020

SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Elon Musk in 2002, is steamrolling toward its first-ever rocket launch of people into orbit.

The NASA-funded commercial mission is called Demo-2 and will fly two passengers: seasoned NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley.

But before Demo-2's launch can happen, SpaceX needs to clear a number of final safety hurdles, and the company on Friday passed two of those penultimate steps.

"We are now preparing for a launch in five short days," NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine said during a televised press briefing on Friday, later adding: "We are a go."

Musk: It's taken 'probably 10,000 meetings' and tests to get here

The first milestone SpaceX achieved was a flight readiness review. Such pre-launch meetings are typically long, as stakeholders comb for any final issues and think of ways to reduce risk. When people are on the line, though, such reviews become even more painstakingly detailed.

Behnken and Hurley's mission has them docking to the International Space Station and living with a crew of three other people for up to 110 days, too. So Russia, Japan, and other member-states of the orbital outpost got a say in the decision to launch Demo-2 as well.

"Everybody in the room was very clear that now is the time to speak up if there are any challenges. And there were," Bridenstine said.

Kirk Shireman, who manages the space station program at NASA's Johnson Space Center, said Roscosmos in 2019 made SpaceX aware of a "very, very remote possibility of a failure" with the Crew Dragon that might cause "catastrophic damage" when docking to the ISS.

"SpaceX said we understand, and we'll make a modification," Shireman added, noting the unspecified issue was resolved to Russia's satisfaction with the new Crew Dragon ship for Demo-2.

The meeting lasted nearly two workdays, but SpaceX came out the other end with permission.

The second major hurdle that SpaceX cleared, shortly after the review, was a brief test-firing of the Falcon 9 rocket's engines.

SpaceX and NASA just have to conduct one last full mission dress rehearsal this weekend, and then take the results of it and the static fire test into another review.

Luckily for Musk, that should be the final meeting on the path to launch.

"There might have been 10,000 meetings" to get to this point, Musk said on May 17 for a Bloomberg story by Ashlee Vance. "There are probably 10,000 tests of one kind or another that have taken place."

NASA: 'We're going to stay hungry until Bob and Doug come home'

Kathy Lueders, who manages the Commercial Crew Program for NASA, also revealed that the estimated chance the astronauts might die during the mission — a figure called loss-of-crew — fell within a crucial 1-in-270 threshold set by the space agency.

Business Insider requested the exact loss-of-crew probability for Demo-2, but NASA did not immediately provide the figure. The agency also did not immediately provide a loss-of-mission estimate, which examines the likelihood astronauts survive yet can't complete their mission.

Whatever the risk of Demo-2 may be, Behnken and Hurley — who SpaceX's president and COO, Gwynne Shotwell, has described as "badass" dads, test pilots, and astronauts — said they're ready to fly.

"I think we're really comfortable with it," Behnken told Business Insider just after the flight review finished on Friday. He added that, by working with SpaceX on Crew Dragon for roughly five years, he and Hurley have more insight into the ways the mission could fail "than any crew has in recent history, just in terms of understanding the different scenarios that are at play."

Lueders said no amount of reviews and tests would stop the team from continuing to imagine other possible problems and improve solutions for known issues.

"We're going to stay hungry until Bob and Doug come home," Lueders said. "Our teams are scouring and thinking of every single risk that's out there, and we've worked our butt off to buy down the ones we know of, and we'll continue to look — and continue to buy them down — until we bring them home."

With people stuck at home due to the coronavirus pandemic, streaming is on the rise.

Disney Plus and Hulu are likely the services seeing the biggest gains in US subscribers since the outbreak began, according to a recent survey from TV analytics firm EDO (the former has gained over 54.5 million subscribers since launching in November, and the latter had more than 30 million as of February). And Netflix exceeded expectations in its Q1 earnings report last month, adding 15.8 million subscribers globally. It now has 183 million subscribers worldwide.

But the data isn't as clear cut for Apple TV Plus.

Data from the research company Antenna, which is based on a variety of anonymized transactional data sources (like credit card transactions), suggests that Apple TV Plus is the only major streaming service that hasn't surged in subscribers while people practice social distancing. Antenna said that Apple TV Plus sign-ups in March and April, when coronavirus guidelines were implemented, were no greater than February sign-ups.

But audiences might, however, be warming to Apple TV Plus' programming.

Data from Parrot Analytics provided to Business Insider suggests there's been increased "demand" for Apple TV Plus' original programming recently. The data company doesn't look at subscribers, but measures audience demand, which reflects viewership, engagement, and desire weighted by importance. The demand share in the US for Apple TV Plus' programming among other streamers had increased by more than 10% in the seven weeks after March 11.

