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Soham Parekh caught secretly working for multiple Silicon Valley startups at once

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A single software engineer has become the most-hired person in Silicon Valley. The engineer, Soham Parekh, has admitted that he had been working across multiple up-and-coming Silicon Valley startups at the same time after he went viral on social media.

Startup founders told Fortune that Parekh would ace early interviews, land high-paying jobs, and then ghost employers when work began.

They say Parekh came up with creative excuses for late or poor quality work, before they discovered that he was simultaneously working for multiple tech companies. He’d been offered salaries of up to $200,000 per year in base compensation by founders. 

The saga began on Wednesday when Suhail Doshi, co-founder and former CEO of Mixpanel, issued a warning about him on X.

“PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) who works at 3-4 startups at the same time. He’s been preying on YC companies and more. Beware. I fired this guy in his first week and told him to stop lying / scamming people. He hasn’t stopped a year later. No more excuses,” Doshi wrote in a post on X.

The post was quickly flooded with replies from fellow founders with similar stories, including a few who claimed to still have Parekh on their payroll.

Doshi shared the engineer’s CV in a follow-up post, which listed multiple companies, work experience, and a master’s degree from Georgia Institute of Technology in computer science. However, the institute told Fortune in a statement that they were “unable to find any record of enrollment at Georgia Tech for a person with that name.”

In an interview on the daily tech show TBPN, Parekh confirmed the claims he was holding down multiple jobs at the same time, saying: “I’m not proud of what I’ve done. That’s not something I endorse either. But no one really likes to work 140 hours a week, I had to do it out of necessity.”

He added he made the choice because he was “in extremely dire financial circumstances.”

When reached for comment, Parekh referred Fortune to Sanjit Juneja, Founder and CEO of Darwin, who shared this statement: “At Darwin, we are solely focused on building the most innovative software products for both brands and content creators. Soham is an incredibly talented engineer and we believe in his abilities to help bring our products to market.”

‘He really crushed my interview’

Arkadiy Telegin, co-founder of AI startup Leaping AI, wasn’t surprised when he saw the now-infamous engineer was trending on X.

Telegin told Fortune he’d made Parekh a job offer in April after being blown away by the engineer in the interview process.

“He really crushed my interview. I interviewed around 50 people in the prior two weeks before talking to him and he passed, by far, all of the people I interviewed,” he said. “He also was a very likeable person.”

“I offered him a salary range of $160,000 to $200,000 per year base compensation plus equity ranging from around 0.7% to 1.1%, he chose the middle of the cash and middle of the equity,” Telegin said. “I told him to come to San Francisco and we could sign the papers.”

Telegin said Parekh told him he was in the process of getting his O-1 visa—a type of visa reserved for individuals who possess extraordinary ability in the sciences, arts, education, business, or athletics—but wanted to contribute remotely while he was still in India. However, almost immediately after the company onboarded him, Parekh started behaving strangely.

“He produced and wrote code, but he was insanely slow. And there were always these excuses like a flood or the electricity went out, and then the [Indo-Pakistan conflict] happened—but he was so far away from the conflict,” Telegin said. 

Parekh had told Telegin he was based in Mumbai, more than a thousand miles away from the fighting near Jammu and Kashmir, but later claimed a drone had damaged the building he lived in.

Telegin said he assumed Parekh was picking up some work on the side and decided to formally pay him for his time, with the aim of locking in the engineer exclusively with a formal full-time employment contract which he would sign when he got to San Francisco, where the role was full-time, in-office. 

“I thought if I pay him, then it’s officially … he’s going to contribute and commit, but he never sent an invoice. In the end, I didn’t transfer him a single dollar, which is the most confusing part of it all, because other people seem to have paid him.”

Founders realize they’re ‘dating the same guy’

A month later, when Telegin was visiting a fellow founder from his Y Combinator cohort, the pair got chatting about their AI hiring woes.

The war for AI talent is particularly tough on startups right now as tech companies are competing for an increasingly small pool of talent. Big Tech companies are shelling out eye-watering salaries, making it difficult for startups with fewer funds to compete.

“Hiring is the biggest problem for any YC company, including us and including them,” he said. “We’ve been chatting about our hiring pains while describing people we’ve been talking to, and then we both started describing Soham to each other. Then the next moment it was like: ‘Wait, are we dating the same guy?’”

Later, Telegin realized that his friend was merely the tip of the iceberg. Within his YC batch, Soham had interviewed or worked with three other companies.

“It was just surreal … At some dinner events, somebody would start saying: ‘Oh, I’m interviewing this cool guy, he crushed my interview’ and then people would say in unison: ‘Oh, is it Soham?’ And then the person telling the story would freak out, because what the hell is going on? It’s like a dream,” he said.

