Two months after the March meeting, the administration committed to give the tiny Gulf monarchy access to around 500,000 of the most advanced AI chips a year—enough to build one of the world’s biggest AI data center clusters. The framework agreement called for roughly one-fifth of the chips to go to G42, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.
The agreement was widely viewed as a coup for the emirate’s ruling family, overcoming longstanding U.S. national security concerns and allowing the country to compete with the most powerful economies in the world at the cutting edge of AI advances. Proponents hailed the deal for unlocking a flood of investment into the U.S. and for helping entrench American technology as the global standard.
What wasn’t publicly known: Tahnoon’s emissaries had signed the deal to purchase 49% of World Liberty that January.
At the time of the investment, World Liberty had no products. It had raised $82 million by selling a token called WLFI. Aryam’s investment, though, didn’t give it the rights to future WLFI token sales, leaving the Tahnoon-backed entity out of what was then the company’s only source of revenue, the documents said.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/spy-sheikh-secret-stake-trump-crypto-tahnoon-ea4d97e8
Yale University is going tuition-free for undergraduates from families with incomes of less than $200,000, following recent moves by peers including Harvard University to broaden access.
Enhanced financial aid will ensure that students from such families will “receive need-based scholarships that meet or exceed the cost of tuition,” Yale said in a statement Tuesday. The changes, which take effect in the 2026-2027 academic year, will also eliminate all expected costs for families with typical assets and incomes below $100,000.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-27/yale-to-offer-free-tuition-to-families-making-less-than-200-000
“An alliance between 3Com and Huawei was attractive to both sides. Huawei would get the immediate legal protection of 3Com’s deep patent portfolio; 3Com would get Huawei’s lower production costs and its connections to the vast China market. Soon after the two announced their joint venture, called H3C, 3Com’s lawyers filed a motion to intervene in the Cisco case, calling 3Com an interested party.”
--- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”
“Ren told his trusted deputy, Guo Ping, who was now Huawei’s executive vice president, to get to the US as quickly as he could. Ren invoked the fable of ancient Chinese military general Han Xin*, who had accepted the humiliation of crawling between another man’s legs to prevent a deadly fight.”
* The fable of General Han Xin’s humiliation, known as "crawling between the legs" (胯下之辱), tells of a young, poor Han Xin being challenged by a bully in his hometown of Huaiyin to either kill him or crawl through his legs. Choosing to endure this shame rather than waste his life on a petty killing, Han Xin crawled through, later becoming a renowned military strategist and rewarding the man for testing his resolve.
“Ren saw a Russia devastated by hyperinflation... Ren felt that the United States was partly to blame: Washington had coaxed the leader of the new Russia, Boris Yeltsin, to apply “shock therapy” to the economy with a rapid shift to capitalism, he wrote, but Washington did not follow through with the financial aid it had dangled. “They always give you some bait to get you to change some policies, but when you’ve made changes according to their demands, they raise further demands,” Ren wrote. “You still cannot get ‘sincere’ help from the United States.”
At the end of the day, the Russians remained wary about installing Chinese switches in their networks. “We are still unsure how much we know about Russia and if we can really open up the market,” Ren wrote to staff.
( Read more... )
-- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell plans to attend Wednesday’s Supreme Court hearing over the attempted dismissal of Fed Governor Lisa Cook by President Donald Trump, according to a person familiar with the situation.
Fed watchers and legal analysts say the outcome of the case will have a profound impact on the president’s ability to fire Fed governors and, by extension, on the central bank’s ability to set interest rates free of political interference.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-19/fed-s-powell-plans-to-attend-cook-s-supreme-court-hearing
“On January 28, 1996, Ren Zhengfei held Huawei’s first “mass-resignation ceremony.” Each head of a regional sales office was told to prepare two reports: a work summary and a written resignation. “I will only sign one of the reports,” Ren said.
