Only I could get canceled for giving people a place to live with no strings attached.

That was the response from YouTubes biggest star MrBeast following reports that the North Carolina man was buying a neighborhood to house his staff and members of his family.

MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, has reportedly been buying up property in Greenvillea city in his home stateover the past couple of years.

But the move has been criticized by commentators online, who slammed the move as being cult-like and predicted the online personality would begin to control the inhabitants lives.

The generous move isnt a new habit for the 25-year-old, who launched Beast Philanthropy in 2017 with a mission statement of: Feed those who are hungry. House those who are homeless. Combat the suffering of those in need.

So far the organization has distributed more than six million pounds of food to more than 319 million people, and gifted $3 million of aid to Ukrainian refugees last summer.

But the house-buying scheme also isnt the first time Donaldson has landed himself in hot water for one of his projects.

In February, the well-intentioned video star revealed he had paid for 1,000 people to get their sight back at a cost of potentially millions of dollars.

However he was slammed for filming the experience and posting it on YouTube, with critics saying he was making content out of people who cant see.

Donaldson Drive

MrBeasts house-buying endeavor began with the purchase of his own home in 2018a four-bedroom, four-bathroom property for approximately $320,000, according to records obtained by the New York Post.

Donaldson now owns a total of five properties in the cul de sac: a second property was purchased in 2020 for $263,000 and three more bought off-market for a combined total of $1.45 million.

The figure isnt going to put much of a dint into the bloggers fortune, with Celebrity Net Worth estimating he earns $3 million per month from his video views alone, which total nearly 40 billionbefore revenue streams such as merchandise and products are added.

Aaron Bowden, who sold his home to the entrepreneur last year, told the Post that MrBeast had shared his plans to move members of his family and staff into the properties.

We negotiated back and forth and it had to be worth my while. And he wasnt gonna buy it, if it wasnt worth his while, Bowden said.

There is also one home left on the street that Donaldson is yet to snap up, with Bowden speculating its because the familys children are yet to finish their years at school.

He explained: My understanding is the folks who are holding out is similar to any reason why would anyone would have held outits the best school districts in the area, and they have kids in school. I wouldnt know anything for a fact because I dont walk in their shoes, but they may change their minds when their kids are out of high school and off to college.

Other neighbors, Bowden said, had simply moved up the street after selling their property to the video media mogul.  

Representatives for the YouTuber confirmed Donaldson will be using the home when hes not traveling or working out of his studio nearbywhich he gave fans a sneak peek into last year.

Company towns

Critics have said Donaldson is attempting to create a company towna city or town where the residential and retail property is owned by the employer of the people who live there.

Although such schemes have been used across the coal, steel and lumber industries, historically the schemes have been found to repress employees conditions and rights.

MrBeast has rejected the hypothesis that his properties constitutean albeit very smallcompany town, tweeting: All these company town tweets make no sense, I was just helping some people.

A company town is reportedly on the cards for Tesla and SpaceX staff after CEO Elon Musk began buying up acres of land in Texas.

The town will be named Snailbrookseemingly a reference to the mascot of Musks tunneling firm the Boring Companyaccording to the Wall Street Journal, which first reported the plan.

Representatives for MrBeast did not immediately respond to Fortunes request for comment.

Democratic Sen. Steven Bradford, of Los Angeles, said anythings possible if the moneys there, but he remains realistic that it could be difficult to garner enough support for large payments at a time when lawmakers havent even debated where the money would come from.

I dont want to set folks expectations and hopes up that theyre going to be getting, you know, seven-figure checks, Bradford said in an interview. Thats just not happening.

The task force on Saturday approved proposals in its final report, which is officially due to lawmakers by July 1. They included estimates from economists who say the state is responsible for more than $500 billion due to decades of over-policing, mass incarceration and redlining that kept Black families from receiving loans and living in certain neighborhoods.

The panel stopped short of endorsing specific payment amounts but recommended any reparations program include the payment of cash or its equivalent to eligible residents. It doesnt delve into how the state would pay for reparations programs.

