🔧 His $28-an-hour job became $880K

🤯 WOW! A welder took a $28-an-hour SpaceX job in 2015 and got paid partly in stock. After June’s IPO, his stake hit about $880,000. Data center electricians are earning up to $260,000, and the FAA hired 2,000-plus video gamers for six-figure control tower jobs. No degrees anywhere in that sentence.

📖 Read time: 2.5 minutes

I love this. In 2015, Juan Hernandez took a $28-an-hour welding job at a company he’d never heard of. It paid him partly in stock, the same way it paid its engineers. The company was SpaceX. After June’s IPO, his shares hit about $880,000. (He welds for Blue Origin now. Fair’s fair.)

While everybody’s panicking about AI taking jobs, the folks who work with their hands are having their best decade in 50 years. No debt. Six-figure incomes. And you can’t outsource a conduit bend to a chatbot.

AI is minting blue-collar money. Every data center the tech giants build needs an army of electricians, and there aren’t enough. Mike Rowe points to three young Texas electricians clearing $260,000 a year with zero college debt.

That’s the top of the range, so let’s keep it honest. 

Journeymen on big projects average around $120,000, and one Wyoming crew hit $190,000 with per diem. First-year apprentices start near $50,000. The catch? The biggest checks travel. You chase the projects, sometimes living out of a fifth wheel.

Not the tool type? The FAA hired 2,000-plus video gamers to train as air traffic controllers. Median pay: $144,580. Only about 25% of current controllers have a college degree. All those hours on the sticks finally count as a résumé.

Here’s the playbook for you, your kid or that grandkid glued to a screen.

Wall Street even has a name for these kids: the tool-belt generation. Trade school enrollment jumped 16% in a single year, the biggest spike since the feds started counting. First generation in decades getting rich without a lecture hall.

AI can write a poem. It cannot wire a panel. You might say the trades are welding, er, wielding all the power.

Speaking of power: Those data centers cutting the big checks? On Friday, I’ll show you why they’re also quietly driving up your electric bill and what to do about it.

🎯 Send this to someone who thinks their kid’s gaming habit or toolbox are dead ends. Both just became career paths.

📱 Text-worthy: Told you the trades are hot. A SpaceX welder’s $28/hr job turned into $880K in the IPO, data center electricians are making up to $260K and the FAA hired 2,000+ gamers for $144K air traffic jobs. No degrees required. Paid apprenticeships: apprenticeship.gov.

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1 in 5 Gen Z workers have had a parent join their job interview, and some grown-ups are even applying to jobs for their kids! Next it’ll be take your mom to work day. Every day.

Watch now before everyone else is talking about it. 👇

▶️ Meet the office’s newest employee: Mom →

Or for audio only, find me in your favorite podcast player.

🪦 Final boarding call, your data: When an airline dies, your seat disappears before your data does. Google reportedly bid about $10 million for some of Spirit Airlines’ records after the carrier folded, planning to use the material for AI training. Your travel dates, spending, frequent-flier information and angry emails can become assets in a corporate estate sale. Share the minimum, because a dead company’s filing cabinet can get a second career, apparently with better retirement plans than the employees.

The FBI invoice: Get this. An Arizona woman lost a whopping $4.3M after scammers posed as government officials, sent phony FBI documents and said she was under digital surveillance for money laundering. They held virtual meetings, kept her frightened, then calmly directed her to send money through a Bitcoin app to resolve the case. Real authorities will never demand crypto. If someone says act now, call the agency yourself using its public number.

🪪 Identity theft inbox: 471 million breach notices landed in the first half of 2026. That’s nearly double all of last year, and only about a quarter even say what was stolen. So you get a vague form letter while someone tests your credit. AI helps drive 1 in 4 malicious breaches, which means faster attacks and more of them. Your move: Freeze your credit, switch to passkeys and watch your accounts, so you’re not playing Clue with your own identity. Check out Coveron now and save 66% with my exclusive offer.*

U can’t torque this: The test for recalled V6 engines in more than 250,000 Toyota and Lexus vehicles is smacking the engine with a small plastic hammer. Really. A sensor reads the crankshaft’s vibration to estimate bearing wear from factory debris. If the software can’t confirm the bearing is safe, Toyota swaps the engine. One tiny tool, one expensive decision. 