“I don’t think anybody hired him in my batch,” he added. “But he was definitely paid for work trials.”

’Then the excuses started’

Marcus Lowe, co-founder of Create, also had Parekh on the payroll as a full-time independent contractor for around two weeks earlier this year, during which the engineer made one appearance in the office and shipped almost no code.

“He’s just a really strong engineer and he crushed the interview,” Lowe told Fortune. “But about a week before he was scheduled to start, he texted us saying he needed to go to New York to visit his sister and needed to push the start date back.”

“Then the day before he was supposed to start, he texted us saying he was feeling sick and wasn’t able to come in, so we pushed back the start date again,” he said.

“By this point, it was actually two weeks late before he came into the office for one day and he did good work … then the excuses started again.”

Lowe had signed Parekh up as an independent contractor in a deal that included five days of in-office work and a base compensation of $150,000. Lowe only saw him in the flesh for one day. 

Suspicious, he went to Parekh’s GitHub profile to investigate, saw he had committed code to another San Francisco-based startup. He went down to the offices to ask if Parekh worked there. He was told the engineer did, but was out sick.

“Long story short, we kept pushing him to come into the office, but he never did again. Eventually, we just gave him a performance conversation and said you’re not shipping enough code, we need you to actually deliver,” he said. Parekh never did and was later terminated.

Another Silicon Valley-based founder told Fortune he hired Parekh for a work trial in 2024 but decided not to move forward with him after it became clear he couldn’t move to the US.

He also said there were issues with his performance and a string of what he came to believe were habitual lies. He paid Parekh $2,400 for the week.

All of the founders Fortune spoke to said they had heard of multiple other incidents where the engineer was working more than one job at once, some as long as three years ago.

He also appears to have had a brief stint at Meta in 2021. Representatives for the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fortune.

In a post on X, Gergely Orosz, a software engineer and author of the”The Pragmatic Engineer” newsletter, said he had “confirmed 10 companies where [Parekh] was hired and fired for doing nothing (but lying to them.) And another 8 that interviewed him but rejected him (many feel they have wasted their time.) There are likely many, many more.”



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Senate Dems’ plan to fix Obamacare premiums adds nearly $300 billion to deficit, CRFB says

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December 5, 2025

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The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget (CRFB) is a nonpartisan watchdog that regularly estimates how much the U.S. Congress is adding to the $38 trillion national debt.

With enhanced Affordable Care Act (ACA) subsidies due to expire within days, some Senate Democrats are scrambling to protect millions of Americans from getting the unpleasant holiday gift of spiking health insurance premiums. The CRFB says there’s just one problem with the plan: It’s not funded.

“With the national debt as large as the economy and interest payments costing $1 trillion annually, it is absurd to suggest adding hundreds of billions more to the debt,” CRFB President Maya MacGuineas wrote in a statement on Friday afternoon.

The proposal, backed by members of the Senate Democratic caucus, would fully extend the enhanced ACA subsidies for three years, from 2026 through 2028, with no additional income limits on who can qualify. Those subsidies, originally boosted during the pandemic and later renewed, were designed to lower premiums and prevent coverage losses for middle‑ and lower‑income households purchasing insurance on the ACA exchanges.

CRFB estimated that even this three‑year extension alone would add roughly $300 billion to federal deficits over the next decade, largely because the federal government would continue to shoulder a larger share of premium costs while enrollment and subsidy amounts remain elevated. If Congress ultimately moves to make the enhanced subsidies permanent—as many advocates have urged—the total cost could swell to nearly $550 billion in additional borrowing over the next decade.

Reversing recent guardrails

MacGuineas called the Senate bill “far worse than even a debt-financed extension” as it would roll back several “program integrity” measures that were enacted as part of a 2025 reconciliation law and were intended to tighten oversight of ACA subsidies. On top of that, it would be funded by borrowing even more. “This is a bad idea made worse,” MacGuineas added.

The watchdog group’s central critique is that the new Senate plan does not attempt to offset its costs through spending cuts or new revenue and, in their view, goes beyond a simple extension by expanding the underlying subsidy structure.

The legislation would permanently repeal restrictions that eliminated subsidies for certain groups enrolling during special enrollment periods and would scrap rules requiring full repayment of excess advance subsidies and stricter verification of eligibility and tax reconciliation. The bill would also nullify portions of a 2025 federal regulation that loosened limits on the actuarial value of exchange plans and altered how subsidies are calculated, effectively reshaping how generous plans can be and how federal support is determined. CRFB warned these reversals would increase costs further while weakening safeguards designed to reduce misuse and error in the subsidy system.

MacGuineas said that any subsidy extension should be paired with broader reforms to curb health spending and reduce overall borrowing. In her view, lawmakers are missing a chance to redesign ACA support in a way that lowers premiums while also improving the long‑term budget outlook.

