• Ray Dalio said on X that Moody's credit downgrade doesn't cover the risks of government money printing.
• Moody's downgraded US credit to Aa1, citing growing deficits and ballooning interest payments.
• A GOP tax bill could worsen US debts, with proposed tax breaks and increased defense spending.

Billionaire investor Ray Dalio thinks Moody's recent downgrade of the US sovereign credit rating doesn't capture the danger of the federal government simply printing cash to cover its bills.

"You should know that credit ratings understate credit risks because they only rate the risk of the government not paying its debt," Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, warned said on X. "They don't include the greater risk that the countries in debt will print money to pay their debts thus causing holders of the bonds to suffer losses from the decreased value of the money they're getting."

"For those who care about the value of their money, the risks for US government debt are greater than the rating agencies are conveying," Dalio added.

Dalio's comments came after Moody's, the international financial services company, downgraded the US credit from Aaa to Aa1 on Friday, citing growing deficits and surging interest payments. That makes Moody's the last of the three major credit agencies to bump America's credit off the highest rating. S&P Global Ratings downgraded the US back in 2011, and Fitch Ratings followed suit in 2023.

In response to the downgrade, stocks slipped on Monday while Treasury yields spiked. The 30-year bond yield jumped 4.995%, and the 10-year bond yield rose to 4.521%.

Adding to investor concerns, economists are sounding the alarm on a tax cut bill proposed by Republicans that could come to pass given the slim GOP majorities in both the House and the Senate.

The bill proposes tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans through a higher estate tax exemption, interest tax breaks for private equity, and a $150 billion boost in defense spending. It also plans to increase the child tax credit by $500 and eliminate taxes on tips and overtime pay.

Despite the bill also proposing spending cuts to Medicaid and SNAP and to hike taxes for immigrants, the Budget Lab at Yale, a nonpartisan policy research center, says that the GOP bill would worsen America's debt.

"The bill as currently proposed would substantially add to the deficit, even if accounting for possible tariff revenue," authors of the report wrote, "If we account for the likelihood that these provisions would become permanent, at the end of 30 years the debt-to-GDP ratio would be over 180%, even assuming substantial revenue from tariffs."

According to the report, Sudan and Japan are the only two countries with a debt-to-GDP ratio over 180%.

"Assuming temporary provisions expire, the bill's baseline cost of $3.4 trillion would make it the largest spending package in US history," the report added.

In a rare Sunday night vote on May 18, the GOP tax cut bill narrowly passed the House Budget Committee, which days before rejected the bill. The bill now heads to the House for a vote this week.

A spokesperson for Dalio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

• Microsoft's Build developer conference kicked off Monday with a slew of agentic AI updates.
• Microsoft's CTO said there's been an "explosion" of people using agents over the last year, with daily active users doubling.
• The keynote included new agentic features in GitHub, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and appearances from Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

It was all about agentic AI at Microsoft's big developer event on Monday.

"The thing that we've seen over the past year is just sort of an explosion of agents," Microsoft CTO and executive vice president of AI, Kevin Scott, said during the company's Build conference.

Scott added that the number of daily active users of the various AI agents that Microsoft has visibility into "more than doubled" since Microsoft's Build event last year.

CEOs and executives across the tech industry have heralded 2025 as the year of agentic AI, and the Microsoft executive took some time to define what Microsoft means by the term.

Scott described the AI agents Microsoft is building as "a thing that a human being is able to delegate tasks to." AI agents are still in their early days, and Scott said there's still a bit of a "capability overhang with reasoning" at the moment, but they will continue to improve. As that happens over the next year, he said AI agents will get more powerful and cheaper to operate.

'The next big step forward'

Microsoft made a slew of announcements about AI updates and partnerships related to agentic AI during its opening keynote at Build.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that the company is working to create a host of tools to help build an open, "agentic web" at scale, including cloud computing tools available through its Microsoft Azure platform. The company demoed multiple new AI features available in Windows, Office, Azure, and other platforms throughout the keynote.

Showcasing Microsoft's new Azure SRE agent for site reliability engineering, which will be embedded in GitHub Copilot, Nadella said agents are all about having a reliable AI "peer" that you can delegate complex tasks to and trust to help remove "pain points" for developers, such as getting woken up in the middle of the night to deal with a website issue.

"This is the next big step forward, which is a full coding agent, built right into GitHub, taking Copilot from being a pair programmer to a peer programmer," Nadella said. "You can assign issues to Copilot, bug fixes, new features, code maintenance, and it'll complete these tasks autonomously."

