The Florida rapper talks about embracing his softer side and recording the Drake collaboration “I’m Spent” while hooked up to an IV
Loe Shimmy was in a St. Louis hotel room, getting vitamins pumped into his arm, when he came up with one of the highest-profile songs of his career.
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The Florida rapper was traveling as an opener on Sexyy Red’s tour when he recorded the original version of “I’m Spent,” a woozy meditation on money and loyalty that would eventually land on Drake’s Habibti. With him in the room, Shimmy says, was a woman who kept asking him to buy her things. He turned the moment into a song.
“I made it in, what, 20, 30 minutes?” Shimmy tells Rolling Stone. “I had a girl with me when I was making that song, and she was just asking me for some shit. So I just put that shit in the song.”
He was multitasking throughout the session. “I was getting an IV at the same time while I was recording,” he adds. “Just catching the vibe.”
“I’m Spent” is one of the quieter standouts from the three albums Drake released simultaneously in May. The song strikes a balance between the flexing bravado you’d expect on a Drake track and a relatable sense of impermanence. “What if I go broke and ain’t got no more racks to spend,” Shimmy sings in the song’s intro.
Drake initially reached out asking him to send a couple of ideas before landing on an early version of “I’m Spent.” Drake then reconstructed the track. “He put it on a different beat,” Shimmy says. “He did his little science to it, and he texted me and said, ‘We got a hit.’”
“I’m Spent” arrived this spring as Shimmy was preparing his own new album, Pretty Girlz Run the World, released July 24. The project offers more of those syrupy melodics, with Shimmy’s distinct, saxophone-like vocals guiding listeners through a romantic landscape.
Shimmy first made a name for himself with the gritty 2020 EP Zombie Land, which introduced him as a street-centric rapper whose music made more sense rattling from the trunk of a car than playing in a nightclub. He’s had flashes of a softer side, though. Zombieland 2, his 2024 follow-up, features “For Me,” a woozy, late-night plea for romantic reassurance that became his first Billboard Hot 100 entry when Brent Faiyaz joined him on a remix later that year.
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On “Run the World,” Shimmy is once again joined by Faiyaz, who pulls the song’s contemplative romanticism into a distinctly R&B register, floating effortlessly over drill-influenced drums from Smash David, Pooh Beatz, and Caleb Bryant. On “Too Exotic,” Shimmy returns to the punchy, menacing cadences that defined his earlier projects, only now he’s rapping about how he wants to treat the women in his life.
On “Everyday,” modern hip-hop’s Eighties dance revival continues with an interpolation of Cherrelle and Alexander O’Neal’s 1985 hit “Saturday Love.” Shimmy’s talents shine brightest here, his cadence balancing the beat’s bouncing 808s against the sample’s breezy melodies. On “Seduce You,” a West Coast-style funk beat ushers in Shimmy’s vibrant storytelling, conjuring a neon-drenched strip club that somehow manages to feel unexpectedly tender.
Shimmy sees Pretty Girlz Run the World less as a reinvention than an opportunity to bring one part of his sound to the foreground. “I’ve been pushing it, though,” he says. “If you listen to my old tapes and shit, I’ve been making soft shit for the women. I’ve been on the subject. I just knew I could capitalize off making an album focusing on that subject. I used to mix it up with that Zombieland.”
On the new album, he goes deeper into that sound, making songs with women in mind. “Put on a nice dress, get pretty, put their makeup on, feel sexy,” Shimmy says of the album’s purpose. “Just a vibe.” Like many savvy musicians, he understands which audience really counts. “When you go to the club, guys get what the girls want to drink,” he says. “You get in the car with girls; we’re going to let the girls play the music they want to play. They just run it.”
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Shimmy says that perspective comes partly from his upbringing. He grew up primarily around his mother and sisters, without his father in the home.
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“Most of my childhood, I only was raised in the house with women,” he says. “So I respect the women differently.”
