Tag: Hoffman

Andrew here. With the federal indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey, Trump is now clearly moving against his enemies. Among the high-profile names on his list are two titans of business: the billionaire philanthropist George Soros (whose former protégé Scott Bessent is Trump’s Treasury secretary) and the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, both of whom are prolific Democratic donors. He spoke about going after them openly in the White House on Thurday.

During past administrations, C.E.O.s in America showed a willingness to speak out against the president or his policies. Do Trump’s latest moves make it more fraught to do so? We have more on this, and other news below.

Comey may not be the last

President Trump has gotten his way, securing a federal indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director and a longtime political opponent, despite concerns within the Justice Department over the case.

The question is who comes next.

Trump has already named potential targets: the billionaires George Soros and Reid Hoffman, both prolific Democratic donors, plus Democratic officials like Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.

The Comey indictment came only after Trump put an ally in charge of the case. Lindsey Halligan, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, secured two charges from a grand jury before a statute of limitations ran out. Halligan, who has never prosecuted a federal case, failed to secure a third charge.

Trump has already weighed in, declaring “JUSTICE IN AMERICA!” on social media.

But the charges came after Halligan replaced Erik Siebert, who had privately expressed misgivings about the strength of the case, as U.S. attorney. Other Trump officials, including Attorney General Pam Bondi (who The Times reported had also raised concerns about the case), publicly praised the charges.

Who else faces scrutiny:

• Soros, whose Open Society Foundations nonprofit is explicitly the target of potential Justice Department investigations, The Times reported. Long a boogeyman on the right for his funding of liberal causes, the billionaire has faced heightened legal pressure in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, though the Open Society Foundations said in a statement that its activities are “peaceful and lawful.” It also decried “politically motivated attacks on civil society.”

• Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder, venture capitalist and longtime Democratic donor who helped bankroll private lawsuits against Trump. Hoffman has stayed relatively quiet about politics since the presidential election.

“I hear names of some pretty rich people that are radical left people,” Trump said on Thursday in specifically naming Soros and Hoffman, and suggesting more may come under fire. “They’re bad, and we’re going to find out if they are funding these things.”

Trump has shown he’s willing to take the gloves off this time around. Remember that his administration has extracted millions in settlements from law firms, pulled billions in federal funding from Harvard, fired officials at independent federal agencies, moved to oust a Fed governor on mortgage fraud allegations and essentially threatened broadcasters over content Trump didn’t like.

Several legal experts have said that the cases against Comey — as well as a mortgage fraud investigation against James — is flawed. Even so, the indictment is already sending a powerful message, and corporate America is already on edge.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

Microsoft cuts off the Israeli military from some cloud services. The U.S. tech giant found that Israel’s Defense Ministry was misusing its products to hold surveillance data on Palestinians, including about millions of phone calls. The move makes Microsoft one of the first tech companies to remove or disable services to Israel since the start of the war in Gaza. It comes as the U.N. announced the need for greater global oversight over the risks and opportunities of A.I., including mass surveillance.

All living Fed chairs ask the Supreme Court to protect bank independence. Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen (as well as the former Treasury secretaries Larry Summers and Hank Paulson) filed a court briefing urging the justices to allow the Fed governor Lisa Cook to remain in her job while she fights President Trump’s move to fire her over mortgage fraud allegations. Their argument hits at a deep investor concern: Research shows that lower inflation and lower long-term interest rates are features of independent central banks.

NBC warns some viewers that they could lose “Sunday Night Football.” NBCUniversal ran ads criticizing YouTube TV in the midst of fraught negotiations over what the Google-owned streaming service would pay for NBC programming. The network threatened a blackout of its programming — which also includes N.B.A. basketball and the “Real Housewives” franchise — on YouTube TV unless an agreement is reached by Thursday.

Tariffs come for the kitchen sink

A new wave of Trump tariffs are coming, and fast.

They’re set to go into effect on Oct. 1, which investors had already circled in their diaries as the start of a potential government shutdown. But what’s striking is how broad these new levies are, targeting pharmaceuticals, semi trucks, and kitchen cabinets and furnishings, including, yes, kitchen sinks.

The breakdown:

• Branded and patented pharmaceuticals face a 100 percent tariff.

• Kitchen cabinets and bathroom vanities are set for a 50 percent levy.

• Upholstered furniture will be hit by a 30 percent charge.

• Heavy trucks will be charged 25 percent.

