MrBeast buys Step to teach teens how to save, spend, and invest
Step offers a Visa card and basic banking without monthly fees
The acquisition gives Beast Industries a fintech team and seven million users
Beast Industries has confirmed the acquisition of Step, a youth-focused financial planning app, adding a regulated money product to its expanding list of business ventures.
Beast Industries, controlled by Jimmy Donaldson, popularly known as MrBeast, the world’s largest YouTuber by subscriber count, appears to be extending its activities beyond entertainment and media into financial services.
The deal follows a year of fundraising by Beast Industries, including a $200 million investment from Bitmine Immersion Technologies, a company closely tied to cryptocurrency markets through its Ether holdings.
What Step actually does
Step was founded in 2018 by fintech veterans CJ MacDonald and Alexey Kalinichenko, with an emphasis on financial literacy for younger users.
The platform is not a licensed bank, instead relying on a partnership with Evolve Bank & Trust for regulated banking services established in 2022.
Step offers a Visa card alongside tools for saving, spending, sending money, and basic investing, without monthly fees.
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Backing from Stripe and major venture capital firms gives the app credibility within fintech circles, independent of its new ownership.
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Beast Industries says Step has more than seven million users and an internal fintech team that aligns with its digital reach and charitable ambitions.
The company already runs Feastables, Beast Philanthropy, and Beast Games, all tied closely to Donaldson’s enormous online presence, with over 450 million subscribers and billions of monthly views as of early 2026.
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From a distribution standpoint, exposure to a young audience is not a problem. The logic suggests that financial tools could scale quickly through that existing reach.
In a statement on Monday to millions of his fans, Mr. Beast explained the reasons behind his acquisition and his goal of helping young people build financial skills.
“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up. That’s exactly why we’re joining forces with Step,” MrBeast said.
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“I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had. Lots to share soon.”
Although this statement gives some explanation, it does not fully answer why a global entertainment brand should mediate financial behavior for millions of young users.
Step is marketed as a way to build credit and money habits early, which sounds straightforward but carries regulatory, ethical, and trust implications.
“This acquisition positions us to meet our audiences where they are, with practical, technology-driven solutions that can transform their financial futures for the better,” Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, said in a statement.
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The app will operate under Beast Industries, effectively tying personal finance to a creator-led brand.
As of the time of writing, there is no information about how much was paid for the app, and no timeline was provided for operational changes following the acquisition.
Nvidia is preparing to launch an open-source AI agent platform called NemoClaw, designed to compete with the likes of OpenClaw. According to Wired, the platform will allow enterprise software companies to dispatch AI agents to perform tasks for their own workforces. “Companies will be able to access the platform regardless of whether their products run on Nvidia’s chips,” the report adds. From the report: The move comes as Nvidia prepares for its annual developer conference in San Jose next week. Ahead of the conference, Nvidia has reached out to companies including Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike to forge partnerships for the agent platform. It’s unclear whether these conversations have resulted in official partnerships. Since the platform is open source, it’s likely that partners would get free, early access in exchange for contributing to the project, sources say. Nvidia plans to offer security and privacy tools as part of this new open-source agent platform. […]
For Nvidia, NemoClaw appears to be part of an effort to court enterprise software companies by offering additional layers of security for AI agents. It’s also another step in the company’s embrace of open-source AI models, part of a broader strategy to maintain its dominance in AI infrastructure at a time when leading AI labs are building their own custom chips. Nvidia’s software strategy until now has been heavily reliant on its CUDA platform, a famously proprietary system that locks developers into building software for Nvidia’s GPUs and has created a crucial “moat” for the company.
Amazon has been aggressively pushing its engineers to adopt AI tools. At least 80% of its developers are expected to use AI for coding tasks at least once a week. However, recent events suggest that this fast-tracked rollout may have come at a cost.
As reported by the Financial Times, Amazon Web Services suffered a 13-hour outage in December after engineers let its Kiro AI coding tool update code without requiring any oversight. Kiro decided the best solution was to “delete and recreate the environment.” That’s one way to fix a problem, I suppose.
Kiro
That wasn’t a one-off. A follow-up FT report revealed that Amazon’s e-commerce business has been dealing with a “trend of incidents” since Q3 2025, prompting a company-wide deep dive meeting led by SVP Dave Treadwell.
Some employees were already skeptical about how useful these AI tools actually are for day-to-day work, and these incidents haven’t exactly helped build confidence.
