Business

1. World Economy Summit
2. Can Powell actually be fired?
3. Affirm joins #Dexit protest
4. Unilever targets Ben & Jerry’s nonprofit
5. FTC sues Uber
6. We have to talk about gold

2025’s Davos consensus continued its unbroken tradition of being wrong. Just three months ago, CEOs were eager — competitively so, it seemed — to express their enthusiasm for the new administration. “Corporate America is unshackled,” I wrote from the ground, “and the mics are everywhere.” You can now add “trade war” to the list of things the Swiss Alps confab missed, behind the 2008 financial crisis, Brexit, the pandemic, and the near-total disintegration of the economic globalism that is at the heart of Davos. The pessimism and fear in the capital class right now is unmissable, and won’t be swiftly reversed.

I mention all this because a) reaping, sowing, etc. and b) I’m on my way to Washington, where our World Economy Summit could not be better-timed. We’ll have more than 200 key global leaders and CEOs on stage including GM’s Mary Barra, Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, and Citadel’s Ken Griffin. Query whether they’ll be as candid in their concern as they were in their optimism a few months ago, but whatever consensus emerges, I hope it holds up better.

See below for some of the conversations I’m most looking forward to, and tune in. The conference starts Wednesday. Livestream here and agenda here.

What we want to know

My colleagues and I (and some special guest moderators) will sit down with CEOs and policymakers. Here’s what we’re dying to know:

• Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos: Netflix wants to be a trillion-dollar company but can it get there just through streaming? The company has upended its business model once — will it make another bold bet?
• FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson: Where’s that deregulation CEOs feel they were promised? His moves so far — including his lawsuit against Uber yesterday for “deceptive” subscription fees and dark-pattern cancellation mazes — are indistinguishable from those of his predecessor, Lina Khan.
• United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby: The industry’s provocateur doesn’t usually need much prompting to say what’s on his mind. Airlines are a bellwether for consumer spending, depend on international travel, and buy French airplanes. Will he go all-in on Boeing?
• Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran: On how all … this… is going, why America should even want the jobs he’s trying to bring back, and whether we’ll see a Mar-a-Lago Accord.
• Carlyle CEO Harvey Schwartz: This volatility is a test for private markets, which have pitched themselves as immune from the gyrations of public markets. Is that head-in-the-sand nonsense or proof of concept? Plus, where he’d be looking for hidden tail risks if he was still in his old job as Goldman’s CFO.

Can Trump fire Powell?

Markets plunged on Monday after a White House official said that Trump and his advisers were studying whether they could fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump called “a major loser” in his latest escalation.

Powell has repeatedly said that the White House can’t fire him and that he won’t leave before his term ends next year.

A 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent prevents the president from firing leaders of independent agencies without cause. Trump has challenged it, asking the Supreme Court to bless his firing of two officials at the National Labor Relations Board.

“The founders really wanted Congress to fight back,” conservative legal scholar John Yoo said in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal’s opinion editor. “They wanted the other branches to stand up and the people we elect to stand up to protect the Fed’s institutional independence.” (The Fed was established in 1913, so originalist arguments will need to be parsed here). Congress has shown little appetite to challenge Trump, though Powell spent more time than most Fed chairs making allies on the Hill.

This may fall instead to the markets, which so far has been the only real check on Trump’s policies. The yield on US Treasury bonds is approaching levels that spooked the president into backtracking on tariffs.

Affirm joins Musk-fueled Delaware exit

Affirm, the fintech giant controlled by Paypal Max Levchin, plans to move its legal home out of Delaware, joining in the Elon Musk-inspired protest movement against America’s longtime corporate home, Semafor’s Rohan Goswami reports.

The company is preparing to reincorporate in Nevada or Texas, according to people familiar with the matter. Affirm joins a growing list of companies quitting Delaware in a rebuke to legacy institutions they see as beholden to liberal forces. Levchin worked at PayPal with Musk, who set off the #Dexit push when he moved Tesla to Texas last year after a Delaware judge nixed his $56 billion bonus.

DropBox, Roblox, Bill Ackman’s investment fund Pershing Square, AMC Networks, and Madison Square Garden Entertainment are all reincorporating in Nevada, which offers insiders more immunity from lawsuits and wider discretion in day-to-day management. “At this point, any lawyer recommending incorporation in Delaware is committing malpractice,” Musk posted on X last week.

Unilever to probe Ben & Jerry’s charitable giving

Unilever is probing the finances of Ben & Jerry’s charitable foundation with a focus on its grants to progressive and pro-Palestinian groups, including to an organization with ties to two of the foundation’s trustees.

It’s the latest escalation of long-running tensions between Ben & Jerry’s and its corporate parent over the creamery’s progressive bent. Unilever is spinning off its ice cream division, which includes Ben & Jerry’s, into a standalone company.

As part of that process, Unilever plans to audit the Ben & Jerry’s Foundation, according to a letter sent earlier this month to the foundation’s president and seen by Semafor. The results “will inform decisions as to future funding of the foundation by Unilever and, post-separation, by” the new company, called Magnum.