Marcus Champion, a Los Angeles resident and organizer with the Coalition for a Just and Equitable California, a reparations advocacy group, criticized Bradfords comments.

That is not the way you come to the table to pay a historic debt, he said. That is not the way that you come to the table in any type of negotiation. Start as high as you possibly can, and then work from there.

Payments are part of a long list of recommendations from the nine-member task force that has studied how the state could apologize and offer recompense for policies that drove housing discrimination, mass incarceration and health disparities long after chattel slavery was abolished. The proposals come as the state faces a projected $22.5 billion budget deficit.

Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement that dealing with the legacy of slavery is about much more than cash payments.

The Reparations Task Forces independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing, Newsom said. We need to wait for the Task Force to finish its work and submit its final report.

Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, another Los Angeles-area Democrat on the task force, took a more cautious approach in predicting the fate of payments or other reparations proposals. He said in an interview that its too early to know whether payments could get passed in the Legislature, as the committees report deadline looms.

We have absolutely no idea right now what will or will not be approved, he said.

The task forces proposals are wide-ranging and ambitious. They include the creation of an agency that would help residents research their familys history, promote financial literacy and preserve historic, cultural sites.

The panel has also endorsed policies to increase tree canopy in historically redlined areas, to provide more incarcerated people with job training that prepares them for life after their sentences and to restore land seized unfairly from Black families through eminent domain.

The committee is calling on the state to issue a formal, public apology for its legacy of slavery and discriminatory policies. Although California entered the union as a free state, it did not enact laws guaranteeing African Americans freedom, the draft report said. The apology could include a condemnation of Peter Hardeman Burnett, Californias first elected governor and a white supremacist who personally enslaved people and pushed for Black peoples exclusion from the state.

Assemblymember Lori Wilson, who chairs the state Legislative Black Caucus, said in a statement that the caucus will champion policy proposals included in the task forces report.

We look forward to working collaboratively with our Legislative colleagues and Governor Newsoms Administration as we continue to fight for equity in our communities, the San Francisco Bay Area Democrat wrote.

Newsom signed a law in 2020 creating the task force. The goal of the legislation authored by Secretary of State Shirley Weber, a former state assemblymember was for the panel to study remedies for Black Californians, with a special consideration for the descendants of people who were enslaved.

Last year, the task force voted that compensation be limited to descendants of Black people living in the United States before the end of 19th century. The panel more recently endorsed further limiting eligibility to residents living in California for at least six months while certain discriminatory policies and practices were in effect, with possible exceptions.

Webers bill stated a reparations program in California should not be considered a replacement for a program at the federal level. That issue has stalled in Congress with a bill to create a commission studying reparations proposals that has not been voted on since it was first introduced in the 1980s.

No other state in the country has gotten further along than California in its consideration of reparations proposals for Black Americans. Task Force Chair Kamilah Moore said shes hopeful recommendations including the agency and payments could get enough support from state lawmakers.

Weve gone above and beyond, Moore said of the groups work.

One of the SECs biggest gripes with the crypto industry is lack of disclosure. Proper disclosures are a rite of passage for publicly traded companies but for crypto projectsmany of which have tokens in the public realmthe practice is typically an after-thought at best.

Not only is there a lack of common standards when it comes to crypto disclosures, but many projects attempts at them are marred by lack of transparency, opaque performance metrics, and abundant information dissymmetry.

If bona fide token projects or blockchain protocols want to be respected, they need to elevate the quality and frequency of their reporting requirements. Token-based projects can no longer live in the wild West side of the business world because competent regulators are starting to demand higher standards from them.

The EUs recent Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulations (MiCA) law is peppered with disclosure expectations. And last week, New Yorks Attorney General James proposed sweeping draft legislation that targets the cryptocurrency industry with a focus on consumer protection. The bill seeks to make New York the nationwide standard bearer for the protection, transparency, and oversight of the cryptocurrency industry but, while it repeatedly calls for disclosure, it offers little in the way of specific measures. 

