Techin' Geek

YouTube megastar MrBeast announced on Monday that his company, Beast Industries, is buying Step, a teen-focused banking app.

Step, which raised half a billion in funding and has grown to over 7 million users, offers financial services geared toward Gen Z to help them build credit, save money, and invest. The company has attracted celebrity investors like Charli D’Amelio, Will Smith, The Chainsmokers, and Stephen Curry, in addition to venture firms like General Catalyst, Coatue, and the payments company Stripe.

If the company wants to continue getting its fintech product in front of young eyes, then partnering with Gen Z phenom MrBeast is wise. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is the most-subscribed creator on YouTube, with over 466 million subscribers, but his ambitions stretch beyond his over-the-top videos.

“Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up,” the 27-year-old said. “I want to give millions of young people the financial foundation I never had.”

I’m so excited to share that we are acquiring the financial services app, @step

Nobody taught me about investing, building credit, or managing money when I was growing up. That’s exactly why we’re joining forces with Step! I want to give millions of young people the financial…

— MrBeast (@MrBeast) February 9, 2026

This acquisition makes sense, considering that a leaked pitch document from last year showed this was an area of interest for Beast Industries. The company is also reportedly interested in launching a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO), a lower-cost cell phone plan similar to Ryan Reynolds’ Mint Mobile.

In line with other top creators, Beast Industries’ business is much more than YouTube ad revenue. (In fact, the company reinvests much of that money back into the content.) The company’s cash cow is the chocolate brand Feastables, which is more profitable than both the MrBeast YouTube channel and the Prime Video show “Beast Games,” according to leaked documents reported on by Bloomberg. Some of his other ventures, like Lunchly and MrBeast Burger, have struggled.

“We’re excited about how this acquisition is going to amplify our platform and bring more groundbreaking products to Step customers,” Step founder and CEO CJ MacDonald said in a statement.

When a startup announced plans last fall to recreate lost footage from Orson Welles’ classic film “The Magnificent Ambersons” using generative AI, I was skeptical. More than that, I was baffled why anyone would spend time and money on something that seemed guaranteed to outrage cinephiles while offering negligible commercial value.

This week, an in-depth profile by the New Yorker’s Michael Schulman provides more details about the project. If nothing else, it helps explain why the startup Fable and its founder Edward Saatchi are pursuing it: It seems to come from a genuine love of Welles and his work.

Saatchi (whose father was a founder of advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi) recalled a childhood of watching films in a private screening room with his “movie mad” parents. He said he first saw “Ambersons” when he was twelve.

The profile also explains why “Ambersons,” while much less famous than Welles’ first film “Citizen Kane,” remains so tantalizing — Welles himself claimed it was a “much better picture” than “Kane,” but after a disastrous preview screening, the studio cut 43 minutes from the film, added an abrupt and unconvincing happy ending, and eventually destroyed the excised footage to make space in its vaults.

“To me, this is the holy grail of lost cinema,” Saatchi said. “It just seemed intuitively that there would be some way to undo what had happened.”

Saatchi is only the latest Welles devotee to dream of recreating the lost footage. In fact, Fable is working with filmmaker Brian Rose, who already spent years trying to achieve the same thing with animated scenes based on the movie’s script and photographs, and on Welles’ notes. (Rose said that after he screened the results for friends and family, “a lot of them were scratching their heads.”)

So while Fable is using more advanced technology — filming scenes in live action, then eventually overlaying them with digital recreations of the original actors and their voices — this project is best understood as a slicker, better-funded version of Rose’s work. It’s a fan’s attempt to glimpse Welles’ vision.

Notably, while the New Yorker article includes a few clips of Rose’s animations, as well as images of Fable’s AI actors, there’s no footage showing the results of Fable’s live action-AI hybrid.

By the company’s own admission, there are significant challenges, whether that’s fixing obvious blunders like a two-headed version of the actor Joseph Cotten, or the more subjective task of recreating the rich lighting and shadows found in Welles’ footage. (Saatchi even described a “happiness” problem, with the AI tending to make women characters look inappropriately happy.)

As for whether this footage will ever be released to the public, Saatchi admitted it was “a total mistake” not to speak to Welles’ estate before his announcement. Since then, he has reportedly been working to win over both the estate and Warner Bros., which owns the rights to the film. Welles’ daughter Beatrice told Schulman that while she remains “skeptical,” she now believes “they are going into this project with enormous respect toward my father and this beautiful movie.”

The actor and biographer Simon Callow — who’s currently writing the fourth book in his multi-volume Welles biography — has also agreed to advise the project, which he described as a “great idea.” (Callow is a family friend of the Saatchis.)

But not everyone has been convinced. Melissa Galt said her mother, the actress Anne Baxter, would “not have agreed with that at all.”

“It’s not the truth,” Galt said. “It’s a creation of someone else’s truth. But it’s not the original, and she was a purist.”

And while I’ve become more sympathetic to Saatchi’s aims, I still agree with Galt: At its best, this project will only result in a novelty, a dream of what the movie might have been.

I was also reminded of a recent essay in which the writer Aaron Bady compared AI to the vampires in “Sinners.” Bady argued that when it comes to art, both vampires and AI will always come up short, because “what makes art possible” is a knowledge of mortality and limitations.

