Andrew here. In the ongoing trade fight between the U.S. and China, who has the upper hand? We go deep into the state of the talks and what may really be going on behind the scenes.
DealBook also has a pair of scoops. Niko Gallogly is first to report on Chobani’s new fund-raising round that values it at $20 billion. And Michael de la Merced has the details on the $1 billion Mammoth Brands deal for upscale diapers.
Who holds the cards?
Multiple rounds of U.S.-China trade talks have achieved little so far, with the exception of a potential TikTok deal.
Steep tariffs imposed by both nations are set to kick in next month, with potentially severe consequences for the global economy. And the fight, which on Sunday appeared to be subsiding, now seems to be escalating: Asked on Wednesday if the U.S. and China were in a sustained trade war, President Trump said, “Well, you’re in one now.”
But Washington and Beijing are still talking. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled on Wednesday that an extended tariff truce is possible, but added, “All that’s going to be negotiated in the coming weeks.”
Yet Bessent himself amped up the rhetoric earlier this week, lashing out at China over proposed limits on exports of critical minerals.
The Trump administration is highly concerned about those minerals, whose global production is dominated by China. Beijing’s crackdown on their outflows could hobble key industries, from cars to chips to artificial intelligence.
“The U.S. now has to face up to the fact it has an adversary which can threaten substantial parts of the U.S. economy,” Henry Farrell, a political scientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told The Times.
Meanwhile, China continues to be vexed by Western restrictions on technology, especially products related to A.I.
The U.S. is trying to break its dependence on China for critical minerals. But that could take years and usher in a new era of U.S. industrial policy in which Washington takes strategic stakes in select companies like Intel to bolster their chances of success.
“When you are facing a nonmarket economy like China, then you have to exercise industrial policies,” Bessent said at an event hosted by CNBC.
Could Trump break the impasse? He is still set to meet with President Xi Jinping of China at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in South Korea later this month, according to Bessent. Global trade experts see that as a possible make-or-break moment.
Both sides could use a win on trade. The economic uncertainty hasn’t badly hit stock markets — yet. But China’s domestic economy has been hurt by trade worries and lackluster consumer spending. And some American farmers are facing big losses because China has essentially stopped buying their soybeans.
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In other trade news, Trump said Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India told him that New Delhi would soon stop buying Russian oil, a potential blow to Moscow’s war in Ukraine. “Now we’ve got to get China to do the same thing,” Trump added.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
A judge temporarily blocks federal layoffs during the government shutdown. Judge Susan Illston of the U.S. District Court in San Francisco sided with government unions fighting proposed mass job cuts. She cited suggestions that the Trump administration was taking advantage of the shutdown to assume “the laws don’t apply to them anymore.” Justice Department lawyers have argued in the case that the president had wide latitude to reshape the federal work force.
The Trump administration is said to consider ways to weaponize the I.R.S. Officials plan to install allies of President Trump in senior positions at the agency’s investigations unit and undercut the power of staff lawyers there, The Wall Street Journal reports. The move is intended in part to let the agency pursue criminal inquiries into left-leaning donor groups including the Soros family, The Journal adds.
Delaware’s highest court hears arguments about Elon Musk’s Tesla pay. Justices of the state’s Supreme Court considered an appeal by Tesla to reinstate its C.E.O.’s huge pay package, after a lower court judge vacated it because of concerns about the company’s corporate governance. Legal experts said it was unclear how the court would rule, but Musk stands to earn even more from a new pay package announced after Tesla reincorporated in Texas.
Exclusive: Chobani’s big new funding round
Chobani has raised $650 million at a $20 billion valuation, according to two people familiar with the deal but not authorized to talk about it, Niko Gallogly is first to report.
That investment will help the yogurt maker fund two major projects announced last year: a $500 million plant expansion in Idaho, which is expected to increase the factory’s production by nearly 50 percent, and a $1.2 billion food-processing plant in Rome, N.Y.
The 20-year-old company expects to make $3.8 billion in net sales this year, a 28 percent increase from last year. It also expects to rake in $780 million in adjusted pretax earnings, a 53 percent jump from 2024.
Chobani has benefited from America’s protein craze. Last year, the company introduced a line of high-protein yogurts and shakes.
Its ambitions are much bigger than yogurt. The company sells oat milk, creamers and — after a $900 million acquisition of La Colombe — coffee. Those products generated around $600 million in retail sales during the 12 months through September, according to company data reviewed by DealBook. This past spring, Chobani announced the acquisition of Daily Harvest, a maker of plant-based foods.
In 2021, the company filed for an initial public offering, reported at a multibillion-dollar valuation, but withdrew it because of challenging market conditions.
“This investment means more than just capital — it’s a testament to everything we’ve built,” Hamdi Ulukaya, Chobani’s founder and C.E.O., told DealBook in an email.
Exclusive: A billion-dollar diaper deal
Mammoth Brands, the parent company of Harry’s razors and Lume deodorant, has ambitions to become a consumer goods conglomerate, including by buying other brands.