Just how bad did it get?
Business Insider obtained internal documents that paint a clearer picture of what actually happened. On March 2, 2026, Amazon’s AI coding tools contributed to an incident that caused 120,000 lost orders and 1.6 million website errors.
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Three days later, on March 5, 2026, a separate outage caused a 99% drop in orders across North American marketplaces, resulting in 6.3 million lost orders. That’s a number that will surely show on the bottom line of a financial sheet, even for a company as big as Amazon.
What is Amazon doing to ensure it never happens again?
Amazon is now rolling out a 90-day safety reset targeting around 335 critical systems. Engineers must get two people to review changes before deployment, use a formal documentation and approval process, and follow stricter automated checks.
The company maintains that these were user errors, not AI errors, and that the same mistakes could happen with any developer tool. That’s a fair point, but it doesn’t change the outcome.
When artificial intelligence tools are handed broad permissions without adequate oversight, things break, and the scale of AI-generated code only amplifies the damage.
TikTok has teamed up with Apple Music to introduce a new feature called Play Full Song. It allows you to stream entire tracks directly from TikTok, but you will need an Apple Music subscription to access this feature.
Once connected, you can move from short clips to full songs without leaving the app. The feature builds on how people already discover music on TikTok. Millions of users hear a track in a video and then jump to a streaming service to play the full version.
With this update, whenever you come across a song you like on the For You feed or the Sound Detail page, you can tap the Play Full Song button. TikTok will launch an Apple Music player where you can listen to the entire track.
New music features are coming to TikTok
TikTok
The new integration uses Apple’s MusicKit technology, which allows Apple Music to power playback inside the TikTok experience. This means streams count toward Apple Music listening data, and artists are compensated the same way they would be on the streaming service.
Once you start playing a track, you are not limited to that single song. TikTok can also surface a personalized stream of recommended songs through Apple Music. If you like what you hear, you can save the track to your Apple Music library or add it to one of your playlists directly from TikTok.
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TikTok
TikTok and Apple Music are also introducing a feature called Listening Party. It allows multiple users to listen to music simultaneously and interact with each other and even the artist while the track plays.
How TikTok is evolving from music discovery to music streaming
TikTok has already been expanding how music travels across platforms. The music streaming platform is trying to make song discovery more social instead of a solo listening experience.
The new Play Full Song feature and Listening Party are rolling out globally over the coming weeks. If you already use Apple Music, your TikTok feed can soon double as a place to discover songs and music streaming without leaving the app.
Meta has that it’s introducing parent-managed accounts on WhatsApp. Designed to allow young people under the age of 13 to use the messaging platform more safely, these accounts feature new controls that enable a parent or guardian to restrict who can send them messages. Parent-managed accounts can also only be used for messaging and calling, so additional features like Channels, location sharing and Meta AI integration aren’t included.
To set up an account, you’ll need to put your phone next to the pre-teen’s device to link the two accounts. Once that’s done, the person managing the kids’ account can decide who’s able to contact them and which groups they’re able to join. Step-by-step instructions on how to activate the new accounts can be found
They’ll also see message requests from unknown contacts first and can adjust privacy settings from the managed device. Parent-managed accounts are PIN-protected and only the parent or guardian can make changes to privacy settings.
Like all WhatsApp conversations, end-to-end encryption means nobody else can see messages exchanged on parent-managed accounts. By default, only saved contacts can message a managed account, and a child won’t be able to join a group or view group invites from strangers before they’re separately approved by the owner of the parent account. These requests will appear as notifications to the parent.
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WhatsApp doesn’t specify a minimum age suitable for a parent-messaged account, but says it’ll roll the new features out gradually in the coming months.
Meta has spent the last few years ramping up its parental controls features across its various platforms. In September it introduced — aimed at teens between the age of 13 and 15 — for Facebook and Messenger. A year earlier, Under-16 became a requirement on Instagram. Like the new parent-managed accounts on WhatsApp, these allow parents to vet requests and enable stricter privacy settings.
At the start of 2026, Meta put a temporary on allowing teens to interact with its AI chatbot characters, following that some of these bots had engaged in sexual conversations and other concerning interactions with minors.
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UPERFECT UFree V: 30-second review
This isn’t the best monitor in the world, but it’s one that should work with almost anything that outputs a display, and it’s easy to carry.
