5 Things to Know Before the Opening Bell 2/20/2026

0:28It's smart to always have a few financial goals. Join host Keith Lansford for this information-packed daily market preview delivered in 10 minutes or less, including projected stock updates, monetary policy decisions, and key results and statistics that may impact your trading. Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com slash market update podcast or find Schwab Market Update wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Joe Kernan, co-host of Spockbox with Andrew Ross Sorkin, and this is five things to know before the opening bell. President Trump says he's going to decide in the next 10 days whether to launch military strikes against Iran.

1:08The U.S. has been building a major military presence in the Middle East. Johnson & Johnson is now reportedly looking at selling its orthopedics unit. A deal could be worth more than$20 billion. Reports say possible buyers include private equity firms. We talked about it. I had deja vu from this. Back in October, they didn't say they were going to sell Dupuis. They said that they were going to separate their business within 18 to 24 months in a tax-free spinoff to shareholders. This is the first time. They did talk about multiple paths back then, but this is the first point at which the company has actually indicated it might exit.

1:49ownership of that orthopedics unit is as a sale rather than a spin-off. Amazon's own AI tools temporarily sparked outages at the company's cloud unit twice in recent months, including a December incident during which engineers let a coding tool make changes. That's according to the Financial Times. Amazon told the publication that the outages were due to user error, not AI error. Live Nation shares are higher, the company topping quarterly revenue estimates on strong concert demand. And President Trump says he's going to direct the Defense Department and other agencies to release government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life to the public.

2:34That follows former President Obama saying last week that he thinks aliens are real, but he hasn't seen them and they're not being kept at Area 51. There's so much life in the universe. How do you feel about this? There's so much life in the universe and other civilizations. There's a billion stars per galaxy and a billion galaxies. I know, but do you think that by releasing whatever this is... Well, I want to talk about the possibility of them being here. If you believe in Einstein, you can't, unless you go into some singularity or black hole, you can't travel past the speed of light because E equals mc squared, So mass goes to infinity as you accelerate more and more.

3:16That's what happens in a cyclotron when we accelerate particles. So to get to Alpha Centauri, Andrew, the closest star, takes literally years to travel. So how are they going to find this piddly little planet, planet Earth? They're everywhere. It's just hard to imagine that they would stumble across us. Let me just ask you a different question, though. I don't think there are any. I don't believe it. I want to go back to the release of these documents. Okay. What documents? what the president's going to be releasing. Well, I know. What's in them? I don't believe anything is in them. Well, but here's, this goes, this is a little bit in the camp of Epstein.

3:51I want to connect them for you. Oh, Jesus. I'm not surprised. No, no, no. I think that I have a concern. Trump was sleeping with aliens? No. No, no, no. Once you start, one of the things we've discovered by releasing the Epstein files, and I think Jay Clayton would say this, is that the public, there's something fabulous about transparency in such a way that now we can all see it. But it also raises all sorts of questions, and most people can't really get to the bottom of it. And maybe you can never get to the bottom of it. People that are hurt are the victims, obviously. Are you worried about the aliens being hurt?

4:25No. What I don't know is once you start releasing more, whether you're going to create this whole sort of hum and drum about things that aren't really real or true or what, it creates even... There's so much disinformation in our world today already, and I can't tell, honestly, I can't tell. I like to think, because I'm a journalist, that more information is always better, but I don't know if more information is always better because I don't think that we, as a people, are always capable of processing all the information. Well, now you sound like Jack. You can't handle the truth from that. You can't handle the truth.

5:05I remember the movie. You're going to decide what we can handle. But if I recall, there was a newspaper headline that Bill Clinton actually met with aliens. And they had a picture of the guy. Do you remember that? I think it was the Globe or something. Funny looking guy. I mean, I don't know if he's going to look. Yeah. Well, Bill Clinton was a handsome guy at that point. But I don't know if he was funny looking to other people in his alien race. But to me, he looked. I don't want to prejudge. But so where do you come down on this? Do you think that they're around? I'm with Elon Musk. Some people think we're aliens.

5:43I'm with Elon Musk. And he doesn't... Elon Musk says if there's one person on the planet who should know whether there are aliens out there, it is him. And he says he has not seen them. So... My point is that I think there are billions of other civilizations. That's what I'm saying. I just think it's really... The distances are so vast that it's just... The chances of us finding them or them finding us. Or them finding us is... In our lifetime. We'll be back later today with an all-new Squawk Pod, our daily podcast featuring the best of Squawk Box. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts. Listen anytime.

6:17time.

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