Business
C.E.O.s, and President Trump, Want Workers Back in the Office
Five years since the pandemic began, workers have grown accustomed to a script. Their bosses make return-to-office plans, which then get shelved. And then shelved again.
In recent weeks, the calls to end remote work have come back with gusto, and with authority.
On Monday, President Trump signed an executive order requiring federal department heads to “terminate remote work arrangements” and require all federal workers to return to in-person work five days a week. He previewed the move in December when he said those federal workers who refused to go into the office were “going to be dismissed.”
Some chief executives, who have long been enthusiastic about ditching remote work, have also announced full return-to-office plans. Amazon, JPMorgan and AT&T told many employees they would have to be back in the office five days a week this year. Even in popular culture, the office is making a comeback, with “Babygirl” glamorizing the blouse wearing C.E.O., “Severance” returning for a new season probing corporate psychological drama, and buzzy newsletters like “Feed Me” declaring remote work “out.”
And some workers, who have come back to in-person work of their own volition, are eager to pick up their prepandemic work routines.
Two years ago, Ellen Harwick would have said she wanted to work remotely forever. Last fall, a switch flipped.
A marketing manager for an apparel brand in Bellingham, Wash., Ms. Harwick worked remotely for two weeks in Portugal while still working on Pacific time. Suddenly, she began to crave office chatter.
“Something just shifted for me,” said Ms. Harwick, 48. “Working from home was really novel for the first bit, and then I just felt isolated.” She is now back in the office five days a week.
But many proponents of remote work, who underscore the benefits it offers to people with caregiving responsibilities, voiced concern about flexibility evaporating entirely.
“It’s very challenging to find child care that allows you to be in the office 9 to 5,” said Sara Mauskopf, the chief executive and founder of Winnie, a start-up that connects families with child care providers. Her company is fully remote.
Amazon’s return to office began on Jan. 2, when the company instructed most workers to come in five days a week, up from the three days required as of May 2023. In some locations, the deadline has been postponed as the company reconfigures office space. Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, told employees in a memo that returning to the office would better allow workers to “invent, collaborate and be connected” to one another and to the company culture.
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Mr. Jassy wrote.
JPMorgan told employees that in-person work would support better mentorship and brainstorming. The company will start rolling out its return to office in March.
“We know that some of you prefer a hybrid schedule and respectfully understand that not everyone will agree with this decision,” JPMorgan wrote in a memo to employees. “We feel that now is the right time to solidify our full-time in-office approach.”
Many work force experts point out that executives have wanted people back in the office for a while, for the purposes of building culture and relationships. What has changed, they say, is that employers feel they have more leverage now that the labor market is not quite as tight as it was at the height of the Great Resignation, when there were more open jobs for the number of unemployed people.
“It becomes like another dimension of compensation — in a really tight labor market, employees get their way more, employers might not pressure them to come back because they might want to quit,” said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University. “In a labor market where there’s more slack, employers might be less worried about that.”
Sometimes a return-to-office push has less to do with building an office culture and more to do with cost. Nick Bloom, an economist at Stanford University who studies remote work and advises executives on hybrid arrangements, said he had seen some companies press employees to return to the office as a way to reduce head count, understanding that calling all workers back would encourage some to quit.
“The waning of the D.E.I. movement has made it a bit easier,” added Mr. Bloom, referencing the backlash to corporate diversity initiatives, and explaining that women and employees of color have tended to voice more support for remote work in surveys.
In spite of these high-profile efforts to get workers back five days a week, many other employers are holding on to a hybrid approach.
Data from a Stanford project tracking work-from-home rates shows that over one-quarter of paid full days in the United States are worked remotely. And about three-quarters of Americans whose jobs can be done remotely continue to work from home some of the time, according to Pew.
One of the reasons that hybrid work has remained so sticky is that workers have made clear their preference for flexibility. Nearly half of remote workers surveyed by Pew said they would consider leaving their jobs if their employers no longer allowed them some remote flexibility. At Amazon, corporate workers staged a walkout in May 2023 protesting R.T.O. Some employers said they had no plans to change course from hybrid arrangements.
