Ryan Roslansky, CEO of Microsoft’s LinkedIn subsidiary, speaks at a LinkedIn event in San Francisco on Sept. 22, 2016.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Influencer marketing has become big business on TikTok and Instagram, where popular creators can make good money by helping brands promote their stuff. Now, LinkedIn wants in the game.
As of last week, LinkedIn is letting advertisers pay to amplify posts from users, including those with sizable followings. Its product, called Thought Leader ads, launched in a limited capacity last year.
The Microsoft-owned business is looking for a jolt, as LinkedIn’s revenue growth has been stuck in single digits since 2022. The company is turning to its membership, which topped 1 billion in November, to help fuel expansion.
Influencer marketing to date has largely been a phenomenon of consumer apps, where shticks and gimmicks can turn internet-savvy creators into celebrities with millions of followers. Almost two-thirds of U.S. social media marketing dollars this year will flow to Instagram parent Meta and TikTok’s Chinese owner ByteDance, with Instagram and TikTok picking up a combined 2 percentage points of additional share by 2026, according to estimates from eMarketer.
LinkedIn, which was launched a year before Facebook, will grab just 4% of the market, equal to $4.5 billion in marketing revenue, eMarketer says, and its share will remain flat over the next two years.
“It takes a long time for ads and ad formats to really take root,” said Max Willens, a senior analyst at eMarketer, referring to LinkedIn’s latest endeavor.
LinkedIn introduced Thought Leader ads last year but with limited use. Brands could only amplify posts from their own employees. Mastercard, for example, promoted posts written by some of its leaders in Singapore, with one receiving over 500 notifications on the first day. LinkedIn has used Thought Leaders ads itself for some posts from operating chief Dan Shapero, but not yet for CEO Ryan Roslansky.
By opening up Thought Leader ads, LinkedIn is letting anyone boost a post as long as the author grants permission. Social media marketer Brendan Gahan is so bullish on the format that he’s focusing much of his efforts on helping companies use Thought Leader ads.
“In an era where brand safety is a big issue, LinkedIn has a leg up, particularly in contrast to Twitter,” said Gahan, who started an agency last year called Creator Authority, referring to the social media platform now known as X.
X lost some leaders working on brand safety last year, just as the Elon Musk-owned platform was seeing a surge in hate speech on the app.
LinkedIn has long been an effective site for advertisers because members list their employment details, making it easy for brands to target ads to relevant audiences. Advertising skews toward business-focused products like software and computer infrastructure, though automakers, universities and banks also use the network to reach potential customers.
“If you’re looking to sell a high-end B2B product, and you know the buying group is a CFO and someone in finance and like someone in HR, we can literally put ads in front of those specific people on LinkedIn, because the first-party data is so strong,” Roslansky said at a conference in late 2022.
Thought Leader ads came about after employees saw marketing clients promoting screenshots of other users’ content. Since turning on the offering last fall, the ads have yielded higher engagement than regular ads that run with images, said Abhishek Shrivastava, a LinkedIn vice president of product management.
“Humanizing your brand is critical for B2B and has been underused in that space,” said Shrivastava, adding that clients are very excited about it.
It might not be cheap. Racking up a thousand ad impressions generally costs more on LinkedIn than on Instagram or TikTok, partly because the company charges more for advertisers to reach its more affluent user base. Shrivastava said that rather than comparing the costs to other sites, brands will look at the sales and business leads they get from running ads.
For months, project management software startup ClickUp has been paying to promote LinkedIn posts from its own executives. Chris Cunningham, head of social marketing at the company, said traditional ads on LinkedIn can sometimes be repetitive and generic, and he’s eager to see how promoted posts will perform when influencers get involved.
On other social networks, ClickUp has found more success promoting posts from creators than with standard ads, Cunningham said. Plus, he said, “it’s super easy.”
Betsy Hindman, a marketer in Tennessee who helps companies make the most of their LinkedIn presence, said a brand ambassador with an audience can have a bigger impact than a typical ad.
“It’s part of a full end-to-end strategy that includes warming people up along the way with whatever type of content they respond to,” she said.
