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At the core of the ongoing government shutdown is a fight over the decision to end subsidies that let some 12 million Americans and legal immigrants get affordable healthcare coverage. To understand why this is so important, BBTW editor Peter Green spoke with long-time health care executive John Driscoll, who is now board chair of the University of Connecticut’s health care system.

John Driscoll:Right now, over 7 million people will lose their subsidies, and around 5 million will lose their health insurance completely. And the way the reductions work is you’re reducing the higher coverage levels, which typically are the healthier people. At a time when health insurance costs are going to go up, you’re taking the better risks and throwing them off the rolls, which will increase the cost going forward for healthcare in general. In addition to destabilizing the marketplace by taking so many people off the rolls so quickly, you’re also changing the risk profile of the underlying covered lives.

What they’re doing is cutting the ACA subsidies for over 400% of the federal poverty level [Currently $32,150 for a family of four]. As you increase the number of people who make more money in the subsidy pool, your risk profile decreases. In addition, with 5 million people losing coverage, what happens is they don’t stop getting care; they just get care when they’re very sick.

Those 5 million-ish people will end up accessing care through emergency rooms, getting hospitalized at the highest possible cost level. We know that uninsured people are 40% more likely to die because they don’t have access to primary care or specialists, and only half of them take the drugs that they’re prescribed. It’s a doom loop. 

Obamacare was really a public-private compact to extend coverage, but without funding, it’s not like the private sector is going to run in. And the irony here is that two-thirds of those who are the beneficiaries of enhanced subsidies are living in red states.

We don’t solve high costs in the healthcare system by dumping people off of insurance, particularly when the trade is lower taxes for millionaires and billionaires. Your mortality is much higher if you’re uninsured.

Uncovered people are by definition more expensive. And you have to solve the problem of extremely high prescription drug costs, and then invest in chronic care and chronic care support. If you cover everyone and can bring down the cost of prescription drugs, and you start to actually invest in integrated chronic care, you could substantially reduce the cost trend. 

You give me a budget, but I get to manage all the costs. The only way you reduce the excess costs and the excess trend is if you manage all the costs through one clinical entity that has its patient care at the center. Everybody’s got to get covered and everybody’s got to have access to care they can afford. Otherwise more people are going to suffer. And that shouldn’t be true in the richest country in the world.

This interview has been condensed and edited.