“We are committed to providing flexibility to the work force and believe the hybrid-flex approach allows teams to collaborate intentionally,” said Claire Borelli, the chief people officer at TIAA, an investment firm that called its employees back to the office three days a week in March 2022.
Some remote work stalwarts say that the policy has had no impact on productivity and that it has helped employee retention. When Yelp’s lease came up for renewal in 2021, the company decided to shift locations and sublease a smaller space from Salesforce. The company now allows employees to work fully remotely, bucking broader return-to-office trends.
“At this point, we almost drop the descriptor of remote work — it’s just the way we work,” said Carmen Amara, the company’s chief people officer.
Ms. Amara said any skepticism the company faced over its remote policy went away because of bottom-line results. The company reported record net revenue and profitability in the last quarter of 2024, as well as a 13 percent decrease in turnover since 2021.
But with big names like Amazon and JPMorgan returning to the office in full force, and with President Trump insisting that the federal work force do the same, the commercial real estate industry is tentatively optimistic, according to Ruth Colp-Haber, the chief executive of Wharton Property Advisors, a real estate brokerage.
Office occupancy is still shaky — a little over half of what it was prepandemic — according to Kastle, a workplace security firm whose “return-to-office” barometer has reflected the ups and downs of remote work since 2020. But that is up from what it was in 2022.
“These things take a while to work their way into the numbers, but there’s no question the momentum is on the positive side,” Ms. Colp-Haber said. “For a variety of reasons, one of them being the push by big companies to have five days a week back in the office, we’re seeing greater demand for office space.”
The lord of the rings works behind a nondescript door in a Beverly Hills office building, not far from the UCLA campus where he once sold hair clips and trinkets from a folding table. Jason Arasheben was $28,000 in debt back then, running low on options. Now, eight of the last 11 NBA champions have worn his jewelry on their fingers.
Super Bowl winners have his rings, too — the Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Philadelphia Eagles and the Seattle Seahawks, whose players opened their ornate jewelry boxes at a private team party Thursday night to find the prize every NFL player covets.
The Seahawks ring, large as a child’s fist, is encrusted with 20 carats of white diamonds and blue sapphires. It’s a miniature Lumen Field, featuring the hawk-head logo and two Lombardi Trophies. The top lifts off and converts into a pendant. Inside is a cowhide segment of a game-used football. Twelve flags on the sides nod to the “12th Man” fan base; one is a secret button — push it and the arches pop out to reveal the words “World Champions.”
A look at the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl ring celebrating their 2025 season championship.
(Courtesy of Jason of Beverly Hills)
Even the box performs. Three tiny spotlights shine on the ring as it rotates on a mechanical platform. Each weighs about a third of a pound.
“It’s a memento to a certain period of time,” said Arasheben, whose company is Jason of Beverly Hills. He concedes the rings are closer to trophies than wearable jewelry. He competes for ring contracts with Tiffany & Co. and Jostens, both much larger operations. “It celebrates this time that these players and these fans will remember forever.”
His rings appraise for $50,000 to $250,000, though the market can push them higher. In 2024, Kobe Bryant’s 2000 Lakers ring sold at auction for $927,000, the highest price ever paid for an NBA title ring, topping Bill Russell’s 1957 ring at $705,000.
Beverly Hills jewler Jason Arasheben is
(Ric Tapia / For The Times)
NFL franchises typically order two or three times what NBA, NHL or MLB teams request — as many as 3,000 rings in four quality tiers. Lower-level employees might get cubic zirconia instead of diamonds. A limited number of fan versions are available at smaller scale and lower price. Arasheben always builds two extra into his contract so each of his sons can have one.
A career in luxury jewelry was never the plan. He grew up in Granada Hills and Calabasas; his Iranian father and Norwegian mother envisioned a doctor, lawyer or engineer. At UCLA, he found himself more interested in bars than books.
“I was $28,000 in debt because I enjoyed going out far too much, like every other college student,” he said.
One day he tagged along with a friend to the wholesale district downtown and had a flash of inspiration. She was buying plastic hair clips and silver trinkets by the dozen. He figured he could sell them to girls on campus.