Building up a roster of creators will likely take time. Some influencers are represented by agencies, and LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager advertising system doesn’t have an automatic process for connecting media buyers with agencies.
“That’s a direction we are exploring,” Shrivastava said.
More data will soon be available to advertisers. Starting in a few weeks, LinkedIn members will be able to look up any company’s collection of ads and see its Thought Leader ads, a spokesperson said. That could help advertisers see what works best.
One potential boon for LinkedIn rests with the fate of TikTok. The app faces a possible ban in the U.S. after the House of Representatives passed legislation last month that would force ByteDance to sell it within six months. Momentum has since slowed, though Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., urged lawmakers to take action on the matter earlier this week.
Willens from eMarketer said agencies are keeping an eye on the issue, but said “nobody feels there’s an imminent threat.”
The Netflix logo is pictured at the company’s offices on Vine in Los Angeles, California on Dec. 5, 2025.
Patrick T. Fallon | AFP | Getty Images
“Who’s watching?” Netflix asks whenever someone accesses its site. On Friday, it was probably everyone with an interest in business, markets and television.
The key characters that had people hooked were Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which jointly announced that the streaming giant will acquire the latter’s film studio and streaming service, HBO Max. The equity deal value is pegged at $72 billion.
Netflix investors did not seem too jazzed about the deal, with shares dropping 2.89% on the sheer size of the transaction.
“Look, the math is going to hurt Netflix for a while. There’s no doubt,” Rich Greenfield, co-founder of LightShed Partners, told CNBC. “This is expensive,” he added.
But if one side is paying a lot, that means the other is receiving a bounty. Indeed, investors cheered the potential Warner Bros. Discovery windfall, sending the stock up 6.3% on the news.
It is not a done deal yet, and faces regulatory scrutiny. U.S. President Donald Trump said he would be involved in the decision, Reuters reported Monday, after a senior official from the Trump administration told CNBC’s Eamon Javers on Friday that they viewed the deal with “heavy scepticism.”
Despite this initial show of resistance, stranger things have happened in this administration, and the transaction might eventually go through. Should we get ready for Netflix’s next blockbuster: “The K-Pop Demon Hunters’ Song of Ice and Fire”?
What you need to know today
U.S. stocks had a positive Friday. The S&P 500 had its ninth winning session in 10 and rose 0.3% for the week. Europe’s regional Stoxx 600 closed flat. Separately, third-quarter euro zone economic growth was revised upward to 0.3%.
Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery’s film and streaming businesses. The total equity value of the deal is $72 billion, announced the two companies Friday. But the transaction could run intoregulatory hurdles.
Core inflation in the U.S. cools down. September’s core personal consumption expenditures price index was 2.8% on an annual basis, 0.1 percentage point lower than expectations and August’s figure. Other numbers were in line with expectations.
A Ukraine peace deal is ‘really close.’ That’s according to Keith Kellogg, the U.S. special envoy for Ukraine, who reportedly said Saturday that there were two key outstanding issues: the future of Ukraine’s Donbas region and its Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.
[PRO] Goldman Sachs unveils its top five global stocks. The picks are from China, Taiwan, India, Germany and the U.K. — and all offer an upside of at least 70%, according to the bank.
And finally…
The Sizewell A and B nuclear power stations, operated by Electricite de France SA (EDF), in Sizewell, UK, on Friday, Jan. 26, 2024. Photographer: Chris Ratcliffe/Bloomberg via Getty Images
The U.K. once had more nuclear power stations than the U.S., USSR and France combined. It was a global producer until 1970 but hasn’t completed a new reactor since Sizewell B in 1995.
There is ambition to change that. Authorities want a quarter of the U.K.’s power to come from nuclear by 2050. The country is spreading its bets across tried-and-tested large nuclear projects and smaller, next-generation reactors known as small module reactors.
Divorce always raises thorny questions of how to divide marital property. In most cases, the remedy is pretty straightforward, requiring a surgical split between the two parties’ assets — although you can’t do that with the family dog or aquarium. But if you thought deciding who gets the dog was complicated, here comes cryptocurrency.
