This week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ is about how Apple plans to raise the price of an iPhone by $275 because of the AI-driven crunch in memory chip prices. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers. (Don’t worry if you get a bounce-back email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately and the good people at Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 1.8% ) seem not to have figured out how to fix Outlook yet).

Now for crying out loud, can we hear about the news?

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

News you Need2Know

• Chipmakers take the markets for a dive

• Top-paid CEOs smash the $200 million payday

• Feds probe fatal Tesla crash into Texas home

• SpaceX sheds $400bn in market value

• The bionic hand teaching robots to think human

• Poll of the day: $$$$$$$$$$$?

What’s the stock market up to, eh?

$SPX ( ▼ 1.44% )  $DJI ( ▼ 0.09% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

$NVDA ( ▼ 4.13% )   $MU ( ▼ 13.18% )  $QCOM ( ▼ 8.01% )  $SNDK ( ▼ 13.64% ) $WDC ( ▼ 8.45% )   $ASML ( ▼ 7.82% )  $SSNLF ( ▲ 116.8% )  $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.02% ) $AMZN ( ▲ 0.57% )  $META ( ▼ 0.29% )  $WELL ( ▲ 2.94% )  $SPRX ( ▼ 6.3% )  $SPCX ( ▲ 0.98% )  

Chipmakers take the markets for a dive

The AI hype train has hit a speed bump to start the week, and Wall Street is throwing a yard sale on chipmakers! If you own tech stocks, you might want to look away, here.

Nvidia $NVDA ( ▼ 4.13% ) , Micron $MU ( ▼ 13.18% ) , and Qualcomm $QCOM ( ▼ 8.01% ) took a nasty tumble yesterday, dragging down their data-storage buddies Sandisk $SNDK ( ▼ 13.64% ) and Western Digital $WDC ( ▼ 8.45% ) . Overseas, ASML $ASML ( ▼ 7.82% ) , SK Hynix, and Samsung Electronics also succumbed to gravity.

Even the hyperscalers spending big money on their AI infrastructure aren’t safe: Eric Johnston of Cantor Fitzgerald summed up the market's new motto in conversation with the Financial Times: “The trade now is to sell the spenders.”

Why the sudden downturn? Laura Cooper at Nuveen noted that “investors are being increasingly focused on the returns of the eyewatering AI spend.” Arun Sai called the situation “a double whammy of building AI skepticism and strong economic growth in the U.S.”

As investor Ben Inker observed about these tech giants, “They have been due for a pullback.” Or, as Mike Bell warned, “When stocks have gone up so far, so fast, and there’s a lot of leverage and lots of retail money involved, it doesn’t take much to trigger sharp falls.”

I’m just glad I put half my Roth into a chip-heavy exchange traded fund a few weeks ago $SPRX ( ▼ 6.3% ) . Yikes! Still, it’ll all turn around again next week, though, right?

Quote of the day

Top-paid CEOs smash the $200 million payday

The extremely well paid CEO is back with a bang, the Wall Street Journal reports. Elon Musk just laughed in the face of standard wealth with a staggering $158 billion pay package from Tesla. Just to put that into perspective, that is roughly 16 times the combined pay of 391 other top CEOs on Wall Street, and the deal might ultimately be worth a mind-boggling $1 trillion.

Not to be completely outdone, Welltower’s $WELL ( ▲ 2.94% ) Shankh Mitra raked in a cool $821 million, with 99% of it coming from stock grants. Welltower felt so generous they actually handed out nine-figure packages to three other executives just to align their incentives. Meanwhile, Broadcom's $BRCM ( 0.0% ) Hock Tan casually breezed past our titular threshold with a $205 million payday.

By comparison, the median pay for CEOs of S&P 500 companies is a meager $17.9 million. Pocket change!

Feds probe fatal Tesla crash into Texas home

U.S. auto-safety regulators have launched a special crash investigation into a tragic incident where a Tesla $TSLA ( ▼ 5.79% ) Model 3 slammed into a house near Houston, killing a woman.

The fatal wreck occurred on a Friday evening in Katy, Texas, when the blue vehicle sped across a yard and driveway, crashing through the front wall of a home. According to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, the Tesla “entered through the brick residence at a high rate of speed,” fatally striking Martha Avila, the lady inside.

