Business

1. SpaceX money hose
2. ‘War insurance’ cost soars
3. Blue Owl blues
4. NFL antitrust
5. LLM proxy battles

Whatever the market was hoping to hear from President Donald Trump last night, it didn’t. Trump said the war was “nearing completion” without sharpening the aims of the fighting, the minimum needed to declare victory, or the expected timeline. He didn’t escalate or deescalate, promising only to “finish the job” without defining it. Brief market rallies reversed as he spoke, and this morning oil is higher, stocks reversed, and bonds sold off.

Markets can digest signals but abhor noise. Buy the rumor, sell the news is a shopworn but true investment thesis: Here, investors bought the national-primetime-address calendar invite, then sold the speech.

Expectations mismatch is always a risk — companies are, to executives’ annoyance, judged not on whether they grow profits, but whether that growth exceeds Wall Street’s to-the-penny forecast — but the mismatch hits harder in today’s extra-twitchy market. Investors desperate for clarity don’t know what to do with Trump’s shifting goal posts. It’s the same story for software investors, who expected sticky growth only to see AI melt the glue, and private credit investors, who are demanding their money back while managers tap the fine print. (Blue Owl is the latest; more on that below.)

“Things that were previously held to be sort of unassailable truths are now coming into question,” a16z’s David Ulevitch told Semafor earlier this month. Of course, some of those unassailable truths were always misplaced: Private credit funds are not, in any mathematical sense, “semi-liquid.” They are, as Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz told me in December “sometimes not liquid at all.” That’s not catchy marketing, nor is anything coming out of the White House selling the war.

SpaceX IPO is a big bite at a hard time

The giant sucking sound you’re going to hear this spring in the markets is banks assembling $75 billion of investors’ money to take SpaceX public. Elon Musk’s rocket company filed this week for an IPO that is expected to be three times bigger than the largest IPO on record — Saudi Arabia’s 2019 listing of its national oil company — and 350 times bigger than the average since 2000.

Demand is expected to be high: SpaceX is profitable and crucial to the US government. It also benefits from Musk’s undimmed ability to rally investors to his ambitions. But $75 billion is a lot of money, enough to be noticed if it’s pulled from other market bets. If stock prices are still beaten down by the war in Iran and AI fears, investors will likely be reluctant to crystallize their losses by selling, which could put pressure on other investments like Treasury bonds.

SpaceX is “an incredible company, but one has to wonder where that $75 billion is going to come from,” Mitchell Green, managing partner of Lead Edge Capital, a $9 billion tech growth equity firm, told Semafor. “It’s one thing raising $1 to $2 billion. It’s another thing raising $75 billion.”

‘War insurance’ costs soar

The cost of insuring everything from energy infrastructure to hotels to data centers against war damages has skyrocketed in the Middle East.

A $100 million policy covering damage from war and terrorism that would have cost $250,000 per year before the outbreak of hostilities costs $5 million today, Joe Peiser, CEO of Risk Capital at insurance brokerage Aon, said in an interview. The maximum coverage available for a single property has dropped from $3 billion to $100 million, he said.

An Amazon data center in the UAE and luxury hotels in Dubai have been damaged by missile strikes and resulting debris, and Iran warned on Tuesday that the Middle East facilities of 18 US companies​​, including Microsoft, Google, and JPMorgan, would be considered “legitimate targets.”

Blue Owl investors break for the exit

Investors rushed out of Blue Owl’s flagship and technology-focused credit funds as private-credit jitters grow.

Investors sought to redeem about 25% of their money across the two funds, known by their tickers, OCIC and OTIC, according to Semafor calculations of Blue Owl disclosures Thursday. The withdrawals, which were somewhat offset by inflows of about $1 billion, follow a spike in withdrawals at peer funds run by Ares (11.6% at its flagship credit fund), Apollo (11.2%), and BlackRock-owned HPS (9.3%).

The redemption requests at Blue Owl included some large institutions and wasn’t just limited to panicky retail investors, an executive said. (Ares noted a similar trend last week, calling out Asian family offices in particular.) Still, Blue Owl’s redemptions grew each of the past three months, meaning that blended quarterly rate obscures the more recent, and acute, panic.

“We continue to observe a meaningful disconnect between the public dialogue on private credit and the underlying trends in our portfolio,” the firm said in a letter to investors.