—Peter S. Green

• Forget the Singularity, it’s the Circularity. Are the multiple trillions of dollars in AI spending a virtuous circle, or just a shell game of circular financing, where Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 1.42% ) invests in OpenAI, which then uses the money to buy…Nvidia chips? That’s increasingly what it looks like. The whole machine is built on the premise that a lot more companies will be using a lot more AI, and that they’ll need huge data centers, using vast numbers of chips to make it all happen. But if the demand isn’t there fast enough, or isn’t even there at all, that’s a lot of debt that won’t get serviced, and massive capital expenditures that won’t get amortized. It’s “a bit odd,” hedgie Jim Chanos wrote on X after a recent deal between chipmaker AMD $AMD ( ▲ 1.43% ) and OpenAI, “that when the narrative is ‘demand for compute is infinite,’ the sellers keep subsidizing the buyers?” 
• I phone, you phone, we all use our iPhone: Apple $AAPL ( ▲ 0.52% ) shares hit a record Monday after a report that sales of the new AI-powered iPhone 17 outsold the iPhone 16 by 14% in its first 10 days on the market. Shares rose about 4% on the news before dropping slightly, and Apple briefly had a market cap above $4 trillion.
• Sing along with Netflix  $NFLX ( ▼ 0.05% ) : The streaming app said third-quarter revenue rose 17%, and profits rose 8%, largely on the back of tween sing-along sensation “KPop Demon Hunters,” the Sony Animation film released direct to streaming that’s gotten 325 million views since its late August release. The movie also sparked a cinema renaissance, as the top box office draw on its one-weekend theatrical release. Merchandising deals with Mattel and Hasbro were announced this week, and co-CEO Ted Sarandos said sing-along parties were boosting viewership. But despite the good news, higher expenses and some tax issues mean operating margins are falling, and strong competition from Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 1.46% ) , Alphabet’s YouTube $GOOG ( ▲ 1.0% ) , and Paramount $PSKY ( ▲ 0.63% ) sent shares down nearly 10 percent after the earnings report.
• It’s coming for your job, and it’s not AI: Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 1.46% ) plans to replace 600,000 jobs by 2023 and replace them with robots, according to internal company documents viewed by the New York Times. The company now has 1.2 million workers, and the documents show that filling new jobs with machines would save 30 cents on every package. The end goal is to automate 75% of its operations. Amazon doesn’t release the number of items it ships from its warehouses, but it processed 6.3 billion U.S. delivery orders in 2024. Amazon called the documents “incomplete.” If Amazon goes ahead, warned Nobel-prizewinning economist Daren Acemoglu of MIT, “one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator.”
• AI, yei yei! AI is coming for your job, at Meta $META ( ▼ 0.03% ) . Chief AI officer Alexandr Wang just fired nearly 600 employees, according to a memo seen by CNBC. The cuts largely target people working in AI before CEO Mark Zuckerberg poured $14.3 billion into Wang’s Scale AI, and appear to cement Wang’s role as Meta’s chief AI geek. With the cuts, Meta’s got about 3,000 people working on AI, in what it calls the Superintelligence Labs. Not that this will do much to hurt Wang. Forbes says’s he’s worth $3.2 billion. 
• Luddites or prophets? Top tech pioneers and AI leaders have signed on to a public statement warning that super-intelligent AI could destroy the world, and urging a halt in AI progress until there’s a consensus that it can be built and controlled safely. AT least 26,000 people have signed the call, including Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, Virgin founder Richard Branson, and AI pioneers including Yoshua Bengio, Geoff Hinton, and  Stuart Russell. Even Trump-friendly media figures Steve Bannon and Glenn Beck, and of course, the singer Kate Bush, have joined the call.

• A would-be mogul sinks Warner: That’s it for media dealmaker David Zaslav, who merged the Discovery Channel with Warner Brothers to create Warner Bros. Discovery $WBD ( ▲ 3.73% ) , and made himself one of the powerful moguls of Hollywood, lording over everything from DC Comics and HBO to CNN and Warner Bros. Pictures. Alas, the deal failed to produce the promised results, and on Tuesday, Zaslav said what Hollywood’s known for months — the shop’s for sale. Chief among prospective buyers is Larry Ellison’s son David, who just last month completed the purchase of Paramount Studios and CBS from fellow nepo-mogul Shari Restone. So far, WBD has rejected three offers from Paramount $PSKY ( ▲ 0.63% ) , the last for $24 a share. Analysts say the studio’s worth at least $30 a share. Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 1.46% ) , Netflix $NFLX ( ▼ 0.05% ) , YouTube (part of Alphabet’s Google- verse) $GOOG ( ▲ 1.0% ) , and even NBC-Universal owner Comcast $CMCSA ( ▲ 0.15% ) are also reported to be bidding for all or part of WBD. WBD shares are down some 60% since Zaslav took over in 2021. Some of that’s due to a changing entertainment industry, but a lot of it’s due to the debt taken on to combine the two companies and some really bad decisions, like losing the exclusive rights to NBA games. What happens next will depend a lot on whether regulators will allow more consolidation, and those regulators happen to be the same ones who just approved Ellison’s purchase of Paramount.

