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A proposed billionaires’ tax in California has ignited a political uproar in Silicon Valley, with tech titans threatening to leave the state while Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom maneuvers to defeat a levy that he fears will lead to an exodus of wealth.A technology mecca, California has more billionaires than any other state a few hundred, by some estimates. Nearly half its personal income tax revenue, a financial backbone in the nearly $350 billion budget, comes from the top 1% of earners.A large health care union is attempting to place a proposal before voters in November that would impose a one-time 5% tax on the assets of billionaires including stocks, art, businesses, collectibles and intellectual property to backfill federal funding cuts to health services for lower-income people that were signed by President Donald Trump last year.In a state with a vast gap between rich and poor, the plan has resulted in a tangle of competing interests at a time when both Democrats and Republicans are struggling to respond to economic anxiety driven by rising costs ahead of this year’s midterm elections.An online war of words has tech leaders pondering a hollowing out of Silicon Valley, and millions of dollars are flowing to political committees engaged in the fight. That includes $3 million from billionaire Peter Thiel, a founder of PayPal, to a committee tied to a business group opposing the tax.However it’s not clear if the proposal will make the ballot, with more than 870,000 petition signatures required for it to qualify. Threatened exodus Although the tax would affect only a minuscule slice of California’s roughly 39 million residents, it would siphon money from an immense pool of wealth. If would apply retroactively to billionaires living in the state as of Jan. 1.At least 25 billionaires listed among Forbes magazine’s 2025 rankings of the world’s 500 wealthiest people either lived in California or had some significant ties to the state, based on a review by The Associated Press. But determining whether they were full-time residents or just frequent visitors could turn into a matter of dispute, since many of them own property elsewhere.“You are really playing with fire with this one,” said Aaron Levie, CEO of the publicly traded Silicon Valley company Box. He fears that the proposed tax would drive entrepreneurs to look elsewhere to run their companies and launch startups.Even liberal-leaning tech pioneers would “find it absurd just on pure economic and structural grounds, even if they might agree that the cause itself is very worthy,” said Levie, who is not a billionaire. Governor worries about a competitive disadvantage Newsom has long opposed state-level wealth taxes, believing such levies would be disadvantageous for the world’s fourth-largest economy. At a time when California is strapped for cash and he is considering a 2028 presidential run, he is trying to block the proposal before it reaches the ballot.Analysts say an exodus of billionaires could mean a loss of hundreds of millions of tax dollars.“It’s one of the reasons why Newsom’s path to the Democratic nomination is not going to be an easy one,” Claremont McKenna College political scientist Jack Pitney said. “He’s already facing a (budget) deficit the size of which is uncertain and in the years to come, a billionaires tax that could backfire badly.” Democrats divided on the issue The proposal has created a deep rift between Newsom and prominent members of his party’s progressive wing, including Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who endorsed it and said it should be a template for other states.“Our nation will not thrive when so few have so much while so many have so little,” Sanders said on the social platform X.Another supporter, and a potential 2028 Newsom rival, is Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who mocked billionaires for threatening to flee over a tax intended to provide health care for lower-income people.The measure’s lead proponent, the Service Employees International Union, sees the threat of an exodus as exaggerated.The tax is a “workable response to a crisis created by Congress,” Suzanne Jimenez, chief of staff of SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West, said in a statement. She added that it would “keep emergency rooms open, hospitals staffed and health care systems functioning.”The California Business Roundtable, meanwhile, is leading an effort to defeat the measure, saying it would “undermine our economy, decimate the state budget, drive investment out of the state and ultimately make everyday life more expensive for working families.” A business climate known for heavy regulation and steep costs Fleeing California because of its high cost of living and reputation for stringent regulations started to gather momentum well before the proposed wealth tax began circulating last year.Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest man with a $724 billion fortune, bought a home in Texas and moved his electric automaker Tesla to Austin several years ago.The financial threat posed by the proposed tax apparently is pushing even more of Silicon Valley’s renowned pioneers to curtail their exposure to California and its liberal policies, including Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who moved to the state during the mid-1990s for graduate study at Stanford University.Page and Brin stepped away from their executive roles years ago but remain the largest shareholders in Google parent company Alphabet, with stakes that account for most of their combined fortunes of $530 billion, according to Forbes.But both men have begun moving more of their assets to Florida, according to multiple reports. Google, which has been based in Mountain View for the past quarter century, did not respond to an AP inquiry about their recent moves. Associated Press writer Sophie Austin in Sacramento, California, contributed. Michael R. Blood and Michael Liedtke, Associated Press
