The guy who helped construct the computer company in a garage-to-billionaire pipeline has put his money where his mouth is. Bill Gates, a proponent of competitive clean energy sources to combat climate change, broke ground on a next-gen nuclear power facility yesterday outside a small Wyoming town.

TerraPower, a company Gates co-founded in 2008 to boost private nuclear investment, is building a first-of-its-kind reactor that it thinks will usher in a new era of scalable clean energy.

What’s the big deal? TerraPower’s new reactor isn’t like old reactors—it’s smaller, cheaper, and may stand a shot at being finished…unlike new traditional reactors, whose death certificates are usually written before they even start running due to delays and cost overruns. The US has only built two reactors in the last 30 years, costing $35 billion, but TerraPower sees itself as #builtdifferent.

• The TerraPower design calls for liquid sodium rather than water to cool the reactor, meaning the power station won’t need extensive (and expensive) heavy piping.
• The reactor will also be able to adjust its output, making it easier to coexist with wind and solar sources and take advantage of selling energy to the grid.

Digging deep

Gates maintains that he’s not involved in the nuclear project to make more money. “I’m involved in TerraPower because we need to build a lot of these reactors,” he said in an interview.

The project still has plenty of unknowns, including whether the reactor will actually be cheaper to build (some critics say it won’t) and whether the Nuclear Regulatory Commission will approve its unorthodox engineering plan.

You need deep pockets to pull this off…but with some of the deepest pockets propping up the project, there’s a chance it can work. Gates has poured $1 billion into the project so far, raised another $830 million, and said he’s prepared to stand by it financially.—CC

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Hunter Biden convicted of criminal gun charges. A Delaware jury found the president’s son guilty on all three felony charges against him over his saying on a form that he was not using illegal drugs when he purchased a gun in 2018. Hunter Biden faces a maximum of 25 years in prison but, as a first-time offender, he is unlikely to receive a harsh sentence. The verdict comes during a tense election season where the president’s GOP opponent, Donald Trump, was also recently convicted of felonies. President Joe Biden said he would “continue to respect the judicial process as Hunter considers an appeal.”

Looks like Skydance won’t be buying Paramount. Proving that Paramount Global doesn’t save the drama for its movies, Chair Shari Redstone has reportedly cut off merger talks with Skydance Media after the companies previously agreed to broad terms. Instead, Redstone will likely seek a buyer for Paramount’s controlling shareholder, National Amusements (which she owns), without a separate merger for Paramount, according to the Wall Street Journal. Paramount’s stock fell nearly 8% after the news broke.

Chiquita found liable for deaths caused by paramilitary it financed in Colombia. The term “banana republic” was not coined to sell blazers: A Florida jury ordered Chiquita to pay $38.3 million to the families of people killed by the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group it funded during Colombia’s civil war. Although many similar cases have been brought over the company’s relationship with the group—which Chiquita admitted to paying in a 2007 plea deal with the US, which considers it a terrorist group—the jury’s decision marks the first time Chiquita’s been found responsible for the AUC’s actions. Chiquita plans to appeal and said the claims have “no legal basis.”

When Zillowing a home to find out just how loaded an acquaintance is, the price tag you see is only the tip of the iceberg. On top of mortgage payments, there’s the cost of owning a home, a number that surged in the past four years, according to a recent Bankrate analysis.

Even if someone has a suitcase full of cash to cover a home’s entire purchase price (the median for which hit $436k in March, per Redfin), they’d still face a lifetime of regular expenses.

• Owners of a single-family home can expect to pay an average of $18.1k a year for home insurance, property taxes, maintenance, as well as bills that renters pay too, like energy, cable, and internet. The overall tab is 26% more than in 2020.
• Annual homeownership costs vary by location: They’re highest in Hawaii ($29k), California ($28.8k), and Massachusetts ($26.3k), and lowest in Kentucky ($11.6k), Arkansas ($11.7k), and Mississippi ($11.9k).

Rising home insurance premiums and maintenance are the main culprits for the increased cost of the American Dream, Bankrate analyst Jeff Ostrowski told CNN. Insurance premiums have skyrocketed, particularly in areas with more frequent natural disasters.

A way to avoid the steep cost…is to buy an apartment or a multifamily home, which might be cheaper to own than a single-family property.—SK

Fast food’s superpower. Fast-food prices have more than doubled in the past decade. But Miso Robotics has the solution. They revolutionize kitchens with AI-powered robots that can 4x restaurant profit margins. Miso is working with brands like White Castle, Jack in the Box, and Nvidia. Now their breakthrough tech can boost this $1t industry’s profits by $24b/year. And you can become a Miso shareholder for a limited time.

The app that has seen way too many of your desk lunches is getting a new owner. French mobile game and app publisher Voodoo announced yesterday that it has acquired pandemic darling BeReal for €500 million (~$537 million).

The French-founded app prided itself on capturing users’ authentic daily experiences by allowing only one post per day and providing no path to influencer status. But it turns out authenticity isn’t all that alluring to new users.

• BeReal snagged 3.25 million downloads in the first half of 2022, making Instagram nervous enough to start working on a potential copycat.
• Then, the app’s daily active users plateaued at around 25 million for the last two years as the company burned through its VC funding, according to Business Insider.

So, what attracted Voodoo to a stagnating photo-sharing app? Voodoo CEO Alexandre Yazdi said a majority of current users log in to the app six days a week. Voodoo plans to stuff seamlessly flow ads into BeReal and add more features to the platform.

Big picture: The French tech scene is becoming known for more than long lunches. Paris-based startup Mistral AI—OpenAI’s European competitor—closed a $640 million Series B funding round yesterday that valued the company at $6 billion.—MM

If you find yourself passing through Luling, TX, needing a clean bathroom or a gas pump you won’t have to wait in line behind other cars to use, you’re in luck: Buc-ee’s opened the world’s largest convenience store there this week. The store boasts 75,000+ square feet and 120 gas pumps. That makes the new store bigger than the 74,707 square foot Buc-ees’s in Sevierville, TN, which was previously the world’s biggest, and much larger than a typical store, which the National Association of Convenience Stores says is less than 5,000 square feet. Plus, it sells barbeque and Beaver Nuggets.