• Chip Challenged: A move by the Dutch government last month to take control of Chinese-owned chipmaker Nexperia has rattled the car industry. Nexperia chips are used to control everything from lights to brakes, and the Dutch takeover, for national security reasons, prompted the Chinese government to ban the export of some Nexperia chips that aren’t made in Holland. Mercedes $MBGAF ( ▲ 0.79% ) said it’s secured a short-term supply of chips, and Volkswagen $VLKAY ( ▼ 0.99% ) said it could be forced to temporarily halt some production. Shares in both Mercedes and VW were down more than 2% on Wednesday. 
• U.S. EV maker Rivian $RIVN ( ▲ 1.32% )  says it’s laying off more than 600 people, about 4% of its workforce, hammered by the expiration of the EV tax credit and changes in the sale of climate credits, which could cost it $100 million. Rivian’s EV sales grew 32% to 13,201 vehicles in the third quarter, and it plans to introduce a lower-cost, $45,000 SUV “soon.” 
• GM $GM ( ▼ 0.54% )  surprised analysts and investors with higher-than-expected revenue and profits in the third quarter, pushing its stock up 15% Tuesday, its best day since 2020. Tariffs on imported medium- and heavy-duty trucks helped, the company said, but the numbers don’t include a $1.6 billion charge for cutting back EV production. Nor do they include the cost of killing 1,200 jobs in Canada and halting production there of the BrightDrop electric delivery van, after 25% tariffs on Canadian-made vehicles and no more subsidies for EVs. 

• Meme gets cooked: The latest meme stock to grab the market’s attention, Beyond Meat $BYND ( ▼ 17.04% ) , the faux-burger brand that’s been unable to compete on price with he real thing, soared 625% from Monday to Wednesday, topping out at $7.69 before crashing back down some 60% to around $3 on Thursday morning. What drove the stock? First, it was added to a meme index, but second was a big short squeeze. That’s still left the shares up 400% in the past five days. 
• Kelce Koaster? Shakeup fund Jana Partners has teamed with TayTay fiancé Travis Kelce to buy a stake in Six Flags $FUN ( ▲ 2.04% ) , promising to revive the stalled theme park operator. Kelce says he grew up going to theme parks back home in Ohio, and wants to help breathe some life into the tiring brand. Six Flags shares rose nearly 20% on the news. 
• All bets are on: The NHL has a licensing deal with sports betting markets known euphemistically as prediction markets, Kalshi and Polymarket. The deal lets the two use NHL logos and data. But rival gambling sites, like FanDuel and DraftKings, say the prediction markets violate state gambling laws and are too loosely regulated. The NHL hit back saying that the more access fans have to betting, the better for everyone. Prediction markets say they’re really option exchanges and are regulated by the federal Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The Feds have been concerned about gambling on games, and on Thursday arrested Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups for allegedly taking part in a complex Mafia-linked sports gambling scheme. What are the odds?

• Tariff costs: A new study released by S&P Global says two-thirds of the cost of the Trump tariffs is going to be passed along to consumers, and the total price: $1.2 trillion for 2025 alone. The rest will hit business. “Tariffs and trade barriers act as taxes on supply chains and divert cash to governments; logistics delays and freight costs compound the effect,” wrote the report’s author, Daniel Sandberg.