(Courtesy of Jason of Beverly Hills)
He pitched the idea of a folding table to the university, which agreed when he offered to split the profits. He bought $400 worth of tchotchkes. One table became two, then six locations across Southern California campuses.
Then came the motherlode. He built acrylic display cases holding 30 to 40 pieces and drove from Agoura Hills to San Diego, stopping at every nail salon he could find, splitting the profits with owners who let him put a case on the counter. By his senior year, he had agreements with roughly 350 salons and was clearing $25,000 to $30,000 a month.
After college, as a regular on the L.A. nightclub scene, Arasheben built relationships with professional athletes and celebrities. He would go home and sketch chain designs for players he’d met, knowing nothing about the jewelry industry.
“Finally, an NBA player said, ‘Why don’t you come to my hotel room tomorrow before we play the Lakers and bring all the jewelry you have? I’m going to buy something from you,’ ” said Arasheben, describing an encounter with the late Anthony Mason.
Problem was, he had no jewelry. He spent the night cutting pictures from magazines and downloading images to create a makeshift catalog, then promised Mason a custom $40,000 necklace. Mason put down $20,000.
Arasheben went downtown, knocked on doors and found somebody to make it for $37,000. A new business was born, growing by word of mouth. Eventually he had four employees and a small office downtown, outsourcing most of his work.
Through his friendship with Jim Buss, son of owner Jerry Buss, Arasheben landed the contract to make the Lakers’ 2009 championship ring. It was a mad scramble. He and his employees slept in sleeping bags on the factory floor the final two weeks of production.
“We delivered the very last player ring 20 minutes before the ceremony began,” he said. “The ring ceremony was on national television, and can you imagine if they had to announce the rings weren’t ready? My career would have been over before it started.”
He made the Lakers ring in 2010, too, and five years later — through relationships with several Golden State players — produced four championship rings for the Warriors.
Tom Brady saw LeBron James’ ring during the 2020 offseason and convinced the Buccaneers to go with Arasheben.
A lot of Arasheben’s rings have James Bond elements such as secret compartments or special elements. The top comes off the miniature SoFi Stadium on the Rams ring, for instance, and the field below is made of a melted-down patch of the actual artificial turf. The World Series ring of the Texas Rangers features a tiny circle of leather from a game-used baseball.
He first incorporated a special feature in the 2018 Warriors ring, when a star player objected to a blue face and wanted white, only weeks from delivery. Arasheben devised a mechanism allowing the face to switch colors.
Jason Arasheben poses with some of the sports championship rings he has crafted over the years.
(Ric Tapia / For The Times)
“We started getting a lot of championship ring contracts after that,” he said. “Because we took it to a new level and showed some ingenuity. We wanted to be innovative.”
Push a button on the Eagles’ ring and wings pop out on the sides. Arasheben came up with that idea while shopping for a Buzz Lightyear toy for his nephew.
Buzz, too, has wings that pop out.
“I thought, ‘I can do that for the Eagles, but with amazing gold and diamonds,’ ” he said.
He will put a proposal together to make the medals for the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles. Then there’s the one that got away.
“We lost out on the L.A. Dodgers,” Arasheben said. “… But you know, that’s part of the business. You take your lumps.
“But I’ll still pitch. Every year, I pitch.”
Fox Corp. has agreed to acquire the streaming platform Roku Inc. in a deal valued at $22 billion, the companies announced Monday.
The deal will combine the Murdoch family’s media assets, which include its news, sports and broadcast channels, with the San José-based streaming platform that reaches 100 million consumers globally.
The acquisition would give Fox access to consumer households at a time when the traditional pay-TV universe continues its slow decline as viewers move away from cable and satellite services to video streaming. Fox already owns the free ad-supported streaming service Tubi, which recently became profitable.
“This is a defining moment for Fox and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decade,” Fox Corp. Executive Chair Lachlan Murdoch said in a statement.
By owning Roku, Fox gets access to data from the 100 million households connected to the service, which can be used to better target audiences with advertising. The combination would also make Fox less dependent on traditional pay TV platforms for the distribution of its channels.
