Good morning.

It’s Monday, April 6. Weekend energy is fading, coffee is working overtime, and everyone is pretending this week will be different.

On this day in 1896, the first modern Olympics opened in Athens. The original reboot. Nations competing, records breaking, everyone briefly united by sports… and now we mostly compete in step counts and unread emails. Progress.

Anyway, it’s Monday. Open the laptop. Make a plan. Immediately get distracted. Thanks for being here. Let’s ease into it.

Today’s stories:

Markets were closed Friday for Good Friday — a quiet end to a week that wasn’t exactly calm.

Despite a volatile Thursday (including a record oil spike), stocks managed to snap a five-week losing streak. The Dow Jones slipped 0.1%, while the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite edged up 0.1% and 0.2%. Small moves, but enough to end the week in the green.

The path there was… less stable. At one point, the Nasdaq was down over 2%, with the Dow Jones and S&P 500 both sliding more than 1%.

Translation: messy week, decent ending.

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Warren Buffett is bringing back his iconic charity lunch. This time, he’s not coming alone. Stephen Curry and Ayesha Curry are joining, adding a little celebrity energy to your $10M lunch date. The deal is simple: bid on eBay, win, and you plus seven friends get lunch in Omaha with Buffett and the Currys. Proceeds go to charity — Glide Foundation and the Curry family’s nonprofit. Historically, this lunch gets expensive. Like… $19 million expensive. Over the years, it’s raised more than $50 million, mostly from people who really wanted to ask Buffett questions in person instead of just reading quotes online. Buffett stepped down as CEO this year, but clearly he’s not done showing up, eating lunch, and raising millions while doing it.

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Americans think they need $1.46M to retire. The new “magic number” for retirement is now $1.46 million. Last year it was $1.26M. People think they need more money because everything is more expensive, and saving feels like a side quest no one has time for. Add in job anxiety from AI, and suddenly everyone wants a bigger cushion. Here’s the problem: reality is not keeping up with the fantasy. Only about 5% of Americans have $1M saved. Around 9% have $500K. And people close to retirement? Median savings is about $185K. Yes, that gap is doing a lot. To make it better, people are actually saving less. Contributions to 401(k)s dropped slightly last year. Not dramatically, just enough to keep things stressful.

Mortgage rates keep climbing. Mortgage rates are up again. Fifth week in a row. The 30-year rate is now at 6.46%, the highest since early September. The 15-year isn’t helping either, ticking up to 5.77%. Not dramatic, just enough to make buying a home feel slightly more unrealistic. Markets are basically reacting to every headline. One minute things look calm, the next minute not so much. Rates follow the chaos. Meanwhile, mortgage applications dropped again — down more than 10% this week. Refinancing is especially struggling, down over 40% compared to last month. Turns out people don’t love higher rates. Shocking. There is one small positive: more homes are being listed, which could give buyers slightly more options. But timing matters, and spring usually sets the tone.

Blue Owl limits withdrawals. Things are getting a little tense in private credit. Investors tried to pull $5.4 billion out of Blue Owl Capital’s funds. Blue Owl responded with: not so fast. They’ve capped withdrawals at 5% per quarter, which is a polite way of saying you’ll get your money back… eventually. The demand to exit was not small. One fund saw nearly 22% of investors asking for their cash, another over 40%. That’s not a “just checking” situation, that’s a group decision. This all comes as confidence in private credit — basically lending outside traditional banks — is starting to wobble. There’s a lot of exposure to things like AI spending, which sounded great until people remembered risk exists. Blue Owl says everything is fine, the loans are solid, and this is just “negative sentiment.” Which is exactly what you say when everyone is trying to leave at the same time.

NASA finally sent humans toward the moon again — big moment, dramatic launch, everyone clapping. Right now, the four astronauts are just orbiting Earth, taking it slow. The crew — Reid Wiseman, Christina Koch, Victor Glover, and Jeremy Hansen — are preparing for the next step, which is actually heading toward the moon. At the moment, they’re not quite on their way yet. Think of it as sitting on the runway… but in space. There are some real milestones here, though. Glover will become the first Black astronaut to travel near the moon, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first Canadian. Took a while, but we got there. This mission is basically a test run. NASA wants to make sure the Orion capsule can handle humans before attempting a proper moon landing in 2028. Reasonable goal. Nobody wants a “let’s see what happens” situation in space. Next up is a maneuver to push the spacecraft into a path toward the moon — a four-day trip that will finally make this feel like an actual moon mission. If everything works, they’ll fly around the far side of the moon, travel farther from Earth than any humans ever have, and see views even the Apollo astronauts missed. 