"The impact the pandemic is having on audience demand has certainly helped Apple TV Plus so far," said Parrot Analytics partnerships director Steve Langdon, adding that "Defending Jacob," starring Chris Evans, had been a breakout hit for the platform.

In the six months since its debut, the service's content selection is slim, but there is high demand for what is available, according to Parrot.

Is that enough to grow a significant subscriber base?

It's unclear how many people are actually using Apple TV Plus

Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, based on anonymous sources familiar with the matter, that about 10 million people had signed up for Apple TV Plus by February, but only half were actually using it.

Apple hasn't publicly revealed subscriber numbers. CEO Tim Cook has only said that Apple TV Plus was "off to a rousing start," as of January.

And while the Antenna data didn't specify exact subscriber numbers, the fact that they weren't increasing in recent months, as other streaming services have surged, does not bode well.

'Defending Jacob' is a hit, but it may not be enough to inspire growth

Despite a lack of surging subscribers, Apple TV Plus might have its first real hit.

Deadline recently reported that the latest Apple original series, "Defending Jacob," was Apple TV Plus' biggest premiere since the launch. According to Parrot Analytics, "Defending Jacob" has been more than 32 times more in demand than the average show in the US since premiering last month. But while "Defending Jacob" is popular with audiences, its viewers aren't watching other shows on the platform, Parrot Analytics said.

Some of Apple's original series have received lukewarm to downright bad reviews from critics, with some exceptions like "Little America."

"Defending Jacob" has a 70% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes, while others are labeled "rotten," like "See" starring Jason Momoa (44%) and "Truth Be Told" starring Octavia Spencer (32%). Its initial flagship series, "The Morning Show," starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston, debuted with poor reviews that slightly improved as the season progressed (it sits at a 60% critic score now). 

Apple was probably hoping for a better reception after heavily investing in such star-powered shows.

With few original programs available, even its biggest shows might not be enough to sustain a strong subscriber base. And with film and TV productions shut down across the entertainment industry due to the coronavirus, it's safe to assume second seasons of some of its high-profile series like "The Morning Show" will be delayed, leaving the service starving for more content.

Apple TV Plus is still a disappointing deal

At $4.99 per month, Apple TV Plus is the cheapest major streaming service available right now, but it's still a disappointing deal. The service's original releases have been few and far between and despite how popular "Defending Jacob" is with its users, it still doesn't have a "blockbuster" series like a "Witcher" (Netflix) or a "Mandalorian" (Disney Plus) to drive interest. 

Apple is taking some measures to potentially remedy these growth and content concerns.

The company has purchased some older movies and TV shows and have taken pitches from studios about licensing content, according to Bloomberg. It's the first of what would be licensed content for Apple TV Plus in a space where rivals like Netflix and Disney Plus have large libraries of it. And Deadline reported on Tuesday that the upcoming World War II movie "Greyhound," starring Tom Hanks, will skip its theatrical release and head straight to Apple TV Plus.

But with so many other options on the table — from existing streaming giants like Netflix, Disney Plus, and Hulu to upcoming competitors like WarnerMedia's HBO Max and NBCUniversal's Peacock — Apple TV Plus may struggle to break through the crowd even if Apple expands its content library.

Car-rental giant Hertz filed for bankruptcy Friday night after it was unable to reach an agreement with its biggest lenders, The Wall Street Journal first reported.

Hertz filed for Chapter 11 protections in the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wilmington, Delaware, making it one of the largest corporate casualties of the coronavirus pandemic's widespread economic fallout as travel restrictions decimate the rental car industry.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Hertz has around $19 billion in debt, which includes roughly $4.3 billion in corporate bonds and loans as well as $14.4 billion of debt backed by the company's fleet of vehicles, and lenders had asked the company for upfront payment on some of those obligations but couldn't get it to agree, according to The Journal.

Hertz's business had already been struggling even before the pandemic as it tried to fend off competition from other rental agencies as well as ride-hailing businesses like Uber and Lyft.

In April, as travel ground to a halt, it laid off 10,000 workers — roughly 26% of its total workforce — and even put at least 20 identical yellow Corvette Z06s up for sale online at a steep discount as it tried to preserve cash.

CEO Kathryn Marinello resigned last Saturday, and the company's board of directors named Paul Stone, who previously served as the company's executive vice president and chief retail operations officer for North America, to step in for Marinello.

Hertz, whose parent company, Hertz Global Holdings Inc., also owns rental brands Dollar and Thrifty, had said in a regulatory filing in April that it was considering seeking bankruptcy protections after it "did not make certain payments" on its operating lease. Hertz said it "could be materially and negatively impacted" if discussions with lenders to reduce those payments weren't fruitful by the first week of May.

Hertz's stock dropped by as much as 50% in after-hours trading following the The Wall Street Journal's initial report that the company would file for bankruptcy on Friday night.

