Our interview lineup for the DealBook Summit 2024
We are pleased to announce our lineup for the DealBook Summit, which will be held on Dec. 4 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York. Andrew will host a series of conversations with the biggest newsmakers in the world of business, politics and culture. We hope you can join us in person.
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Sam Altman, co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI
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Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon
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Bill Clinton, 42nd president of the United States and author of “Citizen: My Life After the White House”
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Alex Cooper, host of the “Call Her Daddy” podcast and founder of The Unwell Network
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Shawn Fain, president of the United Automobile Workers
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Ken Griffin, founder and C.E.O. of Citadel
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Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-C.W.A., A.F.L.-C.I.O.
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Sundar Pichai, C.E.O. of Google
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Jerome Powell, chair of the Federal Reserve
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David Ricks, chair and C.E.O. of Eli Lilly
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Fatima Cody Stanford, obesity medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School
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Serena Williams, 23-time Grand Slam singles champion and managing partner at Serena Ventures
We will announce more speakers in the coming weeks. You can apply to attend here.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Boeing raises $21 billion in a big stock sale. The transaction is one of the biggest ever of its kind and represents an effort by the plane maker to shore up its balance sheet as it deals with a crippling strike and a potential credit-rating downgrade. The company is weighing other steps to overhaul its business, including selling assets like its troubled Starliner division.
Waymo collects $5.6 billion to expand its robotaxi fleet. The round — which included outside investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Silver Lake, Tiger Global and T. Rowe Price — is meant to help the dominant autonomous-vehicle business grow its presence in more cities. In other automotive news, shares in Ford fell 6 percent in premarket trading after the carmaker delivered disappointing profit guidance, and Volkswagen may close factories in Germany for the first time and lay off thousands.
Starbucks threatens to fire employees who aren’t in the office enough. The coffee giant said corporate workers must be in the office at least three days per week from January, or face possible “separation.” Critics of Starbucks’s hybrid working policies note that Brian Niccol, the company’s new C.E.O., commutes to corporate headquarters in Seattle from his home in California via company jet.
Bezos speaks
Days after The Washington Post said it wasn’t endorsing a presidential candidate, drawing criticism from inside and outside the paper, the consequences are becoming clearer.
But Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s billionaire owner, defended the decision in an essay in the newspaper — and said his complex and enormous business interests were assets for The Post as much as liabilities.
The context: By Monday afternoon, The Post had shed more than 200,000 digital subscribers, according to NPR, after reports emerged that Bezos had blocked an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.
And three members of the editorial board resigned, though they were staying on at the newspaper.
“No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” Bezos insisted, denying suggestions that he had sought to curry favor with Donald Trump. As DealBook has written, several corporate executives have grown increasingly worried about drawing Trump’s ire should he win re-election.
“When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post,” Bezos wrote, acknowledging that his business interests, including Amazon and Blue Origin, create a “complexifier” dynamic, given how often his companies interact with government officials.
In fact, on Friday — the same day the no-endorsement plan was announced — Blue Origin’s C.E.O. had met with Trump. Bezos wrote that he didn’t know about the meeting beforehand and added that he sighed when he learned about the coincidence.
But Bezos argued that he was acting out of principle. The mogul said that political endorsements not only didn’t matter, but that they also left publications open to accusations of bias. That the decision came so late, he wrote, “was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
Bezos added:
You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up.
What’s next for The Post? Bezos suggested that he would continue to push the publication to innovate and stay relevant. But Status’s Oliver Darcy points out that he didn’t commit to providing money to fill in the financial hole from the subscriber losses. Darcy also reported that potential suitors for The Post have started discussing whether to make offers.
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In other political news: Philadelphia’s district attorney sued Elon Musk and his pro-Trump super PAC to block its $1 million giveaways for registered voters. Mike Bloomberg made a $50 million donation to efforts to elect Harris after pressure from fellow billionaires. And here’s how Trump’s proposed tariffs could disrupt global trade.
A Big Tech fight goes public
Microsoft and Google are in a race to dominate artificial intelligence. But the Windows maker has fired a salvo in a separate fight with the search giant, accusing its rival of “shadow campaigns” targeting European regulators and politicians, to undercut its cloud computing and data center businesses.
Microsoft has taken the unusual step of going public with its complaint. Rima Alaily, the company’s deputy general counsel, wrote in a blistering blog post on day that Google was secretly backing a new lobbying campaign to “discredit Microsoft with competition authorities, and policymakers and mislead the public.”
