Business

1. Trade talk tightrope
2. Tech goes nuclear
3. Anthropic annoys Trump
4. Musk’s money grab
5. CEO perk protection
6. Jamie Dimon, prognosticator

The last time this much of the global economy and security hinged on a single phone call, the phone was red. The direct line that connected the US president and the Kremlin for decades — which wasn’t actually red or a phone, but popular perceptions persist — was credited with helping dial down tensions during the ensuing decades of global flare-ups.

Now it’s 2025, and we’re all hoping President Donald Trump can get a hold of China’s Xi Jinping. The White House says the two are expected to speak this week, though the Chinese embassy hasn’t confirmed it. As the Financial Times’ Edward Luce wrote this morning, you can’t fault China for being wary: In April, Trump said Xi had called him, an interaction the embassy flatly denied and for which the White House has provided no evidence.

The defining economic quality of MAGA is nostalgia. The economy that Trump idealizes is that of the 1950s. The trade system he’s ushering in looks more like that of the 1930s. And the financial system — which is getting “yippy” again, in the president’s words, with Treasury yields hovering in uncomfortably high territory— is left hoping for the best in a conversation between two world leaders. Nostalgia usually looks back to a better time.

Meanwhile, China is mindful of lessons learned from Trump’s first term, whose bilateral trade deal was seen as favoring the US. They are playing hardball this time, which means markets and companies will have a harder time figuring out how this ends.

Xi, Trump trade barbs — but will they talk?

Renewed China-US worries sent the markets into a tailspin (again), as each side accused the other of violating the temporary reprieve agreed to in Switzerland last month.

Detailed follow-on negotiations had already hit a “logjam,” per Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, when Trump said Friday that China had “TOTALLY VIOLATED” the terms of the truce, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth upped tensions when he called China an “imminent” threat to the Indo-Pacific. China’s trade negotiator has slow-walked export licensing, The Wall Street Journal reported, while the Trump administration has targeted Chinese students at American colleges (taking aim at one of the US’ most-successful exports.)

China is technologically stronger than it was during its last trade war with Trump but economically fragile, midway through a yearslong pivot to become more self-reliant. And while Trump has warned companies against passing on tariff costs to consumers, they’re doing it anyway, which won’t help his poll numbers.

AI’s energy suck is driving a nuclear renaissance

Meta’s 20-year deal with Constellation Energy is Big Tech’s latest commitment to nuclear as it hunts for electrons to power its AI data centers. Microsoft is rebooting dormant reactors in Pennsylvania (also with Constellation), and Google is betting on mini-reactor technology. Trump makes more headlines for his embrace of oil, gas, and coal, but with a series of executive orders, he has drawn comparisons to President Dwight Eisenhower, who launched America’s nuclear age.

It’s unlikely that tech companies, whose CEOs include some of the president’s biggest supporters, can meet their energy needs without nuclear — especially as low oil prices have sapped enthusiasm among US companies for “drill, baby, drill.”

A rare bit of Silicon Valley #resistance

Anthropic, the AI startup, is emerging as a thorn in the side of the Trump administration, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti reports. The company has been lobbying against a bill that would prevent states from regulating AI, which the White House says will avoid regulatory red tape and keep American companies ahead of Chinese rivals. Most AI firms support the bill, trying to avoid a patchwork of state laws that OpenAI, in its 15-page comment letter, said “risks bogging down innovation.” (More than 1,000 bills regulating AI have been proposed already this year in state legislatures.)

Administration officials have privately complained about Anthropic’s lobbying efforts and its hiring of former Biden staffers, Reed reports. They were also annoyed at Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s recent prediction that AI will wipe out half of entry-level, white collar jobs within a few years.

Musk returns to his companies, passing the hat

Newly back in the private sector, Elon Musk is betting investors aren’t as tired of him as some Tesla owners are. Companies run by the billionaire have launched, or just wrapped up, fundraises testing how Musk’s reputation emerged from his 130 days as Trump’s bureaucracy wrecking ball.

So far, so good: His brain-mapping company, Neuralink, said it had raised $650 million, confirming an earlier Semafor scoop that reported the new cash valued the startup at $9 billion. His recently merged xAI-X is looking to borrow $5 billion, while letting employees sell up to $300 million of their stock, according to Bloomberg and the Financial Times. The latter deal looks to be an effort to validate the $113 billion valuation Musk put on the combined company.

