To hear some Silicon Valley insiders tell it, California is on the verge of economic suicide. This November, Californians will likely vote on a ballot initiative that would levy a one-off tax on the wealth of about 200 of the state's richest residents. Garry Tan, the CEO of the start-up incubator Y Combinator, posted on X that the measure would 'kill and eat the golden goose of technology startups in California.' Investors and tech executives are threatening to leave the state. Governor Gavin Newsom, who has been angling for a centrist presidential pivot, has vowed to 'do what I have to do' to stop the initiative. Many progressives, however, see the billionaire tax as a long-overdue effort to finally force the ultra-wealthy to pay their fair share. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, calls it a 'model that should be emulated throughout the country.' In their telling, hyperbolic claims about the death of innovation and entrepreneurship in California are a smoke screen for the fact that billionaires simply don't want to pay higher taxes....

Beyond the headlines about generative AI, what do leaders really need to know' In this insightful video, AI experts Thomas H. Davenport and Randy Bean explain why most AI investments aren't paying off yet ' and what leading companies are doing differently. AI investment continues to fuel the U.S. economy, but many expect it to slow down dramatically in 2026. Agentic AI was the hot topic of 2025, but it remains an expensive early-stage experiment that's not quite ready for mainstream use. What does this mean for leaders looking to guide their teams' Get a better sense of how to guide your organization's AI efforts with expert advice from Davenport and Bean. For a deeper look at these trends, read their full article, 'Five Trends in AI and Data Science for 2026.' Thomas H. Davenport is the President's Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management and faculty director of the Metropoulos Institute for Technology and Entrepreneurship at Babson College, and a fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. His latest book is The New Science of Customer Relationships: Delivering the One-to-One Promise With AI (Wiley, 2025)....

In 2013, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Managing Director Bill Aulet published 'Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup,' which has since sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been used to teach entrepreneurship at universities around the world. One MIT course where it's used is 15.366 (Climate and Energy Ventures), where instructors have tweaked the framework over the years. In a new book, 'Disciplined Entrepreneurship for Climate and Energy Ventures,' they codify those changes and provide a new blueprint for entrepreneurs working in the climate and energy spaces. MIT News spoke with lead author and Trust Center Entrepreneur-in-Residence Ben Soltoff, who wrote the book with Aulet, Senior Lecturer Tod Hynes, Senior Lecturer Francis O'Sullivan, and Lecturer Libby Wayman. Soltoff explains why climate and energy entrepreneurship is so challenging and talks about some of the new steps in the book. A: It's a broad umbrella. These ventures aren't all in a specific industry or structured in the same way. They could be software, they could be hardware, or they could be deep tech coming out of labs. This book is also written for people working in government, large corporations, or nonprofits. Each of those folks can benefit from the entrepreneurial framework in this book. We very intentionally refer to them as climate and energy ventures in the book, not just climate and energy startups....

'At MIT, we believe in the transformative power of learning by doing, and there's no better example than UROP,' says MIT President Sally Kornbluth, who attended the mixer with Provost Anantha Chandrakasan and Chancellor Melissa Nobles. 'The energy at the inaugural UROP mixer was exhilarating, and I'm delighted that students now have this easy way to explore different paths to the frontiers of research.' The event gave students the chance to explore internships and undergraduate research opportunities ' in fields ranging from artificial intelligence to the life sciences to the arts, and beyond ' all in one place, with approximately 150 researchers from labs available to discuss the projects and answer questions in real time. The offices of the Chancellor and Provost co-hosted the event, which the UROP office helped coordinate. First-year student Isabell Luo recently began a UROP project in the Living Matter lab led by Professor Rafael Gomez-Bombarelli, where she is benchmarking machine-learned interatomic potentials that simulate chemical reactions at the molecular level and exploring fine-tuning strategies to improve their accuracy. She's passionate about AI and machine learning, eco-friendly design, and entrepreneurship, and was attending the UROP mixer to find more 'real-world' projects to work on....