In their annual letter, Patrick and John Collison said businesses running on Stripe generated $1.9trn in total volume in 2025, up 34pc on 2024.

The annual Stripe letter published today – signed by its founders, Irish brothers Patrick and John Collison – which coincides with news that Stripe has hit a $159bn valuation with its latest employee tender offer. This is up from a $106bn valuation a year ago, but the founders still appear not to be heading for a public offering.

Stripe said it had signed agreements with investors “to provide liquidity to current and former Stripe employees through a tender offer at a $159bn valuation”, with the majority of funds for the tender offer are being provided by investors including Thrive Capital, Coatue, A16z and others. Stripe said it will also use a portion of its own capital to repurchase shares.

Stripe remained “robustly profitable”, the Collisons’ letter stated, allowing it to continue investing heavily in product development, with more than 350 product updates last year, as well as acquisitions that included programmable wallet company Privy, stablecoin orchestration platform Bridge and Metronome, which “powers the intricate usage-based billing models used by companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, Confluent and Nvidia”.

While much of the letter covered recent developments in AI – the brothers believe we are still at the relatively early stages of agentic AI in commerce – they also write at length about the stablecoin payment market which they say doubled to $400bn in 2025.

In September, Stripe teamed up with venture capital firm Paradigm to announce their joint venture Tempo, a blockchain built around stablecoins. Tempo is being jointly incubated by the two companies and is led by Matt Huang, Paradigm’s co-founder and managing partner.

“Tempo is purpose-built for stablecoins and real-world payments, born from Stripe’s experience in global payments and Paradigm’s expertise in crypto tech,” Huang said in a blogpost at the time, adding that Tempo will complement existing crypto infrastructure and offer a way for large enterprises to come on chain, increasing the adoption of crypto tools and infrastructure.

“With Tempo, businesses get dedicated payment lanes, sub-second finality, opt-in privacy, and interoperability with compliance and accounting systems,” the Collisons wrote today. “These features may sound prosaic, but they matter a great deal for infrastructure that supports real-world economic activity. Companies like Visa, Nubank, and Shopify are already testing Tempo for a number of use cases, including global payouts, embedded finance and remittances.”

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• OpenClaw can silently execute dangerous actions while holding full access credentials
• Persistent tokens allow subtle manipulations to remain undetected across multiple sessions
• Running OpenClaw on standard workstations exposes critical data to invisible risks

Microsoft’s security researchers have warned OpenClaw should not run on ordinary personal or enterprise workstations.

A new Microsoft Security blog post outlines how the risk is tied to how the runtime operates — which blends untrusted instructions with executable code while using valid credentials.

While there are a ton of different gaming headsets to choose from, with their own strengths and weaknesses, one has stood out among the crowded field. My favorite gaming headset for most people, the SteelSeries Arctis Nova 3, is currently marked down as low as $90 at Amazon, a $20 break from the full price.

My favorite thing about the Arctis Nova 3 is their fit, which I think are the most comfortable of any gaming headset I’ve tested so far. They’re super lightweight, which makes them great for long gaming sessions and larger heads like mine, and the earcups are a light, squishy mesh that’s breathable without sacrificing too much in sound isolation. Despite the super lightweight build, the battery life doesn’t disappoint, with these cans lasting around 30 hours on a single charge.

They sound excellent for both gaming and mixed media usage, largely thanks to the SteelSeries app, which has a huge library of game-specific equalizer presets ready to go for any situation. That more than makes up for the lack of Dolby Atmos, and the spatial audio implementation is still great even without the official stamp of approval from Dolby. On the input side, the microphone does a surprisingly good job of filtering out unwanted noise, like a surprise sneeze or my dog barking at the mail carrier. I wouldn’t use it for any professional recording sessions, but it sounds clearer than most other gaming headsets at the price.

While the Arctis Nova 3 have great compatibility with all of your modern major gaming consoles, including PC and Switch 2, there are two different versions to choose from, so you’ll want to make sure you grab the right one for you. The Nova 3X supports all systems, including Xbox and PlayStation consoles, while the 3P lacks Xbox support. Unless you’ve committed to never buying Sony for some reason, I’d recommend going for the 3X, which are currently marked down to $90 in white. If you’re a dedicated PlayStation gamer, or want a splash of color, the Aqua Nova 3P are also available for a slightly higher $97 in Aqua or $100 in Lavender.

Lamborghini is done with the Lanzador. The all-electric supercar the Italian automaker showed off back in 2023 — the one that was supposed to drag the brand, kicking and screaming, into the EV era — was quietly axed late last year (via The Times).

CEO Stephan Winkelmann confirmed it this week, and frankly, he didn’t sound too broken up about it. The reason? Winkelmann put it bluntly: EV development was becoming “an expensive hobby.”

EV dream runs out of charge

And when your hobby involves billion-dollar research and development budgets, along with a customer base that basically doesn’t want the thing you’re spending the money on, it’s time to put down the soldering iron.

