Andrew here. There’s a new phenomenon in the world of investing. For years, Wall Street firms brought celebrities and athletes into investment funds to attract and entertain their wealthy clients.
Now, celebrities are creating their own funds, using their star power and relationships to get into deals — and investors are clamoring to be part of their club. The latest example is Jake Paul, the influencer turned boxer, who just raised a new nine-figure growth-stage fund. We’ve got more below.
A Fed stunner
Kevin Warsh’s first meeting as Fed chairman is reverberating through global markets on Thursday.
S&P 500 futures are gaining and the price of oil has fallen after President Trump signed a framework U.S.-Iran agreement in France last night. But investors are also bracing for what seemed unthinkable not long ago: that Warsh, Trump’s pick, would preside over a more hawkish central bank.
The latest: Futures traders on Thursday see at least one interest rate increase this year, possibly as early as October. Fed policymakers are moving to that view, too. (In March, not one Fed official had penciled in a rate increase this year.)
Here’s why the math is changing. The war in Iran has sent energy prices soaring, pushing inflation to a three-year high.
Warsh called that trend “a burden for the American people,” and signaled that lowering inflation to the central bank’s 2 percent inflation target would be Job 1.
Trump may be coming around to the idea. When asked by reporters about the prospect of higher rates, the president, who has bullied and cajoled the Fed to cut rates for much of his second term, said on Wednesday: “It could happen. It’s hard to believe. It just keeps our country down. It’s so unusual.”
Warsh’s influence could be felt elsewhere. He had called for “regime change” at the Fed and is critical of Fed officials freely sharing their views about the economy. Central bank watchers saw glimpses of that focus on Wednesday, especially in his abbreviated remarks that struck some as Greenspan-ian.
“We are going back to the days of Alan Greenspan when FOMC statements were deliberately minimalist,” Jeffrey Roach, the chief economist at LPL Financial, wrote to investors after the news conference.
Warsh also announced the establishment of five task forces, including ones focused on:
-
communications (Warsh is lukewarm on news conferences)
-
the balance sheet, which Warsh has said he wants to see reduced
What’s next? The central bank is expected to offer less forward guidance — Warsh did not submit his outlook on rates, leaving Wednesday’s dot plot short one dot — which would force individuals and firms to rely more on the available data to guide investment decisions.
If anything, the reliability of economic data has grown more thorny.
HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING
Tim Cook of Apple warns price increases are “unavoidable.” Surging prices for memory and storage chips, driven by high demand from artificial intelligence companies, will mean higher prices for Apple devices, Cook told The Wall Street Journal: “The situation has become unsustainable,” he said. In related news, shares in Intel jumped in premarket trading after President Trump said the chipmaker would partner with Apple on U.S.-made chips.
Trump administration officials split on taking stakes in A.I. giants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has reportedly favored distributing equity stakes in such companies to Trump Accounts, while Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick prefers the creation of a sovereign wealth fund, according to Semafor. (Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, has drafted legislation for a sovereign fund approach.) But some tech executives and Republicans have regarded the whole idea coolly.
Harvard and Bard face more questions about their links to Jeffrey Epstein. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the leading Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, asked the schools to hand over documents detailing their interactions with the convicted sex offender, The Wall Street Journal reported. Raskin said that internal inquiries by the schools — Harvard’s looked at Larry Summers, its former president, while Bard’s focused on Leon Botstein, its departing leader — were incomplete.
Can tech moguls keep the West aligned on A.I.?
It was striking enough that artificial intelligence executives like Dario Amodei of Anthropic, Sam Altman of OpenAI and Demis Hassabis of Google joined world leaders on Wednesday for a fish-and-cheese lunch at the Group of 7.
But more important than the image was the message that many tech leaders promoted: Don’t let U.S. clampdowns on Anthropic’s leading models Balkanize democracies’ approach to A.I.
Political leaders appeared to agree that countries needed to collaborate on overseeing A.I. But cracks in that coalition don’t appear to have been entirely patched over.
Tech executives sought to walk a tightrope on A.I. sovereignty and regulation.
-
“Everyone around the table agreed that the G7 needs to lead” in deploying and regulating A.I., Aidan Gomez, the C.E.O. of the Canadian A.I. company Cohere, who attended the lunch, told Vivienne Walt.
-
Amodei said G7 leaders must “resist the temptation to splinter” when it came to A.I., according to The Financial Times.
-
Altman called for an international group to agree on “globally accepted standards for testing,” adding that it was vital to avoid concentrating too much power with any one country.
But others — perhaps mindful of President Trump, who sat between Altman and Hassabis at the lunch — emphasized that the U.S., home to most of the leading A.I. labs, remained centrally important. Gomez described Washington as “a key partner and the primary investor that created this technology.”
World leaders still appear deeply worried about American dominance. “We won’t buy any models made by these companies if overnight, you can just flip the switch,” President Emmanuel Macron of France told reporters at the G7. He has sought to promote Mistral, his country’s homegrown A.I. champion, as a European counterweight to Silicon Valley giants; Arthur Mensch, Mistral’s C.E.O., was at the lunch.
