This week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ is about how Intel stock soared more than 20% last Friday, eight months after the U.S. government took a 10 percent stake to prop up the firm. Try to get the famous “Intel Inside” jingle in there if you can? Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers.

Also:

But what’s the business, tech, and finance news?

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

News You Need2Know

• A surprising solution to the Hormuz crisis?

• The insider who made $400,000 on Polymarket

• GM’s profits boosted by $500m tariff refund

• OpenAI misses key revenue goals in float sprint

• This professor built an AI trading bot in 6 days

• Poll of the day: The inside man!

• Poll of the day: Let them eat taxes!

What’s the stock market up to, eh?*

$SPX ( ▼ 0.49% ) $DJI ( ▼ 0.05% ) $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

 $POLYMARKET ( 0.0% )$GM ( ▲ 1.27% )  $OPENAI ( 0.0% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.16% )  $ANTHROPIC ( ▲ 1.66% )  

A surprising solution to the Hormuz crisis?

Just when you thought Middle Eastern oil politics couldn't get more complicated, the United Arab Emirates announced it's breaking up with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)—effective Friday.

The official line? "This decision reflects the UAE's long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile," the UAE said through its state news agency.

Here's where it gets interesting. With the Strait of Hormuz choked off by conflict and Brent crude hovering above $111 a barrel, the UAE holds a geographic, er…trump card. Unlike Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq—whose oil must navigate that narrow, Iran-controlled chokepoint—the UAE sits on the Arabian Sea side of the strait (see the image in the Tweet above). Its Fujairah export terminal bypasses Hormuz entirely, meaning UAE crude can flow freely to global markets while competitors watch their tankers queue up in dangerous waters.

Suddenly, going rogue from OPEC quotas makes strategic sense. If the UAE cranks up production to its 5-million-barrel capacity, it becomes the reliable supplier everyone desperately needs. The news will be warmly welcomed in the White House as a win for President Donald Trump, who was too busy meeting with King Charles of England yesterday to make a comment. But he has long railed against OPEC for distorting oil prices by artificially adjusting supply against market forces, accusing it of "ripping off the rest of the world" in a fiery 2018 speech to the U.N. General Assembly.

Meanwhile, UAE Energy Minister Suhail al-Mazrouei insists there's no Saudi beef: "We have the highest respect for the Saudis for leading OPEC," he told CNBC. But the move is going to undermine Saudi oil pricing interests as the major OPEC power. One would think twice about upsetting the Saudis, particularly if one were a dissident Saudi journalist visiting the Istanbul embassy, surely? But, no! Not in this case!

As analyst Jorge Leon put it: "A structurally weaker OPEC... will find it increasingly difficult to calibrate supply and stabilize prices."

Meanwhile gas prices in the U.S. hit their highest level since the war in Iran began yesterday. So, the timing could be helpful.

Quote of the Day

The insider who made $400,000 on Polymarket

We all love a good side hustle, but U.S. Army soldier Gannon Ken Van Dyke might have taken the concept of using your professional skills for extra cash a bit too literally. Stationed at Fort Bragg, Van Dyke allegedly decided to supplement his military income by placing bets on a massive, highly classified military operation he was helping to plan: The January raid and capture of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro.

Instead of just doing his job, Van Dyke dropped a casual $33,034 on Polymarket $POLYMARKET ( 0.0% ) prediction contracts with titles like “US Forces in Venezuela” and “Maduro out.” Shockingly, his "predictions" were spot on, netting him a tidy $409,881 profit!

Perhaps also surprisingly, the Department of Justice wasn't amused by his entrepreneurial spirit. Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche had to remind everyone that troops are "prohibited from using this highly sensitive information for personal financial gain." Jay Clayton, U.S. attorney of the Southern District of New York, chimed in, noting that “prediction markets are not a haven for using misappropriated confidential or classified information for personal gain.”

Although… Van Dyke is far from the only government insider placing prediction market trades over recent weeks. Just hours before the joint U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran in late February, for example, a cluster of six newly created wallets executed a series of uncannily precise trades. These wallets collectively earned approximately $1.2 million.

Still, Polymarket was quick to pat itself on the back for throwing Van Dyke under the bus, boasting on X: “Insider trading has no place on Polymarket. Today’s arrest is proof the system works.”

Van Dyke tried hiding his winnings in a foreign cryptocurrency vault, but now he's facing multiple charges carrying up to 20 years in prison each. The other insider traders, so far, seem to have gotten away with it.

GM’s profits boosted by $500m tariff refund

General Motors $GM ( ▲ 1.27% ) just reported a cool $2.6 billion profit for the first quarter, which is only a 6 percent drop from last year. But $500 million of that money is because the Supreme Court kindly struck down some of President Trump’s tariffs.