Of particular interest to Unilever: hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to the Oakland Institute, a nonprofit that promotes global aid and is critical of the World Bank and Israel. One Ben & Jerry’s Foundation trustee is a salaried employee and founder of the Oakland Institute, and another is an unpaid adviser, according to tax filings.

Uber in FTC hot seat

Corporate America is not getting the regulators they expected.

The Federal Trade Commission sued Uber on Monday, claiming that it used “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” to boost its Uber One subscription product. The language in the complaint wouldn’t have been out of place in Joe Biden’s FTC, where Lina Khan led the toughest antitrust crackdown in a generation.

“The Trump-Vance FTC is fighting back on behalf of the American people,” Ferguson said in a release.

Big Tech’s donations and support have bought them little of the influence and deregulation they had hoped for. Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who donated to Trump’s inauguration, lobbied the president unsuccessfully to kill the FTC’s monopoly lawsuit. Trump’s antitrust cops affirmed Khan’s tighter merger guidelines, and among their first moves in January was suing to block a $14 billion tech deal.

A gold rush

There’s a new safe haven.

Gold hit a record Wednesday even as US Treasury bond prices continued to fall. Both have historically been where investors go when they get scared, with gold bugs and some central banks preferring bullion, and most everyone else opting for T-bills. Remember, cratering Treasury prices is what prompted Trump to backtrack on tariffs.

One other reason to keep an eye on gold: There’s an idea floating around, not quite a conspiracy theory but not quite a real thing, that the Trump administration will revalue gold stores at Fort Knox, which are valued for arcane reasons at $42.22 an ounce. At current market prices, it would be worth about $850 billion more. That money could be used to pay for an extension of Trump’s tax cuts, seed the sovereign wealth fund he wants, or buy bitcoin.

Introducing The Semafor View — our annual guide helping business leaders make sense of this moment. This year’s edition brings together bold provocations from world-class thinkers on the forces reshaping business, policy, and the global economy. From AI disruption to geopolitical realignment, The Semafor View is a must-read for leaders navigating today’s fractured world.

➚ BUY: Defensive stocks. Netflix shares jumped more than 6% after reporting strong earnings. The company is banking on a yet-untested theory that consumers will keep their subscriptions even in a market downturn. Utilities, another defensive sector, have also held up lately.

➘ SELL: Defense stocks. Shares of RTX plunged after it said it expected to take an $850 million hit from tariffs. Pushing for “zero-for-zero” tariffs, GE chief Larry Culp pointed out that the aviation industry has the highest trade surplus of any sector, selling $60 billion more of defense tech abroad than it imports.

Companies and Deals

• Pay day? Goldman shareholders will decide tomorrow whether to award CEO David Solomon and deputy John Waldron $80 million apiece — bonuses that the board says is meant to keep them from leaving but that proxy advisory firm ISS said lacked “rigorous” performance-based criteria.
• Rapprochement: Swiss pharma giant Roche announced this morning that it would invest $50 billion in the US to bulk up its R&D and manufacturing facilities across America’s heartland.
• Navigating uncertainty: Boeing agreed to sell its navigation-software arm to Thoma Bravo, a rare bit of action in private-equity land that gives the airplane maker cash and breathing room as it navigates a trade war.
• Standing firm: Progressive law students might not like BigLaw’s capitulation to the White House but, saddled with debt, they’re finding $250,000 paydays hard to resist.
• South of the border: Chipotle thinks it can compete for Mexican foodies — in Mexico. The company will open its first restaurant there next year.
• Cheaper by the gallon: BP’s sagging share price has made it “the most obvious takeover target in its sector,” the FT writes. It was the only super-ish major to invest heavily in alternative energy and then, at the urging of activist investor Elliott Management, pivot away. A quarter of shareholders voted at the company’s annual meeting yesterday to boot its chairman Helge Lund.

Markets

• Smoke signals: You can obviously bet on the next Pope.
• Odd man out: “We are very interested in continuing to invest in our own country,” a head of a Canadian pension plan told Bloomberg, and are “intrigued” by opportunities in Europe and Asia. (Note what’s not on the list.) Separately, another Canadian investment giant has stopped all non-essential travel to the US.
• Tokyo shift: Japanese institutional investors sold $20 billion in foreign debt — mostly Treasuries, one analyst believes — between March 31 and April 11, according to data from the Ministry of Finance.
• There’s always a few: Some Chinese companies are still trying to go public in the US, despite escalating trade tensions, investors’ total lack of appetite for new listings, and a sketchy history of Chinese IPOs in New York.
• Buy the dip: Meet the veteran investors who see value in the discombobulated and depressed oil patch, Tim McDonnell reports. Bear markets can’t last forever.

The World Bank’s private investment arm plans to “significantly” increase its equity stakes in Africa over the next five years to drive businesses’ growth, its top official told Semafor’s Alexis Akwagyiram, part of a strategic shift as the continent’s economies and firms grapple with often crippling levels of debt.

Makhtar Diop, a former Senegalese finance minister who became the International Finance Corporation’s first African managing director in 2021, said the strategy was part of the institution’s global commitment to grow its equity portfolio in order to “support transformative development.”