Workday must face a California lawsuit over AI bias in job screening tools
Oracle's workforce shrinks by about 21,000 employees amid AI adoption
Trump signs orders calling for a powerful quantum computer, targeting 2028
The Senate passed a bipartisan housing bill on Monday that aims to reduce federal regulations and expand local control, one of the most sweeping efforts in recent decades to increase supply and bring down prices.
The bill, which passed 85-5 and now heads to the House, has been the focus of intense negotiations in recent weeks as lawmakers in both parties try to address housing costs in an election year. The final version of the legislation bans corporate investors from buying single-family homes but doesn’t include a Senate provision that would have required investors to sell newly constructed homes within seven years.
The measure was the result of years of work to “lower costs, expand housing supply, cut red tape, protect taxpayers, and help more Americans achieve the dream of homeownership,” said Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott, R-S.C., who worked with Democrats to get the bill passed.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the top Democrat on the banking panel, said it is the most significant housing bill to pass Congress since 1990, when the average home in America was sold for $150,000. Now it costs more than $500,000, she said.
The bill “acknowledges that the federal government has a role to play in lowering housing prices,” Warren told The Associated Press. “For the first time ever, private equity will be blocked from buying up single-family homes and trying to turn housing into one more Wall Street investment.”
Senate passage of the bill shapes up as a rare bipartisan legislative achievement when much of the Republicans’ agenda has stalled. The House is expected to give final approval later this week and send the bill to President Donald Trump, who has signaled his support.
Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California, who helped negotiate the legislation, said it was a “huge step toward finally addressing the affordable housing and homelessness crises in this country.”
Housing costs are a concern for both parties
Republicans and Democrats have embraced the bill as a way to show they are addressing the nation’s affordability crisis, driven in part by rising home prices due to a shortage of affordable housing. The U.S. housing market has been in a slump dating back to 2022, when mortgage rates began to climb from pandemic-era lows.
Sales of previously occupied U.S. homes have been hovering close to a 4-million annual pace going back to 2023 — well short of the 5.2-million annual pace that’s historically been the norm. Sales slowed last year to a 30-year low and have remained sluggish so far this year, declining in January and February versus a year earlier.
The Economic Report of the President in April found a shortage of 10 million homes, while a report this month from the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found sales of existing homes were at three-decade lows and inventories were rising due to high home buying costs. “Cost burdens for both renters and owners continue to climb, while assistance remains profoundly underfunded,” the report said.
While the median U.S. monthly rent has been declining for nearly three years, it was still 17.2% higher in May than it was before the pandemic, according to data from Realtor.com.
Changes for grants, Section 8, and manufactured housing
To increase the supply of housing, the bill would streamline environmental reviews and speed up the construction process.
It would offer funding to local governments that build more housing, including Community Development Block Grant money to places exceeding the median rate of homebuilding. It would also provide new dollars for communities to turn abandoned infrastructure into housing, and offer a framework for communities that want to reform outdated zoning regulations, which often limit larger housing developments.
The legislation would allow banks to invest more in affordable housing and raise limits on the number of public housing units that can receive private financing through Section 8 funding to rehabilitate properties. And it would remove outdated requirements and expand federal financing to make manufactured homes more affordable.
“Manufactured housing produces some of the most cost-effective housing in America, but access to financing has been tightly restricted,” Warren said. “This creates the opportunity for more manufactured housing and, at the same time, creates a structure for people living in manufactured housing communities to organize and protect their investment in their homes.”
Lawmakers compromised on a disaster program
One of the sticking points between the two chambers was over a federal disaster recovery program.
An earlier Senate bill had permanently authorized block grant recovery funds, a change intended to ensure that funding requests aren’t needed after every disaster. House lawmakers opposed that provision because of concerns over how the program was run, so they agreed on a three-year authorization instead.
The final bill has received widespread support in the housing community, both from organizations representing landlords and large property owners as well as groups that advocate for tenants and low-income renters.
“There is no magic wand that will fix this crisis overnight, and no single piece of legislation is perfect,” said David Dworkin, chief executive of the National Housing Conference, the nation’s oldest housing coalition.
“Compromise demands that. But this bill is a significant down payment on a long-term effort to make housing more affordable for all Americans.”
