Business

1. Oil shrugs off strikes
2. WhatsApp ads
3. Trump’s gold visa
4. MAGA Instant Pots
5. Carney’s energy pivot

AI companies as Wizard of Oz characters... Rolex thieves are having a field day at Cannes... The coolest herb in town

Markets are holding steady — not what you’d expect to see with bombs dropping on Iranian refineries and a stock market already priced to perfection, if not slightly beyond it. In survey after survey, consumer sentiment looks like Wile E. Coyote’s cliff trajectory, but people keep spending. White-knuckled corporate executives haven’t yet hit the panic button. Corporate default risk is its highest since the 2008 crisis, but money is more widely available, and on better terms, than it’s been in years.

Economic signals make little sense, because the inputs don’t either. Tariffs are on, then off, then back on again with carveouts and pauses. The White House promises across-the-board immigration raids, then exempts farm workers and hotels. Executives, investors, and policymakers — including the Federal Reserve officials who meet this week and are likely to disappoint those hoping for a rate cut — are left to parse soupy data that can serve as a Rorschach test for personal politics. “If I know how people voted, I could tell you how they feel about the stock market,” one billionaire wealth manager told The Wall Street Journal.

Pessimists are worried that the hard data, which shows healthy economic activity, will catch up with gloomy soft data. Optimists are waiting for the opposite to happen. (Historically, the pessimists are right, and early data released this morning shows May retail sales fell about 1% from April.)

Tariffs will raise costs beyond what most companies can absorb without passing on to customers. Trump’s immigration raids already have Latino shoppers staying home and could raise labor costs in key industries like housing. Executives unable to plan for the long term may eventually hit pause entirely. Stephen Wise, a top private-equity executive at Carlyle, said he was “pleasantly surprised” that none of that has happened yet, but worried that investors numbed and confused by the constant reversals are being lulled into thinking it won’t.

“The market is a little bit ahead of itself,” Wise told me last week, when I stopped by the firm’s investor conference in Washington. “It’s going to be another couple of months before we have clarity on whether there’s real demand destruction.”

Oil market shrugs, but watches Hormuz

Why haven’t oil prices skyrocketed? Investors have been mostly untroubled by reports from Iranian state media of Israeli attacks on key gas fields and refineries.

But a move by Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, which carries 30% of seaborne crude oil and 20% of liquefied natural gas prices, could change that. Closing the Strait — if Iran even has the military might to do so — would anger China, Iran’s biggest oil customer and one of its few global allies. One factor keeping a lid on oil prices: China has been stockpiling crude, Reuters reports, which would allow it to buy significantly less in the coming months.

History shows that spikes to oil prices from global instability don’t last long. Data from the European Central Bank finds “no clear relationship between oil prices and geopolitical events,” as strange as that sounds. (Hat tip to Duncan Weldon at the Financial Times.)

WhatsApp adds ads

Meta is finally slapping ads on WhatsApp, 11 years after buying the messaging service. The company will also let sponsored channels collect subscription fees. (The latter may intrigue some media organizations, if they can get over the the last time they trusted Meta to distribute their content.)

The move betrays the original promise of WhatsApp, whose founders believed so strongly in keeping their service free of ads that they quit over it in 2018, leaving hundreds of millions of dollars in then-Facebook stock behind. Meta said it will limit the ads to a specific corner of the app, called Updates, and won’t read users’ messages to target them. The company softened up the ground with users in a recent ad campaign that touted the privacy and end-to-end encryption of WhatsApp messages.

The change, unveiled at the advertising industry’s annual gathering in Cannes, France, opens a new source of revenue for Meta at a time when it’s spending heavily on AI. WhatsApp has more than 3 billion monthly users, the company said last month.

Foreigners queue for Trump’s golden visa

Some 70,000 people have joined the waitlist for the $5 million Trump Card visa, the US’ pay-to-play residency program. The card will be made of real gold, suiting the president’s gilded tastes — “Donald Trump appreciates these kinds of things,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told the FT — but making the US an outlier among Western democracies in offering foreign nationals legal status for cash.

Malta was the last EU member to sell citizenship, raising more than $1.5 billion before Europe’s top court ordered it to stop this year after reports indicated that sanctioned individuals were slipping through. Britain shut down its golden visa in 2022 after half of the issued documents were flagged for security risks. Portugal’s program, arguably the most well known, remains open, and many Gulf states have introduced similar programs in the last decade. (Ray Dalio is an honorary Emirati, Semafor has reported.)

The US has had a similar program since the 1990s, but the Trump Card raises the minimum investment required from $1.8 million to $5 million. Lutnick has said the program, reportedly the brainchild of Trump donor and hedge-fund manager John Paulson, could raise $1 trillion to offset the cost of tax cuts.

Retailers tap Trump gravy train

Home goods manufacturers are hoping to cash in on MAGA. Instant Pot and storied glassware firm Lenox are among those companies releasing Trump-inspired collections ahead of July 4, Semafor’s Shelby Talcott reported Monday.

