Julie Morgan

Silver, platinum, and palladium are all down at least 4%.

Gold was expected to rally amid war and inflation fears, but instead it has dropped sharply, falling about 14% since the start of the Iran conflict.

According to the Wall Street Journal's Streetwise column, the decline has surprised investors who typically view the metal as a safe haven in times of geopolitical stress.

Gold ended last year at $43.19 an ounce and spiked to an all-time high above $55.95 an ounce in late January.

According to market participants, rather than buying the dip, traders are pricing in a higher-for-longer rate environment to combat energy-led inflation.

Elon Musk has unveiled plans for a new semiconductor venture.

It's called TeraFab.

It'll be built in Austin and operated jointly by SpaceX and Tesla.

The project would begin with a smaller advanced fabrication facility capable of designing and testing a wide range of chips with ambitions to scale into a much larger operation.

The proposed fab would produce two main types of chips, lower-power processors for vehicles, robotaxis and humanoid robots, and higher-performance chips designed for space-based computing.

The Austin location would sit near Tesla's existing operations and could further position Texas as a growing hub for chip manufacturing.

Tesla currently relies on suppliers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung.

Berkshire Hathaway plans to invest about $1.8 billion in Japanese insurance firm Tokyo Marine Holdings, further expanding its exposure to Japan.

The investment will be made through Berkshire's reinsurance unit, National Indemnity Company, which will initially acquire a roughly 2.5% stake in the insurer.

The initial shares will be allocated through the disposition of Treasury stock held by Tokyo Marine.

Any additional acquisitions of Tokyo Marine shares by national indemnity are expected to be made primarily through open market purchases.

The two companies also plan to collaborate on reinsurance as well as potential acquisitions, according to a statement released today.

The Japanese insurer added that national indemnity would not acquire more than 9.9% of the company without prior approval from the Tokyo Marine Board.

Now for a look at a few other articles that are trending.

The first two articles are about Social Security.