LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Technological Incompetence: autonomous vehicles consistently malfunction by stranding themselves in floods and obstructing critical emergency services.
• Public Nuisance: suburban cul de sacs and urban intersections are suffering from robotic gridlock caused by flawed navigation patterns.
• Safety Failures: despite corporate claims of superior statistics, the machines struggle to handle edge cases like construction zones and blackout conditions.
• Regulatory Scrutiny: federal investigators and state authorities are probing multiple incidents involving collisions with children and standard mechanical failures.
• Corporate Denial: market players rely on questionable data comparisons to brush off legitimate community concerns regarding reckless machine behavior.
• Scaling Delays: aggressive expansion goals are hitting reality as software confusion leads to repetitive loops and necessary fleet recalls.
• Growing Backlash: local governments and labor unions are actively resisting the deployment of these automated systems due to safety and displacement fears.
• Fairy Tale Illusion: the promised innovation is currently functioning as an unreliable novelty that frequently collapses under basic environmental pressure.

A driverless Waymo in downtown Austin, Texas. Bob Daemmrich/ZUMA Press

By

Sean McLain

May 29, 2026 9:00 pm ET

BPC > Only use to renew if text is incomplete or updated: | archive.is

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• Robotaxi companies like Waymo and Tesla face mounting criticism and scrutiny from the public and local governments as problems appear in police report and viral social-media posts.
• Waymo vehicles have been involved in incidents like getting stuck in flooded streets, impeding traffic and briefly blocking an ambulance responding to a mass shooting.
• Waymo recalled 3,800 vehicles for a software update, and both the NTSB and NHTSA are investigating the company.

This summary was generated with AI and reviewed by an editor. Read more about how we use artificial intelligence in our journalism.

• Robotaxi companies like Waymo and Tesla face mounting criticism and scrutiny from the public and local governments as problems appear in police report and viral social-media posts.

  View more

This was supposed to be the year that robotaxis hit Main Street across the U.S., as companies like Alphabet’s GOOGL -2.51%decrease; red down pointing triangle Waymo, Tesla and Amazon.com’s Zoox launch AI-powered autonomous rides in dozens of cities. 

But as hundreds of robot cars collide with humans, both literally and figuratively, tensions are rising. The problems cropping up in police reports and viral social-media posts range from the concerning to the comical.

Over Mother’s Day weekend, Andy Milheizler’s quiet Atlanta cul-de-sac was overrun with empty Waymo vehicles. 

Her neighbors put up a barricade to block the vehicles. The next day, the robotaxis stopped at the barrier one after another, boxing each other in for around two hours.

“We started realizing that there might be a problem here,” said Milheizler, a 48-year-old civil engineer and mother.  

Empty Waymo vehicles recently clogged an Atlanta cul-de-sac.

The passengers in two Waymo vehicles in Atlanta last week were in a less-humorous predicament. Their taxis drove into flooded streets during a storm and became stranded. 

Now, criticism is mounting from drivers, law enforcement and local governments from California to New York—and as the companies attempt to scale, robotaxis face more scrutiny than ever before.

Waymo and other robotaxi operators point to the safety records of autonomous vehicles, saying they are involved in far fewer accidents than a human-driven car. 

“Reducing serious car crashes is core to our mission, and we’re incredibly proud of our record that shows we can make roads safer,” a Waymo spokesperson said. “At the same time, we know trust is earned.”

Waymo said peer-reviewed research showed its vehicles had over 80% fewer injury-causing crashes compared to human drivers operating on the same streets. The company said it would soon begin offering rides in a new vehicle dubbed the Ojai, which it says offers superior safety.

Tesla’s TSLA -1.43%decrease; red down pointing triangle robotaxis use a version of its Full Self Driving software, which is also available to consumers. The company maintains that FSD is safer than a human, able to travel 1.6 million miles before a minor collision, compared with the national average of 220,000 miles.

“Robotaxi companies want safety to be the number of crashes per mile,” said Phil Koopman, an autonomous-driving safety expert and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. “As long as they get lucky and no one gets hurt, they don’t think that’s a safety problem, but humans see that as a safety problem.”

