Good morning. Andrew here. We’re taking a deeper look this morning at the fusion industry that is at the center of the Trump Media & Technology Group’s merger with TAE Technologies. We’re also digging into the latest C.P.I. data — and what was omitted in the process of the government collecting that information. And finally, if you have a moment for a longer read, there’s a fascinating Times interview that we highlight in Best of the Rest. It features the woman who was caught with her boss on the Coldplay concert kiss cam. The footage went viral this summer. The back story is much more complicated and nuanced — as life always is — than what was presented in the moment. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
The politics of fusionPresident Trump’s paper wealth has soared by more than $450 million on news that Trump Media & Technology Group, the publicly traded company that counts the president as its biggest shareholder, was merging with TAE Technologies, a privately held fusion technology company. It was the latest in a head-spinning series of pivots by Trump Media, born as the owner of Truth Social in 2021 and which has recently moved into crypto, raising $2.5 billion to invest in Bitcoin. Niko Gallogly breaks down the latest on the deal; what the president stands to gain; and how it may affect the budding fusion industry. Private funding for fusion technology has been on a tear. TAE, which has raised about $1.3 billion in private funding, is one of the oldest and largest fusion start-ups. Fusion is achieved when atoms are forced together under extreme pressure. It has proved much harder to achieve than fission, the kind of reaction used in today’s nuclear reactors. Commonwealth Fusion, which is backed by Bill Gates and has about $2.9 billion in funding, and Helion Energy, which is backed by Sam Altman and has about $1 billion in funding, are two of TAE’s closest U.S. peers by funding.
The funding surge has been driven in part by the artificial intelligence boom, which requires huge amounts of electricity to power data centers. Prominent A.I. leaders like Altman have said fusion is critical for the future of A.I. (Notably, Elon Musk, who is heavily invested in solar, is a skeptic.) But the technology is still not commercially viable. While government researchers have achieved impressive results in recent years, no private company has reached the point where the fusion reaction creates as much energy as it consumes. “It’s great for fusion that people think fusion is going to be on the timeline where it can help with A.I., but I don’t think it is,” Guy Cohen, a senior researcher at Sightline Climate, told DealBook. The U.S. government has taken a back seat to private investors in funding fusion. That approach has come under scrutiny, especially as China has vastly outspent the U.S. Department of Energy’s fusion program. But the Trump administration wants to prioritize fusion. The Department of Energy recently created an Office of Fusion to support commercialization. “Now is the time for the U.S. to make a significant investment, and that means over a billion dollars per year in annual appropriations and a one-time infrastructure investment,” Andrew Holland, the head of the Fusion Industry Association, said last month. That funding could help support the country’s largest fusion companies, including one — Trump Media — that counts the U.S. president as a part owner.
ByteDance signs a deal that would create a U.S. joint venture for TikTok. An agreement had been reached with a group of investors — including Oracle; Silver Lake, a private equity group; and MGX, a state-owned investment firm in Abu Dhabi — that would take over operations such as data protection, algorithm security and content moderation, according to an internal memo from TikTok. (The Chinese company would retain control of e-commerce, advertising and marketing.) It’s not clear if this arrangement would pave the way for an American version of the popular app, but President Trump indicated the deal was an important legal step to avert a U.S. ban. Another mega-merger reshapes Big Law. The firm Hogan Lovells said it reached an agreement to combine with Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, Wall Street’s oldest law firm. Cadwalader has struggled with dozens of departures since pledging to conduct pro bono work to support President Trump’s priorities. The Trump administration suspends the green card lottery after the killings at Brown and M.I.T. Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said that Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, a Portuguese national suspected in the killings of two Brown students and an M.I.T professor, had entered the U.S. through the lottery. The suspension of the lottery, which awards up to 55,000 visas each year, follows a series of steps Trump has taken to curb immigration. Separately, a tip from a user on Reddit led police to the suspect, who was found dead. C.P.I.-dunnoWall Street is still trying to make sense of yesterday’s puzzling Consumer Price Index release, sparking a debate that spread onto social media. White House officials hailed the surprisingly low inflation numbers as a sign that President Trump’s policies were helping to tame price rises. Economists are less certain. Several found issues with how the Bureau of Labor Statistics used patchy price data — the government shutdown interrupted data collection in October and part of November — to calculate that inflation for airfares, apparel, rents and housing costs had dipped last month well below forecasts. The reaction:
Investors appeared to have few doubts about the report. The S&P 500 rallied yesterday, as did bonds. And traders this morning gave roughly 56 percent odds to the prospect of the Fed cutting interest rates again in the first quarter. How the new defense bill may trip up U.S. investorsTucked in the $900 billion defense policy bill that President Trump just signed is a small provision with big implications for American investors: the outbound investment rule. The rule, now enshrined in law, is designed to curb U.S. investment in companies deemed national security risks, a move that China hawks quickly claimed as a win. But major questions remain about how aggressively the White House and the Treasury Department will enforce it, reports Grady McGregor for DealBook. There’s reason for doubt. Trump recently authorized Nvidia to sell advanced H200 chips to China, despite objections from Republicans about helping Chinese tech firms catch up to American peers. “The Nvidia stuff shows that if you’re a big American company who gets a meeting with the president, you can do whatever you want in China,” Derek Scissors, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told DealBook. A recap: The rule is focused on strategically important technologies such as artificial intelligence, semiconductors and quantum computing, and applies to certain “countries of concern” like China. Publicly traded stocks and bonds are generally exempt from the ban, but the rule gives the Treasury Department wide latitude to change the terms. Critics say the rule chills investment. Companies “could just pull back from these markets more broadly,” said Sarah Bauerle Danzman, a political scientist at Indiana University Bloomington. Despite bipartisan support for such investment restrictions, getting such a rule across the finish line has been far from straightforward. President Joe Biden faced significant pushback from industry groups when he authorized outbound investment rules in an executive order in August 2023. Its future was thrown into doubt after the Trump administration in January ordered a comprehensive review of U.S. trade policy, including the outbound investment rule. Supporters in Congress failed three times to make the rules permanent and close loopholes by attaching the provision to must-pass spending bills. The closest effort came in last year’s annual defense bill. Republicans blamed Democratic leadership for the rule’s collapse, while some Democrats, including Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, suggested that Elon Musk’s involvement in budget negotiations, and his desire to protect Tesla’s investments in China, might have contributed to the provision’s failure. Tesla did not respond to DealBook’s request for comment. This time, one stumbling block has been uncertainty on the White House stance, particularly after Trump in January ordered a review of Biden’s outbound investment rule, DealBook hears. The new restrictions come as global investors are clamoring to get in on China’s A.I.-powered stock rally. Shares in Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu are up more than 40 percent this year, helping lift the broad-based MSCI China index.
Talking A.I. with the C.E.O. of TubiEvery week, we’re asking a chief executive how he or she uses artificial intelligence. This week, Anjali Sud, who leads the free streaming service Tubi, told The Times’s Jordyn Holman that she expected the apprenticeship model to change. Her answers have been condensed and edited. How do you use A.I.? I’m only as good as my decision-making and my ability to spot my own blind spots. One of the ways that I love using A.I. chatbots is to be like: “I have a hypothesis or thesis on something. Tell me why I’m wrong. What did I miss?” What have you told your team about using A.I.? We have A.I. change makers on every team who are basically there to help inspire and motivate. It’s Tubi’s job as an employer to help every employee be fluent in A.I. It’s a skill set that we all need to be good at. It’s also really scary and intimidating. We want you to feel like we’re helping you. How do your change makers get people excited about A.I.? We created the Tubi Builders program, where we hire early-career talent, so people with machine-learning degrees. We have 20 of them now. They are very fluent in A.I. tools. What we find is they end up being sort of culture carriers to make it less intimidating. They add value, and then it becomes contagious. Everyone around the team starts to be like: “OK, yeah, that’s great. I start to see the benefits. Let me do more.” We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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