Tim Cook built Apple's leadership into a monument of stability. In 2025, that monument cracked. Meta poached AI and design chiefs with $25M packages. The chip architect may follow. What broke inside the world's most valuable company?
OpenRouter's 100 trillion token study was supposed to prove AI is transforming everything. The data shows something else: half of open-source usage is roleplay, enterprise adoption is thin, and one account caused a 20-point spike in the metrics.
The New York Times sued Perplexity for copyright infringement—months after signing an AI licensing deal with Amazon. Perplexity built revenue-sharing programs for publishers. The Times declined to join any of them. Now lawyers are involved.
Wall Street's love affair with tech stocks turned sour this week. The market darlings known as the Magnificent Seven tumbled hard, with Tesla leading the descent at a 10% drop.
Nvidia, the AI chip champion, fell 7%, while Apple shed over $533 billion in market value - roughly equivalent to erasing a company the size of Tesla. The carnage spread beyond the tech titans.
Semiconductor stocks crumbled as investors digested Trump's harsh tariffs on chip-making hubs. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., the world's largest chip maker, plunged 10%. Even crypto felt the pain, with Bitcoin dropping below $78,000 - a stark reversal for the "first Bitcoin president's" signature achievement.
Trump remained unmoved by the market chaos. "Sometimes you have to take medicine to fix something," he told reporters, displaying the bedside manner of a medieval barber. Meanwhile, Wall Street veterans broke their silence. Bill Ackman warned of "economic nuclear winter," while JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon cautioned against America going it alone.
Corporate America scrambled to respond. Car companies halted shipments, trade groups warned of price hikes, and tech firms watched their AI dreams get more expensive by the day. The semiconductor industry, caught between U.S. demands and Asian manufacturing realities, faces particularly thorny decisions.
Global markets showed no signs of recovery Monday. European chip makers joined the slide, with ASML and STMicroelectronics dropping over 3%. In Asia, markets bled red as investors priced in a new era of trade barriers.
Trump's team keeps listening to concerns from financial executives, but the channels aren't as open as during his first term. Some analysts still hope for deals to reduce tariffs, while others argue this market correction was overdue.
Why this matters:
Marcus Schuler
Marcus Schuler
The NYT calls David Sacks's 708 tech investments a scandal. But when America needs an AI czar, should it hire someone who's never built anything? The real conflict might be demanding expertise without exposure.
David Sacks holds 449 AI investments while crafting Trump's AI policy. The Times investigation reveals how ethics rules made this legal. The scandal isn't the conflict—it's the system that permits it.
Trump's Genesis Mission invokes Manhattan Project urgency to accelerate AI-driven science. But the executive order commits zero new dollars, claims credit for existing partnerships, and arrives while university research funding gets slashed.
Trump's draft executive order seeks to override state AI laws through litigation and funding threats, reviving a proposal Congress rejected 99-1 months ago. Republican governors and conservative senators oppose the move as tech investors push harder.
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