This week’s world-famous news haiku competition™ is about how financial disclosures for President Donald Trump showed hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of transactions involving securities in major American companies including Nvidia $NVDA ( ▲ 1.3% ) , Palantir $PLTR ( ▲ 1.4% ) , Paramount $PSKY ( ▲ 2.32% ) , and Boeing $BA ( ▲ 3.34% ) in the first three months of 2026. Send me your entry — to haiku at cheddar dot com — by noon ET Thursday, for consideration by your Cheddar peers.

To the news-mobile, Batman!

Matt Davis — Need2Know Chedditor

News You Need2Know

What’s the stock market up to, eh?

$SPX ( ▲ 1.08% )   $DJI ( ▲ 1.31% )   $NDX ( ▲ 1.59% )  

Companies mentioned in today’s newsletter

$AMZN ( ▲ 2.19% )   $TSLA ( ▲ 3.25% )   $OPENAI ( ▲ 12.46% )   $ANTHROPIC ( ▲ 8.13% )  

Jeff Bezos says low earners shouldn't be taxed

In a stunning display of solidarity with the working class, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has descended from his billionaire’s yacht to declare that the bottom half of earners in the U.S. should pay zero federal income taxes.

Speaking on CNBC's "Squawk Box," our benevolent tech overlord argued that struggling families shouldn't have to cough up their hard-earned money to the government. Of course, while he was eager to "advocate" for this noble cause, he conveniently forgot to specify exactly how lawmakers might actually achieve this massive reduction in the tax burden. Details, details!

One might wonder if this sudden populist gambit is a desperate attempt to rejuvenate his image. After all, the billionaire is still nursing a PR hangover from a disastrous New York Times profile of his wife, Lauren Sánchez Bezos. The piece painted a picture of a modern-day Marie Antoinette, explicitly noting that "Mrs. Sánchez Bezos seems to have influenced the uber-rich to stop apologizing, and start enjoying themselves.”

And oh, how they’ve been enjoying themselves! Bezos has been living it up on his megayacht and recently threw a lavish, three-day bacchanal of a wedding in Venice, complete with a pre-wedding foam party and private water taxis for his 200 A-list guests. To make matters worse, while the couple was dripping in vintage Dior and diamonds at Paris Couture Week, Amazon $AMZN ( ▲ 2.19% ) announced it was laying off a staggering 16,000 employees.

But please, don't accuse Jeff of hoarding all his gold. The Bezos family recently made headlines for donating $100 million to a charity funding preschool education in New York City. It certainly sounds like a king's ransom, until you realize that Forbes currently estimates Bezos' net worth at a mind-boggling $269 billion. For those doing the math at home, that generous $100 million gift represents a whopping 0.037% of his total wealth. For an American with a median net worth, it’s like donating $70, or (checks notes) about half the cost of your annual Amazon Prime membership.

Truly, a hero for our times.

Quote of the Day

Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder

It seems the AI industry only has about five key employees who just rotate between companies. The latest to spin the revolving door is Andrej Karpathy, an AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI, got poached by Tesla $TSLA ( ▲ 3.25% ) , went back to OpenAI $OPENAI ( ▲ 12.46% ) , took a brief detour to start an education startup, and has now decided to bless Anthropic $ANTHROPIC ( ▲ 8.13% ) with his presence.

He’ll be joining Anthropic’s pretraining team to help their Claude models acquire their "core knowledge and capabilities." Taking to X, Karpathy shared his groundbreaking revelation: “I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative," he said.

Elon Musk, who poached Karpathy to work on Tesla's still-non-existent fully autonomous cars, previously described him in an email as “arguably the #2 guy in the world in computer vision.” In that same email exhibit from his recent lawsuit, Musk gloated, “The OpenAI guys are gonna want to kill me, but it had to be done.…"

Now it's Anthropic's turn to borrow him! How long before he’s playing for Real Madrid?

What could possibly go wrong with OpenAI’s float?

The plucky little former nonprofit that could is going to bless the summer markets with an Initial Public Offering. What better time to file a confidential prospectus than right after missing multiple internal revenue and user targets, thanks to stiff competition from rivals like Google $GOOGL ( ▲ 0.32% )  and Anthropic $ANTHROPIC ( ▲ 8.13% ) ?

CEO Sam Altman is apparently eager to ring the bell by September. Sure, the company's own CFO, Sarah Friar, has cautioned company leaders that they "may need more time," but who has time for financial prudence when you have a mind-boggling $852 billion private valuation to justify?

To get this monumental task done, OpenAI has enlisted the humble services of bankers at Goldman Sachs $GS ( ▲ 5.75% ) and Morgan Stanley $MS ( ▲ 4.32% ) . The path to an IPO was conveniently cleared after OpenAI successfully swatted away a landmark lawsuit from jilted co-founder Elon Musk, who alleged in court that Altman and crew had "stolen a charity" when they pivoted to their highly lucrative for-profit model.

To sum up: Despite bleeding cash to fund giant data-center commitments, losing ground to faster-growing competit