Following the crash, the driver told authorities he was operating the car using an automated driving assistance system. However, Ashok Elluswamy, Tesla’s vice president of AI and software, said on the social media platform X that the driver had manually depressed the accelerator pedal and kept it pressed even after the collision.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is examining the crash as part of its broader scrutiny of Tesla's advanced driver-assistance technologies, including its Full Self-Driving system, the Wall Street Journal reports. Meanwhile, local authorities are continuing their probe. “This remains an active and open investigation,” a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s office told the paper.

Song of the day: Olivia Rodrigo, ‘Stupid Song’

Olivia Rodrigo's "Stupid Song" has received widespread critical acclaim, with reviewers calling it a standout, emotional highlight of her third studio album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. I mean, we’ve all been there. The track debuted at No. 1 on both Billboard Global charts.

SpaceX sheds $400bn in market value

Elon Musk’s rocket and AI behemoth $SPCX ( ▲ 0.98% ) has experienced a breathtaking return to Earth. Following its record-breaking $86 billion initial public offering on June 11, SpaceX shares took a massive hit, plummeting 16.4% to close at $154.60 on Monday. The single-day plunge wiped an astonishing $400 billion off the company's market capitalization, dragging its valuation down to $2.03 trillion from an intraday peak of nearly $3 trillion just days earlier. The drop officially marks the second-largest one-day market cap wipeout for any U.S. company on record.

The sharp reversal is largely being fueled by rising U.S. government bond yields, with two-year Treasuries climbing to 4.23% — their highest level in over a year. These rising rates are particularly brutal for richly valued tech firms like SpaceX, which currently trades at over 100 times last year's revenue. Furthermore, much of the company's sky-high valuation hinges on its AI division — recently formed by merging xAI and X into the rocket company —which actually posted a $6.4 billion loss in 2025.

The post-IPO enthusiasm seems to have rapidly evaporated. As Mike O’Rourke at Jones Trading bluntly summarized the shifting momentum to the FT: “Everyone who wanted to buy [SpaceX] bought in the first few days, and it looks like basically they’re done.”

The bionic hand teaching robots to think human

At PSYONIC, the future of AI is quite literally in the robotic hands of human amputees. Dr. Aadeel Akhtar, the company's founder and CEO, has developed the Ability Hand—a revolutionary bionic limb that restores a sense of touch while simultaneously generating data to train the next generation of robots.

“We are developing and solving dexterity for humans and robots,” explains Dr. Akhtar. The FDA-approved Ability Hand is "the first prosthetic hand to give users touch feedback," allowing one veteran to "actually feel his daughter's hand,” he said.

But the innovation doesn't stop at human prosthetics. “What's unique about us is that we can actually train robots to do all sorts of different tasks based on how our human users... do the same task with the same hand,” Dr. Akhtar told us. Because humans naturally figure out complex movements — from folding laundry to industrial manufacturing — they seamlessly act as teachers. “They're training the robots by taking the data that's generated from their hand and then using that to build AI models,” he says.

Ultimately, this creates a powerful, world-changing ecosystem. “What we built for humans benefits robots,” Dr. Akhtar states, adding that commercial robotics "can subsidize the cost for humans so that more people can afford bionic limbs.” It’s a remarkable step toward the “seamless integration between humans and robots."

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Should you check your 401(k) today?

👎️ 

Still a no, I’m afraid, and a harder no, in fact, than it has been lately.

Poll of the day: $$$$$$$$$$$?

Poll of the day: Cottage industry, indeed!

We asked: Where do you stand on cottage cheese?

You answered:

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I stand exactly where TikTok tells me to stand: blending this formerly "soulless diet food" into my ice cream and pasta in the sacred name of "protein-maxxing." (13)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I would gladly tell you where I stand, but I would have to actually find some first. (21)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I stand with the deeply paranoid internet commenters who assume private equity is to blame for the empty shelves. (17)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ I stand in sarcastic solidarity with the utterly blindsided dairy industry. Imagine happily watching your product "dying off," only to suddenly have to pour $275 million into facility upgrades because an influencer made sales explode. (90)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 I stand as a historical purist longing for the 1970s, back when the average American quietly ate five pounds of it a year and nobody pretended it was a trendy superfood. (349)
490 Votes via @beehiiv polls

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