Did California lose Larry Page? The Google and Alphabet cofounder, who left day-to-day operations in 2019, has seen his net worth soar in the years since—from around $50 billion at the time of his departure to somewhere approximating $260 billion today. (Leaving his job clearly didn’t hurt his wallet.) Last year, a proposed ballot initiative in California threatened billionaires like Page with a one-time 5 percent wealth tax—prompting some of them to consider leaving the state before the end of the year, when the tax, if passed, would retroactively kick in. Page seems to have been one of those defectors; The Wall Street Journal reported that he recently spent more than $170 million on two homes in Miami. The article also indicated his cofounder Sergey Brin also might become a Florida man.

The Google guys, formerly California icons, are only two of approximately 250 billionaires subject to the plan. It’s not certain whether many of them have departed for Florida, Texas, New Zealand, or a space station. But it is clear that a lot of vocal billionaires and other super rich people are publicly losing their minds about the proposal, which will appear on the November ballot if it garners around 875,000 signatures. Hedge fund magnate Bill Ackman calls it “catastrophic.” Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, boasted that he already pays plenty of taxes, so much so that one year he claims his tax return broke the IRS computer.

Still, when considered as a percentage of income, even the big sums paid by some billionaires are way lower than the tax rates many teachers, accountants, and plumbers pay every year. If Musk, currently worth an estimated $716 billion, had to pay a 5 percent wealth tax, he’d probably manage to scrape by with a $680 billion nest egg—enough to buy Ford, General Motors, Toyota, and Mercedes, and still remain the world’s richest person. (In any case, he’s safe from California taxes; a few years ago he moved to Texas.)

California’s politicians, including Governor Gavin Newsom, are generally opposed to the initiative. A glaring exception is Representative Ro Khanna, who said to WIRED in a statement that he’s on board with “a modest wealth tax on billionaires to deal with staggering inequality and to make sure people have healthcare.”

Khanna might pay a price for taking on the wealthy and may face a primary challenge backed by oligarch bucks because of it. A safer position for Bay Area politicians is the one taken by San Jose mayor Matt Mahan. He recently posted a tweet stream opposing the bill, saying that if California passed the wealth tax it would be cutting off its nose to spite its face. When I speak to Mahan, he emphasizes the risk of California standing alone in taxing the net worth of billionaires. “It puts at risk our innovation economy that is the real engine of economic growth and opportunity,” he says. (Mahan isn’t super rich, but he is billionaire-adjacent: He once was CEO of a company cofounded by former Facebook president Sean Parker.)

Because of the mobility of rich people, California does have real worries about the impact of a state wealth tax. Not being a billionaire myself, I find the idea baffling—moving away from one’s ideal home simply to avoid a tax that makes no impact on your living situation seems, to use Mahan’s words, like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

Also, I don’t see why an exodus of billionaires necessarily means the end of Silicon Valley as the heart of tech innovation. If you want to become a billionaire, there’s no place better than the Bay Area, with an ecosystem that nurtures innovative businesses. That’s not changing. A few years ago, some tech people moved to Miami, claiming it was going to become the new Silicon Valley. That didn’t happen.

After creating thousands of “undressing” pictures of women and sexualized imagery of apparent minors, Elon Musk’s X has apparently limited who can generate images with Grok. However, despite the changes, the chatbot is still being used to create “undressing” sexualized images on the platform.

On Friday morning, the Grok account on X started responding to some users’ requests with a message saying that image generation and editing are “currently limited to paying subscribers.” The message also includes a link pushing people towards the social media platform’s $395 annual subscription tier. In one test of the system requesting Grok create an image of a tree, the system returned the same message.

The apparent change comes after days of growing outrage against and scrutiny of Musk’s X and xAI, the company behind the Grok chatbot. The companies face an increasing number of investigations from regulators around the world over the creation of nonconsensual explicit imagery and alleged sexual images of children. British prime minister Keir Starmer has not ruled out banning X in the country and said the actions have been “unlawful.”

Neither X nor xAI, the Musk-owned company behind Grok, has confirmed that it has made image generation and editing a paid-only feature. An X spokesperson acknowledged WIRED’s inquiry but did not provide comment ahead of publication. X has previously said it takes “action against illegal content on X,” including instances of child sexual abuse material. While Apple and Google have previously banned apps with similar “nudify” features, X and Grok remain available in their respective app stores. xAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment.

For more than a week, users on X have been asking the chatbot to edit images of women to remove their clothes—often asking for the image to contain a “string” or “transparent” bikini. While a public feed of images created by Grok contained far fewer results of these “undressing” images on Friday, it still created sexualized images when prompted to by X users with paid for “verified” accounts.