A police officer on a motorcycle following a Waymo through downtown Los Angeles this month. Mike Blake/Reuters

Recent advancements in AI allow robotaxi companies to train their vehicles better and more quickly, leading to bold expansion goals. Waymo, the current market leader operating in 11 cities, including San Francisco and Orlando, said it aims to add 19 more cities.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said earlier this year that he hoped to expand its robotaxi service to a dozen states this year as the company puts artificial intelligence at the core of its business. New players like Zoox, Hyundai-backed Motional and Nuro are seeking a piece of the pie as well.

The autonomous vehicle space is expected to account for around 30% of the U.S. rideshare industry by 2032, according to Morgan Stanley.

But delivering safer-than-human transit depends on solving what the industry calls edge cases: rare, unusual incidents beyond everyday driving. Those edge cases cause the biggest headaches. 

Waymo vehicles in December froze up during a San Francisco blackout, blocking traffic when they were unable to navigate traffic signals; in March, a Waymo vehicle in Austin, Texas, briefly blocked an ambulance responding to a mass shooting. The vehicles also faced a backlash in Austin for passing stopped school buses.

A blackout in December knocked out traffic lights in San Francisco, causing Waymo robotaxis to idle at intersections. Jeff Chiu/AP

In April, an unoccupied Waymo became stuck after it drove into a flooded street in San Antonio, Texas, leading the company to recall all 3,800 vehicles with a software update. In its recall report, Waymo said vehicles traveling at higher speeds might slow but not stop when confronted with “a potentially untraversable flooded lane.”

A month later, after the software update, two Waymo vehicles in Atlanta got stuck in flooded streets. Last week, the company also halted rides on freeways in some cities for a few days to tweak how the vehicles responded to construction zones.

Many of the robotaxi issues being reported involve Waymo, in part because the company accounts for the overwhelming majority of self-driving taxis on the road today. But it isn’t alone.

In August, a Zoox vehicle pulled partially into oncoming traffic while making a right turn, leading the company to issue a software update to correct the issue. 

Musk has said Tesla is exercising caution in its robotaxi rollout after finding issues with how the vehicles behave on the roads. 

He said during the company’s earnings call in April that Tesla robotaxis still get confused when faced with atypical traffic situations, stopping in traffic—or endlessly driving in circles.

“We have also had literal infinite loops where the car might want to make a turn into a road, but there’s construction and then it goes around the block,” Musk said.

The National Transportation Safety Board opened an ongoing investigation into Waymo after a robotaxi struck a child in Santa Monica, Calif., near an elementary school. The company said the vehicle had hit the brakes, reducing the car’s speed from 17 mph to 6 mph at the time of impact.

Waymo said in a blog post that the accident demonstrated the relative safety of a computer-driven vehicle, adding that a human in the same situation would have made contact at 14 mph.

A separate investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is examining whether Waymo’s software behaves with the appropriate caution around schools during drop-off hours.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul had been pushing to allow robotaxi companies to operate a commercial service this year. But in February, she reversed course, and Waymo’s testing permit wasn’t renewed.

The Boston City Council has debated putting restrictions on robotaxis, supported by labor unions fearful of losing driver jobs. In Seattle, home of some of the biggest technology companies, robotaxi operators have been hit by protests.

Musk last year promised Tesla’s robotaxis would soon be available to half the U.S. population. He is now striking a more cautious tone as the service rolls out more slowly than projected. 

Tesla registered 42 robotaxis that operate in portions of Austin, Dallas, and Houston, according to state filings. By comparison, Waymo has 577 vehicles registered in Texas.

“We haven’t had any injuries and certainly no fatalities to date with the unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion,” Musk told analysts on a call in April. “We want to keep it that way.”

During a hearing in March about San Francisco’s blackouts, city Supervisor Bilal Mahmood said autonomous cars are “a technological miracle” that he likened to one of “Cinderella’s magical carriages.”

“But just like in the fairy tale,” Mahmood said, “We can now see that those carriages can turn into pumpkins at the drop of a hat.”

