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What Trump Gained, and Didn’t, From China

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What Trump Gained, and Didn’t, From China

Andrew here. With President Trump set to arrive back in Washington on Friday, we’re taking a hard look at what his high-stakes summit in Beijing actually achieved. The TL;DR: It didn’t lead to the “grand bargain” many had anticipated.

While there were optics of cooperation between Trump and Xi Jinping, concrete deals — including on Nvidia chips or tariffs — were few. Trump just said that he rejected a proposal from Xi, China’s leader, to help broker a peace between the U.S. and Iran, leaving the critical Strait of Hormuz effectively shut.

Ultimately, the president is coming home to rising oil prices and a slumping bond market.

President Trump departed Beijing a few hours ago, hailing “fantastic trade deals” struck during his two-day summit.

Still, many analysts and investors appear underwhelmed by a lack of details or breakthroughs on key issues like tariffs, Iran and tech restrictions. The summit seems to have fallen short of already diminished expectations.

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For the 17 business leaders who accompanied Trump on the trip, the deal flow also appeared thinner than what was announced on his last presidential trip to China, in 2017.

Here are the highlights so far, Grady McGregor writes.

Nvidia and Citi apparently scored wins. Shares in Nvidia, the chipmaker, hit a record on Thursday on reports that Washington had cleared 10 Chinese companies to buy its H200 semiconductors.

That said, Beijing, which is looking to champion domestic rivals like Huawei, has not signaled it would be open to permitting the sales — an issue echoed on Friday by Jamieson Greer, the U.S. trade representative.

And on the eve of the summit, Beijing approved Citi’s application to operate a securities business in China, ending a yearslong regulatory application process. It is unclear whether the presence of Jane Fraser, the bank’s C.E.O., on the trip played any role in Beijing’s decision. Citi shares gained on Thursday.

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Boeing landed an order for 200 aircraft, a deal Trump highlighted in a Fox News interview last night.

But shares in the plane maker fell sharply in premarket trading on Friday: The number was short of analysts’ forecasts of at least 300 planes.

The Board of Trade looks like a go. The Washington-Beijing body would manage trade in sectors such as aviation, energy, medical equipment and agriculture. Greer said it would aim to reduce tariffs on roughly $30 billion worth of goods.

He added that he expected the tariff truce the countries struck last fall in South Korea to be extended.

What’s still unclear:

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Major cryptocurrency regulation clears a key hurdle. The Senate Banking Committee passed the Clarity Act, which has been promoted by crypto companies and investors like the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The bill heads to the full Senate, where it faces a less certain fate.

Federal prosecutors will drop criminal charges against India’s richest man. The move to end the case against the businessman Gautam Adani came after one of his lawyers — Robert Giuffra, who is also one of President Trump’s personal lawyers — met with Justice Department officials, The Times reports. (A presentation by Giuffra said that Adani was willing to invest $10 billion in the U.S., though sources told The Times that the withdrawal of charges wasn’t tied to the offer.) A settlement in a parallel case by the S.E.C. was announced Thursday in which Adani agreed to pay $6 million.

Bill Ackman bets big on Microsoft. The billionaire financier said on Friday that he had acquired a major stake in the tech giant and that he believed in the long-term prospects of its productivity software and its spending on A.I. Other hedge fund managers have bet the opposite: TCI, the firm run by Chris Hohn, recently sold off an $8 billion stake in Microsoft.

The high-stakes legal showdown between Elon Musk and OpenAI is finally headed to the nine-person jury.

Over more than seven hours of closing arguments, lawyers for each side sought to paint the other as untrustworthy.

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Here are some of the highlights of Thursday’s proceedings.

Can anyone trust Sam Altman? That was again the central attack by Steven Molo, Musk’s lead lawyer, who has argued that Altman, the OpenAI chief, deceived Musk, a fellow founder, about plans to convert the company from nonprofit to for-profit.

Molo told jurors that five witnesses had called Altman a “liar,” and he hammered home his point with a creative metaphor:

Imagine that you’re on a hike, and you come upon one of those wooden bridges that you see on a trail, and it’s over a gorge. There’s a river that’s 100 feet below and it looks a little scary, but a woman standing by the entry to the bridge says, “Don’t worry, the bridge is built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth.” Would you walk across that bridge? I don’t think many people would.