Instead of going all-electric, Lamborghini will pivot to plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) across its entire lineup by 2030. The Lanzador itself will reportedly be reborn as a PHEV — which, to be fair, might actually be a better fit for a brand whose identity is wrapped up in the sound and fury of a roaring V10 or V12.

EVs, Winkelmann admitted, “struggle to deliver this specific emotional connection.” Translation: a silent Lamborghini is basically just an expensive golf cart.

Industry-wide reality check

The numbers back him up. The “acceptance curve” for battery-powered cars among Lamborghini’s wealthy clientele is, in his words, “close to zero.” Meanwhile, the company just had its best year ever — delivering a record 10,747 cars in 2025, with its PHEV lineup of the Urus, Temerario, and Revuelto doing all the heavy lifting.

Lamborghini isn’t alone in this rethink.

Stellantis just ate a $26 billion charge to ditch some EV models, and Ford wrote down nearly $20 billion on its EV plans. The electric gold rush, at least in the luxury supercar space, appears to be on pause.

Never say never on a Lamborghini EV, though — Winkelmann himself used that exact phrase. But for now, if you’re hoping to buy a silent raging bull, you’ll have to wait.

from the triggered-much? dept

For the better part of a decade, conservative politicians—and Texas politicians in particular—have been absolutely apoplectic about the state of free speech on college campuses. You’ve heard the greatest hits: students are coddled snowflakes who can’t handle the real world, trigger warnings are destroying intellectual rigor, safe spaces are turning universities into daycare centers, and the real threat to America is that professors might have opinions that lean left.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott was so concerned about this supposed crisis that he signed a campus free speech bill in 2019. The whole thing was framed as a brave stand for open inquiry and the marketplace of ideas. As state Senator Joan Huffman said at the time:

“Our college students, our future leaders, they should be exposed to all ideas, I don’t care how liberal they are or how conservative they are.”

What a beautiful sentiment. Truly inspiring stuff.

So naturally, the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents just voted unanimously to ensure students can graduate without being exposed to ideas that might make someone uncomfortable.

The University of Texas System’s Board of Regents unanimously approved Thursday a rule requiring its universities to ensure students can graduate without studying “unnecessary controversial subjects,” despite warnings it could leave them less prepared for the real world.

The rule also requires faculty to disclose in their syllabi the topics they plan to cover and adhere to the plan, and says that when courses include controversial issues, instructors must ensure a “broad and balanced approach” to the discussion.

If you had described this policy to any Texas Republican in 2018 and told them a bunch of liberal professors had come up with it, they would have been on Fox News within the hour screaming about the death of Western civilization. The words “trigger warnings,” “safe spaces,” and “cancel culture” would have been deployed at machine-gun pace all surrounded with high-minded claims about “free speech” and “academic freedom.”

But when it’s governor-appointed regents doing it? When the people being “protected” from uncomfortable ideas are conservative students and donors rather than marginalized communities? Well, then it’s just good governance.

The truly revealing moment came from Board Chair Kevin Eltife, who was asked about the fact that the policy doesn’t bother to define what “controversial” means or what a “broad and balanced approach” actually looks like. His response should be printed on a plaque and hung in the Museum of Political Cowardice:

“We are in difficult times,” he said. “Vagueness can be our friend.”

Ah yes. Vagueness. The chairman of a board governing one of the nation’s largest public university systems—more than 260,000 students across nine campuses—is openly admitting that the entire point of the policy is that nobody knows what it means. He’s saying the quiet part loud: the vagueness is a feature, not a bug.

And of course it is. Because when you leave “controversial” undefined, you don’t need to go through the messy business of actually banning specific topics, which might allow everyone to call you out on your hypocrisy and highlight the subjects you hope to censor.

You just create a system where every professor has to wonder, before every lecture, whether today’s lesson is the one that gets them hauled before an administrator. The chilling effect does all the work for you.

As UT-Austin physics professor Peter Onyisi pointed out during public testimony:

“Will they (administrators) be experts in the relevant disciplines or will they just seek to avoid unpleasant publicity?”

We all know the answer to that question. When a policy gives administrators the power to decide what counts as “unnecessarily controversial” without any definition whatsoever, administrators are going to do what administrators always do: minimize risk. That means the most easily-offended person in the room—or more precisely, the most politically connected complainant—effectively gets a veto over what gets taught. It’s a heckler’s veto laundered through bureaucratic process.

There are legitimate debates about how universities should approach controversial material in the classroom. But any time anyone has brought any of those up for serious debate over the last few decades, they were mocked as “woke snowflakes” who need their “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”

This is the exact dynamic that conservatives spent years claiming to oppose. The whole argument against “political correctness” and “cancel culture” was supposedly that small groups of oversensitive people shouldn’t be able to dictate what ideas are permissible in public discourse. The argument against trigger warnings was that adults should be able to encounter difficult material without having their hands held. The argument against safe spaces was that the university should be a place of intellectual challenge, not comfort.

