Beyond Tech: Your Weekend Upgrade

Equinox Wants $36,000. Wahlberg’s new Municipal Gym Asks $99. Longevity was never expensive. It was just sold that way.

Author

The Tech Buzz
October 24, 2026

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH

WHAT’S INSIDE TODAY:

Feature: Equinox Wants $36,000. Wahlberg’s New Gym Asks Just $99

Consumer Tech: Flying Tesla Roadster; Porsche Mission S; touchscreen Mac; Claude Duet + Fable 5.5; Kindle Plus

Art/Culture: Theranos doc record; BBC–Trump; Disney–Character.AI; card heist; RDJ–SPECS; Netflix shakeup; Jay-Z halftime

Sports: NBA bet limits; Euroleague €13B plan; NASCAR–Tom Cruise; 24-team CFP; football club losses; TrackMan golf

Futurism: Singularity; OpenAI humanoid + Orchestra Bio; Wahlberg gym; dodo revival; fusion chip; magnetism + ageing; AI drug discovery

Wellness: NIH women’s health; Colorado public option; frozen pig kidneys; robotic exoskeleton; RYZ101 trial win; BeSound scans; Abby Care $82M

Food/Drink: AI pricing backlash; HomeView recipes; home distilling case; KFC–Coke; Ember Mug 3; Eric Sze’s NYC eats

IN PARTNERSHIP WITH FINANCEBUZZ

Erase interest until nearly 2028 - 0% Intro APR on Purchases and Balance Transfers

Stop bogging yourself down with those high-interest credit card payments. It seriously limits your spending power. If your monthly interest payments are starting to creep out of control, you might need to take a look at changing things up with your current credit card by finding a card with a 0% intro APR.

Editors at FinanceBuzz have done their research, and they’ve identified some of the best options to help you take back control. These cards offer a generous 0% intro APR on purchases and balance transfers into nearly 2028, which means you could get the breathing room you need to tackle your debt or make a new purchase without being hamstrung by high interest for over the whole year.

On top of that, you can earn up to 5% cash back on everyday purchases with these cards and enjoy a $0 annual fee. It’s really a no-brainer when you consider you could save on interest and earn rewards on everyday purchases.

Get rid of your high-interest payments. Learn more about these cards today.

CONSUMER TECH

Tesla Roadster 2029 — The 2029 Roadster reveal showed a demo version with compressed air flight. The standard model is estimated at $200K–$250K.

Porsche Mission S — Porsche's mid-engined, two-seat supercar is expected around $500K for 2029, with gas, hybrid, or plug-in options and a MagSafe phone dock replacing touchscreens.

Apple's Touch-Screen Mac — Apple's Oct. 28 LA event will debut the first touch-screen MacBook Pro, with OLED and Dynamic Island, plus an M6 MacBook Pro, new iMac and iPad mini.

Claude Duet — Autonomous agent rivals Muse, live, runs on Opus 5. + Leakers have Claude Fable 5.5 arriving next week. An Azure listing showed $10/$50 per 1M tokens and a 1M context window.

Kindle Plus — Amazon renames Kindle Unlimited to Kindle Plus and expands access to audiobooks + adds AI-narrated audiobooks, $11.99/mo.

WEEKEND CRYPTO BYTE

SoFi Tokenized Deposit — SoFi launched SOFIE, a tokenized deposit paying 4.4% APY with FDIC insurance, offering a yield-bearing option that converts to SoFiUSD.

Dune Data Feeds — Dune, the blockchain analytics platform, launched real-time feeds covering trades from 200+ onchain venues across 12 blockchains.

Best Crypto Debit Cards 2026 — Coinbase 4% cashback, Kraken 2% in BTC or USD, EAT Card cashbacks and hunger relief & Crypto.com 5% reward card.

Equinox Wants $36,000. Wahlberg Gym Asks $99

Longevity was never expensive. It was just sold that way. Wahlberg’s new Municipal Gym is changing the game with fees a fraction of the premium clubs.

Mark Wahlberg is opening a 32,000 sq ft longevity club outside Las Vegas in December with blood work, epigenetic testing and cold plunges at a price point that undercuts Equinox by about 97%. The bet is that biological age testing follows the same path every luxury health product eventually takes.

The Gap Is The Story

In December, a 32,000 sq ft gym opens in Summerlin, just outside Las Vegas. It will have blood work, epigenetic testing, compression therapy, cold plunges, recovery equipment, hormone therapy and a café selling protein muffins. Mark Wahlberg owns it, it is called Municipal, and founding memberships start at $99 a month. Roughly the same menu at Equinox costs $36,000 a year, as an add-on to a membership you are already paying for. That gap is the whole story, and gaps like it do not usually survive long once somebody points at them.