On Thursday, it plans to announce a new addition — Coterie, a maker of premium-price diapers and other baby care goods — with hopes of drastically expanding its reach, Michael de la Merced is first to report. The deal values Coterie at potentially more than $1 billion, DealBook hears.
What is Coterie? Founded in 2018, the start-up began with diapers that its founder, Frank Yu, said were far more absorbent than the competition’s. The company has focused on the higher end of the market, with diaper subscriptions starting at around $95 a month and has largely focused on online sales, though its products are now in Whole Foods, Wegmans and the high-end L.A. chain Erewhon.
Coterie has since added baby wipes and, as of last month — and after three years of R.&D. according to the start-up’s president Grace Weingard — skin care.
“The premium segment is what’s growing” in baby care, Jess Jacobs, Coterie’s C.E.O., told DealBook. “It’s not about competing with major incumbents head-to-head. It’s about carving this new category.”
It has also drawn prominent investors, including venture capital firms and the models and entrepreneurs Karlie Kloss and Ashley Graham.
Coterie has grown quickly. It has collected more than $200 million in revenue during the past 12 months and has grown about 22 percent annually since 2020. It has been profitable for the past three years.
That put the start-up on Mammoth’s radar and piqued its interest when Coterie put itself up for sale earlier this year, said Andy Katz-Mayfield, Mammoth’s co-founder and co-C.E.O.
The deal consists of cash and stock, and includes payouts contingent on Coterie hitting certain financial targets. Unlike with its previous major acquisition, Lume, Mammoth isn’t raising external equity to buy Coterie: “It’s a nice thing of having a cash-flow profitable business,” Katz-Mayfield said.
What’s next: Coterie plans to expand its presence in physical retailers and expects to draw on the experience and resources from its new parent company to do so.
Jacobs also suggested Coterie would continue to expand into more product categories. “There’s a lot of space within baby care,” she said, noting that the company’s tagline was “Here for the changes.”
As for Mammoth, Katz-Mayfield said that further diversifying the company’s offerings is “certainly helpful” in terms of a future I.P.O., though there’s no specific timeline for taking the business public.
“Of course there’s a bubble.”
— Hemant Taneja, the C.E.O. of the venture capital firm General Catalyst, on the state of the artificial intelligence boom. More signs of the fervor for all things A.I. have emerged, including another raised sales forecast by the chipmaker TSMC and a $40 billion takeover of Aligned Data Centers.
A top proxy adviser broadens its view
Glass Lewis is the latest firm to opt out of giving clients a single point of view on proxy voting.
Starting in 2027, it plans to stop offering its “house view,” and its more than 1,300 clients will instead choose custom voting options, such as a perspective that favors environmental and governance issues or one that simply sides with the company. The move follows criticism from Republicans in Congress and red states over Glass Lewis’s endorsement of some E.S.G. proposals, Niko Gallogly writes.
“The traditional one-size-fits-all model of proxy advice no longer meets the needs of a diverse client base,” Glass Lewis’s C.E.O., Bob Mann, said in a statement. About 70 percent of Glass Lewis clients already use a custom voting policy.
It’s part of a trend toward returning proxy voting power to investors. Glass Lewis’s biggest rival, Institutional Shareholder Services, introduced a similar change this year.
Large investment managers like Vanguard, BlackRock and State Street have recently given individual investors more say over proxy measures by expanding pass-through voting.
Proxy advisers are facing “a ton of political heat,” Caleb Griffin, an associate professor of law at the University of Carolina at Chapel Hill, told DealBook, saying “there’s no political upside” for Glass Lewis to continue offering a house view.
Glass Lewis may also be seeking a better business outcome, Ann Lipton, a professor of corporate governance at the University of Colorado Boulder, told DealBook, because clients will most likely have to pay more for a customized approach.
The shift will also fragment voters. “More dispersed voters that are going in different directions ultimately tends to mean that management wins,” Lipton said.
That may end up consolidating the power of boards. That’s what data from Vanguard’s pass-through voting pilot indicates: The top choice for investors, other than opting into the Vanguard voting policy, was to side with a company’s board on proxy voting.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Deel, the payroll software company battling accusations that it placed a spy at a rival, said it had raised $300 million at a $17.3 billion valuation. (Deel)
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“American Bankers Are Making a Mint Helping China Inc. Go Global” (WSJ)
Politics, policy and regulation
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Argentina’s government bonds briefly jumped on Wednesday on reports that the Treasury Department is assembling a $20 billion private-sector debt package for Buenos Aires, doubling U.S.-led aid. (Bloomberg)
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The financier Steve Schwarzman, the oil mogul Harold Hamm and representatives of Amazon, Google and Microsoft attended a dinner that President Trump hosted on Wednesday in exchange for donations to build a $200 million ballroom at the White House. (NYT)
Best of the rest
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Nestlé is cutting 16,000 jobs over the next two years as the Swiss food giant retrenches to improve its financial performance. Shares in the company soared as it maintained its 2025 growth outlook. (NYT)
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Artificial intelligence can improve productivity at hedge funds — but it isn’t leading to better investment performance, according to the billionaire financier Ken Griffin. (Bloomberg)
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected].
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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