Microsoft also flexed its reach with virtual appearances from a who's who of AI CEOs, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Tesla and xAI CEO Elon Musk, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Altman made a live appearance virtually to talk about the evolution of agentic AI and the recent launch of Codex, the AI startup's new agent designed to assist programmers with writing code, fixing bugs, and running tests. Altman described Codex as "true software engineering task delegation."

"We've been talking about someday we'd get to a real agentic coding experience, and it's kind of wild to me that it's finally here," Altman said. "I think this is one of the biggest changes to programming that I've ever seen."

"This idea that you now have a real virtual teammate that you can assign work to, that you can say, 'Hey, go off and do some of the stuff you were just doing and increasingly more advanced things,' you know at some point saying, 'I've got a big idea, go off and work for a couple of days and do it,'" the OpenAI CEO added.

The productivity gains can also be significant, Altman said.

"It was amazing to watch over the last few months as we were working on Codex internally — you know there's always a few people who are the early adopters — and how quickly the people who were just using Codex all day changed their workflow and just the incredible amount they were able to do relative to someone else was quite interesting," he said.

Microsoft announced plans to expand the AI models available through Azure to integrate xAI's Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini. In a pre-recorded clip, Musk, who once interned at Microsoft, talked with Nadella about his first experiences using Microsoft software as well as Grok's capabilities.

Microsoft also introduced "Copilot Tuning" to create agents using company data. The announcement confirmed Business Insider's reporting from last week that Microsoft was planning to debut a new Copilot designed to "rapidly channel an organization's knowledge into a Copilot that can 'talk,' 'think,' and 'work' like the tenant itself," according to an internal memo. That project was previously called Tenant Copilot internally, the company has since confirmed.

In Satya Nadella's closing comments, the Microsoft CEO said the company is trying to apply AI across the "full stack" of software development and agentic web products, including Microsoft 365 Teams, Copilot Studio, and more.

"Ultimately, though, all of this is about creating opportunity to fuel your ambition," the Microsoft CEO said, pointing to a father who used Foundry to speed the diagnosis of a rare disease affecting his son and a startup in South America that created an app to gamify wellness.

• Walmart's announcement that it will raise prices due to tariffs has other retailers "delighted."
• The news gives retailers cover to raise their own prices, experts told BI.
• Trump's criticism of Walmart sends a warning about discussing price hikes.

Consumers may not be psyched about Walmart's announcement that it's going to raise prices because of President Donald Trump's tariffs, but other retailers are likely breathing a sigh of relief.

Retail analysts told Business Insider that Walmart did other companies a favor with the news, giving them more freedom to raise their own price tags.

"What they are doing is providing air cover for the tens of thousands of retailers — extra-large, large, medium, and small — all of whom are faced with exactly the same issue, and all of whom are going to be raising their prices," said Mark Cohen, a professor at Columbia Business School and the former director of retail studies at Columbia Business School. Other retailers are, he said, "delighted" about the benchmark Walmart set.

Retailers across the board are contending with rising costs, the experts told BI, but Walmart "leads the market on price," according to the cofounder of the blog Omni Talk Retail, Chris Walton. The country's biggest retailer said shoppers will probably start to see prices tick up at the end of this month and more drastically in June, and those BI spoke to agreed with that timeline.

"We have always worked to keep our prices as low as possible and we won't stop. We'll keep prices as low as we can for as long as we can given the reality of small retail margins," Molly Blakeman, a spokesperson for Walmart, told BI in a statement.

GlobalRetail analyst Neil Saunders wrote in an email that Walmart's honesty about price hikes might open the door for other retailers to have "open dialogues." Yet the honesty didn't come without consequences — Trump bashed the company in a Truth Social post, saying Walmart should, '"EAT THE TARIFFS,' and not charge valued customers ANYTHING. I'll be watching."

Representatives for the White House directed BI to Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt's comments on Monday about Walmart, when she confirmed that Trump will be "watching" the company and said he "has always maintained that Chinese producers will be absorbing the cost of these tariffs."

Trump's reaction will likely influence how other retailers manage their own pricing conversations, the experts said.

"Retailers will have learned they need to be very careful — and it's very tricky — on how they articulate that so as to not wind up on a Truth Social post," Michael Baker, a senior analyst at D.A. Davidson, told BI. "That does add a layer of complication."