With the crypto wealth accumulation phase still new within many households, and the recent sharp decline in digital assets including bitcoin and ether dinging the confidence of investors who had just seen record highs, the path forward is murky. But for many married Americans, the current price of crypto doesn’t even register as an issue. That’s because the assets are easily squirreled away from an unsuspecting spouse.
“In divorce cases, crypto is creating the same headaches we’ve long seen with offshore accounts, except now the assets can be moved instantly and invisibly,” said Mark Grabowski, professor of cyber law and digital ethics at Adelphi University and author of several books about cryptocurrencies. He added that the problem is that ownership isn’t determined by a name on an account — it’s determined by who holds the private keys.
“If one spouse controls the wallet, they effectively control the assets,” Grabowski said.
Lawyers now have to subpoena exchanges, trace transactions on the blockchain, and determine whether coins were purchased before or during the marriage.
“Without that transparency and given the lack of reporting standards, it’s easy for one spouse to hide or underreport holdings. Courts are still catching up,” Grabowski said.
In theory, though, a crypto divorce should work like any other. Renee Bauer, a divorce attorney who has dealt with crypto splits, says the biggest question couples fight about is simple on the surface: who gets the wallet?
“That question opens the door to a mess of complications that traditional property division never had to deal with,” Bauer said.
The first challenge is figuring out what actually exists.
“A retirement account comes with statements. A house has an address. Crypto may be sitting in an online exchange or in a hardware wallet that one spouse conveniently forgot to mention,” Bauer said.
Tracing it then becomes part detective work and part digital forensics. Once the digital asset is authenticated, hashing out custody comes next.
“Some spouses want to keep the digital wallet intact, especially if they are the one who managed it during the marriage, while others want a clean monetary split,” Bauer said.
Courts are still figuring out the best way to handle this.
“There is also the security piece. If one spouse hands over private keys, they are effectively turning over total control. If they refuse, the court has to decide how to enforce access,” Bauer said.
She recounts seeing one lawyer who didn’t know much about crypto try to give the other spouse credit for the value of the bitcoin in another asset, not recognizing it’s not so simple, nor fair.
“Many divorce lawyers are slow to catch up and don’t even ask for disclosure. In my state of Connecticut, there isn’t a spot for crypto specifically on the financial affidavits. And for some, that could mean missing a valuable asset if they aren’t looking for it,” Bauer said.
Crypto hunters, PIs of digital asset divorce era
One of the few companies that can help locate a missing asset is BlockSquared Forensics. Ryan Settles, founder and CEO of the Texas-based company, says that the need for his services has increased exponentially since he founded his company in 2023. BlockSquared is dedicated exclusively to the crypto aspects of family law and divorce.
If a spouse (generally women, Settles says) suspects their partner is hiding crypto, their attorney may call in BlockSquared, which does anything from simple asset verification to deep investigations, tracing crypto across continents and into the murky world of wallets and exchanges. Settles’ company will then present the spouse with a “storyboard” that traces and timestamps the movement of cryptocurrencies.
Investigating whether one spouse has crypto is becoming increasingly common, he says, “especially folks involved in high-net-worth divorces and individuals with high net worth.”
Ryan Settles, founder and CEO of the Texas-based company BlockSquared Forensics, which offers services from simple asset verifications to deep investigations, often for women going through divorces who were unaware of spouses’ crypto holdings.
Another aspect Settles looks at is tax liability for the spouse, making sure that gets addressed during the divorce.
“There are a significant number of tax issues that most people, even attorneys, are not even familiar with,” Settles says, adding that the number of taxable events and reporting requirements from even a single transaction can come as a surprise to even the most seasoned litigators.
“Most attorneys don’t understand it, don’t understand the terminology. There is a whole lot of trust without verification going on,” Settles said.
Many of his cases involve wives who were not only unaware of their husband’s crypto dabbling, but when the assets are finally split, can be socked with a massive tax bill from capital gains.
“Unlike a savings account, the value of crypto can swing wildly in a single day,” Bauer said. “Selling crypto to divide proceeds can trigger capital gains. Holding it can trigger new arguments when value changes,” Bauer added.
