Andrew here. Late last night, just hours after Andrew Left’s conviction sent a shock wave through Wall Street, the investor sent me an email: “Amazing. I was actually criminally convicted on manipulating Nvidia Facebook and Tesla for telling the truth and making a profit. I am a bit speechless.”
He asked rhetorically: “What this does for future of free speech is chilling. Can Individual investors not talk SpaceX? Wow. Still shocked.”
The jury decided that the case wasn’t about free speech, but straightforward market manipulation. But it does raise questions for investors about how public they can be or should be about their bets. More below.
A blow to short selling?
Wall Street was riveted by the criminal trial of Andrew Left, the prominent short seller, over the past few weeks. Now it’s reckoning with the jury’s verdict.
Left was convicted of securities fraud on Monday, and his fellow short sellers are now worried that their investment style of betting against companies for profits could leave them open to charges of illegal market manipulation.
What happened: The jury found Left, the founder of Citron Research, guilty of 13 of the 17 charges against him. They revolved around statements he made about trades in the cannabis company Cronos Group, the streaming device maker Roku, Nvidia, Tesla, American Airlines and others.
Left was among the most famous of a breed of short sellers who bet against — shorted, in Wall Street parlance — individual stocks and then published long treatises about their investment theses. (Left also bought shares of larger companies like Nvidia, then urged other investors on social media to buy them.)
He rose to fame for shorting companies like China Evergrande, Valeant Pharmaceuticals and Beyond Meat. Shares in Beyond Meat were trading at around $86 when he announced his bet in 2019. Today, its stock price is about 77 cents.
What the case hinged on:
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Prosecutors said Left quickly closed out his positions after publishing a report or a social media post about a stock’s price.
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They also argued in court that he gave advance warning to hedge funds of stocks he planned to short in exchange for a cut of their profits on his moves. (In one message, he bragged that profiting off his bet against Cronos, after retail investors latched onto his statements, was like “taking candy from a baby.”)
For his part, Left said his comments reflected his beliefs, and that he didn’t think he was required to hold a stock position after publicizing his opinion on it.
The trial was dramatic to the end. Judge Virginia Phillips berated Left’s lawyers after he disappeared from the courtroom during deliberations, leaving the jury waiting for an hour.
“If this happens again, I’m going to keep him in custody until we get a verdict,” she told Left’s lawyers.
The fallout: Corporate America has long disdained short sellers, while investors like Left have argued that they bring important facts — like wrongdoing — to light. Short selling has gotten increasingly difficult, especially during the recent bull market run, and some prominent practitioners have quit.
Some experts say Left’s conviction could further chill the business of shorts: “It will scare them into silence,” Frank Zhang, a professor of accounting at the Yale School of Management, told Bloomberg.
Left suggested he would appeal. “It’s a sad day for free speech,” he told the Financial Times, saying he was being penalized for giving “honest opinions on the biggest companies in the world.”
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
President Trump is said to be backing off plans for a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization” fund. The Times reports that he has recently leaned toward scrapping the initiative, which drew political opposition even from Republican lawmakers. On Monday, the Justice Department signaled that it could kill the fund, agreeing to abide by a judge’s order not to activate it until at least June 12.
China’s military has reportedly been trying to acquire Nvidia chips for years. Chinese records reviewed by Wirescreen, a software platform, showed “directly and irrefutably” that U.S. technology was equipping the Chinese military. The report may heighten the debate over U.S. export restrictions on Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence chips, which Jensen Huang, the C.E.O., wants to sell to China.
Huang predicts the next trillion-dollar company. Shares in Marvell Technology, which designs chips for data centers, jumped more than 22 percent in premarket trading after the Nvidia C.E.O. talked up the company as poised to achieve a $1 trillion market valuation, like fellow processor companies Micron Technology and SK Hynix. Investors have been hot for semiconductor-makers that are benefiting from hefty spending on A.I. infrastructure.
California heads to the polls with a lot on the ballot. Candidates for the governor’s race include the former Biden administration official Xavier Becerra, the billionaire Tom Steyer and the former Fox News host Steve Hilton. The consequences include the fate of a proposed tax on billionaires and the regulation of artificial intelligence. In the Los Angeles mayoral race, polls show a close race between the incumbent Karen Bass, the council member Nithya Raman and the reality TV star Spencer Pratt; on the prediction market Kalshi, Bass holds a substantial lead.
The benefits of being a publicly traded A.I. company
The race among artificial intelligence giants to go public just picked up speed, after Anthropic filed confidentially for an I.P.O. That means it could be publicly traded by year-end.
