Like many recent high school graduates choosing their careers, Bradley, who declined to give his full name, once felt the pressure of trying to have it all figured out in his late teens. A degree felt like a life or death decision for your future.
With no strong interests outside of baking and pastries, he enrolled in the prestigious Culinary Institute of America. But a week before graduation, with little financial guidance or preparation, he learned he’d racked up $134,000 in debt. With interest, that ballooned to about $147,000. His monthly payments were projected to hit $1,500, even while earning only $12 to $13 an hour at his first farm-to-table restaurant job in upstate New York.
A switch flipped: ‘I have to completely overhaul my life’
Traumatized by his student loan burden, a switch flipped at 20: he turned extremely frugal and adapted several side hustles to find a way to pay it off, embracing the life of underconsumption.
“My brain in that one instant was like, I have to completely overhaul my life,” Bradley, now 32 and known on TikTok as @BradleyOnABudget, tells Fortune.
Since September of 2013, he’s paid off $80,000 toward his loans. He still has $114,000 left in a Parent PLUS loan under his mother’s name, which he hopes will be forgiven through the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. The federal loans in his own name—originally around $25,000 but grown to $35,000—were recently discharged through the Borrower’s Defense to Repayment program.
But the underconsumption didn’t stop in his 20s. Since implementing these habits he still lives this way today.
“I’d rather have my $2 lunch than a $20 meal, that’s just how my brain works,” Bradley says. “A lot of people spend money to fit in. I don’t see the point in spending more for things when it’s unnecessary like clothes, going out to eat, a newer car.”
From dog sitting to crisis counseling–his frugal habits and side hustles are here to stay
Bradley still lives the same ultra-frugal life he adopted in his early 20s. From dog sitting to crisis counseling, he juggles 10 side hustles—and avoids unnecessary spending at every turn. He now earns a significant portion of his income through content creation and brand deals.
His frugal habits include eating the same meals, making wipes out of napkins and water, buying kids clothes, skipping AC in the summer months, unplugging appliances when leaving the house, bringing his own meals on vacation, reusing towels, trimming his nails with scissors and living with no insurance. He can’t imagine living his life any other way.
But despite saving over $250,000, his audience often questions why he still chooses to live “in survival mode.”
“I get a lot of opinions and judgment, but I’m the one paying my bills, right?” he said.
Online critics have accused him of “hoarding money” or “cosplaying” poverty.
“The only thing I wanted when I was in my 20s and struggling in debt was to be financially stable,” he said. “I think some people can’t grasp that now that I’ve increased my income and accomplished my financial goals, I would still find joy in how I choose to live.”
And he’s not the first high-earner to be extra cautious of his choices. Some high-net-worth individuals and $100,000+ earners that previously spoke to Fortunesaid they keep their discretionary spending as minimal as possible by cooking for themselves, for example, or even buying frozen groceries because they’re cheaper than fresh ones.
Others choose to mend their own “capsule” wardrobes, find some of their children’s toys on Facebook marketplace, or not own cars.
“I don’t go to Starbucks, I avoid it like the plague. It just feels comfortable too because I’ve always been frugal,” tech entrepreneur Brenda Christensen previously told Fortune, whose fortunes run into the multi-millions.
Working hard to make a better life for myself 🙂 my life even a few years ago was completely different. I never thought I would get out of a life making a low to average income so never give up on yourself! ♬ Walking Around – Eldar Kedem
By the end of July this year, Bradley calculated he made $120,000. In August, he raked in over $18,000.
This August, his monthly income with 10 side hustles were broken down as follows, according to his TikTok account.
Content creator: $10,633
OnlyFans: $4,105
Financial coach: $1,724
Dog sitter: $875
Crisis counselor: $396
Partnership: $416
CD account: $342
Lawn mower: $160
Dancer at a night club: $124
House cleaner: $85
Dumpster diving: $37
Change found on the ground: $0.43
Total: $18,897.43
“For me, ‘treating myself’ means watching my bank account grow. And I guess that’s my advice for younger folks trying to save: focus on your mindset. That’s been the biggest factor in everything I’ve been able to do.”
