The criminal charges represent the second major legal action against the pair over the same conduct. In February 2024, a federal court found the defendants liable for approximately $19 million in combined penalties and restitution in a civil enforcement action brought by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation (DFPI).
According to the FTC, the scheme harmed more than 3,000 people nationwide, many of them elderly or veterans.
Meanwhile, an Orange County woman was arrested on wire fraud charges after she allegedly siphoned more than $411,000 from a nonprofit she oversaw as treasurer — using the diverted funds, in part, to clear a delinquent balance on the mortgage of her Aliso Viejo home.
Inside the scheme
Barron, who served as a beneficial owner and senior manager of the operation, and Ahiga, who oversaw the collection of monthly client payments and documents, ran the enterprise under a succession of company names: Green Equitable Solutions (d/b/a Academy Home Services), South West Consulting Enterprises Inc. (d/b/a Home Matters USA), Apex Consulting & Associates Inc. (d/b/a Golden Home Services America), and Infocom Entertainment Ltd. (d/b/a Atlantic Pacific Service).
Prosecutors allege the rebranding was intentional, a tactic to outpace regulators and suppress negative online reviews.
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Space Exploration Technologies Corp(SPCX +2.04%) and Apple(AAPL +1.75%) are two of the largest publicly traded companies in the world. However, they are markedly different.
Apple, which focuses on consumer tech hardware, went public in 1980 and now has a market cap of nearly $4.7 trillion. SpaceX, which focuses on building rockets, broadband, and artificial intelligence (AI), only went public in June and has a market cap of over $2 trillion.
Wall Street sees strong upside for one of these stocks and remains neutral on the other, at least from an appreciation perspective.
Image source: Getty Images.
Apple: Analysts largely view the stock as fully valued
While it often gets compared to hyperscalers, Apple varies in that it has been less direct in its AI strategy. The company is not investing hundreds of billions to build data centers, and it has spent far less than any other hyperscalers on capital expenditures.
The company recently turned over a new leaf with the departure of longtime CEO Tim Cook, who is being replaced by John Ternus. As the former senior vice president of hardware engineering, Ternus brings back traits of the late Steve Jobs, in that he is a “product guy.”
Apple recently unveiled a slate of new products, including the Apple 18 Pro and the iPhone Duo, the company’s foldable smartphone that starts at $1,999. It’s one of the biggest changes to the iPhone in quite a while.
Apple stock has performed pretty well this year, up roughly 18%. But Wall Street analysts, on average, now view the stock to be nearly fully valued. Of the 32 analysts who have issued a research report on Apple over the past three months, 16 have a buy rating on the stock, 12 recommend holding, and four assigned a sell rating.
Today’s Change
(1.75%) $5.70
Current Price
$332.27
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$4.8TMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.
Day’s Range
$326.30 – $336.22
52wk Range
$235.03 – $344.57
Volume
50.7M
Avg Vol
53.8M
Gross Margin
48.65%
Dividend Yield
0.32%
The average price target among all the analysts is nearly $336 per share, implying about 5% upside from current levels (as of Sept. 10), according to TipRanks.
Earlier this month, Rosenblatt analyst Barton Crockett maintained a neutral rating on Apple and assigned a price target of $303 per share. Crockett believes the new iPhone rollout will be a major test for Ternus, demonstrating whether its product innovation can validate the current valuation.
Recently, Crockett, in a separate note, said gross margins could be pressured due to higher memory costs.
I certainly agree with the concerns about innovation. However, I do think Apple will be able to participate in the AI revolution by bringing AI to consumers through its hardware, which puts the company in a strong position. Furthermore, I like how Apple has not overinvested in AI infrastructure like other hyperscalers.
SpaceX: Controversial, but with significant potential upside
SpaceX is the largest initial public offering ever, raising an incredible near-$86 billion once everything was said and done.
The company is built on its signature fully reusable rockets, which make voyages into space significantly cheaper and quicker than older methods. It’s this innovation that serves as the backbone of the entire business.
Space Exploration Technologies
Today’s Change
(2.04%) $3.03
Current Price
$151.21
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$2.1TMarket cap calculated using publicly traded shares outstanding only. Does not include unlisted, private, or dual-class non-traded shares. Implied market cap may vary.