“While Fox remains in a strong position to monetize its existing portfolio within the evolving pay TV ecosystem, we see this deal as a way to ensure the company’s future as streaming overtakes traditional distribution in the years ahead,” analyst firm MoffettNathanson wrote.
According to Nielsen data, 21% of all internet-connected TV viewing comes through Roku. The Roku Channel, which carries 500 ad-supported streaming networks, accounts for 3% of all TV viewing.
An image of a Roku branded TV.
(Roku)
Research firm EMarketer projects ad revenue of $3.57 billion for Roku this year, up 19% from last year.
Lloyd Greif, chief executive of the Los Angeles investment bank Greif & Co., said that Roku would have been challenged to compete against far better capitalized competitors in the streaming business and that a sale was “inevitable.”
For Fox, the proposed deal makes it a larger player in the digital advertising business. EMarketer senior analyst Ross Benes said the Roku business will “more than double” the company’s revenue in that area.
“It remains to be seen how well the combination of a digitally innovating streaming company will mesh with a media conglomerate rooted in legacy assets,” Benes said. “But the strategy makes sense and it jibes with the continual consolidation that’s occurring in streaming.”
Fox sold its TV and movie production assets to Walt Disney Co. in 2018. Rather than invest heavily in scripted entertainment to compete with emerging streaming companies, Fox decided to concentrate on sports and news.
The Roku deal will put Fox deeper into the distribution network. Over its history, the company has held stakes in satellite TV provider DirecTV and Sky TV.
Fox’s streaming aspirations have been modest up to this point. The company launched its stand-alone direct-to-consumer subscription service Fox One, offering Fox News and other channels outside a pay TV package.
The company acquired the ad-supported streaming service Tubi for $440 million in 2020. The business is now approaching $1.5 billion in annual revenue.
The companies said they are committed to keeping Roku as a “partner-friendly” platform that carries program services that compete with Fox. Brian Wieser, a consultant at Madison and Wall, said that might require some convincing.
“Other content owners may still need Roku’s distribution, but they may be less comfortable with the idea that one of their competitors controls an increasingly important part of the streaming interface,” Wieser wrote in his note on the proposed deal.
Roku shareholders will receive a combination of cash and Fox Corp. stock valued at $160 a share.
The companies say they expect a cost savings of $400 million in the combined entity.
Roku was founded in 2002 by Anthony Wood, a British digital entrepreneur. The company launched a streaming device, the Roku player, in 2008. Within six years, the company sold more than 10 million devices, as the popularity of streaming video rapidly grew.
Fox Corp. shares closed down 11% on news of the deal Monday, ending the day at $54.76. Roku shares closed at $140.90 apiece.
Times staff writer Wendy Lee contributed to this report.
Just two years ago, Monarch Tractor was worth half a billion dollars and ready to shake up the wine industry. In April, it shut its headquarters, laid off its employees and sold its technology to a competitor.
The wine-country startup wanted to revolutionize the cultivation of grapes and other fruit with $100,000 robotractors, but the technology didn’t work well enough. At a time when Waymo’s impressive success and the advent of AI have rekindled excitement about everything driverless, Monarch’s failure to disrupt has become another cautionary tale about massive bets on the latest tech.
The driver optional, battery-powered tractors — built skinny enough to fit in the narrow lanes between the rows of grapevines near its headquarters in Livermore — were going to make it easier and cheaper to handle pests, irrigation and harvesting. They were supposed to use cameras and sensors to collect data, learn what works best and then share that learning online with thousands of other high-tech tractors.
On the back of hopes it could save farmers hundreds of thousands of dollars, the Monarch tractor made Time magazine’s list of the year’s best inventions in 2023. That same year, Monarch was on a Forbes list of startups most likely to reach a $1-billion valuation. It made it halfway there the following year.
“Every farmer around the world is under tremendous pressure because of a lack of labor,” Monarch Chief Executive Praveen Penmetsa told Forbes in 2023, projecting hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. “We are the only all-electric, smart, driver-optional tractor in the world that farmers can buy today.”