Even as the album leans into his softer sound, Shimmy does not plan to abandon the murkier street records that first built his following. “I like both,” he says. “I’m going back home now. I’m going back to the trenches, but I’m still going to keep it melodic, saucy. It’s me.” %!s()
Microsoft says device isolation can stop ransomware attacks in just 128 seconds.
getty
With the business media and many so-called cybersecurity thought leaders focusing on AI-powered breaches these days, you might be forgiven for thinking the ransomware threat is a thing of the past. You would be very wrong indeed, however, as newly published reports have confirmed. Reported ransomware incidents have risen year-on-year, with attackers increasingly using AI to automate and scale, IBM said. Meanwhile, BlackFog has confirmed that attacks targeting the service sector have increased by 221% from Q1 to Q2 this year. Anything that can give your organization the edge in fighting off the threat, therefore, is worth investigating. And Microsoft has just published a claim that a new response action within Defender can extend “autonomous protection directly to compromised endpoints” and halt a ransomware attack chain before a second-stage payload establishes persistence or moves beyond the host, in 128 seconds from “the first high-severity alert to completed isolation.”
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ForbesMicrosoft Has Paid A Record $20 Million For Security VulnerabilitiesBy Davey Winder
How Microsoft Killed A QNET Ransomware Attack In A Little Over Two Minutes From Start To Finish
QNET is a global multi-level marketing and direct-selling company with a distributed workforce, and so a fairly typical target of ransomware actors. A distributed workforce is a magnet for threat actors looking for an in, and a global business signifies worthwhile ransom demands to be made if an attack is successful. The case study detailed by Microsoft has revealed that on this occasion the attackers employed a legitimate Windows tool on a compromised endpoint to fetch the malicious remote ransomware payload. The use of such a living-off-the-land technique can be very profitable as it often slips past defenses.
Often ransomware attacks involve identity through shared or otherwise compromised credentials, and as James Maude, the field CTO at BeyondTrust, told me, “too many environments still have administrator accounts with permanent, always-on access to both IT and OT domains,” which is just asking for lateral movement exploitation. The Microsoft report detailed, however, that incidents such as this one often start with initial access directly on the device, which gives the threat actor a chance to establish an endpoint foothold from where multiple persistence mechanisms can be dropped. “This means that acting against the user’s identity alone is no longer enough to dismantle the threat,” Microsoft said, because that actor can “establish persistence, steal credentials, inject into processes, and prepare follow-on stages directly from the compromised endpoint itself,” without the need for immediate lateral movement.
Which is where device isolation comes into play. As the name would imply, this closes the threat gap by isolating the compromised device. And isolating it within seconds, 128 in this particular case.
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“When Microsoft Defender determines with high confidence that an endpoint is compromised,” the report said, confirming that AI-driven correlation and real-time analysis are employed to reach a 99% confidence verdict, “it isolates the device to immediately stop attacker activity and reduce the risk of further impact.” And isolation means just that: external network connectivity is blocked, although access to security services is maintained and the organization itself can enable “customer-defined services or exclusions to continue functioning.” The important takeaway here is that such device isolation, or ransomware containment action if you prefer, breaks the lateral movement opportunity and gives the security team time to breathe.
In the case of the QNET attack, that meant the difference between “a contained initial living-off-the-land binary execution and a fully detonated second-stage payload that had achieved credential theft and persistence,” according to Microsoft.
“The device isolation was triggered almost immediately,” A QNET spokesperson said, “which gave us confidence that the threat was contained early before it had any chance to spread.”
Of course, what this doesn’t mean is that you can ignore the basics of ransomware prevention and mitigation. Device isolation alone, if you’ll excuse the pun, is not a magic Microsoft bullet. “Regardless of the ransomware actor, the foundational controls still matter,” Trey Ford, chief strategy and trust officer at Bugcrowd reminds us. “Knowing your total attack surface, testing your environment with an eye toward efficient remediation is key.” And that means employing enterprise controls, including privileged account management, careful inventory of service accounts, and multi-factor authentication for domain admin and remote access. %!s()
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange in New York.
