Inside the Mormon Church’s Globe-Spanning Real-Estate Empire From Guam to Cape Verde, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is using the financial cushion of its $100 billion investment portfolio to go on a temple-building spree A whistleblower revealed a few years ago that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints had an estimated $100 billion investment portfolio, and at the time, church officials called the holdings a rainy-day account. They now say the money also has provided a financial foundation that gives the Mormon Church confidence to construct more than 100 temples, from Cape Verde to Guam, a series of stone-clad monuments exhibiting the church’s vast and expanding wealth. In Pocatello, Idaho, a city of 56,000 in the rural southeastern corner of the state, a recently constructed temple stands at 71,125 square feet. Its polished limestone flooring was quarried in Bethlehem, the biblical birthplace of Jesus, and wood for its doors was imported from the Congo
Good to know. The way tech companies continue to deliver ever-faster and more capable computers is undergoing a profound change—at the atomic level. Performance gains that were for decades accomplished mostly by shrinking the individual components on microchips—often described as Moore’s Law—are now increasingly the result of materials science, which is evolving faster than it has in decades. Santa Clara-based Applied Materials, founded in 1967, a year before Intel, is the biggest of the companies that are leading the way. It’s a change born of necessity. Chip makers are bumping up against a hard limit on how tiny the elements on chips can become, as some of their features can now be measured at the scale of just a few atoms. As a result, manipulating what materials are in these tiny machines, and how they’re connected to one another, has become a primary way that engineers can continue to make them faster and more capable. Applied Materials AMAT 0.72%increase; green up pointing trian
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