June 3, 2026

The Appetizer

“It is never, ever, too late to finish what you have started.”

• Billie Jean King, after graduating from California State University, Los Angeles, at age 82, 65 years after first enrolling.

Now, on to the numbers. Drum roll, please …

• $1.4 billion: The combined earnings of the world’s 10 highest-paid athletes over the past 12 months.
• 17: The age of French tennis player Moise Kouame, making him the youngest man to win a French Open match since 1991.
• 7: The age of Joey Danger Evermore, making him the youngest person ever to climb California’s El Capitan rock formation. I’m 25 – 17 (Kouame) and 7 doing all that … I really gotta get on it.
• 100 times: How much the movie Obsession has earned relative to its $750,000 budget after just two weekends in theaters worldwide. Low-budget thriller, high-budget victory lap.
• -14%: The forecasted decline in the number of 18-year-olds in the U.S. over the next decade, following a peak in 2026.

Dig In
Memory Lane

For a while, the artificial intelligence trade seemed to belong to the “Magnificent Seven” – Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla. But lately, the rally has started moving down the semiconductor food chain. Investors are realizing the AI buildout does not stop at the household names. It also needs memory chips, custom silicon, and networking equipment to keep everything running.

Memory chips were never supposed to be the exciting part. They store data quietly and mostly out of sight. But now, names like Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix are moving from the background of the AI trade to center stage because data centers need more than powerful processors. They need enough memory to keep those processors fed. No memory, no performance.

That has made high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, one of the biggest bottlenecks in AI infrastructure, with supply reportedly spoken for well into next year. As cloud companies race to lock in capacity, prices have surged – and Wall Street has noticed. Higher chip prices can mean stronger revenue, better margins, and bigger earnings estimates.

Of course, memory has always been boom-and-bust, so “this time is different” still deserves oven mitts. But for now, these quiet chips are loudly driving the market.

Weekly Specials

Back home, getting to school meant catching the bus, or if I was lucky, getting a ride from my mom with a quick coffee stop. But in Carleton, Michigan, students roll up in tractors, ATVs, and golf carts for the legendary “Tractor Day” The tradition dates back to the 1980s and honors the town’s farming roots with loud engines, music, food, and the most chaotic senior parking lot imaginable.

Recruiters don’t just want resumes anymore – they want AI magic tricks. From marketing to venture capital, candidates are now expected to use tools like Claude Code live in interviews. Building dashboards, cleaning data, and automating tasks on the spot is the new workplace flex. Forget “Where do you see yourself in five years?” Just vibe code.

This summer’s hottest job? Becoming a European Ranch Ambassador for Hidden Valley. Over 6,000 people applied to travel to Europe promoting ranch dressing like its world peace. Applicants drank ranch, bathed in ranch, and made ranch-themed videos, hoping to land the $12,000 gig.

Corporate Lunch

Starbucks is scrapping is AI inventory tool after it reportedly confused milk varieties and struggled to track ingredients. Apparently, even AI taps out halfway through orders like “half-caf, no foam, extra hot, oat milk, and three pumps of vanilla.” Stat?

Fanatics is launching a sports fan-focused credit card with American Express, letting users earn rewards on jerseys, tickets, and collectibles. For sports fans, this feels like official approval to turn every date night into a trip to the stadium.

Google says the era of the “10 blue links” is over as Search becomes more AI-powered and interactive. Remember when Google was just a blank page and a search bar? Simpler times.

Lululemon is close to settling a boardroom dispute with founder Chip Wilson by adding his nominees to the board. While the leggings may be built for flexibility, founders tend to hold their ground.

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