NYSE
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Hedge fund manager Gavin Baker, who famously invested early in SpaceX, says investors have been too quick to judge how much Big Tech is spending on AI infrastructure.
Baker, speaking on the "Invest Like The Best" podcast, said improving cash flow, continued demand for AI, and underpriced compute contracts are all reasons investors should worry less about Big Tech's eye-popping spending.
"You're going to see a lot of acceleration that's going to answer these ROI questions," Baker said, referring to what he says is a recent increase in the amount of cash these AI businesses are collecting. "You've started to see that this quarter."
In July, investors rushed to sell memory and chip stocks. They were largely worried that companies like Meta were spending too much on AI infrastructure without a clear path to generating returns on those investments.
Meta's free cash flow plunged 91% year over year, to $784 million in the second quarter of 2026. The company, however, posted a 25% year-over-year rise in net cash from its operating activities.
"That's a material acceleration at this scale," Baker said.
Baker also said that persistently high GPU prices show that demand for AI computing remains strong.
"I don't think anyone in '24 or '25 thought that the prices of old GPUs would still be going vertical in 2026," he said.
Many cloud providers, Baker said, have yet to fully monetize the AI infrastructure they've already built because much of their compute capacity is tied to older, lower-priced contracts they signed when GPUs were cheaper.
"Essentially, you have the contracted base of installed compute trading at a massive discount to the current spot market," he said.
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Truman Dickerson is the Weekend News Fellow at Business Insider, based in New York City. He covers trending tech and business news. He previously reported for The Boston Globe's Express Desk. He graduated from Boston University, where he served as editor in chief of The Daily Free Press, BU's student-run newspaper.Contact him at [email protected]
Ryan McPherson fought hard for his piece of Austin. Back in the spring of 2022, when it seemed like everyone was angling for homes in the Texas capital, he and his wife set their sights on a tidy four-bedroom in a sprawling new development on the east side of town. They bid $20,000 above the asking price, stretching the total to $615,000, and penned a heartfelt letter to the sellers to lock in the deal. Austin was booming, and if the previous two years were any indication, that price might soon seem like a bargain.
"Everybody that I worked with, they kept saying Austin only goes up," says McPherson, a surgeon who moved to the city for a job.
McPherson's timing, however, couldn't have been worse. In the four years since he grabbed the keys to his new place, asking prices in the Austin metro have plummeted by nearly 25%.No major city has seen a steeper fall, Realtor.com found. The rental market is also among the country's softest, with landlords handing out discounts to lure potential tenants. California expats flocked to the Texas capital at the start of the work-from-home era, but last year, more people left Austin for San Francisco than the other way around.
New homes to continue to rise in Easton Park, a master-planned community in Southeast Austin.
Jordan Vonderhaar for BI
The roots of the slowdown are no mystery. Developers built a ton of new homes, which, coupled with fewer cross-country moves and a painful rise in mortgage rates, put the brakes on Austin's runaway prices. Plenty of other pandemic-era hot spots — places like Boise, Denver, and Phoenix — have also seen prices go south in the past few years, but even among these once raging cities, Austin's long, painful hangover stands alone.
"The market got super out of whack, super quickly," says Joel Berner, an Austin-based senior economist for Realtor.com. "We're just still slowly recovering from that."
Things might have worked out for McPherson if he had stayed in Austin for the long haul. Housing forecasters remain mostly bullish on the city, which continues to draw big-name employers and young, well-paid workers. Even today, agents tell me listings in coveted neighborhoods regularly attract multiple bidders. But McPherson quickly soured on Austin. He liked his neighborhood but hated the endless traffic, the crowds, and the steep cost of living. Now back in his hometown of Phoenix, he and his wife are preparing to list their Austin home for sale at a hefty loss. An experienced local agent has told them she thinks it could sell in a few months for somewhere between $420,000 and $450,000 — a roughly 30% haircut — but even that sounds ambitious to McPherson, who knows they'll be competing against the swarm of nearby homebuilders offering huge perks to keep inventory moving. Still, he's ready to cut his losses.