Relatively relaxed Internal Revenue Service reporting requirements for crypto have not helped, though they are set to get stricter starting with the 2025 tax year.
“There are so many pieces. There are a lot of attorneys doing nod and smile and pretend to understand,” Settles said.
But companies like his are usually brought in only when there is a good suspicion of a spouse hiding significant crypto assets, he said. With a retainer fee of $9,000 and investigations that can cost $50,000, Settles says his services often cost more than an attorney.
Hard questions about crypto property splits
Roman Beck, a professor at Bentley University, where he directs the Crypto Ledger Lab, says that because this is a relatively new area, it’s best to look at it as courts not dividing the digital wallet but instead the assets the wallet controls.
“The law treats crypto much less exotically than people think. The starting point is simple: for tax and most property-law purposes, cryptocurrency is treated as property, not as money,” Beck said.
In divorce, that means bitcoin, ether, stablecoins, and NFTs acquired during the marriage are usually part of the marital estate, just like a brokerage account or a second home, with how that property is split depending on the state.
“Courts don’t split wallets, they split value,” Beck said.
The real legal question is not “Who gets the wallet?” he said, but ‘How do we allocate the economic value the wallet represents, and who is trusted with technical custody afterward?”
This leaves courts and lawyers to do one of three things: split the holdings on-chain, sell and split fiat, or offset with other assets.
“From a technical point of view, a wallet is just a set of private keys, often spread across hardware devices, mobile apps, or even seed phrases on a piece of paper. You cannot safely ‘share’ a hardware wallet or a private key after divorce,” Beck said.
Another wrinkle in a crypto divorce is the volatility of the underlying asset, with price swings in the currency making it more difficult for couples to agree on timing of a split, both as a couple and for the digital assets. In the past two months alone, bitcoin fell from a high over $126,000 to the low $80,000s, a 35% decline, and saw its year-to-date gains wiped out, with plenty of wild daily swings.
If couples are thinking rationally and not emotionally, among the simplest solutions would be splitting the wallet on a chain to create two wallets for each of the divorced partners so they can continue holding their share of cryptos, or drawing up a legal agreement that gives shares of a wallet to each party.
“They would not have to sell immediately,” Beck said.
However, often one party is not familiar with holding a wallet and thus not comfortable with that solution.
Similar to a house jointly owned which a divorcing couple may not want to bring to the market at a bad time, a couple could also agree to turn over crypto holdings to trusted third party to act as agent on behalf of both and to sell the crypto once the market has improved — once a certain agreed upon minimum value has been reached.
But Beck added that while from an economic and technical point of view there is no barrier preventing a divorcing couple from keeping crypto assets using any of these methods to allocate a legal percentage to each partner and delay liquidation until market conditions improved, both parties need to agree, and “most just want to be done,” he said.
Blockchain ledger transparency and the courts
One positive it that despite crypto’s reputation as a haven of anonymity, other aspects of digital assets work well for divorce proceedings.
“Public blockchains like bitcoin and ethereum are transparent ledgers. Every transaction is recorded forever. In other words, on-ledger data analytics turns the blockchain into a very patient financial witness,” Beck said. “That leaves a perfect audit trail if you know how to read the chain. … The real frontier isn’t the law, it’s the forensics,” he added.
Crypto’s adoption by many Americans — surveys in recent years from Gallup and Pew Research estimate that 14% to 17% of U.S. adults have owned cryptocurrency — is forcing family law to become more data-driven.
“The combination of transparent ledgers and powerful analytics gives lawyers and judges better tools to reconstruct financial behavior than they ever had with cash. The policy question going forward is not whether we can trace, but how far courts will go in requiring that level of scrutiny in everyday divorces,” Beck said.
Still, that doesn’t mean people won’t keep trying to hide assets. Settles says that often within 20 minutes he’ll see movement on the ledgers.
“They’ll start scrambling their assets, moving things, hiding things, moving them to tumblers. It’s quite fascinating,” Settles said.