But just as the technology seemed poised to move from moonshot to mainstream, customer complaints started coming in.
Patrick O’Connor, who runs Moonvine Wines, an organic vineyard near the Sierra Foothills wine region, was one of the first users and said the tractors too often went rogue, veering off straight paths and damaging his vines.
“It totally failed,” O’Connor said in an Instagram video. “While I was excited to eliminate diesel, run off my solar panels and embrace new technology, it just did not perform. It was actually quite dangerous.”
The potentially world-changing technology wasn’t working as designed. Meanwhile, Monarch hit a wall when its manufacturer — the same company that makes most iPhones — had to stop making the tractors.
“Building and scaling a new tractor platform in agriculture came with unforeseen challenges,” the company said in a statement in April.
Monarch and its founders did not respond to requests for comments.
The company was launched in 2018 with a promising pedigree.
Its founding team included Tesla veteran Mark Schwager and Napa Valley wine scion Carlo Mondavi, the grandson of Napa legend Robert Mondavi.
Penmetsa, the chief executive, had worked for years in the automotive and EV industries, largely in and around Los Angeles.
The company set out with the ambitious goal of bringing battery power, data collection and driverless technology to tractors. If it could pull it off, it could change farming around the world.
The Californian wine industry has been struggling with rising competition and dwindling demand, which could have nudged more farmers to try to save money using Monarch’s technology. It also could have made farmers more cautious about using unproven and expensive new technology.
Monarch may have aimed too high, industry insiders said.
While Monarch was trying to solve two problems at once — making its tractor both electric and autonomous — it didn’t spend enough time thinking about farmers’ needs, said Walter Duflock, vice president of innovation for the Western Growers Assn. Duflock owns San Bernardo Rancho, a fifth-generation family ranch in south Monterey County.
“The electric tractor has struggled to find a use case on the farm,” Duflock said in an interview. “They never got to the point where their electric vehicle was solving a fundamental problem.”
On Duflock’s ranch and many other California farms, there’s little to no charging infrastructure, he said. Even if infrastructure was developed, the time it takes to charge an electric tractor is too long for most farmers who can’t have downtime during busy seasons.
“The notion of sitting there waiting for a charging tractor to finish getting charged just doesn’t fit,” Duflock said.
Duflock heard that the Monarch tractor “would bump into stuff, it would not stop fast enough,” he said. “It just did not work.”
Monarch’s collapse was gradual. In July 2024, the company laid off 15% of its workforce, followed by another round of layoffs in November that year that affected around 35 employees, or 10% of its workforce. A year later, the company warned employees it could lay off 100 workers or even “shut down” in a company-wide memo obtained by TechCrunch.
In November 2025, Monarch Tractor was sued by the Idaho-based dealership Burks Tractor, which accused Monarch of misrepresenting its autonomous technology.
Burks Tractor paid Monarch more than $770,000 for 10 tractors.
“Upon receiving the tractors, Burks Tractor discovered that the tractors did not perform as represented and were unable to operate autonomously,” the complaint said.
A Burks Tractor manager declined to comment due to the ongoing litigation.
Monarch’s vehicles were supposed to be manufactured at a facility in Ohio owned by Foxconn, a Taiwanese electronics company known for assembling iPhones. Foxconn sold the factory in August 2025, shutting down Monarch’s plans there.
In April, Monarch sold the technology it had spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing to construction giant Caterpillar, for an undisclosed amount.
“It means the technology will continue to move forward,” with another company, Monarch said in a LinkedIn post at the time. “Thank you to our employees, investors and customers for being a part of this journey.”
Caterpillar did not respond to requests for comment.
Other companies are plowing forward where Monarch has failed.
For example, farm equipment company John Deere has had more success marketing and selling autonomous farm equipment. It has taken a different approach, gradually incorporating autonomous technology into its existing products. The company’s 8R tractor can operate autonomously while being controlled by a smartphone and has been deployed at large-scale commodity farms growing corn, soy and wheat.
Organic vineyard owner O’Connor still uses his Monarch tractor, but only as a battery and to cut wood with an attachment he has added.
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