When it comes to crypto projects, its fair to acknowledge they are not the same as traditional companies, and that tokens are not the same as securities. Therefore, its not realistic to simply transpose the SECs forms and schedules designed for public companies onto the crypto industry. Given the intrinsic peculiarities and innovations of crypto networks, the agency must consider disclosure rules tailored for the industry. 

For example, crypto projects do not have revenues or equity ownership in the same way that traditional companies do. If you hold an Ethereum token or a Bitcoin, you are not a shareholder. But if you earn staking or mining rewards, are these equivalent to a dividend? It would be nice to have some clarity here. Meanwhile, the SEC should also develop crypto-specific disclosure rules for network security, attack vulnerabilities, governance rights, software update permissions, or algorithm changes.

More broadly, regulators must recognize that many tokens are a proxy to an underlying ecosystem, and they simultaneously exhibit hybrid properties of currency, essential utility, and certain rights. It is a new world and it doesnt make sense to try and shoehorn crypto into rules designed for another era.

A crypto-specific disclosure regime would not only help keep projects accountable. It would also be invaluable to consumers, many of whom decide to buy cryptocurrency tokens based on news, hype, and unverified promises.

You might think that blockchains are already transparent due to their public nature. But this is only partially true given that blockchain explorers like Etherscan are barely readable by the average person. 

So what exactly would proper disclosures look like for crypto-based projects? Similar to their traditional counterparts, they need to include a mix of quantitative and qualitative narratives. Additionally, I can think of six specific criteria:

1. Token issuance, economics, and network utility. Explanation of tokenomics in laymans terms and how token utility affects supply/demand. Full list of token allocations, to whom they are distributed, and exact vesting schedules.  

2. Treasury positions. Everything related to operations including paying for people, services, or generating any type of revenue. This is the closest to actual financial statements.

3. Performance metrics. Success metrics the creators originally envisioned. Key dashboards that unequivocally display the health of the network against those metrics, including the variety of related revenues (e.g. gas, transaction, or minting fees). 

4. Risks. All known and unknown risk vectors, including potential network attacks, consensus failures, algorithms hacking, smart contracts dependencies, models iterations, or others. 

5. Material events. Any significant ad hoc developments, insider selling, team changes, failures, or successes. 

6. Governance. How decisions are made, who makes them, and various boards or councils in place. 

Token projects should not wait for regulators to dictate disclosure details to them. They will most certainly overshoot or get it wrong. The industry should make disclosure initiatives a priority. That will go a long way in converting token holders from hopeful speculators to informed investors.

Proper disclosures are cryptos Achilles heel. If not dealt with, the entire industry is at risk.


William Mougayar has four decades of tech industry experience and is the author of The Business Blockchain. The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

Twitter launched encrypted messaging Wednesday, offering select users the ability to communicate more securely. But its new service is much more of a baby step than a giant leap forward.

For starters, it lacks basic protections that security experts consider essential for shielding messages from hackers and other prying eyes. Senders and receivers must also be subscribed to Twitters Blue service for $11 a month ($8 for desktop-only) or otherwise affiliated with an organization verified by Twitter for $1,000 a month plus $50 per user.

The companys official message announcing the rollout promised additional features soon. But CEO Elon Musk offered his own caution via a tweet:  Try it, but dont trust it yet. 

WHAT IS ENCRYPTED MESSAGING AGAIN?

Ordinary messages sent across the internet, whether by email, direct message, Twitter or other means are generally vulnerable to interception that could allow other people or organizations to read them. That includes the companies offering the message services. Those companies can also be required to produce user messages in response to a legal subpoena or court order.

Encryption technology offers protection against spies and nosy online neighbors by encoding messages so that only the sender and the recipient can decipher them.

SO HOW DOES TWITTERS NEW ENCRYPTION STACK UP?

Not super well. The gold standard in secure messaging is set by services such as Signal and ProtonMail, which use strong end-to-end encryption to shield messages so that no one else not even the companies themselves can read them.

Twitters service doesnt currently do that. For the moment, its encrypted messages are vulnerable to a so-called man-in-the-middle attack that allows an attacker to insinuate themselves into an encrypted conversation to listen in and even modify messages as theyre sent. Twitter itself, in fact, has the ability to do this.