The surprise windfall conveniently distracted from G.M.’s $1 billion oopsie-daisy expense for scaling back electric vehicle production because people stopped buying them after the tax credits died. Instead of moving forward, G.M. is bravely pivoting backward, now, converting a Michigan plant back to good old gas-guzzlers.

Despite plunging vehicle deliveries, CEO Mary T. Barra kept a straight face, boasting that the company's "operating performance has remained strong.” As for the future? Barra noted, "The No. 1 thing we are watching is what happens with the Iranian conflict.” But don't panic, she added, "we believe it is prudent to wait and see how events unfold before we make any changes."

The firm’s stock was slightly up on the news, suggesting investors are impressed by the firm’s navigation of some choppy waters on the policy front.

Song of the Day: Madonna, ‘I Feel So Free’

Madonna has returned to the hypnotic vibes of her club scene roots with this teaser from her new album, and thank goodness for all of that!

OpenAI misses key revenue goals in float sprint

Burning through cash faster than a rocket on re-entry isn't the foolproof business model we thought it was. OpenAI $OPENAI ( 0.0% ) is reportedly sweating as it misses internal targets for both revenue and weekly users, thanks in part to Google’s $GOOGL ( ▼ 0.16% ) Gemini and Anthropic $ANTHROPIC ( ▲ 1.66% ) stealing market share.

Despite a record-breaking $122 billion funding round, OpenAI is on track to set that pile of money on fire in just three years, weighed down by CEO Sam Altman's massive $600 billion data-center shopping spree. While rumor has it that CFO Sarah Friar is trying to hit the brakes so they can actually pay their bills, the duo insists everything is peachy. In a totally-not-panicking joint statement, they told the Wall Street Journal: “We are totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can and working hard on it together every day,” calling rumors of a rift “ridiculous.”

Whenever you have to call rumors of a rift ridiculous, you know…there’s a rift.

Meanwhile, rival Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei vaguely hinted that some folks cranked “the risk dial too far” on spending. OpenAI's clap-back memo? “In hindsight, that caution looks less like discipline and more like underestimating how fast demand would arrive.” Let's just hope that demand actually does, you know…arrive…before their IPO, which Friar politely hinted they aren't even remotely ready for.

This professor built an AI trading bot in 6 days

Meet Darri Eythorsson. He studies rivers, snowmelt, and Arctic environments. He has absolutely zero trading experience. Yet, armed with just a laptop and a monthly subscription, he built a production-grade, autonomous AI trading platform in a mere six days and wrote about it for Bloomberg.

Using Anthropic's Claude Code, Darri simply described what he wanted in plain language, and the AI built a complex system that reads the news, manages risk, and trades unsupervised on prediction markets. Just five years ago, this would have required a team of eight people and attracted serious fintech funding. Today, it’s a quick project for a computational hydrologist.

But here is why Darri is terrified: The barrier to entry has completely collapsed, and everyone is using the exact same AI brains to trade the markets. Whether it's Claude or OpenAI's GPT, these DIY bots share the same training data and reasoning patterns.

Why is that risky for markets? Well…imagine a slightly ambiguous economic announcement. Instead of diverse human analysts debating the outcome, thousands of unregulated AI bots might reach the exact same conclusion simultaneously and frantically dump their assets. It's a hyper-speed, machine-driven herd mentality that could trigger a full-blown financial crisis in minutes. Darri knows exactly how small flows become floods (he studies rivers for a living, remember) and right now, he writes, “the algorithmic water is rising fast.”

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Should you check your 401(k) today?

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Not today, thank you.

Poll of the day: The inside man!

Poll of the day: Let them eat taxes!

We asked: Should California tax its billionaires 5%?

You answered:

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ Yes — 5% seems low, but it's a nice appetizer before the entrée. The eat-the-rich movement has to start somewhere. May I recommend a wine pairing? (203)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No — I'm not a billionaire yet, but I'm VERY confident about my lottery tickets. Can't be voting against my future interests here, people. (23)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Absolutely. If Jensen Huang is 'perfectly fine' with it, who am I to argue with a man worth $127 billion? When the guy in the leather jacket says it's chill, it's chill. (238)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ No — let's not give them an excuse to flee to Texas and ruin Austin even more. We've already exported enough tech bros. Think of the breakfast tacos. (80)
🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Sure, but only if we get live coverage of billionaires dramatically packing U-Hauls while crying about tyranny. I want to see Elon personally bubble-wrap a Cybertruck. (110)
654 Votes via @beehiiv polls

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