Streamers and networks duke it out

Here’s something you don’t see every day: The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial board calling for tighter antitrust enforcement. A brewing battle over sports rights — and the stakes for the Murdoch family’s cable holdings — may explain why.

The paper’s opinion section, which generally dislikes regulation, suggested Wednesday that the NFL should lose its decades-old exemption from federal antitrust rules if it keeps moving games from TV networks, including the Murdoch-owned Fox, to streaming platforms like YouTube. A 1961 rule lets NFL team owners sell their game rights as a group, behavior that would otherwise trip anti-collusion laws.

A representative for News Corp didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lobbyists for the legacy cable and broadcast networks — ABC, CBS, and NBC, who all have a lot to lose if sports shifts to streaming platforms — have been working the phones across Washington pushing the same message, industry executives tell Semafor. They have an ally in Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, who first previewed his argument to Semafor two weeks ago: “There’s a point at which you sort of tip the scale, and they just put too many games behind a paywall, and then that whole exemption collapses,” he told Rohan. (Watch that conversation here.)

— Rohan Goswami

Activists find unlikely ally in AI

Activist investors have been a bit defanged by AI. When nobody can see the future, it’s hard to find a playbook, or credibly critique CEOs’ choices. But in the information and persuasion war that is corporate proxy season, AI may be an activist’s new best friend.

Corporate-comms firm Kekst CNC ran materials from 49 proxy contests that took place between 2023 and 2025 across four top AI models — ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity — and asked a simple question: Should investors back the activist or management? All favored the activist by wide margins, and were more friendly to those hedge funds than the leading (presumably human-forward) advisory firms ISS and Glass Lewis. But the models were also more likely to recommend compromise, which supports some recent research that shows LLMs nudge users toward consensus views.

We doubt too many big investors choosing between activist and company ballot measures will ask ChatGPT who to vote for, but AI is increasingly an input into human judgment and doing much of the number-crunching and analysis. And JPMorgan is using its own AI tools — it’s unclear which LLMs power it — to help the bank decide how to vote the shares it owns in its money-management arm. The dueling pitch decks and spicy letters look increasingly like weapons of the last war.

— Rohan Goswami

At the end of her tenure as CEO of GSK, Dame Emma Walmsley is clear-eyed about what the job required. On this week’s episode of The CEO Signal, co-hosts Penny Pritzker and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson spoke with Walmsley late last year, just as she was preparing to step down as CEO of GSK after planning her own succession.

After more than a decade leading one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies through significant change, reshaping its strategy and structure, and navigating activist campaigns, she reflects on what the job actually demands and how that understanding evolves over time.

Hear what she has to say and more on The CEO Signal — watch the full conversation now.

➚ BUY: David. A lawsuit accusing the popular protein bar of lying about its low calorie count was quietly dropped. The company, which had said the suit stemmed from a misunderstanding of industry metrics, reiterated its stance: “David is 150 calories.”

➘ SELL: Goliath. Nike CEO Elliott Hill aired his frustrations with the footwear giant’s slow turnaround. “I’m so tired, and I know you are too,” he said in a all-hands meeting. A weak outlook in China sent shares to their lowest level in more than 10 years.

Companies & Deals

• Late-stage capitalism: Global M&A values reached $1.3 trillion in Q1, the best start ever despite massive geopolitical turmoil.
• Powder piles up: Private equity giant KKR raised $23 billion for its latest flagship buyouts fund at a time when it’s getting harder to sell assets and return money to investors.
• Venezuelan bulls: Executives are already flooding in to scour investments, capitalizing on the country’s reconstruction.
• Under the Hood: Bloomberg profiled Microsoft CFO Amy Hood, whose need to balance capex and AI investment FOMO makes for “one of the toughest jobs in tech.” Said one analyst: “You either believe in her way or you don’t, and if you don’t, look out.”

Watchdogs

• Cockroaches in the Cash Room: The Treasury Department is meeting insurance regulators to discuss risks in private credit, as investors flee for the exits.
• Oral fixation: FDA approval for Eli Lilly’s weight loss pill could push the company even further ahead of rivals in the weight-loss game.

Markets

• Scrimping: Surging energy prices are forcing less-wealthy countries in Asia to adopt rationing measures, including WFH days and promoting cycling and carpooling.

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