He also hopes his story can help others who are struggling, especially with debt and depression:
“I thought all my life was going to be drowning in debt and not making a lot of money, and I just always had this thing within me to be like, just keep going. Just keep going,” he said.
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Coupang chief executive officer Park Dae-jun resigned over his failure to prevent South Korea’s largest-ever data breach, which set off a regulatory and political backlash against the country’s dominant online retailer.
The company said in a statement on Wednesday that Park had stepped down over his role in the breach. It appointed Harold Rogers, chief administrative officer for the retailer’s U.S.-based parent company Coupang Inc., as interim head.
Park becomes the highest-profile casualty of a crisis that’s prompted a government investigation and disrupted the lives of millions across Korea. Nearly two-thirds of people in the country were affected by the breach, which granted unauthorized access to their shipping addresses and phone numbers.
Police raided Coupang’s headquarters this week in search of evidence that could help them determine how the breach took place as well as the identity of the hacker, Yonhap News reported, citing officials.
Officials have said the breach was carried out over five months in which the company’s cybersecurity systems were bypassed. Last week President Lee Jae Myung said it was “truly astonishing” that Coupang had failed to detect unauthorized access of its systems for such a long time.
Park squared off with lawmakers this month during an hours-long grilling. Responding to questions about media reports that claimed the attack had been carried out by a former employee who had since returned to China, he said a Chinese national who left the company and had been a “developer working on the authentication system” was involved.
The company faces a potential fine of up to 1 trillion won ($681 million) over the incident, lawmakers said.
Coupang founder Bom Kim has been summoned to appear before a parliamentary hearing on Dec. 17, with lawmakers warning of consequences if the billionaire fails to show.
Park’s departure adds fresh uncertainty to Coupang’s leadership less than seven months after the company revamped its internal structure to make him sole CEO of its Korean operations. In his new role, Rogers will focus on addressing customer concerns and stabilizing the company, Coupang said.
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Ali Ghodsi, the CEO and cofounder of data intelligence company Databricks, is betting his privately held startup can be the latest addition to the trillion-dollar valuation club.
In August, Ghodsi told the Wall Street Journalthat he believed Databricks, which is reportedly in talks toraise funding at a $134 billion valuation, had “a shot to be a trillion-dollar company.” At Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Tuesday, he explained how it would happen, laying out a “trifecta” of growth areas to ignite the company’s next leg of growth.
The first is entering the transactional database market, the traditional territory of large enterprise players like Oracle, which Ghodsi said has remained largely “the same for 40 years.” Earlier this year, Databricks launched a link-based offering called Lakehouse, which aims to combine the capabilities of traditional databases with modern data lake storage, in an attempt to capture some of this market.
The company is also seeing growth driven by the rise of AI-powered coding. “Over 80% of the databases that are being launched on Databricks are not being launched by humans, but by AI agents,” Ghodsi said. As developers use AI tools for “vibe coding”—rapidly building software with natural language commands—those applications automatically need databases, and Ghodsi they’re defaulting to Databricks’ platform.
“That’s just a huge growth factor for us. I think if we just did that, we could maybe get all the way to a trillion,” he said.
The second growth area is Agentbricks, Databricks’ platform for building AI agents that work with proprietary enterprise data.
“It’s a commodity now to have AI that has general knowledge,” Ghodsi said, but “it’s very elusive to get AI that really works and understands that proprietary data that’s inside enterprise.” He pointed to the Royal Bank of Canada, which built AI agents for equity research analysts, as an example. Ghodsi said these agents were able to automatically gather earnings calls and company information to assemble research reports, reducing “many days’ worth of work down to minutes.”