He returns to a business empire that’s a mixed bag: A humming and profitable space business that has its eye on killing the entire telecom market, a carmaker facing steep competition and a tariff-scrambled outlook, a health-tech startup doing truly incredible things, and a drilling company that could use a boost from government contracts. Musk’s swing through government hurt his reputation; polls show that a growing majority of Americans don’t like him. The question is whether investors will welcome him back: Tesla shares are down 3% since he formally announced his return last week.

CEO perks may get easier to hide

The Trump administration is laying the groundwork to roll back rules that require companies to disclose executive use of private jets and bodyguards. The focus of a Securities and Exchange Commission roundtable set for later this month — invitees still TBD — is changing rules on what companies have to tell shareholders about CEO perks, people briefed on its agenda said.

Perks are rounding errors, but growing more quickly than total CEO pay. Blame the pandemic: Companies footed the bill for private jets and remote work setups, and once extended, perks are hard to revoke. Spending on bodyguards is likely to increase after the murder of an insurance executive last year. The SEC declined to comment.

Scott Bessent is wrong about Jamie Dimon

“I have known Jamie a long time and for his entire career he’s made predictions like this. Fortunately, none of them have come true.” That was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent this weekend, shrugging off Jamie Dimon’s warnings that the bond market would crack under the strain of ballooning national debt.

Wall Street’s longest-serving and most outspoken CEO does indeed have a long list of prognostications — 24 years of shareholder letters will do that — but his record is better than Bessent is giving him credit for. Where he’s been wrong over the years, he’s mostly been too gloomy, though his conservatism may help explain why JPMorgan has weathered successive financial crises better than any other bank.

The one thing he is near-perfect on: His personal purchases of JPMorgan stock.

Want to get the latest investing news as soon as markets close? Brew Markets is a daily newsletter breaking down everything from AI revolutions to tariff turmoil, all with a dash of Morning Brew’s signature humor. Subscribe for free today.

➚ BUY: Oil cartels. OPEC+ announced a small increase to output, calming fears of a glut and sending oil prices higher. (Semafor’s Tim McDonnell is bearish longer-term.)

➘ SELL: Takeout cartel. The EU fined Delivery Hero and Glovo €329 million for running a takeout “cartel” that divvied up areas and agreed not to poach each other’s employees.

Companies & Deals

• If you can’t beat ’em: Universal Music, Warner Music, and Sony Music are in talks to license their libraries to AI companies accused of stealing their music to feed into song-generating software. A deal could give the labels an equity stake in the two startups, Bloomberg reports — an intriguing idea as legacy media companies start trying to get retroactively paid for what they say was blatant theft of their content to train AI models.
• Watch this space: A $200 million private equity trade doesn’t usually catch our eye, but this merger of two private-markets data and software providers bears watching. It could be the start of a competitor to Preqin, the giant of private-markets data that was acquired last year by BlackRock. Wall Street is nervous about having their dealmaking data (and fund returns) in the hands of a competitor — BlackRock, known for its low-cost index funds, is turning itself into a private-investment giant — and it’s not hard to imagine this as the nub of an alternative.
• Hands on the wheel: Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi eased his tight leadership grip, appointing the company’s first chief operating officer since 2019.
• Immune response: Bristol Myers Squibb will pay up to $11.1 billion to license a promising cancer drug that directs the body’s own defenses against tumors. The bet is a threat to Merck, whose competitor, Keytruda, was the world’s top-selling drug last year, and a sign of how quickly the war for molecules is heating up.
• Mind-bending: A $390 million takeover to build “the clear leader in psychedelic[s].”

Watchdogs

• Sunshine statements: California legislators want to hear from top CBS employees who resigned after perceived meddling by corporate brass into Trump-related stories. Their testimony would focus on whether the network’s parent company’s attempts to settle the president’s lawsuit violated state bribery laws, Semafor’s Max Tani scooped.
• Next-gen: Benjamin Black, the son of Apollo co-founder Leon Black and the nominee to run the US International Development Finance Corp. (not to be confused with the now-gutted USAID), disclosed assets of more than $200 million. In a co-authored blog post in January, he criticized the Biden regime for “absurd mission drift” and “virtue-signaling,” and called for an “investment-driven model” that marshaled US private-sector funds for, among other things, building mines in Greenland.

After weeks of turmoil, a bipartisan bill that would create rules for digital assets known as stablecoins is at last on track to pass the Senate.

It was supposed to be one of the GOP’s easiest aisle-crossing wins this Congress, but bitter fallout has transformed it into the most vivid example yet of how hard it is to strike a deal in President Donald Trump’s Washington. It’s a textbook case pointing to more challenges ahead, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports.