Business

1. Trump plans endowment fight
2. Robby Starbuck’s next move
3. Ka-Powell
4. Elliott targets HPE boss
5. Jensen in China
6. Google goes 0-for-2

As President Donald Trump continues his clampdown on elite universities, one thing is becoming clear: These schools’ finances may end up being as much of a liability as the DEI programs and Middle Eastern Studies departments they fund.

At $53 billion, Harvard’s endowment would be a whale on Wall Street and free to invest in whatever it wants. But its and its peers’ reliance on two pillars of government support — a tax-exempt status and billions in federal funding — make them uniquely vulnerable to Trump’s pressure campaign, which is about to ramp up, as you’ll read below.

Universities are big businesses attached to (or masquerading as, if you’d prefer) academic institutions. Penn has $15.8 billion in annual revenue and runs a hospital system whose identified growth areas, outpatient surgery and infusion therapies, are indistinguishable from any for-profit health care company. Its $22 billion investment portfolio “provides critical support for the University’s goal of becoming the most inclusive, innovative, and impactful university in the world” — rage-bait for conservatives printed in the university’s latest annual report.

These universities are subsidized by US taxpayers in a way that leaves them vulnerable to White House attacks. So, too, does their enthusiasm in recent years for riskier investments that appreciate nicely on paper but don’t spit out much cash, as we wrote on Tuesday. Endowments may now be called on to fill gaps in federal funding at exactly the moment their investments go under a White House microscope.

In today’s newsletter: Trump’s next university play, HPE weighs replacing its CEO under activist pressure, and parsing Jensen Huang’s week of surprising moves.

Plus: I’ll be in DC next week at Semafor’s World Economy Summit. There’s still time to request a pass and you can catch it all livestreamed, April 23-25, from Washington. We’ll bring you highlights from our conversations with more than 100 CEOs and government officials.

My interview card includes Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz, United CEO Scott Kirby, White House Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran, and Germany’s new finance minister, Jörg Kukies. What should I ask? You can respond to this email and find out more about the event here.

White House plans to target university investments

The next phase of the Trump administration’s pressure campaign on elite universities will focus on their financial investments, particularly in areas disfavored by the White House, like clean energy and China, people familiar with the plans said.

The White House’s war on universities, which it accuses of antisemitism and fostering progressive ideology, began two weeks ago with frozen federal funding and escalated Wednesday to a threat to revoke the nonprofit status of Harvard University and others, a move first reported by CNN. The new acting director of the IRS has been preparing internally to challenge the tax-exempt status enjoyed by universities, even those with huge endowments — Harvard’s is $53 billion, Princeton’s is $34 billion — that operate more like hedge funds than charities.

The next phase will put endowments themselves under the microscope. White House officials plan to examine their investments in China and ESG-related stances, the people said. Congress is also examining ways to tax endowment profits, some of the people said, potentially to offset an extension of tax cuts.

• Further reading: The Department of Homeland Security has warned that Harvard might lose the ability to enroll foreign students if it doesn’t comply with the administration’s demands. Elite universities could likely absorb that blow at the undergraduate level, where admissions are ultra-competitive, but would take a hit in graduate and research programs.

Robby Starbuck is going corporate (sort of)

Corporate America’s most potent adversary is planning a lobbying group for “long-term corporate oversight” of diversity policies. Robby Starbuck, who has become a widely known boardroom boogeyman by pressuring companies including Walmart, Lowe’s, and Harley-Davidson to abandon DEI efforts, told Semafor’s Rohan Goswami that he plans to formalize his efforts through a lobbying group “to ensure that this never happens again.”

Starbuck said he has gotten a “blank check” offer from at least one big Republican donor. “The catch is: they want the ability to kill stories” — Starbuck said he considers himself a journalist — “and pick targets. And I just don’t work that way.”

Trump’s cold war on Fed turns hot

“Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Trump wrote on social media. The president said the Federal Reserve chair should be cutting interest rates, like Europe did again today. (Europe has higher unemployment than the US and isn’t facing the same price shocks from tariffs.)

“There isn’t a modern experience of how to think about this,” Powell said about the sharp US policy shifts in a speech yesterday. He said he was surprised by the size of Trump’s tariffs, which were “significantly larger” than the central bank had modeled.

Powell’s comments were his starkest yet about the bind the Fed finds itself in. Its playbook — raise interest rates to bring down inflation, lower them to spur a weak economy — doesn’t neatly work in a tariff-scrambled world, which economists predict will bring both higher prices and slower growth, a rare combination.

HPE’s chief faces activist that wants him out

HPE’s board is expected to meet in coming days to discuss whether to replace CEO Antonio Neri after an activist investor said it would seek his ouster, people close to the company told Semafor’s Rohan Goswami.

Activist investor Elliott Management, which has a $1.5 billion stake in HPE, wrote in a letter to HPE’s board earlier this week that it would push for a CEO change, some of the people said. If Elliott has its own candidates in mind, it didn’t share them with HPE’s board. The size of its stake was previously reported by Bloomberg.

HPE has struggled since its 2015 separation from HP’s legacy PC business. Both companies combined trade today for about what HP was worth on its own before the split, versus a 415% increase in the S&P 500 tech sector.

