Business

1. Intel’s money tour
2. Comcast’s new predator
3. Disney investors want Kimmel docs
4. Dems target antitrust pick
5. The timeless dollar

“Free speech insanity aside, this absolutely makes the case for spins/sales,” one media banker texted me late last week. He was talking about Disney’s Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha and noting, correctly, that if Bob Iger had jettisoned ABC and its other TV channels, as he considered doing after his return as CEO in 2022, he’d have $10 billion and one fewer headache.

The business reporter in me agrees. Pesky media businesses are liabilities for companies like Disney, whose fortunes lie in theme parks, cruises, and movie studios (which carry their own free-speech pitfalls, but at least they’re profitable). CNN accounts for maybe 2% of David Zaslav’s revenue, but a huge share of his problems. Those problems will soon be someone else’s.

But from a free-speech perspective, it’s worth asking who that somebody else is and what their incentives would be to put Kimmel back on the air, as Iger did — and let him cast Robert DeNiro as a mob-boss caricature of FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. A more focused owner of ABC would be even more beholden to Carr and the affiliate networks whose blackout threats set the whole affair in motion.

That’s a feature, not a bug, of spinoffs, which don’t so much solve a problem as move it and magnify it. Spinning off ABC would let Disney not care what Carr thinks. But it would require ABC to care only about what Carr thinks. Iger might worry about President Donald Trump sending the Coast Guard after a Disney cruise ship, but that’s a longer shot than the FCC making life impossible for a pure-play broadcast network.

If backlash from Hollywood talent or streaming customers canceling their Disney+ influenced Iger to reinstate Kimmel, the conglomerate model served a purpose — maybe not for shareholders (some of whom, as you’ll read below, are mad), but for society.

Elsewhere in media spinoffs: In Semafor’s upcoming episode of the Mixed Signals podcast, Ben Smith and Max Tani sit down with Mark Lazarus, who will be the CEO of Comcast’s cable spinoff, Versant, for his first in-depth interview. We’ve got a peek at that conversation below, and you can listen tomorrow.

Plus: I’m interviewing London Stock Exchange Group CEO David Schwimmer at Georgetown’s Psaros Center this afternoon. You can tune in here at 3 pm ET.

Intel still seeking money

Intel is on its way to being one of the strangest and most economically vital utilities in modern history. The company is seeking an investment from Apple, a person familiar with the matter said, confirming a Bloomberg report. That would follow the 4% stake Intel sold to Nvidia, the 2% it sold to SoftBank, and the 10% it forked over to the US government.

Talks with other chip companies predated the White House’s move, which began as a pressure campaign on CEO Lip-Bu Tan but has become a badly needed vote of confidence in a company with a long history of missteps and complacency. Intel shares are now outperforming the three companies whose money it sought.

Intel is behind in both cutting-edge AI chips and more prosaic models used in mobile phones, which cost it Apple’s Mac business back in 2020. Apple has since perfected its own M-series chips. But Western AI companies see the value in a strong US manufacturer, and like almost all of corporate America, are taking cues from the White House.

Mark Lazarus won’t be left for dead

Comcast’s soon-to-be-independent cable TV business is on the hunt for acquisitions, and for clues to what CEO Mark Lazarus will buy, just tune into his telecasts.

“Watch any number of newsletter podcasters that are on MSNBC as guests, and imagine some of them that might make sense,” Lazarus tells Semafor’s Mixed Signals podcast in an episode that posts tomorrow. “Certainly, we’d be interested in [buying] the ones that fit our vertical plans.” (He wouldn’t bite on two names Ben threw out: Crooked Media and The Bulwark.)

The longtime NBC Sports executive is tasked with managing the decline of pay TV while using the cash it throws off — and the clean balance sheet Comcast gifted his company, Versant, on the way out — to build “aspirationally, a modern media company,” he said. “Our head’s not in the sand about the direction” of linear television, which made up 60% of the revenue from the Versant businesses last year.

Lazarus wants to cut that in half, to about a third, and have people think less of CNBC and E! as channels for financial and celebrity news, respectively, and more as places to interact and transact. He cited Versant’s golf business, which includes the Golf Channel but also video instructions from Rory McIlroy, a tee-time reservation app, and software for golf-course owners. The strategy mirrors what Fox has been doing in the podcast space, with a bit of Airbnb’s new Experiences and The New York Times’ Wirecutter.

Lazarus sounds like a consolidator ready to make good on his promise last year that Versant would be “predator, not prey.” (We trust he’s a Semafor reader, not just a podcast guest.)

Disney investors demand Kimmel records

A group of Disney shareholders are demanding records related to Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, Semafor’s Max Tani scooped Wednesday. Lawyers representing the American Federation of Teachers and other shareholders said in a letter that investors were entitled to investigate whether the company’s leaders hurt them by briefly benching the late-night host after receiving threats from the Federal Communications Commission chairman and two big affiliate groups.

The group wants any materials shown to Disney’s board that estimate the financial hit from Kimmel’s suspension, as well as documents detailing how executives are supposed to make decisions around “politically sensitive programming.”

