Tag: Bezos

The C.E.O. inauguration crowd

In a stark display of money and power, the three wealthiest men on the planet lined up on Monday in the Capitol Rotunda to witness Donald Trump being sworn in as the 47th president.

The message was clear: With a president in office who wants to be known as a deal maker, Washington is open for business.

The three men, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, collectively worth close to a trillion dollars, were seated in front of Trump’s cabinet picks and behind his family, creating what might be a hierarchy of influence. (Sundar Pichai, the billionaire head of Google, was between Bezos and Musk.)

The visuals spoke volumes. In contrast, Trump’s inauguration speech, in which he vowed to usher in a “golden age of America” and also took on contentious issues like gender politics, carried few surprises.

Taking note of the conspicuous invitees could reveal a lot about what to expect in Trump’s second term; The Times’s Mike Isaac, Karen Weise, Ryan Mac, Cade Metz, Cecilia Kang and Theodore Schleifer broke it down for DealBook. It was also notable who was relegated to the Siberia section, including the Republican governors Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis. (Here’s a zoomed-in view of the V.I.P. section.)

The inauguration on Monday was a marked contrast to Trump’s first presidential run, when tech titans (and other business leaders) largely ignored him and only reluctantly showed up to a summit after he won the White House.

But since Election Day, a parade of business leaders, especially from the tech sector, have toasted him, many traveling to Mar-a-Lago to show support and curry favor.

Bezos, who clashed with the president in his first term, was among them. He told Andrew at the DealBook Summit in December that he was optimistic about a second Trump presidency. “What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled,” Bezos said.

Tim Cook, Sam Altman and Sergey Brin praised Trump’s victory and pledged money to his inauguration fund. Cook and Brin had prime seats on the dais. Altman, who leads the artificial intelligence juggernaut OpenAI, was bumped to the spillover room.

And then there was Musk. The entrepreneur, who spent over a quarter of a billion dollars to help get Trump elected and is likely to get a West Wing office to run a government-spending task force, was seated closest to the president. At a gathering of Trump supporters at the Capital One Arena in Washington on Monday, Musk drew condemnation for making hand gestures that resembled the Nazi salute.

Also spotted:

• Shou Chew, the C.E.O. of TikTok, was squeezed into the back row next to Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s choice for director of national intelligence. (Joe Rogan was in front of them.)

• Bernard Arnault, the head of LVMH, made the trip along with his daughter, Delphine, and son Alexandre. The luxury goods conglomerate is eager to avert Trump tariffs.

• Dana White, the head of U.F.C. and a new board member at Meta, also had a prime seat.

Notably absent was Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s earliest backers, who hosted a blowout at his Washington mansion this weekend.

HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING

TikTok officially gets a reprieve. President Trump signed an executive order on Monday to delay enforcement of a ban on the popular video app for 75 days, but it’s unclear if that action can override a law that went into effect this weekend. The move effectively allows TikTok to operate in the United States, but Trump announced a twist as he was signing the order: He threatened to impose tariffs on China if Beijing doesn’t approve a TikTok deal.

The European Union hopes to convince Trump to ease A.I. chip curbs. Some European officials plan to press for an unwinding of export restrictions ordered by President Joe Biden that have limited the kinds of computing power that countries like Poland and Portugal can buy, Bloomberg reports.

Costco workers authorize a strike. A union representing 18,000 employees at the third-largest retailer in the U.S. voted to walk out if they didn’t secure a new contract by Jan. 31. Labor organizing surged during the pandemic and continued to climb under the Biden administration; but that could be tested under Trump, who favors pro-business legislation and deregulation.

Executive orders roil the markets

President Trump has promised that his return to office will unleash a bonanza of investing and growth.

But the Trump administration’s first day — a torrent of executive orders that pardoned hundreds of Jan. 6 rioters, threatened to undermine the constitutional provision for birthright citizenship and withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization — gave investors a reminder of his volatile effect on global markets.

The latest: S&P 500 futures were up, and the yield on Treasury bonds were down. But the rally lost steam overnight after Trump threatened to impose 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico as soon as Feb. 1. That remark sent the dollar higher.

It also indicated that the prospect of a Trump trade war, which could hit corporate profits and reignite inflation, was weighing heavily on investors.

Market winners included:

• Chinese stocks. Trump didn’t impose tariffs on Day 1 as he had promised. He instead called for a study that would determine, among other things, whether Beijing had complied with deals struck during Trump’s first term. The move contradicts hawkish comments about China by Scott Bessent, Trump’s pick for Treasury secretary.

