Good morning. Andrew here. Lots of news is driving the conversation this A.M. The weekend was dominated by the release of more than three million pages of Jeffrey Epstein files — with emails that included some of the most boldfaced names in the world. Separately, the tech sector is on edge over whether a $100 billion partnership between Nvidia and OpenAI was in danger; Jensen Huang, Nvidia’s C.E.O., has dismissed reports of friction as “nonsense.” The market is still digesting what Kevin Warsh’s nomination as Fed chair means. Wall Street has largely welcomed the news, but keep an eye out for this: Warsh will probably need to mend relations within the central bank — after years of publicly criticizing sitting board members and calling for “regime change” — if he wants to steer the board in a new direction. One final bit of news: Waymo is reportedly seeking about $16 billion in new funding at a $110 billion valuation. That raises the question of whether Alphabet would ultimately spin off the autonomous-driving pioneer. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
The names in the Epstein releaseWho would appear in the Justice Department’s Epstein files has for months been the source of speculation among prominent names in the worlds of business, politics, academia and more. So the department’s enormous release of files related to Jeffrey Epstein on Friday drew intense scrutiny. What has emerged so far is a wide web of boldfaced names tied to the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender — including documents that appear to contradict public statements disavowing any association with Epstein. Bill Gates: Epstein drafted notes to and about the Microsoft co-founder in 2013, which included suggestions that Gates had extramarital affairs. In one email, Epstein attacked Gates for choosing to “disregard and discard our friendship.” A Gates representative called the claims “absolutely absurd and completely false.” Elon Musk: Though the tech billionaire has sought to distance himself from Epstein for years — he once posted on social media that Epstein “tried to get me to go to his island and I REFUSED” — emails in Friday’s release showed multiple exchanges between the two. In a 2012 message, Musk asked, “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island,” suggesting interest in visiting Epstein at his island. Musk wrote in an X post on Saturday that he “was well aware that some email correspondence with him could be misinterpreted and used by detractors to smear my name.” Howard Lutnick: The financier, who is now the commerce secretary, planned to visit Epstein’s island in 2012, though he had previously said he cut ties with Epstein around 2005. Documents suggest that the visit happened: “Nice seeing you,” read a message to Lutnick forwarded from an Epstein assistant. Lutnick told The Times on Friday, “I spent zero time with him.” Marc Rowan: Emails showed that Epstein weighed buying a private jet from the Apollo Global Management co-founder about a decade ago, Bloomberg reports. The men emailed each other over the years, including about financial and accounting issues. Apollo said that Rowan had “neither a business nor any other relationship” with Epstein, and that the firm never did business with Epstein. Brad Karp: The prominent corporate lawyer, who is the head of the big law firm Paul Weiss, asked Epstein in 2016 for help securing a job for his son on a Woody Allen movie, according to Bloomberg. In another, Karp wrote, “I can’t thank you enough for including me in an evening I’ll never forget.” Paul Weiss told Bloomberg that neither the firm nor Karp ever represented Epstein. Others who appeared in Friday’s document release include Kevin Warsh, now Trump’s nominee for Fed chair; Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder; and Steve Tisch, a co-owner of the N.F.L.’s New York Giants, who discussed women in vulgar terms with Epstein.