“We observe the same kind of prompt, we observe the same kind of outcome, just fewer than before,” Paul Bouchaud, lead researcher at Paris-based nonprofit AI Forensics, tells WIRED. “The model can continue to generate bikini [images],” they say.

A WIRED review of some Grok posts on Friday morning identified Grok generating images in response to user requests for images that “put her in latex lingerie” and “put her in a plastic bikini and cover her in donut white glaze.” The images appear behind a “content warning” box saying that adult material is displayed.

On Wednesday, WIRED revealed that Grok’s standalone website and app, which is separate from the version on X, has also been used in recent months to create highly graphic and sometimes violent sexual videos, including celebrities and other real people. Bouchaud says it is still possible to use Grok to make these videos. “I was able to generate a video with sexually explicit content without any restriction from an unverified account,” they say.

While WIRED’s test of image generation using Grok on X using a free account did not allow any images to be created, using a free account on Grok’s app and website still generated images.

The change on X could immediately limit the amount of sexually explicit and harmful material the platform is creating, experts say. But it has also been criticized as a minimal step that acts as a band-aid to the real harms caused by nonconsensual intimate imagery.

“The recent decision to restrict access to paying subscribers is not only inadequate—it represents the monetization of abuse,” Emma Pickering, head of technology-facilitated abuse at UK domestic abuse charity Refuge, said in a statement. “While limiting AI image generation to paid users may marginally reduce volume and improve traceability, the abuse has not been stopped. It has simply been placed behind a paywall, allowing X to profit from harm.”

As age-verification laws continue to dismantle the adult industry—and determine the future of free speech on the internet—a Utah lawmaker proposed a bill this week that would enforce a tax on porn sites that operate within the state.

Introduced by state senator Calvin Musselman, a Republican, the bill would impose a 7 percent tax on total receipts “from sales, distributions, memberships, subscriptions, performances, and content amounting to material harmful to minors that is produced, sold, filmed, generated, or otherwise based” in Utah. If passed, the bill would go into effect in May and would also require adult sites to pay a $500 annual fee to the State Tax Commission. Per the legislation, the money made from the tax will be used by Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services to provide more mental health support for teens.

Musselman did not respond to a request for comment.

A new age of American conservatism commands the political arena, and more US lawmakers are calling for additional restrictions on adult content. In September, Alabama became the first state to impose a porn tax on adult entertainment companies (10 percent) following the passage of age-verification mandates, which require users to upload an ID or other personal documentation to verify that they are not a minor before viewing sexually explicit content. Pennsylvania lawmakers are also eyeing a bill that would tax consumers an additional 10 percent on “subscriptions to and one-time purchases from online adult content platforms,” despite already requiring them to pay a 6 percent sales and use tax for the purchase of digital products, two state senators wrote in a memo in October. Other states have flirted with the idea of a porn tax in the past. In 2019, Arizona state senator Gail Griffin, a Republican, proposed taxing adult content distributors to help fund the border wall, a key priority during Donald Trump’s first presidential term. So far, 25 US states have passed a form of age verification.

Although efforts to criminalize participants in the sex work industry have been ongoing for years—with new regulations unfolding at a moment of heightened online surveillance and censorship—targeted taxes have failed to gain widespread approval because the legality around such laws are up for debate.

“This kind of porn tax is blatantly unconstitutional,” says Evelyn Douek, an associate professor of law at Stanford Law School. “It singles out a particular type of protected speech for disfavored treatment, purely because the legislature doesn’t like it—that’s exactly what the First Amendment is designed to protect against. Utah may not like porn, but as the Supreme Court affirmed only last year, adults have a fully protected right to access it.”

Utah, Alabama, and Pennsylvania are among the 16 states that have adopted resolutions declaring porn a public health crisis. “We realize this is a bold assertion not everyone will agree on, but it’s the full-fledged truth,” Utah governor Gary Herbert tweeted in 2016 after signing the resolution. One of Utah’s earliest statewide responses to the proliferation of adult content happened in 2001, when it became the first state to create an office for sexually explicit issues by hiring an obscenity and pornography complaints ombudsman. The position—dubbed the “porn czar”—was terminated in 2017.

“Age restriction is a very complex subject that brings with it data privacy concerns and the potential for uneven and inconsistent application for different digital platforms,” Alex Kekesi, vice president of brand and community at Pornhub, told WIRED in a previous conversation. In November, the company urged Google, Microsoft, and Apple to enact device-based verification in their app stores and across their operating systems. “We have seen several states and countries try to impose platform-level age verification requirements, and they have all failed to adequately protect children.” To comply with the new age gate mandates, Pornhub has currently blocked access to users in 23 states.