Devoted Health wants to change the way the U.S. takes care of its senior citizens, and it has big plans in its first five years to do just that.

The startup, which has been gathering lots of buzz in the last year, was founded to sell private health insurance plans to U.S. seniors, a market that is growing rapidly as Baby Boomers age.

Using one pitch deck, Devoted Health managed to secure $300 million from investors in a funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz late last year, with a valuation of $1.8 billion — all before it signed up a single customer.

But the deck also outlined the company’s aggressive plans for its first five years. Devoted Health planned to sign up 5,000 members for 2019 and grow that to 103,722 by 2023. It expects to make about $1.2 billion in revenue in 2023 while generating a small net loss.

Here’s what else Devoted Health laid out in the pitch deck:

BI Prime is publishing dozens of stories like this each and every day, chock full of exclusive content and industry analysis. Get started by reading highlights from the Devoted Health pitch deck

A US Navy ship downed a flying drone with a "solid state laser" in the Pacific Ocean, the service branch announced on Friday.

The USS Portland (LPD-27), a San Antonio-class amphibious transport dock ship, deployed its Technology Maturation Laser Weapon System Demonstrator (LWSD) against an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) last week during a demonstration, the first such use of a high-energy class solid-state laser, the Navy said.

"By conducting advanced at sea tests against UAVs and small crafts, we will gain valuable information on the capabilities of the Solid State Laser Weapons System Demonstrator against potential threats," US Navy Capt. Karrey Sanders, the ship's commanding officer, said in a press release.

"The Solid State Laser Weapons System Demonstrator is a unique capability the Portland gets to test and operate for the Navy, while paving the way for future weapons systems, " Sanders added. "With this new advanced capability, we are redefining war at sea for the Navy."

According to the Navy, the weapon system is being developed due to "an increasing number of threats" that include UAVs, armed small boats, and adversary intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance systems. The Navy has used other laser weapon systems on its ships, including its 30-kilowatt class Laser Weapon System (LaWS) aboard the USS Ponce.

The Navy hopes laser cannons can defend the fleet from drones and even the long-range missiles being fielded by rivals like China, which can outrange a US carrier strike group's jets and missiles. China's land-based missiles could overwhelm a carrier group's ability to intercept with a finite supply of missiles, which is where the laser comes in.

The US Army is developing its own laser weapon, the Indirect Fires Protection Capability-High Energy Laser (IFPC-HEL), which is expected to range up 300 kilowatts and intercept rockets, artillery, and mortars.

The Office of Naval Research first awarded Northrup Grumman an initial $53 million contract to develop the 150-kilowatt-class LWSD in 2015.

"For about the price of a gallon of diesel fuel per shot, we're offering the Navy a high-precision defensive approach that will protect not only its sailors, but also its wallet," director and program manager Guy Renard, said at the time.

The coronavirus pandemic has forced millions of people around the world to work from home full time — many for the first time in their lives — and the transition hasn't always been seamless.

By now, we've all seen plenty of horror stories about Zoom calls gone wrong, kids interrupting at the worst possible moments, and the difficulties of staying productive while also maintaining your mental health.

Research shows that a big part of that means taking breaks to parent, eat, or just get some fresh air and give your mind a chance to refocus.

But some workers haven't felt able to do that, either because of demanding employers and managers who are concerned about productivity suffering — or simply because employees don't want to give coworkers the impression that they're slacking off.

In-person workplaces allow your bosses and colleagues to see when you're on the job, but now many companies have become reliant on tools like Microsoft Teams or Slack to determine when someone's "at their desk." Some have even turned to virtual private networks and webcams to constantly monitor employees throughout the day.

That's increased stress levels for some employees — but it also inspired Rehaan Adatia, a consultant at KPMG, and Haris Akbar, a post-doctoral fellow at Vertex Pharmaceuticals, to find a way to help people working from home reclaim some control over their schedules.

"We were seeing an uptick in these micromanaging initiatives taken up by managers to really check in a little bit further on their employees," Adatia told Business Insider, adding that a survey they sent around online confirmed that others were having difficulties taking breaks without prompting questions from managers or judgment from coworkers.

So they built Lurk From Home, a tool that tricks work chats and productivity-monitoring software into thinking someone's still at their computer using a Java plugin to intermittently move the mouse or play a media clip in the background to keep their screen active.

It's invisible to the human eye, but Adatia said it was enough to trigger activity logs for Slack, Cisco Jabber, Microsoft's Teams, Skype for Business, and Lync, as well as VPNs that may track what workers are up to throughout the day.

Adatia said he and Akbar didn't build Lurk From Home to enable people to be lazy, and he's mindful of companies that might perceive it that way and try to block their tool.