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

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LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• State Longevity Initiative: the russian government has authorized a 26 billion dollar vanity project focused on staving off biological decline.
• Dubious Scientific Focus: researchers are chasing fantasies involving organ printing and the harvesting of mini-pigs for potential human transplantation.
• Optimistic Timeline: official claims suggest human organ replacement will be achieved by 2030 despite significant technological hurdles.
• Lack Of Transparency: unlike private western initiatives, this state-sponsored effort has produced almost no verifiable evidence in international peer-reviewed journals.
• Questionable Metrics: the initiative set a goal of saving 175,000 lives, a figure observers sarcastically link to massive wartime losses.
• Speculative Research Methods: extreme measures including exposure to ultralow temperatures are being touted as legitimate anti-aging interventions.
• Technological Grandiosity: the program mirrors common authoritarian tendencies to prioritize showy scientific breakthroughs over practical public health outcomes.
• Geopolitical Parallel: the project attempts to frame state-directed resource allocation as a cutting-edge technological race against western billionaire investment.

By

Conor Grant

May 29, 2026 12:00 pm ET

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Alexei Druzhinin/Associated Press

This is an edition of The Future of Everything newsletter, a look at how innovation and technology are transforming the way we live, work and play. If you’re not subscribed, sign up here.

Silicon Valley billionaires such as Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman and Peter Thiel are not the only powerful men fascinated with antiaging research: Russian President Vladimir Putin has made his quest to stave off decline a state priority.

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This week, Bojan Pancevski reports on Putin’s $26 billion longevity initiative, which encompasses methods as wide-ranging as organ printing, harvesting mini-pigs and exposure to ultralow temperatures.

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175,000

How many lives Putin’s national longevity initiative promised to save by the end of the decade (the figure had an awkward wartime echo, roughly matching independent estimates of Russian troop losses in the invasion of Ukraine, as critics noted)

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Russian state scientists appointed by Putin have focused on two key technologies: bioprinting, or 3D-printing living tissue, and xenotransplantation, or growing human organs inside mini-pigs, a porcine breed deemed genetically compatible to humans. 

Russian scientists working with government agencies claim to have bioprinted human cartilage tissue and a mouse thyroid gland, with the aim of achieving human organ replacement by 2030. A similar timeline has been discussed for growing organs inside pigs.

Yet unlike similar research funded by Bezos, Altman or Thiel, the work promoted by Putin’s circle has produced little peer-reviewed research in major international journals.

More on this topic:

• These billionaires are fueling the quest for longer life. (Read)
• The longevity business is booming—and its scientists are clashing. (Read)

🤔 What do you think about Vladimir Putin’s longevity push? Send me your thoughts, questions and predictions at future@wsj.com (if you’re reading this in your inbox, you can just hit reply).

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More of What’s Next: Putin’s Longevity Push; AI Investing; China’s High-Tech Sedan

Investors are betting big on “physical AI,” or autonomous machines that can understand and perform complex real-world tasks, as they search for new investment opportunities in a landscape where AI is disrupting many software businesses.

Robinhood is letting customers use AI to trade stocks and make credit-card purchases. The brokerage is part of a crowded field of financial firms that have introduced AI tools into a range of services they offer individual customers.

China’s answer to a Rolls-Royce is stuffed with gadgets. The battery-powered Maextro S800 sedan is manufactured with the help of more than 1,000 robots in Hefei, China, and runs on tech from Huawei, best known as a maker of mass-market phones.

Mistral is chasing AI superintelligence to counter U.S. dominance. The French AI company says it’s working as fast as it can on the moonshot race to develop so-called superintelligence because Europe can’t afford to rely on U.S. tech giants.

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Future Feedback

Last week, we reported on business leaders who are creating AI versions of themselves. Readers shared their thoughts on these so-called digital twins:

• “I’m in the process of making a digital twin for my own use, mostly to synthesize my thinking or make papers, presentations and email responses faster. But I wouldn’t ever trust it to act or create material without me in the loop. It’s my reputation on the line if it hallucinates or behaves inconsistently.” —Richard Fray, United Kingdom
• “We’ve developed a tool at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University to access Peter Drucker’s extensive legacy with accuracy. We explored the use of images, video and synthetic voice but chose not to. Why? This is not a reincarnation of Peter Drucker—it’s a highly reliable and accurate access to his volumes of material. The idea of a digital twin is catchy, but misleading. Presenting such creations as live and anthropomorphic is incorrect. Presenting them as ‘here’s what Reid might say if he had the time’ is correct. That clarity reflects morals and values, and should be the standard.” —Steven C. Tarr, Washington
• “Leveraging technology for one-way communications—with authenticity—could be a good use of the ‘digital twin.’ To me, that’s the key point: Simulating a CEO visiting with employees in a location she’s never actually been would be falsifying the authenticity and empathy that real leaders need to demonstrate.” —John Dabbar, New York
• “I would use a digital twin, were I still a CEO. Only now I’m 89. Back in my startup days (1973), I was so busy I had to forgo many things, like keeping up correspondence with old pals. Since this was before start-uppers were ‘founders’—with the attending glorification—my friends thought I was just rude. Now, at my grand old age, I have so much I could feed my AI doppelgänger that it would surely fool my pals (though most are dead, alas). Surely the AI twin would be more ‘me’ than I am now. I think we (my twin and I) will go do another startup!” —Willis ‘Scooter’ Duff, New Mexico

(Responses have been condensed and edited.)

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Elsewhere in the Future

• A new extraction process could unlock the world’s lithium. (MIT Technology Review)
• This $6 billion Chinese startup is trying to build hands for every robot. (Wired)
• This writer tried to sell his house with a chatbot. (The New York Times)

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About Us

Thanks for reading The Future of Everything. We cover the innovation and tech transforming the way we live, work and play. This newsletter was written by Conor Grant. Get in touch with us at future@wsj.com. Got a tip for us? Here’s how to submit.

Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Political Maneuvering: mayor mamdani introduced a limited rent increase policy as a performative gesture rather than a structural solution to the city's housing shortage.
• Limited Scope: the program targets a negligible fraction of the city's fifty thousand vacant rent-stabilized units, leaving the vast majority of uninhabitable apartments untouched.
• Regulatory Constraints: current state law restricts allowable renovation cost recoupment to levels far below the actual capital investment required to restore distressed units.
• Capital Inefficiency: systemic rent caps combined with high rehabilitation costs render private ownership of older buildings economically unviable, incentivizing long-term vacancy.
• Administrative Discretion: the policy shifts power to the mayoral housing agency, allowing officials to exercise case-by-case control over property owners instead of implementing market-wide reforms.
• Subsidy Reliance: the proposal lacks a clear path for legal rent increases, necessitating potential reliance on existing federal or state subsidy mechanisms rather than market adjustments.
• Perverse Incentives: rent freezes and discretionary control may intensify owner distress, encouraging the further withdrawal of housing supply from the market.
• Ideological Obstruction: the administration avoids necessary revisions to the housing stability and tenant protection act to satisfy political allies, prioritizing optics over housing availability.

Courtesy Andreas M/Unsplash

On Tuesday, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani announced that owners of vacant regulated apartments would be eligible for a “one-time” rent increase if their units are part of city-financed, city-regulated affordable housing. The announcement was billed as relief for distressed rent-stabilized landlords whose vacant units can’t be economically repaired at current rents.

In reality, the measure is something closer to a political maneuver. It will affect a minuscule share of the city’s long-term vacant apartments, counterproductively create incentives to keep more units off the market, and place owners at the mercy of a mayoral housing agency. The real culprit behind the city’s vacancy crisis is a 2019 state law that created it in the first place—and that Mamdani has no intention of fixing.

Of the city’s roughly 1 million rent-stabilized apartments, an estimated 50,000 units sit vacant because their rents cannot be raised enough to justify costly renovations. (Precise figures aren’t available because the state’s Division of Housing and Community Renewal, which oversees rent stabilization, does not release the data—even though it collects it.) Readers may wonder: How is it possible that there are any vacancies in a city with a severe housing shortage?

To answer that, go back to 2019, when Albany passed the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act (HSTPA). Before HSTPA, when a tenant moved out, rent-stabilized landlords were allowed a “vacancy bonus”—a larger rent increase—to compensate for years of below-market raises. Once a unit’s legal rent reached $2,774.76, it could be entirely deregulated upon vacancy.

Tenant activists argued that arrangement created an incentive for landlords to harass tenants into leaving in order to capture the bonus. In response to these allegations, the 2019 law severely restricted owners’ ability to raise rents.