Are semiconductors next? The administration is said to be formulating a plan to use tariffs to sharply reduce corporate America’s reliance on foreign-made chips and bolster domestic production, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The levies could land unevenly. For example, President Trump said that drugmakers building U.S. factories (which he said included those that are “‘breaking ground’ and/or ‘under construction’”) would be exempt.

Worth noting: The trade deal struck this summer between the U.S. and the E.U. set a 15 percent tariff on imports including brand-name medicines. Olof Gill, a European Commission spokesman, said on Friday that the agreement would protect European importers from these new taxes, but the White House didn’t clarify that point on Thursday.

The new tariffs could complicate the Fed’s job. Levies that drive up the price of patented drugs are expected to increase Americans’ health care costs. They come as inflation remains well above the central bank’s 2 percent target. Friday’s Personal Consumption Expenditures report is expected to show that tariffs are beginning to nudge prices higher.

A hot number could also scramble the outlook for interest rates. Fed officials are divided on whether to slow the pace of cuts to bring inflation under control, or take bolder action to revive a slowing labor market.

• Elsewhere in trade: China, historically a major customer of U.S. soybeans, has stopped buying them — and is instead sourcing them from Argentina. That has outraged Republicans, especially as the Trump administration plans a financial backstop for Buenos Aires. That aside, Trump said he would like to use some tariff revenue to help struggling American farmers.

TikTok deal confusion

It looks as if there’s finally a deal to keep TikTok operating in the U.S. But there are already questions about the valuation and one of the principal investors.

The latest: President Trump said on Thursday that “American investors, American companies, great ones” would lead the consortium to take over TikTok’s U.S. operations from its Chinese owner, ByteDance.

But one of the expected backers is the Abu Dhabi-based investment firm MGX. It would also gain a board seat, the latest sign of the Emiratis using their deep pockets and growing ties to the Trump administration to expand their global influence.

Consider:

• The Persian Gulf state has pledged to invest $1.4 trillion in the U.S. over the next 10 years, to not only purchase Boeing jets, but to branch into artificial intelligence quantum computing and more.

• MGX is also a major player in crypto, bringing it closer into Trump’s orbit. This spring it announced a $2 billion investment involving World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Trump family and Zach Witkoff, the son of Trump’s international diplomatic envoy, Steve Witkoff.

• Two weeks later, the White House approved giving the United Arab Emirates access to a vast cache of advanced A.I. chips, a Times investigation revealed, many of which would go to G42, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, who chairs MGX. (There’s no evidence the crypto and chips deals are linked.)

• On Thursday, the Democratic senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan asked inspectors general at the Commerce and State Departments to investigate whether these actions violated ethics rules.

Wall Street is confused, too. Vice President JD Vance, who has led negotiations around TikTok, valued the deal on Thursday at $14 billion. Some analysts had pegged it at closer to $30 billion to $40 billion. The app’s ad revenue alone was estimated at $10 billion last year. In contrast, Snap collected about $5.4 billion in sales last year. Its market capitalization: $14 billion.

“The number’s got to be wrong,” Brent Hill, a technology analyst at Jeffries, told CNBC. “It doesn’t make sense.”

“When the state becomes involved in picking winners and losers, there’s only one way this game ends: All of us lose.”

— Ken Griffin. The billionaire investor and longtime Republican donor, who recently spoke out against President Trump’s efforts to undermine Fed independence, has a new criticism: the Trump administration cutting deals with companies in exchange for tariff relief.

Talking A.I. With the C.E.O. of DLA Piper

Every week, we’re asking a chief executive how he or she uses generative artificial intelligence. Frank Ryan of the law firm DLA Piper, which has about 4,500 lawyers in 40 offices, told DealBook that the company was developing its own A.I. tools. His answers have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How do you use A.I. personally?

I had a family member undergo surgery, and I took all of his results and put them into Perplexity — it was remarkable.

What directives have you given your employees on A. I.?

You have to embrace new technology — you just do. We have 20 or so data scientists. We have a group developing our own technology.

The public large language models provide you with some helpful responses. But given the precision that we require and that our clients require, we need something a bit more specific. So we’ve created our own data sets to look at different needs. We’ve got a great team that does red-teaming [trying to break through the safeguards of A.I. programs in an effort to identify their vulnerabilities]. We look at whether or not there are hallucinations.

We’ve got great tools on both the transaction and the litigation sides of our business that try to predict outcomes rather effectively.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

Technology and artificial intelligence

• “Spending on A.I. Is at Epic Levels. Will It Ever Pay Off?” (WSJ)

• Having laid off thousands in recent months, Accenture has warned employees that it plans to “exit” those who they feel cannot be retrained for the A.I. age. (FT)

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