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Senators including Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Chuck Schumer of New York signed a letter on Friday asking the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to investigate President Trump. The move comes after the presidents April 9 Truth Social post in which he told followers it was a GREAT TIME TO BUYjust hours before announcing a 90-day pause on the sweeping international tariffs that hed enacted just days earlier. The letter urges the SEC to determine if any administration officials or insiders engaged in insider trading, market manipulation, or other securities laws violations. It also comes following a video filmed in the Oval Office of Trump explaining how much several of his guests made in the market on Wednesday. He made $2.5 billion today and he made $900 million. Thats not bad, Trump said in the video, posted by More Perfect Union on X, pointing out his friend and investor Charles Schwab as one of the beneficiaries of the intense gains the stock market made on Wednesday. U.S. stocks rose at record-breaking speeds on Wednesday as Trump paused some of his tariffs. The S&P 500 surged 9.5% in response to his announcement, marking the third-best day for the index since 1940. Questions around SEC’s ability to pursue enforcement The senators letter, addressed to SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, also poses a series of questions, including about cutbacks in staff and enforcement activity at the SEC. The questions ask explicitly about the SECs ability to monitor and respond to large-scale market events and “investigate and pursue enforcement actions. Warren posted a tweet Friday morning concerning the investigation request. Did President Trump tip off big donors or family to cash in on his tariff chaos? she wrote. Today with @SenSchumer and Senate Democrats, I officially called for an SEC investigation to find out. Presidents are not kings. Jordan Belfort, a former Wall Street stockbroker and convicted financial criminal known as the Wolf of Wall Street, told Sky News that theres no way Trump is guilty of illegal insider trading. I personally dont find it overly suspicious. Especially since hes told it to everybody at once, Belfort said in a segment of The World. White House spokesperson Kush Desai responded to Fast Companys inquiry with the following statement: It is the responsibility of the President of the United States to reassure the markets and Americans about their economic security in the face of nonstop media fearmongering, Desai said. Democrats railed against Chinas cheating for decades, and now theyre playing partisan games instead of celebrating President Trumps decisive action [Wednesday] to finally corner China. A spokesperson for the SEC declined to comment. On Thursday, Senators Adam Schiff of California and Ruben Gallego of Arizona also sent a letter, this one to White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles and U.S. Office of Government Ethics Acting Director Jamieson Greer, requesting an urgent inquiry into whether President Trump, his family, or other members of the administration engaged in insider trading or other illegal financial transactions. A list of questions requesting information about alleged ethical violations by White House administration or members of Trumps family follows, with a deadline of April 18.
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On a panel this week, U.S. secretary of education Linda McMahon, the former WWE CEO who is now charged with making sweeping decisions for 100 million American school children, repeatedly referred to AI technology as A1. For McMahon, who was speaking at the ASU+GSV Summit for educators, it was an embarrassing mistake. But for Kraft Heinzs A.1. steak sauce, it was basically free product placementand the brand didnt hesitate to take its cut. McMahons first slip-up occurred when she shared an anecdote with the audience about a school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-Ks, have A1 teaching in every year. Matters only got worse when she continued, Kids are sponges. They just absorb everything. It wasn’t all that long ago that it was, We’re going to have internet in our schools! Now let’s see A1 and how that can be helpful. Maybe it can make the cafeteria meatloaf tastier? A.1. was thinking along the same lines. The brand jumped on Instagram yesterday with a spoofed ad for a McMahon-inspired A.1. bottle, complete with a photoshopped version of the sauce with the label For educational purposes only accompanied by the slogan, Agree, best to start them early. The post was captioned, You heard her. Every school should have access to A.1. Heinz is no stranger to thinking up limited-edition novelty goods, from its neon pink Barbie-cue sauce to a Taylor Swift-inspired ranch and portable Velveeta packets. However, this is the first time (to Fast Companys knowledge) that the company has used its stunt marketing resumé to make a jab at a political figure. So far, A.1.s loyal fans seem to be in support of its new sauce. My husband wants a bottle for his desk, one commenter wrote under the brands post. He teaches middle school, at least until they replace him with A.1. View this post on Instagram A post shared by A.1. Original Sauce (@a1originalsauce)
