It was a major business news week, with a new Fed chair appointment, Big Tech earnings, a potential OpenAI IPO on the horizon, and a daunting memo on the future of AI, written by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei.
• President Donald Trump finally chose his Fed chair, and he’s not the dovish rate-cutting Powell replacement he’s longed for. Instead, he’s a “central casting” choice with hard-money leanings and deep ties to Trumpworld, with a billionaire father-in-law who’s known the president since college. The Fed independence challenge may finally have reached a finale—or just the beginning.
• OpenAI is reportedly racing toward a fourth-quarter IPO, having begun informal talks with Wall Street banks in an effort to beat rival AI startup Anthropic to market. If OpenAI can successfully IPO while burning billions and projecting losses through 2030, it’s a sign the AI boom still has room to run.
• The Anthropic CEO penned a 20,000-word essay on his personal blog in which he pleaded with the world to get to grips with what he sees as AI’s imminent risks, from bioterrorism to mass unemployment, and proposed several policy solutions, including a progressive tax on AI-generated wealth and more generous philanthropy. He said he and his Anthropic cofounders have pledged to give away 80% of their own fortunes. But he also talked up Anthropic’s own safety work, making the document as much a marketing novella as it was a policy plea.
• Microsoft said Wednesday that its revenue had surged 17%, but investors freaked out, knocking $440 billion off its market cap over the next 24 hours, as they fretted over the still huge gap between its AI capex investments and AI revenue.
• Meta is also spending a king’s ransom on AI infrastructure. But its revenue and profits are growing faster than Microsoft’s—maybe social media is the magic ingredient that turns AI into money?—and investors drove its shares up by 8% this week.
• Apple announced a massive quarter, thanks to sales of the new iPhone 17. But investors were evidently hoping for a grand strategic announcement about AI that did not come, and the stock didn’t move.
• Tesla announced its first-ever quarterly revenue decline. Elon Musk said the company would discontinue its Model S and Model X EVs, make more Optimus robots—and invest $2 billion in Musk’s AI company, xAI. Tesla stock soared, then plunged: Once again, Musk is keeping investors guessing.