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Your portfolio now runs on autopilot. Investing just got… lazier. Or smarter. Depends how you spin it. Public, calling itself the world’s first Agentic Brokerage, rolled out “Agents” — basically AI that watches the market and trades for you while you go live your life (or scroll, same thing). Before this, investing meant actually doing things: clicking buttons, checking charts, pretending you knew what “timing the market” meant. Now you just type what you want, and the AI handles it. Very “I have an idea, you figure it out.” These Agents monitor the market in real time and execute trades based on your instructions. You can set rules, tweak conditions, and build strategies — all by chatting with it like it’s your slightly overachieving assistant.

Lawyers finally stop billing by the hour (thanks to AI). Lawyers might finally lose their favorite hobby: charging you for every minute. Meet Crosby, a new kind of law firm where AI does most of the work and humans double-check it. One lawyer now spends his day managing AI agents that review contracts, suggest edits, and flag issues. He steps in to fix what they miss and make sure nothing is… creatively invented. At his old firm, it was all about billing hours and drowning in documents. Even tools like ChatGPT weren’t that helpful — too slow, too much effort, and no time to play with prompts when every minute costs money. Now there are no billable hours. Crosby charges per contract instead. Their AI reviews agreements in hours instead of days, with a human doing a final pass. The goal is simple: close deals faster, not stretch them out. A very new concept for law firms.

Beehiiv wants to be your entire personality now. Beehiiv just added podcast hosting. Because newsletters alone were apparently too simple. Now creators can record, publish, share, and monetize podcasts directly on the platform. Everything in one place, no more juggling five tools and pretending it’s “part of the process.” The strategy is obvious: newsletters and podcasts are basically the same format — long content, loyal audience, sponsorship money. So Beehiiv just merged them. This is part of a bigger push to become the all-in-one platform, going straight at Substack and Patreon. The main flex: Beehiiv takes 0% of your revenue. Substack takes 10%. Patreon takes 8%. Creators can bundle podcasts into paid newsletters, offer exclusive episodes, or keep things free. So yes, your newsletter now talks too.

Microsoft prepares for life beyond OpenAI. Microsoft is building its own AI models. Because relying on one partner for the future of technology feels a little… fragile. After years of riding OpenAI’s success, Microsoft is now working on its own “frontier” models — meaning top-tier AI that can do everything: text, audio, images, your job, your personality, etc. They even reshuffled leadership to focus on it, which is corporate language for “we should’ve done this earlier.” To be clear, they’re still deeply tied to OpenAI. They own a big stake, have access to its tech until 2032, and just helped fund it at an $852 billion valuation. So yes, they’re still best friends. But also building their own version on the side.

The James Beard finalists in NYC are out, and yes, it’s the same story: amazing restaurants, impossible reservations. Big moment for Brooklyn — The Four Horsemen made it to Outstanding Restaurant after years of being one of the city’s hardest tables to get. Natural wine, cool crowd, and just enough attitude. Chambers in Tribeca also finally got recognized for Outstanding Wine. Took long enough. If you know, you know — mostly because you’ve tried and failed to get a seat. In the Best Chef category, Mexican spots are having a moment. Corima and Carnitas Ramirez both made the list, proving once again that simple food done perfectly beats anything overly complicated. Also, Best New Restaurant finalist: Lei in Chinatown. Meanwhile, some big names didn’t make the cut, because there’s always drama. Not everyone gets a trophy, especially in NYC.

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Amazon finally lands a real box office hit. Amazon MGM has a hit. A real one. Not a remake, not part 7 of something — an actual original movie. Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling as a lonely astronaut with an alien bestie, just crossed $300 million globally in 10 days. It already beat Creed III to become Amazon MGM’s biggest movie ever. The wild part: people are still showing up. The movie only dropped 32% in its second weekend, which basically means audiences didn’t immediately lose interest. Rare behavior. It’s now one of the biggest movies of 2026 so far, especially impressive for something that isn’t tied to an existing franchise. Hollywood executives are probably confused. The film is based on a book, directed by the Lego Movie guys, and somehow turned into a massive crowd-pleaser. Critics like it, audiences like it, and the human + alien friendship thing is apparently working.

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TikTok of the day: watch here

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