Shareholders in Delaware, where Disney is legally based, can demand corporate records to investigate wrongdoing, but access is limited to board matters, not day-to-day management decisions. So communications between Bob Iger, Disney TV chief Dana Walden, and Kimmel are off-limits — and Roberta Kaplan, the heavyweight Democratic lawyer who sued Trump on behalf of E. Jean Carroll, didn’t ask for them in the carefully tailored request to Disney.

Dems poke MAGA’s antitrust soft spot

Four Democratic senators accused Trump’s nominee for a top Justice Department post of allowing “outside corporate influence to corrupt” merger reviews, in a letter first viewed by Semafor. They are seeking records of his dealings with HPE, Amex GBT, and other companies that received DOJ takeover approvals.

The lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., can’t prevent the confirmation of Stanley Woodward to be the third-ranking official at the DOJ. But in their letter, they poke at a rare area of disagreement among conservatives, who are torn between a populist dislike of corporate power and the traditional Republican impulse to simply back big business.

Woodward, currently a counselor to Attorney General Pam Bondi, approved the settlement that cleared HPE’s $14 billion takeover of rival Juniper over the objections of DOJ antitrust chief Gail Slater, Semafor previously reported. The agreement, which let the merger go through with small tweaks, prompted the firing of two DOJ officials, one of whom let loose in a fiery speech last month that accused MAGA lobbyists (including Woodward) of compromising Trump’s “populist conservative agenda.”

Dollar’s days are not numbered, WTO lead says

Listen up, dollar doomers. Trump’s tariffs have amplified concerns that the dollar may lose its central role at the heart of global trade and financial markets. But Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, director-general of the World Trade Organization, said that will happen slowly, if at all, and isn’t inevitable.

“It took a long time to build up the dollar, and I think it would take a long time to find a currency that can replace it,” she said. (The Atlantic Council has a handy dope sheet on the contenders. None look that promising.)

New bilateral routes are cropping up that sidestep the US: Canada signed its first-ever bilateral trade deal with Indonesia this week, and Brazil and India recently agreed to almost double their trade. But foreign-exchange plumbing still requires a common currency to sit in the middle. While faith in America’s stability has declined under Trump, the most likely challenger to the dollar, China’s renminbi, also scores low in international trust.

“If the institutions of the US stay strong, then that confidence will be there,” Okonjo-Iweala said at Semafor’s Next 3 Billion summit in New York on Wednesday. “If they weaken, then it might be something else.”

Also of note: Okonjo-Iweala said China’s decision this week to forgo special WTO benefits afforded to self-identified developing countries marks a “momentous occasion.” The US and Europe have long complained that the world’s second-largest economy gets graded on a curve by misrepresenting itself as a scrappy upstart.

➚ BUY: Look-ins. Kimmel’s return drew 6.3 million viewers, more than three times his normal haul, despite being unwatchable in more than 20% of US households after affiliate groups Nexstar and Sinclair refused to carry the show.

➘ SELL: Outlook. The OECD expects global economic growth to slow from 3.3% in 2024 to 2.9% in 2026, as higher tariffs and uncertainty weigh on investment and trade.

Companies & Deals

• Venti to tall: Starbucks will cut hundreds of jobs and close stores as CEO Brian Niccol looks to recapture the “third-space” feel lost by a decade of overexpansion and mobile-ordering retrofits. Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson talked to Niccol about all of that in an interview out tomorrow.
• Bolt-on acquisition: The Trump administration is seeking a stake in a key supplier of lithium used in electric cars. Its leverage is a Department of Energy loan currently being renegotiated for the company’s mine project with General Motors.
• A smaller Citi: Citigroup finally sold a stake in its headache-prone Mexican banking unit, Banamex, three years after it first started trying. It’s a win for CEO Jane Fraser in her bid to slim down and simplify Citi, once the quintessentially global bank.
• Gulf buddies: An arm of Abu Dhabi’s state gas company closed the first of what it says will be many investments in US energy, buying 12% of a BlackRock-backed LNG project in Texas.
  

Watchdogs

• Plan B: The White House is vetting a former senior Commodity Futures Trading Commission official, Josh Sterling, as a potential nominee to chair the markets regulator after its current nominee got crosswise with crypto, Semafor’s Eleanor Mueller reports.
• Chill pill: The UK government wants to end a feud with pharma companies and pay more for drugs “to get those companies back again,” Britain’s science minister told the Financial Times. His remarks come as AstraZeneca, one of the largest London-listed companies, has made rumblings about moving to New York in what would be a big blow to the LSE, which lost another company today.
• Cons of pro bono: Congressional Democrats are probing whether law firms that are doing free work for the Trump administration are breaking appropriations rules.

Markets

• Raising the roof: US sales of new homes jumped 20% in August, an unexpected increase likely driven by steep price cuts and incentives for buyers. Existing homes are still selling slowly, though, and few are available.
• Southern exposure: Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Washington was ready to prop up Argentina’s economy with a $20 billion swap line. The World Bank has already pledged $4 billion, providing much-needed relief to President Javier Milei’s free-market agenda.