The acid test is that I could not see your DMs even if there was a gun to my head, Musk tweeted on Tuesday. But Twitter isnt there yet.

Twitter also doesnt offer any way to report encrypted messages for harassment or abuse, although it will be possible to block individual senders.

ARE THERE OTHER DRAWBACKS?

Yes. For instance, Twitters encrypted messages can only be sent to another individual. Twitter says it will soon be expanding encryption to groups. Encrypted messages are also limited to text and links; photos, video and other attachments arent supported yet, the company says.

Twitter encryption also doesnt provide whats called forward secrecy, which would prevent an attacker who gets hold of a users private key from using it to read earlier and subsequent messages.

In its official document, Twitter says forward secrecy techniques arent compatible with user expectations that theyll always be able to obtain their historical messages from the cloud. As a result, the company doesnt plan to offer forward secrecy at all.

A final issue: Users wont have any way to make encrypted messages a default setting; theyll have to deliberately choose encryption each time they start a new conversation.

A bipartisan group of Nevada lawmakers introduced a bill Thursday that would give massive tax credits aimed at bringing film production to southern Nevada, including a $1 billion Sony expansion.

Its the latest attempt at diversifying southern Nevadas gaming and tourism-reliant economy, which was hit hard by the pandemic.

The $190 million annually in tax credits for 20 years would be the largest proposed tax incentive package in recent state history, even after its deals with Tesla and Redwood Materials totaled hundreds of millions of dollars each. But unlike those deals, which used direct tax abatements, these tax credits would only be awarded upon completion of the films at studios built by private developers.

The legislation would involve the state entering an agreement with private developers who would pay for two film production sites one on the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and another in the Summerlin area of Las Vegas.

It creates a whole new industry in Nevada, the bills sponsor, Democratic state Sen. Roberta Lange of Las Vegas, said in an interview Thursday. I think it helps build and diversify our economy, which is something weve talked about in Nevada for as long as Ive lived here.

Even with a hearing scheduled for Tuesday, the bill faces a tight deadline and further complicates the final month of Nevadas legislative session, where Republican Gov. Joe Lombardo has sparred with the Democratic-controlled Legislature on its historic $11.6 billion budget.

It also comes as a funding bill to bring the Oakland As to Las Vegas is expected to drop any day. The As originally asked for $500 million in public assistance for a $1.5 billion stadium site, but have reportedly lowered that number.

A spokesperson for Lombardo, who promised no new taxes on the campaign trail, declined to comment on the film production tax credits bill.

In a statement, a Sony spokesperson said the company is supportive of the film industrys expansion into southern Nevada and would commit up to $1 billion on production over the next decade pending the passage of legislation guaranteeing a competitive Nevada production incentive.

Under the bill, production companies would apply for the transferable tax credits, which are used to offset the modified business tax, insurance premium tax or gaming license fee. The tax credits could be 30% of production and construction cost for films up from the current 15% threshold. Part of those tax credits would fund local workforce training and educational programs for jobs that the studios create.

The developers of the UNLV and Summerlin sites would foot the bill for development of the production studios, projected at $500 million and $400 million respectively by 2030.

The risk is really on the developers, not on the state of Nevada, said Republican Senate Minority Leader Heidi Seevers Gansert, of Reno, who co-sponsored the bill.

Brandon Birtcher, co-owner of Birtcher Development, which is developing the UNLV site, said its still being determined which film or content creator would use his site. Sony is planned for the Summerlin site, run by the Howard Hughes Corporation.

Tax incentives for some of the nations largest companies have become a major driver of recent efforts to diversify Nevadas economy. The Las Vegas area was hit particularly hard during the pandemic and is particularly reliant on gaming and tourism.

In northern Nevada, major tax incentives have focused on the U.S. transition to green energy. The governors economic development office awarded Tesla $330 million in tax abatements in March for a multi-billion dollar expansion near Reno, as well as $105 million in tax incentives to Redwood Materials in December, a massive lithium battery recycling plant in northern Nevada.