• Bank stocks. Investors are betting that sweeping deregulation and lower taxes will be good for business, including by padding lenders’ profits. Shares in big banks, or at least those with little exposure to Mexico and Canada, were up on both sides of the Atlantic this morning.

• Energy stocks. The oil giants Chevron and Exxon Mobil were higher in premarket trading after Trump signed executive orders to pull the country out of the Paris climate accords and open up vast swaths of federal land to drilling and mining. But the price of crude oil dipped on concerns that those policies would greatly increase supplies.

The biggest losers:

• Crypto. Trade in Bitcoin has been especially erratic. It came near a high of $110,000 on Monday, before falling sharply. Notoriously volatile memecoins, including tokens for the president and the first lady, plunged. One culprit: Trump, who has signaled that his administration will loosen regulation around the sector but who made no mention of crypto in his speech on Monday.

• European auto and green energy stocks. Shares in Stellantis, Volkswagen and Mercedes fell on Tuesday, as did those in Orsted, a Danish wind farm developer, after Trump said he would eliminate Biden-era regulations aimed at promoting electric vehicles and halt approvals of new wind farms in federal waters.

The Trump effect at Davos

Executives, bankers and even busy Uber drivers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, were discussing on Monday’s inauguration. There seemed to be two responses to President Trump’s return: excitement and fear.

Crypto executives, technology investors and bankers, all of whom are focused on deregulation, are apparently looking forward to a second Trump term. Others expressed alarm over a possible trade war and how that might affect European unity if Trump tried to broker deals with individual countries.

There was one development that had executives talking. Trump didn’t announce tariffs as part of his flurry of executive orders. Some think that could mean tariffs were a campaign talking point and a bargaining tactic rather than an actual economic policy.

Many said that things felt quieter in Davos than in years past. That could be because of the inauguration in Washington, the snowstorm in New York or the fact that more people were simply planning to arrive later (or some combination of the three.) The weather in the Swiss ski town is a lot milder than usual though, making it easier to go from meeting to meeting.

Some notable sights:

• The embattled TikTok, like dozens of other companies, has a promotional outpost on the Promenade.

• USA House, organized by With Honor, a nonprofit that supports military veterans, is in Davos for the first time. (Its window features a giant bald eagle draped in the American flag.) It will be hosting the U.S. ski team’s Daron Rahlves and Picabo Street on Tuesday.

• The soccer icon David Beckham, the fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg and the Japanese architect Riken Yamamoto were in town to receive Crystal Awards from the World Economic Forum.

• The usual protesters are in Davos, too. Fossil fuel demonstrators splashed paint on Amazon’s outpost — and were briefly handcuffed, DealBook hears.

DOGE’s first cut

Though Elon Musk has long been regarded as the leader of the Trump cost-cutting panel known as the Department of Government Efficiency, he actually had a partner: Vivek Ramaswamy, the investor and right-wing social activist.

No longer.

Ramaswamy is leaving the panel to run for governor of Ohio. But The Times reports that tensions with others in the Trump orbit, particularly with Musk, were a factor in his exit.

It also followed Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments blaming an American culture that venerated “mediocrity over excellence” for top tech companies often hiring foreign-born engineers. People close to Mr. Trump said he was unhappy about Mr. Ramaswamy wading into the online debate over H-1B visas among conservatives, many of whom saw Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments as critical of American workers.

The apparent clash over skilled worker visas underscores how potent that issue has been among Trump allies. While immigration hard-liners favor clamping down on the program, the tech cohort, led by Musk, wants to preserve it. So far, Trump appears to be siding with the H-1B defenders.

Politico reported that while Ramaswamy had told others as late as Saturday that he was still actively involved in the panel, he hadn’t done much work on it since December.

THE SPEED READ

Deals

• Andrea Orcel, the acquisitive C.E.O. of the Italian lender UniCredit, said that he intended to continue his pursuits of an Italian rival, Banco BPM, and of Commerzbank of Germany. (Bloomberg)

• Investors including Brookfield and the Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky have reportedly been invited by Berlin to bid for the state-owned utility Uniper. (Reuters)

Politics and policy

• President Trump picked Caroline Pham, a commissioner at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, as the agency’s acting chair. (Bloomberg)

• “‘We’re running out of time’: GOP already antsy on Trump’s Hill agenda” (Politico)

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