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

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.