Andrew here. I knew Charlie Kirk. His assassination is a travesty, whether you agreed with his views or not. We had just been texting over the weekend. He was an unusual political activist: forceful and committed to his views, but uniquely open to hearing opposing perspectives — and even seeking them out, not only to better understand them but even to shift his own opinion.
We had a number of thoughtful debates. Kirk sent me a note on Sunday about the way he thought the “mainstream media” was underplaying the murder of a Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina. We went back and forth about it, and while he probably saw me as part of the mainstream media, it was a genuinely respectful dialogue. His appeal to many young people through social media makes his death a profound blow to a generation of his followers.
There is a much bigger issue we need to confront as a nation: the rising level of targeted violence, whether against politicians like President Trump, corporate figures like the president of UnitedHealthcare or N.F.L. employees who may have been the intended victims of the Midtown Manhattan shooter this summer.
All these attacks may seem unrelated, but political and other targeted violence in America cannot be ignored. Something feels different about this moment — about the normalization of violence in our culture. The question is how to solve it. We often write about leadership in this newsletter; right now, we could use more of it.
A.I. oracle
Shares in Oracle are climbing again in premarket trading on Thursday. The tech giant, which went public in the floppy-disk era of the 1980s, is nearing the trillion-dollar-valuation club on investor hopes that it’s the next darling of the A.I. trade.
The stock is on a tear, briefly crowning its 81-year-old co-founder, Larry Ellison, the world’s richest person on Wednesday. But some are wondering whether Oracle can sustain that investor exuberance.
How did this happen? Several analysts upgraded their views on Oracle after the company delivered a blowout outlook on Tuesday, saying it was poised to lock down hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of contracts from customers of its artificial-intelligence infrastructure and cloud services.
OpenAI has signed one such deal for roughly $300 billion, The Times reports.
The success of Oracle’s A.I. push surprised Wall Street. Typically, good news from one A.I. bellwether tends to lift others in the sector, but Oracle was in a league of its own on Wednesday. “It’s almost as if nobody believes anyone benefits besides Oracle,” Jim Cramer of CNBC wrote on X.
Safra Catz, Oracle’s C.E.O., told analysts that its cloud infrastructure business would grow from $18 billion this fiscal year to $144 billion in four years. That would make company’s business comparable to that of its biggest rivals Amazon, Microsoft and Google.
But shares of most stocks in the Magnificent 7 group of A.I. behemoths actually fell in trading on Wednesday.
Is this a sign that investors’ fervor for A.I. is ebbing? Few on Wall Street are calling an end to the A.I. rally, but sky-high valuations are drawing tougher scrutiny.
Heading into this week’s earnings call, there were questions about how much Oracle’s expansion beyond its core database software business into A.I. infrastructure would dent its bottom line. Those concerns faded once the company delivered a “historic” outlook for the booking of new contracts, Tyler Radke, an analyst at Citigroup, wrote in an investor note on Wednesday.
Oracle’s good fortunes are great for Ellison. He saw his net worth balloon by roughly $90 billion on Wednesday alone. (To put that in perspective, Paramount Global, the media conglomerate acquired by Ellison’s son, David, has a market capitalization of about $16 billion.)
On Thursday, Ellison was a tick below his close friend, Elon Musk, on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. The wealth of Ellison, who has a roughly 41 percent stake in Oracle, is closely tied to the company’s success.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
A Trump ally for the Fed moves a step closer to confirmation. The Senate Banking Committee advanced the nomination of Stephen Miran, a close economic adviser to President Trump, to a vote by the full chamber. That puts Miran nearer to taking a seat on the central bank’s Board of Governors in time for its rate-setting meeting next week, despite concerns that he is too close to the White House.
Mexico plans 50 percent tariffs on Chinese car imports. The move was buried in a list of proposed taxes the president sent to lawmakers. It comes as Mexico seeks to curry favor with the U.S., its most important trading partner, despite also being one of the biggest buyers for Chinese vehicles. In other trade news, officials in Japan and South Korea are feeling political heat over U.S. trade agreements.
CBS News may give the commentator Bari Weiss an expansive role. Weiss may become editor in chief or co-president of the network as part of a potential deal to sell her Free Press media outlet to CBS News’s parent, Paramount Skydance, according to The Times. The discussions underscore how Paramount’s new owner, David Ellison, is moving to reshape its news division as the media sector faces pressure from the Trump administration.
Another boost for the I.P.O. market
What a difference a few months makes.
In April, the online payment processor Klarna paused its efforts to go public amid tariff-related shocks to the stock markets. On Wednesday, on its stock’s first day of trading, the company saw its shares leap more than 14 percent.