• Tesla’s tumble: It was not a good quarter for Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 1.93% ) , even as expiring EV credits pushed many American drivers to finally buy that Model Y. Price cuts slashed profits by 37%, as overall revenue rose 12% to $28 billion, with revenue at the battery storage unit up 44%. But investors’ doubts about Tesla’s ability to keep up the sales growth without a new model sent shares down 5% by midday Thursday. Musk said in a conference call on Wednesday that self-driving cars will power Tesla to a record. “Honestly, it will be like a shockwave,” he said. The real shockwave may be Elon’s pay package: Next month, shareholders will vote on a proposed $1 trillion pay package — awarded if Tesla hits some gargantuan targets over the next decade. Shareholder advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis are urging a no vote, but Musk says he’ll walk if shareholders turn him down. The proposal would leave him with 25% of the company, up from his current 13%. Still, he’s not hurting. He was worth $487 billion on Wednesday, according to Forbes. 
• Petty cash: Trying to find more cash flow at his companies, Musk has had SpaceX and xAI buy fleets of Tesla cybertrucks. With a production geared for 250,000 trucks a year, and sales that have fallen below 20,000 trucks, that may be the only way to clear a buildup of inventory. 
• X-ing out SpaceX? Travelling at the speed of Elon may not be fast enough for NASA, whose chief, Sean Duffy said the agency could go back to the moon using lunar landers not made by Musk, noting that SpaceX is far behind schedule on building a viable moon lander. “We’re not going to wait for one company,” Duffy said on Monday. “Sean Dummy is trying to kill NASA,” said Musk.
• Secret Sats? What’s that secret SpaceX network of spy satellites being run for the U.S.’s National Reconnaissance Office? That’s what amateur satellite tracker Scott Tilley says he’s discovered from his home in Canada’s British Columbia. In a published paper, Tilley says he’s found radio transmissions from the Starshield Constellation using low-tech radio spectrum to beam detailed photos back to Earth. Crucially, Tilley says he’s found “no evidence of authorization” to use the bandwidth, suggesting it’s not meant to be noticed. Shhhh!

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NEW YORK (AP) — Tesla reported a fourth straight decline in quarterly profit even as sales rose, triggering a drop in its shares in after-hours trading.

The car company run by Elon Musk reported third-quarter earnings plunged 37% to $1.4 billion, or 39 cents a share, from $2.2 billion, or 62 cents a share, a year earlier. That marked the fourth quarter in a row that profit dropped. And even the revenue rise, a welcome relief from a sales plunge earlier in the year due to anti-Musk boycotts, came with significant caveat: Customers rushed to take advantage of a $7,500 federal EV tax credit before it expired on Oct. 1, possibly stealing sales from the current quarter.

Tesla shares fell 3.5% in after-hours trading.

In a conference call with investors Musk sought to shift attention away from selling cars to other businesses: its driverless robotaxi service, its AI product and its Optimus robots for the home and factories.

“It’ll seem so real, that you’ll need to poke it,” he said of the Optimus, predicting what he called a “robot army” will likely become “the biggest product of all time.”

Musk also said he was confident enough in the robotaxi to remove “safety monitors” from the driver’s seat by the end of the year in its first market, Austin, Texas. He added that the service, which is also available in San Francisco, will roll out to as many as 10 other metro areas also by the end of the year.

The revenue surge, to $28.1 billion from $25.2 billion, was not unexpected. Musk had announced earlier this month that sales of electric vehicles, one part of the multipronged business, rose 7% in the quarter after plunging for most of the year.

Tesla was also helped by surging sales from its separate battery storage and electric charging businesses, but the EVs still make up much of the overall revenue figures.

“It’s a positive that they are increasingly diversifying from the auto business, but our primary concern is demand for EVs,” said Garrett Nelson, an analyst at CFRA Research who has a “sell” rating on the stock. “There’s a lot of uncertainty.”

A closely watched measure, gross margins, hit 18%, the highest for this year but still declinedc from the third quarter a year ago. The figure, which shows how much money Tesla makes after paying staff, raw materials and other basic expenses, is also down from 25% four years ago as the company offers discounts and other incentives to fight back against rival EV makers that have been stealing market share.

Earnings excluding certain charges, fell to 50 cents per share from 72 cents per share a year ago and below the 56 cents forecast by Wall Street analysts.

Musk was predicting 20% to 30% sales growth for 2025 at this time last year, but it hasn’t turned out that way.

In addition to alienating potential customers with his embrace of right-wing politicians, sparking boycotts in key markets in the U.S. and abroad, he also has failed to shake up his vehicle lineup with a new, exciting model or introduce a substantially cheaper car to appeal to more buyers.

When he finally did reveal two cheaper offerings earlier this month — stripped down versions of the Model Y and Model X — investors were unimpressed because the discount didn’t seem deep enough. They both cost slightly less than $40,000, much higher than expected.