"I'm not going to keep trying to wait this out and pray that there's a turnaround, because it's not coming right now," McPherson tells me, "I'd rather just stop losing sleep over it."
Austin had a lot going for it at the start of the decade. With mortgage rates at record lows and white-collar workers untethered from big office buildings, the central Texas oasis quickly emerged as a prime destination in the housing shuffle. Austin had long offered lower taxes and cheaper homes than pricey coastal hubs, but it looked particularly appealing to anyone squeezing into makeshift home offices in New York, San Francisco, or Los Angeles. Between 2020 and 2022, Austin's population swelled by 5.3%, or more than 120,000 people, per census data, making it the fastest-growing large metro in the country.
No large metro grew faster than Austin between 2020 and 2022.
Jordan Vonderhaar for BI
"Ironically, affordability was the big draw," Berner tells me. That didn't last long. In August 2021, asking prices were up more than 36% year over year. By the time Austin-area prices peaked the following spring, the typical home there cost more than $465,000, about 50% more than it had three years earlier.
"Things were just going gangbusters," Berner tells me. "Prices were getting totally out of control."
Desperate buyers weren't the only ones clamoring for a slice of Austin. Builders saw dollar signs and got busy churning out homes to meet the growing demand. Between April 2020 and July 2025, the Austin area's housing supply (both for-sale and rental) grew by more than 20%, or roughly 211,000 units, according to census estimates. "It was pretty dramatic," says Keith Hughes, an Austin-based executive at the housing research firm Zonda.
Things were just going gangbusters. Prices were getting totally out of control.Joel Berner, senior economist at Realtor.com
Beginning in March 2022, though, the Federal Reserve began jacking up interest rates to fight inflation. Rates for home loans quickly followed — between December 2021 and July 2022, the typical mortgage rate jumped by nearly three percentage points, from less than 3% to the 5%-6% range. For most potential buyers, the massive swing meant paying hundreds of dollars more in interest each month. The rate spike was enough to pour cold water on Austin's historic run.
"Everything was going into multiple offers, and then it really just stopped," says Lindsay Neuren, an Austin real estate agent. "That really spooked the market."
It usually takes a year or two for homebuilders to translate demand signals into fresh three- and four-bedrooms, which meant that the bulk of those new units hit the market right as many buyers came down with a case of cold feet.
Economists often talk about a "Nike swoosh"-shaped recovery after financial calamity — a steep drop, followed by a slow climb upward. Berner likens Austin's trajectory to an inverted swoosh, with Austin-area prices seeing a quick jolt followed by a long drift downward. This July, the Austin area's typical asking price was down nearly 12% from a year prior, Realtor.com found. Buyers, meanwhile, can afford to be picky, with far more options at their fingertips than before the pandemic. Roughly 12,700 Austin-area homes were sitting on the market in July, compared to about 8,000 at the same point in 2019.
"The game has completely changed," Berner tells me.
Gary Froniewski and his wife began hunting for an Austin home in early 2022, after their landlord hiked their monthly rent by $300. Most places they came across needed a lot of work and seemed "incredibly overpriced," Froniewski tells me, but they ended up snagging a three-bedroom condo in North Austin shortly before it officially hit the market. Though the price still felt steep, "it wasn't in that ridiculous range," he says. They closed in July of that year.
Gary Froniewski and his wife, Sierra Rogers, stand in front of their North Austin home.
Jordan Vonderhaar for BI
Froniewski has been keeping an eye on the market since. Based on nearby sales and his own property tax assessments, he estimates that his home has shed as much as half of its value.
"I expect to take a haircut on this, no matter what," Froniewski tells me. "It's just a matter of how devastating it ends up being when we're ready to actually move."