The UPerfect UFree V is a bold attempt to solve one of the most persistent frustrations in portable computing. Specifically, the tangle of cables that tends to follow you everywhere. Positioned as a 15.6-inch wireless portable monitor with a 1080P Full HD display, it comes bundled with a Bluetooth keyboard, all the necessary cables and a power supply.
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It’s pitched squarely at remote workers, frequent travellers, and anyone who wants an ad hoc second screen without the faff of setting one up.
The headline feature is UPerfect’s proprietary UFree wireless technology. Rather than relying on Bluetooth pairing or a Wi-Fi connection, the system uses a USB-C transmitter to cast your screen wirelessly, with no drivers, no pairing process, and no waiting around. It is a plug-and-play approach that, on paper at least, removes the usual friction of getting a portable monitor up and running. The wireless signal can operate at up to 13 metres, which should comfortably cover most office and café scenarios.
According to the company, this IPS panel delivers a 1920×1080 resolution, a 178-degree viewing angle, 350 nits of brightness, a 1500:1 contrast ratio, and covers 125% of the sRGB colour gamut. Although my testing suggests some of those numbers are wildly optimistic.
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Low blue light technology is also built in, aimed at reducing eye strain during longer sessions.
Portability is central to this proposition. The monitor weighs just 0.79kg and measures a mere 5.5mm thick, making it genuinely slim enough to slip into a bag alongside a laptop. Crucially, an 8,000mAh built-in battery provides around four hours of use on a single charge, meaning you are not dependent on finding a power socket.
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Connectivity extends beyond wireless, with full-featured USB-C, mini HDMI, and a 3.5mm audio output, making it compatible with laptops, smartphones, and game consoles. Whether the wireless technology lives up to its promises in real-world conditions is what this review sets out to find out.
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If only for its low-price, this is an obvious candidate for one of the best portable monitors.
UPERFECT UFree V: Price and availability
(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)
How much does it cost? $190/£142/€164
When is it out? It available now
Where can you get it? Direct from UPerfect or via online retailers like Amazon
Direct from the maker, the UFree V is $189.99, £141.53 or €163.55, depending on where in the world you are. However, there is currently a spring sale that can reduce the cost by another 12% off, reducing the UK cost to only £124.55. There are also deals for corporate and bulk purchases, so this hardware can be extremely cheap.
For US customers, it can be found on Amazon for only $159.99, although that version doesn’t include the Bluetooth keyboard. It’s also on European Amazon sites, and from amazon.co.uk, it can be found with a voucher for £129.99.
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If you didn’t guess already, this product is also sold under a wider range of brand names, and I can’t say with any certainty that UPerfect is the primary source. However, most other brands selling displays with almost identical specifications are asking slightly more.
This is a slice of the market that the branded monitor makers are staying well clear of, since the margins for a display like this must be paper-thin.
UPERFECT UFree V: Specs
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Specification
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Value
Model
Ufree V
Screen Size
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15.6 inches
Resolution
1920 × 1080 (Full HD)
Panel Type
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IPS
Quoted Brightness
350 cd/m²
Quoted Contrast Ratio
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1500:1
Quoted Colour Gamut
125% sRGB
Colour Depth
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16.7M (8-bit)
Viewing Angle
178°
Refresh Rate
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60Hz
Response Time
30ms
Screen Type
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Matte
Pixel Density
141 PPI
Wireless Technology
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UFree (proprietary, no Bluetooth/Wi-Fi required)
Wireless Range
Up to 13m (45ft)
USB-C (A/V Input)
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1× Full-featured
USB-C (Power Input)
1×
HDMI
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1× Mini HDMI (Audio & Video Input)
Audio Output
3.5mm AUX
Battery Capacity
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8,000mAh (built-in)
Charge Time
2 hours
Battery Life
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Up to 4 hours
Rated Power
8W
Built-in Speakers
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2× 8Ω 1W
Dimensions
356 × 226 × 5.5mm
Weight
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0.79kg (1.73 lbs)
Material
ABS
VESA Mount
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75 × 75mm (M4)
Touch Screen
No
HDR
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No
FreeSync
No
Driver Required
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None (plug-and-play)
Included Accessories
Bluetooth keyboard, 2× USB-C cables, 1× Mini HDMI cable, power adapter, carry bag, manual
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UPERFECT UFree V: Design
(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)
Lightweight
Poor port placement
Versatility
What anyone travelling is most interested in is the weight of devices like the UFree V, since carrying it around will ultimately decide whether it’s used.
