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Former CEO and chairman of Google, now a prominent technology investor and advisor on AI policy and national security issues.
Tech billionaires have raised more than $340m to defeat California's Proposition 40, a one-time 5% tax on billionaires. Californians vote in early November, and two countermeasures on the same ballot can block the tax even if Prop 40 passes.
Reality
Opponents of California's one-time 5% billionaire tax have raised more than $300 million, about ten times what its backers have. For the few hundred people in scope, residency was fixed on Jan. 1, 2026, so payment and a rival nullifying measure are what remain open.
Reality
Sergey Brin has given $102 million to defeat California's Prop 40, a one-time 5% billionaire tax that could cost him about $13 billion. The state's $100 billion estimate depends as much on how many of its 200 billionaires stay resident as on the November vote.
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Google flies one server's worth of TPUs on 1 kilowatt of solar power on Oct. 1, its first hardware test for orbital AI data centers. The flight tests chip survival and cooling while SpaceX's and Blue Origin's far larger constellations still wait on FCC review.
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Rick Osterloh's own laptop is a 16GB Dell XPS Googlebook, one of five machines launching on Googlebook OS. The Verge's account of how the project began is also a record of two earlier attempts to join ChromeOS and Android.
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Anthropic published three scenarios and an interactive model, declined to say which is likelier, and left aggregate demand out of the arithmetic. The same newsletter carrying the research reports business AI spending is falling.
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Anthropic published three scenarios for AI's effect on the US economy without probabilities. The middle one, where AI does half of knowledge work by 2030 while knowledge-worker pay stalls, is the branch a capex plan can actually use.
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Newcomer argues Silicon Valley now has no leader who commands cross-industry respect, but the evidence it offers is one line about a G20 ministerial and a retiring CEO the same piece faults for going quiet.
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The San Francisco Democratic Party broke with its state party 17-4 to oppose Prop 40, but the six billionaires who have already ended their California residency are the only votes on this measure that are already counted.
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Universal, Sony and Warner all took equity in Stability AI's $76 million Series B. Two years after suing AI song generators, the majors are buying the toolmakers.
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A $76M Series B puts four rights holders on a generative-media vendor's cap table. What it does not put anywhere is a disclosed spending commitment, valuation, or revenue figure.
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A New York Times investigation traces Microsoft, Google and OpenAI's hold on US schools to professional development rather than procurement. The pharma comparison is the load-bearing part.
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A developer graded 18 expired AI predictions against their own words. The best mark he shows is a C+, and the one he built on took six weeks out of his own roadmap.
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California's billionaire tax faces a nine-figure defense built as ballot engineering: two counter-measures that only have to outpoll Prop 40, not beat it head-on.
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