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Inaccurate advice on social media led thousands of taxpayers to file inflated refund claims during the past tax season, the IRS warned.
The agency’s most recent alert focuses on scams that center on the Fuel Tax Credit (claimed for various nontaxable uses of fuel, including farming and off-highway business use), as well as the Sick and Family Leave Credit that was available for self-employed taxpayers during the pandemic, and household employment taxes, also known as “nanny taxes.”
If the IRS flags any of these claims, it will freeze your entire refund. If you claimed any of these credits, you may need to amend your return. And be skeptical of anyone hyping up a big tax refund on social media.
FIRST UP
Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was confirmed dead Monday along with two other Iranian officials after a helicopter crash in Iran’s mountainous East Azerbaijan province, according to state media. Raisi, an ultra-conservative with a history of atrocity accusations, was widely considered to be a potential future supreme leader of Iran. First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber will take over as the country’s acting president and a new presidential election must take place within 50 days, per the Iranian constitution.
The 2024 meme stock rally appears to be ending not long after it began: Shares of GameStop cratered Friday after the company dumped several unwelcome announcements on investors, and shares of the video game retailer are down 69% from their Tuesday peak. The Friday selloff was driven by a company announcement of preliminary earnings results, and a possible new equity offering that could expand the company’s outstanding shares by about 15%.
WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP
The California couple who made an estimated $1.5 billion selling energy bar maker Clif Bar to snack giant Mondelēz in late 2022 have since handed over more than a third of their fortune to their charitable foundation, new reporting by Forbes reveals. Kit Crawford and Gary Erickson, who first came up with the idea for Clif Bar in 1990, have already donated to more than 1,000 nonprofits, including one helping Somali refugees and another that works to keep Alaska’s waters clear for fish.
Thomas Gayner has built an impressive career as chief executive of Virginia’s $16 billion Markel Group, by worshiping at the altar of Warren Buffett. Markel Group has “three engines,” Gayner says: insurance underwriting, stock investing and purchasing controlling interests in private companies, which it does through what it calls Markel Ventures.
TECH + INNOVATION
TikTok and Instagram’s popularity with teens and minors has made both apps top destinations for child predators, and though the problem predates today’s AI boom, AI text-to-image generators are making it even easier for predators to find or create imagery of exactly what they’re looking for. That raises questions across tech and law enforcement about how a scourge of suggestive, fake images of kids who don’t exist should be dealt with—or whether, if they’re not explicit and legal, it should be addressed at all.
Tesla will cut more than 600 jobs across its workforce in California, including senior-level positions at a manufacturing plant and the company’s engineering headquarters, according to a filing, the latest layoffs for the Elon Musk-owned firm after announcing mass cuts earlier this year. Musk said in an internal memo last month that Tesla would cut more than 10% of its global workforce, impacting more than 10,000 employees.
SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT
The shifting demographics of Formula 1’s fan base point to a growing demand for diverse representation and gender equality, parallel to a broader rise in engagement in women’s sports. Launched in 2023, F1 Academy is a women-only racing series created by Formula 1 to expand access and opportunity in the sport, led by former professional racing driver Susie Wolff, who made history in 2014 at the British Grand Prix by becoming the first woman to take part in a Formula 1 race weekend in 22 years.
WORLD
The Israel Defense Forces said Friday it had recovered the bodies of three hostages killed during Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel. The IDF concluded the three individuals were murdered while escaping the Nova music festival, and their bodies were brought to Gaza afterwards, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari said. The Israeli military believes Hamas still holds 132 hostages, according to CNN.
MORE: Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Saturday quickly rejected an ultimatum from centrist rival Benny Gantz, who said he would quit Israel’s war cabinet and government if it doesn’t adopt a new Gaza plan by June 8. The three-person war cabinet, which includes Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant, has been showing signs of fraying in recent days, with Gantz’s ultimatum coming days after he backed comments by Gallant, who criticized Netanyahu for failing to produce a post-war plan that finds an alternative government in Gaza to Hamas.
TRAVEL + LIFESTYLE
The State Department on Friday warned U.S. citizens currently overseas to “exercise increased caution” in a worldwide security alert for potential violence against people who identify as LGBTQ. The department urged Americans overseas to “stay alert in locations frequented by tourists,” including Pride events, with just over a week before the start of Pride month.
TRENDS + EXPLAINERS
Mercedes-Benz workers in Alabama rejected union representation by the United Auto Workers on Friday, a setback for the labor union as it tries to expand to non-union factories in the South after ratifying contracts with Stellantis, General Motors and Ford last year. A vote for union representation would have made Mercedes the second foreign-owned automaker in the South whose staff joined the UAW, following employees at Volkswagen.
DAILY COVER STORY
Inside Quora’s Quest For Relevance: Why CEO Adam D’Angelo Has Gone All In On AI
TOPLINE Nearly 15 years after founding Quora, CEO Adam D’Angelo wants to reinvent the question-and-answer company around AI with its second product ever, Poe.
Poe, a service the company launched last year, is a freemium $200 per year subscription service that gives people access to several AI models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude and Mistral’s Mixtral family. With the service, users can sample multiple models at once, comparing how each one tackles the same prompt. Developers can build bots on top of those models, creating, for example, an AI focused specifically on travel booking or creating coloring books for school children.
D’Angelo likens Poe to a web browser for AI, making the tech more accessible, like Netscape did three decades earlier.
D’Angelo says Poe was born out of AI experiments the company began running two years ago, where it used OpenAI’s GPT-3 to generate answers for Quora questions. They were not as good as human-written answers, but the company found that there was a sweet spot for AI-generated answers: replies to niche questions that no human had ever written an answer for. Getting a lower quality AI answer was better than waiting around for a human to answer your question, he concluded.
Founded in 2010, Quora has become a venerable throwback to the late web 2.0 era, surviving where rivals like Yahoo Answers fizzled out. But it hasn’t evolved into the modern era compared to competitors like Reddit, which went public in March and long ago became a cultural hub of the internet. That raises an interesting question: Who still uses Quora, really?
D’Angelo declined to comment on Quora’s revenue, though the company says it has 400 million users a month.
WHY IT MATTERS With Poe, a seemingly disparate product from Quora, the company’s trajectory has gotten more murky. Is it a social forum backed by an advertising business model along the lines of Reddit, or is it going to become a player in AI? D’Angelo says it’s now poised for the latter. In January, the company announced $75 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz to build out Poe.
MORE Databricks Unveils An AI Model That Helps Businesses Build Their Own Models
FACTS + COMMENTS
Most of the U.S. could see above-average temperatures this summer, according to a National Weather Service climate outlook published Thursday. A weather pattern known as La Niña is expected to hit in the coming months, and contribute to potentially record-breaking heat:
50%: The chance La Niña could come between June and August, and there is a 69% chance it will develop between July and September and last through the winter, according to the Climate Prediction Center
15.4 months: The average duration of La Niña
37 months: The length of the longest La Niña pattern observed
STRATEGY + SUCCESS
Many of us have a box (or multiple) of old receipts, documents, or tax returns, but how long do you really need to keep tax documents? Generally speaking, you will need to keep your tax records between three and seven years. But the higher your income is and the more complicated your return, err on the side of caution. If you do throw away any documents, make sure to shred them first to avoid exposing personal information.
VIDEO
QUIZ
Viral social media posts have circulated claiming a major restaurant chain is going out of business, but the company debunked them Friday. Which chain is it?
A. Outback Steakhouse
B. Applebee’s
C. Red Robin
D. Chili’s
Check your answer.
ACROSS THE NEWSROOM
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