🦣 Herd, not heard: This is great! Electric safari vehicles (paywall link) are replacing rumbling engines at lodges across Africa, while battery-powered boats get travelers closer to whales and rays in Norway and the Galápagos. Guests get better photos and hear paws, wind and chewing instead of diesel. The compromise? Money and range. Ask the elephants how they feel about diesel: irrelephant.

There are all types of scholarships out there that no one applies for. Left-handers. Tall people. Even duck callers. AI searches for you. Plus, we help Debbie turn her passion and decades of teaching into her next big career move.

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🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

⚡️ 3-second tech genius: When Chrome tabs shrink into tiny mystery icons, press Ctrl + Shift + A on Windows or Cmd + Shift + A on Mac. You’ll get a clean list of every open tab, plus recently closed ones. Pick what you need, and jump straight in. No more hovering over thumbnails like it’s a memory test.

💲 What is your phone bill actually costing you? If you pay over $100 a month, you’re overspending. Get a new 5G phone and unlimited everything for $59 a month or less. When the financing ends, you own the phone, not the carrier. Use promo code KIM50 for an extra $50 off your service.* 

👀 Seeing really isn’t believing anymore: Google lets you remove the visible “made with AI” watermark from Gemini images, videos and songs. That sparkle icon in the corner? Optional now. Go to Gemini > Settings > Media Watermark and turn it off. For everyone else scrolling online, maybe give that “perfect” photo a second look. 😅 

☕ My coffee finally stays hot: Sometimes work gets so busy, my coffee goes cold before I even take a sip. So I picked up this mug warmer for $20. It keeps coffee, tea, milk or cocoa warm and shows the temperature setting. If I forget it’s on, no worries. It shuts off by itself. Works with flat-bottom ceramic, glass and stainless-steel mugs. 👌

😱 Hackers are coming for routers: A new botnet is infecting routers and using them to hide internet traffic or steal private info. TP-Link, NETGEAR, D-Link and plenty more are in the mix. Open your router app, or try 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1 in your browser, then update the firmware. Still using “admin” as the password? Change that, too. 

💊 Costco without the Costco card: Folks, you don’t need a membership to use the pharmacy. At the door, say, “I’m here for the pharmacy.” Same goes for those cheap eye exams. Want even bigger discounts? The Costco Member Prescription Program can knock down prices on certain generic drugs.

Be on the show! Is tech making your life easier? Or driving you absolutely nuts? Or maybe you have a story that could help millions of people? Tell me all about it here. I’ll read it. A producer may reach out to feature you on the air.

Robots already want your desk job. Now they’re coming for your Strava records, too.

China’s Unitree unveiled “Superman,” a humanoid it says can run 28.3 mph and jump 6.56 feet vertically. The perfect speed for your Doordash delivery to arrive splattered on your front door. 

That’s faster than Usain Bolt’s peak speed, meaning humanity spent 300,000 years evolving to get smoked by a rechargeable mannequin.

Watch it go here.

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🎓 What you learned today: AI can’t meet the demand for electricians, welders and air traffic controllers as the “degree required” sign keeps getting smaller, bankrupt companies sell your data like office furniture, scammers stole $4.3 million from one Arizona woman and router updates are now household chores because hackers love forgotten hardware. Tomorrow, I’ll show you why some prescriptions cost less without insurance and the simple question that can uncover the real price.

⌨️ The answer: A) So metal arms wouldn’t smack into each other mid-word. Early typewriters could jam when typebars close to each other fired too quickly, so QWERTY helped space out commonly paired letters. Your keyboard layout started as 19th-century traffic control.

The keyboard has been around for a century and a half, but it can pull off some modern tricks:

Text replacement is the best feature you’re not using.

On a computer, your five best friends are Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+F and Ctrl+T. That last one opens a browser tab. People gasp when they learn it.

A 150-year-old design, still going strong. If it ain’t broke, don’t QWERTY it.

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

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Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, SAIJI, ESOXOFFORE, @UnitreeRobotics via X

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