While the Constitution addresses many weighty issues, the type of pork chops California merchants may sell is not on that list, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in an opinion for the court.

Industry groups have said the law would mean expensive, industry-wide changes even though a majority of the farms where pigs are raised are not in California, the nations most populous state, but instead in the Midwest and North Carolina.

A majority of the high court agreed that lower courts had correctly dismissed pork producers challenge to the law. Both liberal and conservative justices were a part of the majority, though they were not united in their reasoning.

Gorsuch said the pork producers challenging the law were asking the justices to fashion two new and more aggressive constitutional restrictions on the ability of States to regulate goods sold within their borders. The justices declined.

Four justices would have sent the case back to continue in lower courts. Chief Justice John Roberts was joined in that view by fellow conservative justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh and liberal Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson.

During arguments in the case in October, liberal and conservative justices underscored the potential reach of the case. Some worried whether greenlighting the animal cruelty law would give state legislators a license to pass laws targeting practices they disapprove of, such as a law that says a product cannot be sold in the state if workers who made it are not vaccinated or are not in the country legally. They also worried about the reverse: How many state laws would be called into question if Californias law were not permitted?

California Attorney General Rob Bonta said in a statement that the ruling affirms states important role in regulating goods sold within their borders and that it means that California can continue to have in place humane and commonsense standards, instead of the extreme confinement pushed by some pork producers.

The case before the court involved Californias Proposition 12, which voters passed in 2018. It said that pork sold in the state needs to come from pigs whose mothers were raised with at least 24 square feet of space, with the ability to lie down and turn around. That rules out confined gestation crates, metal enclosures that are common in the pork industry.

The American Farm Bureau Federation and the Iowa-based National Pork Producers Council sued. They said that while Californians consume 13% of the pork eaten in the United States, nearly 100% of it comes from hogs raised outside the state, including in Iowa, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana and North Carolina. The vast majority of sows, meanwhile, are not raised under conditions that would meet Proposition 12s standards.

Scott Hays, the president of the National Pork Producers Council said in a statement following the ruling that the group was very disappointed with the courts opinion. Allowing state overreach will increase prices for consumers and drive small farms out of business, leading to more consolidation, he wrote.

The Biden administration had urged the justices to side with pork producers, telling the court in written filings that Proposition 12 would be a wholesale change in how pork is raised and marketed in this country and that it has thrown a giant wrench into the nations pork market.

Pork producers argued that 72% of farmers use individual pens for sows that do not allow them to turn around and that even farmers who house sows in larger group pens do not provide the space California would require.

They also say that the way the pork market works, with cuts of meat from various producers being combined before sale, it is likely all pork would have to meet California standards, regardless of where it is sold. Complying with Proposition 12 could cost the industry $290 million to $350 million, they said.

Animals rights groups cheered the decision.

Were delighted that the Supreme Court has upheld California Proposition 12 the nations strongest farm animal welfare law and made clear that preventing animal cruelty and protecting public health are core functions of our state governments, the president of the Humane Society of the United States, Kitty Block, wrote in a statement. The organization had backed Proposition 12 and was a participant in the case.

Tesla Inc. will need to fix almost every car its ever sold in China due to an issue with the vehicles acceleration systems.

Some 1.1 million electric cars that Tesla made at its Shanghai factory or imported into China between January 2019 and April this year will need to be sent an over-the-air software fix to rectify the issue, according to a statement from the State Administration for Market Regulation on Friday.

The problem occurs when a driver takes their foot off the accelerator in order to slow down. When that happens, what typically occurs is the additional power starts getting transfered to the cars battery to charge it up. This makes the rate of deceleration somewhat uncertain, and could increase the risk of collision and pose a safety hazard, Chinas regulator said.

Because of this defect, drivers may mistakenly step on the accelerator pedal, thinking its the brake.

Tesla representatives didnt immediately respond to a request for comment.

According to data from the China Automotive Technology and Research Center and Bloomberg Intelligence, Tesla sold around 1,129,055 cars in China from 2014 through March.

Tesla will also be required to send an electronic notification to drivers when they depress the accelerator for too long a period, according to Fridays notice.

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