One Musk watcher on Wall Street was undeterred by the quarterly report.

“It’s nice to have revenue come back,” said Brian Mulberry, a senior client portfolio manager at Zacks Investment Management. “There is still strong demand for Teslas.”

WASHINGTON (AP) — As the United States rapidly builds massive data centers for the development of artificial intelligence, many Americans are concerned about the environmental impact.

Worries about how AI will affect the environment surpass concerns about other industries that worsen climate change, according to a new poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago.

The results of the poll, conducted in September, suggest that as AI reshapes work, communication and culture, it’s also sparking anxieties about how the growing energy demands could further harm the environment.

It takes massive amounts of electricity to power AI. Electricity consumption from data centers is set to more than double globally by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency. The United States accounts for by far the largest share of the projected increase, followed by China. In many places, the electricity for data centers will come from power plants that burn coal, oil and natural gas. Burning these fossil fuels for electricity emits carbon dioxide, trapping heat in the atmosphere and warming the planet.

The energy needs are so large that major technology companies are investing in next-generation nuclear technology, which can produce electricity without emissions, and quietly scaling back their own goals to cut carbon pollution.

Aidan Collins, a 26-year-old Democrat in New York, said in his view, AI uses an “absurd amount” of energy.

“Using all this energy and contributing to climate change in a bad way, it all just seems very awful to me,” he said.

President Donald Trump unveiled a plan this summer for America’s “global dominance” in artificial intelligence, which included cutting back environmental regulations to speed up the construction of AI supercomputers. The U.S. Department of Energy has identified federal sites where tech companies could build data centers to power AI. Trump, a Republican, has made sweeping strides to prioritize fossil fuels for electricity generation and hinder renewable energy projects.

About 4 in 10 U.S. adults say they are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the environmental impacts of AI. That’s higher than the share of Americans who are highly concerned about the environmental impact of the cryptocurrency, meat production and air travel industries, all of which contribute to climate change and cause environmental harm. Bitcoin mining uses enormous amounts of electricity. Livestock produce methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. And when airplanes burn jet fuel, it releases carbon dioxide.

Like Collins, several Americans said in follow-up interviews that they are worried about the energy and water required to power AI. Data centers need a tremendous amount of water to keep cool. Some communities strongly oppose data centers because they demand so much energy and water.

Aaron Gunnoe, a 29-year-old independent in Ohio, said he’s very concerned about the increasing electricity demand, when much of it is supplied by fossil fuels.

“They haven’t done anything in the way of offsetting it cleanly,” he said. “They just keep building more and more.”

Democrats are particularly likely to be concerned about the environmental impacts of AI.

“I feel like it’s going to be a greater and greater burden,” said Amy Fennewald, a 61-year-old Democrat in Minnesota.

But while about half of Democrats are “extremely” or “very” concerned, so are about one-third of independents and Republicans. Raymond Suarez, a 60-year-old living in Florida, considers himself a “strong” Republican. He fears data centers will be built on land that should be preserved or used for other things, such as farming, and he worries AI is becoming too pervasive.

“For them to uptick it and for them to think it’s a great thing, no, it’s not,” he said.

On the other hand, James Horner said he’s not at all concerned about the environmental impacts. The 52-year-old Republican living in South Carolina said he thinks artificial intelligence will be the solution to its own energy problem — it will show how clean energy can be built in an efficient, profitable way, and clean energy will be used to power AI.

“It’s going to help everybody,” he said. “I think it’s going to be able to figure out these processes happening in our body that scientists, as smart as they are, haven’t figured out yet. With supercomputers taking all that data, I think it will help everything, health care, the environment. If it’s used correctly, it will do good.”

Americans are more likely to think that over the next decade, artificial intelligence will do more to hurt than help the environment, the economy and society as a whole.

Doug Bowen, a 79-year-old moderate Republican living in Kansas, said he thinks artificial intelligence will do more to hurt. The demand on the planet’s resources will be greater as AI and the number of companies involved in the field grow, he said.

