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The presence of business leaders at a White House event for Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman underscores a deepening of U.S. and Saudi ties.
Andrew Ross SorkinBernhard WarnerSarah KesslerMichael J. de la MercedNiko GalloglyBrian O’Keefe and
Andrew here. Breaking news: Larry Summers said he was resigning from OpenAI’s board, as he steps back from public commitments amid the revelation of emails he traded with Jeffrey Epstein. “Larry has decided to resign from the OpenAI board of directors, and we respect his decision,” the A.I. giant said in a statement. Summers added that he was “grateful for the opportunity to have served, excited about the potential of the company.”
It’s perhaps the biggest fallout yet for Summers from his association with Epstein. But it leaves open a big question: Can he still teach at Harvard, as he has said he intends to?
Below, we also explore whether Big Tech is about to go on an M.&A. spree after Meta defeated the F.T.C. in court. And we’re waiting on Nvidia’s results after the market close on Wednesday, which could determine where the stock market moves next.
The red carpet optics coming from the White House on Tuesday night underscored a deepening of ties between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, including several deals with big price tags.
Hours after President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s de facto ruler, talked up the prospect of the kingdom investing (a possibly unrealistic) $1 trillion in the U.S., captains of industry attended a White House gala with the Saudi royal.
It is the crown prince’s first U.S. visit since the 2018 killing of the Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, which U.S. intelligence determined the prince approved. But Western corporate executives have been returning to the oil-rich nation in the years since.
Tuesday’s dinner appeared to relegate that to old news. Hours earlier in the Oval Office, the president angrily brushed aside a journalist’s question about the intelligence implicating the crown prince, saying, “Things happen.”
The event further reset diplomatic ties — Saudi Arabia is now designated a major non-NATO ally — a Trump imperative that appears to be good for his family business, too.
The U.S.-Saudi meeting allows both countries to claim victories. Trump wants the kingdom, an oil power, to help drive down prices at the pump. Riyadh needs to show it is open for business, especially as it pushes further into artificial intelligence.
Here are some deals that could come out of the gatherings:
The U.S. reportedly plans to greenlight the sale of advanced A.I. chips to Humain, a Saudi A.I. firm founded by the crown prince that is angling to buy Nvidia’s processors, as soon as this week, Bloomberg reports. Tareq Amin, its C.E.O., attended the White House dinner.
Trump said he planned to approve the sale of F-35 fighter jets to Saudi Arabia. Some Pentagon officials have expressed national security concerns over such a deal.
Paramount Skydance’s David Ellison, another guest at the dinner, has held talks with Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund and other big Gulf investors about backing his effort to buy Warner Bros. Discovery, according to The Financial Times.
C.E.O.s and others who were on the invite list include:
Brian Armstrong of Coinbase
Mary Barra of G.M.
Marc Benioff of Salesforce
Albert Bourla of Pfizer
Tim Cook of Apple
Jane Fraser of Citigroup
Jensen Huang of Nvidia
Alex Karp of Palantir
Elon Musk of Tesla and SpaceX
Steve Schwarzman of Blackstone
Vlad Tenev of Robinhood
Mike Wirth of Chevron
Congress votes to approve the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Both chambers voted in near unanimity to release the files on the disgraced financier. But it is unclear if the Justice Department would release them, and President Trump’s order to open an investigation into prominent Democrats with ties to Epstein could delay the matter further.
The Trump administration lends $1 billion to help restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant. The funding, announced by the Energy Department, could provide a power boost for Microsoft’s data centers. Microsoft and Constellation, which owns a unit at Three Mile Island that was closed in 2019, announced a deal to restart the plant last year, as technology companies scrambled to find power for their artificial intelligence expansion.
Hyundai says the U.S. has apologized over the September ICE raid. José Muñoz, the carmaker’s C.E.O., said the company had received an apology over the episode at the Hyundai-LG Energy Solution battery plant in Georgia, where federal agents detained 475 workers. Images of the shackled workers — mostly South Korean — had appeared to threaten Hyundai’s plans for significant investments in U.S. clean energy projects.
Big Tech scored a major win when a federal judge ruled decisively for Meta in a closely watched court battle with the F.T.C. over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
The decision that Facebook’s parent company didn’t create a social media monopoly underscores the government’s challenge in using the courts to rein in or break up technology giants.
The F.T.C. didn’t prove that Meta was or is a monopolist, according to Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. The agency had argued that Facebook bought Instagram (in 2012) and WhatsApp (in 2014) to eliminate budding competitors, citing internal documents by Mark Zuckerberg and others.
But Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said it wasn’t clear then — or now — that Meta controls the social media sector. TikTok, he wrote, “holds center stage as Meta’s fiercest rival.”
U.S. antitrust enforcers have fallen short several times in taking on Big Tech. Boasberg’s decision most likely salts the earth for any appeal by the F.T.C., given that appellate courts will probably defer to his broad definition of the social media market, Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a law professor at Vanderbilt University, told The Times.
Even when federal prosecutors have won, their victory was limited: A different judge ruled that Google operates an illegal search monopoly, but declined to break up that company.
Using the courts to police Big Tech has limits, experts say. Boasberg noted that “the landscape that existed only five years ago,” when the F.T.C. filed its lawsuit, “has changed markedly.”
That could be good news for Amazon and Apple, which face court battles with regulators.
Can Big Tech go shopping for start-ups again? While companies like Meta have devised complicated investment-slash-hiring deals to gain talent, they’ve largely abstained from full-on takeovers in recent years to avoid drawing regulators’ opposition.