Today, landlords can no longer increase rents between tenancies. And when an apartment requires renovation, they can recoup at most up to $50,000 over 12 years—a maximum monthly rent increase of $347.

Rehabbing an apartment in New York City frequently costs double that or more. According to a 2018 analysis by the city’s Independent Budget Office, bringing highly distressed public-housing buildings in Brooklyn into good repair would cost an average of $260,000 per unit—roughly $325,000 in today’s dollars. Similar math constrains private owners. As a result, tens of thousands of apartments are uninhabitable and economically unviable to renovate.

How does Mamdani’s plan change this equation? By the administration’s description in Tuesday’s press conference, it seems like a longstanding HPD program would expand to a broader set of distressed properties. The mayor’s proposal would allow buildings subject to HPD financing and regulatory agreements to receive a rent bonus on vacant apartments on a case-by-case basis.

It remains unclear how city regulatory agreements can supersede the HSTPA’s restrictions on rent increases. Deputy Mayor Leila Bozorg suggested that federal Section 8 housing vouchers might be used to cover the higher rent.

Another answer may lie in Section 610 of the Private Housing Finance Law, signed by Governor Kathy Hochul in December 2022. Similar to Section 8, it allows owners of affordable housing projects with rental assistance to collect the full subsidy amount even if it exceeds the legal stabilized rent, without affecting what tenants pay out of pocket. While the law requires owners to execute an amendment to their existing regulatory agreement, Section 610 is explicitly a subsidy mechanism, not an authority to raise rents above HSTPA’s limits.

Whatever the mechanism, the Wall Street Journal reports that City Hall “projects that hundreds of apartments could use the rent increase”—a drop in the vacancy bucket. The proposal would do nothing to address the vacancies that are in buildings not subject to HPD financing or regulatory agreements, which make up the vast majority of the city’s 50,000 apartment vacancies. The mayor hasn’t called for overhauling the HSTPA to allow for vacancy bonuses, which would solve the problem for all owners as-of-right, without needing a discretionary review by a city housing authority.

But case-by-case control is politically useful for a mayor who built a campaign on the premise that landlords of rent-stabilized units were profiting too much. It lets him claim credit for returning vacant apartments to use while avoiding any concession that the HSTPA itself is broken. Such a solution will also give reason for far-left housing advocates to push for more public intervention in the housing market.

What’s more, in Tuesday’s press conference, Mamdani said that no tenant would see rents rise beyond what the Rent Guidelines Board determines, even if their apartment is otherwise eligible for a reset under the new program. Current tenants in affected buildings would remain subject to whatever the Rent Guidelines Board sets—including a freeze, if one is enacted in June.

A rent freeze, however, would only accelerate distress in stabilized buildings and force more units into vacancy. Owners might remove units from the market in the hopes of obtaining a vacancy bonus, potentially restricting supply further. Mamdani’s program thus provides an illusion that something is being done to address vacancies, which allows him to delay the reality that stabilized tenants will eventually need to pay more to keep their buildings afloat.

If the mayor were serious about filling vacancies, he would provide political cover for his leftist allies in Albany to amend the HSTPA and allow re-introduced vacancy bonuses. Instead, his program is a fig leaf—a chance to claim credit for “solving” a minuscule slice of a crisis that will only deepen if he achieves his campaign’s rent freeze.

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LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Predictive Markets: online platforms allow gamblers and insiders to speculate on global events under the guise of market innovation.
• Public Vigilantism: internet sleuths now perform the basic investigative labor once reserved for actual oversight agencies.
• Corporate Malfeasance: google employees allegedly exploit their access to internal company data to manipulate betting outcomes for personal profit.
• Tracing Transgressions: the inherent transparency of blockchain technology serves as a digital leash for those attempting to hide illicit windfalls.
• Naive Obfuscation: even self-described technical experts fail to conceal their criminal financial trails when interacting with regulated banking infrastructure.
• Regulatory Vacuum: offshore betting hubs operate with minimal scrutiny until federal authorities finally catch up to the obvious evidence left behind.
• State Enforcement: justice department officials are forced to clean up the messes left by unregulated betting sites after amateur crowds verify the crimes online.
• Illusion Of Anonymity: these high-tech prediction schemes ultimately collapse when they collide with the reality of traditional identification and centralized financial systems.

