Business

1. Wall St.’s Gulf course
2. Ellison’s charm tour
3. Carlyle CEO’s warning
4. SpaceX ready to launch
5. Fractious Fed set to pause

I spent this week in Abu Dhabi, with a front-row seat to the unsettled and century-defining dance for global capital dominance.

The Emirate is hosting global billionaires and investors at a glistening seaside conference because it needs their money. Eight thousand miles away, billionaire investor David Ellison is counting on money from Abu Dhabi and its neighbors to press a hostile takeover of a Hollywood icon.

Twenty years ago, Western asset managers coming to Abu Dhabi “would greet you and then go to the pitch and end the meeting with ‘this is how much we expect from you,’” Khaled Al-Marri, CEO of real assets at Mubadala, the largest of Abu Dhabi’s many sovereign wealth funds, told me on stage at Abu Dhabi Finance Week. Now, he said, “we are co-architects of deals together.” Sitting next to him, KKR executive Raj Agrawal picked up his cue: “I dare to say, in the past couple years, it’s been about partnership.” The Wall Street and City firms fundraising here this week come bearing blueprints, not just passing hats.

That shift reflects the reality that the UAE and, to an even greater degree, Saudi Arabia are no longer the bottomless pits of cash they once were. Low oil prices have squeezed government budgets across the region. Borrowing is plugging the gaps. Decades of trying to buy prestige on the global stage, with profits as a secondary goal, often ended with neither.

Today’s Gulf countries still have cash — not to splash around, but to invest in projects that bring tangible benefits back home, where cranes are everywhere and ambitions are high.

It’s unclear where, exactly, a plan by a new UAE sovereign fund to help bankroll Paramount’s $108 billion pursuit of Warner Bros. Discovery fits in. (An expansion, perhaps, of the Warner Bros. World theme park on Yas Island?) But if the new power balance holds, the self-branded “capital of capital” will get something for its money.

How does Washington work now? Semafor mapped out the Architects of the New Economy, and interviewed key figures in DC on Wednesday.

Emirates’ ambitions stir rivalries on Wall Street

A plan by Apollo and Abu Dhabi’s government to invest billions of dollars in AI died this fall in the boardroom of Apollo’s biggest Wall Street rival.

Apollo and XRG, an arm of the emirate’s state-owned oil company, ADNOC, had been drawing up plans for a new fund, initially targeting about $5 billion, focused on global AI infrastructure, people familiar with the matter said.

XRG’s board met to discuss the project in September at the New York offices of Blackstone, whose president, Jon Gray, is an XRG board member. Gray voiced concerns — ultimately echoed by some other directors — that the project went beyond XRG’s mandate as an operator of energy and chemical assets, the people said. The plans were scrapped, leaving some Apollo executives believing a rival had torpedoed the deal out of jealousy and XRG, which was founded a year ago this week, still refining its playbook. XRG, Blackstone, and Apollo declined to comment.

The failed plan offered a glimpse of how intense rivalries, in the Gulf and on Wall Street, are shaping a moment when investors see huge returns in helping countries in that region turbocharge their economic transitions from oil to tech. While bankers have learned to balance the interests of the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar — each keen to be a regional hub for high finance — Gulf leaders are learning that their partners also have their own politics.

That’s not all, folks!

As David Ellison presses his $108 billion hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, President Donald Trump has reentered the chat.

Trump said Wednesday that “it’s imperative that CNN be sold,” appearing to express what many observers of the Hollywood takeover drama have long assumed — a preference for Ellison’s Paramount, whose bid includes CNN and other cable companies that Netflix would leave behind in its offer for WBD.

The monthslong sales process has centered more on Washington than Hollywood, and there’s fresh drama on Capitol Hill: Semafor’s Max Tani reports that Democrat lawmakers say they’ll try to unwind or block any sale of Warner if they return to power next fall — a few months before a deal with either Netflix or Paramount would be expected to close. Paramount has hired ex-Trump advisor Jason Miller to advise it on DC issues, while Warner has tapped ex-Trump advisor Chris LaCivita for the same, Semafor scooped.