A representative for the brands said they “are extremely supportive of President Trump and the MAGA Agenda, standing with the president with their efforts to onshore and show public support.” Lenox will release a porcelain set with the president’s face on it, while Instant Pot will sell Make America Great Again-branded appliances, which typically sell for around $115. Trump has made millions licensing his name and likeness, but will not be paid for these products, a representative for the companies said.

Brands like Black Rifle Coffee, PublicSquare, and Strive Asset Management pitched themselves as Republican alternatives to Starbucks, Amazon, and BlackRock, respectively, in an attempt to create a parallel consumer economy, sorted by ideology, that never really took off. Outside of the loud, self-sorted world of online media, conservatives have struggled to unseat mainstream consumer companies, few of which until now have decided to court partisan shoppers.

Carney’s climate conversion on display at G7

The gathering of global leaders in Canada’s oil-rich west highlights the political transformation of the country’s prime minister on climate change.

Before his improbable and Trump-assisted election win, Mark Carney was an eco-warrior who urged companies and investors to prepare for a climate reckoning. As co-head of the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, he browbeat reluctant banks and asset managers — including some he had worked with during a career on Wall Street — to pledge to cut their financed emissions. As governor of the Bank of England in 2019, he predicted a future where 80% of all coal assets and half of oil reserves stayed in the ground because burning them would risk overheating the planet. Most recently at Brookfield, he oversaw one of the world’s largest portfolios of renewable energy projects.

Now, he’s meeting with energy executives, backing new pipelines to export Canadian oil abroad, and cutting carbon taxes levied by his Liberal predecessor, Justin Trudeau. His promise to make Canada an “energy superpower” is borrowed from former conservative PM Stephen Harper (who failed, in part because the US beat him to it).

In an interview with CTV News last month, Carney said he supported increased drilling to replace imports from the US, whose light oil feeds refineries in eastern Canada that can’t process heavy crude from its western provinces. “It makes no sense to be sending that money south of the border or across the ocean,” he said. “But yes, it also means more exports, without question.”

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Crypto kidnappers initially demanded €50,000 ransom from a French TikToker, only to release him when they discovered his account balances didn’t come close. Still, it’s a reminder that the self-promotional and highly visible nature of the space can lead to very bad outcomes, as we’ve noted before.

➚ BUY: Trump Mobile. The president’s family launched a mobile network, which will also sell $499 US-made devices with better specs than iPhones (impossible, WSJ notes.)

➘ SELL: T-Mobile. Shares dropped on news that SoftBank will unload another slug. Masayoshi Son has used the carrier as a piggy bank for past moonshots, and looks to fund his AI ambitions the same way.

Companies & Deals

• Lovers’ quarrel: Tensions between Microsoft and Sam Altman’s OpenAI are reaching a boiling point, WSJ reports, with the AI startup privately weighing whether to file an antitrust complaint against Microsoft.
• Yahoo reboots: The original dot-com giant has its biggest presence ever at Cannes Lions, hoping to woo advertisers with, of all things, news. “Not only is news safe, but in fact, it provides incremental reach that you would not be able to get any other way,” its chief revenue officer told Semafor’s Max Tani. Its two-story Riviera HQ, with Diplo spinning, is a code-switch from its 30th anniversary relaunch party in New York this spring, when a “back to the ’90s” banner and CD-ROMs heralded its return to a reshaped web.
• Easy, breezy?: Beauty giant Coty is exploring a sale or a split-up, WWD reports. A straight buyout would be a clean solution for majority shareholder JAB, which is looking to sell down its consumer portfolio as it pivots into insurance and asset management. A split along its luxury (Gucci, Burberry, Hugo Boss) and mass-appeal (CoverGirl) products would be more on-brand for today’s conglomerates.

Watchdogs

• Foundational principles: A leading contender to be the next Republican commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission says startup founder jobs should be reserved for US citizens. (See YC’s Paul Graham’s cheeky reply.)
• Down, under: A botched trading-systems upgrade took down Australia’s stock exchange last year. Now regulators are probing “serious and repeated failures” at ASX, opening the door for the forced replacement of its executive team or board.
• Holding pattern: A federal judge extended an order temporarily blocking the Trump administration’s plan to ban international students from attending Harvard.

Markets

• Wait and see: The Federal Reserve is expected to hold interest rates steady at its meeting this week as it looks for clues of how Trump’s tariffs and deportations affect prices and wages.
• Buildout backtrack: America’s office-supply surplus is set to contract for the first time in 25 years, CBRE estimates — as conversions and demolitions pick up and an incentive- and startup-fuelled buildout spree loses steam, WSJ reports.

American YouTuber IShowSpeed’s viral trip to China, amplified by Chinese state media, is part of a broader Beijing effort to reshape its global image using foreign influencers, Zichen Wang writes in a Semafor column. His surprising advice: Beijing should disclose its sponsorship and embrace American-style transparency.