By

Alexander Osipovich

4

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A blockchain engineer wrote that ‘a Google insider’ was ‘milking Polymarket.’ Pascal Mora/Bloomberg News

Late last year, Haeju Jeong noticed that a mystery trader on Polymarket had just earned more than $1 million with a series of uncannily accurate bets on the top Google search results of 2025. He shared his suspicions with the internet. 

“He’s a Google insider milking Polymarket for quick money,” Jeong, a blockchain engineer, wrote on X. “It’s one of the wildest things I’ve seen on the platform.”

Now, the government says he was right. In a criminal complaint this week, federal prosecutors alleged that Michele Spagnuolo, a longtime software engineer at Google, used his access to internal company data to place the lucrative bets, using a Polymarket account called “AlphaRaccoon.” 

It was the same account that Jeong identified in his Dec. 4 tweet, which went viral and drew more than 6 million views. It was the latest case of amateur sleuths identifying suspicious activity on Polymarket in nearly real time, before law enforcement gets involved.

Spagnuolo, an Italian citizen who was charged with fraud and money laundering, didn’t respond to a request for comment. His prosecution follows the April arrest of Gannon Ken Van Dyke, a U.S. special-forces soldier accused of using his role in the military operation in Venezuela to earn more than $400,000 in betting profits. Polymarket watchers shined a social-media spotlight on his successful bets in early January, within hours of the capture of Nicolás Maduro.

Michele Spagnuolo

Israeli authorities arrested two people earlier this year for using classified information to make profitable bets on military operations. Those wagers also drew attention online months before the arrests.

Sharp-eyed observers like Jeong are proving to be an unexpected ally of law enforcement as it tackles the emerging challenge of insider trading on prediction markets.

Platforms such as Polymarket and Kalshi let users bet on future events in areas such as politics, war, and popular culture. That can create tempting opportunities for people with nonpublic knowledge to make profitable bets at the expense of less-informed traders.

Many of the armchair sleuths hunting insiders are prediction-market traders themselves. They typically focus on Polymarket, whose offshore, crypto-based platform isn’t overseen by U.S. regulators and has drawn repeated allegations of insider trading and market manipulation.

Polymarket doesn’t require users of its offshore platform to submit proof of identity, making it largely anonymous. But its blockchain-based technology makes it possible for anyone to monitor the bets, profits and losses of individual accounts. 

That allows sleuths to spot suspicious activity and highlight it online, even if they can’t identify the actual traders. These sleuths are often anonymous themselves, such as an X user who goes by Andrey_10gwei and tracked potential insider bets on Middle East wars.

“Anyone with the right skills and knowledge can access all of this information,” Andrey_10gwei told The Wall Street Journal in a direct message via X. He declined to give his name.

Jeong, who flagged the alleged “Google insider” on social media, is an engineer at Meta Platforms. He didn’t respond to requests for comment, but on Thursday he posted on X again. “Bro got caught and is now getting federally charged. I called this out 6 months ago lol,” Jeong wrote. 

Polymarket said it cooperated with the investigations into Spagnuolo and Van Dyke and hailed their arrests as vindication for its blockchain-based model. “Blockchain trading is transparent, traceable, and bad actors leave footprints,” a spokesperson for the New York-based company said.

Polymarket has a data partnership with Dow Jones, the publisher of the Journal. 

To catch a Polymarket insider trader, authorities need to trace the movement of digital funds to another platform that has recorded the trader’s real-life identity. 

Van Dyke, the special-forces soldier, funded his Polymarket bets with transfers from Coinbase Global, a regulated cryptocurrency exchange that tracks customers’ identities and cooperates with law enforcement. That made it relatively straightforward for authorities to identify him, blockchain analysts said.

Spagnuolo—a network-security specialist with “extensive technical experience in blockchains,” according to his LinkedIn profile—used more sophisticated techniques to attempt to mask his identity, according to the Justice Department. 