Thankfully, and somewhat amazingly, even with all the cables and PSU, this device is only a little over 2kg. And if you decide not to bring all the accessories, things become even lighter.
The form factor is basic, with a 15.6-inch 1080p panel that rests in landscape mode on two rubber feet with a folder-out foot determining the viewing angle.
It is possible to use it in portrait mode, although that causes some issues with the cabling due to the placement of the ports and controls.
What I really didn’t care for was that the support covers up the three ports and the controls when it is folded flat, and that could be even more of a problem if you VESA mount the screen, since the foot won’t be able to sit flat. Having the support potentially guillotining the USB-C and HDMI cables when the support is pressed down seems a less-than-ideal scenario.
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On the left are two USB-C ports and one HDMI mini, and a cable is provided to enable a full-size HDMI to be connected to the latter. The USB-C ports are multifunctional: you can use USB-C as a display connection from two sources, and they can also power the panel and charge its internal battery. If you use HDMI as the display connection, the screen must use either battery power or the provided USB-C PSU.
(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)
For most screens, that would be plenty of inputs, but the Ufree V also supports a wide range of wireless connectivity, such as MiraCast, so it’s entirely possible to arrive only with the screen (battery charged) and use it without any cables whatsoever.
That makes this a truly flexible solution, since you can connect a phone or a laptop, and with the provided Bluetooth keyboard, you could even use something like a Raspberry Pi on this display.
From a design perspective, it would have been better if the inputs and the OSD controls had not been covered by the stand. And, I should also make note that placing the inputs on the left was a poor choice over putting them on the right. That’s because the majority of laptops put their USB-C and HDMI on the left also, forcing the user to put the Ufree V on the right of their laptop.
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I realised that UPerfect identified their mistake when I noticed that one of the accessories they offer beyond what’s in the box was a USB-C female to male adapter in a U-shape. This adapter allows the connecting USB-C cable to come from the right side of the screen instead of the left.
Despite the port placement issue, this is a highly flexible design that provides an additional screen, and by using the built-in battery, it also doesn’t drain power from the host system.
(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)
UPERFECT UFree V: Performance
Better than 300 nits
80% sRGB
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Colour Gamut
Percentage
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sRGB
80%
AdobeRGB
62%
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P3
62%
NTSC
59%
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Rec2020
44%
Gamma
2.1
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Brightness/Contrast
Maximum Brightness
347.6
Maximum Contrast
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1250:1
Given the price of this screen, I wasn’t expecting anything special about the quality of this IPS panel, and it delivered almost exactly what I predicted.
The results were also oddly familiar, as they were almost identical to the KYY X90E I reviewed, as I presume they both use the same underlying panel.
In terms of colour representation, this isn’t great, managing only 80% of the sRGB gamut, but on the upside, brightness and contrast are decent.
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I should also say that testing this panel with the Datacolor Spyder X2 Ultra proved more difficult than usual, as the panel only steps its brightness in ten levels. Since the brightness testing asks for 25% and 75%, that part of the testing was slightly fudged.
Also, operating the OSD menu with four buttons you can’t see is a royal pain, and you really need to develop an app or add a joystick control to this device. The menu is something most users will likely use only once because it’s so annoying to navigate.
The weaknesses of this hardware are a mediocre tone response and poor white point. And with all these lightweight panels, luminance uniformity is a major low point. The brightest part of the screen is the middle, and each corner is at least 10% darker; in one instance, 20%.
For those not in direct sunlight, it’s good enough to work with, but it’s hardly a cutting-edge display.
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How high you set the brightness is the critical factor in how long the 8000mAh battery onboard lasts, with UPerfect quoting up to four hours of use. I set the brightness to 10 (100%), connected a phone via Miracast, set a 30-minute timer, and left the battery at 98%.
Amazingly, after 30 minutes of running a YouTube video from the phone, it had used only 11% of the capacity. That would infer more than four hours running with the brightness at max, which is an excellent result.
(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)
UPERFECT UFree V: Final verdict
There is an odd contradiction about this hardware where relatively few aspects are in the middle, and most are either wonderful or dire.
