The year in photos
Volatility, shifting technology and high-stakes decisions shaped the global economy this year. Tariff wars wreaked havoc and disrupted supply chains, artificial intelligence raced from promise to product, and tech executives made visible efforts to curry favor with the White House.
Our photographers covered it all. Below is some of our best visual journalism, as well as some of the year’s most memorable imagery, documenting the forces and people behind a defining year in business.
Tariffs reverberated across the global economy.
President Trump’s expansive and sometimes shifting slate of new tariffs reverberated across the globe. Photographers for The Times showed the effects.
Scott McIntyre documented the rush to import goods before the tariffs took effect by following the Queen B, a small container ship, as it pulled into port less than 24 hours before the new levies became active.
The Trump administration has prioritized protecting U.S. industries like steel, aluminum, semiconductors and pharmaceuticals. Kaoly Gutierrez visited U.S. textile factories, part of an industry that felt left out.
Linh Pham took readers inside a factory in Vietnam that makes 500,000 pairs of jeans a month for Saitex, a company that aspires to do more of its manufacturing in the U.S. despite hurdles with the work force and logistics.
Trump pressured and bullied the Fed.
The Trump administration’s pressure campaign on the central bank to lower rates hit one of its most unusual notes when the president visited the Federal Reserve’s headquarters to look for evidence to support his allegations that the Fed chair, Jay Powell, had mismanaged a costly renovation project.
Powell led Trump through the construction site, and Haiyun Jiang photographed the tense event.
Trump is potentially weeks away from naming the next chair of the Fed, who risks being seen as acting to please the president rather than in the best interests of the economy.
Elon Musk slashed through Washington.
At the helm of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk oversaw the gutting of agencies and layoffs of thousands of federal workers. At one point, he waved a chain saw that Argentina’s president had given him onstage at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Musk left the government in May, still far from his goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal budget.
Mamdani rocked the capital of capitalism.
The business community spent more than $20 million to try to defeat Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist, as mayor of New York City. He has promised free buses, universal free child care and a rent freeze on stabilized apartments. Mamdani’s political ascent will be watched well beyond New York for it means for American capitalism more broadly.
Tech C.E.O.s made their mark on a new Washington.
The nation’s top tech leaders were regularly summoned to the White House for meetings and photo opportunities as they lobbied the president on behalf of their companies. Critics argued they were bending the knee to Trump and the administration, while supporters said the parade of C.E.O.s to visit the White House was further evidence that Trump was engaging the business community to help further his economic agenda.
The tech world was well represented at the presidential inauguration in January, with Elon Musk, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos in attendance.
The following day, Trump announced a $100 billion joint venture to invest in new A.I. infrastructure, alongside Sam Altman of OpenAI, Masayoshi Son of SoftBank and Larry Ellison of Oracle.
In August, Tim Cook, the Apple C.E.O., announced in the Oval Office that the company was pledging $100 billion in additional investment in the U.S. He also presented the president with a glass statue with a 24-karat gold base.
And in September, the president hosted a dinner with many tech executives, including Altman, Cook, Zuckerberg and Bill Gates.
Trump embraced cryptocurrency.
Trump, who declared himself the “crypto president” and has financial ties to several cryptocurrency companies, pulled back from a regulatory crackdown on the industry and signed pro-crypto legislation.
He pardoned Ross Ulbricht, who created the Silk Road dark-web marketplace and was serving a life sentence for drug distribution. Gabriela Bhaskar photographed Ulbricht during his closing speech at the Bitcoin 2025 conference in Las Vegas.
A bitcoin crash in October wiped out $1 trillion of market value, highlighting the volatility of crypto assets even as they become more mainstream.
A.I.’s big players went on a spending spree for the ages.
The major players in A.I. spent hundreds of billions of dollars on A.I. infrastructure this year. By one estimate, that spending accounted for nearly all of the G.D.P. growth in the first half of the year.
All of that spending, especially as it increasingly involves complicated financing, has prompted fears of an A.I. bubble.
These data centers, like Meta’s new one in Georgia, which was photographed by Dustin Chambers, also consume enormous amounts of electricity and water, which can choke the communities around them.
Deal making showcased Hollywood’s evolution.
First came the $8 billion merger of Paramount and the media company Skydance. Then, Netflix agreed to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery, and Paramount made a hostile takeover bid for the company, which Warner Bros. Discovery formally rejected. Paramount is hardly backing down. It sweetened its offer this week: Larry Ellison, the tech mogul whose son, David, runs Paramount, will personally provide a guarantee of more than $40 billion in equity to try to win the bidding war.
The consolidation has highlighted Hollywood’s shifting place in an entertainment landscape where theater releases have taken a back seat to streaming services. And Hollywood studio lots have become less popular filming locations than states and countries with generous tax incentives.
Zelensky and Trump had an explosive White House meeting.
The first visit by Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelensky, to the White House was acrimonious, and he was criticized for not wearing a suit, (Zelensky has said he wears military-style clothing to show solidarity with his soldiers.) The second, in which Zelensky did wear a suit, ended with few signs of progress. Trump has proposed a peace plan for Ukraine that would have Ukraine capitulate to most of Russia’s demands.
Warren Buffett stepped down from Berkshire Hathaway.
Warren Buffett said at Berkshire’s annual shareholders’ meeting in May that he would step down and hand over leadership to Gregory Abel. In one of his final letters to shareholders, he said he would accelerate plans to give away much of his $150 billion personal fortune.
Automation made strides.
Questions about how advances in technology will affect jobs loomed large this year. New A.I. products threaten to transform office work, while robots in factories and warehouses continue to become more sophisticated.
Interviews and internal strategy documents viewed by The Times showed that Amazon executives believed the company could soon replace more than half a million jobs with robots.
Emily Kask photographed some of those robots at Amazon’s facility in Shreveport, La.
As more companies released robots for use in homes, Loren Elliott and David B. Torch captured their potential — and limitations.
The global economy pivoted to a new world order.
As rising temperatures, droughts and excessive rains diminished the world’s coffee supply and sent prices soaring, even the producers who had a windfall grew more nervous about the industry’s future. Alejandro Cegarra photographed one of those suppliers, Finca El Puente, a coffee plantation carved into the mountains of southwestern Honduras.
Our photographers captured pieces of another big shift in the global economy in China and the Netherlands: The world has too much steel, but no government wants to forfeit the jobs and national security benefits that would be lost by ceasing production. Trump’s steep tariffs on the material have thrown another wrench into the works.
For the industry, the result has been plummeting prices and shrinking profits.
And the DealBook Summit made big headlines.
It took a team of 10 photographers to capture everything happening at this year’s DealBook Summit: the main-stage interviews, the mingling in the hallways and the task force panels, where experts hashed out some of the most complex questions facing businesses and the economy. The photographer Thea Traff took studio portraits of each of the main speakers.
Thanks for reading! We’ll see you in the new year.
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Sarah Kessler is the weekend edition editor of the DealBook newsletter and writes features on business.
The post The Photos That Defined Business and the Economy in 2025 appeared first on New York Times.
