President Donald Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops in Los Angeles over the weekend, in the face of protests over his deportation efforts and against local officials’ wishes, was in line with the nativism Businessweek Editor Brad Stone writes about in Remarks for our next issue. You can read an excerpt below. But first, Steven Church, who’s covering the 23andMe bankruptcy for Bloomberg, lays out the value in its data. Plus: Why this year’s college graduates are having a hard time finding work.

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When Anne Wojcicki tried in February to buy back 23andMe, the DNA testing company she co-founded in 2006, it had never made a profit and was struggling to stay afloat.

Board members rejected her offer, which was worth about $75 million, or $2.53 a share. Instead, facing legal troubles related to a 2023 data breach and no prospects for a financial rescue, the company filed for bankruptcy with plans to hold a court-supervised sale. On the auction block: a trove of data on the ancestry, genetic traits and health risks of as many as 15 million people who had mailed in saliva samples.

The board’s gamble on a Chapter 11 case paid off. Wojcicki is back with a new offer worth $305 million and faces a final round of bidding against Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, which could push the value of 23andMe even higher. Wojcicki didn’t respond to a request for comment about how she and her business partners would use the data. Regeneron said in an emailed statement that 23andMe’s assets would help develop drugs through “population scale human genetics studies.” The Regeneron Genetics Center is involved in hundreds of studies using data from 5 million people, the company said.

The next round of bidding for 23andMe could start as early as this week, depending on when a privacy ombudsman files a report on the sale process, according to court documents.

Wojcicki, at the 2020 Makers Conference in Los Angeles. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

The company’s business model failed because so few people who sent in their spit for genetic analysis also signed up for a monthly subscription service. That package gave them access to DNA-related services, like finding unknown relatives, or health advice based on their genetic makeup. But over the years, the customer data grew in value.

“That kind of dataset is rare,” says Shelly Simana, an assistant professor at the Boston College Law School. “What makes the 23andMe dataset so valuable is the scale and depth—millions of people who linked their DNA with self-reported health, lifestyle and ancestry data.”

When 23andMe filed for bankruptcy in March, only about 550,000 people had subscribed to its two primary offerings, not enough to keep the company afloat. One of those services, the telehealth provider Lemonaid Health, isn’t part of the sale and will be wound down, 23andMe said in a statement.

The company had tried in the months leading up to its bankruptcy to attract a buyer, while struggling to end a class-action lawsuit related to the 2023 data breach that gave hackers access to customer information. The company will try to resolve those claims as part of the bankruptcy.

The bankruptcy attracted scrutiny from state and federal regulators concerned about how such personal data will be handled. Regeneron and Wojcicki have both pledged to abide by 23andMe’s privacy policies, which allow users to have their data deleted. Any other restrictions buried in the fine print are unlikely to drastically erode the value of the customer information, says Vasant Dhar, a professor of data science at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

The data is likely to be most valuable to medical researchers, who could use it to create new drugs or tailor treatments to a specific genetic profile, he says. But the data could also be used to make money in the food industry or simply in advertising, Dhar says.

Linking intimate details that customers gave 23andMe about their lifestyles, daily habits and, of course, genetic makeup could be used to sell those same people products that more directly appeal to them, Dhar says.

The customer information still has value even if government regulators or the privacy policy requires the data to be anonymized, blocking the buyer from directly connecting an individual to the details. Broad population studies can give researchers valuable clues about consumers with a shared genetic profile, Dhar says.

And if the buyer can persuade enough 23andMe customers to keep providing information, the data could become a gold mine, he says. That’s because matching someone’s old genetic profile to a new disease, like cancer, could help researchers identify possible treatments. The key is cobbling together a database with a large number of people. Despite its business failings, that’s exactly what 23andMe did.

“The holy grail would be connecting the genetic data to clinical data,” Dhar says.