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When people talk about how AI might reshape media, the term hyper-personalization comes up a lot. In broad terms, it means that AI can tailor the experience around your preferencesassuming it has enough data about you. To some extent, algorithms and ad tech have been doing this for years, recommending links and stories based on your clicks and browsing behavior. What generative AI brings to the table is the ability to adapt the content itself. A large language model could, in theory, understand the kinds of stories I care about and modify what Im readingmaybe by adding an angle relevant to my region. It could even offer up different lengths or even formats. If I’m about to go for a run, maybe I want that feature article as a podcast. Or if Im in a hurry, a short video in TikTok style might do. But this frames AI as a kind of Santa Claus: a magical benefactor dropping content “presents” on demand. In the AI courses I teach, I often explain that a key unlock of AI is that, once you use it enough, you start to realize the value is often more in the conversationthe questions you ask and the answers it givesthan the so-called output. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}} Verbal features such as ChatGPT’s Advanced Voice Mode are ideal for this. If you haven’t engaged in a brainstorming session while driving or walking, you’re missing out. AI can be an excellent brainstorming partner when you need to think through something. Even better: it can be a superb writing assistant, helping you develop ideas, stay on track, and fill in the holes in your argumentswithout taking over the writing itself. Rethinking how we read the news Now apply that same idea to how we consume news. When you hit a point in the story you’re reading where you want to go deeper, you can instantly do that. If, say, you were reading a story about bringing the dire wolf back from extinction, you could ask about whether the same technique could be applied to other extinct species, how ethicists are responding, or how the news is affecting the biotech sector. The AI could bring in all that context without needing to “navigate” anything. Were already seeing early signs of this behavior. On X, for example, people often tag Groka chatbot built into the platformto ask follow-up questions about trending stories. Its a small but telling behavior: instead of passively reading the news, users are instinctively treating it as a jumping-off point for a deeper conversation. Most news stories aim to deliver the latest facts, often with only a perfunctory amount of backgroundusually tucked into a paragraph or two at the end. For exotic topics like crypto, this often leaves the subject impenetrable to casual readers. With AI, however, a news story can be a conversationone that explains things at exactly your level. In other words, the most powerful personalization tool isnt dataits your words. This is the eureka moment in Joshua Rothman’s recent New Yorker essay that contemplates how AI might improve the news. The only catch? It requires a mindset shiftfrom AI giving you things to AI helping you discover things for yourself. There needs to be some education in the use of AI on the part of the reader. AI still needs a map But for that vision of AI and news to work, context is everything: In other words, the machines still need a map. For AI to bring you the absolute best information for whatever news rabbit hole you want to go down, you need a data set that’s oriented towards news topics. The massive data sets in today’s large language models are probably overkill, since they bring noise or generic knowledge when specificity is whats needed. However, restricting the context to just the stories on the site you’re reading would be too limiting. A better idea would be something like a “general news corpus” of vetted sources that publishers could opt into, which other sites could access to bring a wide-ranging context into their AI experiences. ProRata and NewsGuard are building these kinds of products, but their best use case might not be general search engines like Perplexity or ProRata’s own Gist. Context is arguably more important when a reader has already clicked on an article and begun to go down a path. With AI, that path doesn’t have to be on railsthe reader can go in any direction, and the right context will follow. The most compelling thing about this vision of personalized news is that it doesn’t require Big Tech to be part of it, at least outside of building the large language models themselves. Journalists provide the raw information, product designers can build the experiences, and third-party content brokers assemble the context. Participation, not prediction For the past two decades, media organizations have optimized their platforms by trying to anticipate what audiences would respond to. But AI may be rendering that approach obsolete. Imagine a news experience where every reader gets the background they need, the angles they care about, and the context to go deeperall just by asking. Thats not personalization by prediction. Thats personalization by participation. {"blockType":"creator-network-promo","data":{"mediaUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/03\/mediacopilot-logo-ss.png","headline":"Media CoPilot","description":"Want more about how AI is changing media? Never miss an update from Pete Pachal by signing up for Media CoPilot. To learn more visit mediacopilot.substack.com","substackDomain":"https:\/\/mediacopilot.substack.com\/","colorTheme":"blue","redirectUrl":""}}
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