He anticipates executives will figure out how to more delicately discuss tariffs on coming earnings calls so as not to anger the president. Walton told BI that other retailers may try to avoid talking about rising costs publicly, and instead let shelf prices speak for themselves.

"President Trump has sent a warning shot that he doesn't like companies talking about price increases related to tariffs," Saunders wrote. "That may make some retailers more hesitant to draw a link, but I don't think it will stop them putting up prices. They will need to financially."

The president has issued not-so-subtle warnings about price hikes before, like when he sharply criticized Amazon for its reported plans to publicize how much tariffs were contributing to rising costs. Amazon said it had no plans to do so on its main site at the time, but experts told BI that the swift reaction sent a "warning signal to other companies" nonetheless.

Though Walmart may be one of the first big box retailers to publicize looming price hikes, it's better positioned to deal with the new tariffs than some competitors. Both Saunders and Baker said the company's scale gives it the ability to offset some of the tariff impact.

Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux has become an important tool for developers and power users since it was introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update back in 2016, giving them access to a built-in Linux command line and Linux applications from within Windows.

The company has steadily improved WSL since then, improving performance, making it easier to install and use, and adding features like GPU and audio support. But today as part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced that it would be making almost all of WSL open source, closing the very first issue that the then-new WSL project attracted on Github in 2016.

"WSL could never have been what it is today without its community," writes Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Pierre Boulay in the company's blog post. "We’ve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we can’t wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project."

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Microsoft is making its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) open-source today, opening up the code for community members to contribute to. After launching WSL for Windows 10 nearly nine years ago, it has been a multiyear effort at Microsoft to open-source the feature that enables a Linux environment within Windows.

“It has been a consistent request from the developer community for some time now,” says Windows chief Pavan Davuluri in an interview with The Verge. “It took us a little bit of time, because we needed to refactor the operating system to allow WSL to live in a standalone capacity that then allowed us to open-source the project and be able to have developers go and make contributions and for us to ingest those into the Windows pipeline and ship it at scale.”

The WSL code is now available on GitHub, allowing developers to download it and build it from source, participate in fixes, or even add new features. The WSL community hasn’t had access to Microsoft’s source code in the past, but that hasn’t stopped them from making contributions that have helped improve WSL over the years. Davuluri says he’s now expecting that developers will use the open-source project to help improve WSL performance, or for more integration into Linux services.

It’s a major milestone for WSL, which started off life in 2016 as part of the Windows 10 Anniversary update. “At that time WSL was based on a pico process provider, lxcore.sys, which enabled Windows to natively run ELF executables, and implement Linux syscalls inside the Windows kernel,” explains Pierre Boulay, senior software engineer at Microsoft. “Over time it became clear that the best way to provide optimal compatibility with native Linux was to rely on the Linux kernel itself.”

Microsoft announced its second major version of WSL in 2019, eventually adding GPU support and then moving to ship the project separate to Windows. “It eventually became clear that to keep up the growing community and feature requests, WSL had to move faster, and ship separately from Windows,” says Boulay. “That’s why in 2021 we separated WSL from the Windows codebase, and moved it to its own codebase.” In the latest 24H2 update for Windows 11, Microsoft has fully transitioned WSL users to a package that’s separate from Windows, instead of the WSL component that was baked into the OS.

All of these changes to WSL in recent years have led Microsoft to close off the first ever issue raised on its WSL repo on GitHub, asking “Will this be open-source?” That answer is very much yes now, and it’s a part of making Windows more developer-friendly. “Our goal is quite simple: we want Windows to be a great dev box for developers,” says Davuluri. “That’s really the ambition.”

Sunny days are on their way to Netflix. The streamer just announced that the next season of Sesame Street will be available on Netflix “later this year.”

Season 56 of the show won’t be fully exclusive to Netflix, as the company says that it “has exclusive worldwide premiere rights and episodes will be available day-and-date on PBS stations in the US and across PBS KIDS digital platforms.” The streamer also says that the new season will include some format changes, describing it as “reimagined.” Those include new animated segments and what Netflix calls “one 11-minute story” per episode. “The longer format provides the opportunity to tell stories with even more character-driven humor and heart,” Netflix explains.

Sesame Street has been searching for a streaming home ever since it was dropped from Max (now HBO Max once again) at the end of 2024. In addition to the new episodes, Netflix says that it will be streaming “90 hours of previous episodes,” though there are no specifics as to what will be available. The streamer also intends to develop Sesame Street games as part of the deal.

