Financial Mindset

The most striking feature of the September summit between Chinese President Xi Jinping and U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington was not what was discussed—trade, tariffs, technological competition—but what was not. Taiwan was not absent entirely—both sides touched on it in the low-key “agree to disagree” framing register that has come to define the issue—but it was conspicuously absent from the top tier of the agenda. Pundits continue to portray the Taiwan Strait as the world’s most dangerous flashpoint; the summit’s agenda suggested otherwise. That does not mean the Taiwan issue has disappeared. Taiwan remains the “core of core interests” for Beijing, and tensions across the Strait remain a central feature of U.S.-China relations. Precisely because the issue is so sensitive, both Washington and Beijing have strong incentives to preserve stability. For years, the Western world has been counting down to 2027. The year has acquired a talismanic significance for China wa...

President Donald Trump has another body of water in mind for a name change: the Atlantic Ocean. But this time, he says, Google CEO Sundar Pichai told him no. “We seriously looked at the Atlantic Ocean, and I called Google Maps, who were really great with the lake,” Trump said at a rally in Pendleton, S.C., on Wednesday . “No, no, no. This time, I’m not doing it,” Trump recalled Pichai saying. According to Trump, Pichai explained that oceans span multiple countries and urged him, “Please don’t ask us to do that.” “Should I pass on… I think let’s keep it the Atlantic Ocean, right?” Trump asked the crowd. But Trump wasn’t finished with the oceans. He then floated renaming the Pacific the “American Ocean” and asked how Europe would feel about it, though no part of Europe borders the Pacific. It wasn’t the first time Trump had raised the idea. At a rally in Dalton, Ga., last Friday , Trump said he had asked Google about renaming either the Atlantic or the Pacific the “T...

The Colossal and Anduril founders want to clone, gene-edit and armor America’s working dogs, and bring the supply chain home from Europe. The U.S. military’s oldest autonomous system has a supply-chain problem: most of its dogs come from Europe. Fewer than half make it through training. And the Pentagon is bidding against foreign governments for the ones that are left. Ben Lamm is the co-founder and CEO of Colossal Biosciences, the Dallas de-extinction company that announced in April 2025 it had brought back the dire wolf, a predator that died out more than 10,000 years ago. What Colossal actually produced was three pups, Romulus, Remus and Khaleesi. Its scientists took gray wolf cells, edited about 20 sites across 14 genes to match DNA recovered from ancient dire wolf remains, cloned the pups from those edited cells and had domestic dogs carry them to term. Lamm and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey think the same tools, plus defense hardware, can fix that. Warhound, a defen...

The blowout news from SpaceX’s Q3 earnings wasn’t the rocket and AI giant’s outstanding performance that far exceeded even the analysts’ elevated expectations, but Elon Musk’s revelation that SpaceX and Tesla are weighing a merger. On the call, held the evening of October 20, Musk declared that his two signature holdings have each named “special committees” composed of independent directors to explore a union. Musk’s statement confirmed Wall Street’s long-held view that the union was highly likely, and now—given that Musk effectively controls both companies and loves the idea (though as a “conflicted party” can’t serve on the committees), the tie-up looks all but inevitable. The prospect of a SpaceX-Tesla combo got rave notices from the research crews covering both companies. In most cases where the acquirer is en route to paying a price amounting to a humongous PE, the acquirer’s stock falls. Not this ...

Americans have placed an unprecedented bet on the transformative power of artificial intelligence. The past 50 years of economic history suggests it won’t pay off, at least not on a timetable the market expects. Not since the Gilded Age—when, in 1885, railroad stocks accounted for more than 80% of active trading on the New York Stock Exchange—has the U.S. economy wagered so much on a single theme. When that bubble burst in the Panic of 1893, a third of railroads went bust, more than 500 banks failed, and the economy plunged into a four-year depression. Today’s frantic AI buildout may be on a similar trajectory. AI-related capital spending has surged to about 2% of U.S. GDP , from near zero five years ago. But this time, the AI wager is concentrated in far fewer companies than the railway mania ever was. In January, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis reported that investments in information processing equipment, software, research and development, and data centers—four...

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg intends to maintain control over the company he founded in 2004 and a new class of stock will help him do just that. On Wednesday as Meta released third quarter earnings results, the company announced that it would issue a new share class of Class C stock. The share class, which is technically a one-for-one stock dividend of new Class C shares, will be distributed to all shareholders. It was conceived following months of extensive negotiation that grew contentious at times between Zuckerberg and board members, including DoorDash CEO Tony Xu, Ambassador Robert Kimmitt, and ex- Microsoft executive Charles Songhurst. Xu disclosed his personal friendship with Zuckerberg but said it wouldn’t impair his judgement. At one point, the committee even talked about resigning if they couldn’t come to a resolution. According to a Meta filing with the Securities & Exchange Commission, Zuckerberg wanted to be able to maintain his voting control, meet his ...

Across the global energy sector, a quiet but significant shift is underway. The debate around energy usage is intensifying because the pressures on it are becoming more real: grid queues, water resource pressures, increased industrial electrification and the need for reliable power at every hour of the day to match changing demand patterns. Recent strategy resets among global energy majors BP , Shell and ExxonMobil illustrate a greater focus on delivering reliable supply and ensuring that infrastructure can meet fast-growing power demand.  The International Energy Agency (IEA) expects global electricity demand to grow at an average annual rate of 3.6% between 2026 and 2030 . That represents an acceleration of around 50% from the average pace of growth over the past decade. Global data center electricity consumption is already spiking , driven in particular by the rapid expansion of AI-focused facilities. That trend shows no signs of slowing down.   The IEA est...