Market Beats | LIRR Strike Halts Trains, Leaving Long Island Commuters Facing Messy Monday; Middle East Conflict Triggers Sharp Rise in US and European Mortgage Rates; Lululemon Rejects Founder Chip Wilson’s Board Nominees; Trump Drops $10 Billion IRS Lawsuit; Dell Adds 1,000 AI Factory Customers to Capture Enterprise Workloads; Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit Over Statute of Limitations; Cuban’s Affordable Pharmacy to Add Generic Meds

—— LIRR Strike Halts Trains, Leaving Long Island Commuters Facing Messy Monday; Middle East Conflict Triggers Sharp Rise in US and European Mortgage Rates; Lululemon Rejects Founder Chip Wilson’s Board Nominees; Trump Drops $10 Billion IRS Lawsuit; Dell Adds 1,000 AI Factory Customers to Capture Enterprise Workloads; Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit Over Statute of Limitations; Cuban’s Affordable Pharmacy to Add Generic Meds

1. LIRR Strike Halts Trains, Leaving Long Island Commuters Facing Messy Monday

Long Island commuters face congested roads and packed buses as a workers’ strike threatens to disrupt travel in and out of New York City unless negotiators can strike a deal. Monday is the first weekday since the Long Island Rail Road (LIRR), the nation’s busiest commuter railroad, stopped service on Saturday after roughly 3,500 engineers, signalmen and electrical workers walked off the job following a stalemate between the state-run Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and union leaders on a labor deal.

The parties restarted negotiations Sunday afternoon after federal mediators summoned the unions and the MTA for talks, according to a spokesperson for the coalition of unions. The renewed discussions didn’t provide an agreement, but the labor groups and the MTA are set to meet again early Monday morning. With the strike in its third day, trains remain halted indefinitely—threatening to bring a morning of messy commutes and upending the unofficial start of the summer tourist season this Memorial Day weekend at Long Island beaches, including the Hamptons.

Even if a deal is reached soon, it will take time for the railroad to ramp up operations.

______

2. Middle East Conflict Triggers Sharp Rise in US and European Mortgage Rates

Mortgage costs across Europe and North America have risen sharply as the economic impact of the Middle East war spills into housing markets, piling pressure on borrowers wanting to buy a new home or refinance. The jump has come even though central banks have refrained from raising interest rates. Mortgage lenders are responding to increases in governments’ borrowing costs and betting that official rates will eventually need to rise to contain the threat of inflation. In the US, the conflict has driven the 30-year mortgage rate to 6.36 per cent, above levels seen in September 2025, before the Federal Reserve began a cycle of three quarter-point rate cuts.

In the Eurozone, mortgage rates in Germany have risen about 0.3 percentage points. The interest rate on popular 10-year loans in the country has increased to about 3.6 per cent, according to data from Dr Klein, raising annual interest costs for a new €350,000 loan by €1,000 to about €13,000. The sharpest rises have been in the UK, where the average quoted rate on a two-year fixed mortgage with a 75 per cent loan-to-value ratio increased to 5.1 per cent in April from 3.97 per cent at the end of February.

In the US, the rise in mortgage rates comes as the market was already struggling from a dearth of housing supply before the Middle East conflict began in late February and blockades of the Strait of Hormuz sent oil prices soaring.

______

3. Lululemon Rejects Founder Chip Wilson’s Board Nominees

Lululemon Athletica Inc. rejected the overtures of founder Chip Wilson to install new board members, and the company set a shareholder vote for next month. In a letter to investors, the athletic-wear maker said Wilson has hurt shareholders with his criticisms of the board and that his nomination of three directors is an attempt to regain influence over the company.

Wilson has been pushing for changes at Lululemon as its results weakened. The retailer recently named Heidi O’Neill as its new chief executive officer to help steer the brand.

Shareholders will vote on the three competing board nominees from the company and Wilson on June 25 at the annual meeting.