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In the plus corner is undoubtedly the low asking price, the input flexibility, being able to run from an internal battery and the great portability. Opposing that is a kick-stand that wants to cut off the cable and obscure the controls, a panel where the backlight isn’t evenly distributed, and port placement that didn’t take into account current laptop designs.
Yet despite how many points are on the wrong end of this scale, there is something wonderfully freeing about a device this flexible and so cheap.
I wouldn’t normally suggest that a hardware maker raise their prices, but perhaps what would be acceptable is for UPerfect to revamp this design with maybe a better panel, a bigger battery, and a kickstand that doesn’t obscure ports and inputs. Because if they did that, then they could ask for more money and still get a significant number of sales.
The Ufree V isn’t perfect by a long way, but for those on the move, it could be the flexible second display they need and can afford.
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(Image credit: Mark Pickavance)
UPERFECT UFree V Portable Monitor: Report card
Swipe to scroll horizontally
Value
Cheap from online retailers
5 / 5
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Design
Placement of ports and kick stand is an issue
3.5 / 5
Performance
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Other than brightness uniformity, these are decent monitors
4 / 5
Total
Excellent value for money and a highly flexible solution
Looking Glass has revealed Musubi, a really device that allows you to project holographic photos and videos directly into your living room without the need for a headset or special glasses. At first glance, the 7-inch frame appears to be a standard picture frame, with the same clean glass border and white matte finish that you would use to show a photo of your grandchildren. Users can simply add their own personal photos or short video clips and watch as they are turned into 3D scenes that appear to float right in the room and follow you as you move about.
The Musubi uses Hololuminescent Display technology, which essentially uses light to produce several view points at the same time, which sounds quite ingenious. This implies that you may combine up to 100 separate viewpoints to create a single image with a lot of convincing depth, allowing several people to see it from different angles all at once. The viewing angle is also rather wide, about 170 degrees, so even if you stand to the side, you won’t lose the illusion.
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The 3D effect is achieved using free software on your PC or Mac; nothing fancy, just a local AI that determines what is the main part of the photo or video, separates it from the backdrop, and places it in a 3D environment. It’s all done on your own machine, so no data is sent to any servers, simply copy the files over to the frame with a USB-C cord.
Musubi can store approximately 1000 images or 30 seconds of video clips, and the battery life lasts about 3 hours if not plugged in, but let’s be honest, most people will leave it plugged in all day. They’ve also kept things simple by not including a Wi-Fi connection, an app, or a camera, opting for a clean look.
Musubi starts at $149, and they’re presently offering it for $99 during the first 24 hours of a Kickstarter campaign that launched today. Shipping is scheduled to begin in June 2026, but they intend to proceed with production regardless of the outcome of the campaign, since they have a track record with previous goods.
Editor’s note: GeekWire publishes guest opinions to foster informed discussion and highlight a diversity of perspectives on issues shaping the tech and startup community. If you’re interested in submitting a guest column, email us at tips@geekwire.com. Submissions are reviewed by our editorial team for relevance and editorial standards.
Jesse Proudman.
As a kid growing up in Tacoma, I remember visiting Seattle to interview executives at Go2Net and leaving in awe of what was possible. That moment distinctly shaped my career, one I’ve spent as a founder building multiple companies in Washington state. I stayed because this region had something special: a culture of innovation, a willingness to take risks, and a tax climate that fostered the high risk, high reward reality of startup life.
Watching what’s happening in Olympia, I’m saddened by the storm brewing on the horizon. I see an unconstitutional tax being passed to plug a hole created by a spending problem that in turn will cause an exodus of talent and capital, widen the deficit, and result in the application of this income tax to every Washingtonian. And all of this is happening just as AI transforms the knowledge economy in a way almost no one yet understands.
Washington legislators have a spending addiction, and Olympia’s solution is to reach deeper into the pockets of its citizens. The proposed SB 6346, the “millionaires tax,” would impose a 9.9% income tax on high earners, not through a constitutional amendment approved by voters, but through legislative sleight-of-hand. Proponents promise revenue to close a projected $4.3 billion deficit in the state’s budget. But the numbers don’t work, the constitutional bypass is dangerous, and the consequences for Washington’s economic future have been wildly underestimated.
The state’s spending problem is undeniable and untenable. The budget has more than tripled in the last decade: from $33.6 billion in 2013-2015 biennium to a projected $173 billion for ‘25-27 biennium. Even adjusted for inflation and population growth, real per-capita spending is up over 50%. The state faces a $1.5 billion deficit this biennium and a projected $4.3 billion hole in the next.
