The online brokerage firm that was home to meme stock mania is growing up, and that means getting its own plastic…or, in this case, gold.

This week, Robinhood launched its shiny new Gold Card, the latest of the company’s efforts to expand its financial services offerings beyond its commission-free stock trading app. The no-annual-fee card will only be available to Robinhood users who subscribe to its Gold program, which costs $5/month or $50/year.

The card’s main draw: It offers 3% cashback on all purchases—not just on certain categories like almost all other credit cards—plus 5% back on travel booked through Robinhood’s portal (and no foreign transaction fees). Customers can invest that cash via their Robinhood brokerage accounts, but the credit card will live on a separate app.

Robinhood will also give solid 10-karat gold versions of the new credit card to the first 5,000 customers who get 10 friends to sign up for a Gold membership.

All about the long game

Robinhood doesn’t just want to compete with popular rivals like the Chase Sapphire cards—it wants to become the everything platform for personal finance. “The goal is for all of our customers to hold all of their assets in Robinhood, and for all of their transactions to go through it,” CEO Vlad Tenev told Bloomberg this week.

• Last week, Robinhood became available in the UK, operating outside the US for the first time.
• Robinhood introduced retirement savings last year and does a 3% IRA match for Gold members. As of last month, ~500,000 accounts were open and deposits surpassed $3 billion, according to Tenev.

Zoom out: Robinhood follows Apple in releasing a no-fee credit card. As of January, 12+ million people have Apple Cards, which offer 2% cash back on all purchases made with Apple Pay.—ML

People scroll on their smartphones; they get depressed. And this contributes to 25% of American adults suffering from some kind of diagnosable medical condition every year.

After seeing their mother struggle with depression, brothers and Forbes 30 Under 30 winners Steve and Daniel Lee started Aura, the all-in-one mental wellness marketplace that already has 8m+ users and 100k+ paying monthly subscribers.

Aura has already raised $10m+, including investments from legendary Silicon Valley investors Cowboy Ventures and Berkeley SkyDeck, as well as from executives at Spotify, Facebook, Masterclass, and Apple.

Their new investment round just opened to fuel internationalization and is filling up fast.

Join over 2k people investing in Aura. Only one day left for 5% bonus shares—campaign ends on April 29.

Disney and DeSantis squashed their beef. Much like Buzz and Woody, Disney and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis are setting aside their differences and becoming friends—or at least parties not actively suing each other. The company and the board hand-picked by the governor to run the special district where Disney World sits after Disney spoke out against the state’s so-called Don’t Say Gay law have reached a settlement in their legal battle. The deal wipes out changes to the board’s power and the company’s development plans that Disney pushed through just before the new board was seated. Instead, Disney will move forward with an earlier plan to expand the theme park.

Amazon ups its investment in AI. In the e-commerce giant’s largest outside investment since its founding, Amazon said yesterday that it’s pouring another $2.75 billion (on top of the $1.25 billion it already invested) into Anthropic, maker of ChatGPT competitor Claude. With the race for AI dominance heating up, Anthropic, which also counts Google and Salesforce among its backers, has raked in over $10+ billion in investments over the last year, including the latest one from Amazon, per CNBC. Meanwhile, bankrupt FTX recently reached a deal to sell off its $844 million stake in Anthropic, mostly to a UAE sovereign wealth fund.

Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, one-time VP candidate, has died. The centrist four-term senator from Connecticut died yesterday from complications of a fall at age 82. As Al Gore’s running mate in 2000, Lieberman was the first Jewish nominee for vice president from a major party. He mounted an unsuccessful bid for the presidential nomination in 2004, and was defeated in the 2006 Democratic primary for the nomination for his senate seat—but won the seat in the general election anyway as an independent. After retiring from the Senate in 2013, he helped lead the group No Labels, which has said it intends to field a candidate in the 2024 presidential contest.

On the heels of an NBA investigation into allegations of prop betting irregularities involving a Toronto Raptors player, the NCAA has set its sights on preventing similar scandals.