And Prime Minister Narendra Modi also expressed concern about the Trump administration’s move on Anthropic, according to the F.T.
It’s unclear where Washington’s latest clash with Anthropic stands. Trump told reporters after the lunch that negotiations over the fate of the company’s high-end models, Fable and Mythos, were “going fine.”
But unnamed administration officials told Wired that they want Anthropic to make their frontier models jailbreak-proof, something cybersecurity experts say is probably impossible. Meanwhile, some Anthropic employees say that their company is being bullied by the administration, The Times reports.
-
The Anthropic fight has other potential consequences. OpenAI executives have told the administration that building the best A.I. “requires the best talent from around the world,” Jason Kwon, the company’s chief strategy officer, told employees, according to The Information.
Scoop: Jake Paul’s big new fund
Jake Paul is many things, including a professional boxer and content creator. He’s adding another title to his résumé: investor in late-stage start-ups.
Anti Fund, the venture capital firm Paul founded with the investor Geoffrey Woo, plans to announce on Thursday that it has closed its first growth capital fund at $100 million, Michael de la Merced is first to report.
Anti Fund now manages $180 million, a significant evolution from its start in 2021 as an AngelList rolling fund, essentially a subscription-based investment service.
The firm is run by Paul and Woo, who have founded several start-ups; Logan Paul, Jake Paul’s brother, is a general partner.
-
Investors in the growth fund include Aquarian Holdings, a $27.1 billion investment firm; FocusPoint Private Capital Group; Daniel Michalow, a former partner at D.E. Shaw; and Matt Holt, the founder of the private equity firm Thoreau Group and a former executive at New Mountain Capital.
Paul has parlayed fame into investment access alongside other celebrities like actors and athletes. Consider the companies Anti Fund has invested in: OpenAI, SpaceX (before it went public) and the drone maker Anduril. Others its growth fund has invested in include Saronic, a maker of boat drones; Etched, a designer of artificial intelligence chips; and Erebor, a digital bank focused on start-ups.
“Fame gets me in the right rooms and the right time, and my business knowledge allows me to strike the right deals and partnerships,” Paul told DealBook via text message. He added that his attention-getting skills helped OpenAI in its debut of the (since-shuttered) Sora video tool.
“My goal is to be regarded as the best ‘celeb’ investor of my generation,” Paul said.
Where Anti Fund sees opportunity: “The future will be defined by robotics in defense and manufacturing, semiconductors, power and specialized A.I. labs,” Paul wrote, pointing to ventures like Cognition AI, a maker of A.I. agent software, and Helion, a start-up focused on nuclear fusion.
Chart of the day
Snap’s slide
Shares of Snap fell sharply on Wednesday after the company announced its latest augmented reality glasses, which cost $2,195, more than sleeker rival products from Meta and are more akin to Apple’s unsuccessful Vision Pro device.
Snap laid off about 1,000 workers this year and drew an activist investor amid concerns about its lack of profits.
Talking A.I. with the C.E.O. of Prologis
Every week, we ask leaders how they use artificial intelligence. This week, Dan Letter, who leads Prologis — a logistics real estate company — told Sarah Kessler that A.I. was helping him find deals. The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
What have you told your employees or your direct reports about how you want them to use A.I.?
Every other year, we bring together about 150 leaders from around the globe. This year, our C.T.O. and our head of A.I. created a “Shark Tank”-style challenge, where teams of three or four built a role companion to do or augment a job. And it was all scored by A.I.
How did you do?
My team chose the C.E.O. role and did not do well. The winner had a more specific role, which was executing a repeatable process.
How has A.I. changed your approach to real estate deals or management?
We’ve either done or pursued trillions of dollars of transactions. And we’re taking all of that data and using A.I. to build tools to help us make better, faster decisions.
How much can you push up rent in that building in one of the hundred markets in which we operate? What buildings in Chicago should we be focused on that we don’t own? What buildings do we own that we shouldn’t own anymore? It’s all-around better, faster decisions around that data.
THE SPEED READ
Deals
-
Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley will most likely lead the I.P.O.s of OpenAI and Anthropic. But not the same bankers at each investment bank. (WSJ)
-
Thoma Bravo surrendered Medallia, a software company, to its lenders, potentially losing its entire $5 billion investment in one of the largest losses ever for a private equity deal. (FT)
-
Accenture agreed to buy a majority stake in Dragos, a cybersecurity provider, and buy two other companies for $4.2 billion. (WSJ)
Technology and artificial intelligence
-
Roelof Botha, the former leader of Sequoia, is reuniting with a fellow PayPal alumnus, Elon Musk, by joining SpaceX’s board. (Fortune)
-
OpenAI poached Noam Shazeer, an author of the research paper that kicked off the A.I. boom, from Google. (Bloomberg)
Best of the rest
We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.
