Lodro Rinzler won last week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ with this beauty, about how best to visualize a trillion dollars:

Congrats, Lodro, who writes:

“While Elon may have $1 trillion, that value pales in comparison to the recognition of my fellow Cheddar readers.”

👏🏻

Here’s your celebratory gif!

And the competition was fierce:

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Three million teachers, One trillion ends the night shifts, Three hundred grand each ~Elise (40)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ One trillion dollars, Wealth beyond measure can't fill, A gaping black hole ~Stephen R. Balzac (42)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Line up every Tesla, bumper to bumper to Mars, still short a few bucks ~Kristin Lanham (18)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Which is the farthest: Seattle to Butte Montana, Or $1 trillion? The money! ~Clair (4)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ One trillion dollars, 5,000 Olympic pools, Filled with jelly beans! ~Harriett Feldman (22)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A trillion good folks, side by side would circle Earth, some ten thousand times ~Margaret Lea (36)
🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ You would think zeroes, Mean nothing. And yet to Musk. Twelve is not enough ~Erika Ettin (83)
🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ A trillion seconds -- before Rome, before Vikings, still counting today ~Sue Boros (29)
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 First, end world hunger, Then solve for homelessness please, No? Just space trips? Damn ~Lodro Rinzler (125)
⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Count a stack of bills, Reaching past the stratosphere, Space bound we will go ~Bob Andersen (13)
412 Votes via Beehiiv polls.

This week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ is about how Apple plans to raise the price of an iPhone by $275 because of he 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 bounceback email. The mailbox is working, it’s just been inundated with haikus lately and the good people at Microsoft $MSFT ( ▲ 0.13% ) 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

• Mars spends millions to make elusive blue M&Ms

• Companies rein in AI spend as costs blow budgets

• Why airfares may not fall after the U.S.-Iran deal

• L.A. wants its Hollywood back

• How The Edge viewing platform got its edge

• Poll of the day: A controversial question…

What’s the stock market up to, eh?

$SPX ( ▲ 1.08% )  $DJI ( ▲ 0.14% )  $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

$MARS ( ▲ 4.6% )  $AMZN ( ▲ 2.9% )  $WMT ( ▼ 0.8% )  $CSCO ( ▲ 1.88% )  $UBER ( ▲ 1.03% )  $META ( ▲ 1.7% )  $WKATZZX ( ▼ 0.28% )  $ANTHZZX ( ▼ 0.09% )  $LUV ( ▲ 2.81% )  $UAL ( ▲ 2.15% )  $SAVEQ ( ▲ 0.43% )  

Mars spends millions to make elusive blue M&Ms

Mars $MARS ( ▲ 4.6% ) is stripping artificial dyes from M&Ms thanks to the "Make America Healthy Again" campaign. Red and yellow were easy, but nature apparently hates the color blue. As dye manufacturer Paul Manning explained to the Wall Street Journal, "Nature produces few truly blue plants and minerals, making blue the holy grail of natural food dyes."

Their expensive solution? Spirulina, an organism affectionately known as "pond scum." Unfortunately, this algae foams up, clogs spray nozzles, and leaves a sticky film inside factory pipes literally described as "akin to dental plaque."

Mars has an army of employees fighting the plaque monster. Claire Hewitt, the self-dubbed "chief color officer," isn't sugarcoating the candy crisis: "It’s the hardest thing I’ve had to do in my career,” she siad.

Despite spending millions, the pond scum is winning. Mars's upcoming dye-free mix of new M&M’s completely excludes blue. And the unassuming brown M&M is also getting axed! Why? Because it turns out that making brown requires a fair bit of blue.

Anton Vincent, head of Mars's North American snacks, captured the corporate terror: "It was a daunting situation... You’re messing with an 85-year-old icon."

Indeed.

Quote of the Day

Companies rein in AI spend as costs blow budgets

Remember when AI was going to do all our jobs for free? Turns out, our robot overlords are surprisingly expensive. Tech giants and early adopters like Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 2.9% ) , Walmart $WMT ( ▼ 0.8% ) , Cisco $CSCO ( ▲ 1.88% ) , Uber $UBER ( ▲ 1.03% ) , and Meta $META ( ▲ 1.7% ) are suddenly realizing that unlimited AI costs actual human money.

Meta began the year with a Claude leaderboard, forcing staff to compete for who could use more of the technology. Then their AI costs ballooned to $900 million a month and they got rid of it.