That calculus may have changed, with tech giants now potentially deciding “we don’t have to hide what we’re doing,” Samuel Weinstein, a law professor at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, told The Times.
A change in strategy may have arrived just in time, Bloomberg reports, given how much competition companies like Meta now face.
Since 2019, one of OpenAI’s biggest advantages in the artificial intelligence race has been its close relationship with Microsoft, one of the richest technology giants around.
But as OpenAI moves to strike deals with other technology companies, Microsoft is doing the same — and has now reached an agreement with one of the ChatGPT maker’s fiercest rivals.
Microsoft will invest up to $5 billion in Anthropic, the developer of the Claude large language model. Nvidia, the giant chip maker that is also investing in many promising A.I. start-ups (including OpenAI), agreed to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic.
That’s on top of the more than $16 billion in equity that Anthropic has raised this year alone. (Bloomberg reports that the Microsoft and Nvidia checks are part of Anthropic’s next fund-raising round.)
Microsoft has been seeking to diversify its A.I. offerings, something made possible by the recent renegotiation of its partnership with OpenAI. Both companies can now pursue so-called artificial general intelligence, or A.I. as capable as a human brain, independently of each other.
OpenAI now works with the likes of Amazon and Oracle. And Microsoft is offering Azure customers one of the most popular A.I. models, alongside OpenAI’s GPT-5.
But the new investments may raise further concerns about A.I. deal-making. Anthropic has committed to buying $30 billion worth of computing capacity from Microsoft’s Azure service. It also agreed to take up at least one gigawatt’s worth of compute powered by Nvidia’s latest processors.
Tech investors and analysts have noted that deals in the sector look increasingly circular, with investments in A.I. companies from compute and processor providers going to pay for … compute and processors.
Skeptics say those kinds of transactions may be helping to inflate a bubble. Analysts at Deutsche Bank noted on Tuesday that shares in Microsoft and Nvidia didn’t jump significantly on the news, as they might have earlier this year.
The A.I. industry’s latest health check will come later on Wednesday, when Nvidia reports quarterly results. Any slowdown in demand for its processors could have major repercussions for the markets.
Five Democrats on the Senate Banking Committee sent a letter on Tuesday to seven major “buy now, pay later” lenders demanding data about their loan practices and credit reporting cooperation with FICO, the company whose credit scores are used by 90 percent of U.S. lenders, Niko Gallogly is the first to report.
The issue: Pay-later borrowing has exploded in popularity in recent years. There are now an estimated 91.5 million users in the U.S., according to Empower, a financial services firm, with many relying on the loans to finance daily expenses. And a growing number of Americans who use pay-later services made a late payment on one of those loans this year.
Those figures have raised concerns among Democratic lawmakers, who want a clearer view into just how reliant Americans have become on the lenders.
Regulators are in retreat. The senators’ request for information comes after the nation’s consumer protection watchdog, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, said it would not enforce a Biden-era rule that sought to treat pay-later lenders like credit card companies.
Lenders aren’t required to respond. But the committee’s authority to compel companies to testify could act as a powerful incentive. The letter was sent to Affirm, Afterpay, Klarna, PayPal, Sezzle, Splitit and Zip.
In a statement to DealBook, a representative from Affirm said it supported “thoughtful regulation and consistent industry standards that promote transparency for consumers and the flexibility to pay over time without any late fees or junk charges.” It added that it would continue to work with regulators and policymakers.
The other companies did not immediately responded to requests for comment from DealBook.
“Hidden leverage” is a chief concern for lawmakers, said Justin Katz, an economics researcher at Harvard and an author of a paper that showed that pay-later borrowers were more likely to increase their spending. “People are borrowing a lot more than we think,” he added.
Consumer data paints a troubling picture, DealBook reported in May. Pay-later default rates have grown to 41 percent on Wednesday from 34 percent in 2024, according to a survey by LendingTree.
And in January, the consumer bureau released a study that found that nearly two-thirds of pay-later loans went to borrowers with lower credit scores.
Even industry insiders are uneasy. Consumers are using pay-later services “to buy something as basic and fundamental as groceries,” Nigel Morris, a co-founder of Capital One and an early Klarna investor, said last week at the Web Summit conference. “I think is a pretty clear indication that a lot of people are struggling.”
Deals
AkzoNobel, the Dutch paint giant, agreed to buy Axalta Coating Systems, an American rival, and list the combined company in the U.S. (Bloomberg)
The activist hedge fund Elliott Investment Management has reportedly built a large stake in the gold miner Barrick, which is weighing a breakup. (FT)
Politics, policy and regulation
“The ‘JPMorgan Boys’ Behind the U.S. Bailout for Argentina” (WSJ)
A federal court blocked Texas’ Republican-friendly congressional redistricting map. (NYT)
Best of the rest
“Wall Street Is Paywalling Your Kids’ Sports” (The Lever)
A broke California town’s proposal to save itself: annex nearly 23,000 acres from a nearby urban project backed by Silicon Valley billionaires. (NYT)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a columnist and the founder of DealBook, the flagship business and policy newsletter at The Times and an annual conference.
Bernhard Warner is a senior editor for DealBook, a newsletter from The Times, covering business trends, the economy and the markets.
Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
Michael J. de la Merced has covered global business and finance news for The Times since 2006.
Niko Gallogly is a Times reporter, covering business for the DealBook newsletter.
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