An indie rock band from New Zealand, Thomas Edison and the New York Rangers each had a cameo in Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s latest letter to shareholders. In a sprawling manifesto published Thursday, Jassy shared his early aspirations to be a sportscaster, deployed a medley of golf terms and took a few swipes at competitors. He also doubled down on the company’s massive AI spending.

AI is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger,” Jassy wrote. Translation: What bubble? Of course, he has to say that. In early February, Amazon said it expected to spend $200 billion in 2026 as it pumps money into AI innovation. Investors hated the idea, and the stock price still hasn’t fully recovered.

“We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” Jassy’s now promising them.

The Old One-Two

The Amazon leader took a page out of the Regina George playbook (ahem, burn book) as he went after Nvidia, doling out back-handed compliments. “We have a strong partnership with NVIDIA, will always have customers who choose to run NVIDIA, and we will continue to make AWS the best place to run NVIDIA,” Jassy wrote, simultaneously signaling that the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance may be just around the corner. “Customers want better price performance,” he said, and Amazon’s Trainium chip can deliver.

Jassy’s 5,000-word manifesto had plenty of shade left over for the rest of the Valley:

• The CEO also namedropped Intel. “In the CPU space, virtually all of the workloads ran on Intel chips until we invented Graviton in 2018,” he wrote. Graviton, Amazon’s CPU chip, “is now used expansively by 98% of the top 1,000 EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) customers.” Rubbing salt in the wound, Jassy added that two large AWS customers have asked if they could buy all Amazon’s Graviton instance capacity this year. (The answer was no: “We can’t agree to these requests given other customers’ needs, but it gives you an idea of the demand,” Jassy said.)
• Jassy didn’t directly take aim at Elon Musk or his companies, but he did say that Amazon Leo, the company’s low Earth orbit satellite network, is scheduled to launch in mid-2026. Leo’s main competitor is SpaceX’s Starlink, which typically offers users download speeds of 45 to 280 Mbps and upload speeds of 10 to 30 Mbps. Amazon previously promised download speeds up to 1 Gbps and upload speeds up to 400 Mbps.

Staying Strong: Sticks and stones aren’t hurting Intel. The semiconductor’s stock has soared nearly 50% since the end of March amid news it would join Musk’s Terafab AI chip project and buy back Apollo Global Management’s stake in its Ireland chip plant. On Thursday, stockholders got another win with the announcement that Intel is expanding a chip partnership with Google.

Shhhh!!! Or you could screw up Scottie Scheffler’s stroke.

The Masters Tournament, which began yesterday at Augusta National Golf Club, continues through Sunday when one bogey man will be fitted with the famous winner’s jacket in verdant Pantone 342 C. Considered by many the sport’s most prestigious event, the contest comes at a time when Americans are playing the most golf in two decades, but some firms have found that capitalizing on the economics requires expert-level finesse with metaphorical wedges and mid-irons.

No Handicaps

According to the National Golf Foundation, the number of players who hit the links annually in the United States has risen by more than 5 million over the past eight years. In 2025, it reached 29.1 million, within putting distance of the 2003 record of 30.6 million set during Tiger Woods’ superstar peak.

That’s been great for course operators, with nearly 70% telling the foundation they are in “good” or “excellent” financial shape. For equipment manufacturers, it’s more complicated, with inflation, tariffs and consumer sentiment colliding like a macroeconomic crosswind over the fairway. Publicly traded Callaway Golf and Acushnet, two leading makers of balls, clubs and other equipment, both reported in February that tariffs were squeezing their margins. Acushnet said it expected to incur $70 million in import taxes this year and Callaway $40 million (those figures may change since the Supreme Court struck down the Trump administration’s International Emergency Economic Powers Act levies). Tariffs have coincided with rising equipment prices, and while dollar sales are climbing, unit sales haven’t kept pace as consumers report inflation fatigue. It’s a tough course, but executives have made some big shots:

• Earlier this year, Callaway strengthened its balance sheet with the sales of outdoor apparel maker Jack Wolfskin and a 60% stake in sports-gaming businesses Topgolf, repositioning itself as a pure golf play. That helped the company pay down $1 billion in debt before leaders authorized a $200 million buyback program to reward shareholders.
• While Callaway is forecasting 2026 sales to be roughly flat around $2.1 billion, its shares are up 24% this year amid the streamlined focus. Acushnet forecasts 2.5% to 4.5% sales growth, and is up 23%.

Institutional Enthusiasm: An SEC filing this week revealed that Rochester-based advisory O’Keefe Stevens boosted its stake in Callaway, with the holding now 4% of the fund or more than Berkshire Hathaway. Given Callaway’s exceptionally high 12-month trailing price-to-earnings ratio of 69, that’s quite the vote of confidence.

The rescue of a US airman concealed in a mountain crevice in Iran was comparable to finding a grain of sand in the desert, says CIA director John Ratcliffe: The agency was only able to pull off the mission thanks to “exquisite technologies” exclusive to the US.

One key piece of that technology was a Boeing-made satellite beacon that the aviator, known only by his call sign Dude 44 Bravo, used to signal his location. President Trump alluded to the “very sophisticated” gadget while speaking about the rescue on Monday.

It’s one example of an emerging arsenal of small defense tech that goes beyond the obvious missiles and fighter jets.

Front Lines of Funding

President Trump convinced Congress to boost this fiscal year’s defense budget to $1 trillion and said in January he wants to spend $1.5 trillion next year. Within this year’s budget, spending on newer technologies like AI and drones is said to have jumped more than 20%, while spending on legacy programs has remained the same. The Iran War has showcased how innovative, smaller defense tech can play an outsized role in modern warfare:

• The US in March deployed the so-called Toyota Corolla of drones, a small and affordable suicide drone developed by the startup SpektreWorks. The drone’s a response to Iran’s Shahed drones, which have been dominating the airspace and taking down large payloads.
• Startups like SpektreWorks are spearheading much of the defense sector’s emerging technology and reaping the rewards for it. The defense tech sector raised $11.2 billion globally last year, Dealroom found, up from just $869 million in 2020. While major players like Boeing make innovative tech, too, like Dude 44 Bravo’s communications device, the majority of their revenue still comes from legacy systems.

Mirage or Solid: As defense tech receives a wave of investment, it’s unclear how much R&D will turn into reality. On Tuesday, the New York Post reported that Boeing’s device was the mythicized “Ghost Murmur,” a futuristic CIA tool that can trace the electromagnetic signal from a single human heartbeat across vast distances. The Post’s unnamed source said the tool leverages AI and quantum magnetometry (basically, magnetic field measurement). Physicists interviewed by Scientific American were skeptical that such a device could exist.