Alaily said that the effort would be introduced this week and comes after Google failed to persuade a group of European cloud companies to continue an E.U. antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
The accusations are part of a long-simmering battle between the tech giants. Google trails Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure in the cloud market. Last month, Google filed an antitrust complaint in Europe, arguing that Microsoft’s high fees and licensing terms prevent companies from switching to rival cloud platforms.
“We and many others believe that Microsoft’s anticompetitive practices lock in customers and create negative downstream effects that impact cybersecurity, innovation and choice,” a Google representative told DealBook.
Google is already facing a tough legal fight in the United States. The Justice Department is weighing whether to ask a federal court to force Google to split up the company over its dominance in search. Google also lost an antitrust case over its app store and is in court over its advertising business.
Alaily suggested that Google was maneuvering because of the intense scrutiny of its business. She added that Google was also engaging in underhand tactics in the United States, such as pitching negative stories about Microsoft to the news media and suggesting questions to lawmakers about its China business.
Trump is on the mind in Riyadh
Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative kicked off at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Riyadh on Tuesday, and it was hard to ignore the history of the venue. It’s where Mohammed bin Salman, the kingdom’s crown prince, detained hundreds of the country’s business elite almost seven years ago in a purge that preceded his rise to power.
On Tuesday, some of the C.E.O.s in attendance took to the stage after an evening spent at embassy parties or more private gatherings at compounds in the desert. DealBook spoke to The Times’s Rob Copeland, who is covering the event in Riyadh.
The Carlyle co-founder David Rubenstein led the opening session. Full credit to Rubenstein for his wry sense of humor: He asked Yasir al-Rumayyan, governor of the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, whether there were enough foreign fund managers with hands out asking for money.
For the Wall Sttreet moguls on the panel, Donald Trump was the big talking point. “The expectation today is that Donald Trump will win the White House,” Citadel’s Ken Griffin pronounced, although he added that “it’s almost a coin toss.”
Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman, a Trump backer, wasn’t ready to declare that it was in the bag. But he did say Trump would be a better president this time around. “I think he has a much better base of knowledge of how that job works and how to be efficient and effective in doing it than compared to 2016,” he said.
The cost of ending Fed independence
The Fed’s longstanding political independence has come into question after repeated suggestions by Donald Trump that the president should have a say in central bank policy, including the setting of interest rates.
The markets and economists have grown increasingly worried that Trump, who took plenty of shots at Fed officials during his administration, would break with political norms and sideline Jay Powell, the Fed chair, should he win the White House.
Legal experts disagree on whether Trump could fire or demote Powell. But there’s wider consensus that either move would have dire consequences. Marketplace asked economists what could go wrong:
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Borrowing costs would rise. “The first casualty of that will be inflationary expectations, which are built into interest rates,” said Alan Blinder, a Princeton professor and a former Fed vice chair. Americans would pay higher interest rates as a “penalty for the Fed’s loss of credibility.”
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Global markets could go haywire. Fed independence has been a kind of North Star for investors, said Wendy Edelberg, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. Mess with that, and “you wouldn’t just have the U.S. stock market to worry about,” she said, adding, “You would have the international financial system to worry about.”
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It would send a chill through the market for U.S. Treasuries. “The bond market is going to react, and bond prices are going to decline,” said Daniel Tarullo, a Harvard Law School professor and former Fed governor. “Depending on how serious the threat is regarded, you may get a strong reaction in the stock market as well.”
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Sierra, an A.I. start-up co-founded by Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI, closed a funding round that values it at $4.5 billion. (CNBC)
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How Elliott Investment Management, the big activist investor, won major concessions from Southwest Airlines. (Bloomberg)
Artificial intelligence
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Meta is reportedly working on a search engine for its chatbot users to reduce the service’s reliance on Google and Microsoft’s Bing. (The Information)
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Universal Music Group, which has sued A.I. start-ups for copyright infringement, has partnered with Klay Vision, a music generator that says it won’t rip off artists. (The Verge)
Best of the rest
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“Elon Musk Wants Big Families. He Bought a Secret Compound for His.” (NYT)
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How the Inflation Reduction Act provided billions for green-energy initiatives — and persuaded a Chinese solar giant to set up shop in Ohio. (Bloomberg)
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The post Jeff Bezos, Jerome Powell, Serena Williams and More at the DealBook Summit appeared first on New York Times.