The addition of Sesame Street will provide another boost to Netflix’s kid-oriented programming, joining recent additions like Ms. Rachel.

• One of tech's biggest celebrities, Jensen Huang, spoke on Monday at a major industry show in Taiwan.
• Huang said Nvidia is building a new office in northern Taipei.
• He also introduced a new desktop system and talked about China's DeepSeek R1 model.

Taiwan's biggest tech celebrity — clad in his signature black leather jacket — ran onstage in Taipei on Monday morning with a lot to talk about.

Jensen Huang's 100-minute keynote at the tech show Computex featured Nvidia's usual assortment of high-tech videos, complete with a cute robot, and praise for semiconductor hub Taiwan.

The tech titan also outlined new products and a significant regional expansion. Business Insider was in the audience while Huang spoke — here are the top four takeaways from his speech.

1. Nvidia's new office

Speculation about Nvidia's new office in Taiwan has been brewing since Huang said in January that the company's current building was too small and that it was "looking for real estate."

On Monday, Taipei's mayor, Chiang Wan-an, generated buzz when he showed up at Huang's keynote. Huang went on to announce that Nvidia is eying the Beitou Shilin area — home to a science park — in northern Taipei for the tech giant's new Taiwan office, named "Nvidia Constellation."

The announcement was met with applause and cheers from the audience.

Chiang said in a media interview following Huang's keynote that the city government welcomes Nvidia's move and will provide any necessary assistance.

2. New computer systems

Huang introduced Nvidia's DGX systems, which are designed for users who want heavy-duty AI without dedicating significant storage space to a weighty server system.

The physical workstation can be used as a single computer or as a central node for multiple users.

"This computer is the most performance you can possibly get out of a wall socket. You could put this in your kitchen. But just barely, if you put this in your kitchen and then somebody runs the microwave, I think that's the limit," he joked.

Huang said the cloud-based system — DGX Spark — will be ready in a few weeks. Nvidia is working with companies including Dell and HP on the systems.

"I'll let all of our partners price it for themselves, but one thing's for sure: Everybody can have one for Christmas," Huang said.

3. DeepSeek praise

Huang talked software, too.

He praised the DeepSeek R1 model, saying that it's "genuinely a gift to the world's AI industry."

"The amount of computer science breakthroughs is really quite significant and has really opened up a lot of great research for researchers in the United States and around the world," Huang said.

He said DeepSeek R1 — owned by the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer — has made a "real impact" in how people think about AI and that it has made a "great contribution to the industry and the world."

Shares of Nvidia and many of its peers were clobbered in January, as Wall Street grappled with how to price in the new, seemingly cheaper technology.

Huang said in February that investors got it wrong because the industry will still need computing power for post-training.

4. New AI supercomputer for Taiwan

Huang announced an Nvidia collaboration with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Foxconn — the world's largest electronics contract manufacturer — and the Taiwanese government to build an AI supercomputer for the island.

Nvidia's joint effort with the Taiwanese government and Taiwan's top tech giants highlights the Santa Clara-based company's close ties to the hub of global chipmaking.

Born in Tainan in southern Taiwan before he moved to the US as a child, Huang's meteoric rise to the top of tech royalty has captivated Taiwan and catapulted him to folk hero status.

In Taiwan, Huang is surrounded by local media and fans who ask for selfies and autographs. The celebrity factor has also rubbed off on Nvidia, the company he cofounded, at home and abroad. The chipmaker's stock is up nearly 43% in the last year.

Paige Bueckers made her WNBA debut on Friday.

The former UConn Huskies star had 10 points on 3-of-10 from the field with seven rebounds and two assists against the Minnesota Lynx. However, the Dallas Wings fell short in their first game of the season, 99-84.

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Bueckers suggested she had a sigh of relief after her first-career game was finished.

"The first one’s always the hardest, usually," Bueckers said. "Not to say that it won’t get harder, but just being able to have a starting point and continuing to build off that. And then there’s no more questions about what is it going to be like for your first WNBA game. Now you have (to) move on past that."

Wings head coach Chris Koclanes spoke glowingly of Bueckers and said the rookie was able to handle the hype and pressure that will come with her first season in the W.

"She’s been fantastic. She’s special in how she’s able to handle things with such grace," Koclanes said. "As a team, like really preaching, lots of attention to evolving our mental game and just dealing with everything else, all the outside expectations, the outside noise, and really trying to expose them and give them all sorts of different ways to stay present.