Can jurors trust Musk’s version of events? OpenAI’s lawyers, from the law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, argued that the billionaire knew about the company’s plans for for-profit conversion earlier than he admitted to and that the statute of limitations for his claims had passed.

Referring to Musk’s claim that he hadn’t read most of a 2018 email about OpenAI’s plans to seek outside investment, Sarah Eddy, a lawyer for OpenAI, said:

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Here you have one of the most sophisticated businessmen in the history of the world and he claims he didn’t read a four-page summary term sheet.

The outcome of the trial could drastically alter the A.I. landscape. If OpenAI loses, its operations could be disrupted at a time when rivals are gaining steam.

The artificial intelligence boom has been a tale of haves and have-nots. Some companies have benefited mightily, most recently the chip maker Cerebras, whose stock shot up 68 percent in its debut. But many enterprise software providers have been walloped.

One of them was Figma, the design-software maker whose shares have tumbled since it went public last year. But as it reported strong quarterly earnings on Thursday, its C.E.O., Dylan Field, spoke with Michael de la Merced about why he believed his company was poised to survive, and even thrive. Here are our takeaways after the conversation.

Remember the “SaaSpocalypse”? Referring to “software-as-a-service,” it referred to investors’ worries that tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code would devastate the entire category of subscription-based software companies, like Figma.

Figma appears to have dispelled at least some of those worries:

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The company’s results held up after an A.I.-related change in pricing. For most of its existence, Figma charged companies per user (known as seat-based pricing). But A.I. agents that can do work once reserved for humans promise to drastically reduce how many “seats” customers need to pay for.

In mid-March, Figma switched to a system in which it charged users for how much A.I. they used past a certain amount. The company said that more than 75 percent of its business users kept using A.I. tools despite the cap.

The result: Shares in Figma are up more than 10 percent in premarket trading since the report.

“Market narratives are market narratives,” Field said to DealBook about the SaaSpocalypse sell-off, playing down the investor concern while pointing out Figma’s strong performance.

“The way we see it, A.I. is going to create more software than ever,” he said. He added, “Design matters.”

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But Field remains on guard. Makers of A.I. models have muscled into Figma’s territory, notably Anthropic, which in March introduced Claude Design, a tool seen as a competitor of sorts. (Only three days before, Mike Krieger, a senior Anthropic executive, resigned from Figma’s board; Field reportedly complained about the situation.)

“You have to take a company like Anthropic seriously,” Field told DealBook.

The musical playlist for Thursday’s state dinner in Beijing for President Trump drew big buzz on social media. It contained some Trump favorites, including the Village People hit “Y.M.C.A.”


Every week, we’re asking a leader how he or she uses artificial intelligence. This week, Jeremy Allaire, who leads the stablecoin issuer Circle, told Sarah Kessler that he had built a “C.E.O. prioritizer.” The interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How do you personally use A.I. at home or work?

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One interesting one is a C.E.O. prioritizer. If there’s a request for me to meet someone or do something, you go to the agent and it interrogates you about it and does background research. Then it assigns a one-to-five score, with one being “Completely ignore it” and five being “This is a highly strategic use of your time.”

Circle wants to be part of the infrastructure that helps A.I. agents spend money. Tell me more about that.

The primary units of work in the economic system are going to be executed by A.I. agents. And increasingly, it’s going to be agents that are operating in teams.

You need an economic system to support that. We need a way for one agent to access and use the services of another agent. For example, you might have research data in a particular domain of biology, and I want to make that available to A.I.s to consume. And it’s going to be 5 cents, 10 cents. Whatever it is, you receive that payment, and the A.I. then can consume that data and use it.

And this transaction would take place via stablecoin and not dollars, because there is less friction and these are tiny transactions?

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There’s no payment system in the world except for something like USDC that can conduct a transaction for a fraction of a penny. Or even 5 cents or 10 cents. And it’s all programmable.

You said on your latest earnings call that 85 percent of your employees are using A.I. coding and automation tools. What does that look like?

