Business

1. Europe knuckles under
2. Shooting in New York
3. Econ data dump
4. How old media got out-Foxed
5. Syngenta’s farm boy

A tokenization turducken … Sanity prevails in naming of Warner Bros. split

The shooting at Blackstone’s global headquarters is a tragedy that will unnerve the business community in New York and beyond. The clearest picture so far is that a Las Vegas man, a mentally ill former football player angry about the NFL’s handling of concussions, drove across the country, shot his way into a Midtown office building where the league has offices, and ended up on a floor housing the building’s owner and property manager. His victims included a Blackstone executive and a New York City police officer.

When a UnitedHealth insurance executive was gunned down in Midtown in December, companies tightened their security. Executives pulled back from public engagements, especially in uncontrolled environments.

But the 33rd floor of a Midtown skyscraper isn’t supposed to be an uncontrolled environment. Security in these buildings is tight. Entrances off elevator banks are controlled by key cards — measures aimed at keeping corporate assets in, not shooters out. Monday’s gunman shot his way in with an M4 assault rifle, police said.

When Blackstone expanded its lease at 345 Park Ave. last year, it was seen as a vote of confidence in commercial real estate, a sector in which Blackstone itself has invested billions of dollars, and a bet on the return of a vibrant, in-office culture. That stretch of Park Avenue and the glass towers across town at Hudson Yards are home to many more investment and law firms than Wall Street itself. Modern turnstiles and access codes — plus the increased presence of uniformed police officers, like the one shot and killed yesterday — made them feel safe.

CEOs, landlords, and police will now have to rebuild that feeling or risk losing ground in the return-to-office fight. As John Torres, a former Homeland Security official who works at the security firm Guidepost Solutions, told me this morning: “People don’t want to work in a police state, but they want to feel safe.”

EU “submits” to keep US customers

President Donald Trump muscled the European Union, the US’ biggest trading partner, into a deal that disappointed many in the bloc. The EU committed to importing $750 billion worth of American energy over the next three years — spending for which neither the supply nor the infrastructure exists, Semafor’s Tim McDonnell writes. Still, the bloc’s concessions reflect a changed economic world order and the dimming of the TACO trade, as European negotiators weighed the risk of being cut off from US consumers.

France’s prime minister called the EU’s trade deal a “submission,” while the party leader of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen described it as “damage control.” Von der Leyen herself defended the deal with resignation: “We should not forget it keeps access to the American market.” The euro had its worst day against the dollar since May.

Some US actors are displeased, too. The deal framework doesn’t address taxes that Europe assesses on digital services like smartphone apps — “a significant missed opportunity,” wrote an analyst at a trade group backed by Microsoft, Meta, and Apple.

Shooting rattles New York

New York’s deadliest shooting in more than two decades shattered rush hour in a neighborhood packed with workers from finance, accounting, and law. Four people, including Blackstone executive Wesley LePatner and NYPD officer Didarul Islam, were killed in the shooting at 345 Park Ave., which also houses the NFL and consulting firm KPMG.

“Words cannot express the devastation we feel,” Blackstone said in a statement, describing LePatner as “brilliant, passionate, warm, generous, and deeply respected.” The firm’s offices remain closed.

Mayor Eric Adams said the suspected gunman intended to target the NFL, but entered the wrong elevator and arrived at the offices of Rudin Management, the New York real estate dynasty that owns the building. Police found a note referencing traumatic brain injuries, which the NFL has been under pressure for years to address, on the shooter’s body, Adams told MSNBC.

The shooting will also scramble the New York City mayoral race, where safety and quality-of-life issues have squared off with economic opportunity and inequality for prime billing. Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani is cutting short a trip to Uganda to return to the city, his campaign said.

All eyes on new economic data

A wave of fresh economic data this week may finally bring a bit of clarity that policymakers and investors have been desperately seeking. Numbers on unemployment claims, new hiring, consumer sentiment, and US GDP should sharpen an economic picture that has so far been a partisan Rorschach test, with the White House and its critics clinging to their masts and investors, unable to discern much, continuing to nervously buy. Who is buying what, at what price, and why are questions that have remained puzzlingly hard to answer in the four months since “Liberation Day.”

US stocks hit fresh highs on Monday before retreating slightly ahead of quarterly results from tech giants that may provide some ballast for the AI hype. The IMF said today that it expects the global economy to grow 3% this year, up from 2.8% in April. Also due out this week is Census Bureau data showing the US’ trade balance and corporate inventories ahead of Trump’s Aug. 1 deadline for fresh tariffs to go into effect.

How Fox got ahead on the big media future

For a glimpse of the coming consolidation in digital media, take a look at Fox. With deals for the Ruthless podcast, Dave Portnoy’s Barstool Sports, and Red Seat Ventures (the ad machine behind Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson, and Piers Morgan), Fox is creating a template for big media to navigate the world of independent creators, Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote Sunday.

