ELLISON'S CANCER INSTITUTE IS LAYING OFF 88 PEOPLE AS LARRY STATES "MOST CANCER WILL BE GONE IN FIVE YEARS" The Ellison Medical Institute in Los Angeles filed a WARN notice on Nov. 4. The 88 layoffs are permanent and start in January. The institute describes itself as a research center focused on AI and disease research. It has not said why it is cutting. Ellison funds it. At Oracle AI World this year he said AI will make most cancers "gone in five years, and certainly in 10."

LAYOFF ALERT: UPWORK Upwork plans to cut about 37% of its workforce. The board approved the cut on Tuesday. Upwork filed it with the SEC this morning. Upwork had about 630 employees at the end of 2025. By that math the full plan reaches roughly 230 people.

JENSEN OUT. KRESS IN. Colette Kress was named interim CEO of NVIDA. Kress has been NVIDIA's CFO and an executive vice president since September 2013. Before that she spent three years at Cisco as CFO of its Business Technology and Operations Finance group She was at Microsoft for 13 years starting in 1997, including four as CFO of the Server and Tools division. She started her career with eight years in finance roles at Texas Instruments. She has a finance degree from the University of Arizona and an MBA from SMU. When she joined NVIDIA, annual revenue was $4.13 billion. Fiscal 2026 revenue was $215.9 billion. Her fiscal 2026 pay was about $14.3 million. She's also the person who presents Q3 results this Tuesday, Nov 17. She'll be the first finance executive to run NVIDIA, which has only ever had Huang as CEO.

LAID OFF? WE GOT THE GIG FOR YOU! Kalshi is hiring a GTA VI Researcher. Yes, this is a real job posting paying over 6 figures. You play from midnight on Nov 19. You stream it. You write weekly reports on the game's economy. Pay is $100K to $120K base pay equivalent for the contract, plus a $15K bonus, a 100-inch TV and $75 a day in DoorDash. Apply here:

20-SOMETHINGS ARE SKIPPING THE FIRST JOB? I think the better headline would be they are forced to try to make ends meet themselves, but we will summarize their report anyway. The Wall Street Journal reports that young Americans are turning down entry-level offers and starting companies instead. The paper says AI is shaking up those starter jobs, and that younger founders are using it to get businesses off the ground. Babson College's Global Entrepreneurship Monitor puts early-stage entrepreneurship among ages 18 to 24 at 23.6% in 2025. The rate among ages 25 to 34 is 23.0%. Both sit above every older age group in the survey. A decade earlier, in 2015, the 18-to-24 rate was about 10%. Gusto surveyed more than 1,000 people who started businesses in 2025. About 71% of Gen Z founders in that survey used AI to help launch. The entry path into wage work is also thinner. The New York Fed puts underemployment among recent college graduates at 42.5% in the third quarter of 2026. That means they hold jobs that typically do not require a bachelor's degree. Their unemployment rate was 5.2%.

BOEING IS CUTTING 5% OF ITS COMMERCIAL AIRPLANE WORKFORCE The division had nearly 50,500 employees at the end of 2025. Notices start going out in December, through a mix of layoffs and attrition. The reason given is production. Boeing Commercial Airplanes head Pope told staff that slower output "puts us in an overstaffed position." Boeing's own India site says it has about 7,000 employees in the country. Its Bengaluru campus is the largest Boeing facility of its kind outside the US. Its approved H-1B petitions rose from 26 in FY2025 to 72 in FY2026.

THE H-1B WAGE RULE IS NOW ONE STEP FROM PUBLICATION The current floor is what creates the labor arbitrage of "Cheap Foreign Labor." This rule is not a solution, but it does help. The Labor Department sent its final prevailing wage rule to the White House for review on November 6. The White House lists it as economically significant. The rule sets the minimum pay an employer must offer on H-1B, H-1B1, E-3 and PERM green card filings. The proposal raised the Level I floor from the 17th percentile of local pay to the 34th. Level I is the entry-level wage. At the 17th percentile, about 83% of local workers in the same job earn more. Until published, the old wage floors still apply. New filings can still use them.

HIPAA DOES NOT REQUIRE YOUR MEDICAL FILE TO STAY IN THE UNITED STATES The agency that enforces the federal health privacy law has already said a health plan can store or process electronic medical records outside the country. The plan needs a business associate agreement and has to follow the rest of the HIPAA rules. In that same official answer, the HHS Office for Civil Rights warned that sending those records overseas "may increase the risks and vulnerabilities to the information" and can make privacy protections harder to enforce. CVS and Aetna have a written playbook for this. A 2025 compliance notice tells their contractors to report any offshore work that receives, processes, transfers, handles, stores, or accesses beneficiary protected health information. The examples include your name, Social Security number, health insurance claim number, diagnosis, medical history, and treatment records. For Medicare plans, an authorized CVS Health representative has to approve that work before it starts. The notice defines "offshore" as people or companies physically located outside the United States or its territories, and it lists India among the example countries. UnitedHealth told investors the same thing in its 2025 annual filing: "Some of the data we process, store and transmit may be outside of the United States due to our information technology systems and international business operations." Medicare has been collecting paperwork on this since 2007. CMS said it was concerned about beneficiary information "handled outside of the United States," and about contractors "operating outside the jurisdiction of the United States." It asked each plan to file an attestation for every offshore contractor that can receive, process, or access those records, including work like claims processing and beneficiary call centers. The official Medicare Advantage application for 2027 still requires that filing. A patient does not generally get a personal notice that their own file is being handled overseas. Aetna's current privacy notices mention business associates "who provide services to us" and do not mention offshore or overseas handling. These rules sit in official company filings, contractor notices, and Medicare applications, written down before any of that work leaves the country.

WELLS FARGO IS DOWN NEARLY 11,000 EMPLOYEES IN 2026 WHILE EXPANDING IN INDIA The bank's own SEC filing shows 194,369 people on payroll at the end of September, down 10,829 from 205,198 at the end of 2025. Over the past twelve months the drop is 16,452, or about 8% of the workforce. That drop sits next to a large offshore footprint. At year-end 2025, Wells Fargo said approximately 76% of its staff was based in the United States. For now. Wells employs over 30,000 people across its Indian centers. Chennai. Bengaluru. Hyderabad. Even more in Manila. The business is doing fine. Wells Fargo earned nearly $6 billion in the third quarter, up 6% from a year ago, on $21.9 billion in revenue, while personnel expense fell $276 million year over year. Wonder why? In September the CFO told investors that AI "will bring headcount down more." Our work shows Indian salaries are what is bringing it down. The cuts keep arriving in small WARN filings, and the newest covers 173 jobs in Iowa and Virginia by Dec. 26. In Roanoke County, 82 of the 87 jobs are in fraud and claims operations, which you can go ahead and call their customer service and it’ll be clear who is handling that now.

MORE PEOPLE ARE STARTING BUSINESSES THAT NEVER PLAN TO HIRE ANYONE New Census-based research from the Mercatus Center tracked business applications in the sectors most exposed to AI: professional services, information, education, and finance and insurance. From early 2024 to early 2026, applications with no sign of future payroll rose 26.8%, from about 222,000 a quarter to 281,000. Applications that look like future employers fell 6.4% over the same stretch. In construction and wholesale, where AI use is low, the no-hire filings barely moved. The author is careful to say the data does not prove AI caused it. But all of the growth in new filings in those sectors came from people who plan to work alone. That matters for anyone counting on new small businesses to hire the people big companies keep cutting.