Previously in Businessweek:
All Those 23andMe Spit Tests Were Part of a Bigger Plan (November 2021)
23andMe DNA Tests Probably Won’t Help You Live Longer (May 2024)

In Brief

National Guard and law enforcement officers at the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building in Los Angeles on Sunday. Photographer: Kyle Grillot/Bloomberg

• Los Angeles prepares for a fourth day of unrest as Governor Gavin Newsom resists the deployment of the National Guard in a standoff over immigration raids. 
• Warner Bros. Discovery is dividing itself in half, splitting its streaming businesses from its cable-TV channels.
• Ken Moelis, who became one of the most recognizable dealmakers on Wall Street in his four-decade career, will step down as CEO of his boutique investment bank effective Oct. 1. 

Trump’s Uncompromising Isolationism

Illustration: Raven Jiang for Bloomberg Businessweek

Over the past century, US foreign policy has been guided by the notion that as a country we’d do well by doing good—that there are dividends, both moral and material, from helping our friends and neighbors. Now the administration of President Donald Trump is unraveling that philosophy with startling speed. How other branches of the American government, countries and multinational companies respond in the months and years ahead will be the defining question of at least the rest of our lives.

America’s practitioners of altruistic statecraft were famous for their high-minded ideals and soaring rhetoric. “I need not tell you gentlemen that the world situation is very serious,” said Secretary of State George Marshall in 1947 to students at Harvard University, in a speech still replete with historical resonance. He was introducing the Marshall Plan, the program to rebuild the war-torn countries of Western Europe. “It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace.”

Universally lauded by historians, the Marshall Plan (worth about $170 billion in today’s dollars) had ample precedent. Through a program called lend-lease, Franklin D. Roosevelt had supplied Great Britain with arms to fight Nazi Germany during the 1930s without asking for any payment, arguing that when your neighbor’s house is on fire, you ensure the fire won’t spread by giving them a garden hose without haggling over the price. Winston Churchill called it “the most unsordid act in the whole of recorded history.”

Of course, America has repeatedly fallen short of its own values. The war in Vietnam, backing tyrants in the Middle East and Latin America, the invasion of Iraq, Abu Ghraib—the list is long and, to use Churchill’s word, sordid. But American presidents, regardless of party, generally embraced the conception of the US as an ethical superpower. That certainly was as true of Jimmy Carter, who put human rights at the center of his foreign policy, as it was of his successor, Ronald Reagan, who blended moral leadership with fierce anticommunist policies in backing such initiatives as Radio Free Europe, the Voice of America and humanitarian assistance to poor countries. “With the exception of some clear examples, such as Vietnam, the American public has believed that its leadership in the world is principled and worthwhile,” says Robert Keohane, a professor of international affairs at Princeton University. “And Trump has tried to overturn both of those premises.”

Brad Stone writes about the end of a postwar precedent: America Cast Itself as the World’s Moral Leader. Not Anymore

What a Time to Be Starting a Career

Illustration: Sun Bai for Bloomberg Businessweek

Robert Trowe never imagined it would be so difficult landing a full-time job. By the time the 21-year-old graduated from Arizona State University in May, he had a roster of references, a network of family and alumni offering advice and a summer internship at JPMorgan Chase & Co. under his belt. Like any good finance major, he’s kept a spreadsheet of all 300 jobs he’s applied to since the start of his senior year, and the stats are bleak: Just 4% resulted in interviews, 33% sent an automated rejection, and the rest haven’t gotten back at all. “The entry-level roles are few and far between,” he says. “Everyone I know who is graduating right now is struggling.”

Every generation seems to think they’re entering the workforce at a difficult time—just ask those still-reeling 2008 grads who launched during the Great Recession—and they’re not entirely wrong. After all, the US has undergone three recessions since 2000. But there are signs the most recent college grads are facing especially brutal conditions, thanks in part to the rise of artificial intelligence, which is replacing some entry-level positions, and the hiring freezes implemented across much of corporate America under the threat of President Donald Trump’s on-again-off-again tariffs.

Although the economy still appears to be on solid footing by many metrics—with the overall unemployment rate little changed in May—the number of unemployed people just rose for a fourth straight month, the longest such streak since 2009, government data show. And younger people in particular are feeling the pain.

Claire Ballentine runs the numbers and talks with would-be employees: New Grads Join Worst Entry-Level Job Market in Years

Quant Secrets

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