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WNBA star Paige Bueckers went from having no bank account to a net worth of $1.5 million

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As a freshman at the University of Connecticut, Paige Bueckers blew through her college stipend so fast that she turned to her mother for financial support. 

Spending all her money on clothes and food, she had to borrow her mom’s credit card to buy gas and other necessities.

“So she wasn’t really happy about that,” Bueckers, now a WNBA star, told Fortune. “Then [name, image, and likeness] came into place, and then my mom [got] her credit card back.”

Bueckers—the WNBA’s 2025 No. 1 draft pick and winner of the NCAA national championship with the UConn Huskies—had a meteoric rise. The 23-year-old was among the first batch of college athletes to benefit from the Supreme Court-backed NCAA policy change allowing student-athletes to benefit from name, image, and likeness (NIL) deals. 

Months after the 2021 policy implementation, Bueckers signed her first NIL deal, a multiyear partnership with apparel and sneaker marketplace StockX. She signed her second deal with Gatorade the same month, becoming the first college athlete to sign with the brand. After the 2024-2025 NCAA season, Bueckers’ estimated net worth was around $1.5 million thanks to NIL deals. 

Now a 23-year-old rookie in the WNBA, the financial transition was startling; five years ago, Bueckers didn’t even have a bank account.

“It happened super fast, and I really wasn’t prepared for it,” she said. “Building your wealth in college and starting to really understand finances is something that I didn’t really know, and so I was kind of forced to know.”

Bueckers now earns a regular paycheck, though it pales in comparison to her endorsement deals. In April, Bueckers signed a $348,198 rookie contract with the Dallas Wings, earning $78,831 in her first year, per the league’s collective bargaining agreement. 

The same month, Bueckers signed a three-year deal to compete in the 3-on-3 basketball league Unrivaled, cofounded by WNBA veterans Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart. The average salary for the league is more than $220,000, nearly the maximum base salary for the WNBA.

Financial literacy in the NIL era

Buecker’s eye-opening introduction to personal finance is a trial by fire shared with many young athletes, some of whom experience a whirlwind rise to success only to see their wealth slip away when their tenure as professional athletes ends.

About 60% of NBA stars go broke within five years of retirement, Sports Illustrated reported in 2009. A 2015 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 15.7% of NFL players filed for bankruptcy 12 years after retirement.

That’s not lost on Bueckers, who learned the hard way about setting up savings accounts and investment portfolios.

“It can be gone at any single moment,” she said. “And that’s something that I’m still learning.”

Now she’s trying to spread the word. On Tuesday, Bueckers announced a partnership with Intuit for Higher Education, a program that pairs the business software company with higher education institutions to provide college and graduate students with financial literacy and budgeting tools—including for NIL-focused tax education for student athletes. 

Michael Rueda, head of U.S. sports and entertainment at law firm Withers, said the NIL era has changed how young athletes approach financial literacy. Since the landmark 2021 ruling, the $2.3 billion NIL industry has expanded to allow athletes to negotiate deals before enrolling in a school, which are now permitted to pay their athletes directly. As of this month, the University of California, Los Angeles has already paid its athletes $4.8 million under the new rules.

“There is the opportunity to be put at risk by earning all this money suddenly when you’re 18,19, 20 years old,” Rueda told Fortune.

Schools are still playing catch-up to the evolving set of policies surrounding NIL, but there’s also a growing infrastructure of support for student-athletes to help reap the potential benefits of these deals, Rueda said. Athletes have access to agents and lawyers as well as training required from schools, which want to have successful athletes reflect the success of their respective programs.

While NIL policies may be constantly shifting, efforts to improve the financial literacy of athletes have been increasing over the past decade as a result of record-breaking contracts and simply more money pouring into professional sports, according to Molly Cloud, financial advisor and director of sports and entertainment at Morgan Stanley. Younger athletes may be making more money, but there are emerging guardrails in place influencing how they can spend it.

“As much as NIL is still kind of the wild west, there are starting to form some guidelines and goalposts around what makes the most sense for the benefit of the kids,” she said.

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SpaceX to offer insider shares at record-setting $800 billion valuation

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SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite maker at as much as $800 billion, people familiar with the matter said, reclaiming the title of the world’s most valuable private company. 