The debate over ACA subsidies recently contributed to a government funding standoff, and CRFB argued that the new Senate bill reflects a political compromise that prioritizes short‑term relief over long‑term fiscal responsibility.

“After a pointless government shutdown over this issue, it is beyond disappointing that this is the preferred solution to such an important issue,” MacGuineas wrote.

The off-year elections cast the government shutdown and cost-of-living arguments in a different light. Democrats made stunning gains and almost flipped a deep-red district in Tennessee as politicians from the far left and center coalesced around “affordability.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is reportedly smelling blood in the water and doubling down on the theme heading into the pivotal midterm elections of 2026. President Donald Trump is scheduled to visit Pennsylvania soon to discuss pocketbook anxieties. But he is repeating predecessor Joe Biden’s habit of dismissing inflation, despite widespread evidence to the contrary.

“We fixed inflation, and we fixed almost everything,” Trump said in a Tuesday cabinet meeting, in which he also dismissed affordability as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats.​

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle now face a politically fraught choice: allow premiums to jump sharply—including in swing states like Pennsylvania where ACA enrollees face double‑digit increases—or pass an expensive subsidy extension that would, as CRFB calculates, explode the deficit without addressing underlying health care costs.



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Netflix–Warner Bros. deal sets up $72 billion antitrust test

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December 5, 2025

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Netflix Inc. has won the heated takeover battle for Warner Bros. Discovery Inc. Now it must convince global antitrust regulators that the deal won’t give it an illegal advantage in the streaming market. 

The $72 billion tie-up joins the world’s dominant paid streaming service with one of Hollywood’s most iconic movie studios. It would reshape the market for online video content by combining the No. 1 streaming player with the No. 4 service HBO Max and its blockbuster hits such as Game Of Thrones, Friends, and the DC Universe comics characters franchise.  

That could raise red flags for global antitrust regulators over concerns that Netflix would have too much control over the streaming market. The company faces a lengthy Justice Department review and a possible US lawsuit seeking to block the deal if it doesn’t adopt some remedies to get it cleared, analysts said.

“Netflix will have an uphill climb unless it agrees to divest HBO Max as well as additional behavioral commitments — particularly on licensing content,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Jennifer Rie. “The streaming overlap is significant,” she added, saying the argument that “the market should be viewed more broadly is a tough one to win.”

By choosing Netflix, Warner Bros. has jilted another bidder, Paramount Skydance Corp., a move that risks touching off a political battle in Washington. Paramount is backed by the world’s second-richest man, Larry Ellison, and his son, David Ellison, and the company has touted their longstanding close ties to President Donald Trump. Their acquisition of Paramount, which closed in August, has won public praise from Trump. 

Comcast Corp. also made a bid for Warner Bros., looking to merge it with its NBCUniversal division.

The Justice Department’s antitrust division, which would review the transaction in the US, could argue that the deal is illegal on its face because the combined market share would put Netflix well over a 30% threshold.

The White House, the Justice Department and Comcast didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. 

US lawmakers from both parties, including Republican Representative Darrell Issa and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren have already faulted the transaction — which would create a global streaming giant with 450 million users — as harmful to consumers.

“This deal looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare,” Warren said after the Netflix announcement. Utah Senator Mike Lee, a Republican, said in a social media post earlier this week that a Warner Bros.-Netflix tie-up would raise more serious competition questions “than any transaction I’ve seen in about a decade.”

European Union regulators are also likely to subject the Netflix proposal to an intensive review amid pressure from legislators. In the UK, the deal has already drawn scrutiny before the announcement, with House of Lords member Baroness Luciana Berger pressing the government on how the transaction would impact competition and consumer prices.

The combined company could raise prices and broadly impact “culture, film, cinemas and theater releases,”said Andreas Schwab, a leading member of the European Parliament on competition issues, after the announcement.

Paramount has sought to frame the Netflix deal as a non-starter. “The simple truth is that a deal with Netflix as the buyer likely will never close, due to antitrust and regulatory challenges in the United States and in most jurisdictions abroad,” Paramount’s antitrust lawyers wrote to their counterparts at Warner Bros. on Dec. 1.

Appealing directly to Trump could help Netflix avoid intense antitrust scrutiny, New Street Research’s Blair Levin wrote in a note on Friday. Levin said it’s possible that Trump could come to see the benefit of switching from a pro-Paramount position to a pro-Netflix position. “And if he does so, we believe the DOJ will follow suit,” Levin wrote.

Netflix co-Chief Executive Officer Ted Sarandos had dinner with Trump at the president’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida last December, a move other CEOs made after the election in order to win over the administration. In a call with investors Friday morning, Sarandos said that he’s “highly confident in the regulatory process,” contending the deal favors consumers, workers and innovation. 