Americans are divided on whether AI will do more to help or hurt them personally. About one-quarter say AI will do more to help them, and about the same share say it will do more to hurt them. About half say that it won’t make a difference in their lives or that they are unsure.

Amanda Hernandez, a 24-year-old Democrat in California, said she grew concerned after watching TikTok videos about the immense energy and water demands. Hernandez said she thinks she will be personally hurt by AI because she works as a cashier at a fast food restaurant.

“I’m more concerned, as AI continues to grow and advance, that we’re just not going to need any cashiers or customer service people altogether,” she said.

Fennewald, in Minnesota, said she doesn’t know whether she will be personally helped or hurt by AI in the future.

“I think it’s a black box. I don’t know how we can know,” she said. “We really have no idea what’s ahead.”

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McDermott reported from Providence, R.I.

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The AP-NORC poll of 3,154 adults was conducted Sept. 2-18, 2025, using a combined sample of interviews from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population, and interviews from opt-in online panels. The margin of sampling error for all respondents is plus or minus 2.4 percentage points. The AmeriSpeak panel is recruited randomly using address-based sampling methods, and respondents later were interviewed online or by phone. To incorporate the nonprobability sample, NORC used TrueNorth calibration, an innovative hybrid calibration approach developed at NORC to explicitly account for potential bias associated with the nonprobability sample.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Find the AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

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Follow the AP’s coverage of artificial intelligence at https://apnews.com/hub/artificial-intelligence.

Why would you make a third “Tron” movie? The first two, despite their groundbreaking technology that revolutionized the film industry multiple times over, bombed at the box office. Making a third from a business standpoint is a horrible decision, unless you have a theme park ride that costs somewhere in the nine-figure region that you need to promote.

For companies like Disney and Universal, the actual film division is little more than a rounding error when compared to their theme park revenues. Disney didn’t spend 4 billion on “Star Wars” just so they could run the film series into the ground, it’s because their toy sales are more valuable than some countries. Where better to sell toys than a place themed after the toy? These companies aren’t so much film studios, they are theme park companies, at least if you go by some of their recent filmmaking decisions.

This summer’s “How To Train Your Dragon” live-action remake was a massive hit, making $635.4 million worldwide off a $150 million budget, but it was greenlit to promote “How To Train Your Dragon - Isle of Berk”, a ride opening this past summer at Universal’s new Epic Universe theme park, which cost between $6 and $7billion to construct.

Why sink hundreds of millions upon hundreds of millions into James Cameron’s “Avatar” series besides them being some of the best and highest grossing films of all time (the original film made $2.9 billion worldwide off a $237 million budget and the second made $2.3 billion worldwide off a budget between $350 to 400 million)? To promote the already existing “Pandora” ride in Walt Disney World’s Animal Kingdom (which cost around $500 million to build) and the upcoming “Pandora” ride in Disneyland’s California Adventure (part of a $1.9 billion DisneylandForward expansion project).

The 2023 “Super Mario Bros Movie: was a colossal success (making $1.3 billion worldwide off a $100 million budget), and its upcoming sequel “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” most likely will be too. However, those movies exist to drive to you the incredible “Super Nintendo World,” which can be found in Universal’s Epic Universe, Universal Studios Hollywood, Universal Studios in Osaka, Japan (and cost $575 million to make).

Pixar’s “Coco” (which made nearly $800 million off of a $175 million budget) is a perfect film that doesn’t need a sequel, but one is on the way because a ride based on the original film is coming soon (part of the same DisneylandForward initiative as California’s “Pandora”).

“Tron: Ares” makes much more sense as production and advertising cost for a theme park than as a movie in its own right. Disney and Universal know that making movies that get audiences to fall in love with characters and worlds they can visit will be more effective than anything an advertising firm can cook up. Let’s just hope the firms remember that these films do have to be kinda good for the strategy to work.