The details, discussed by SpaceX’s board of directors on Thursday at its Starbase hub in Texas, could change based on interest from insider sellers and buyers or other factors, said some of the people, who asked not to be identified as the information isn’t public. SpaceX is also exploring a possible initial public offering as soon as late next year, one of the people said. 

Another person briefed on the matter said that the price under discussion for the sale of some employees and investors’ shares is higher than $400 apiece, which would value SpaceX at between $750 billion and $800 billion. The company wouldn’t raise any funds though this planned sale, though a successful offering at such levels would catapult it past the record of $500 billion valuation achieved by OpenAI in October.

Elon Musk on Saturday denied that SpaceX is raising money at a $800 billion valuation without addressing Bloomberg’s reporting on the planned offering of insiders’ shares. 

“SpaceX has been cash flow positive for many years and does periodic stock buybacks twice a year to provide liquidity for employees and investors,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X. 

The share sale price under discussion would be a substantial increase from the $212 a share set in July, when the company raised money and sold shares at a valuation of $400 billion. The Wall Street Journal and Financial Times earlier reported the $800 billion valuation target.

News of SpaceX’s valuation sent shares of EchoStar Corp., a satellite TV and wireless company, up as much as 18%. Last month, EchoStar had agreed to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $2.6 billion, adding to an earlier agreement to sell about $17 billion in wireless spectrum to Musk’s company.

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The world’s most prolific rocket launcher, SpaceX dominates the space industry with its Falcon 9 rocket that lifts satellites and people to orbit.

SpaceX is also the industry leader in providing internet services from low-Earth orbit through Starlink, a system of more than 9,000 satellites that is far ahead of competitors including Amazon.com Inc.’s Amazon Leo.

Elite Group

SpaceX is among an elite group of companies that have the ability to raise funds at $100 billion-plus valuations while delaying or denying they have any plan to go public. 

An IPO of the company at an $800 billion value would vault SpaceX into another rarefied group — the 20 largest public companies, a few notches below Musk’s Tesla Inc. 

If SpaceX sold 5% of the company at that valuation, it would have to sell $40 billion of stock — making it the biggest IPO of all time, well above Saudi Aramco’s $29 billion listing in 2019. The firm sold just 1.5% of the company in that offering, a much smaller slice than the majority of publicly traded firms make available.

A listing would also subject SpaceX to the volatility of being a public company, versus private firms whose valuations are closely guarded secrets. Space and defense company IPOs have had a mixed reception in 2025. Karman Holdings Inc.’s stock has nearly tripled since its debut, while Firefly Aerospace Inc. and Voyager Technologies Inc. have plunged by double-digit percentages since their debuts.

SpaceX executives have repeatedly floated the idea of spinning off SpaceX’s Starlink business into a separate, publicly traded company — a concept President Gwynne Shotwell first suggested in 2020. 

However, Musk cast doubt on the prospect publicly over the years and Chief Financial Officer Bret Johnsen said in 2024 that a Starlink IPO would be something that would take place more likely “in the years to come.”

The Information, citing people familiar with the discussions, separately reported on Friday that SpaceX has told investors and financial institution representatives that it’s aiming for an IPO of the entire company in the second half of next year.

Read More: How to Buy SpaceX: A Guide for the Eager, Pre-IPO

A so-called tender or secondary offering, through which employees and some early shareholders can sell shares, provides investors in closely held companies such as SpaceX a way to generate liquidity.

SpaceX is working to develop its new Starship vehicle, advertised as the most powerful rocket ever developed to loft huge numbers of Starlink satellites as well as carry cargo and people to moon and, eventually, Mars.



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National Park Service drops free admission on MLK Day and Juneteenth while adding Trump’s birthday

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The National Park Service will offer free admission to U.S. residents on President Donald Trump’s birthday next year — which also happens to be Flag Day — but is eliminating the benefit for Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth.

The new list of free admission days for Americans is the latest example of the Trump administration downplaying America’s civil rights history while also promoting the president’s image, name and legacy.

Last year, the list of free days included Martin Luther King Jr Day and Juneteenth — which is June 19 — but not June 14, Trump’s birthday.

The new free-admission policy takes effect Jan. 1 and was one of several changes announced by the Park Service late last month, including higher admission fees for international visitors.

The other days of free park admission in 2026 are Presidents Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Constitution Day, Veterans Day, President Theodore Roosevelt’s birthday (Oct. 27) and the anniversary of the creation of the Park Service (Aug. 25).