“Our plans here are to work really closely with all the appropriate governments and regulators, but really confident that we’re going to get all the necessary approvals that we need,” he said.

Netflix will likely argue to regulators that other video services such as Google’s YouTube and ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok should be included in any analysis of the market, which would dramatically shrink the company’s perceived dominance.

The US Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the transfer of broadcast-TV licenses, isn’t expected to play a role in the deal, as neither hold such licenses. Warner Bros. plans to spin off its cable TV division, which includes channels such as CNN, TBS and TNT, before the sale.

Even if antitrust reviews just focus on streaming, Netflix believes it will ultimately prevail, pointing to Amazon.com Inc.’s Prime and Walt Disney Co. as other major competitors, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking. 

Netflix is expected to argue that more than 75% of HBO Max subscribers already subscribe to Netflix, making them complementary offerings rather than competitors, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing confidential deliberations. The company is expected to make the case that reducing its content costs through owning Warner Bros., eliminating redundant back-end technology and bundling Netflix with Max will yield lower prices.



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The rise of AI reasoning models comes with a big energy tradeoff

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December 5, 2025

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Nearly all leading artificial intelligence developers are focused on building AI models that mimic the way humans reason, but new research shows these cutting-edge systems can be far more energy intensive, adding to concerns about AI’s strain on power grids.

AI reasoning models used 30 times more power on average to respond to 1,000 written prompts than alternatives without this reasoning capability or which had it disabled, according to a study released Thursday. The work was carried out by the AI Energy Score project, led by Hugging Face research scientist Sasha Luccioni and Salesforce Inc. head of AI sustainability Boris Gamazaychikov.

The researchers evaluated 40 open, freely available AI models, including software from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Microsoft Corp. Some models were found to have a much wider disparity in energy consumption, including one from Chinese upstart DeepSeek. A slimmed-down version of DeepSeek’s R1 model used just 50 watt hours to respond to the prompts when reasoning was turned off, or about as much power as is needed to run a 50 watt lightbulb for an hour. With the reasoning feature enabled, the same model required 7,626 watt hours to complete the tasks.

The soaring energy needs of AI have increasingly come under scrutiny. As tech companies race to build more and bigger data centers to support AI, industry watchers have raised concerns about straining power grids and raising energy costs for consumers. A Bloomberg investigation in September found that wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267% over the past five years in areas near data centers. There are also environmental drawbacks, as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.com Inc. have previously acknowledged the data center buildout could complicate their long-term climate objectives. 

More than a year ago, OpenAI released its first reasoning model, called o1. Where its prior software replied almost instantly to queries, o1 spent more time computing an answer before responding. Many other AI companies have since released similar systems, with the goal of solving more complex multistep problems for fields like science, math and coding.

Though reasoning systems have quickly become the industry norm for carrying out more complicated tasks, there has been little research into their energy demands. Much of the increase in power consumption is due to reasoning models generating much more text when responding, the researchers said. 

The new report aims to better understand how AI energy needs are evolving, Luccioni said. She also hopes it helps people better understand that there are different types of AI models suited to different actions. Not every query requires tapping the most computationally intensive AI reasoning systems.

“We should be smarter about the way that we use AI,” Luccioni said. “Choosing the right model for the right task is important.”

To test the difference in power use, the researchers ran all the models on the same computer hardware. They used the same prompts for each, ranging from simple questions — such as asking which team won the Super Bowl in a particular year — to more complex math problems. They also used a software tool called CodeCarbon to track how much energy was being consumed in real time.

The results varied considerably. The researchers found one of Microsoft’s Phi 4 reasoning models used 9,462 watt hours with reasoning turned on, compared with about 18 watt hours with it off. OpenAI’s largest gpt-oss model, meanwhile, had a less stark difference. It used 8,504 watt hours with reasoning on the most computationally intensive “high” setting and 5,313 watt hours with the setting turned down to “low.” 

OpenAI, Microsoft, Google and DeepSeek did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Google released internal research in August that estimated the median text prompt for its Gemini AI service used 0.24 watt-hours of energy, roughly equal to watching TV for less than nine seconds. Google said that figure was “substantially lower than many public estimates.” 

Much of the discussion about AI power consumption has focused on large-scale facilities set up to train artificial intelligence systems. Increasingly, however, tech firms are shifting more resources to inference, or the process of running AI systems after they’ve been trained. The push toward reasoning models is a big piece of that as these systems are more reliant on inference.

Recently, some tech leaders have acknowledged that AI’s power draw needs to be reckoned with. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the industry must earn the “social permission to consume energy” for AI data centers in a November interview. To do that, he argued tech must use AI to do good and foster broad economic growth.



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