Day’s Range
$145.92 – $151.85
52wk Range
$104.83 – $225.64
Volume
79.3M
Avg Vol
111.2M
SpaceX has a launch business, a low-Earth-orbit satellite internet service, Starlink, and an artificial intelligence division, which encompasses the social platform X, Grok Intelligence, data centers on land, and a future terafac facility, among other things.
In its registration statement, SpaceX claims to have a $28.5 trillion total addressable market (TAM).
While SpaceX has begun signing some large data center deals, investors are split because much of what the company is attempting to do in space depends on getting its fully reusable, super-heavy-lift rocket, Starship, operational. The business is also incredibly capital-intensive.
Starship is still in testing mode, and SpaceX has talked about the rocket operating on a launch schedule more like a commercial airline. Still, the company is run by Elon Musk, who has significant market sway, and analysts, on average, still see significant upside.
Of the 35 analysts who have issued a research report on SpaceX over the past three months, 26 have a buy rating on the stock, six recommend holding, and three assigned a sell rating. The average price target is roughly $228 per share, implying roughly 51% upside from current levels (as of Sept. 10), according to TipRanks.
Earlier this month, Oppenheimer analyst Timothy Horan maintained an outperform rating on the stock and raised its price target from $250 per share to $280. Horan praised SpaceX’s recent acquisition of Cursor, a platform that leverages AI to more easily write code that can create software.
Horan is bullish on SpaceX’s vertically integrated platform, which now includes intelligence, data centers, proprietary chips, and broadband via Starlink. Horan said SpaceX is targeting a $100 billion revenue run rate by year’s end and could hit $120 billion to $130 billion next year.
While I can certainly see the potential of SpaceX, I’m still cautious on the name, given the large valuation and capital-intensive nature of the business.
While everything Musk and the team want to do sounds incredible, I do think obstacles are inevitable, and the timelines for most of these ambitious projects will take much longer than investors expect.
Wellesley College announced that families earning under $200,000 a year will pay no tuition beginning in fall 2027, under a policy it is calling the Wellesley Tuition Promise. The threshold replaces the $150,000 cutoff the college adopted for this fall, a jump of $50,000 in eligibility less than nine months later. Wellesley now sits alongside the small group of endowment-heavy institutions that have pushed free tuition into six-figure household income territory.
Tuition alone for the 2026-27 academic year runs $72,570, with housing at $12,020, meals at $11,186 and a $360 activity fee on top. Dean of Admission and Financial Aid T. Peaches Valdes said the college is “committed to expanding accessibility by making a Wellesley education more affordable.”
As the Boston Globe reported, eligible students will still owe somewhere between $0 and roughly $26,000 for housing, meals and other costs depending on need. This is why families still need to run the net price calculator before applying.
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Why It Matters
Free tuition is not free college, and the gap between those two things is where families get in trouble. A student from a household earning $180,000 gets $72,570 off, but can still face a $23,000 annual bill for room and board ($92,000 over four years). Families planning around these offers need the full cost of attendance figure, not just the tuition line.
The timing is not accidental. The 2025 tax law raised the endowment tax to a top rate of 8% but exempted institutions with fewer than 3,000 tuition-paying students. Wellesley enrolls about 2,400.
Schools that dodged the tax have money to redirect, which is exactly the outcome we flagged when Congress wrote the endowment tax while still funding those same schools through federal aid.
There is also an admissions play buried in the financial aid language. A $200,000 cutoff reaches households that earn well into the top 10% nationally, and the schools using it are competing for the same applicants. Wellesley enrolls about 2,400 students, so the marginal cost of extending the promise is small next to the yield it buys, and families weighing the offer against in-state tuition and a smaller loan balance now have a cleaner comparison to run.
The Details
Under $100,000: tuition covered, no loans in the aid package, and 100% of calculated need met.
$100,000 to $200,000: tuition covered plus 100% of calculated need met, though housing and meals remain a family expense scaled to the aid formula behind the CSS Profile.
Above $200,000: need-based aid continues, with awards determined by the same institutional methodology used to calculate the Student Aid Index.
Asset test: families need “typical assets” for their income band. Business ownership, rental property or oversized taxable accounts can disqualify a household.
Who qualifies: U.S. citizens and permanent residents whose families live and work in the United States, and who live on campus with a meal plan. International students, roughly 13% of enrollment, still receive need-based aid but fall outside the pledge.