When cashing in his winnings from the Google bets in December, Spagnuolo used multiple steps to obfuscate the digital money trail, including the use of a crypto-transfer service with special privacy protection, according to the DOJ’s criminal complaint.

But the FBI identified Spagnuolo because of an earlier withdrawal, in which he didn’t try as hard to cover his tracks. 

In November, he moved $149,980 off Polymarket onto a crypto “swapping service,” the complaint said. Soon afterward, an identical quantity of funds left the service for a payment processor, where they were received in an account in Spagnuolo’s name. His Italian government ID had been used to open that account.

Blockchain data show that the payment processor he used was Nexo, a crypto trading and lending platform whose offices are largely in Europe, while the swapping service he used was FixedFloat, which says on its website that it offers users “anonymity and security,” according to Bubblemaps, a blockchain analytics firm.

A Nexo spokeswoman said the platform cooperates with law-enforcement request, but couldn’t comment publicly on individual clients. FixedFloat didn’t respond to emailed questions. Bubblemaps identified the two platforms at the request of the Journal, based on details disclosed in the DOJ’s complaint.

The fact that Spagnuolo got caught shows how even sophisticated operators have trouble staying hidden, said Nicolas Vaiman, co-founder and chief executive of Bubblemaps, a Paris-based startup that has enjoyed a burst of publicity in recent months by identifying suspicious Polymarket bets tied to the war with Iran.

“It’s very easy to make a mistake with this blockchain betting,” Vaiman said. Bettors who want to convert their crypto winning into dollars or other traditional currencies eventually need to use banks or regulated crypto exchanges, making it possible for the authorities to identify them, according to Vaiman.

“If you’re smart enough, you’re going to create a trail of wallets to obscure the funding source,” he said. “But at the end of the day, it’s all going to be visible on-chain.”

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Copyright ©2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Alexander Osipovich is a London-based business, finance and economics reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He previously covered exchanges and cryptocurrencies. Before joining The Wall Street Journal in 2016, he worked for The Moscow Times, Agence France-Presse and <a href="http://Risk.net" rel="nofollow">Risk.net</a>, a trade publication focusing on derivatives.

Alexander has completed a Knight-Bagehot fellowship in business journalism at Columbia University. He won a SABEW Best in Business award in 2011 for a profile of hedge-fund manager turned anti-Putin activist Bill Browder, and he contributed to the Journal's SABEW award-winning coverage of the 2022 collapse of FTX.

Earlier in his career, Alexander worked as a software engineer in Silicon Valley. He has a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in computer science, both from Stanford University.

Governor Gavin Newsom has dismissed fossil fuels as “alternative energy,” and wants to power California with, among other things, the sun. Through extensive mandates and extra energy costs for non-solar consumers, the Newsom administration has directed billions to building solar energy capacity.

The centerpiece of this initiative is the Solar on Multifamily Affordable Housing (SOMAH) program. SOMAH began under Governor Jerry Brown, who signed legislation requiring a state commission to apportion up to $100 million a year from California’s cap-and-trade program to pay for the installation of solar panels on apartment buildings in poor areas. Since then, California has devoted nearly $900 million to SOMAH, which the state hoped would create 300 megawatts of power by 2030 and advocates envisioned would create a million solar-using renters.

The results have been disastrous. Since 2015, the program has installed or reserved only 129 megawatts of solar power for approximately 65,600 residents—nowhere close to the target of 1 million “solar renters.”

What happened? First, incompetence. For a decade, businesses and utilities have been forced to buy emissions credits, and while the state has lavished nearly $900 million on SOMAH, administrators designed the program so poorly that they have paid out only $131 million for solar installation.

As the program’s largest contractor admitted in a draft audit, potential customers were turned off by the paperwork, bureaucracy, and red tape. “Initially, we found housing owners excited about the program,” the contractor said, “but after a long and laborious process, they are much less enthusiastic.”

That is an understatement. From the beginning, the SOMAH program has been plagued by delays and cancellations. More than 400 applications have wound up cancelled or withdrawn, or about a third of the total. On average, projects take three and a half years to make it through the program’s gauntlet of paperwork and inspections.

Some projects have been fully installed—only to sit idle for a year or more waiting for permission to begin operating. As a result, more than $700 million of the program’s budget remains unspent. In other words, California can’t even give away a heavily subsidized, and sometimes free, product.

