Good morning. The sun’s out, the birds are hyped, and New York finally smells more like flowers than hot dog water. Honestly, maybe April is the best month. No offense to October, but its pumpkin obsession is exhausting. On this day in 1981, IBM dropped the personal computer and casually rewired the entire planet. A humble beginning to our collective spiral into screen addiction. Anyway, stretch your legs, tilt your face toward that glorious April sun, and enjoy this week’s stories. Wishing you a breezy weekend and a scroll-worthy read.

Today’s stories:

• Buffett’s iPhone obsession turned into billions

• Investors flee dollar, cuddle gold and crypto

• Saying “please” to ChatGPT costs millions

• Airbnb finally shows real prices upfront

• Atomic clocks launch to test time itself

• Yale sells private equity, says it's fine

• FDA begs food makers to ditch dyes

• New AI’s smarter, also full of fiction

  and more…

Stock futures wobbled Wednesday night, cooling off after two straight days of gains. The Dow dipped 144 points (about 0.4%), while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq followed suit, down 0.2% and 0.3% respectively — a mild post-party hangover.

In after-hours drama, IBM dropped over 6%. Yes, it beat earnings expectations — but investors were hoping for more than just “steady as she goes.” Meanwhile, Southwest Airlines fell more than 3% after announcing it’s trimming its flight schedule later this year and grounding any hopes for EBIT guidance through 2026. Translation: the market’s having second thoughts about celebrating too early.

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Buffett Bet Big on Apple. It Paid.

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway has 22% of its $265 billion stock portfolio parked in one place: Apple. That’s right — nearly a quarter of Buffett’s Wall Street empire is riding on iPhones, AirPods, and whatever else comes out of Cupertino. He started buying back in 2016, when Apple was trading at a humble 10x earnings. Since then the stock's up 649%, and Berkshire’s been laughing all the way to the cash pile. Even after selling chunks, Apple’s still Berkshire’s biggest bet — because Buffett loves a strong brand, pricing power, and companies that print cash like it's confetti. But before you sprint to your brokerage account, take a breath. Apple’s now trading at over 31x earnings — triple what Buffett paid. Great business? Yes. Bargain? Not so much.

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Gold hits $3.5K, Bitcoin breaks $90K. Investors are sprinting from the US dollar like it’s radioactive. Gold hit a record $3,500 before cooling off, while Bitcoin soared past $90K because apparently digital money and shiny metal are what we cling to in chaos. Blame it on Trump’s tariff tantrums — again. Market jitters have made both old-school gold bars and blockchain bros look like safe bets. JPMorgan’s already predicting $4K gold by 2026. Bitcoin, meanwhile, is clawing its way back from earlier losses and dragging spot ETFs up with it. Wall Street had a midday glow-up, but the flight to “safe” assets is still very much on.

Yale dips into the private equity cookie jar. Yale’s cracking open its private equity piggy bank and might sell off a chunk — with Evercore holding its hand through the process. No numbers, no drama (publicly), but it comes right as Harvard and Princeton start poking Wall Street for cash, all while Trump waves around threats to slash federal funding for elite schools. Yale says this move has been in the works for a while and insists it’s still very into private equity. They're not breaking up — just, you know, rebalancing. Meanwhile, their endowment is sitting pretty at $41.4 billion, up from $40.7B last year, growing at a decent 5.7% rate. Still, even the Ivies are starting to look over their shoulders.

AI Is Free, Your Manners Are Not

Turns out good manners aren’t free — at least not when you’re chatting with AI. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman casually admitted that people saying “please” and “thank you” to ChatGPT has racked up tens of millions in electricity costs. Politeness: expensive and, apparently, power-hungry. Microsoft folks claim etiquette makes AI more helpful and “collaborative,” like it’s your coworker Becky from HR. Meanwhile, a survey found people are polite to bots mostly out of habit… or fear. Yes, fear — because nothing says “healthy tech relationship” like being scared your toaster will remember.

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Smarter AI, dumber lies. OpenAI’s newest models — o3 and the budget-friendly o4-mini — are more powerful, but also way more delusional. According to OpenAI’s own data, o4-mini spits out made-up info nearly half the time. That’s three times worse than the older o1 model. Even o3, the star student, hallucinates in 1 out of 3 responses. All because the smarter the model, the more it talks — and the more it talks, the more nonsense slips in. Classic overachiever behavior. OpenAI admits it doesn’t fully understand why this is happening. They’ve tried a few tricks, but fact-checking with AI is still a mess since machines famously lack things like “judgment” and “common sense.” For now, just assume every confident answer might be a beautiful, well-written lie.

The most accurate clock you'll never use. SpaceX just launched two atomic clocks so accurate they’d lose a second every 300 million years — which is still faster than your group chat deciding on dinner. These laser-powered time lords are headed to the ISS to test Einstein’s general relativity and possibly hunt for dark matter. The European Space Agency says this “internet of clocks” could redefine how we measure time. They're syncing global clocks via lasers and satellites, turning the ISS into a glorified time server. Bonus: it all burns up in Earth’s atmosphere by the 2030s when the ISS retires, so enjoy it while it lasts.

FDA to Food Industry: “Stop poisoning kids… Please”

The FDA just asked food companies to quit using synthetic dyes. Instead of banning them outright (as promised in RFK Jr.'s health crusade), the agency is hoping the industry will just… voluntarily behave. Adorable. Commissioner Marty Makary says they’ve had “wonderful meetings” with food execs who are totally excited to ditch the fake colors. No bans, no rules, just vibes and a "national standard" that’s basically a polite suggestion. 

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Airbnb discovers basic honesty. After years of playing hide-and-seek with cleaning fees, Airbnb will finally show users the actual price of a stay upfront. Shocking. No more clicking through five screens just to find out your $89-a-night shack is really $312 with fees. Now, listings will display “Prices include all fees” — excluding taxes, of course, because dreams are free but the government isn’t. It only took global outrage and a decade of complaints, but hey, progress.

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TikTok of the day: watch here