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"Credit to Paige, she individually comes in with an incredible amount of personal attention on that and already lives that way," Koclanes said. "It matched up well with our style and what we’re trying to create with the type of person she is already."

Arike Ogunbowale had 16 points to lead the Wings. Newcomer DiJonai Carrington had 15 points in her Dallas debut.

Napheesa Collier had 34 points to lead the Lynx. Courtney Williams had 25 points and nine assists.

The Lynx lost in the WNBA Finals last season to the New York Liberty. They finished the year 30-10.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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• Dropbox's VP of product and growth, Morgan Brown, advises job seekers to put their work on display.
• Brown said anyone can build products with the amount of free tools and online courses now available.
• Brown took 20 years to finish his degree and worked his way up the career ladder by teaching himself.

Like many tech execs, Dropbox's VP of product and growth agrees that job seekers should still learn basic technical skills — but his No. 1 piece of advice is to "show your work."

Morgan Brown told Business Insider that it's about showcasing your capabilities, rather than showing how you arrived at an answer.

"Publish your stuff, publish your thinking," Brown said in an interview. "Build the apps, build the websites."

Brown said he would give that advice at any time, but it's especially relevant in the age of AI. In a time where there's an abundance of free tools and online courses, Brown said there's nothing stopping job seekers from building products on their own. All candidates need to get started is a phone and internet access, Brown said.

"There are so many opportunities to kind of, like, show what you have to offer right now without kind of any credential necessary other than just your work," Brown said.

The Dropbox product exec said that when he suggests building a product, people sometimes say that they don't know enough or don't have good ideas. That shouldn't be a deterrent, Brown said.

"First of all, no one's paying any attention," Brown said, adding that you can "learn by doing" and eventually create a body of work to point to that some people will end up noticing.

Brown said his advice comes from the perspective of someone who isn't a "classically trained product manager." Despite spending years in product management at Facebook, Instagram, and Shopify, the now Dropbox VP didn't have a typical start to the realm of Big Tech. In fact, he didn't finish his college degree until a few years ago.

"I was a biology major, you know, I failed out of college. It took me 20 years to get my degree," Brown said.

After dropping out of school, Brown started his first job in data operations at a startup in the midst of the dot-com boom. It was a time before the rise of APIs, and the bulk of his work started with typing information from physical newspapers. He said search engine optimization had recently emerged, and he had to figure out how to get web traffic.

"I basically was a self-taught digital marketer, fully based on like what kind of impact we could have," Brown said. "And then from there I went to digital marketing."

In addition to learning how to generate traffic, Brown ended up teaching himself how to create a website and blog, and eventually how to build products. While Brown said he's grateful for the experience and where it led him, he said he learned what he knows now "at the school of hard knocks" and experienced "a lot of failure along the way."

He went from publishing his thoughts online to co-authoring a published book called "Hacking Growth," a guide for driving growth. He said putting his work out there led people to find him and ultimately created opportunities.

"There's nothing stopping anyone from publishing and showing their work," Brown said. "And I think more people that do that, that's where good stuff happens."

Pope Leo XIV is getting recognition at the Chicago White Sox's ballpark, Rate Field, to commemorate his 2005 World Series attendance. 

The team plans to unveil a graphic Monday that honors the pope.

Last week, Chicago native Robert Prevost revealed his White Sox fandom, and footage of Prevost attending Game 1 of the 2005 World Series surfaced on social media. 

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By pure chance, Prevost was shown on the MLB on FOX broadcast for that game at U.S. Cellular Field Oct. 22, 2005, and the cameras caught him during the top of the ninth inning as the White Sox were clinching a 5-3 win over the Houston Astros.  

The new graphic at Rate Field marks the location where the future pope cheered for Chicago in that 5-3, Game 1 win, the first of a four-game sweep for the title.

The team said the pillar artwork commemorates the pope’s Chicago roots "and the unifying power of baseball on the world stage."

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According to the White Sox, the pope attended the game with the late Ed Schmit, a family friend and season ticket holder. They knew each other through their work at a Catholic high school on Chicago’s South Side, and Schmit’s son, Nick, remains the account holder for the pope’s World Series seat.

The White Sox, who have struggled in recent years, and their fans have embraced their connection to the new pope since he was elected. The team said it sent a jersey and a hat to the Vatican after the announcement.

A group of White Sox fans dressed as the pope and watched a 13-3 loss to the crosstown Cubs from the bleachers at Wrigley Field Friday afternoon.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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