______

4. Trump Drops $10 Billion IRS Lawsuit

President Donald Trump moved to drop his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the 2019 leak of his tax information, according to a filing in a Miami federal court on Monday morning. The legal document contained few specific details other than the voluntary dismissal request submitted by Trump’s lawyer, Alejandro Brito. To resolve the dispute, US officials have discussed creating a $1.7 billion federal compensation fund to pay victims of alleged government weaponization.

Under this arrangement, Trump himself would not receive any monetary payout directly. Instead, claims could be made by parties asserting they were victimized by the weaponization of government under President Joe Biden.

Critics have condemned this framework, labeling it an inappropriate “slush fund” designed to reward his political allies, who could potentially include around 1,500 individuals prosecuted for storming the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

______

5. Dell Adds 1,000 AI Factory Customers to Capture Enterprise Workloads

Dell Technologies Inc. said it added 1,000 customers for a key AI product line in the past quarter as the company tries to capture business from traditional large businesses taking on new artificial intelligence workloads. Dell now has 5,000 clients for its AI Factory, a line of servers to power artificial intelligence work with Nvidia Corp. chips, software and services, up from 4,000 when the company reported quarterly earnings in February, Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell said in an interview. Customers including Eli Lilly & Co., Honeywell International Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. are using Dell products for work such as drug discovery and creating AI-optimized semiconductor factories.

The hardware company, which has long sold traditional servers and storage to most of the biggest US companies, is trying to take advantage of a shift by these clients to use their own equipment to deploy AI, an area that has been dominated by cloud providers and AI-focused firms.

“We have been winning disproportionately in this area,” Michael Dell said. “In the enterprise, nothing is taken for granted, but we have done a great job for customers in their existing infrastructure and so they’re giving us the opportunity with AI to help them with that.”

______

6. Jury Rejects Elon Musk’s OpenAI Lawsuit Over Statute of Limitations

A jury has decided to throw out Elon Musk’s case against Sam Altman and OpenAI on the basis that its claims fell outside the statute of limitations, handing a blow to the world’s wealthiest man. After just two hours of deliberation, the nine jurors unanimously returned their verdict, stating that Musk’s claims of breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment fell outside the statute of limitations. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said she would accept their judgment. The judge had been holding parallel proceedings to determine what, if any, financial or legal remedies to impose on OpenAI. The unusual nature of the trial means the jury’s verdict is merely advisory. The decision hands a big victory to OpenAI in a legal case that has loomed over its plans to go public in the coming year. Musk can appeal against the decision.

Musk had called on the Oakland court to extract damages of $134bn from OpenAI and Microsoft, remove the AI lab’s chief executive Altman and president Greg Brockman and reverse its conversion to a for-profit. The Tesla chief brought the case in 2024, claiming that Altman, Brockman and OpenAI had breached their contract with him by turning the company they co-founded as a charity in 2015 into a for-profit entity. Musk donated $38mn to the group before departing after a power struggle in 2018. At the time Musk framed his case as a fight for the soul of AI, a technology he described as “perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today”.

During the trial, both sides sought to portray their opposition as untrustworthy and motivated by commercial success rather than the good of humanity, which is OpenAI’s stated mission.

______

7. Cuban’s Affordable Pharmacy to Add Generic Meds

The Trump administration is adding generic medications to its direct-to-consumer drug sales website TrumpRx, and billionaire Mark Cuban is set to attend the White House rollout Monday afternoon, according to people familiar with the matter. The administration has been touting its deals with pharmaceutical companies to reduce their prices for government programs and sell drugs directly to consumers as part of an effort to address healthcare affordability ahead of the midterm elections this fall. A White House official said President Donald Trump would announce an expansion of TrumpRx’s offerings. The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and Cuban didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.

Cuban, through his Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company, sells mail-order medications directly to consumers for transparent prices.

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts criticized Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for the TrumpRx platform’s lack of generic options in a hearing last month.

______