Business

➚ BUY: Stimulus. China’s belated economic booster shot has pushed stocks up 25% in nine sessions before closing for a weeklong holiday. With Beijing readying a “fiscal bazooka,” the country could be headed for its own memestock moment: “We must keep trading!” one young investor screamed in a video being passed around WeChat.

➘ SELL: Standstill. As the dockworkers’ strike enters its third day, Democrats worry that price hikes will be this cycle’s October surprise. Wage demands from workers with six-figure salaries have sparked a debate about two-tiered wage systems and what we owe those who kept working through the pandemic.

Oil prices rise… Iran’s oil infrastructure, mapped… How Andrea Orcel outfoxed Germany’s government… Banks are already jockeying for OpenAI’s IPO… Cybertruck recall… NASCAR cartels…

Wall Street slices and dices itself

THE SCOOP

Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund has held talks to buy a stake in a major US lender, HPS, people familiar with the matter said.

The deal continues one of the hottest trades among Wall Street firms: owning pieces of each other. In another similar investment, Blackstone is in talks to take a stake in Vitruvian, a London buyout firm with €16 billion, other people familiar with the matter said.

The current state of the talks couldn’t be confirmed.

The business of money managers buying stakes in other money managers is booming. From essentially a dead start in the early 2010s, there were 38 such deals last year, and new rivals are jumping in all the time. Blue Owl raised a record $12.9 billion fund to acquire stakes in other managers last year, and is already out raising its next.

Investors benefit from a share of steady management fees and a portion of profits when investments are eventually sold.

It’s a machine only Wall Street could invent, self-propelling and profitable. It can also turn a bit circular: Mubadala is already an investor (through a fund) in Blue Owl, which itself owns a stake in HPS.

A spokesman for HPS didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Blackstone and Mubadala declined to comment. Vitruvian didn’t respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg reported in March that Vitruvian was looking for investors.

HPS, which manages $117 billion, has been trying to go public but faces a frosty market that is just now showing signs of thawing. Stocks have been high enough to tempt companies, but chaotic enough to keep them away.

Few people embody Silicon Valley’s rightward political shift, underway for a decade but sharpened lately, better than Marc Andreessen. The co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, who tweeted “I’m with her” in support of Hillary Clinton in 2016, has become a big donor and influential voice in Republican politics. He and his co-founder, Ben Horowitz, endorsed Donald Trump in July: “The future of our business, the future of technology, and the future of America is at stake,” Horowitz said. The pair also said they’d be donating to a pro-Trump PAC set up by Elon Musk, the leading avatar of the tech community’s rightward lurch.

In 2020, not a single Andreessen employee donated to a Republican candidate or PAC, according to federal election data. This cycle, their spending is significantly larger and tilts toward the right. A lot comes from the co-founders, but others have shifted their donations, too. (We’ll know more in about two weeks, when third-quarter donor data is released.)

Speaking of Musk: The Wall Street Journal reports that his contributions to Republican candidates and causes started back in 2022, well before he took to X to voice increasingly right-wing views. Other billionaires put their money where their mouth is; Musk’s mouth followed his money.

ClosedAI: OpenAI doesn’t want its investors backing its rivals, the FT reports. Exclusive funding arrangements are likely to heighten government concerns about competition among AI startups, just as exclusive licensing agreements have. Counterpoint: Antitrust regulators have been investigating whether Big Tech companies are using their size and cash in anticompetitive ways. That’s a harder case to make if OpenAI can strong-arm Microsoft and Nvidia.

Spigot span: Last week, Saudi Arabia gave up on its hopes of $100-a-barrel oil. Now it’s threatening an all-out, race-to-the-bottom price war. Its oil minister warned that prices could drop as low as $50 a barrel, according to the Journal, an unsubtle warning that the kingdom is now willing to sacrifice profits to keep its market share — even if that means blowing up its budget, which needs $96-a-barrel oil to stay balanced.

• For more on the kingdom’s calculus, read the latest from my colleagues on Semafor Gulf and sign up for their newsletter!

• A London lawsuit could amp up environmental pressure on big businesses.
• ADNOC’s still on the hunt after $13 billion acquisition.
• China’s domestic struggles won’t change its trajectory in Washington.