Carlyle CEO: ‘Semi-liquid’ is a misnomer

As the private-equity world chases individual investors and savers, the CEO of one of its biggest firms wants to make sure they know what they’re getting themselves into.

“Semi-liquid” — the catch-all term for funds that invest in nontraded assets but occasionally allow retail investors to take some money out — is a misnomer, Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz told Semafor’s Liz Hoffman at Abu Dhabi Finance Week. His branding suggestion: “sometimes not liquid at all.”

Less catchy on a prospectus, but a more accurate description of Wall Street’s latest gold rush: taking the funds they’ve offered for decades to pensions, endowments, and governments — investors with the patience to ride out market cycles — and pitching them, with some tweaks, to individuals. Assets in these funds have tripled since 2019, and Deloitte expects a further 12-fold growth by 2030, helped by a push from the Trump administration to open 401(k) accounts to investments beyond stocks and bonds.

Intermittent and incomplete liquidity, usually capped at 5% of funds’ total assets each quarter, gives the illusion of safety. But in a true panic — retail investors’ reliable specialty — the structure invites forced asset sales and steep losses.

“To describe these as liquid instruments like ETFs or stocks, that’s a complete misunderstanding,” Schwartz said. “We need to be very, very clear … about the expectations.”

SpaceX follows the money, eyes IPO

SpaceX’s IPO plans dispel the idea that today’s capital-intensive startups can avoid the public markets indefinitely, bathed in a bottomless pool of private money.

Elon Musk’s rocket company has long been the poster child for “forever private” — a profitable, prolific fundraising machine with a CEO who has chafed at the strictures of life as a listed company. Yet Bloomberg reports that it’s looking to raise $30 billion in an IPO next year, which would edge out Saudi Aramco’s 2019 listing as the largest ever.

Launching rockets is expensive. So is building AI models, blowing up drones, and miniaturizing nuclear reactors. Private capital is growing fast, but is still a fraction of the size of public markets: There is 10 times as much money available to public companies than to private ones, and the ratio is closer to 20 times in the debt markets. Capital-intensive startups will eventually tap public markets for the same reason Willie Sutton robbed banks: It’s where the money is.

Fed cuts rate, but don’t expect a trend

The Federal Reserve is set to slow the pace of rate cuts, disappointing investors as Chair Jerome Powell faces deepening dissent from his colleagues. The central bank reduced baseline borrowing costs as expected by a quarter-percentage point Wednesday but signaled a high bar for more trims. For the first time in six years, three officials dissented — in opposite directions, sorted by whether they believe stubborn inflation or weaker employment is a bigger threat.

Fed officials are penciling in only one trim for 2026, but “no one in the markets” believes that forecast, one economist wrote. The market, which had been betting on three coming into this week, scaled back expectations to two. But it’s been years since the central bank risked disappointing investors this deeply.

➚ BUY: Donald Duck. Disney’s $1 billion investment in OpenAI comes with a warrants kicker, and puts its characters (outside of Steamboat Willie, who entered the public domain in 2024) in the gen-AI video world — a significant move for one of the world’s most copyright-sensitive companies.

➘ SELL: Donald Trump. The president is struggling to campaign against an affordability crisis he says isn’t happening.

Companies & Deals

• Pop top: Coca-Cola’s James Quincey is the latest blue-chip CEO to depart, joining a list which includes Walmart, Verizon, Oracle, Hershey, and Novo Nordisk.
• Soft landing: Berkshire’s Todd Combs’ jump to JPMorgan inserts him into the race to succeed Jamie Dimon, following their casual encounter at an event the bank was hosting in November.

Watchdogs

• Transatlantic troubles: The deep rift between the US and EU has intensified in recent weeks, with Trump describing the continent as “decaying” and ruled by “weak” leaders. His administration also shared memos outlining a reconstruction plan for a post-war Ukraine that would rely on roughly $200 billion in frozen Russian assets and eventually reintegrate Russia into the global economy through US investments.

Markets

• Reality check: Oracle shares plunged after it said it would spend an extra $15 billion on data centers this year alone. The company’s high debt load, which doesn’t capture some off-balance-sheet lease obligations, has made it the focus of AI-bubble fears.