It has never been easier to trick yourself into paying $250 for a pair of jeans, because Apple rolled out its buy now, pay later (BNPL) service yesterday. The feature, Apple Pay Later, was introduced to randomly selected Apple Pay users and will become available to more customers over the next few months.

How it works: When using Apple Pay to buy something, users can pay for $50–$1,000 purchases in four payments over six weeks with no interest or fees.

It’s a weird time to get into BNPL

Rewind to peak Covid, when digital layaway companies were hotter than matching sweatsuits. In 2021, Swedish BNPL company Klarna was Europe’s most valuable fintech startup at a valuation of $45.6 billion. The same year, Block (formerly Square) bought the Australian BNPL company Afterpay for a staggering $30 billion.

But eye-popping valuations didn’t stick around for long. By mid-2022, rising interest rates strained BNPL companies’ business models, and regulators started cracking down on potentially predatory lending practices. Plus, the BNPL field has gotten more crowded than an Old Navy during the 2010 $1 flip-flop sale as established companies like Walmart and PayPal tried to cash in on the gold rush.

But now, the state of BNPL looks more like…an Old Navy the day after the $1 flip-flop sale. Klarna’s valuation plummeted 85% to just $6.7 billion in a July 2022 funding round. And when the short seller Hindenburg accused Block of being ultra-sketchy in a scathing report last week, it said that acquiring Afterpay was actually a very bad idea, btw, because the company was “designed in a way that avoided responsible lending rules.”

Apple sees opportunity among the ruins

While unprofitable BNPL startups watch their VC drips dry up, the tech behemoth is cool with losing money on its Apple Pay Later feature for a while. It’s got iPhone money. And Apple has been playing the long game in its ultimate goal of replacing your leather wallet completely. In October 2014, when Apple Pay was first introduced, 3% of retailers in the US used its contactless payment service. Now, over 85% of retailers accept Apple Pay.—MM

Nashville shooting update: The suspect who fatally shot six people, including three children, at The Covenant School on Monday had bought seven firearms legally in recent years that they hid from their parents, and was in treatment for an unspecified emotional disorder, police said. Between 1966 and 2019, 77% of mass shooters bought at least one of the guns they used in their attacks legally, according to the National Institute of Justice. You can read about the lives of the victims of the Nashville school shooting here.

An appeals court reinstated the conviction of Serial’s Adnan Syed. Yesterday, a Maryland appeals court reinstated Syed’s conviction for the murder of his former high school girlfriend, ruling that the victim’s family should have been given more notice before the hearing on the state’s motion to vacate his conviction. Syed, whose efforts to overturn his conviction gained national prominence via the massively popular podcast Serial, spent 23 years in prison while maintaining his innocence. The court’s decision will not necessarily send Syed back there, as it gives the parties 60 days to decide how to move forward.

Sam Bankman-Fried charged with bribing Chinese officials. US prosecutors added another indictment to SBF’s already extensive list of criminal counts, accusing the FTX founder of bribing Chinese government officials with ~$40 million worth of crypto payments. Prosecutors claim that SBF directed employees to send payments to at least one Chinese official in exchange for China freeing up frozen accounts connected to his hedge fund, Alameda Research. The US says those accounts contained more than $1 billion in crypto.

Accountants, survey researchers, and interpreters could see a sizable chunk of their day-to-day work get outsourced to ChatGPT, according to a study published by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

If you’re not eager to compete with a language model for a job, you might want to consider physical labor. The study found that for tire repairers, meatpackers, and athletes, ChatGPT was about as impactful as a degree in metaverse real estate management.

Ultimately, the study found the most GPT-able jobs to be those performed by knowledge workers, particularly ones who spend their days coding and writing .

The paper stopped short of predicting how quickly typing prompts into AI tools could become part of the workflow of various jobs. But it’s already happening at some workplaces: One digital artist went viral recently by lamenting how their job went from creating original art to entering prompts into the text-to-image AI app Midjourney and editing its output in a matter of weeks.

Looking ahead…almost 1 in 5 US employees could have at least half of their work tasks disrupted by ChatGPT, per the study. And Goldman Sachs estimates that AI chatbots might affect 300 million full-time workers across the major economies.—SK

The Australian food company Vow said yesterday that it’s made a meatball from the extinct woolly mammoth.

This wasn’t the result of a freezer cleanup 10,000 years overdue. Vow “grows” unconventional meat in a lab to offer a protein alternative to slaughtered animals and reduce the environmental impact of animal agriculture.

To make the mammoth meatball, Vow took the DNA sequence of a mammoth’s muscle protein, added a splash of elephant DNA, and then inserted that completed gene into a sheep muscle cell, where it was grown (along with many more sheep genes) into 400 grams of meat. Add salt to taste.

So, why mammoth? The animal probably wasn’t chosen because it’s particularly tender or goes well with marinara—unfortunately, Neanderthal Guy Fieri didn’t leave a review.

Instead, the mammoth was selected to generate marketing buzz around Vow’s mission. The idea was the brainchild of creative agency Wunderman Thompson, whose global chief creative officer,​​ Bas Korsten, told the Guardian that mammoth meatballs were intended to “start a conversation” about the harmful environmental impact of meat consumption.

Looking ahead…the mammoth meatball won’t be coming to an Ikea near you anytime soon. But Vow is hoping to get its first cultivated meat product, Japanese quail, sold in restaurants in Singapore this year.—NF

Stat: The Marshall Islands is the only UN-recognized country without a national soccer team, according to ESPN. Yes, even Vatican City (which is one-seventh the size of Central Park) has a national soccer team. But some Marshall Islands soccer boosters are aiming to establish a team and one day upset Brazil at the World Cup. Okay, maybe their ambitions don’t extend that far, but they do want to use soccer to raise awareness about climate change’s impacts on this cluster of islands in the Pacific Ocean. Projections show that 40% of the capital island of Majuro will be underwater by 2030.

Quote: “SVB’s failure is a textbook case of mismanagement.”

Michael Barr, the Fed’s vice chair for supervision, and other financial regulators testified on Capitol Hill yesterday about the two biggest bank blowups since the financial crisis. Lawmakers were keen to blame both Silicon Valley Bank’s executives, who made risky bets that collapsed in value, and regulators, who may have been asleep at the wheel. No consensus was reached on how to prevent the next bank from imploding.

Read: The impossible job of being a Premier League referee. (The Guardian)

Before there was Drippy Pope…there was Balenciaga Harry Potter.

The gift of knowledge: Here’s a list of free educational resources on the internet, broken down by category.

Sure to spark a debate: The best debut albums ever, ranked.

What are we missing? Here are nine trends that may be overlooked by the media but will be studied by historians.

Work smarter: Finance executives are addressing talent gaps and replacing manual tasks with AI. Aspiring finance leaders: Join Workday and Fortune on April 12 for a CFO-led webinar preparing finance teams to succeed with advanced technologies. Don’t miss out.*

Build with confidence: Ditch the guesswork + get practical, actionable advice on how to grow your business when you check out the new episode of The Crazy Ones, sponsored by Intuit Mailchimp.*

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Tech Brew connected with industry experts to address the biggest questions in cybersecurity and discuss the challenges created by our increasingly digital economy.

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Word Search: Today’s puzzle brings the wonders of the world to your computer (or phone). Play the Word Search here.

Final Four trivia

Teams from eight universities are competing in the men’s and women’s Final Four games this weekend: LSU, Iowa, South Carolina, Virginia Tech, UConn, Florida Atlantic, San Diego State, and Miami.

Two of these schools are located in their state’s capital. Can you name them?

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