Huawei had started out in rural markets, and many of its early sales managers were provincial in their experience and network of contacts. As Ren sought to go national and international, he decided to make the entire sales staff resign and reapply for their jobs. “The mountain goat must outrun the lion to not be eaten,” he had told them ahead of the event. “All departments and sections must optimize and eat the lazy goats, the goats that do not learn or progress, and the goats with no sense of responsibility.”
They were following the strategy that Mao had used to win the Chinese Civil War of “encircling the cities with the countryside.”[9] They’d won over villages and towns in the beginning, building their strength to take on the big cities.
Ren told his followers that demotions built character and that the demoted would only be stronger when they worked their way up again.... “Even Deng Xiaoping could go down and up three times. Why can’t you go down and up three times?”
-- Eva Dou. “House of Huawei.”
Corporate America is entering the second year of Donald Trump’s second term with a new, hard-won understanding: The president’s personal interventions can shape business as profoundly as any economic force.
5. Perhaps above all, the author of The Art of the Deal sees every interaction as a transaction. Urban, of BGR, cites a Beltway adage: “The first rule of horse trading is to have a horse.”
In Trump’s Washington, those transactions often hinge on what a company can offer—or surrender—to stay in the administration’s good graces.
Three decades ago, the entire middle 40% held a greater share of wealth than the top 1%. Today the reverse is true, with Moody’s Analytics recently estimating that the top 10% of US households now make up about half of all spending.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2026-01-14/america-s-a-la-carte-economy-is-making-everyone-feel-poorer
Chevron снова начала работать в Венесуэле с конца 2022 года, и благодаря ее проектам добыча с тех пор действительно выросла, хотя и не особенно сильно. Более реалистичными выглядят расчеты, предполагающие ежегодный рост добычи на 200–250 тысяч баррелей в день в течение четырех-пяти лет при инвестициях от 10 миллиардов долларов в год.
Все это в основном касается традиционной нефти. Перспективы расширения добычи сверхтяжелой нефти при цене Brent 50–55 долларов за баррель совсем туманны. Для окупаемости таких проектов нужны цены на 20–30 долларов выше.
...
Возрождение нефтяной отрасли Венесуэлы не обещает мгновенных гигантских прибылей, а значит, американские нефтяные компании оказываются перед непростым выбором. У них и без Венесуэлы есть подготовленный конвейер проектов. Ресурсы — технические, человеческие, финансовые — расписаны на годы вперед.
Переключаться на Венесуэлу в такой ситуации означает отказываться от каких-то других вложений. Причем делать это придется в обстановке низких цен на нефть, когда у компаний снижен аппетит к риску и сильно желание блюсти финансовую дисциплину.
Mr. Trump seems to view the oil proceeds as a personal executive account, beyond the control of Congress’s purse-strings, to dole out as he sees fit.
It elides U.S. national security interests with Mr. Trump’s personal power, much like his gambit to let TikTok keep operating in the U.S. in violation of the law on the condition that the Treasury get a cut of its eventual sale to American investors. To the victor go the oil spoils won’t improve U.S. standing in the world, and it sends a bad message to the world’s rogues about the way to buy U.S. support.
...
U.S. companies are unlikely to invest in Venezuela until a political transition creates stability and respects property rights. Oil investment is measured in decades, not the next three years. Merely maintaining current output will require billions of dollars a year, and a hundred billion or more to return production to the levels of the early 2010s.
U.S. companies have other attractive opportunities that carry less political risk, such as offshore Guyana where ExxonMobil and Chevron are making big investments. Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources is expanding in Argentina’s Vaca Muerta shale formation. Don’t forget America’s own resources, including in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska. Mr. Trump may be able to coerce Chevron to invest more in Venezuela, or dangle subsidies as he has suggested, but this is dubious industrial policy.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/donald-trump-venezuela-oil-tankers-nicolas-maduro-67c4775c
Research shows real names curb toxicity. While not immune to misinformation and scams, LinkedIn lured people leaving X and Facebook as content moderation and fact-checking there declined. Many concluded it was worth trading rage bait on other platforms for earnest monologues about why getting laid off was a blessing in disguise.