But Anthropic’s rivals, including older ones like Alphabet, aren’t standing still.
What we know: So far, not much. Anthropic hasn’t disclosed how much it will seek to raise, or at what valuation. But it’s already worth more than OpenAI, with a $900 billion valuation, and has been praised for focusing early on corporate users.
Anthropic still faces big questions, including:
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How much will it have to spend on computing power? It has gone on a spending spree recently, including a deal to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month to rent data center capacity.
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Will it win its fight with the Pentagon over limits to the military’s use of its products?
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Will people keep paying up for its expensive, if powerful, models?
How big is the first-mover advantage for A.I. offerings? Both Anthropic and OpenAI are hoping to lock up more of the investor money that’s waiting to be poured into leading A.I. companies. (They’re also hoping SpaceX, which owns xAI, doesn’t suck up all of the oxygen before they get there.)
That said, Sam Altman of OpenAI sought on Monday to play down any need to file first. “Going public is a financing event,” he told CNBC, “and I don’t think that’s one that we’re focused on the timing of.”
Alphabet showed a major benefit of being publicly traded. Google’s parent company said on Monday that it was selling an astounding $80 billion in stock to fund its own data center build-out.
It’s a sign that even the mightiest tech companies need to keep shoveling money into the A.I. race. Alphabet has said it expects its capital expenditures this year to hit about $190 billion, about six times more than in 2022.
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About $10 billion of the stock will be bought by Berkshire Hathaway, via an introduction brokered by Goldman Sachs, Lauren Hirsch reports. The deal adds to Berkshire’s stake in Alphabet — the tech giant is now among the conglomerate’s biggest holdings — and seems to underscore a shift in Berkshire’s thinking about tech companies, its stake in Apple aside.
There’s a difference between Alphabet and the newer A.I. labs, of course. Alphabet earned $62.6 billion in its most recent quarter. That’s roughly $62 billion more than either OpenAI or Anthropic has ever generated.
DealBook previously confirmed that Anthropic is on track to generate a $559 million operating profit in the current quarter. But in light of the company’s ongoing spend on computing, that seems unlikely to endure.
Chart of the day: M&A on the rise
The volume of U.S. M&A deals worth $100 million or more is forecast to grow 8 percent in 2026, according to a new report from the consulting firm EY-Parthenon. That’s expected to be driven by corporate takeovers, which EY predicts will grow by 11 percent this year; private equity deals will probably stay flat. (That would be an improvement on the 11 percent year-over-year drop in private equity transactions in the first quarter of 2026.)
High-powered litigators join forces
A senior Manhattan prosecutor who led the team that won the 34-count conviction of Donald Trump, and a seasoned defense lawyer representing Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela, have joined Harris Trzaskoma, a boutique Manhattan law firm, Jonah E. Bromwich and Hurubie Meko report exclusively for DealBook.
The prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, and the defense lawyer, Barry J. Pollack, will add firepower to the firm, bringing the number of lawyers at Harris Trzaskoma to 12.
Each of the lawyers has proved unafraid to face down Mr. Trump, an asset at a time when the president’s shadow looms large over the legal landscape.
Big law, small firm: Hoffinger and Pollack said they were attracted to Harris Trzaskoma because of the reputation of its founders. The firm was started in 2025 by Justine Harris and Theresa Trzaskoma, both experienced trial lawyers. Hoffinger and Pollack see the firm’s small size as a plus.
Pollack has represented a number of prominent clients, including Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Previously a partner at Harris St. Laurent in Washington, Pollack said in an interview last week that small firms had been essential to his practice.
“Having a team of 20 or 30 lawyers on a case may be right for a massive corporate representation, but I’ve never found it is right for representing an individual,” Pollack said.
During her second stint at the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Hoffinger was the head of the investigations division and later a senior adviser to the district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg. She led a number of the office’s most prominent cases in recent years, including trials that led to the convictions of Trump and his family business, the Trump Organization.
Hoffinger said that with the new team in place, the firm was positioned “to take on some really high-profile cases in New York, D.C. and elsewhere.”
Part of a trend: Big, corporate law firms — often an attractive landing spot for top litigators — have faced an exodus after many struck deals with Trump. Some top litigators have left to start their own shops, while existing small competitors have become more appealing to top-shelf talent.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
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Nearly half of American “unicorns,” start-ups valued at $1 billion or more, haven’t raised money in three years. Blame the artificial intelligence boom. (CNBC)
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Elliott Management, the big activist investor, called on Northern Star, Australia’s largest gold miner, to put itself up for sale. (FT)
Technology and artificial intelligence
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