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➚ BUY: Heir time. Apollo’s Marc Rowan’s flirtation with the Treasury Secretary job highlighted the need for the firm to settle on a successor, WSJ reports. Apollo already had one messy near-handoff, when co-founder Josh Harris left after a media glowup that had tipped him as the firm’s next CEO.

➘ SELL: Airtime. ABC’s $15 million payout to Trump raises concerns of a press crackdown from the Oval Office — and capitulation inside newsrooms. Washington Post media watcher Erik Wemple called it a “low, low point.”

TikTok appeals to Supreme Court… while its CEO courts Trump… Fed expected to cut rates… but retail sales come in hot…Milei drags Argentina out of recession… Ozy Media co-founder gets 10 years in prison… Corporate beefs to watch in 2025…

SoftBank CEO pledges billions for Trump’s America, again

THE NEWS

SoftBank will invest $100 billion in the US, Donald Trump announced yesterday at Mar-a-Lago with CEO Masayoshi Son at his side. That’s double the $50 billion Son pledged after Trump’s 2016 win, pumping billions of dollars in startup investments that fueled the late 2010s Silicon Valley bubble.

“I say, ‘President Trump is a double-down president, so I’m going to have to double down,’” Son said at Monday’s press conference. “That’s my confidence level.” (Trump asked Son on the spot yesterday to double down again to $200 billion. Son said he would try.)

LIZ’S VIEW

SoftBank doesn’t have $100 billion on hand, but assembling giant pools of other people’s money is Son’s specialty. He got half of the Vision Fund’s $100 billion from Middle East governments and funded his dealmaking for years by mortgaging SoftBank’s stake in Alibaba to generate cash. The cornerstone of his telecom and technology empire — the 2006 purchase of Vodafone Japan — was done almost entirely with borrowed money. He has that in common with Trump, who has proudly dubbed himself the “King of debt.”

Semafor reported in October that SoftBank had discussed a partnership of at least $20 billion with Apollo to invest in data centers and other AI infrastructure. Those talks appear to have cooled, but expect Son to tap his global network to make good on his promise to Trump.

KNOW MORE

Son was, in Trump’s telling, the first CEO to visit him after his 2016 win, but he has plenty of company this time around. Meta, Amazon, AI firm Perplexity and OpenAI founder Sam Altman have each pledged $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee. And executives including Apple’s Tim Cook, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, TikTok’s Shou Zi Chew, and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai have or are expected to meet with Trump at Mar-a-Lago. “The first term, everybody was fighting me,” Trump said at Monday’s news conference. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”

Trump has been burned before by companies making big, job-creating promises. Foxconn’s planned $10 billion factory in Wisconsin, which was kicked off by a shovel-wielding Trump in 2018, has been dramatically scaled back. Son helped broker that deal and accompanied Trump to the ground-breaking.

An activist investor’s nominee to the board of Air Products allegedly gave secret information to a friend about the 2014 sale of Covidien, where he was a director, according to federal legal filings. A man who admitted to insider trading ahead of the takeover said in court in 2019 that the information came from Dennis Reilley, who is now one of four people nominated by hedge fund Mantle Ridge for Air Products’ board, Semafor reported.

The US dollar is climbing. The greenback has regained almost all the ground it lost against a basket of global currencies since Donald Trump threatened sanctions on any countries that backed away from it.

His comments were aimed at Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, a loose coalition known as the BRICS that, for more than a decade, has been taking steps to build a global financial system that doesn’t revolve around the dollar.

It’s been a decade since the group launched its own development bank, a competitor to the World Bank, and collectively set up a $100 billion bailout fund. But talk of a common currency hasn’t gone far, and most of its members are facing their own domestic economic problems that an alternative to the Western financial order would do little to help, said Joe Brusuelas, global economist at accounting and advisory firm RSM.

“We’re 10 years into this idea and there’s still no there there,” Brusuelas said.

The dollar accounts for 58% of foreign exchange reserves, and while that’s down slightly in recent years, the slack has been picked up by allied currencies like the Japanese yen and British pound. Chinese renminbi has actually fallen to 2.1% of reserves from a peak of 2.8% in 2022 — despite Beijing shoveling its currency into developing economies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America through central-bank swap lines.

“The dollar is a trusted instrument, if sometimes not well liked,” Brusuelas said. Hopes among emerging economies for an alternative are “more aspiration than reality.”

ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT: The IMF notes that countries that might be dumping dollars are also likely not to report their holdings of foreign reserves to the organization, which doesn’t have visibility into about one quarter of all global currency reserves.

Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times (and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson’s former boss). ‘Gambling Man,’ his book on SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son, will be published on Jan. 21 by One Signal.

After Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee, deputy campaign manager Rob Flaherty turned to sports to reach those who aren’t obsessed with politics, he told Semafor’s Max Tani.

The campaign’s failure to completely crack the sports sphere was, to Flaherty, ominous. “When it’s not cool to talk about politics,” he said, “you’re kind of afraid of the audience.”