The real-name rule doesn’t just stop jerks. It also pressures people to perform... the need to look professional has a hidden upside: smarter conversations.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/three-reasons-we-cant-get-enough-of-linkedin-31333eff
Trump said the project to have US oil industry companies expand their operations in the country could be “up and running” in less than 18 months, in an interview Monday with NBC News — a timeframe starkly at odds with estimates from energy industry experts, while oil companies have been largely silent about their willingness to reinvest in Venezuela.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-05/trump-tells-nbc-us-may-reimburse-firms-for-venezuela-oil-efforts
Before making any commitments, oil companies want to ensure there’s a stable government in place, that the rule of law is upheld and that they have some degree of confidence Washington will to support their presence in Venezuela even after Trump is no longer in office, the person said.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-01-05/us-to-meet-with-oil-executives-this-week-on-venezuela-revival
Costco Wholesale Corp. joined a fast-growing list of businesses suing the Trump administration to ensure eligibility for refunds if the US Supreme Court strikes down the president’s signature global tariffs policy.
The nation’s biggest warehouse club chain is among dozens of companies to file lawsuits in a US trade court since late October challenging President Donald Trump’s use of an economic emergency powers law to impose the levies, according to court records. It’s one of the biggest corporate players to jump into a fight largely driven this year by small businesses and Democratic state officials.
White House spokesperson Kush Desai said in a statement that, “The economic consequences of the failure to uphold President Trump’s lawful tariffs are enormous and this suit highlights that fact. The White House looks forward to the Supreme Court’s speedy and proper resolution of this matter.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-12-01/costco-joins-companies-suing-for-refunds-if-trump-s-tariffs-fall
For the Kremlin, the Miami talks were the culmination of a strategy, hatched before Trump’s inauguration, to bypass the traditional U.S. national security apparatus and convince the administration to view Russia not as a military threat but as a land of bountiful opportunity, according to Western security officials. By dangling multibillion-dollar rare-earth and energy deals, Moscow could reshape the economic map of Europe—while driving a wedge between America and its traditional allies.
Dmitriev, a Goldman Sachs alumnus, had found receptive partners in Witkoff—Trump’s longtime golfing partner—and Kushner, whose investment fund, Affinity Partners, drew billion-dollar investments from the Arab monarchies whose conflict with Israel he had helped mediate.
More recently, Kremlin-linked businessmen Timchenko, Kovalchuk and the Rotenbergs have been offering U.S. counterparts gas concessions in the Sea of Okhotsk, as well as potentially four other locations, according to a European security official and a person familiar with the talks. Russia has also mentioned rare-earth mining opportunities near the massive nickel mines of Norilsk and in as many as six other Siberian locations that are still unexploited, these people said.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Witkoff told The Wall Street Journal, describing at length his hopes that Russia, Ukraine and America would all become business partners. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be a bulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
https://www.wsj.com/world/russia/russia-u-s-peace-business-ties-4db9b290
“Books also had a “shelf life.” In a seventeenth-century bookseller’s shop, they could wait patiently for readers to come and purchase them. But staged plays were big events that happened at set times. They required an immense investment of both funds and labor: a paid company of actors and a theater, which must be built, purchased, or rented. They also needed to bring in the broadest cross-section of society if they were going to meet expenses. This difference in the technology and marketing of these two narrative media has only grown with time. ”
-- Abbott, H. Porter. “The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative (Cambridge Introductions to Literature).”
“...once revealed, the action of the story of the murder of Councilman Stubbs can be described in “terms of a linear chain: A->B->C->D (where D is the Death of Stubbs).
...
Characters are, usually, harder to understand than actions. They are themselves some of narrative’s most challenging gaps.
...
..we have to move from a horizontal to a vertical analysis, descending into the character to construct a plausible sense of her complexity.”
“The model, then, for the construct“tion of character in fictional narrative might look something like this:
reader/viewer + narrative -> reader/viewer’s construction of a character
Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence startup xAI is burning through $1 billion a month as the cost of building its advanced AI models
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-17/musk-s-xai-burning-through-1-billion-a-month-as-costs-pile-up
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