NCAA President Charlie Baker issued a statement yesterday calling on states to prohibit prop betting on college sports games, citing concerns about maintaining the integrity of the game and the safety of student-athletes. Prop betting allows bettors to wager on players’ individual stats rather than on the outcome of games.

• Baker has opposed college prop betting since he became NCAA president last year. He’s said that legal sports gambling is increasing stress on college players.
• Some student-athletes have been harassed by prop bettors for failing to make them money.

Prop bets on college sports, which accounted for just 1.4% of total DraftKings wagers last year, are only fully legal in Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Wyoming, and Washington, DC.

NCAA gambling scandals have already begun: Temple University, Iowa State, and the University of Alabama have all been implicated to varying degrees in betting improprieties within the last year.

In other betting news…the Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that online betting VIP programs are facing federal scrutiny.—CC

Follow the data . AI has changed a lot—and Snowflake’s here to break the data down. Uncover the insights in the free report: Snowflake Data Trends 2024. It explores key trends, including how 9k+ leading organizations are building toward advanced AI success. Read the deets.

Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioral economics, died yesterday at 90 years old. He’s best known for applying psychology to economics and uncovering biases and mental shortcuts that make people act irrationally, as he chronicled in his best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

Kahneman, along with his long-time collaborator and friend Amos Tversky, developed “prospect theory,” or loss-aversion theory, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 (which he shared with fellow economist Vernon Smith). The idea is that people value losses and gains differently, so we feel more bad about losing $100 than we feel good about making the same amount.

He applied this theory to investors, who had previously been considered rational decision-makers. It shows up elsewhere, too—for example, golfers putt better when they’re facing the loss of a stroke than when they might gain one.

A few other biases he identified that are probably buried in your brain (whether or not you learned them in Psych 101):

• The “peak-end rule” that people remember an experience primarily based on how they felt at its most intense moment and the final part of it. It’s why you consider a whole vacation good if the last day was good—or the opposite.
• The conjunction fallacy where people erroneously think the probability of two things being true is more likely than just one thing, which the famous “Linda the Bank Teller” problem illustrates.

For further reading: Kahneman and Tversky were the center of Michael Lewis’s 2016 book, The Undoing Project.—MM

Stat: Japan’s aging population is shifting even its diaper business. Japanese diaper company Oji Holdings recently announced that it’ll stop producing for babies domestically and will make adult versions instead—though it will continue making products for babies’ tushes in Malaysia and Indonesia. The decision reflects what’s been happening in the Japanese market for a while now: In 2011, the nation’s biggest diaper brand, Unicharm, said adult versions had outsold baby ones. And it’s grown more acute since then. Last year, Japan recorded its fewest annual births since the 19th century, and the proportion of its population over age 80 grew to more than 10%, per the BBC. Japan’s growing adult diaper market is estimated at ~$2 billion.

Quote: “This is an unprecedented situation and a big deal. It’s not a huge change in the Earth’s rotation that’s going to lead to some catastrophe or anything, but it is something notable.”

Feel dizzy? It might be because the Earth is spinning faster than it used to. OK, you can’t really feel the change, but to keep our clocks running precisely, we may need to have a “negative leap second” (where clocks will skip a second) in 2029, according to a paper published in Nature yesterday. The geophysicist behind the paper—who explained to the Associated Press that this is most unusual because to reconcile astronomical and atomic time, we usually add seconds—claims that climate change has delayed the need for a strange subtraction because the melting of the polar ice caps has counteracted some of the extra rotational speed by slowing Earth down with extra ocean water.

Read: An architect’s vision for cities that float on water. (The New Yorker)

You might know that Nestlé makes a ton of the snacks in your pantry or that Johnson & Johnson is all over your medicine cabinet, but lower-profile industry titans lurk behind many of the other products that have become part of our daily lives. If you’ve used a zipper, put on glasses, or walked by a bus stop today, you’ve probably encountered one.

Check out our dive into three brands you might be accidentally loyal to here.