Where Wellesley Lands
The $200,000 line is now the standard among wealthy private colleges. Harvard set it in March 2025, and MIT, Yale, Penn and Caltech followed. Rice extended the same cutoff for fall 2027, while Boston University capped total family costs rather than just tuition. Two schools have gone further: UChicago doubled its threshold to $250,000, and Princeton uses the same figure.
Roughly 60% of Wellesley students already receive aid, with an average award of $70,519, meaning much of this announcement is PR around a policy it was doing anyway.
That pattern shows up sector-wide, where tuition discount rates hit a record 56%. The competitive pressure is also federal: with Parent PLUS borrowing capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 in total since July 1, expensive private colleges lost the borrowing tool that many families used to close the affordability gap.
What fills the remaining gap is the open question. Room, board and fees at Wellesley total $23,566 a year before books and travel, and the federal caps leave parents short of that at most private colleges. Analysts expect to nearly double private student loan volume this year in response to the federal caps. A tuition promise removes the largest line on the bill without touching the one families most often borrow for.
What’s Next
Watch which colleges offer tuition-free pledges next. Public flagships and mid-tier privates cannot fund a $200,000 cutoff, but some state schools like Texas State’s move to a $100,000 cap shows where that market actually is.
Editor: Colin Graves
The post Wellesley Goes Tuition-Free At $200,000, Joining Harvard And MIT appeared first on The College Investor.
Wyndham Rewards has launched a new promotion where members can purchase points for as little as 0.68 cents each. If you are able to get that lower price, this can be a good opportunity to add more points to your account. Check out the details below.
Offer Details
Stock up on points this holiday season with a limited-time offer. Receive up to a 90% bonus when you purchase Wyndham Rewards points to use toward free and discounted nights.
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Important Terms
Offer valid through October 21, 2026, 11:59:59 pm ET.
This “mystery” bonus will be randomly assigned to Wyndham Rewards members upon being prompted to login to their Wyndham Rewards account.
Purchases of fewer than 3,000 points in a single transaction will not qualify for a Bonus.
For the duration of this Promotion Period, the annual limit on Wyndham Rewards points purchases through points.com has been raised from a total of 100,000 Wyndham Rewards points to a total of 200,000 Wyndham Rewards points.
Guru’s Wrap-up
With this mystery bonus, you can get up to 90% bonus on purchases points, which is the best ever bonus offered by Wyndham. If you buy at least 3,000 points you can purchase them at a price of just 0.68 cents per point.
Just keep in mind that Wyndham Rewards points expire after four years from the date they are earned, or after 18 months of inactivity, whichever comes first.
HT: FM
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Congress has put off making tough choices on Social Security for years, but the bill is coming due soon, and it’s looking like taxpayers will pick up the tab.
That’s because a small but growing group of lawmakers has signaled openness to shoring up Social Security’s finances by raising more revenue via taxes. The group includes some Republicans, who have traditionally viewed tax hikes as anathema.
For decades, Social Security was viewed as the “third rail” in American politics, with any suggestion of tax hikes or benefit cuts producing swift blowback.
But as retirees face the prospect of much smaller checks, the political calculation may be changing. Projections earlier this year showed that the Social Security trust fund will run out of money sooner than previously thought, meaning benefits would face a 22% cut by 2032 unless adjustments are enacted.
Revenue from payroll taxes has been insufficient to fund current benefits, and the trust fund covers the gap. But once it runs out, Social Security will only be able to distribute what comes in.
For now, workers and employers each pay a 6.2% tax on wages of up to $184,500 a year. Any additional wages beyond that cap aren’t subject to the tax, meaning the wealthy pay a relatively small share of their income to support Social Security compared to lower-income workers.
“We’ve got too many people who say, ‘Well, we have to stay within the current income level or stay at the current tax rate,’” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., told the Washington Post earlier this month. “I’m willing to look at the tax rate. I am willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”
The influential chairman of the House Appropriations Committee suggested the mathematics of Social Security are overshadowing the politics.
“And believe me, you’ll have a lot bigger problem if it goes bankrupt than you’ll have keeping it whole, because people will feel cheated,” he added.
Rep. Lloyd K. Smucker, R-Penn., indicated this month that raising the income cap could be part of the solution to the trust fund’s insolvency.
Like Cole’s, his voice also carries extra weight as he is a top candidate to be the leading Republican on the House Budget Committee in the next Congress.
“You’ll probably have to do something on the payroll half of the money being paid into the system,” Smucker told reporters, according to Roll Call.