“In the past, a lot of linear networks have needed exclusive deals to own the talent — but the creator economy doesn’t work like that,” Fox executive Paul Cheesbrough told Semafor. It’s a remarkable turnaround for Fox, which was seen as dangerously small when it sold off its studio in 2019. But that size has allowed it to dive decisively into new media while Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast muddle through corporate spinoffs.

That studio sale, to Disney, was struck at the peak of the market, opening the possibility that Fox will have both smartly top-ticked old media and bottom-ticked new media.

Room for disagreement: Comcast’s expensive and buzzy plunge into new media a decade ago yielded little.

Syngenta eyes IPO

Can an Illinois farm boy take a Swiss company controlled by Beijing public in Hong Kong? Syngenta CEO Jeff Rowe is going to try.

“We missed the window,” Rowe told my colleague Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson about the company’s scrapped plans to list in 2023 on Shanghai’s main board. Pulling the plug after regulatory delays had been one of Rowe’s first decisions as CEO. “Our shareholder wasn’t very happy.” That would be ChemChina, which bought Syngenta in 2016 in an agricultural megamerger, and whose ownership has brought political headaches for Syngenta in the US.

Rowe said Syngenta is “on pace” for a listing late next year after cutting jobs and improving cash flow. New York is effectively off-limits to a Chinese-controlled firm, a lesson learned by fast-fashion company Shein in its tortured quest to list. That leaves Hong Kong and London, and a Syngenta IPO would be coveted by either. The UK’s Starmer government is on a mission to defend the London Stock Exchange’s global position. Hong Kong, meanwhile, has leapfrogged both NYSE and Nasdaq for new listings this year.

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➚ BUY: US. Spain’s prime minister said he backed the EU’s trade deal “without any enthusiasm,” while one European newsletter called Monday “Humiliation Day.”

➘ SELL: UPS. Shares fell 10% this morning after the company reported weak earnings and warned the economic picture was too fuzzy to give investors a financial forecast. Pressure is building on CEO Carol Tomé, who cut jobs and slashed low-margin Amazon deliveries.

⇌ HOLD: UBS. The Swiss bank is ordering bankers to stop shilling risky currency products that forced it to make apology payments to clients.

Companies & Deals

• Silicon tally: Design software company Figma is seeking an IPO valuation of as much as $18.8 billion — not quite the $20 billion Adobe was offering in 2022, but a big deal for venture firms needing a win lately.
• Station stop: Norfolk Southern can walk away from its $72 billion sale to Union Pacific scot-free, while Union Pacific has to pay $2.5 billion if it finds another merger partner. The unusual setup — buyers are usually more worried about getting left at the altar than targets — suggests that the M&A machinations in the US railroad industry may not be done.
• De Novo: Novo Nordisk’s brand-new CEO already has problems. It’s a remarkable reversal for the Danish pharma giant, which launched the GLP-1 race and was nearly undone by it. Ozempic made Novo the most valuable company in Europe before competition bounced its chief executive.
• Penny-wise, pound-foolish? The corporate governance world is pushing back against UK money-transfer company Wise’s plan to relist in the US. The move would entail extending a controlled-share structure that would have expired next year for another decade.
• Goliath vs. Davids: JPMorgan plans to start charging fintech apps for access to its customers’ data, which would undermine startups’ entire business model. Will customers push back and insist that their data is their own?

Watchdogs

• Pound of flesh: UK star economist Thomas Piketty is urging Prime Minister Keir Starmer to introduce a wealth tax on estates worth £10 million and up. Several billionaires have threatened to leave the country over recent tax changes for non-domiciled residents.
• Everything is IP: The US government may start charging patent applicants new fees based on the potential worth of their inventions, an overhaul meant to raise new revenue that is already being interpreted as a tax on innovation, The Wall Street Journal reported. Biotech stocks fell on the idea, which one patent attorney called “catastrophically stupid.”
• Ivy envy: Harvard may offer the Trump administration up to $500 million to settle its investigations, more than twice what Columbia paid, The New York Times reported.

Markets

• Plus ça change: Short sellers lost $2.5 billion in July betting against Kohl’s, Opendoor, Krispy Kreme, and other unlikely meme stocks.

It’s a piece of conventional wisdom on the new American right that Trump struggled in his first term because he hired the wrong people.

Trump’s most passionate supporters weren’t going to make that mistake again in 2024, Semafor’s Ben Smith writes. They created initiatives like American Moment, Project 2025, and others aimed at grooming and credentialing a cadre of MAGA appointees. And yet — just as Trump often ignored his conventional advisers in the first term, he’s stunned loyalists by sweeping aside many of these MAGA appointees in 2025.