"I can see why the perception would be that this is more of a laid-back tool," Adatia said. "But we believe that this gives our users peace of mind, and that actually helps them inversely perform better when they're at their desk."

Adatia said the original idea for Lurk From Home came about years earlier during a part-time internship he had one summer that let him work remotely but also gave him tasks that didn't take the entire week to complete.

"I had basically figured out how to automate all of my work," he said. But he was still worried that efficiency may be perceived as laziness if he wasn't available on his work chat.

Adatia's solution at that point was to open a blank document on his laptop, place a coffee mug on his keyboard, and clamp the lid down so it kept typing, making his work chat think he was online.

Lurk From Home may be a slightly more high-tech hack, but as more companies encourage remote work moving forward, Adatia said tools like it would become even more essential.

That's why he and Akbar are now building additional features to encourage productivity and make working from home less isolating, like reminders to take breaks and ways to connect with coworkers and network, Adatia said. While Lurk From Home is a free tool, he hopes the additional functionality is something employers might pay for.

"Long term, I think our goal is to develop an entire suite of different tools for those working from home, not specifically just related to productivity," he said.

Amazon's advertising business continues to balloon and along with it, the number of companies that help brands navigate the ins and outs of advertising and selling on the platform.

Business Insider identified 18 companies that are part of a cottage industry of Amazon-focused tech firms. These companies sell software that helps brands do things like set up digital storefronts, merchandise, and run advertising.

The companies range from tech firms that sell software to help third-party sellers manage sales to agencies that offer managed services like ad buying and strategy.

Some, like Pacvue and Orca Pacific, were founded by ex-Amazon employees and entrepreneurs that wanted to start their own firms to help brands understand Amazon's complex marketplace.

Click here to see the full list of 18 Amazon-focused firms solving selling and advertising problems.

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PayPal Chief Marketing Officer Allison Johnson left the company this week after fewer than 18 months in the role.

A spokeswoman said her departure was part of an effort to simplify the fintech giant's marketing organization and that Johnson left as part of the shift.

"As PayPal moves into the next phase of its journey, we have made some organizational changes to reduce complexity, simplify our processes, and better align with our customers. As part of this change, we are streamlining our marketing teams under one cohesive function," the spokeswoman told Business Insider.

Johnson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

PayPal hired the former Apple marketer to shake up its brand

Johnson, a former vice president of worldwide marketing communications for Apple who reported directly to Steve Jobs, joined PayPal in January 2019. She became its first chief marketing officer in six years as the company sought to expand beyond its ubiquitous payment button to products like the money-transfer app Venmo, the merchant gateway Braintree, and the deal-finding browser extension Honey Science.

CEO Dan Schulman told The Wall Street Journal at the time that the company needed more sophisticated marketing to address an increasingly complex market.

Two people with direct knowledge of the matter, both of whom are known to Business Insider but requested anonymity because they are not authorized to discuss the matter, said Johnson conducted a clean sweep of PayPal's internal marketing department upon her arrival.

Several executives, including PayPal's vice president of global brand marketing, its director of global brand advertising and creative services, and its senior director of brand marketing, left over the following months.

The fintech giant faces increasing competition from rivals like Apple, Amazon, and Square 

One of the people said that before Johnson's arrival, PayPal's brand marketing focused on internal services for clients with separate divisions in regions around the world.

According to the two people, Johnson aimed to consolidate the department under a single global remit. She established PayPal's creative lab to elevate the brand as it faced increasing competition from companies like Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, and Square, which offer their own payment products.

A third person close to the business said Johnson took on a lesser role when the latest reorganization began several months ago.

Before Apple, Johnson held top marketing and public-relations roles at HP, Netscape, and IBM. She also cofounded West, a combination marketing agency and consulting firm based in San Francisco. 

As states prepare to lift COVID-19 stay-at-home orders across the US, some of tech's biggest players have started to solidify their timelines for reopening their offices.

In the past month, companies including Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Amazon have started to tell employees when they can expect to return to work in the coming year.

Twitter was the first major tech company to make a bold decision about the future of remote work — in the first week of May, the company went so far as to tell employees that they can keep working from home permanently if they want to. A slew of smaller tech companies have followed that lead, including Spotify, Shopify, and Box.

Meanwhile, Google and Facebook will both return to offices in the coming year, but are planning to limit office capacity to less than 30% in the months after they reopen. Most employees at those companies will be allowed to continue working from home at least through the end of 2020.

Companies returning to offices will face unprecedented challenges to stave off potential COVID-19 outbreaks among employees. Some, like Amazon, are turning to high-tech solutions like thermal cameras that screen workers for fever. Experts say offices may have to implement sneeze guards, one-way corridors, and staggered hours to reduce the density of employees.

Here's how tech giants are planning to return to offices in the coming year.