Stocks eked out gains Friday and closed the week higher after the Federal Reserve’s favorite inflation gauge added to the case for an interest rate cut next week. For the week, the S & P 500 rose 0.3%, while the Nasdaq added nearly 1%. Both indexes logged back-to-back weekly gains. The Dow gained roughly 0.5%. On Friday morning, the government’s September personal consumption expenditures price index showed a cooler-than-expected year-over-year increase in the core rate, which excludes food and energy prices. While the PCE report was delayed because of the government shutdown, it was welcome news in a data-starved market ahead of the Fed’s two-day policymaking meeting on Tuesday and Wednesday. .SPX 1M mountain S & P 500’s 1 month performance It has been a couple of weeks since New York Fed President John Williams breathed new life into the possibility of a central bank rate cut. During that time, the S & P 500 rebounded 5% and ended this week just shy of its record-high close of 6,890 on Oct. 28. Here are some of this week’s portfolio highlights. Meta Platforms shares advanced 4% for the week after Bloomberg reported Thursday that the Instagram and Facebook parent was set to cut metaverse spending by up to 30%. It would be a wise move by CEO Mark Zuckerberg, especially if it means the company focuses on technology that can be monetized more quickly, such as Meta’s smart glasses and its AI efforts. Meta has been spending like crazy, and its stock has taken a hit since late October when management increased its capital expenditure guidance alongside strong earnings. Salesforce shares jumped 13% for the week after a big earnings beat. While it was this week’s best-performing portfolio stock, it was still down 22% year to date. That dynamic reflects Salesforce’s struggle to convince investors that generative AI adoption does not pose a threat to the seat-based business model of its core customer relationship management software. Alongside fiscal 2026 third-quarter results, management on Wednesday evening also raised guidance and disclosed more paid deals for Agentforce, the company’s AI platform. On Thursday’s “Mad Money” with Jim Cramer, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff argued AI is a ” commodity feature ” that boosts the value of the company’s CRM software. CrowdStrike on Tuesday evening reported better-than-expected fiscal 2026 third-quarter results and strong forward guidance. Jim called it a “trophy quarter” after the cybersecurity firm delivered record free cash flow, annual recurring revenue, and operating income. We weren’t fazed when the stock, which was pretty flat for the week, didn’t move on the bullish report. It’s become commonplace to see CrowdStrike — and even our other cyber stock, Palo Alto Networks — trade lower after earnings, only to recover and move higher in the weeks ahead. Following the print, we reiterated our buy-equivalent 1 rating on CrowdStrike and raised our price target to $550 from $520. We sent out three trade alerts this week. On Monday , we bought more Boeing as the stock stabilized after a steep post-earnings decline in November. We didn’t buy shares on the way down because the stock was trading like a falling knife. We wanted to see things calm down before putting more money to work. On Tuesday , we bought more Procter & Gamble shares after they dipped following CFO Andre Schulten’s remarks on a volatile U.S. environment. We see better times ahead for P & G, and we’re building this defensive position in case the AI trade losses steam. On Wednesday , we booked some profits on Goldman Sachs , which closed at a record high Friday. We still love this position long-term. (See here for a full list of the stocks in Jim Cramer’s Charitable Trust.) As a subscriber to the CNBC Investing Club with Jim Cramer, you will receive a trade alert before Jim makes a trade. Jim waits 45 minutes after sending a trade alert before buying or selling a stock in his charitable trust’s portfolio. If Jim has talked about a stock on CNBC TV, he waits 72 hours after issuing the trade alert before executing the trade. THE ABOVE INVESTING CLUB INFORMATION IS SUBJECT TO OUR TERMS AND CONDITIONS AND PRIVACY POLICY , TOGETHER WITH OUR DISCLAIMER . NO FIDUCIARY OBLIGATION OR DUTY EXISTS, OR IS CREATED, BY VIRTUE OF YOUR RECEIPT OF ANY INFORMATION PROVIDED IN CONNECTION WITH THE INVESTING CLUB. NO SPECIFIC OUTCOME OR PROFIT IS GUARANTEED.