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In a parking lot in Detroit next to the Henry Ford Museum, three streetlights now double as EV chargers. The site is one of the first installations of the Voltpost Air, a device that taps into existing infrastructure to quickly add charging capability at the side of the road or in parking lots. The approach is simpler than adding stand-alone EV chargers: Installation takes just a few hours. We don’t have to do costly utility upgrades to the grid in order to this, says Jeff Prosserman, cofounder and CEO of Voltpost. We’re just finding pockets where power already exists and then making it work. [Photo: Voltpost] Thats possible partly because the chargers are Level 2, meaning they charge more slowly than others and don’t need large amounts of power. Slower charging is still useful for the target customersapartment dwellers or others who don’t have a garage where they can easily charge at home, but who may park in the same spot next to streetlights during the day for hours at a time. Installing conventional EV chargers often involves much more work. You would rip up the sidewalk, you rip up the street, and then you’d lay down new wire, and basically that would be a very large expense to repair effectively, Prosserman says. Instead of digging up the road to install new conduit, Voltpost checks to see whether those conduits have spare capacity under electrical code. Then they open up existing access points and pull a single bundled power cable through. If power is overhead, the cable can drop down the pole from above. [Photo: Voltpost] The chargers are mounted about 10 feet above the ground. (In the case of the new installation in Detroit, each streetlight has two charging connectors; in other cases there might be one per pole.) Drivers access the charger with an app or by tapping a credit card, and then push a button to extend the charging cable up to 25 feet to their car. Once charging is complete, the cable automatically recoils inside, protecting the hardware from vandalism or rough weather. The company partnered with AT&T to add connectivity to the devices for remote diagnostics, firmware updates, and performance monitoring so drivers know that the charger is working before they arrive. AT&T is also exploring the possible use of the same poles and conduit for telecom gear like 5G or fiber alongside the chargers, stacking infrastructure to cut costs for both. [Photo: Voltpost] Voltpost now has hundreds of new chargers in its pipeline, including many more in Michigan, where the state’s Office of Future Mobility and Electrification and DTE’s Emerging Tech Fund are helping fund the rollout. More funding is likely to come from the federal government, despite the Trump administration’s efforts to roll it back. Trump froze funds for the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) charger program a year ago, but courts blocked the move. The money goes first to high-speed chargers, but states that have built out a network of those chargers can also use the money to install Level 2 chargers like Voltpost’s. Around 820,000 new Level 2 EV chargers will be needed by 2030, according to an estimate from the International Council on Clean Transportation. (That many are needed even without the federal EV incentives that were cut last year.) Retrofitting streetlights could be one of the fastest ways to fill that gap.
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On the surface, Apples announcement on Tuesday of a subscription service called Apple Creator Studio does not demand a whole lot of explanation or analysis. The Mac/iPad/iPhone offering, which bundles the Final Cut Pro video editor, Logic Pro audio editor, Pixelmator Pro image editor, and other apps for making and manipulating media for $13 a month or $129 a year, is exactly the sort of thing youd expect the company to get around to introducing. After all, its strategy of expanding the portion of its revenue that comes from services has already resulted in offerings such as Apple TV, Apple Music, Apple Arcade, and Apple News+. It would have been weird if Apple hadnt pushed its creativity apps in a service-y directiona process that began a couple of years ago when the first iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro carried subscription pricing. But Creator Studio, which arrives in the App Store on January 28, also ties together several other ongoing plot lines relating to Apples business. Its very existence helps answer questions about how the company sees AI as a creative tool. The company has the opportunity to address others as it builds out the product in the coming years. I spoke with Apples VP of Worldwide Product Marketing Bob Borchers, and senior director of Worldwide Product Marketing Brent Chiu-Watson, about the new servicestarting with the fundamental question of what sort of people they envision using it. Creator Studio subscribers will be able to generate images using OpenAIs models inside apps such as Keynote. [Photo: Apple] Apples history in creativity software is long: For example, Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro both date to the previous century. Yet at times, it hasnt been entirely clear whether the company saw the customer base for such tools as consisting literally of professionals, prosumers whod outgrown products such as iMovie and GarageBand, or some combination thereof. Even now, Creator Studio does not add up to a full-blooded rival to Adobes Creative Cloud, which offers many more apps in various editions at much higher prices, up to $70 a month for the full shebang. Still, Borchers offered me a reasonably crisp definition of Creator Studios intended audience: creators who, increasingly, do a little bit of everything. A musician isn’t just songwriting, he told me. They’re producing the tracks, they’re creating album artwork, they’re editing music videos, they’re designing merch. They’re