AI Fuels a Huge California Boom / Europe’s Oceans Are Boiling / A New Bank for Trumps / Musk Opens his Spigot for Texas / America Sends Iran The Dissidents It Asks For / A Stellar Collision 12 Billion Years Ago
California Draws More Investment Than All Other 49 States Combined
Wall Street Journal
Silicon Valley’s unrivaled concentration of AI workers, companies and investors keeps the money flowing. Photo: Carlos Barria/Reuters
Scott: Viewers of Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News know that California is a dystopian hellhole from which business executives are only too eager to exit in favor of Texas or Florida. In the meantime, of course, Rupert and his family have no doubts about where they prefer to live, and that’s in California. The actual numbers of course tell a totally different story. California is by a long distance the best performing economy in the United States, and neither Texas nor Florida come within hailing distance (though Texas does rank at the top of CNBC’s worst states to live in). Here, the fact-based island in Rupert’s empire chronicles California’s ability to attract enormous amounts of capital and what drives it.
California is in the midst of a record-shattering investment wave, fueled by the artificial-intelligence boom in Silicon Valley.
Companies based in the Golden State have drawn around $366 billion of venture capital since the beginning of the year, according to data provider PitchBook. That’s more than three times the amount of venture funding that has gone into the other 49 states combined, and nearly double California’s previous record, set in 2025. New York state ranks a distant second in venture-capital investment, with $27 billion in deals announced so far this year.
California’s funding keeps coming despite the threat of a billionaire tax that detractors, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have warned could scare off investors. Thus far, at least, investments in the biggest AI companies are keeping the frenzy going while the state’s billionaire class waits to see if voters back the new levy in November.
The capital pouring into AI has supercharged housing prices in San Francisco and created a new class of millionaires overnight. But the boom is reverberating beyond the tech-centric Bay Area: the money has also helped ease the state government’s chronic budget deficit by helping push income-tax revenues well above forecasts.
In May 2025, California’s finance department projected $126 billion in personal-income tax revenues for the fiscal year that ended June 30. Actual income taxes instead generated around $147 billion, as AI enthusiasm fueled a soaring stock market and boosted compensation for tech workers. Future initial public offerings of young AI companies that are raising venture funding today will produce additional tax revenue from capital gains.
Europe’s Oceans Are Boiling; Humans Are Turning Up The Heat
The Guardian
Charles: As Europe reels from massive forest fires in France and Spain, a new study says carbon pollution has fueled a “massive expansion” of marine heatwaves in Europe, with some waters recording temperatures 6C (10.8 F) higher than normal.
The hottest fortnights of this year would have been “virtually impossible” in a preindustrial climate in three of the four sea regions studied, according to analysis by World Weather Attribution, while in the Celtic region, which covers much of the water around the British Isles, heat hit levels that used to strike just once a century.
Climate breakdown was responsible for about two-thirds of the observed excess heat, the researchers said, having warmed waters by about 2C in the Mediterranean, 1.4C in the Bay of Biscay and Iberian Peninsula, and 1.3C around Ireland and the Channel.
While hot seas receive little attention, they can lead to the death of habitat-forming species such as corals and macroalgae, disrupting ecosystems and leading to large-scale mortality of fish and seabirds. They also raise dangerous overnight temperatures in coastal regions, as oceans cool more slowly than land.
There has been a “massive expansion” of marine heatwaves in 2026 that has so far hit 90% of the Bay of Biscay and Iberian coast region, and 80% of the western Mediterranean. In a hypothetical climate not heated by humanity, scientists said they would expect those figures to be half as big.
Removing the effect of climate breakdown cut the expected marine heatwave area from 70% to 9% in the eastern Mediterranean, and from 80% to 30% in the Celtic region, the analysis showed.
Separate research published in January found that marine heatwaves lead to more intense rainfall on land. Globally, about 5-25% of extreme rainfall over coastal land is accompanied by a nearby marine heatwave, the study found. Rainfall during extreme downpours influenced by a strong heatwave was found to be 20-30% higher.
Europe is the fastest-warming continent and is increasingly reckoning with the consequences of planet-heating pollution with which it has disproportionately polluted the atmosphere. In recent years, it has been struck by a series of catastrophic weather events found to have been made worse by climate breakdown, even as national governments have sought to extract more polluting fuels and roll back policies to stop the planet from heating.
Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa, a climate thinktank, who was not involved in the study, said it showed “there is no safe corner of the planet in a climate crisis” and questioned the continent’s expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure.
“Europe cannot acknowledge the science with one hand while continuing to expand fossil fuels with the other,” he said. “Every new oil and gas project locks in more warming and pushes ecosystems closer to limits from which they may not recover.”
The Trump Bros Crypto bank offers depositors way to ‘gain favor’ with White House
The Guardian
Scott: Is the Trump Bros new bank, World Liberty Financial, really anything other than a thinly disguised vehicle for bribing and corrupting public officials? Not really. Aram Roston explains in this essential Guardian piece.
Two fundamentals underpin the business model of a new crypto bank partly owned by the Trump family, cryptocurrency experts tell the Guardian.
World Liberty Trust Company received conditional approval this month from the US office of the comptroller of the currency (OCC) to start a bank. An entity affiliated with Donald Trump and his family members owns about 38% of the company. The agency is led by a political appointee of the US president.
The first distinctive feature of this bank – and stablecoin operations like it – is that there is almost no risk that it can lose money. The second is the sole logical motivation for depositors to put their money into it, according to five experts: the financial connection to the president and his family.
World Liberty is not really a bank, in the conventional sense: it won’t be lending money to businesses or individuals, issuing mortgage or credit cards, or getting federal insurance on deposits.
What it will be able to do is directly issue the Trumps’ dollar-pegged stablecoin, USD1. Stablecoins, unlike other cryptocurrencies, are pegged at fixed values such as $1, and used almost exclusively to buy and sell riskier crypto assets, like bitcoin.
Because of the way stablecoins are regulated – under a law signed by Trump in 2025 – World Liberty’s bank will not be allowed to pay its depositors, the companies and individuals who buy its stablecoins, any interest. The bank, however, can earn interest for itself by putting the cash it collects from those depositors into high-quality liquid investments – US government-backed treasury bonds.
Why would depositors be interested in buying the Trump family’s little-used stablecoins? Experts point to their ties to the White House.
“The only reason really to do it is because they want to appease Trump, because they want to gain favor with Trump or in some way help Trump for whatever reason,” said James Angel, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business.
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H/t Sarah Burke
