JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America are pledging to put in more safeguards to prevent what their industry is infamous for: overworking junior employees, the Wall Street Journal reported this week.

This comes one month after WSJ revealed that BofA bosses regularly told underlings to lie about hours and four months after 35-year-old BofA associate Leo Lukenas III died from a blood clot following several 100-hour workweeks. BofA formally capped hours at 80/week 10 years ago, but managers have avoided triggering internal alarms by pressuring workers to leave dozens of hours “off the books,” per the WSJ.

Now, amid calls for better employee protections throughout the industry:

• JPMorgan will set its first cap on working hours at 80/week in addition to its already in place “pencils down” period from 6pm Friday to noon Saturday. JPMorgan wasn’t named in the WSJ’s overwork investigation, aside from CEO Jamie Dimon saying the bank wanted to “learn from” Lukenas’s death.
• Meanwhile, BofA is giving junior bankers a diary. Starting next week, they’ll be required to fill out a daily timekeeping tool that asks which deals they worked on and when, which senior bankers oversaw each project, and how much capacity they have for more projects on a scale from 1 to 4. It was already in development before Lukenas died, BofA said.

But there’s a big catch: JPMorgan’s limits have an exception for live deals, which tend to be the part of the job that causes dangerously long hours anyway (Lukenas was part of a team wrapping up a $2 billion acquisition before he died). Plus, based on how BofA has historically maneuvered around its own hourly limit, it remains to be seen whether today’s juniors will actually work shorter days.

Elsewhere on Wall Street…Goldman Sachs doesn’t cap hours but does offer a “protected Saturday” from Friday at 9pm to Sunday at 9am (with exceptions). Morgan Stanley doesn’t offer any guarantees for free time.—ML

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33,000 Boeing factory workers went on strike. Boeing’s year just went from bad to worse. Aircraft assembly workers belonging to the company’s largest union walked off the job at 12:01am PDT after overwhelmingly rejecting a contract agreed to by the company and union leaders last Sunday. Workers were set to receive a 25% pay hike over four years, but they said that wasn’t enough to keep up with the cost of living. The strike will shutter production of Boeing’s bestselling jets and deal another financial blow to a company already reeling from an in-flight panel blowout in January. The walkout also presents an immediate challenge to CEO Kelly Ortberg, who just started the job six weeks ago and had pleaded with workers not to strike. Boeing responded that it was “ready to get back to the table to reach a new agreement.”

OpenAI says its new model can reason like a person. The ChatGPT-maker released a preview of a new artificial intelligence model that’s officially called o1 but is known to the tech-heads who eagerly awaited it by its internal code name, Strawberry—a cheeky reference to AI’s inability to determine the correct number of r’s in the word. The company claims the new model can perform sophisticated, humanlike reasoning, allowing it to solve complex math and coding problems. It’s been a big week for OpenAI: It also had talks with investors about raising funds with the company valued at $150 billion, and CEO Sam Altman got to sit down with Oprah for a TV special.

New York City’s police commissioner resigns amid federal investigation. Edward Caban stepped down from his post at the top of the US’ largest police force yesterday, a week after it became public that his phone had been seized as part of a federal investigation involving many people close to NYC’s not-so-beloved mayor, Eric Adams. Though Caban’s attorney said his client “unequivocally denies any wrongdoing,” the former commissioner said he resigned because the news had become a distraction. The topic of the federal investigation is unknown, but it’s one of several that touches the mayor.

A billionaire and a private astronaut walk into a bar, but the bar is outer space and they are making history. Tech entrepreneur Jared Isaacman and SpaceX engineer Sarah Gillis completed the first commercial spacewalk yesterday morning before most of you had even brushed your teeth.

SpaceX’s Polaris Dawn mission launched Tuesday with four private astronauts on board and began depressurizing its cabin for the historic spacewalk around 6am ET Thursday.

• Because the spacecraft doesn’t have an airlock, all four people had to wear spacesuits, but only Gillis and Isaacman got to poke their heads out of the capsule. The two didn’t venture far; they just sort of tested their mobility in SpaceX’s newly designed spacesuits, which had never been to the cosmos before.
• The mission also reached a record distance of 870 miles above Earth, more than three times the distance of the International Space Station. That’s the farthest distance traveled for a mission not headed to the moon.

Imagine taking your little mental health walk among the stars. Before yesterday, the only people to take space strolls were astronauts who worked for governments. The private walk not only represents a milestone for SpaceX’s space economy goals but also expands the a la carte options for the space tourism industry.—MM

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The government agency so secret it denied its own existence for years is now looking for a little recognition. The National Security Agency debuted a podcast, giving listeners access to declassified files and goings-on inside the secretive organization.

The series, titled No Such Podcast in a nod to how insiders used to refer to the NSA as “No Such Agency,” has three episodes available so far, with the first diving into how NSA codebreakers led the CIA to Osama bin Laden’s location.

Why go public? An agency spokesperson said it wants to talk about the work done by its “diverse, expert” workforce of cryptologists and cryptanalysts, who have gone without public acknowledgment.

Plus…it could help the NSA convince smart tech grads to work for them instead of Google by showing that the people who work at the agency are cool and normal, according to the spokesperson.

A long way from Snowden? The pod may also help the NSA distance itself from the rap it got when Edward Snowden revealed over a decade ago that the agency spied on US citizens. Future episodes will focus on the agency’s work analyzing communications, known as signals intelligence, which it says keeps America safe.—CC

In what will likely be shocking news to some powerful VCs, former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann might be better at building hype than at following through. Forbes reports that Flowcarbon, an environmental tech startup co-founded by the serial entrepreneur and noted enjoyer of feeling city pavement beneath his bare feet, has been returning cash to buyers of its crypto token because it…never launched. When Flowcarbon raised $70 million in funds from investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, in 2022, at least $38 million was raised through the sale of its “Goddess Nature Token.” The crypto was meant to represent carbon credits, a controversial method of trying to help the planet by offsetting pollution. The total sales figure for the token that never came to fruition might be even higher because Forbes said it’s unclear if the number the company released included retail buyers.

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