Wahlberg told TechCrunch last week that the gym excites him more than anything else he has done. "We have a better price point than our competitors, and we're going to get far more results," he said.

What The Luxury Version Actually Sells

The top of this market is crowded and getting more so. Fountain Life, co-founded by Tony Robbins, raised $18M last year to expand its centers, and a full subscription runs about $21,500 a year. The Estate, another Robbins venture, has mapped out $35,000 memberships. Remedy Place charges around $24,000 for ice baths and hyperbaric oxygen in Los Angeles and Manhattan. Toronto's Longevity House has been reported at a $100,000 lifetime fee. R360 does not publish a price at all. It asks for a $100M net worth instead.

Take the marble away and the underlying services are blood panels, body composition scans, epigenetic clocks, saunas and cold water. None of that is exotic. Lab work is cheap and getting cheaper. Epigenetic testing went from research tool to consumer product in under a decade. The biological age diagnostics market is forecast to hit $5.58B by 2030, which is the shape of a category going mass, not one staying rare.

What the $36,000 buys, mostly, is the room and the people in it.

The Exclusivity Premium Has Low Longevity

Harvey Spevak, Executive Chairman and Managing Partner of Equinox Group, has said people "will pay anything for longevity." That is true of a few thousand people. The industry has run this pattern before. Spin studios, then boutique HIIT, then recovery suites. Each arrived expensive, each got copied down the price ladder, and the premium operators ended up competing on brand rather than access.

Fitt Insider has been tracking the other half of it. Budget gym chains are already moving upmarket, adding the recovery and diagnostics that used to mark the top tier. At the same time, consumers are showing early fatigue with optimization culture, and the word longevity itself may need a rebrand before an average member will buy it. Wahlberg is arriving at the exact point where the service is cheap enough to scale and the branding is still doing the heavy lifting.

He Has Been On The Wrong Side Of This Before

Wahlberg bought into F45 in 2019 at a $450M valuation. It went public in 2021 and was delisted from the NYSE in 2023 after the stock collapsed. He is candid about it. "I think the biggest takeaway was just making sure that I'm involved with people that share the same approach that I do," he said.

He drew a structural lesson too. F45 sold 45 minute classes to people short on time. Municipal is a big box where members are meant to stay for hours. He is blunt about the industry's quiet business model, where chains profit from people who sign up and never show. "I can't understand that philosophy," he said.

That is the real bet. Engagement economics instead of breakage economics, at a price that only works on volume.

The Name Is The Argument

Municipal means public. Wahlberg grew up poor in Boston, one of nine children, on public basketball courts and public golf courses. "You learn a lot on the blacktop," he said. "You learn to win, to lose, to compete, and hopefully to get back up and do it again." The gym is supposed to carry that. "It's a place to work, but have fun and support each other and create community and really challenge people to be better versions of themselves."

What To Watch

The unit economics are unproven. Clinical services carry staffing costs, liability and regulatory exposure, and the one club that exists is still a construction site. Wahlberg calls the expansion plan "aggressive" and says landlords who toured the Las Vegas site have offered AAA locations on favourable terms with generous build-out allowances. That is encouraging, and it is also what landlords said to every fitness chain that later folded.

The thing worth tracking is not whether Municipal works. It is whether the $36,000 tier holds its price once a competent operator shows the same tests can be sold for a hundred dollars. Scarcity is a fragile product. Somebody always undercuts it.

“You learn a lot on the blacktop. You learn to win, to lose, to compete, and hopefully to get back up and do it again.”

— Mark Wahlberg, actor and founder of Municipal

ARTS & CULTURE

Holmes Doc Breaks Records — A24's Theranos film by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim earned $15M+ on under 900 screens, the #1 documentary in 20+ years.

BBC vs Trump — BBC lawyers ask a judge to force Trump to sit for a deposition in his defamation suit against the broadcaster, saying he is stalling until January 2027.

Disney Hires Character.AI Staff — After bankruptcy, chatbot startup Character.AI sees 60+ staff get Disney offers worth ~$60M in annual pay.

Card Heist — Thieves broke into a FedEx truck outside PSA, a card-grading firm in Santa Ana, Calif., stealing $963K+ of Pokémon and sports cards.

RDJ Joins SPECS — Robert Downey Jr. is now honorary Chief Customer Experience Officer at SPECS, Snap's AR glasses unit, launching a content series with TV spots.

Dan Lin Out at Netflix — Netflix dismissed film chief Dan Lin after nearly 3 years, days after ~1,000 layoffs and content chief Bela Bajaria's exit; Peter Rice replaces her.

