Pete Buttigieg brought star power to the Transportation Department. Insiders explain how he's winning over his new staff, the White House, and Republicans.
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Matt Turner
Mar 7, 2021, 23:51 IST
Pete Buttigieg drinks a root beer float while talking with journalists as he walks through the Iowa State Fair August 13, 2019.Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
An inside look at Google's top secret project to give you superhuman hearing. Codename: Wolverine.
Hello!
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This week was busy as ever, and we've got a ton of Insider deep dives to share with you today. But before we get to that, a look at what's trending this morning:
Biden vowed to start sending out stimulus checks "this month." Here's the latest.
One DOT staffer remembered being bombarded that December Tuesday with text messages, emails, and Facebook posts from friends who knew little about his actual job but were excited to hear that Buttigieg would be his boss.
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It's not uncommon for political stars and former White House contenders to land in a presidential Cabinet, but they usually don't call their new home the Transportation Department, a behemoth federal agency created during the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and whose portfolio includes pipeline safety, air-traffic control, and highway maintenance.
From Jennifer Eum, Keishel Williams, Sawyer Click, and Taylor Tyson:
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Across corporate America, the struggle to place women - especially Black women - at the helm of major companies continues. Paving the way forward are women like Thasunda Brown Duckett, who was just named CEO of retirement and investment manager TIAA. She will become only the fourth Black woman chief executive of a Fortune 500 company.
Insider asked these executives, from leading companies like Google, Salesforce, and Amazon, to reflect on their rise to the top, the struggle of being a Black woman in white corporate America, and the best career advice they've received. Their answers are raw and poignant, emotional and inspiring.
The project, which is internally named "Wolverine," is a nod to the comic-book mutant's heightened sense of hearing, said four former employees familiar with the details, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press.
The team started seriously working on the project in 2018, the sources said, and in that time it has gone through multiple prototypes and has gained the favor of executives like Google cofounder Sergey Brin.
Trevor Milton's star rose as Nikola raised a billion dollars in funding and assembled a blue-chip roster of partners and customers. By 2020, Milton, the serial entrepreneur who'd started four companies before Nikola and sold two of them, was being compared to Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
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But last June, Bloomberg was the first to report that the One prototype Milton unveiled in 2016 couldn't drive under its own power. Three months later, Hindenburg Research, a financial-research firm that calls out companies it thinks have misbehaved, said Milton had a long history of bending the truth.
Milton denied the allegations, but they hung over him until, a little over a week later, he resigned from the company that made him a billionaire, before it delivered a single truck.
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