Wayan Vota knew something was wrong. 

A 20-year veteran of the international aid sector, Vota was long accustomed to industry changes following the inauguration of a new president—there is always a reset period during which agencies and contractors shift to align with the incoming administration’s priorities. But this time was different. 

Newly-inaugurated President Trump signed an executive order in mid January halting all foreign aid programs through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Vota anticipated a big shakeup at his firm, Humentum, which was predominantly funded by federal grants, and estimated that it would lead to layoffs for around 80% of the company. But Jan. 31 is when he found out he would also be included in those cuts, losing his job along with most of his colleagues.  

“I cried in my daughter’s arms,” he tells Fortune. “All of my peers, everybody who I would think of talking to, were also unemployed.” 

Vota is just one of thousands of federal workers and contractors who lost their jobs this year due to the Trump administration’s funding freezes, unprecedented resignation offers, and outright layoffs. Approximately 75,000 workers accepted the administration’s deferred resignation offer, and many more have been affected in other ways, with the promise of more pain to come. There is no official count for the total number of federal workers and contractors who have been laid off, but 62,530 government positions have been cut so far this year, according to global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray, & Christmas. Some areas have been more affected than others, and international aid has been particularly hard hit. 

After spending 24 hours cycling through various stages of grief following his layoff, Vota decided to take action. “I woke up and said: ‘Okay, I am not going to sit here and be a crying, blubbering mess. I’m going to get up and do something about it.’” 

On Feb. 1, he started a Substack called “Career Pivot,” with the aim of creating a community for laid off aid workers and helping them find new roles outside of the sector. He now has more than 9,000 subscribers, whose interests and specialities run the gamut from AI to health care and data analysis. Vota says that a large percentage are mid-to senior level staff who have spent the majority of their professional lives in the international development sector.

“There are people that spent a decade or 20 years within USAID, or got a master’s degree in International Development, joined the Peace Corps, then joined USAID, and just never worked anywhere else,” he says. 

‘Every single subscriber is somebody in pain’

Career Pivot is a combination of blog posts, FAQs, success stories, job listings, mental health resources, discussion boards, and networking events. 

It provides information and guidance to former federal employees and contractors searching for work, with an emphasis on highlighting expertise that could be valuable in another field, becoming marketable in the private sector, and sharing knowledge with others. “A huge part of Career Pivot is helping people translate their skills into terms the private sector understands,” Vota says. 

Articles on the site have headlines like “10 Ways to Rethink Your USAID Job Titles: How to translate your vast development experience into corporate-friendly terms,” “Resistance is NOT futile,” and “What are your health insurance options now?” 

Alex Collins, a public health social worker who specializes in maternal and child health, worked with Vota many years ago at a nonprofit. When she lost her job last month, she signed up for Career Pivot as soon as it went live. She says the site reinforced “how incredibly valuable not just our immediate networks of people are, but the networks that each of those people bring—a second tier of contacts.”

While the website was initially intended for international development workers, Vota says his subscriber base has grown to include impacted workers at other agencies, like the Department of Veterans affairs, and the Department of Education. 

Vota has a team of eight volunteers who assist him with the site, and offers both free and paid subscriptions. The latter cost $20 a month or $100 annually, and include more curated and personalized content, like “AMA” Zoom calls with recruiters where people can ask specific questions related to their job search. Vota says he’s using the money he makes to reinvest in the business. 

“My wife is very disappointed that at this point I’m a startup. All the money I’m making is going right back into services and processes and content for people,” he says. 

Finding community

Career Pivot certainly offers practical tools for job seekers, but many workers say the best thing they get out of it is a sense that they’re not alone.  

Laura Wigglesworth worked as a global health and development recruiter in the international development sector for 25 years, and lost her job as a result of the funding freeze. She was an early subscriber and has been participating in Vota’s workshops, learning things like how to optimize her resume with AI. Because of her professional experience, she’s also helping others navigate the job search process. 

“Job hunting is daunting and scary and lonely, and it can be very depressing,” she says. “Especially if you don’t have a support community of people going through what you’re going through.” 

That feeling is echoed by Joel Levesque, who lost his job as a federal contractor earlier this year when USAID funding dried up. He was working at government consulting firm Millennium Partners Consulting as an activity manager, and had four years left on his contract when he was fired on Feb. 24. Levesque launched his own Substack in February, where he provides people with guidance on how to leverage AI in the job search process. He now also works with Vota and Career Pivot via guest posts and AMAs. While he appreciates the comprehensive information site provides, he says it was not the main reason he subscribed. 

“What I found was that it was a community,” he says. “This was really quite a traumatic thing that happened for people actually working in the sector. I don’t think anyone was expecting this. So to be able to engage in a community where people are like me, and going through the same thing, really made me feel like I wasn’t crazy.” 