We’re able to basically go through the entire software life cycle with A.I. agents conducting work. Agents are seeing feature requests, picking them up, coding and submitting the code for review. We have other agents that perform code review. Humans then obviously come in to do subsequent reviews.

What about outside of engineering?

It’s in every single function. If you want to build a creative strategy for a campaign, there’s a whole agentic workflow. If you are creating public communications content — we’re a regulated company, so we have very strict guidelines — there’s an A.I. that will vet all of your content and point out the issues with it.

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Deals

  • Investors led by Egon Durban, a C.E.O. of the tech investment firm Silver Lake, have reportedly struck a deal to buy 25 percent of the Las Vegas Raiders at a $9.9 billion valuation. (CNBC)

  • Michael Carr, a longtime top M.&A. banker at Goldman Sachs, died on Tuesday. He was 68. (Bloomberg)

Politics, policy and regulation

Best of the rest

  • Boeing and Toyota are said to have donated $1 million each to fund a reality-TV video series starring the transportation secretary, Sean Duffy. (WSJ)

  • “In a City of Big Dreams, Many Young Adults See a Cloudy Future” (NYT)

We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to dealbook@nytimes.com.

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Latest data show California conundrum: high growth but high prices, high unemployment

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Latest data show California conundrum: high growth but high prices, high unemployment

California, the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, continues to grow its economy faster than the nation, but more people are losing their jobs and the cost of living remains high.

New economic indicators released this week show how the Golden State is grappling with the effects of the Iran war, as well as an AI explosion, which is driving huge investments as well as layoffs.

The state’s unemployment rate reached 5.3% in April, roughly 1 percentage point higher than the nation’s. California’s unemployment rate is expected to peak at 5.6% later this year, according to the UCLA Anderson Forecast released this week.

The state outpaced the nation in economic growth in the fourth quarter of 2025. It probably continued to outgrow the country in the first three months of this year, the report said.

“Income and output will continue to grow faster than the U.S. even as employment growth is tepid,” senior economist Jerry Nickelsburg wrote in the forecast. “Once past the current weakness, expected by the middle of next year, a tech, durable goods manufacturing, and construction resurgence should lead to superior growth in both employment and income in the Golden State once again.”

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The state’s growth is being bolstered by many local companies that are attracting and spending hundreds of billions of dollars in the race to build the software and infrastructure needed for AI. However, there are signs that the same race may be leading to fewer jobs in some sectors.

From January to May, U.S. tech employers announced 123,653 job cuts, up 66% from the same period a year earlier, according to a report Thursday by global outplacement and executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. California had close to 77,000 job cuts across all sectors, double the number of any other state.

Although AI was cited more often than any other reason for cuts, the layoffs haven’t been as bad as the pessimists feared, said Andy Challenger, a labor and workplace expert and chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

“AI isn’t yet the jobpocalypse some predicted,” he said in a statement. “Like spreadsheets and email before it, the technology will ultimately make workers more productive.”

California has seen job growth in sectors including healthcare and social services. But entertainment, tech and manufacturing businesses have been cutting back.

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UCLA’s outlook paints a mixed picture of California’s future, one filled with uncertainty as the Iran war pushes up fuel prices, inflation rises, government policy changes and tariffs disrupt supply chains.

The state is particularly vulnerable to the effect of the war on Iran because it uses pricey low-emissions gasoline, and California ports accept cargo on ships that require large amounts of more expensive oil, according to the forecast.

California also is more dependent on oil from outside the country than other states.

The Iran war has caused gas prices to jump. Above, prices are at and over $6 a gallon at a station in Los Angeles on June, 2, 2026.

(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)

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It’s still too early to predict the fallout from the war on Iran, but economists expect it to negatively affect employment by the end of this year and into 2027, the quarterly forecast from UCLA said. It projected that national real GDP growth would shrink from around 2.3% this year to 1.8% next year.

The UCLA report did not provide a state GDP forecast, but said early indicators suggest California continues to outperform the country. Last year, the national real GDP growth rate was around 2%, the report said. California’s was closer to 2.5%, according to data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Some are concerned that AI could worsen what’s called a “K-shaped” economy, in which the rich see growth and most other people struggle with stagnating opportunities. In California, it could also lead to an “E-shaped” economy, in which low, medium and high-income people each see slight growth.

