Theoretically, contestants on ABC’s “The Bachelor” are looking for love. What they often find are business opportunities.

Mari Pepin, 28, got both.

Pepin was a participant on “The Bachelor” season 25, which aired in 2021, and then returned for “Bachelor in Paradise” season 7 later that year. She went home with Kenny Braasch’s final rose — they’ve now been married for more than a year — and an Instagram base of more than 300,000 followers, up from 50,000 before her reality TV appearances.

That’s when the money started to come in.

After “Bachelor in Paradise” aired and her following jumped, influencer opportunities followed. “Instantly, we were getting huge deals,” she said.

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In most cases, companies send Pepin products, which she then tries at her home in Chicago. If she likes an item, she’ll post about it, hitting the company’s suggested talking points and then earning a fee, she said.

Pepin has worked with Loreal, Factor meal delivery, Ruffino wine and Mermaid hair products, among others. On some account promotions, Pepin and Braasch team up. Braasch also has partnerships, including Apothic wine and gambling site BetUS, which connected Pepin with CNBC.

Brands giving products to celebrities and influencers in return for promotions on their social media feeds is a common marketing strategy, according to a new report from Influencer Marketing Hub.

Alternatively, the businesses will sign deals with influencers to promote the product in their posts for a fee or a share of affiliate revenue, similar to a commission for each sale. The posts alone help drive sales, the survey of more than 3,000 marketing agencies, brands and professionals found.

For the companies, it’s an approach that has proved effective when it comes to building a brand, according to the report.

For many reality television stars, influencing has become a popular side hustle with a low barrier to entry.

Depending on the platform and follower count, along with other factors, content creators can make between $2,500 and $5,000 per month, a 2023 NeoReach survey of more than 2,000 full- and part-time creators found.

Although Pepin earned more than $50,000 last year through influencing and has made as much as $12,500 for a single post, according to records reviewed by CNBC, the number of prospects, and payout, can vary greatly.

“That inconsistency is really scary for me,” she said.

“The larger the following, the more they can make bank,” said Casey Lewis, a social media trend expert and founder of trend newsletter After School. “If they really juice the affiliate, they can make a ton of money.”

In some cases, that can be enough for a supplemental income stream, but few earn a living wage. Most full- and part-time creators earn an annual income of $15,000 or less, according to NeoReach’s survey.

Still, 57% of Gen Zers said they would like to become an influencer if given the chance, according to a 2023 report from Morning Consult. The report was based on a poll of more than 2,200 adults and a separate survey of 1,000 Gen Zers ages 13-26 who use various social media platforms.

“A lot of people aspire to be influencers because they want to be self-employed and to be recognized for their taste and to be someone,” Lewis said.

However, “there’s awareness that it’s not that easy,” she added. “Monetizing your life in that way is exhausting.”

These days, having any sort of side hustle can provide a much-needed income boost to help keep up with a higher cost of living.

As of 2024, 36% of U.S. adults have a second job and make an average of $891 per month in extra cash from that role, up from $810 in 2023, according to a June report by Bankrate that polled more than 2,300 U.S. adults. Among Gen Zers and millennials, the share of adults with a side gig jumps to nearly 50%.

Pepin has a full-time day job as a social media marketing manager. “The influencer stuff is just kind of extra. It’s not really reliable,” she said.

For now, though, Pepin is making the most of her reality TV fame as one half of a successful “Bachelor” couple.

“I think you have to strike while the iron is hot,” Pepin said.

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Elon Musk is on a mission to build new supercomputers. As the CEO of Tesla and his new artificial intelligence startup xAI, the tech titan has big plans for how artificial intelligence can help to supercharge his businesses.

In January, he wrote on X that Tesla should be viewed as an AI/robotics company rather than a car company. Tesla’s custom-built supercomputer named Dojo is key to this transformation. Tesla has said it plans to spend $500 million to build the supercomputer in Buffalo, New York. Tesla is also building another supercomputer cluster, called Cortex, at the company’s headquarters in Austin, Texas.