He added that lawmakers can’t allow benefit cuts to happen in six years, “and the only way you address that is to start being serious and realistic about the math problem and the demographics.”
Another Republican, Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio, touted a plan to raise more revenue via payroll taxes in a New York Times op-ed he wrote with Massachusetts Democrat Sen. Elizabeth Warren in June.
The senators pointed out that the vast majority of Americans make less than the $184,500 cap, meaning Social Security taxes apply to 100% of their income while top earners only pay on a fraction of theirs.
“Why should a middle-class nurse pay a larger share of her paycheck than a wealthy corporate lawyer?” they wrote. “This is doubly unfair in an economy in which top earners’ wages, over time, have pulled far ahead of those of the average worker.”
Moreno and Warren proposed removing the tax cap, citing a report from the Peter G. Peterson Foundation that estimated such a change would generate about $3 trillion for the program over 10 years.
Josh Turek, a Democratic candidate for Iowa’s U.S. Senate seat, has also called for the elimination of the tax cap, saying the wealthy “pay Social Security tax for the first few minutes of the year, but we have teachers… that are paying year-round.”
Removing the cap would raise enough revenue to cover more than half of Social Security’s funding gap, but not all of it, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.
So either more revenue is needed or benefits needs to take some form of a haircut—and no one on Capitol Hill is talking about cuts.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., and Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Pa., have offered a plan to raise more revenue as well. Rather than eliminate the cap, however, it would lift the payroll tax income threshold to $400,000 and also subject investment earnings to the levy.
Another proposal by Sens. Bill Cassidy, R-La., and Tim Kaine, D-Va., would maintain current benefits and continue avoiding any pain for recipients or taxpayers by instead relying on the stock market—along with a mountain of fresh debt.
Their idea is for the federal government to borrow $1.5 trillion for an investment fund that would be loaded with stocks and other risk assets, which would accumulate gains for 75 years and offer better returns than Treasury bonds would.
At the same time, the Cassidy-Kaine plan would require another $25.1 trillion in borrowing to cover the gap between Social Security’s revenue and benefits during those 75 years. Returns from the investment fund would then pay down the $26.6 trillion in new total borrowing.
But Boston College’s Center for Retirement Research ran some simulations recently and found that the senators’ plan is unlikely to work. While the historical average of stock returns could deliver more than enough revenue—assuming they continue that way over the next several decades—the market doesn’t go in a straight line.
“After incorporating the volatility in equity returns, however, the results show that the gamble does not always pay off,” authors Anqi Chen, Alicia Munnell, Jean-Pierre Aubry wrote in a report.
The federal housing agency says Canada narrowly chipped away at its supply gap over the past year, but the country still needs up to nearly 4.7 million new homes over the next decade to restore pre-pandemic affordability by 2036.
The narrative around AI suddenly took an existential turn over the past week as leading voices sounded the alarm over humanity’s future, and the fear of an imminent calamity has sharpened those warnings.
On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called on the industry to slow down development, saying that AI has been advancing “drastically faster” since the summer, driven primarily by AI’s ability to upgrade itself.
If left unchecked, this so-called recursive self-improvement could outrun the ability of humans to control AI, he explained in a blog post.
Amodei also pointed to the hack of Hugging Face by hundreds of autonomous AI agents, warning that a similar swarm armed with greater capabilities could have caused “catastrophic damage.”
“Given the accelerating rate of AI capability development, it’s my worry that in 6–12 months such a swarm could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet (potentially causing hundreds of billions of dollars in damage), and that the scale of damage would continue to increase from there if AI becomes more powerful without the necessary guardrails,” he wrote.
On Sunday, former Anthropic and OpenAI researcher Jacob Coxon made a similar prediction. In an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press with Kristen Welker, he was asked why he went public with his claim that both companies are acting irresponsibly in developing ever more capable AI systems.
Like Amodei, Coxon cited AI’s rapidly accelerating pace of capabilities and the Hugging Face attack, which showed that AI can go rogue.
“So these AIs are getting smarter, very, very quickly,” he said. “And in particular, in the next six months to a year, I expect the capabilities of our AI systems to be quite scary.”
Coxon compared the development of artificial super-intelligence to the arrival of aliens on Earth, adding that AI researchers are building a “superhuman-level mind” without understanding what it wants or the way it thinks.
