The world this week
The week in technology and the money behind it, in brief.
Student founders. Student debt makes skipping university look shrewd, but the best evidence says successful founders are closer to 45 than 19, so the case for dropping out is narrower than its fans claim. Read more on Most founders should not drop out
WeWork. The collapse of WeWork’s flotation is not a failure of public markets but their finest hour: investors read the prospectus and declined. Read more on Out of office
Foreign students and America. America nearly told 1.1m international students to go home over a technicality, and the founders it would have lost are worth far more than the rule’s tidiness. Read more on America should keep its foreign students
NFTs and ownership. Beeple’s $69.3m collage buys a novel but overpriced receipt for a picture anyone can still see, and buyers should be told exactly what it covers. Read more on An NFT buys a receipt, not a picture
Archegos and the banks. Archegos shows that only the banks could see a family office’s leveraged swaps, so the law should make them report what they see. Read more on Margin for error
Student loans and the courts. The Supreme Court was right to stop the president cancelling $400bn of student debt alone, and Congress should now fix the lending that created it rather than bill taxpayers. Read more on Congress should fix student lending
Teens and chatbots. More than half of American teenagers now use chatbots for schoolwork, and schools that treat this as a cheating epidemic are measuring the wrong thing. Read more on Chatbot homework is not a cheating epidemic
Anysphere and Cursor. Four MIT students built one of the fastest-growing software firms on record, then sold it to a buyer with its own models, which shows how thin the moat was. Read more on Cursor’s moat was thin