Business

➚ BUY: UAE. The Gulf nation continues to spread its AI bets around. A deal this week to invest $40 billion into Italy’s energy and data-center sector follows a $50 billion commitment to France’s AI industry and funding for the US-focused $500 billion Stargate project.

➘ SELL: EU. Trump threatened in his first Cabinet meeting yesterday to slap 25% tariffs on imports from the bloc, which he said “was formed to screw the United States.” (In fact, the US was a driving force in creating a united Europe as a military counterweight to Russia.)

Nvidia delivers for Wall Street… Stripe is an enneaconta-corn again… BP dreams of pre-Deepwater glory days… WH plans to Make Eggs Cheap Again… Central bank finfluencers…

CEOs are turning on Trump — fast

THE SCENE

“A difficult time to invest.”

“Everybody’s paralyzed.”

“I’m sorry I can’t be particularly positive.”

“The chaos that is reigning right now is causing everyone to sit on their hands.”

That’s Citadel CEO Ken Griffin, ON Semiconductor CEO Hassane El-Khoury, Franklin Templeton CEO Jenny Johnson, and Nasdaq Private Market CEO Tom Callahan on the world of Donald Trump right now. Their comments over the past week capture a growing disquiet among business leaders, a month into a presidency that many of them had cheered.

“What decision do you make? Do you want to go left or right?” El-Khoury told Semafor in an interview Wednesday. “Are we going to grow the business? Well, I don’t know. Are there tariffs or not?”

CEO optimism is fading as Trump pushes ahead with trade restrictions and business-friendly deregulation has yet to materialize. US consumer confidence in January recorded its biggest one-month decline since November 2023. The US stock market, long Trump’s preferred proxy for economic might, is lower than it was before his inauguration, trailing major indexes in Europe, China, Mexico, and Canada — all targets of the president’s planned tariffs.

Microsoft — whose CEO, Satya Nadella, joined the post-election pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago — is calling on the White House to ease export limits on AI chips to allied or neutral countries. Chevron may lose a lucrative drilling concession in Venezuela over Trump’s immigration spat with that country’s strong-arm leader.

Trump’s picks to run key regulatory agencies, including those overseeing antitrust and the airwaves, appear likely to continue Biden-era enforcement priorities while adding new ideologically driven crackdowns and corporate purity tests. His pick to run the Federal Trade Commission, Andrew Ferguson, reaffirmed tough merger guidelines put in place by his predecessor, Lina Khan, which will do little for M&A, already off to its slowest start in a decade.

The Trump administration sued last month to block HPE’s takeover of Juniper, and said in a court filing last week that it’s unlikely to settle a lawsuit brought by the Biden administration seeking to block a travel-software merger.

Corporate executives making decisions on multiyear timeframes are struggling to decide whether to take Trump seriously, literally, or neither, and plan for a future after 2028. “You can’t move a factory overnight,” El-Khoury said. “It takes four years to build a fab.”

Onsemi gets about one-third of its revenue each from the US, Japan, and China, where half of its buyers are companies assembling cars or phones there for export. “Do you ignore it?” he said of Trump’s tariff threats, which expanded Wednesday to include a proposed 25% levy on European goods. “Or do you start doing scenario planning? That takes a lot of time and bandwidth.”

Trump is poised to get the Ukrainian mining deal he’s been seeking, but the draft agreement looks little like the president’s starting demand for $500 billion in aid payback. Ukraine has agreed to contribute half of its revenue from state-owned resources, including rare metals used in car batteries and nuclear reactors, to a reconstruction fund. Even if the final deal includes repayment to the US, the United Nations estimates Ukraine has 5% of the world’s rare-earth supply, worth about $750 million a year — meaning Trump would get his $500 billion in 600 years.

This isn’t the first time the US has misjudged the material wealth of war-torn countries: A 2010 Pentagon memo calling Afghanistan the “Saudi Arabia of lithium” turned out to be, as Bloomberg’s Javier Blas notes, “a complete fantasy.” But added to increasingly serious tariff talk and somewhat serious efforts to buy Greenland and the Panama Canal, it shows Trump’s commercial approach to foreign policy.

Semafor is keeping tabs on the business community’s MAGA shift and the Trump administration’s crackdown on corporate diversity efforts. The news is coming fast, and we’ll bring you updates in this newsletter.

Crude tactics: Chevron is on the verge of losing its license to operate in Venezuela after Trump accused President Nicolás Maduro of stymying the administration’s immigration agenda. Chevron, which gets 6% of its output from that Venezuelan concession, said it’s “considering its implications.”

Cold shoulder: Trump’s 51st-state bluster has Canadian consumers voting with their wallets. Some 85% of them plan to replace American purchases — ranging from kibble to California pinot — with domestic or other imported alternatives, a survey found. Even a 10% pullback in Canadian tourism could result in 14,000 US jobs lost and $2 billion of spending gone, according to an American travel lobbying group. A patriotic backlash has helped cut the lead of Canada’s conservative party in half since Trump’s inauguration, reviving the fortunes of Trudeau’s Liberal Party.

Three-letter words: CBS parent company Paramount is pulling back on DEI initiatives, The New York Times reports, trying to secure government approvals for its sale to Skydance. FCC Chair Brendan Carr can block that deal and has already gone after rival Comcast for its diversity initiatives.

Core values: Apple’s shareholders overwhelmingly rejected a ballot measure asking the company to nix its diversity efforts. The company’s opposition to the measure wasn’t an impassioned defense of DEI, but rather a criticism of “inappropriate” meddling in corporate affairs.

The British are coming: As PM Keir Starmer arrives in Washington to placate Trump with offers of increased security spending, a big UK pension yanked £28 billion from asset manager State Street over its abandonment of ESG principles. It’s a reminder that MAGA isn’t an entirely global phenomenon, and that red-state AGs are not the only investors who can vote with their feet. European money managers’ support for progressive policies has held firm, new data from Morningstar shows.

Ben & Jerry go to the boardroom: The eponymous founders of Ben & Jerry’s are looking for a “socially minded” investor to help them buy back their brand from Unilever, ahead of a planned spinoff, Bloomberg reports and Semafor confirms. Ben & Jerry’s has been a headache for Unilever from the moment it was acquired in 2000, making noise about Arctic drilling, the Iraq War, and more recently the Israel-Hamas war.

A deal could help Unilever’s planned ice-cream spinoff navigate the DEI storm, but the challenge will be finding investors willing to put money behind social activism. Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield might try that UK pension, which has £28 billion to redeploy.

Trump’s DOGE-led purge of the federal workforce is on the ballot in Virginia, handing Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger an attack line against her Republican opponent, Lt. Gov. Winsome Earle-Sears.

In an interview with Semafor’s David Weigel, Spanberger said her campaign is getting an earful from worried government employees and the business owners who serve them.

“I had a woman who owns a tattoo parlor and piercing shop in Virginia Beach come to me with concerns about the impact on her, because of the threats of these firings on her customers,” she said.