‘I can’t predict the future’

While many laid off federal workers are just beginning their job search, Vota is starting to see the results of his work. 

“I just had somebody email me today saying, ‘I’ve unsubscribed because I have a job.’ Oh, that was the most beautiful email ever! It made my entire day,” he says. His goal is for the average Career Pivot subscription to last three to six months, maximum. “I don’t want to have multi-year members. That would be a mark of failure, not a mark of success.” 

Many former international aid workers, including Vota, still hold out hope for the future of the sector, although they know it will look different. “USAID, as the agency we knew on January 20, will not exist in the future. Foreign assistance, which is the larger concept of helping other countries, will continue,” he says.

 How, exactly? He’s not entirely sure. it could be years before funding cuts are reversed. That may also depend on the outcome of the 2026 and 2028 elections. But Vota doesn’t have time to hold his breath. 

“I can’t predict the future, but I have the strong feeling that the majority of us have to find a new career just to stay alive.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

• Super Micro Computer, a Fortune 500 Silicon Valley tech giant that manufactures high-efficiency servers and data centers, is setting its sights on expanding in the Midwest and East coast regions and hopes to stave off the hit from higher prices due to President Trump’s tariffs, said CEO Charles Liang on Thursday. The company recently partnered with xAI and its Grok team to build a data center in Tennessee. 

Super Micro Computer is looking to turn the page after an arduous slog through a host of accounting and finance issues. The data center manufacturer is working toward a $40 billion revenue target and CEO Charles Liang announced plans to expand from its San Jose campus to new locations in the Midwest and East Coast. Super Micro is in talks with potential partners in the Middle East, he added. Liang spoke at the HumanX AI conference in Las Vegas this week.

He touted the Memphis data center, and said the company assembles its racks in San Jose before it ships components out to customers who can then “plug and play.” The company is a key piece of the AI ecosystem, and its fortunes have risen along with those of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic and others as demand for data center servers needed for operating and training AI models has soared. Liang, who founded the company in 1993 with five people before it grew into a $23 billion Fortune 500 player, counts Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang as a friend, and Super Micro’s servers are packed with Nvidia’s highly coveted GPUs. 

In fact, the new 750,000 square foot xAI Colossus cluster Super Micro built for Elon Musk’s xAI Grok team counts 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, the company said in a recent case study. 

“It took Elon and Super Micro only 122 days to finish,” said Liang, adding that it would usually take a year or longer to build such a data center. “He pushed me a lot, and he has high standards.”

And despite the aftermath of DeepSeek and China’s Manus AI, comingled with talk that companies will scale back on spending, Liang said what’s happening now is that the dynamic environment in tech is being brought back into “balance.”

Ultimately, however, he predicted demand will continue to surge over the next five to 10 years as companies seek the best, most efficient products. 

“This AI boom has been very big and AI now is so powerful,” said Liang. “But AI can be much more powerful, much faster, smarter, and more user-friendly…. There’s more room for AI to grow.”

He also noted that President Trump’s 25% tariffs on steel and aluminum imports aren’t likely to be as meaningful a hit to the company because it has kept its operations U.S.-based. Liang said the company also plans to leverage its footprint in Taiwan. One of its major contract manufacturers, Ablecom, is based in Taiwan along with its distributor, Compuware. The two companies’ CEOs, Steve Liang and Bill Liang, respectively, are Charle’s Liang’s brothers. 

Those and other related-party transactions led to a short seller report last year amid other accounting red flags that catapulted Super Micro into a financial-reporting gridlock in which it delayed its annual 10-K and quarterly financial filings. Its auditor EY quit in the middle of an engagement and Super Micro was in danger of being delisted from Nasdaq, which would have been the second time such a thing occurred. 

Last month, Super Micro issued belated annual financial reports and said its former accounting firm was to blame for the delay. The company has since been hit with at least five lawsuits and faces a probe from the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission. Super Micro is cooperating with regulators. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

When British Airways retired its Concorde fleet in 2003, few imagined that would be the demise of supersonic passenger travel for the foreseeable future. However, one man refused to accept it and has been striving to make his dream a reality since 2014, when he founded U.S. supersonic aircraft manufacturer Boom.

Blake Scholl’s vision to restore supersonic travel and make it both commercially viable and luxurious has been regarded by many as pie in the sky. However, his critics have been eating their words as the Boom’s demonstrator aircraft went supersonic four times in January 2025 to prove his concept.

Blake has always been interested in aviation and earned his private pilot’s license in 2008. However, his early career began as a software engineer with Amazon, eventually selling a small company to Groupon followed by multiple leadership roles with Groupon. He was inspired to start Boom after seeing Concorde in a museum and wondering why aviation had taken such a step backward with no contenders to replace the iconic aircraft. General wisdom said that supersonic travel was no longer financially viable, but Blake refused to accept that modern technology could not be applied to overcome the issues.

