Good morning.

It’s Tuesday, September 30, and on this day back in 1889, Wyoming decided to do something shockingly progressive: the state convention approved a constitution giving women the right to vote. By the time Wyoming joined the union in 1890, it had already made history as the first state to say, “Yeah, maybe women should have a say too.” Radical concept, apparently. The rest of the country took another 30 years to catch up, because men in power never move fast unless it involves taxes or war.

So here’s to starting the week with that same spirit of being ahead of the curve, making bold moves, and proving everyone else wrong. A good day, a good read, and maybe a little history-making energy for whatever’s on your plate today.

Today’s stories:

• Mid-October flagged as best homebuying week

• Ancient skull rewrites human evolution timeline

• Skier climbs, descends Everest without oxygen

• Anthropic launches powerful Claude 4.5 coder

• Trump’s $1M “Gold Card” sells residency

• Meta makes privacy a paid subscription

• New AI stars replace Magnificent Seven

• Freediver sinks 126 meters, new record

• OpenAI adds safety mode to ChatGPT

• $250M floods into New Zealand visas

• EA bought in $52.5B record deal
  

  and more…

Wall Street shook off last week’s AI jitters, pushing stocks higher Monday. The S&P 500 climbed 0.26% to 6,661.21, the Nasdaq added 0.48% to 22,591.15, and the Dow rose 69 points to 46,316.

Nvidia bounced back nearly 2% after a rough stretch of investor skepticism over its $100B OpenAI infrastructure play, which some worried lacked enough energy to power. Fellow chipmakers AMD and Micron joined the rebound, rising more than 1% and 4%, helping the market rediscover some AI momentum.

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The U.S. Is Officially a Pay-to-Enter Club

Trump just slashed his shiny new “Gold Card” from $5 million to $1 million, and the world’s rich are lining up like it’s a Black Friday sale at Gucci. The card promises U.S. residency “in record time,” access to schools, banks, and health care, all for a price that’s cheaper than Samoa’s visa program. Yes, even Samoa. Lawyers say it’s a steal, but also too cheap for the billionaire set who like their exclusivity with sparkle. Singapore charges $8 million for the same thing, New Zealand almost $3 million. Trump wants to pump out 80,000 Gold Cards, plus maybe a $5 million “Platinum” version later with “bonus tax benefits,” because of course there’s an upsell. The catch: there’s still no actual way to apply. The website collects names but gives nothing back. Congress and the courts are already sharpening their knives, since immigration law is technically their job. For now, it’s a visa program dressed up as a luxury subscription service, with the fine print written in crayon.

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Meta starts charging rent for peace and quiet. Meta has finally decided that peace and quiet isn’t free. In the UK, Facebook and Instagram users can now pay for ad-free feeds. The deal is £3 a month on the web or £4 on iOS and Android, because Apple and Google always take their bite. A second account gets a slight discount, which makes privacy sound like a family bundle plan. The UK regulator pushed Meta into this “consent or pay” setup, which basically means either let them track everything you do for personalized ads or hand over cash. For once, the regulators didn’t just write a stern letter — they forced Meta to tack on a subscription. Users in the EU have had this option since 2023, but at twice the price. The US, meanwhile, is still stuck with infinite ads for dropshipping scams, hair gummies, and whatever Shopify site Meta thinks you’ll click. Privacy is now officially a premium feature, and Meta gets paid either way.

October’s “Best Week” to buy a house. Realtor.com circled October 12–18 as the “Best Week” of 2025 to buy a house. More listings, slightly lower prices, and less competition make it the closest thing to Black Friday for mortgages. Inventory has finally climbed back near pre-pandemic levels, though we’re still millions of homes short thanks to years of underbuilding. Sellers are leaving houses on the market longer, which means buyers can actually negotiate instead of begging. Prices and rates are flat, not cheap, but at least not the bidding-war nightmare of 2021. It’s a small window where buyers hold the cards. If you’ve got cash and courage, mid-October might actually work in your favor.

EA sells for $52.5B in record-breaking buyout. Electronic Arts, the studio behind Madden NFL, Battlefield, and The Sims, just got bought for $52.5 billion in the biggest private equity deal ever. Silver Lake Partners, Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, and Jared Kushner’s Affinity Partners are teaming up to take the company private at $210 a share. Including debt, the deal is worth $55 billion, crushing the old 2007 record when TXU got scooped up for $32 billion. Saudi’s PIF already owned nearly 10% of EA and is rolling it into the buyout, doubling down on its gaming spree. The result: one of the most powerful names in video games is now basically controlled by Wall Street, Riyadh, and Trump’s in-law. A merger of The Sims and real-world Monopoly.