Fortunately for Froniewski, he and his wife have no plans to make a change. Four years since Austin's homebuying frenzy came to an abrupt close, though, other owners are staring down sizable, soon-to-be realized losses. A whopping 79% of Austin-area homes that traded hands in 2022 are now worth less than their sale price, according to a Realtor.com analysis.
I expect to take a haircut on this, no matter what. It's just a matter of how devastating it ends up being when we're ready to actually move.Gary Froniewski, Austin homeowner
Cynthia Mattiza, a longtime Austin real estate agent, is marketing one home on behalf of clients who bought in 2022. The experience is jarring, since they bought at a time when the attitude was "whatever it takes to win," and now they're pricing at a loss. "We're just thankful to receive any offer sometimes," Mattiza tells me.
John Mundell, another local agent, recently helped sellers offload their home in the suburb of Buda for $30,000 less than they'd bought it for a couple of years ago. "They're kind of screwed," Mundell tells me. "But they had to move."
The shift in Austin's market has reshaped the calculus for sellers who, a few years ago, might have presided over bidding wars. Because Austin-area rents have fallen off as well, would-be buyers are willing to stay put and let the math work in their favor. A common tactic these days, agents tell me, is to list a home for sale and for rent simultaneously, testing the waters to see whether becoming a landlord might stave off a loss. Buyers in the heat of competition might have once brushed off a stained carpet or looming repairs. These days, Mundell says, the onus is on the seller to do that work before sticking a for-sale sign in the front yard. In a similar vein, Mundell says he might take a pass on a client whose home has been languishing on the market, since the money he'd make may not justify the months of work required to secure a willing buyer. I'll admit I was surprised when he told me this — sellers are generally seen as the more valuable clients among agents, since they practically guarantee a commission.
"I'd take anything before," Mundell says. "Now I'm just being a little more selective."
The sellers in dire straits are those in areas with lots of new homes popping up — people like McPherson, whose location in a still-growing community means he's going head-to-head with homebuilders in the fight for buyers. Big developers can use their in-house lenders to dangle cheaper mortgages in front of house hunters, an option known as a "rate buydown." That kind of deal, combined with all the bells and whistles of a newly built home, makes it "very, very hard for resale homes to compete," Neuren tells me.
McPherson tried renting out his home in June 2025, when he and his wife moved back to Phoenix. The $2,500 monthly rent didn't come close to covering his $4,000 outlay for the mortgage and other expenses, but it did buy him some time. With those tenants gone now, though, he's facing a situation that he says has only worsened as more new construction crops up.
"Life taught me an expensive lesson," McPherson tells me. "Hopefully, I don't repeat these mistakes."
If you're a card-carrying YIMBY who believes that building more homes is the best way to bring down prices, Austin offers the most high-profile case study of the past decade. Compare the city to San Francisco, which built hardly any homes over the past few years and is now reckoning with a run-up in home values that makes Austin's growing pains seem quaint.
"I think that is maybe the lesson for the rest of the country," Berner tells me. "If you think home prices are too high, the solution is to build."
When I spoke with Berner in mid-July, he had just received a bittersweet property tax ruling on his central Austin home, which he purchased in 2023. He'll pay less this year, he says, after the county agreed to lower its assessment of his home's value by 12%.
"If I had a crystal ball and saw that my home would basically not appreciate in the three years that I owned it, and I could have continued renting for about two-thirds of what I pay in my mortgage, I probably would have stayed renting," Berner tells me. "But I didn't have that crystal ball."
Homebuilders continue to offer hefty incentives to keep homes moving in Austin.
Jordan Vonderhaar for BI
The people I spoke with nevertheless pointed to signs of stabilization in the Austin market. Mattiza, the local real estate agent, notes that areas with good schools and fewer homes for sale are still likely to draw multiple offers, though they're not coming close to the crazed bidding wars of 2022 — ultimately a "healthier" scenario for all parties involved, she says. And while overall metro prices are falling, price reductions are less common than a year ago, suggesting sellers are getting more realistic. In June, pending sales were up 11% year over year. "Sellers have just been slowly adjusting to meet buyers," Berner says.