Dojo will process and train AI models using the large amounts of video and data captured by Tesla cars. The goal is to improve Tesla’s suite of driver assistance features, which the company calls Autopilot, and its more robust Full Self-Driving or FSD system. Subscriptions to Tesla’s FSD features cost $99 a month and include automatic lane changes, automatic parking and automatic stopping for traffic lights and stop signs.

“They’ve sold what is it, 5 million plus cars. Each one of those cars typically has eight cameras plus in it. And if you think then that those cars are driving around, let’s just say 10,000 miles a year on average, they’re streaming all of that video back to Tesla,” says Steven Dickens, chief technology advisor at the Futurum Group. “So what can they do with that training set? Obviously they can develop Full Self-Driving and they’re getting close to that.”

Despite their names, neither Autopilot nor FSD make Tesla vehicles autonomous and require active driver supervision, as Tesla states on its website. In the past, the company has garnered scrutiny from regulators who say that Tesla falsely advertised the capabilities of its Autopilot and FSD systems. But reaching full autonomy is critical for Tesla, whose sky-high valuation is largely dependent on bringing robotaxis to market, some analysts say.

The company reported lackluster results in its latest earnings report and has fallen behind other automakers working on autonomous vehicle technology. These include Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already commercially operating fully autonomous taxis in several U.S. cities, GM’s Cruise and Amazon’s Zoox. In China, competitors include Didi and Baidu.

Tesla hopes Dojo, which Musk says has been running tasks for Tesla since 2023, will change that. A Tesla robotaxi event originally scheduled for August is now expected to occur in early October.

Dojo can also be useful for training Tesla’s humanoid robot, Optimus, which the company plans to use in its factories starting next year. Musk has said that Tesla plans to spend $10 billion this year on AI.

Musk is also betting on supercomputers to run his new AI venture xAI. Musk launched xAI in 2023 to develop large language models and AI products, like its chatbot Grok, as an alternative to AI tools created by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google.

Despite being one of its founders, Elon Musk left OpenAI in 2018 and has since become one of the company’s harshest critics. In June, it was announced that xAI would build a supercomputer in Memphis, Tennessee to train Grok. In early September, Musk revealed that a portion of the Memphis supercomputer, called Colossus, was already online.

To learn more about Elon Musk’s supercomputer plans, watch the video.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has asked a federal judge to sanction Elon Musk if he continues to violate the court’s order to appear for a deposition in a probe of his 2022 Twitter acquisition.

The SEC has been investigating whether Musk or anyone else working with him committed securities fraud in 2022 as the Tesla CEO sold shares in his automaker and shored up a stake in Twitter, ahead of his leveraged buyout of the company now known as X.

In May, the court ordered Musk to appear for a deposition by the financial regulators regarding the Twitter deal.

“Musk has now failed to appear before the SEC twice: first in September 2023, in defiance of a lawful administrative subpoena, and last week, in defiance of a clear court order,” SEC attorney Robin Andrews said in the Friday filing.

Andrews asked the judge to consider sanctions should Musk delay further, according to the filing.

“The Court must make clear that Musk’s gamesmanship and delay tactics must cease,” Andrews wrote.

The filing also revealed, in a footnote, that the SEC intends to ask the court to hold Musk in “civil contempt” for canceling a deposition on Sept. 10, giving the agency only a few hours notice that he would not appear. Musk’s cancellation cost the SEC time and money after it sent personnel to Los Angeles to depose him and he didn’t appear for the investigative interview, the agency said.

Musk’s deposition in the probe has been rescheduled for a date in early October at an SEC office, the filing said.

“Without further action by the Court, nothing deters Musk” from “simply failing to show up for that date,” Andrews wrote.

Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, a partner at Quinn Emanuel in New York, wrote in a response that “such drastic action would be inappropriate,” adding that the SEC and Musk had agreed rescheduling would be permissible in light of an emergency.

Additionally, Musk and his companies have “cooperated and are cooperating with the SEC in multiple other ongoing investigations,” Spiro wrote.

In a separate, civil lawsuit concerning the same Twitter deal, the Oklahoma Firefighters Pension and Retirement System has sued Musk in a federal court in New York accusing him of deliberately concealing his progressive investments in Twitter and intent to buy out the company.