These failures do not mean, however, that no one is profiting. The managers of the SOMAH program have spent about $60 million on overhead, including salaries, conferences, website development, and more. And, as part of that budget, they have devoted at least $5.5 million to “community-based organizations” (CBOs), most of which are left-wing nonprofits that, in one case, labeled giving solar panels to low-income housing residents a way to fight “racial injustice.”

Under the guise of marketing and outreach, SOMAH paid more than $163,000 to the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN). Vivian Yi Huang, the group’s co-director, extolled the need to “fight against the systems of white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism of the extractive economy.” The organization called for Richmond, California to “Defund the Police and Invest in Black Lives” and is a member of the Defund Police Coalition in Oakland, California.

California Environmental Justice Alliance (CEJA) told supporters that it “led in the creation” of SOMAH. Officials awarded it $230,000. The nonprofit wants the “democratization” of “land, labor, and resources” to “reverse the long course of environmental racism, the climate crisis, and colonialism.”

CEJA uses aggressive language to support its apparent goal of banning oil. “What’s at stake is our very survival,” its then-executive director said in 2021. “We must make the transition to 100 percent clean energy and bring all communities along to avoid a devastating climate apartheid.”

The group’s political arm, CEJA Action, endorses candidates and publishes voter guides as it “builds the political power of communities of color to advance environmentally and socially just policies.”

While APEN and CEJA no longer partner with the state, one of the active CBOs, Communities for a Better Environment, is no less radical. Last year, the group demanded the immediate release of everyone who was detained in immigration raids in California. “[T]here is no environmental justice without migrant justice,” the group wrote. “[W]e stand in solidarity with migrant, low-income, queer and trans, and people of color.”

Have these groups delivered results? No.

In 2023, a state-contracted auditor interviewed some CBOs. It found that they were only “responsible for a handful of submitted applications.” This year’s draft audit noted an “inverse relationship” between new applications and spending on these groups.

The other main beneficiary of the SOMAH program is a San Francisco-based corporation called Sunrun Inc., which bills itself as the country’s largest solar provider and has been the contractor for 78 percent of all SOMAH projects. The company has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to political candidates—including $50,000 to Gavin Newsom’s campaigns—and has employed an army of lobbyists in Sacramento.

Newsom, in turn, has packed his administration with former Sunrun employees. The governor appointed the company’s public policy manager to the California Energy Commission and appointed its former chief policy officer to a regional water quality control board. In recent years, Sunrun representatives have met with government regulators’ offices to discuss SOMAH, including last December, when the company supported efforts to expand the program.

SOMAH and Sunrun did not respond to requests for comment.

California’s infrastructure projects seem always to fall short. SOMAH shows why. Liberal nonprofits help pass sweeping climate laws and receive money from the programs those laws create. In turn, those groups use their expanded influence to push for still more mandates and spending. The laws finance the activists, the activists demand more laws, and the cycle feeds itself—and helps well-connected firms, like Sunrun, collect new contracts.

Meantime, Californians increasingly think solar isn’t worth the headache. As one property owner told auditors, it’s “hard to justify poking a whole bunch of holes in your roof all over the place, just for a small amount of benefit.”

LLM (google/gemini-3.1-flash-lite-20260507) summary:

• Systemic Obsolescence: terraform exists merely due to professional inertia rather than genuine technical utility.
• Abstract Fallacy: hashicorp configuration language fails to mirror the mental models engineers utilize during design.
• Translation Overhead: the process of converting whiteboard sketches into static code creates unnecessary and inefficient labor.
• Fragmented Architecture: modern workflows suffer from disconnected representations of intent, application logic, and security policy.
• Illusion Of Sync: maintaining separate infrastructure and logic layers inevitably leads to configuration drift and administrative errors.
• Artificial Intelligence Disruption: automated systems eliminate the need for manual translation layers by directly interpreting natural language and design documentation.
• Intent Based Orchestration: future infrastructure management replaces restrictive languages with iterative refinement and explicit constraint definitions.
• Tooling Irrelevance: terraform functions as a redundant abstraction that adds complexity while failing to integrate seamlessly with programmatic execution.