That should be good news for Klarna’s backers — and for the underwriters and public-market investors rooting for a comeback of the I.P.O. market.
The I.P.O., by the numbers:
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Klarna’s shares closed on Wednesday at $45.82, above the $40 at which it priced its I.P.O. That surpassed the $35-to-$37 per share the company had proposed in its prospectus.
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Klarna, a 20-year-old company, is now valued at more than $17 billion. That’s more than it projected in its regulatory filings this month but still far below the $45 billion valuation it fetched in a 2021 fund-raising round led by SoftBank, which it slashed by 85 percent the following year.
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Klarna raised $200 million for itself from the I.P.O., while selling shareholders — including the investment firms Sequoia, Silver Lake and Mubadala — reaped $1.1 billion.
Among the big winners:
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Anders Holch Povlsen, a Danish clothing magnate who invested in Klarna in 2017 and now sits on a stake valued around $1.4 billion. He made an additional $250 million by selling shares in the I.P.O.
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Sequoia, one of Klarna’s earliest investors, which invested nearly $500 million in the company, earned $85 million from stock sales and still owns a stake valued at nearly $3.5 billion. (Mike Moritz, who was a rainmaker at Sequoia for years and who is on Klarna’s board, was on hand for the company’s ringing of the opening bell at the N.Y.S.E. on Wednesday, a rare move for him.)
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Atomico, the first European venture backer of Klarna, which first invested in the company 13 years ago.
Klarna’s success is the latest sign of a resurgence in I.P.O.s. About 144 offerings have been priced in the U.S. so far this year, up 53 percent year-on-year — and double the lows of 2022. Many of the biggest names that have gone public, including the design software maker Figma and the stablecoin issuer Circle, enjoyed triple-digit percentage-point pops in their first day of trading.
Klarna’s stock didn’t run as high, which may be a good thing in the longer term for those who bought in right after the I.P.O.; Circle’s and Figma’s shares are both trading well below their first-day prices.
“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”
— Kamala Harris, in an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, on Democrats’ deferring to Joe Biden on whether he should run for re-election. Harris adds that she believed Biden aides failed to defend her against right-wing attacks and helped fuel negative narratives: “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”
Inflation watch
President Trump was quick to take a victory lap after the release of Wednesday’s tepid Producer Price Index report.
Investors welcomed the data, which showed that wholesale prices declined last month, but a bigger test arrives on Thursday with the release of the Consumer Price Index. That comes as Wall Street and the Fed look for evidence of whether Trump’s trade war is accelerating inflation.
Most economists still think that inflation will continue to rise. Trump doesn’t agree: There’s “no inflation!!!,” he wrote on social media on Wednesday after the P.P.I. release.
Here’s what to watch for:
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Core C.P.I., which strips out volatile food and fuel prices, is expected to rise 0.3 percent on a monthly basis, matching last month’s jump.
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On an annualized basis, core C.P.I. is seen rising by 3.1 percent. That’s unchanged from last month and still well above the Fed’s 2 percent target.
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Analysts will watch for signs that tariffs are driving up the prices of crucial categories including food (especially beef), new and used cars, household furnishings and airline fares.
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Some good news: Shelter inflation, which applies to rents and the costs of owning a home — a significant portion of a household’s budget — has climbed in recent years but should continue to show just moderate gains.
Thursday’s release will be the final significant data point to come out before next week’s Fed meeting. The central bank is widely expected to make its first rate cut in nine months, something Trump has loudly demanded.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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The investment firms Carlyle, EQT and HongShan are said to be among the front-runners to buy control of Starbucks’s China operations. (Reuters)
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Physical Intelligence, which makes artificial-intelligence software for robots, is reportedly in talks to raise money at a $5 billion valuation, more than double what it was valued at in November. (The Information, NYT)
Politics, policy and regulation
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Paul Atkins, the S.E.C. chairman, threatened to bar companies from using the International Financial Reporting Standards’ set of accounting rules if its creators continued to focus on sustainability and climate issues. (FT)
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The Labor Department’s Office of Inspector General said it would review how the Bureau of Labor Statistics collects data on inflation and jobs, after President Trump fired the organization’s chief. (CNBC)
Best of the rest
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“Gulf Powers Question U.S. Protection After Israeli Strike on Qatari Soil” (NYT)
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Plunges in fertility and net immigration rates will lead to a great slowdown of U.S. population growth in the coming decades, the Congressional Budget Office forecasts. (WSJ)
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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 business reporter, covering diversity and environmental and social justice efforts in corporate America. Email them at [email protected].
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