“Without death, without loss, and without the space between my body and yours, separating my memories from yours, we cannot make art or desire or feeling,” he wrote.

In that light, Saatchi’s insistence that there must be “some way to undo what had happened” feels, if not outright vampiric, then at least a little childish in its unwillingness to accept that some losses are permanent. It may not, perhaps, be that different from a startup founder claiming they can make grief obsolete — or a studio executive insisting that “The Magnificent Ambersons” needed a happy ending.

Elon Musk has merged SpaceX and xAI, creating what might be the blueprint for a new Silicon Valley power structure. With his $800 billion net worth already rivaling historic conglomerate GE’s peak market cap, and Musk being vocal about his view that “tech victory is decided by velocity of innovation,” the question isn’t whether a personal conglomerate can be built, but rather how far Musk himself is going to take it. 

Watch as Equity dives into this new era of the “everything” business, whether we’ll see others like Sam Altman follow suit, and more of the week’s headlines. 

Subscribe to Equity on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod. 

People without coding backgrounds are discovering that they can build their own custom apps using vibe coding — solutions like Lovable that turn plain-language descriptions into working code.

While these prompt-to-code tools can help create nice prototypes, launching them into full-scale production (as this reporter recently discovered) can be tricky without figuring out how to connect the application with external tech services, such as those that can send text messages via SMS, email, and process Stripe payments.

Ilan Zerbib, who spent five years as Shopify’s director of engineering for payments, is building a solution that could eliminate these back-end infrastructure headaches for nontechnical creators.

Last summer, Zerbib launched Sapiom, a San Francisco startup developing the financial layer that allows AI agents to securely purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute — essentially creating a payment system that lets AI automatically buy the services it needs.

Every time an AI agent connects to an external tool like Twilio for SMS, it requires authentication and a micro-payment. Sapiom’s goal is to make this whole process seamless, letting the AI agent decide what to buy and when without human intervention.

“In the future, apps are going to consume services which require payments. Right now, there’s no easy way for agents to actually access all of that,” said Amit Kumar, a partner at Accel.

Kumar has met with dozens of startups in the AI payments space, but he believes Zerbib’s focus on the financial layer for enterprises, rather than consumers, is what’s truly needed to make AI agents work. That’s why Accel is leading Sapiom’s $15 million seed round, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures.

“If you really think about it, every API call is a payment. Every time you send a text message, it’s a payment. Every time you spin up a server for AWS, it’s a payment,” Kumar told TechCrunch.

While it’s still early days for Sapiom, the startup hopes that its infrastructure solution will be adopted by vibe-coding companies and other companies creating AI agents that will eventually be tasked with doing many things on their own.

For example, anyone who has vibe-coded an app with SMS capabilities won’t have to manually sign up for Twilio, add a credit card, and copy an API key into their code. Instead, Sapiom handles all of that in the background, and the person building the micro-app will be charged for Twilio’s services as a pass-through fee by Lovable, Bolt, or another vibe-coding platform.

While Sapiom is currently focused on B2B solutions, its technology could eventually empower personal AI agents to handle consumer transactions. The expectation is that individuals will one day trust agents to make independent financial decisions, such as ordering an Uber or shopping on Amazon. While that future is exciting, Zerbib believes that AI won’t magically make people buy more things, which is why he’s focusing on creating financial layers for businesses instead.

Last year, Roblox launched an open-source AI model that could generate 3D objects on the platform, helping users quickly design digital items such as furniture, vehicles, and accessories. The company claims the tool, called Cube 3D, has so far helped users generate over 1.8 million 3D objects since it was rolled out last March.

On Tuesday, the company launched the open beta for its anticipated 4D creation feature that lets creators make not just static 3D models, but fully functional and interactive objects. The feature has been in early access since November. 

Roblox says 4D creation adds an important new layer: interactivity. With this technology, users can design items that can move and react to players in the game.

​At launch, there are two types of object templates (called schemas) that creators can try out. 

The first is the “Car-5” schema, which is used to create a car made of five separate parts: the main body and four wheels. Previously, cars were a single, solid 3D object that couldn’t move. The new system breaks down objects into parts and assigns behaviors to each so that they function individually within the virtual world. The AI therefore can generate cars with spinning wheels, making them more realistic and interactive. ​

The second is called “Body-1,” which can generate any object made from a single piece, like a simple box or sculpture.

The first experience with 4D generation is a game called Wish Master, where players can generate cars they can drive, planes they can fly, and even dragons.

​In the future, Roblox plans to let creators make their own schemas so they’ll have more freedom to define how objects behave. The company says it is also developing new technology that could use a reference image to create a detailed 3D model that matches the image’s style (example below.)

The company says it is developing more ways to help people create games and experiences using AI, including a project it has dubbed “real-time dreaming.” Roblox CEO David Baszucki last month explained that this project would let creators build new worlds using “keyboard navigation and sharing real-time text prompts.”

The open beta comes on the heels of Roblox’s recent implementation of mandatory facial verification for users to access chat features in the game, following lawsuits and investigations related to child safety.