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Good morning,

The cost of eggs was a major talking point leading up to the November election, but the breakfast staple is about to hurt Americans’ wallets even more.

Egg prices are expected to rise more than 20% in the coming year amid the . When avian flu is found, farmers must kill their entire flock to help limit its spread. Over 145 million chickens and other birds have been killed since the outbreak began.

Egg prices in December were 37% higher year-over-year, according to the Consumer Price Index. Some stores like Whole Foods and Lidl have started limiting the number of cartons of eggs customers can buy in response to the shortages.

A U.S. district judge temporarily blocked President Donald Trump’s after state attorneys general and nonprofits sued his administration Tuesday. The freeze was designed so Trump’s administration could review whether programs aligned with his agenda, though the judge said it “seems like the federal government currently doesn’t actually know the full extent of the programs that are going to be subject to the pause.” Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it does not apply to direct assistance to individuals like Social Security or Medicare benefits.

The explosion of a new AI model from Chinese company DeepSeek stoked anxieties this week about China’s formidability in the . It’s a cheap, compelling alternative to offerings from incumbents like OpenAI, Jesse Zhang, CEO of enterprise AI startup Decagon told Forbes, and its new model will likely force American AI giants to reevaluate their prices.

Crypto is riding high to kick off 2025, but investors should proceed with caution, as . The top firm on Forbes’ third annual Best Crypto Exchange ranking is $85 billion futures exchange CME Group, while the $70 billion market cap Coinbase—the only major publicly-traded cryptocurrency exchange in the U.S.—earned the No. 2 spot.

Elon Musk’s X will partner with Visa for its upcoming digital payments service “X Money,” the company’sbeyond a traditional social media site. Still, Musk’s company enters a crowded field, with competitors Zelle and Venmo having an estimated 97 million and 76 million American users, respectively, while only about 55 million Americans use X.

Employees at an Amazon-owned Whole Foods store in Philadelphia have voted to unionize, following . It’s the first move by Whole Foods workers to unionize, and according to local PBS station WHYY, the workers are looking for at least $17 per hour pay, more affordable healthcare benefits and improved retirement benefits.

Billionaire Microsoft founder Bill Gates is reflecting on his “lucky timing” that he was born under the right circumstances to succeed, as he , Source Code: My Beginnings, next month. In an interview with The Times of London, Gates, who is worth an estimated $108.7 billion, called the end of his 27-year marriage to Melinda French Gates “the mistake I most regret.”

Venture firm General Catalyst is leading a $50 million funding round into Onebrief, a startup that makes collaboration software to help . Chris Miller, a former acting Secretary of Defense and co-author of Project 2025, also joined the startup’s board, telling Forbes his role provides a link to the Trump Administration ahead of what Silicon Valley hopes will be a bumper year for startups working with the Pentagon.

The Trump administration began offering buyouts for federal employees Tuesday who agree to resign by Feb. 6, in he recently ordered to return to in-person work. The White House reportedly expects up to $100 billion in savings if the expected number of federal workers take the buyout.

Major U.S. airlines have boosted flight capacity from Kansas City and Philadelphia to New Orleans ahead of the Chiefs-Eagles Super Bowl, and to avoid the steepest prices. Nonstop tickets to New Orleans from domestic airports are already averaging $979 per round-trip ticket, significantly higher than the average domestic airfare of $294 for a round trip, according to the travel platform Hopper.

When high-flying tech companies like Airtable, Figma and OpenAI are close to signing on a new customer, they go through the same important but tedious dance: Before any money exchanges hands, they must answer they remain in compliance with regulations and data privacy laws.

What that looks like is decidedly low-tech: a security questionnaire whose asks often run into the hundreds. What data do you collect and where do you keep it? Would you use it for AI models? Does your data center have barbed wire? What about background checks for your staff? It’s a necessary nuisance, but without it, to follow through.

To handle this paperwork headache, those bluechip companies have found their painkiller in an unlikely place: Nepal. There, in a gated office off a small street in central Kathmandu, about 180 employees of startup SecurityPal use a combination of software and an advantageous time zone to turn around such questionnaires quicker and more cheaply, with what founder and CEO Pukar Hamal argued is the right

In four-plus years, SecurityPal has answered 2 million such questions so far. Companies pay in the hundreds of thousands, with a couple million-dollar contracts sprinkled in, meaning SecurityPal’s revenue has grown 3x in the last two years.

“SecurityPal’s CEO Hamal found success building software that blends AI with human expertise, providing a behind-the-scenes boost for buzzier tech businesses like OpenAI,” says Forbes senior editor Alex Konrad. “But more impressive is the former refugee turned U.S. citizen’s , with American startup sensibilities: ‘Silicon Peaks.”’

Clay, A Secret Weapon For Anthropic And OpenAI, Boosts Valuation To $1.3 Billion

TSA levied a record $23 million in civil penalties againstluggage last year. Agency officials have seen a correlation between the volume of guns stopped at airport security checkpoints and the rise in permitless carry laws across the country:

The increase in fines between 2018 and last year

The share of intercepted firearms that were loaded

The minimum civil fine for getting caught with a firearm while going through an airport security checkpoint

Tax season opened this week, but with no permanent IRS commissioner in place, a hiring freeze at the agency and an uptick in anti-IRS rhetoric, it doesn’t feel like a normal start. Tax professionals say it’s all adding up to confusion among their clients, but to be clear: . And keep an eye out for scammers who may try to convince taxpayers to click on malicious links or provide personally identifying information.

The “doomsday clock,” a scientist-curated measure of how close human civilization may be to total collapse, ticked one second closer to “midnight” this week. are there to go?

A. 12

B. 36

C. 89

D. 103

Check your answer.

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Thanks for reading! This edition of Forbes Daily was edited by Sarah Whitmire, Chris Dobstaff and Caroline Howard.