And finally, the third piece to Ghodsi’s puzzle involves building applications on top of this infrastructure, with developers using AI tools to quickly build applications that run on Lakehouse and which are then powered by AI agents. “To get the trifecta is also to have apps on top of this. Now you have apps that are vibe coded with the database, Lakehouse, and with agents,” Ghodsi said. “Those are three new vectors for us.”
Ghodsi did not provide a timeframe for attaining the trillion-dollar goal. Currently, only a handful of companies have achieved the milestone, all of them as publicly traded companies. In the tech industry, only big tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Alphabet, Amazon, and Meta have managed to cross the trillion-dollar threshold.
To reach this level would require Databricks, which is widely expected to go public sometime in early 2026, to grow its valuation roughly sevenfold from its current reported level. Part of this journey will likely also include the expected IPO, Ghodsi said.
“There are huge advantages and pros and cons. That’s why we’re not super religious about it,” Ghodsi said when asked about a potential IPO. “We will go public at some point. But to us, it’s not a really big deal.”
Could the company IPO next year? Maybe, replied Ghodsi.
Palantir, the artificial intelligence and data analytics company, has quietly started working on a tech platform for a federal immigration agency that has referred dozens of individuals to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for potential enforcement since September.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency—which handles services including citizenship applications, family immigration, adoptions, and work permits for non-citizens—started the contract with Palantir at the end of October, and is paying the data analytics company to implement “Phase 0” of a “vetting of wedding-based schemes,” or “VOWS” platform, according to the federal contract, which was posted to the U.S. government website and reviewed by Fortune.
The contract is small—less than $100,000—and details of what exactly the new platform entails are thin. The contract itself offers few details, apart from the general description of the platform (“vetting of wedding-based schemes”) and an estimate that the completion of the contract would be Dec. 9.Palantir declined to comment on the contract or nature of the work, and USCIS did not respond to requests for comment for this story.
But the contract is notable, nonetheless, as it marks the beginning of a new relationship between USCIS and Palantir, which has had longstanding contracts with ICE, another agency of the Department of Homeland Security, since at least 2011. The description of the contract suggests that the “VOWS” platform may very well be focused on marriage fraud and related to USCIS’ recent stated effort to drill down on duplicity in applications for marriage and family-based petitions, employment authorizations, and parole-related requests.
USCIS has been outspoken about its recent collaboration with ICE. Over nine days in September, USCIS announced that it worked with ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct what it called “Operation Twin Shield” in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, where immigration officials investigated potential cases of fraud in immigration benefit applications the agency had received. The agency reported that its officers referred 42 cases to ICE over the period. In a statement published to the USCIS website shortly after the operation, USCIS director Joseph Edlow said his agency was “declaring an all-out war on immigration fraud” and that it would “relentlessly pursue everyone involved in undermining the integrity of our immigration system and laws.”
“Under President Trump, we will leave no stone unturned,” he said.
Earlier this year, USCIS rolled out updates to its policy requirements for marriage-based green cards, which have included more details of relationship evidence and stricter interview requirements.
While Palantir has always been a controversial company—and one that tends to lean into that reputation no less—the new contract with USCIS is likely to lead to more public scrutiny. Backlash over Palantir’s contracts with ICE have intensified this year amid the Trump Administration’s crackdown on immigration and aggressive tactics used by ICE to detain immigrants that have gone viral on social media. Not to mention, Palantir inked a $30 million contract with ICE earlier this year to pilot a system that will track individuals who have elected to self-deport and help ICE with targeting and enforcement prioritization. There has been pushback from current and former employees of the company alike over contracts the company has with ICE and Israel.
In a recent interview at the New York Times DealBook Summit, Karp was asked on stage about Palantir’s work with ICE and later what Karp thought, from a moral standpoint, about families getting separated by ICE. “Of course I don’t like that, right? No one likes that. No American. This is the fairest, least bigoted, most open-minded culture in the world,” Karp said. But he said he cared about two issues politically: immigration and “re-establishing the deterrent capacity of America without being a colonialist neocon view. On those two issues, this president has performed.”
Politics8 years ago