Lucid Stock (LCID) Slides After 18% Workforce Cut and Sudden COO Exit
Lucid Group (LCID) is cutting 18% of its U.S. workforce, its second major round of layoffs in just four months. The EV maker says the move is aimed at streamlining operations and pushing closer to profitability. The announcement came with another big change: COO Marc Winterhoff has left the company effective immediately, and Lucid says the role is being cut as part of the restructuring. LCID shares fell more than 5% on Monday.
Lucid says the job cuts are meant to simplify its structure, trim operating costs, and better match production with expected demand.
The restructuring is expected to save about $158 million a year, with roughly $32 million in cash charges tied to severance, benefits, and transition support. Lucid expects the plan to be largely complete by the end of Q3 2026.
This deeper cut shows how tough the EV landscape has become. Slower demand, stronger rivals, and tighter funding are forcing companies to rethink their cost base. Lucid has also been burning cash as it ramps up the Gravity SUV and continues work on a lower‑priced model aimed at reaching more buyers.
The company said the new cuts are meant to stretch its cash runway and sharpen its focus as it works toward positive cash flow.
Kunal Shah is taking over as the head of Meta's WhatsApp, the Indian fintech founder shared in a LinkedIn post. The appointment is part of a $900 million investment by Meta in Shah's digital payments company, Cred, and is seen as indicative of the social media giant's desire to become a bigger player in the payments space. Shah replaces Will Cathcart, who led the popular messaging platform for more than seven years and is transitioning to a new role focused on AI.
Google is investing roughly $75 million into indie film studio A24 to develop AI tools for film production and distribution, The Wall Street Journal reports, citing anonymous sources. The search giant's AI lab, DeepMind, confirmed the partnership, saying it will enable artists to "expand storytelling possibilities." A24 partner Scott Belsky says the new tools "won't look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with." The collaboration won't give Google access to A24's library, which most recently includes films such as "Backrooms" and "Marty Supreme."
Meta is 'pausing' its employee tracking program after it let the whole company see sensitive data
This won’t make the already-controversial AI training endeavor any more popular.
Meta has paused use of an AI training program that tracks its own employees' keystrokes and mouse movements. The company has suspended the Model Capability Initiative, not because of workers' understandable displeasure around being (almost) perpetually monitored or for potentially breaking privacy laws, but because it caused an internal data leak. Business Insider reported that sensitive data collected through MCI, including employees' private conversations, performance data, and transcriptions, was made inadvertently available to the entire Meta staff.
"We have carefully designed this program with privacy safeguards, and while we have no indication at this time that any data was improperly accessed by Meta employees, we're pausing it while we investigate," a spokesperson told BI.
Despite this official line and previous statements that employees' collected data would be "tightly controlled," it appears Meta wasn't quite as on top of security as it claimed. This marks the latest in a series of AI-related cybersecurity incidents for the company. Meta reps issued a similar response in March after an agentic AI took unprompted action that also dominoed into a security breach. And earlier this month, the company had to react after hackers exploited its AI customer service chatbot to hijack Instagram accounts.
SpaceX shares saw a third straight day of losses on Monday, tumbling 16% and erasing $400 billion in market value — the second most in a single day for any company, per the Financial Times. Also on Monday, SpaceX signed a deal worth up to $6.3 billion to provide computing power to AI startup Reflection AI. Under the agreement, Reflection will pay $150 million a month from July through 2029 for access to hardware at SpaceX’s Colossus 2 data center.
UPS is allocating $48 million to establish 27 temperature-controlled facilities globally, CNBC reports. The investment comes in response to a projected 8.3% annual growth in demand for temperature-sensitive biologics, such as GLP-1 medications. The company's healthcare segment has been a key growth area, achieving record revenue in recent quarters. "This effort – and all of our work in healthcare logistics – extends from a deep understanding that we’re doing more than moving packages," says Kate Gutmann, UPS’ president of international, healthcare, and supply chain solutions.
Domino's Pizza Chief Operating Officer Joe Jordan is set to take over as chief executive officer in October, focusing on operational consistency amid stagnant sales in the pizza sector. Current CEO Russell Weiner will transition into the executive chairman role. Amid a declining stock price and missed sales expectations, Jordan — who is also president of Domino's U.S. — says he intends to uphold the company's existing strategy while ensuring franchisees can maintain profitability. The transition comes as competitors like Pizza Hut and Papa John's also struggle.