The pension fund’s attorneys argue that Musk, by failing to clearly disclose his investments in and intentions to buy Twitter, had influenced other shareholders’ decisions and put them at a disadvantage.

Discovery from that case in New York yielded correspondence between an unnamed person at Morgan Stanley, and the executive who manages Musk’s money, Jared Birchall. In the messages, the Morgan Stanley contact wrote in February 2022 that Musk’s Twitter stock-buying strategy was closely held.

“No one knows what is going on and why but you and me,” the person at Morgan Stanley wrote. “Not compliance, not anyone.”

Read the court filing below:

Apple on Friday greeted customers at its stores around the world for the debuts of the iPhone 16, Apple Watch Series 10 and AirPods 4.

The new products were announced at an event earlier this month and have been available for pre-order since Sept. 13. The company lit up the glass cube at its Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City, in a nod to the enhanced Siri, which will light up the borders of the new iPhone’s screen when that feature rolls out next month.

Apple’s fresh iPhones mark the company’s latest move into artificial intelligence, with new Apple Intelligence features that will begin to launch in October. The new features will allow customers to rewrite text, remove objects from photos and speak with an improved Siri. The software advancements will only be available on iPhone 16 and last year’s iPhone 15 Pro devices.

But Apple shares slid on Monday after analyst reports suggested that demand for the latest iPhones was lower than expected. TF Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo said in a note on Monday that first-weekend sales were down about 12% year over year from the iPhone 15 last year. Barclays, JPMorgan and Bank of America also noted shipping times could translate to lighter demand for the more expensive iPhone Pro models compared with last year.

CNBC’s Steve Kovach spoke with CEO Tim Cook outside Apple’s Fifth Avenue store and asked whether sales looked better or worse than last year. “I don’t know yet. It’s only the first hour, so we’ll see,” Cook said.

On Friday, UBS analysts suggested investors shouldn’t overreact to what appears to be lighter sales because that data is also collected by analyzing the wait times for new iPhone models and that those were longer last year due in part to supply chain disruptions.

“Ahead of the iPhone 16 announcement, our analysis suggested that a lack of a killer app and arguably somewhat half-baked introduction of Apple Intelligence would dampen demand,” the UBS analysts wrote. “While we still argue the collection of iPhone/iOS attributes are more evolutionary than revolutionary, we caution that investors not overreact to data that suggests somewhat initial tepid demand.”

The UBS analysts said supply chain disruptions last year “slightly distorted/extended last year’s data,” which led to longer wait times for customers for Pro models. Last year, UBS wrote, customers had a 41-day wait time for some iPhone 15 Pro Max pre-orders compared with a 26-day wait time for the iPhone 16 Pro Max this year.

“Nevertheless, data across all models and regions roughly a week post launch support our view that a super-cycle is not imminent as US and China data on the margin is disappointing relative to last year,” they wrote.

The Apple Watch Series 10 offers a larger screen than that of earlier models. It will support, along with the earlier Series 9, new Sleep Apnea detection, as well as other fresh features. The AirPods 4 offer a refresh with a smaller charging case and an option with noise cancellation.

CNBC reviewed the new iPhone 16 Pro Max and the Apple Watch Series 10 earlier in the week.

— CNBC’s Michael Bloom and Steve Kovach contributed to this report.

Elon Musk’s X faces steep daily fines in Brazil for allegedly evading a ban on the service there, according to a statement from the country’s supreme court Thursday.

The fines imposed by Brazil’s supreme court amount to $5 million in Brazilian reals, about $920,000, a day. The court said it would continue to impose “joint liability” on Starlink, the satellite internet service owned and operated by SpaceX, Musk’s aerospace venture.

The suspension of X in Brazil was initially ordered by the country’s chief justice, Alexandre de Moraes, at the end of August, with orders upheld by a panel of justices in early September. The court found that under Musk, X had violated Brazilian law, which requires social media companies to employ a legal representative in the country and to remove hate speech and other content deemed harmful to democratic institutions. The court also found that X failed to suspend accounts allegedly engaged in doxxing federal officers.