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Now, in the 11th hour of this legislative session, SB 6346 is introduced: an income tax that attempts to bypass 90 years of constitutional precedent. Washington’s constitution treats income as property, capped at a 1% tax, and changing that requires two-thirds legislative support plus voter approval. That’s a high bar and intentionally so. SB 6346 side steps this entirely, passing the tax as ordinary legislation and relying on five justices to overturn nine decades of precedent. If Washington wants a progressive income tax, there’s a legitimate path: amend the constitution. Punting to the courts isn’t leadership, it’s a gamble with the state’s economic future.
But more importantly, this tax won’t just apply to millionaires — that’s simply the wedge being used to get it approved. Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen, the bill’s sponsor, has acknowledged that once the infrastructure requiring all Washingtonians to file tax returns is in place, “we all want to make sure that our successors will have the flexibility to respond to the challenges that they see.” This is a polite way of saying the door is open to a universal income tax. On March 10, lawmakers rejected amendments to the bill that would have locked in the $1 million threshold to the law.
Proponents argue that wealthy residents won’t leave over a 9.9% income tax, but history says otherwise. Washington already ranks 45th nationally in tax competitiveness and after the capital gains tax passed in 2022, the state saw major capital flight in years following. Forbes estimated one high-profile relocation saved nearly $1 billion in annual taxes, more than the state collects from capital gains in a year. A February 2026 survey by the Association of Washington Business found 44% of business leaders are considering moving their personal residence out of state, and the share actively looking to relocate has nearly doubled.
The revenue projections for SB 6346 are almost certainly overstated. Capital gains collections fell short because the tax base shrunk from unexpected relocations in the years following and the same will happen here. Every entrepreneur who leaves takes future job creation with them. Every company that moves employees takes their spending (sales tax), housing budget (property tax), and charitable giving with them. The people who feel they “couldn’t be paid to leave” will find their neighbors already have, and those left behind will foot the state’s deficit on their own.
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All of this comes at the worst possible moment. Washington’s tech sector is facing a once-in-a-century transformation from the application of AI. The knowledge economy is in deep trouble as companies determine the breadth and depth of cuts with a post-AI enabled workforce. In October 2025, Amazon announced 2,300 corporate layoffs in Washington. Microsoft has cut more than 3,200 jobs in the state since last May. Tech employment here fell 6% even as the national economy added jobs, and entry-level roles for workers under 25 plummeted by 13%. Microsoft’s CEO recently acknowledged that AI now generates 30% of the company’s code. We’re not just seeing layoffs, we’re witnessing a fundamental restructuring of the industry that has been a core pillar for Washington.
There’s a legitimate path to an income tax: ask the voters. But that’s not what’s happening here. What’s happening is a constitutional end-run in the final days of a legislative session, passed by lawmakers who won’t be around to answer for the exodus that follows and who have acknowledged this tax will ultimately be paid by all. Florida, Nevada, Texas, and Tennessee are watching and they won’t need to recruit, they’ll just need to wait.
The company removed 159 million scam ads last year and took down 10.9 million accounts linked to criminal networks. Now it wants to catch scammers before they get to you.
Meta has announced a fresh wave of anti-scam tools across its platforms, WhatsApp, Messenger, and Facebook, as it steps up both on-platform detection and cooperation with law enforcement in Southeast Asia and beyond.
The centrepiece of the announcement is a new Facebook feature, currently in testing, that flags suspicious friend or follow requests before users act on them. When a request arrives from an account with no mutual connections, a different country location, or a suspiciously recent join date, Facebook will display a warning.
The same alert will appear when users send requests to similarly flagged accounts. The feature is designed to interrupt one of the most common social engineering pipelines: fake profiles that accumulate mutual friends over time to lend themselves a veneer of legitimacy, then pivot to scam messages through Messenger.
WhatsApp is also getting a new layer of protection targeting a specific and growing attack vector: device linking fraud. Scammers have been tricking users into scanning malicious QR codes, sometimes under the pretence of a customer service call or technical support request, which links the scammer’s device to the victim’s WhatsApp account.
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The app will now display a warning when it detects a suspicious device linking request and show the user where the request originated.
