Prestige Property: 24-28 George Street, East Melbourne, VIC

Offered as a residence for the first time in over 100 years is this luxuriously transformed post office in East Melbourne.

Set across an impressive 723sqm plot, the 4-bedroom, 3-bathroom, 2-car garage home presents 687sqm of contemporary living space – designed by Charles Salter – within its historic façade.

Retaining the post office’s 1920’s charm, the interiors blend old with new through soaring ceiling heights and tall windows meeting rich hardwood floors – now with hydronic heating.

The ground floor homes the formal dining, living and library – all leaning into the buildings historic charm – while the open plan living, dining and kitchen play a more contemporary role in the home.

Here, we are met with a large commercial-grade kitchen fitted with Viking industrial appliances and a handcrafted timber island. A fully appointed butler’s pantry and dumbwaiter round out the offering.

Flowing from the living and dining space is access to the vine-clad terrace, complete with a built-in barbecue area. An adjoining entertainment room makes clever use of the post office’s old bones.

The first floor is home to the parents’ retreat which includes a set of elongated ‘his’ and ‘hers’ walk-in robes and ensuite, which is fitted with limestone finishes and an opulent skylight. An impressive feature, the master suite’s northern wall of glazing retracts to bring the verdant gardens inside.

The basement sees three of the bedrooms, a bar, billiard room and 1200 bottle wine-cellar while a studio and conservatory (which sits atop a 10-metre pool in situ) is found at the back end of the property.

CCTV security, automatic irrigation, remote gates to basement garage are also here.

Arriving in a prized location, the residence is moments from the MCG, Fitzroy Gardens and the very best of Melbourne’s inner-city dining.

The listing is with RT Edgar’s Sarah Case (+61 439 431 020) and Warwick Anderson (+61 418 320 873). Price guide: $10 million; rtedgar.com

“Call us optimists. Call us dreamers. Call us whatever the hell you want, but we’re betting on people, and we like those odds. The future is for everyone.”

That ad copy is from the voice-over of a July Meta Platforms META -3.38%.

spot that’s been part of a public-relations blitz to position Meta as the humanist AI company. The message was undercut by the ad’s inclusion of David Bowie’s “Five Years,” a brooding 1972 song about an impending apocalypse. But this week CEO Mark Zuckerberg left no ambiguity, publishing a 6,500-word manifesto—about 10 times the length of this newsletter—with a title that echoed the ad: “The Future is for Everyone.”

That seems to be Meta’s new tagline. In light of sinking public opinion and the company’s thousands of lawsuits from states, school districts, parents, and users, Meta’s public relations have been defensive. This push represents a return to offense, with a chance to distinguish Meta’s approach to AI from other labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, or SpaceX SPCX +9.65%.

“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”

Zuckerberg frames what sort of future we build with AI as the central issue of our time. “We believe that delivering superintelligence to everyone is the way to answer this question,” he says. “This has the potential to begin a new era of personal empowerment where individuals can use this powerful new capability to reach their full potential, pursue their interests, and improve their lives and the world more than ever before.”

The flood of words belies the situation on the ground in mid-2026. Americans, at least, have a love-hate affair with social media. A November Pew Research Center poll reported that 71% of U.S. adults used Facebook, and 51% used Instagram. Worldwide, 3.6 billion people use at least one Meta app every day.

But in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in July and August, 61% of respondents said they wanted more government oversight of social media, and two-thirds supported laws to keep children under 16 years old off the platforms. When it comes to Meta in particular, in the 2026 Axios Harris 100, an annual poll about corporate reputation, Meta placed 96th out of 100. It’s only above two other social media companies, Chinese ultracheap retailer Temu, and Spirit Airlines, a defunct air carrier. Regarding ethics, Meta came in last, and it was only ahead of TikTok in trust.

The steady drip of headlines in the teen social media trials isn’t helping. Last week, Meta lost a judgment in New Mexico state court that raised their liability in that relatively small jurisdiction to nearly $1 billion dollars. On Wednesday, jury selection began for a federal case with four states suing Meta over addictive product design, and false marketing that said its platforms were safe for teenagers. In July, Meta claimed that the states are asking for a total of $1.4 trillion in damages, in addition to design changes in the apps. This is part of a multidistrict litigation, where thousands of federal trials with social media defendants are coordinated in Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers’ district courthouse in Oakland, Calif.

There is a separate such group of thousands of cases in California state court, mostly with individual plaintiffs. The steady drip of bad headlines from the courts will continue unless Meta decides to settle en masse.

Meanwhile, in the second quarter, Meta booked “$2.40 billion of charges related to legal proceedings,” according to its quarterly filing. That may be just the beginning.

Zuckerberg spent 6,500 words getting his utopian message out, but I can sum it up in two: Trust us. The evidence is that Meta has a long way to go to win back that trust.

Prestige Property: 24-28 George Street, East Melbourne, VIC

Historic charm meets modern opulence.

Meta is betting on a human-first AI future, but growing legal battles and declining public trust are putting Mark Zuckerberg’s vision to the test.