X recently moved to servers hosted by Cloudflare and appeared to be using dynamic internet protocol addresses that constantly change, enabling many users in Brazil to access the site. In a previous setup, the company had used static and specific IP addresses in Brazil, which were more easily blocked by internet service providers at the order of regulators.

Musk, who owns X, formerly known as Twitter, has been lashing out at de Moraes for months and continued to do so after the order was issued. He’s characterized de Moraes as a villain, comparing him to Darth Vader and Harry Potter character Voldemort. He has also repeatedly called for de Moraes to be impeached.

Brazil previously withdrew money for fines it levied against X from the accounts of X and Starlink at financial institutions in the country. The new fines will begin as of Sept. 19, with the court calculating a total based on “the number of days of non-compliance” with its earlier orders to suspend X nationwide.

While Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, X has acquiesced to requests to remove profiles and posts in countries including India, Turkey and Hungary.

Musk and X may be in the process of complying with Brazil’s takedown orders as well. Correio Braziliense, a Brazilian publication, reported on Wednesday that X has started blocking accounts as per suspension orders issued by the country’s supreme court.

Among the apparently banned accounts were those of some internet influencers who are reportedly being investigated for spreading misinformation and promoting attacks against democratic institutions in Brazil. 

X said it wasn’t intending to restore access for Brazilian users.

“When X was shut down in Brazil, our infrastructure to provide service to Latin America was no longer accessible to our team,” a company spokesperson told CNBC on Wednesday. “To continue providing optimal service to our users, we changed network providers. This change resulted in an inadvertent and temporary service restoration to Brazilian users. While we expect the platform to be inaccessible again in Brazil soon, we continue efforts to work with the Brazilian government to return very soon for the people of Brazil.”

Brazil’s national telecommunication agency, Anatel, has been ordered by de Moraes to prevent access to the platform by blocking Cloudflare as well as Fastly and EdgeUno servers, and others that the court said had been “created to circumvent” a suspension of X in Brazil.

Cloudflare didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment, but the company is reportedly cooperating with authorities in Brazil.

Before the suspension, X had an estimated 22 million users in Brazil, according to Data Reportal.

WATCH: X is a financial ‘disaster’

YouTube on Wednesday announced artificial intelligence features for creators on its Shorts platform that tap into Google‘s DeepMind video-generation model.

The features, known as Veo, will allow creators to add AI-generated backgrounds to their videos as well as use written prompts to generate stand-alone, six-second video clips. YouTube CEO Neal Mohan said he hopes Veo will enable creators to produce more Shorts videos with the help of AI.

“Everything that we showed with AI was meant to really enhance the work that you do, make it faster, more efficient, to bring your creative ideas to life faster,” said Mohan, speaking at the Made on YouTube event in New York.

The Veo AI backgrounds are an upgrade over a similar AI-generation feature announced by YouTube in 2023 called Dream Screen. The company said its Veo AI background feature will roll out later this year, while the six-second AI clips will become available in 2025.

Other announcements at the event included new features in the YouTube Studio app that will allow creators to use AI to generate titles, thumbnails and video ideas. Those features will roll out in late 2024, YouTube said.

Creators have been exploring various ways to leverage generative AI technology. Creators have used the new technology to insert clips in their videos or produce entirely AI-generated videos.

However, some creators expressed concerns that their videos on YouTube are used to train the AI models that built Veo.

“I don’t know how I feel about all this AI stuff,” said Thomas Simons, a comedian with more than 15 million subscribers on YouTube. “It doesn’t fill me with confidence and love.”

There has been criticism that other services such as Facebook have become overrun by spammy, AI-generated content. There are also concerns that AI-generated content could violate intellectual property protections.

YouTube’s AI-generated content will be watermarked and will have a label indicating it was created by AI, the company said.

Generative AI places a new perspective on the creator economy, giving creators free access to tools utilized by large language models.

We “really sit at the nexus of that technology and creativity,” Mohan said. “Putting those two things together gives us this unique lens that everything we build is really about enhancing that human creativity.”