Hughes, the Zonda executive, expects Austin prices to bounce back in the long term. In Zonda's nationwide ranking of markets by "fundamentals," which takes into account factors like demographics and employment, Austin comes out on top. The metro has the largest share of millennials and has drawn more high-income workers than any other market since 2019. Builders may not be rushing to open more doors, but they're quietly laying the groundwork for future developments with an eye on 2027 and beyond. "The underlying conditions support a comeback," Hughes says.
Froniewski hopes to see that rebound, but he's also at peace with the decision he and his wife made back in 2022. "I'm a firm believer that you can't time the market," Froniewski tells me. "You never know when the peak is, and you never know when the bottom is."
Then again, there are always what-ifs.
"If I had to sell the house today," Froniewski says, "I would be in shambles."
James Rodriguez is a correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team.
Business Insider's Discourse stories provide perspectives on the day's most pressing issues, informed by analysis, reporting, and expertise.
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James is a real estate correspondent on Business Insider's Discourse team. His pieces tackle the most fascinating storylines in real estate, helping readers make sense of an ever-shifting housing landscape.His biggest stories have highlighted the challenges for millennial homebuyers, the stakes in the legal battle between Zillow and Compass, and changes in how buyers and sellers pay their agents. He's also written about the rise of "accidental landlords," the end of casual house hunting, why big investors are buying stakes in Americans' homes, and the race to create the "Amazon of real estate." He regularly appears on nationally syndicated radio, television, and podcasts, including This Morning with Gordon Deal, Marketplace, Vox's Explain It To Me, and CBS News. His 2025 profile of Compass CEO Robert Reffkin was named best overall entry by the National Association of Real Estate Editors. His coverage has won several other NAREE awards, including the gold award for best collection of residential real estate coverage and the Kenneth R. Harney award for best consumer-education reporting.Prior to joining Business Insider, James covered commercial and residential real estate for the Denver Business Journal. He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin.
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Scientists will track stray rocket parts striking the moon to study crater formation and lunar dust from cosmic impacts.
A four-tonne chunk of debris the size of a school bus from a SpaceX rocket has crashed into the moon, according to tracking data, creating a new crater on the lunar surface and providing scientists a rare look at high-velocity cosmic impacts.
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The object, the second stage of a Falcon 9 rocket launched in early 2025, struck the moon early Wednesday near the Einstein Crater, at approximately 8,700 kilometres per hour (5,400 miles per hour), according to orbital trajectories mapped by independent astronomers and confirmed by space-tracking agencies. It struck the lunar surface with the force of roughly three tonnes of TNT.
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Such rocket hardware typically re-enters Earth’s atmosphere to burn up or splash down into remote ocean zones after delivering payloads into orbit.
But over 18 months, gravitational forces exerted by the sun, Earth, and moon gradually altered its flight path, setting it on an inevitable collision course. SpaceX said the trajectory leading to the crash was unintentional but unpreventable, given the vehicle’s remaining fuel reserves.
“What has happened is essentially a mixture of solar activity and gravity forces have put it on a path toward the moon,” Julianna Scheiman, SpaceX director of NASA science and Dragon programmes, told reporters on Monday.
Orbital observation craft, including NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) and South Korea’s Danuri spacecraft, have adjusted their sensor suites to document the collision site. While the instantaneous flash will be obscured by daylight on the lunar surface, orbiters will survey the ejected dust plume and take high-resolution before-and-after imagery of the newly formed crater.
Space tracking expert Bill Gray told The Associated Press news agency: “It doesn’t present any immediate danger, though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware is disposed of.” He added that “things are getting crowded up there.”
Wednesday’s collision marks only the second known instance of discarded rocket space debris accidentally crashing into the moon. The first occurred on March 4, 2022, when part of a Chinese Long March 3C rocket launched in 2014 impacted the lunar far side, carving out an unusual double crater. %!s()