doing all of those things, and they’re inherently working across some of those traditional boundaries. With that in mind, Apple is spreading useful functionality between Creator Studios apps in ways that share the wealth and reduce the learning curve. For example, Pixelmator Proa much-loved indie app whose developer Apple acquired last yearalready had AI-infused features that can intelligently auto-crop images and scale them up without losing detail. Now, Creator Studio subscribers will find the same tools in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. Similarly, Logic Pros Beat Detection feature, which uses AI to visualize an audio tracks tempo, will be available in Final Cut Pro as well, where it will help creators edit video to stay in sync with what audiences hear. Beat Detection, which visualizes beats and bars, is available in Final Cut Pro as well as Logic Pro. [Photo: Apple] The more features that show up in multiple apps, the more Creator Studio should feel like a coherent suite with a unified personality. That sort of consistency, we think, is really, really valuable, and we’re going to find more connection points over time, says Chiu-Watson. Its no shock that the new features Creator Studio is launching with are largely about AI-based assistance. Some run on-device and use Apples own technology, including visual and audio search options that can find media such as a track with funky upbeat drum. Others draw on OpenAI cloud-based models, like image-generation options that go beyond Apple Intelligences Image Playgrounds, as well as Keynote’s newfound ability to turn text outlines into presentations and write speaker notes for slides. (Googles Gemini LLM plays no role in Creator Studio, though given the new Apple-Google AI partnership announced on Monday, its tough to imagine that will stay true forever.) Creator Studios Mac apps inclde MainStage, a sort of industrial-strength counterpart to GarageBand. [Photo: Apple] Applewhich is still an underdog in AI but has learned to be sensitive about suggesting that its trying to automate deeply human tasksis taking pains to emphasize that its not trying to turn content creation over to algorithms. Nor is it (or OpenAI) training models on the media people produce in Creator Studio. The key thing is, we’re doing this with the philosophy that AI should amplify one’s ideas and not replace any piece of human artistry or creativity, says Chiu-Watson. We’re just trying to make someone more efficient as they explore their process. As someone whos used an iPad as my primary work computer for almost 15 years, I am heartened by the fact that Creator Studio represents the iPad debut of Pixelmator Pro. The app supports drawing with pressure-sensitive art materials via the Pencil stylus, and is particularly welcome given that Adobes iPad version of Photoshop remains a dim echo of the desktop version. (Pixelmators sister app Photomatora rough counterpart to Apples Lightroom, and an essential part of my own iPad toolkitis not part of the new suite, and remains available via standalone subscription.) For years, the iPad Pros powerful hardware has felt like its sprinted well ahead of most of the apps it runs. Creator Studio wont change that overnight. But it does give Apple new incentive to beef up its own iPad softwarea boon in itself and, with any luck, a good example for other developers. Our guiding principle here is we wanted to put the most powerful tools in the hands of our creative community wherever they are, says Borchers. The new iPad version of Pixelmator Pro offers Pencil support and drawing tools that go beyond garden-variety image editing. [Photo: Apple] The price of progress It must be acknowledged that the shift in business model reflected in Creator Studios bundling of apps for a monthly or yearly feerather than a one-time priceis not going to be universally hailed. Just ask Adobe, whose Creative Cloud has managed to disaffect a meaningful percentage of creative types who want nothing to do with subscription plans. (Some of those users have gravitated to apps from Affinity, whose new owner Canva recently crammed photo editing, vector illustration, and page layout into one free product.) To be fair, Apple has gone to some length to allay such concerns, at least for the moment. All Mac apps in Creator Studio will remain available as one-time purchases in the App Store. The company is also grandfathering in users who had standalone subscriptions to the iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro and prefer to keep them, though some content may be exclusive to the Creator Studio versions. Until now, the only version of Pixelmator available for the iPad has been a basic, non-Pro edition; Apple says it wont get any more updates, but will remain functional. Apple fans with long memories may remember the long-ago days when Apple packaged Keynote, Numbers, and Pages into a $79 Microsoft Office alternative called iWork. More recently, its shipped them gratis on every new device. Only paying customers will get the new AI features that turn these appsand the Freeform whiteboarding toolinto sort of honorary members of the Creator Studio portfolio. But Chiu-Watson told me that the free versions arent turning into dead ends or demoware. Indeed, theyll continue to get upgrades of their own. Some premium features and premium content are only for subscribers, but that’s just a choice, he says. You can opt in, [but] theres no necessity to do so. In the end, Creator Studio, like any software experience, will speak for itself, in large part through how it evolves over time. Having assembled its disparate elements and given them an initial round of updates, Apple has the opportunity to keep the momentum going through ongoing improvements that make the price feel like money well invested. As Chiu-Watson puts it, We hope people pay attention, because it’s one thing what we say. Its another how we exemplify it.
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