Eliminating Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, which commemorates the day in 1865 when the last enslaved Americans were emancipated, removes two of the nation’s most prominent civil rights holidays.

Some civil rights leaders voiced opposition to the change after news about it began spreading over the weekend.

“The raw & rank racism here stinks to high heaven,” Harvard Kennedy School professor Cornell William Brooks, a former president of the NAACP, wrote on social media about the new policy.

Kristen Brengel, a spokesperson for the National Parks Conservation Association, said that while presidential administrations have tweaked the free days in the past, the elimination of Martin Luther King Jr. Day is particularly concerning. For one, the day has become a popular day of service for community groups that use the free day to perform volunteer projects at parks.

That will now be much more expensive, said Brengel, whose organization is a nonprofit that advocates for the park system.

“Not only does it recognize an American hero, it’s also a day when people go into parks to clean them up,” Brengel said. “Martin Luther King Jr. deserves a day of recognition … For some reason, Black history has repeatedly been targeted by this administration, and it shouldn’t be.”

Some Democratic lawmakers also weighed in to object to the new policy.

“The President didn’t just add his own birthday to the list, he removed both of these holidays that mark Black Americans’ struggle for civil rights and freedom,” said Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada. “Our country deserves better.”

A spokesperson for the National Park Service did not immediately respond to questions on Saturday seeking information about the reasons behind the changes.

Since taking office, Trump has sought to eliminate programs seen as promoting diversity across the federal government, actions that have erased or downplayed America’s history of racism as well as the civil rights victories of Black Americans.

Self-promotion is an old habit of the president’s and one he has continued in his second term. He unsuccessfully put himself forwardfor the Nobel Peace Prize, renamed the U.S. Institute of Peace after himself, sought to put his name on the planned NFL stadium in the nation’s capital and had a new children’s savings program named after him.

Some Republican lawmakers have suggested putting his visage on Mount Rushmore and the $100 bill.



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JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon says Europe has a ‘real problem’

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JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon called out slow bureaucracy in Europe in a warning that a “weak” continent poses a major economic risk to the US.

“Europe has a real problem,” Dimon said Saturday at the Reagan National Defense Forum. “They do some wonderful things on their safety nets. But they’ve driven business out, they’ve driven investment out, they’ve driven innovation out. It’s kind of coming back.”

While he praised some European leaders who he said were aware of the issues, he cautioned politics is “really hard.” 

Dimon, leader of the biggest US bank, has long said that the risk of a fragmented Europe is among the major challenges facing the world. In his letter to shareholders released earlier this year, he said that Europe has “some serious issues to fix.”

On Saturday, he praised the creation of the euro and Europe’s push for peace. But he warned that a reduction in military efforts and challenges trying to reach agreement within the European Union are threatening the continent.

“If they fragment, then you can say that America first will not be around anymore,” Dimon said. “It will hurt us more than anybody else because they are a major ally in every single way, including common values, which are really important.”

He said the US should help.

“We need a long-term strategy to help them become strong,” Dimon said. “A weak Europe is bad for us.”

The administration of President Donald Trump issued a new national security strategy that directed US interests toward the Western Hemisphere and protection of the homeland while dismissing Europe as a continent headed toward “civilizational erasure.”

Read More: Trump’s National Security Strategy Veers Inward in Telling Shift

JPMorgan has been ramping up its push to spur more investments in the national defense sector. In October, the bank announced that it would funnel $1.5 trillion into industries that bolster US economic security and resiliency over the next 10 years — as much as $500 billion more than what it would’ve provided anyway. 

Dimon said in the statement that it’s “painfully clear that the United States has allowed itself to become too reliant on unreliable sources of critical minerals, products and manufacturing.”

Investment banker Jay Horine oversees the effort, which Dimon called “100% commercial.” It will focus on four areas: supply chain and advanced manufacturing; defense and aerospace; energy independence and resilience; and frontier and strategic technologies. 

The bank will also invest as much as $10 billion of its own capital to help certain companies expand, innovate or accelerate strategic manufacturing.

Separately on Saturday, Dimon praised Trump for finding ways to roll back bureaucracy in the government.

“There is no question that this administration is trying to bring an axe to some of the bureaucracy that held back America,” Dimon said. “That is a good thing and we can do it and still keep the world safe, for safe food and safe banks and all the stuff like that.”



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