Blake decided to educate himself and “bought every textbook I could find, I took remedial calculus and physics classes along with an aeronautical design class. I started building a spreadsheet model of the airplane and the market.” This led him to believe that you could develop existing Boeing 787 technology and apply it to supersonic travel.

Using a carbon composite airframe and making it long and thin, you would need to put in twice as many engines. The aircraft should then be able to go twice as fast and reduce the cost of flying supersonic by about three-quarters, which was the major problem with Concorde.

Confident he had found a way forward, in 2014 he founded Boom.

Blake’s vision includes keeping pricing broadly in line with existing business class fares rather than Concorde, which was priced at first class levels “for rockstars and royalty”, beyond the reach of most people.

He expects the price for New York to London to be around $3,500 per ticket to break even, giving an expected fare of around $5,000. There are also plans for future models of their aircraft, Overture, to bring costs down even lower and be within reach of the average traveler.

He is also focused on ensuring that the onboard experience is as comfortable as possible, compared to Concorde’s seats which were more like something from a low-cost airline. Most airline manufacturers outsource their seating, but Boom is keen to keep this in-house and has a small team working on the designs.

Due to the shorter flights, there are no plans to include flatbeds, keeping costs and the aircraft’s weight down. With 64 seats, there is a dedicated baggage space for every seat so you don’t need to worry about boarding late and not finding room.

For now, Blake is keeping tight-lipped about the exact designs but promises something unexpected to wow customers. Passengers will also enjoy views of the earth from the edge of space as Boom will cruise and climb like Concorde up to an altitude of around 60,000ft. 

Overture will still be fuel intensive like Concorde, needing around double the fuel of conventional aircraft, but that just intensifies Boom’s desire to make aviation more sustainable. Most modern aircraft can only use around 50% sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) whereas Overture will be built to run on 100% SAF.

Currently, SAF is too expensive and in too short supply to be viable for mass supply. However, Blake believes that Boom may help increase the supply of SAF as they can support the additional cost due to passengers being willing to pay a premium for a supersonic flight. 

Blake has faced numerous setbacks along the way, such as finding out that the required airframe was 2000 lbs overweight when they were already halfway through building it. Each time under his leadership, the Boom team kept going until they found the solution. All the trials and tribulations finally felt worth it when Boom went supersonic for the first time. Blake says “I was watching the live stream and we watched the Mach number tick over to more than one, which was one of the greatest moments in my life.”  Not content with achieving what many people believed was impossible to bring back commercial supersonic flight, Blake is even more ambitious and plans to train to fly their supersonic aircraft. 

Part of the commercial viability of Boom is down to its “Boomless” technology. While Concorde created a supersonic boom that limited its supersonic travel to being over water, Boom has found a solution to the issue.

In the six times they broke the sound barrier recently, the demonstrator did not create a single supersonic boom. Overture’s autopilot will continuously optimize speed for Boomless Cruise based on atmospheric conditions. Boomless Cruise is possible at speeds up to Mach 1.3, with typical speed between Mach 1.1 and 1.2. Once over the water where the sonic boom is not an issue, speeds of Mach 1.7 will be achieved.

With the Boomless Cruise, speeds are 40-50% faster than conventional airliners, which means a flight from New York to Los Angeles can be up to 90 minutes shorter. With a flight time of around 4 hours and the time difference, you can arrive only an hour after departure, local time. The longest the aircraft can fly continuously is around 4250nm, equivalent to around nine hours flying time at conventional speeds. However, longer flights such as Australia would be possible with a refueling stop, similar to how airlines operate today. It is hoped that the future generation of the aircraft will have an even longer range. 

Boom is working on a fairly short timeframe for delivering aircraft that Blake believes will carry fare-paying passengers within the next five years, with 2029 being the expected launch date. Production on the first aircraft will start in around 18 months with the first test flight expected in 2028.

The aircraft manufacturer already has 130 orders and pre-orders from multiple airlines, including American Airlines, United Airlines and Japan Air. It is interesting that the original operators of Concorde, Air France and British Airways, have not yet formally expressed an interest. Still, Blake is confident that once the concept is proven with firm orders, most major airlines will have to offer supersonic travel to compete. 

While the concept of supersonic aircraft may seem like a hugely costly endeavor, Blake believes in keeping team sizes small for both working together efficiently and keeping costs low. Due to this method of working, he believes that the company will break even by 2030, which is impressive so soon after the commercial launch of the aircraft.

The recent supersonic flights not only proved Blake’s critics wrong, but also culminated many years of hard work to make his long-held dream take flight. Blake Scholl’s unwavering vision and desire to do things differently may lead to Boom being as revolutionary to aircraft as Apple was to mobile phones. 

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com