For Messenger, Meta says it is expanding its existing scam detection feature to more countries this month. The system works in two stages. First, on-device analysis automatically flags messages from unfamiliar contacts that match the patterns of common scams, fraudulent job offers, fake investment pitches, work-from-home schemes.
If flagged, the user is warned and given the option to send the conversation to Meta’s AI for a cloud-based second review. That opt-in step breaks the message’s end-to-end encryption, which Meta discloses; users who prefer not to submit can still act on the on-device warning alone.
The detection feature can be accessed and toggled in Settings > Privacy & Safety Settings > Scam Detection.
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Alongside the platform-level tools, Meta is accelerating a broader advertiser verification push. The company says it wants verified advertisers to account for 90% of its ad revenue by the end of 2026, up from 70% at present.
The remaining 10% would be reserved for low-risk advertisers such as small local businesses, which Meta gives as an example of a category it deems exempt from the high-risk verification requirement.
The announcement comes with a significant set of enforcement numbers. Meta says it removed more than 159 million scam ads last year and took down 10.9 million Facebook and Instagram accounts associated with criminal scam operations.
It also disclosed the outcome of a recent joint operation with the Royal Thai Police, which resulted in 21 arrests and Meta disabling more than 150,000 accounts linked to scam centre networks.
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This was the second such “Joint Disruption Week,” according to Axios, the first, in December, had seen Meta remove 59,000 accounts and pages; the second expanded the coalition to include the UK, Canada, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, the Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, and Indonesia.
Meta also confirmed a partnership with the US Department of State to launch the ‘Trapped in Scam Crime’ awareness campaign in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and several other countries.
The campaign targets the supply side of the problem: the trafficked workers who are themselves coerced into staffing scam centres, often lured with fake job offers before being held against their will in compounds primarily based in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos.
The moves come as Meta faces intensifying scrutiny over scam advertising more broadly. A Reuters investigation in late 2025 reported that internal Meta documents showed the company earned an estimated $7 billion annually from ads linked to scams and prohibited goods, and showed users roughly 15 billion higher-risk ads per day on average.
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Meta has disputed some of the Reuters framing; the current announcement is the latest in a series of enforcement updates the company has made public in the months since.
Sunday night, around 7:00 PM local time, a bright fireball streaked across the western German sky, exploded, and rained chunks of space rock down on the region around Koblenz. One of the largest known chunks put a soccer-ball-sized hole in someone’s roof, landing in their bedroom. Fortunately, nobody was hurt. But given the apparent size of the explosion, there must be many more pieces out there for the finding, and a wave of hopeful meteorite hunters has descended upon the region.
But if you wanted a piece of the action, where exactly would you start looking? How do scientists find meteorites anyway? And what should you do if you happen to see a similar fireball in the night sky?
Citizen Science
Meteorite video-bombs a boring parking lot in Heerlen, NL.
In the age of always-on dashboard cameras, ubiquitous smartphones, and other video recording devices, it’s hard for a shy meteorite to find a quiet spot out of the public eye. That makes them a lot easier to find than they were in the past. Indeed, the International Meteor Organization, which aggregates amateur meteor observations, received more than 3,200 reports of this one, including several with video documentation. Some are stunning, and others may not even be of the event at all.
By collecting reports from many locations, they can hope to piece together the meteorite’s trajectory. However, if you look at the individual reports, it’s clear that this is a difficult task. Nobody is expecting a bright fireball to streak across the night sky, so many of the reports are reasonably vague on the details and heavy on the awe.
This report from [Sophie Z], for instance, is typical. She records where she was and roughly the location in the night sky where the meteorite passed, along with the comment “I’ve never seen anything so amazing and large before in my life.” Other amateur observers are more precise. [David C] (“I have a Ph.D in physics”) managed to record the start and the end heading of the meteorite to a couple of decimal places. He must have had a camera.
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We’d love to know the exact algorithm used for combining the reports. It’s worth noting that reporters get an experience score, and the system presumably takes this into account when producing the average track. However, the system works, though, with 3,200 reports of a once-in-a-lifetime meteorite, it’s bound to come up with a pretty good estimate. But for smaller meteorites, like this one that flew by on Monday night, there are fewer observers, and deducing the actual track is a lot more difficult.