As Deloitte’s Costi Perricos told the Financial Times, "Consumers and businesses have been taught that AI is cheap or free and that is definitely not the case.” Software group Workato $WKATZZX ( ▼ 0.28% ) learned this the hard way when Anthropic $ANTHZZX ( ▼ 0.09% ) switched to token-based billing. CIO Carter Busse recalled the sheer corporate panic: "Our spend went up 7x the first day and I’m like, oh sh*t, we created a monster," he told the paper. His new inspirational leadership motto? "Instead of innovation, let’s talk about AI financial responsibility."

Better yet, hire people. They’re cheaper.

Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Executive Andrew Macdonald admitted this spending is "harder to justify" without proving it is "producing like 25 per cent more useful consumer features." At Walmart, Suresh Kumar saw their internal code-bot usage skyrocket, diplomatically calling it an "opportunity for us to take a step back." Cisco's Jeetu Patel simply lamented, "Our engineers want more tokens . . . We have to figure out a way to fund it." Amazon even explicitly warned engineers to stop using "AI just for the sake of using AI."

Why airfares may not fall after the U.S.-Iran deal

The U.S. and Iran are finally signing a deal that could reopen the Strait of Hormuz and let cheap jet fuel flow freely again. You might think this means your next vacation won't require taking out a second mortgage. Think again! Airlines have discovered their favorite new superpower: You will pay whatever they charge.

Southwest Airlines $LUV ( ▲ 2.81% ) CEO Bob Jordan practically gloated about hiking prices seven times since February, telling the New York Time: "That’s the most that I could remember in my 38 years in the industry, but with fares up that much, there’s been no drop-off in demand at all."

Furthermore, the industry claims they simply can't lower prices right away. Aviation analyst John Grant insists, “The costs of operations are baked in now for the next three or four months... Oil coming down by 10 percent doesn’t mean prices come down by 10 percent”. United Airlines $UAL ( ▲ 2.15% ) CEO Scott Kirby menacingly added, “The longer this lasts, the higher the probability goes that the pricing increases hold.”

Also, Spirit $SAVEQ ( ▲ 0.43% ) kicked the bucket.

Basically, unless one airline suddenly gets generous—which analyst Saj Ahmad notes is “All it takes” for others to “follow suit”—you're stuck paying a premium. Have a great flight!

Song of the Day: Stormzy, ‘Blessings’

Here’s an official World Cup tune from South London’s finest.

L.A. wants its Hollywood back

Los Angeles is finally realizing that taking its star attraction for granted was a terrible idea. For years, L.A. treated the film industry like a captive audience while making it increasingly impossible to actually work there. Consequently, productions fled to cheaper, friendlier cities. As Kate Holguin from Stay in LA explained to the New York Post: "A lot of productions leave because they go anywhere else and everyone welcomes them, rolls out the red carpet and says ‘yes, let us help you’."

Now, the so-called entertainment capital is in full panic mode. Showrunner Noelle Stehman highlighted the grim reality of the situation: "It’s the make-or-break moment to become Detroit or not," she said. Presumably she means becoming Detroit would be a bad thing but the pizza is pretty good and the housing is cheap, so hey…grass is always greener?

She also noted the irony of the city's current status: "We are supposed to be the film capital of the world... But it is both the most expensive and the most difficult." Executive producer Henrik Bastin described the local filming experience as "death by a thousand needles.”

Things are so desperate that L.A. City Councilmember Adrin Nazarian admitted his constituents are "literally are auctioning off their Emmy Award in order to be able to survive." Which sounds ridiculous. But hey…he said it.

L.A. is finally trying to cut its legendary red tape, but it might take more than a few waived fees to win back its glamorous ex, the film industry.

How The Edge viewing platform got its edge

Remember when visiting an observation deck just meant paying to look through coin-operated binoculars? Well, the skyline is now a full-blown, $49-a-ticket theatrical event.

New York’s observation decks generated a massive $85 billion in 2025, but apparently, the view is no longer enough. Hudson Yards just dumped millions into Edge NYC to build seven interactive indoor environments.

They hired design studios to create a love letter to New York: Guests now wander through "Pulse," an exhbition featuring 450 interactive light orbs, and "Infinite City," a mirrored labyrinth designed to "bring the city actually into the space rather than just observing it."

General Manager Joseph Whitman notes it takes over 500 people to keep this high-tech circus running. And don't you dare call it a giant selfie trap! The team insists "It's not about creating just Instagram fodder," but rather creating an experience with "real authenticity". Sure. Pay $49 to navigate 220 rotating robotic mirrors before you are finally allowed to look outside. That’s actually pretty authentically New York in my experience, so good on them.

Free yourself from advertising forever!

Should you check your 401(k) today?

👎️ 

Still not quite. But soon.

Poll of the day: A controversial question…

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