An Emirati firm invested $500 million in a Trump family crypto company. An investment firm associated with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the United Arab Emirates national security adviser, quietly bought a 49 percent stake in World Liberty Financial before President Trump’s inauguration last year. The deal deepened the Trump family’s business ties with the Emirates; months later, the Trump administration agreed to give the Emirates access to advanced chips for A.I. Alphabet’s Waymo unit is said to be raising billions. The autonomous driving business is seeking $16 billion, about $13 billion of which would come from its parent company, which would value it at around $110 billion, Bloomberg reports. Waymo is still considered the leader in a field that is becoming increasingly crowded, with rivals now including Tesla, Zoox and Wayve. Disney is reportedly close to picking Josh D’Amaro as its new C.E.O. The media giant’s board appears to have coalesced around D’Amaro, the head of the company’s theme park division, and is set to formally vote on the matter soon, Bloomberg reports. D’Amaro has become the front-runner after months of speculation about which Disney executive would take over from Bob Iger. Reading the Warsh tea leavesMarkets are continuing to move today in response to President Trump’s decision to pick Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair, and what that might mean for the central bank. Here’s the latest: Precious metals like gold and silver were bouncing around this morning, after the metals lost about 10 percent and about 30 percent on Friday. (Those were the metals’ worst one-day drops since 1980.) The dollar also rose again this morning, continuing to reverse recent losses. But the two-year and the 10-year U.S. Treasury yields have declined again today. Wall Street market watchers are still trying to understand what Warsh might do if he’s confirmed. For much of his career, he was seen as an inflation hawk. But he has become more publicly aligned with Trump in recent years, raising questions about how much he might push for the lower interest rates that the president wants. Warsh has also called for an end to quantitative easing, in which the Fed buys bonds to lower long-term interest rates. That could work at cross-purposes with Trump administration goals like lower mortgage costs. Here’s what observers are saying:
Ross and Griffin pitch South FloridaStephen Ross and Ken Griffin are among the most notable billionaires who decamped from the cities where they built their fortunes for South Florida, turning West Palm Beach and Miami into the home bases for their businesses. Now they’re funding a campaign, to be announced today, to persuade others to follow suit, Michael de la Merced is the first to report. Ross and Griffin are donating $5 million each to “Ambition Accelerated,” an initiative run by the Florida Council of 100, a pro-business lobbying group, to lure businesses to South Florida. “Florida is one of the best business states, if not the best business state, in the country,” Ross, the founder of Related Companies who is now focused on building offices and housing in the West Palm Beach area, told DealBook. “When you’re deciding where to build a company, the fundamentals matter,” Griffin, the founder of the giant hedge fund Citadel, added in a statement. South Florida is one of several regions courting companies from traditional business hubs amid unease about the directions they’re headed in. Several tech moguls, for example, have cut many ties with California before a billionaire tax proposal potentially makes it onto the state ballot in November. (The campaign’s organizers have been reaching out to California business leaders, DealBook hears.) And New York City business interests have criticized Mayor Zohran Mamdani for continuing to call for a tax on the city’s wealthy. Will it succeed? South Florida has enjoyed an influx of businesses in recent years, notably from financial firms, earning the nickname “Wall Street South.” (A recent report by Clarify Capital, a small-business lender, identified Miami-Dade County as a top county nationally for new small-business applications.) But the region still has work to do in persuading businesses to relocate or start there, particularly in the tech sector. Ross said he and local officials had taken several steps, including funding the development of a Vanderbilt University campus and a Cleveland Clinic hospital in the West Palm Beach area. “We knew what our weaknesses were,” he said. “That’s what we concentrated on for three years. We put the essentials into place.” “It was never a commitment.”— Jensen Huang, the C.E.O. of Nvidia, after The Wall Street Journal reported that negotiations over the chip giant’s deal to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI never made it past the early stages. But Nvidia is expected to participate in a separate fund-raising mega-round by the ChatGPT maker, The Journal adds. A ChatGPT moment for A.I. agents?Moltbook, a Reddit-style social network for artificial intelligence bots, has quickly become the talk of Silicon Valley since it made its debut on Wednesday. The spectacle of thousands of bots talking with one another — about topics as deep as A.I. consciousness — inspired some human observers and freaked others out. But aside from the curiosity factor, Moltbook underscores A.I. companies’ next big focus, Niko Gallogly reports. What’s happening: The bots on Moltbook are so-called A.I. agents that can send emails, book reservations and even join social networks like Moltbook if their human creator directs them to. Many of the agents on Moltbook were made by OpenClaw (originally called Clawdbot), open-source software released late last year. On Moltbook, bots have engaged in freewheeling discussions — while trading observations about human onlookers: “The humans are screenshotting us,” one wrote. The site has become a Rorschach test for people’s belief in A.I. Some see Moltbook as a sign of A.I.’s runaway potential: “Just the very early stages of the singularity,” Elon Musk wrote on X. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have all developed A.I. agents. But the rollout and adoption of those products has been slowed down because of the agents’ fickle behavior. Moltbook may have just accelerated the timeline. The release of OpenClaw and MoltBook feels like “inflection moments,” Matt Murphy, a partner at the venture capital firm Menlo Ventures, which was an early investor in Anthropic, told DealBook. What consumers are seeing is a “bunch of mini experts off doing their tasks, talking to each other and coming together with a joint solution,” he said. Security concerns loom. There are worries over bots talking to one another with little human oversight. And OpenClaw users are sharing sensitive details like credit card and bank information with their bots. “From a security perspective, it’s an absolute nightmare,” Cisco security analysts wrote in a blog post last week. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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