AbbVie has struck one of the biggest pharmaceutical deals of the year. The company is acquiring Apogee Therapeutics for $10.9 billion, a move that aims to boost its immunology portfolio against competitors like Johnson & Johnson. The acquisition will provide AbbVie with access to zumilokibart, an experimental drug aimed at treating inflammatory diseases such as eczema and asthma. AbbVie's patent on Humira, which was once the bestselling drug in the world, expired three years ago, and the Food and Drug Administration recently approved a J&J competitor to its current bestseller.
Building materials giant CRH is buying infrastructure-focused Arcosa for $8.5 billion, the companies announced Monday. The all-cash deal would strengthen CRH's lead in North America's aggregates market as demand for energy infrastructure ramps up. The deal, which includes a 10.4% premium on Arcosa's last stock close, should be finalized in the first quarter of 2027, pending shareholder and regulatory approvals. This is the latest deal in a surge of pacts in the building-products sector, following QXO's takeover of TopBuild and Commercial Metals' acquisition of Foley Products last year.
Chevron has entered a 20-year agreement with Microsoft to supply natural-gas-fired power for the tech firm's Pecos, Texas, data center. The campus, located near the New Mexico border, is slated to grow Microsoft's data center capacity by about 2 gigawatts and create hundreds of permanent jobs, the tech giant said, on top of about 6,000 construction jobs. Chevron's contribution, called Project Kilby, will likely be one of the nation's biggest co-located natural gas power projects. Microsoft is LinkedIn's parent company.
🚀 The Silicon Valley Wealth Wave: When Equity Pays Off
Working 80-hour weeks for Elon finally paid off—literally.
SpaceX's recent IPO didn't just make headlines. It created **4,000+ millionaires** and hundreds of centimillionaires among employees who helped build the world's dominant rocket company.
This is capitalism, Silicon Valley style: you get a piece of what you build.
And it's not just SpaceX:
→ 25-year-old founders becoming billionaires overnight
→ Anthropic & OpenAI IPOs looming (more millionaires incoming)
→ Nvidia employees riding the AI wave to serious wealth
**The catch?** Most of this wealth is in *stock*—and that brings challenges many first-time wealthy tech workers have never faced:
💰 **Tax bills** can be brutal when you sell
🏠 **Lifestyle inflation** (hello, SF real estate)
📈 **Wealth preservation** (suddenly you need a real plan)
As wealth advisor Joey Carney puts it: *"You don't pick a strategy and build around it; you build the comprehensive plan first and let the right strategies fall into place."*
Translation? Call a financial advisor *before* you buy that Tesla with your Tesla gains.
🤖 GM just installed 50 robot arms at their flagship EV factory in Detroit — WHILE 1,300 workers are still sitting at home from "temporary" layoffs that started back in March.
Let that sink in.
They're not bringing the workers back. They're bringing the ROBOTS in. 🤬
The UAW is calling it out — and honestly, they have every right to be furious. A laid-off union organizer put it perfectly:
"Technology could make work safer and give us shorter weeks without losing pay. But in the bosses' hands? It's used to pad profits and fire workers." 💯
Meanwhile, China is running "dark factories" — nearly fully automated plants with almost ZERO human workers. Xiaomi builds a new EV every 76 seconds with 700+ robots. Zeekr cranks out 300,000 cars a year with barely a human in sight.
And here we are… replacing our own people with machines while Chinese automakers race ahead. 🇨🇳🤖
This isn't the future we were promised. This is corporate greed wearing a tech costume. 🎭
Are tech executives finally saying the quiet part out loud? 👀
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is calling out his fellow tech billionaires (like Sam Altman and Elon Musk) for bragging about how AI is going to replace white-collar jobs.
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Nadella basically told other CEOs to stop hyping up mass layoffs, stating:
"You can’t say, hey, all white-collar jobs are gone and this could even be a weapon... No, how about we think about reorganizing the jobs?"
He says the industry now has to do the "hard work" of earning "social permission" from the public.
But is this a genuine ethical shift, or just clever PR? While Microsoft tries to position itself as the "humanitarian" choice, critics point out they are still building massive data centers and racing to automate as fast as everyone else.
What do you think? Is Nadella actually looking out for the common worker, or is he just trying to spin the narrative before the AI bubble bursts? 👇