Meta agreed to pay $17.1 billion for hiding how much Instagram was hurting kids. The NBA is investigating whether Steve Ballmer used a fake deal to avoid the salary cap. Dolly Parton died, leaving an estimated $450–650 million fortune, but no will has been found yet. In 1910, six bankers secretly created the Federal Reserve on a private island.

Now, show me the money!

On August 26, Meta agreed to pay $16.7 billion to settle a lawsuit brought by 29 state attorneys general, led by California, Colorado, New Jersey, and Kentucky. The states accused Meta of designing Facebook and Instagram to be deliberately addictive for kids and teens, then misrepresenting how much mental health damage that caused. The trial had only started the week before at the federal courthouse in Oakland. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers signed off on the settlement the same day it was filed, and Meta's stock jumped 5% in premarket trading on the news.  

Several attorneys general put the real number closer to $17.1 billion once an older Cambridge Analytica claim, worth about $459 million, gets folded in. As part of the deal, Meta has to add daily time limits and nighttime blocks for teen accounts, stronger age checks, and new parental controls within months. States could split another $5 billion if YouTube and TikTok agree to make similar changes, meaning this case could end up reshaping how every major platform treats young users, not just Meta's. 

A $17 billion settlement is easier to write than an apology.

Earlier this year, the podcast Pablo Torre Finds Out won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing a "no-show" endorsement deal between Kawhi Leonard and a tree-planting startup called Aspiration, meaning Leonard was allegedly paid without appearing to do any actual work for the company. Aspiration's biggest backer was Steve Ballmer, the Los Angeles Clippers owner and the richest owner in American sports, who had signed Leonard to the Clippers after a competitive free agency chase. The claim, still unproven, is that the arrangement let Ballmer funnel extra money to Leonard outside the NBA's salary cap. The NBA has hired the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to investigate, and Ballmer has denied any wrongdoing.  

Hunterbrook Media, an investigative outlet with its own investment arm, has since reported a second alleged arrangement between Leonard and Daktronics, the publicly traded company that built the Halo Board at Ballmer's Intuit Dome. Hunterbrook says its reporters could not find evidence Leonard performed any work for the company in exchange for the deal. Daktronics declined to explain the arrangement in detail but confirmed to Hunterbrook that Wachtell had already contacted the company as part of its investigation. None of this has been confirmed by the NBA, and no findings have been made public yet.  

An investigation is not a verdict, but the NBA clearly thinks there's something here worth digging into. 

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Dolly Parton died in Nashville on August 25 at age 80. Forbes had estimated her fortune at roughly $450 million in 2025, built largely on her stake in Dollywood and a music catalog of more than 3,000 songs valued at around $120 million. Other estimates from Celebrity Net Worth put the figure closer to $650 million. Her husband of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, died in March 2025, and the couple never had children, which leaves no obvious spouse or child in line to inherit.  

As of this week, no verified will or probate filing has surfaced to say who actually gets the money. Parton told Billboard back in 2020 that she had hired an estate attorney specifically so her death would not trigger the kind of public fight that often follows stars who die without clear instructions. She entered the theme park business with the Herschend family in 1986, when Silver Dollar City reopened as Dollywood, and that stake is believed to make up the largest single piece of her estate. 

She spent a lifetime making sure people knew her story. Right now, nobody knows the ending.

In November 1910, six of the most powerful men in American finance boarded a private railcar bound for Jekyll Island, an exclusive club off the coast of Georgia whose members included J.P. Morgan and the Vanderbilts. The group included Senator Nelson Aldrich, Assistant Treasury Secretary A. Piatt Andrew, Morgan partner Henry Davison, National City Bank president Frank Vanderlip, and banker Paul Warburg. To avoid being recognized by railway staff, they addressed each other only by first names for the entire trip, and at least one member carried a borrowed shotgun to keep up the appearance of a hunting trip.  

For a full week, the men worked in secret to draft the framework for a new national banking system. The meeting was so tightly guarded that its participants did not publicly confirm it had happened until the 1930s, more than two decades later. The plan they wrote at Jekyll Island became the backbone of the Federal Reserve Act, which President Woodrow Wilson signed into law in December 1913, creating the central bank that still sets American interest rates and controls the money supply today. 

The most powerful financial institution in America started with a lie about a hunting trip.

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