Wall Street moves past the Magnificent Seven. Wall Street is bored of the Magnificent Seven. Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, and Alphabet are still riding the AI wave, but Apple, Amazon, and Tesla are dragging their feet. Enter the remix: Broadcom, Oracle, and Palantir are suddenly the hottest tickets, with Oracle up 70% this year and Palantir up 138%. So now we’ve got the “Big Six,” the “Elite Eight,” the “Mag Ten” — basically stock market boy bands, constantly rebranded when someone falls off the charts. Cboe even launched futures on a new Magnificent 10 Index, swapping in Broadcom, Palantir, and AMD. The labels keep changing, but the story’s the same: AI has new winners, and Wall Street won’t shut up about them until it finds the next acronym.

Nearly $250M pours into New Zealand’s residency program. After slashing requirements in April, applications for the country’s “golden visa” tripled. Wealthy investors from the US, China, and Hong Kong lead the charge, pouring nearly $250 million into the program so far. The deal is simple: drop $5 million into a “growth” visa or $10 million into a “balanced” one, and you can snag residency in just three weeks instead of three years. The bonus perk is buying $5M+ homes, a carve-out from New Zealand’s 2018 foreign buyer ban. Lawyers are calling it a win for billionaires hunting tax breaks and lifestyle upgrades, while everyday New Zealanders are leaving in record numbers for better pay abroad. America sells residency with Trump’s $1M Gold Card, New Zealand does it with sheep views and real estate loopholes. Different packaging, same game.

One-Million-Year-Old Skull Rewrites Human Timeline

Scientists just dusted off a one-million-year-old skull in China and decided it wasn’t Homo erectus after all, but Denisovan—a mysterious human cousin who went extinct 30,000 years ago. The skull, dubbed Yunxian 2, was dug up back in 1990 but squashed flat, so researchers ran CT scans and rebuilt it digitally. Turns out, big-brained humans may have shown up half a million years earlier than anyone thought. That means Denisovans, Neanderthals, and early Homo sapiens may have all been awkwardly sharing the planet a million years ago. Picture three rival roommates stuck in the same cave, competing for mammoths. Some experts are still skeptical of the methods, but if it holds, the timeline of “us” just got a massive backdate.

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OpenAI turns on safety mode. OpenAI just strapped a seatbelt on ChatGPT. Over the weekend it started testing a new “safety routing system” that detects emotionally sensitive conversations and automatically switches to GPT-5, which the company says is better at handling high-stakes topics. On Monday, it also added parental controls. The changes follow lawsuits and backlash after incidents where older models like GPT-4o basically nodded along with dangerous or delusional thinking. GPT-5 was trained with a new “safe completions” system that aims to answer sensitive stuff carefully instead of just refusing. Experts call it progress, but some users are furious, saying OpenAI is treating grown adults like kids and watering down the experience. The company says it’s a 120-day trial run to get it right. In the meantime, ChatGPT will quietly flip models mid-conversation like a babysitter swapping out storybooks.

Anthropic drops a coding beast. Anthropic just dropped Claude Sonnet 4.5, its flashiest coding model yet. The company says it can now build “production-ready” apps instead of half-baked prototypes, and early trials show it running autonomously for 30 hours—spinning up databases, buying domains, and even doing a SOC 2 audit like a caffeine-fueled intern. Claude 4.5 is priced the same as its predecessor: $3 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. Developers already love Claude for engineering tasks, with Apple and Meta reportedly using it in-house, but OpenAI’s GPT-5 has recently been eating its lunch on benchmarks. Anthropic insists Sonnet 4.5 is the new state of the art, less sycophantic, harder to trick, and supposedly more “aligned.”

Freediver Goes Deeper Than the U.S. Housing Crisis

Russian freediver Alexey Molchanov just broke his own world record, sinking 126 meters (413 feet) into the Mediterranean on a single breath at the AIDA World Championships in Cyprus. Armed with only fins, a rope, and a headlamp, he disappeared for four minutes and 32 seconds before popping back up like it was nothing. Last year he hit 125 meters, so this was basically a personal best—just with more bragging rights and fewer oxygen molecules.

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Everest summited and skied in one breath. Polish climber Andrzej Bargiel just pulled off the kind of stunt that makes normal marathons look like a nap. He became the first person to climb Everest without bottled oxygen and then ski straight back down in one continuous run. It took him 16 brutal hours to get through the “death zone” above 8,000 meters, where oxygen is so thin your brain basically starts melting. More than 6,000 people have summited Everest, 200 without oxygen, and a few maniacs have skied parts of it—but nobody has ever done both in one shot. After two failed tries in 2019 and 2022, Bargiel finally nailed it, turning the world’s tallest mountain into his personal ski slope.

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TikTok of the day: watch here

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