Everyday meteorites are better tracked by taking a more systematic approach. We’ve covered a few of these networks before, because the equipment needed to contribute meaningfully isn’t all that much more complicated than a single-board computer with a network connection, a camera module, and a weatherproof housing to keep it working all year round. We’ve covered the French meteorite-hunting network, Fripon, before, and have featured other amateur sky-camera builds to boot. But we’re not amateur astronomers, so we’re not in the loop on what the current state of the art is. If you know about coordinated citizen-science meteorite tracking efforts, let us know in the comments.
Geologists Get Into The Astronomy Game
This meteorite was big enough and loud enough when it exploded that participation in tracking wasn’t limited to those who are looking up. Geologists at the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology (KIT) found that the explosion registered on their seismometers. (Via Heise Online.) These have the advantage that they are in very well-known locations with extremely precise timestamps. After all, that’s what they’re used for every day, although the medium that the pressure waves travel through is usually the earth rather than the air.
This was also a particularly lucky event for the KIT team because it happened over a particularly dense network of seismological stations in the Eifel mountains, allowing for greater resolution. And as they point out, using the sound of the explosion has the additional advantage of not being hindered by light conditions during the day or clouds at night. This makes us think of how easy it would be to set up a distributed system of microphones to do something similar.
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The KIT track estimate lines up fairly well with the aggregated estimate from amateur observers, but it’s not exactly the same. Who is right? We’ll see where more of the meteorites are found on the ground, presumably, in the next few weeks.
Meteorite Hunting
If the meteorite fell through our roof and chunks were scattered all around our bedroom, we’d count ourselves lucky. But would we get to keep it? Of course, it depends on the local laws, and in Germany, you can keep the meteorites in most cases, unless the state decides that it’s of special value for whatever reason, and then they get first dibs.
Apparently, the going rate for meteorites is between 1€ and 5,000€ per gram, so we’re not entirely sure that it will cover the damage. Maybe our homeowners’ insurance would? We’ll have to go dig out our policy to be sure, but however that plays out, we’d just be stoked to have the meteorite chunks and a good story.
While very big fireballs like this are rare, NASA estimates that around 44,000 kg of meteoritic material falls on the Earth every day. (Whoah!) Most of this burns up in the atmosphere, but some falls to the ground. Most of that fraction is in the form of micrometeorites, which are sand-grain-sized bits that are very likely raining down on us every day. Indeed, if you’re interested, you can try to collect them, and all you need is a tarp on the roof or a magnet in your downspout, a good microscope, and a bit of knowledge. So if all you want is some extraterrestrial rock, and you’re not worried so much about the size, maybe micrometeorite hunting is the path to success.
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Have you gone looking for meteorites? Know of any up-to-date amateur fireball-hunting networks? Sound off in the comments!
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Chinese authorities moved to restrict state-run enterprises and government agencies from running OpenClaw AI apps on office computers, acting swiftly to defuse potential security risks after companies and consumers across China began experimenting with the agentic AI phenomenon. Government agencies and state-owned enterprises, including the largest banks, have received notices in recent days warning them against installing OpenClaw software on office devices for security reasons […]. Several of them were instructed to notify superiors if they had already installed related apps for security checks and possible removal, some of the people said.
Certain employees, including those at state-run banks and some government agencies, were banned from installing OpenClaw on office computers and also personal phones using the company’s network, some of the people said. One person said the ban was also extended to the families of military personnel. Other notices stopped short of calling for an outright ban on OpenClaw software, saying only that prior approval is needed before use, the people said. The warning underscores Beijing’s growing concern about OpenClaw, an agentic AI platform that requires unusually broad access to private data and can communicate externally, potentially exposing computers to external attack. […]
Despite the potential security risks, companies from Tencent to JD.com Inc. have been rolling out OpenClaw apps to try and capitalize on the groundswell of enthusiasm, while several local government agencies have declared millions of yuan in subsidies for companies that develop atop the platform. […] Tech giants like Tencent and Alibaba, along with AI upstarts ranging from Moonshot to MiniMax, have rolled out their own tweaks of the software touting simple, one-click adoption. A slew of government agencies, in cities from Shenzhen to Wuxi, have issued notices offering multimillion-yuan subsidies to startups leveraging OpenClaw to make advances. The frenzy has helped drive up shares of AI model developer MiniMax nearly 640% since its listing just two months ago. It’s now worth about $49 billion, surpassing Baidu — once viewed as the frontrunner in Chinese AI development — in market value. The company launched MaxClaw, an agent built on OpenClaw, in late February.