Now Texas has built a taxpayer-funded safe space spanning nine campuses and four medical centers, complete with government-mandated trigger warnings (the syllabus disclosure requirement) and an institutionalized process for anyone who finds course material too upsetting to lodge a complaint. How very snowflake of Texas. The only difference here is who gets to be upset.

And then there’s the “broad and balanced approach” requirement, which sounds perfectly reasonable until you think about it for more than three seconds. What does “balance” look like when you’re teaching about the Holocaust? About slavery? The “germ theory” of disease? If a history professor is covering Jim Crow, are they now required to present the segregationist perspective with equal weight in the name of “balance”?

That sounds absurd, and it is. When you refuse to define “controversial” and then mandate “balance” for anything that falls under that undefined umbrella, you’ve created a system where any topic with a political dimension—which is basically every topic in the humanities, social sciences, and increasingly the natural sciences—becomes a minefield.

Allen Liu, policy counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said it could lead to “viewpoint discrimination” and disproportionately affect Black students and faculty by discouraging teaching about slavery, segregation and other subjects central to Black history.

To which, I would imagine, many of the UT Board of Regents would quietly admit among friends “well, yeah, that’s the fucking point.”

It’s also worth noting the broader context in which this is happening:

The vote comes a week after UT-Austin announced it will consolidate its African and African Diaspora Studies, Mexican American and Latino Studies, American Studies, and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies departments into a new Social and Cultural Analysis department. More than 800 students are pursuing majors, minors and graduate degrees in the affected programs.

Ah yes. Basically anything that is not white European heterosexual male focused, all gets shoved into one “those other people over there” department.

Meanwhile, the school is absolutely expanding programs that align with a very particular set of priorities. See if you can figure out which ones:

Last year, UT-Austin was also one of nine universities offered preferential access to federal funding in exchange for agreeing to ensure departments reflect a mix of perspectives and promote civic values and Western civilization, among other requirements.

Some students argue that even without formally signing the agreement, UT-Austin is already moving in that direction. Alfonso Ayala III, a doctoral student in Mexican American and Latina/o Studies at UT-Austin, pointed to the university expanding the conservative-backed School of Civic Leadership as his department loses autonomy.

“It’s hard to understand this as anything other than ideological and political,” Ayala said.

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No shit.

And this is just the latest chapter in what has become a remarkable saga of Texas Republicans dismantling the very speech protections they once championed. As we wrote about last year, that 2019 campus free speech law—the one that was supposed to ensure all viewpoints could be heard—suddenly became a problem when pro-Palestinian protesters started using it.

Texas Republicans couldn’t have that.

The original 2019 law was passed specifically because Texas A&M had canceled a white nationalist rally and Texas Southern University had scrapped a conservative speaker’s appearance. The legislature was furious. Free speech must be protected!

But when the same protections enabled pro-Palestinian encampments, suddenly the legislature couldn’t pass restrictions fast enough. New rules on where you can protest, bans on amplification devices during class hours, prohibitions on overnight encampments, restrictions on wearing masks. All the things that were never a problem in the five years between the law’s passage and the moment students started saying things Texas Republicans didn’t want to hear.

So let’s trace the arc here. In 2019, the Texas legislature mandated that universities must allow protests and controversial speakers because free speech is sacred. In 2025, the Texas legislature rolled that back because the wrong people were speaking. And now in 2026, the UT Board of Regents is mandating that professors can’t even teach “unnecessarily controversial” material in their own classrooms—a phrase so deliberately vague that the board chair openly celebrates its ambiguity.

Senator Huffman, who authored the 2019 free speech law and proclaimed that students “should be exposed to all ideas,” voted in favor of restricting protest rights last year and appears to have raised no objection to the new UT policy. Let’s go out on a limb here and say it: the 2019 law was never about ensuring exposure to all ideas. It was about ensuring that a specific set of speakers (white nationalists) saying a specific set of things (racist shit) would have access to university campuses. Once the same mechanism started working for the “wrong” people, it became disposable.

The UT regents will tell you this policy is about “balance.” That it’s about making sure professors stick to their areas of expertise and don’t wander off into political editorializing. But if that were the actual concern, you’d write a clear, specific policy. You’d define your terms. You’d create transparent standards that professors could understand and follow. You would absolutely not describe your own vagueness as a strategic asset.

“Vagueness can be our friend” is what you say when the goal is discretionary power—the ability to punish the speech you don’t like while leaving the speech you do like untouched.

For all the years of rhetoric about snowflakes and safe spaces and the coddled minds of American youth, the actual policy goal was never intellectual rigor. It was control. Control over which ideas get aired, which histories get taught, which perspectives get treated as legitimate, and which get quietly filed under “unnecessarily controversial” and removed from the curriculum.

The people who spent a decade mocking trigger warnings just voted unanimously to impose the biggest trigger warning in the history of American higher education: Warning: This university has been certified free of unnecessary controversy by the State of Texas.

I guess everything really is bigger in Texas. Including the censorship.

Filed Under: academic freedom, cancel culture, controversial topics, free speech, greg abbott, joan hoffman, kevin eltife, safe spaces, texas, vagueness

Companies: university of texas