Neri, a Hewlett Packard lifer who has run the company since 2018, is now trying to steer his $14 billion acquisition of Juniper Networks past antitrust regulators seeking to block it. Both companies seemed blindsided by the Justice Department’s lawsuit, and have sought to reframe their merger as building an American competitor to Chinese telecom companies.

Jensen Huang zigs

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is in Beijing today, a surprise visit made days after the US government slapped export restrictions on the only chip the company was still able to sell in China. According to state media, Huang met Ren Hongbin, the head of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, and said he hopes “to continue to cooperate with China.”

Nvidia is the biggest corporate bargaining chip in the escalating trade war between the US and China, and Huang is emerging as a key, if chameleonic, player. His visit to Beijing is likely to anger the White House, but his announcement earlier this week that Nvidia will build AI supercomputers in Texas is the kind of bold shovels-in-the-ground commitment that few CEOs are willing to make right now.

Nvidia also didn’t tell major customers in China about the coming crackdown after learning about it on April 9, Reuters reports, so there are likely ruffled feathers on both sides of this trade war. Nvidia took a $5.5 billion charge in its quarterly earnings because of the rules, which Huang thought he had talked Trump out of during a dinner at Mar-a-Lago earlier this month, according to NPR.

Google loses its second monopoly trial

A federal judge ruled today that Google illegally monopolized parts of the digital ad business. The decision is the second to find the tech giant broke US antitrust laws, following a more thorough defeat in a trial last year about its dominance in online search. Alphabet shares fell 3% before bouncing back slightly.

It’s a major blow to Google’s core business and a gloomy backdrop for next week, when the company returns to court with the Justice Department for the second part of its search trial. The government wants to force a breakup, perhaps by separating its Chrome browser or Android software. (Here is what Google thinks should happen.)

That fight will be playing out just down the hall from the Federal Trade Commission’s ongoing monopoly trial against Meta. Of note: two of these three cases were brought by Republican prosecutors appointed by Trump during his first term.

Belgian Deputy Prime Minister Jan Jambon, Lumen Technologies CEO Kate Johnson, Mattel CEO Ynon Kreiz, WeWork CEO John Santora, FedEx CEO Raj Subramaniam, Northrop Grumman CEO Kathy Warden, and more will join the Fostering Global Innovation session at the 2025 World Economy Summit. This session will explore the incentives and barriers we face in generating new ideas, methods, and products while examining the broader implications for economic growth, job creation, and financial opportunity.

April 24, 2025 | Washington, DC | Learn More

➚ BUY: United Airlines. Investors liked Scott Kirby’s choose-your-own-adventure guide to future profits — one scenario that assumes a recession this year and one that doesn’t.

➘ SELL: UnitedHealth. Shares fell 23% today, shaving $120 billion off the market value, after the company offered a bleak forecast and warned of higher-than-expected medical costs. Can’t blame tariffs for this one.

Companies & Deals

• Pay-as-you-go: Global Payments will buy rival Worldpay for $24 billion, continuing the M&A merry-go-round in the world of payments plumbing. Another competitor, FIS, bought Worldpay in 2019 in the last wave of sector consolidation. It was spun off four years later with backing from private-equity firm GTCR, which has at least doubled its money with today’s sale, the FT reports.
• That’s gotta Hertz: Shares of the rental-car company surged 50% after Bill Ackman disclosed a big position. Hertz was one of the most heavily shorted stocks — nearly half of Hertz’s float was sold short — and its spike leaves bears nursing losses.
• Credit where it’s due: Blackstone’s lending arm accounted for half of new money raised by the firm in the first quarter, and generated more than half of the cash available to distribute to investors, blunting a dead-quiet private-equity market.

• De maximis: Discount brands Temu and Shein plan to raise prices in response to tariffs. In addition to putting a 145% levy on Chinese goods, the Trump administration eliminated an exemption that allowed goods worth less than $800 to be imported tariff-free. Hong Kong’s post office said it will stop shipping small packages to the US.

Watchdogs

• You’re (also) fired: Trump axed the two Democrats on the three-member National Credit Union Administration, an independent board regulating nonprofit lenders. The move follows the firings of both Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission, and could be laying the groundwork for “justifying removal of Democrats on the Federal Reserve Board,” analysts at TD Cowen wrote.
• Watchdog leashed: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau will halve its inspections of financial services companies, Reuters reports — though it will still function despite Trump’s calls to dismantle it.

Markets

• American exceptionalism: The US is now an emerging market — and an expensive one at that, MarketWatch’s Brett Arends writes. If you prefer your banana-republic content in audio form, Odd Lots has you covered.

Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris launched financial news platform Moniify at a lavish party in November. Meant to speak to a new generation of investors in emerging markets, the UAE-based outlet hired aggressively, spent prolifically, and made the competition take notice, Semafor’s Kelsey Warner reports.

But it quickly ran into the harsh realities of the news business, current and former staffers said. Costs spiraled, with $50 million spent pre-launch and another $50 million projected annually, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. The outlet struggled to find a voice, debating whether content was “Gen Z enough” with terms like “earnings seazn” and “slay,” and revenue-generating plans faltered.