🌀 Even Whirlpool’s got war woes

Shares of home appliance giant Whirlpool Corp. tumbled nearly 12% on Thursday following its Q1 earnings and stark warning about consumer confidence.

• According to Whirlpool, the war with Iran “resulted in recession-level industry decline in the US as consumer confidence collapsed in late February and March.”

• The company’s Q1 sales were down about 10% year over year. In April, Whirlpool issued its “largest price increase in more than a decade,” with costs for consumers rising 10%. US appliance demand dropped 7.4% in Q1, Whirlpool said, including a 10% drop in March.

• “This level of industry decline is similar to what we have observed during the global financial crisis and even higher than during other recessionary periods,” CEO Marc Bitzer said on the company’s earnings call.

Whirlpool shares were down more than 20% in premarket trading yesterday, but pared some of those losses in early trading. It was one of its worst trading days in company history.

The Takeaway

It seems like all those “economic headwinds” that companies have been alluding to are finally blowing in, and the canaries in the coal mines are coming from unexpected places. Snap’s missed ad revenue came with the caveat that it included a “$20 to $25 million impact from the geopolitical headwinds in the Middle East experienced during March.” Even bougie burger chain Shake Shack, which absolutely tanked after its earnings yesterday, said the “conflict has led to business disruptions,” though in fairness, beef prices were more the issue this past quarter.

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OpenAI’s plan to purchase 10 gigawatts’ worth of custom AI chips from Broadcom, a deal announced in October, is running into some financial difficulties, per The Information.

• The report, citing an internal memo and people involved in the talks, says the custom chip designer is being asked to finance the initial $18 billion in chip production, and is only willing to do so if Microsoft buys 40% of these processors or OpenAI finds other buyers.

• Shares of Broadcom sank to session lows following this news, but pared most of that retreat thereafter.

• All in all, it appears as though Broadcom is willing to meet OpenAI more than halfway in a bid to make sure the parties can secure capacity for these chips to be produced.

The report notes that while Broadcom wanted OpenAI to match its financing dollar for dollar, a relatively common arrangement, “Broadcom recently decided to relax that demand and invest more capital up-front than OpenAI, breaking from Broadcom’s ‘long-held hard-line requirement,’” the OpenAI memo said.

The Takeaway

Microsoft recently revised its agreement with the ChatGPT maker to end revenue-sharing payments from the former to the latter. That’s seemingly a signal of the tech behemoth’s reluctance to contribute as much to OpenAI’s massive cash burn going forward.

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Strategy is best known as the world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder, but one of the more interesting things the firm has done to continue growing its hoard of digital gold was launch STRC, a perpetual preferred equity instrument, in July 2025. New data from Bitcoin Treasuries reveals just how mammoth an instrument it is and who the biggest owners of it are.

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• 🏎️ F1: One week after the Miami Grand Prix for F1, and it’s as good a time as any to drop in and see how this (pretty weird!) season has gone. Events in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia were canceled amid the conflict in the Persian Gulf, so this had been the first event in five long weeks. Andrea Kimi Antonelli is currently in the lead to be the Drivers’ Champion this year, with markets* giving the Italian a 41% chance of winning. 

• 🥊 UFC: This weekend at UFC 328, Sean Strickland takes on Khamzat Chimaev as a significant underdog, with Chimaev, the current UFC middleweight champion, having an 81% chance of winning the fight, according to prediction markets. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC or ForecastEx LLC.

• Earnings from: Wendy’s, Fluor, Trump Media & Technology Group, Monster Beverage, Allbirds, EchoStar, TeraWulf, and Globalstar