Jay-Z Headlines — Jay-Z, who curates halftime via Roc Nation's $5M-a-year NFL deal, has picked himself for Super Bowl LXI in L.A., over Miley Cyrus and Bieber.

FOOD & TECHNOLOGY:

AI Pricing Backlash — Shoppers grow wary as Walmart and Whole Foods roll out digital shelf labels and AI pricing tools.

HomeView vs. Recipe Writers — Apple's HomeView strips online recipes into hands-free, step-by-step steps via Siri AI, but food writers say it cuts essential context.

Home Distilling Case — The Supreme Court agreed to review a Reconstruction-era federal ban on distilling spirits in private homes, a win for hobbyists.

KFC Swaps Pepsi for Coke — After 40 years, KFC is switching from Pepsi to Coca-Cola across its 3,600 U.S. stores by spring, betting beverages can fuel its comeback.

Ember Mug 3 — Ember adds an on-mug button to its third-gen smart mug, cycling 5 presets from 125°F to 145°F without the app.

Eric Sze's NYC Day Off — Wenwen chef Eric Sze hits his weekly NYC staples: a brie-apple baguette at Bakeri, dry-aged short ribs from The Meat Hook, and wontons.

SPORTS & TECHNOLOGY:

NBA Bans Bets — The NBA told sportsbook partners to stop certain bets this season, including a player prop parlay tied to recent scandals, and to restrict parlays.

Euroleague 10-Year Plan — All 13 clubs approved a franchise-model plan targeting a €13B combined valuation, €3.4B in club distributions and €648M in ACR.

NASCAR x Hollywood — NASCAR backs Paramount's Days of Thunder 2 (June 2, 2028) with Tom Cruise and 80+ cars, chasing younger fans for its $7.7B deal.

CFP Goes to 24 — After a month of talks between ESPN, the SEC, Big Ten and Notre Dame, CFP is expanding to 24 teams, extra revenue is only a few $M per school.

Clubs on Brink — Independent Football Regulator says 94% of clubs across the top five tiers lost money in 2025-26, 66% couldn't survive 90 days without owner funding.

TrackMan's Golf Empire — TrackMan, a Danish golf radar maker, now runs a DKK 2.2B business, earning from hardware, software subscriptions, simulators and data.

FUTURISM:

Singularity Has Begun — Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark told the IMF in Bangkok that AI now works at the frontier of human science and the singularity has begun.

OpenAI's Robot Plans — OpenAI will build a humanoid with a 2027 demo planned. It also acquired Orchestra Bio, AI biotech software startup, whose agents automate drug discovery op, and previously raised ~$20M from a16z.

Wahlberg's Longevity Gym — Mark Wahlberg opens Municipal Gym in Dec, a 32,000-sq-ft Las Vegas-area club with blood work and cold plunges, pitched as a cheaper rival to longevity clubs.

Dodo Revival Inches Forward — Colossal Biosciences, a Dallas de-extinction biotech, says the dodo genome is 95% complete and its GenoMorph AI flagged 2,300 beak-gene targets.

AI Drug Discovery Bet — Citrini Research says life sciences stocks like Charles River and Revvity stand to gain after it used Claude Science to design a drug candidate.

Fusion Chip Hits Record Speed — Brookhaven National Lab built a brain-mimicking superconducting chip that processes 1M fusion plasma samples per sec.

Magnetism and Ageing — University of Nottingham researchers found fruit flies with faulty Pink1 mitochondria lived 20% longer shielded from Earth's magnetic field.

WELLBEING AND HEALTH TECH:

Women's Health Order — Trump signed an order creating a White House task force led by Susie Wiles and RFK Jr., plus an NIH women's health division.

Colorado's Public Option — State-designed plan covers 139K enrollees, cutting premiums $14-$33/month and out-of-pocket costs ~15%.

Frozen Pig Kidneys Revived — Minnesota team vitrified pig kidneys at -150°C for up to 1 year, then thawed and transplanted them; preclinical, awaiting peer review.

Walking Again, With Help — Jess Tawil, paralyzed since a 2014 car crash at 16, stood and took steps in a robotic exoskeleton.

RYZ101 Phase 3 Win — RayzeBio's alpha-emitter RYZ101 met the Phase 3 ACTION-1 interim primary endpoint, improving PFS in post-Lu177 GEP-NET patients.

BeSound Opens Clinic — BeSound, a breast imaging startup for women with dense breasts, opened its Manhattan flagship: $349 pain-free scans, results in 48 hours.

Abby Care — AI-native home care startup that trains family members as certified, paid Medicaid caregivers raised an $82M Series C led by Transformation Capital.

Follow Us On Social Media