In the future, AI could obtain “superhuman hacking capabilities, very superhuman abilities to create novel bio-weapons and also abilities to control, say, autonomous drones or all the robots that are currently being built, very rapidly,” he warned.
Coxon also said a kill switch probably would work on a lot of AI systems—for now. But he pointed out there are a lot of switches.
While it’s still doable to shut down AI, he nodded to Amodei’s blog post and cautioned that it’s possible a kill switch wouldn’t work because a swarm might go on “an internet-wide hacking run.”
Others at Anthropic have backed up Coxon, who set off the recent panic with a post on X that claimed the industry is “gambling with our lives.”
Anthropic’s head of alignment commented on the post, saying Coxon was correct in his assertion that many Anthropic and OpenAI researchers believe that increasingly powerful AI could potentially wipe out humanity.
Evan Hubinger, Anthropic’s “alignment science lead,” wrote in response to Coxon’s resignation post that “we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!” Hubinger said his own estimate of the risk of that happening within the next decade is more than 10%.
For his part, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman agreed with Amodei about the need for slowing down development and hinted at an emerging pact to do so among top AI labs.
“I think that will happen,” he told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell in an exclusive interview. “I’m not going to pre-announce private discussions that I think should be at some point shared as a group. But yeah, I think I think that will happen.”
Altman also stressed that OpenAI was committed to safety above any business considerations and that a 10% risk of a catastrophic AI outcome was not acceptable.
He said the most advanced, and still unreleased models, were so powerful that more work was needed on safety before progressing any further.
“I don’t think we’re currently at a place where we could say, you know, push much further on capabilities without making more progress on monitorability, alignment, the ability to understand what a model is doing, and the ability to make sure that a model will follow human values and the intent of its users,” Altman said.
Update 9/12/26: Available again with a new link until November 13, 2026. Hat tip to reader Bockrr
Update 5/8/26: There is now a $200 savings bonus as well. Hat tip to reader Harry
Update 2/16/25: Deal is back.
Offer at a glance
Maximum bonus amount: $300
Availability: ME, NH
Direct deposit required: Yes, $500+
Additional requirements: None
Hard/soft pull: Soft
ChexSystems: Unknown
Credit card funding: Up to $500, Visa or Mastercard only
Monthly fees: $5, avoidable
Early account termination fee: $25, six months
Household limit: None listed
Expiration date: November 15, 2024
The Offer
Direct link to offer
Camden National Bank is offering a $300 bonus when you open a new Rewards OR Premier checking account and complete the following requirements:
Receive a direct deposit of $500+ within 60 days of account opening
Get a $200 bonus when you open and fund your first savings or money market account within 20 days with $10,000 in new money and maintain that balance for 90 days
The Fine Print
To be eligible for account bonus you must open either a Rewards or Premier checking account between September 9 and November 15, 2024.
You must be an individual of at least 18 years of age.
The primary owner of the account must have a Maine or New Hampshire address.
You may not be or have been an owner of a Camden National Bank consumer checking account during the last twelve (12) months prior to opening this account.
The minimum opening account deposit is $25.
If you set up $500 or more in direct deposits within 60 calendar days of opening your account, a $300 will be direct deposited to your account within 90 calendar days of the qualifying transaction.
Account bonuses are reported to the IRS as interest income.
Account must be open, active and not overdrawn at the time the bonus is made.
Overdrawn includes any utilization of any Progressive Pay amount that may be available to you.
One bonus payment per account or individual.
This cannot be combined with any other offer.
Employees of Camden National Bank or its affiliates are excluded from this offer.
Contact the bank for further details. Limited-time offer, subject to change.
All bank account bonuses are treated as income/interest and as such you have to pay taxes on them
Avoiding Fees
Monthly Fees
Rewards checking has a $5 monthly fee
$0 if you maintain a $500 minimum average daily balance
Early Account Termination Fee
There is an early account termination fee of $25 if you close the account within 6 months of account opening.
Our Verdict
There was a $200 bonus with no direct deposit requirement and a $300 bonus with a direct deposit requirement but had an account that was harder to keep fee free. I do think this is worth doing and will add this to our list of the best bank account bonuses.
![[MA, ME, NH] Camden National Bank $300 Checking Bonus + $200 Savings Bonus](https://globalinvestmentstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/camden-national-bank-500-1024x452-768x339.png "[MA, ME, NH] Camden National Bank $300 Checking Bonus + $200 Savings Bonus")