That depends on whether AI ends up helping workers or replacing them, economist William Yu said.

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“If it’s labor substitution, we are going to see this [as] more of a K-shaped economy. If it’s more of labor augmentation, we’re going to see more of [an] E-shaped economy,” he said at a conference about the report.

Tech companies say they are using AI to do more with fewer people. Yu said a lot of the AI spending is going into building out AI data centers rather than hiring.

Citing data from job search website Indeed, AI appears to be slowing down growth in software, information technology, marketing and media job postings, he said. But demand for civil and electrical engineers remains high. AI might not be affecting those roles, or reindustrialization policies are boosting hiring in those areas.

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Earwormy Kars4Kids jingle is back as charity appeals in California court

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Earwormy Kars4Kids jingle is back as charity appeals in California court

The Kars4Kids jingle is back on the air in California after being ordered off the airwaves last month.

The catchy jingle that has been getting stuck in heads for nearly three decades was pulled from the air after a California man took Kars4Kids to court for false advertising.

The man said he donated an old car to the charity, believing it would be used to benefit children in need. He was unaware that Kars4Kids gives the donations to another organization, Oorah, that uses the money to fund Jewish youth trips to Israel.

The Orange County court originally ruled the jingle a violation of California’s false advertising law for failing to disclose its religious affiliations, and it was subsequently pulled from the airwaves. Kars4Kids filed an appeal, and the court has ruled the jingle can stay on the air throughout the appeals process.

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“Kars4Kids applauds today’s court ruling allowing its ads to continue airing in California while the appeals process continues,” a spokesperson for Kars4Kids said. “The uninterrupted airing of its ads will enable the charity to continue funding its programs for children and families. We believe the lower court’s findings on the facts and the law were deeply flawed, and we look forward to pursuing a broad appeal of that decision.”

Kars4Kids has run into allegations of false advertising before. Oregon and Pennsylvania also took the charity to court over the misleading jingle in 2009, resulting in a $130,000 fine and a requirement to disclose its affiliations in all advertisements.

A Kars4Kids spokesperson said last month that its website clearly states its Jewish affiliation.

“We believe this case was nothing more than a lawyer-driven attempt to siphon off charitable funds for their own gain,” the spokesperson said. “The law and the facts are clearly on our side.”

The nonprofit using the funds gathered by Kars4Kids has also previously used the donations for a matchmaking program for Jewish young adults and to purchase a $16.5 million building in Israel.

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While the jingle could be pulled from the air again depending on the result of the appeal, for now, it will remain a part of your morning commute in California.

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California falls behind Texas in Fortune 500 ranking

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California falls behind Texas in Fortune 500 ranking

Texas has dethroned California as the state with the most Fortune 500 companies.

The Fortune 500 list ranks the largest U.S. companies by revenue. This year, 57 of the top companies are headquartered in Texas, compared with California’s 56. It’s a reversal from two years ago when the Golden State had the pole position.

The Lone Star State was quick to claim the victory.

“Texas is the undisputed headquarters of headquarters,” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a news release responding to the ranking, which was announced Wednesday. “The world’s leading businesses invest with confidence in Texas because of our welcoming business climate, predictable regulatory environment, and skilled and growing workforce. People and businesses are choosing Texas because Texas works.”

California’s corporate haters say they try to avoid the state’s high costs, income taxes and strict regulations, but the western state is still a top money maker.

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“California dominates on nearly every other measure: its Fortune 500 companies are the most profitable ($647 billion), most valuable ($20 trillion), and employ more people than any other state (2.8 million workers),” Fortune said in a news release.

Indeed, despite the naysayers, Californian companies have been leading the world in developing artificial intelligence technology as well as the latest in space and defense tech.

The state is home to nearly 400 “unicorns,” or billion-dollar startups — more than any other state, according to CB Insights. It also gobbled up nearly two-thirds of U.S. venture capital last year, with San Francisco Bay Area startups such as OpenAI leading the way, according to the business information platform Crunchbase.

Texas and California have been in a tug-of-war for the crown. In 2024, after a decade, California bagged the top spot with 57 companies on the list, while Texas and New York tied in second with 52 companies each.

Healthcare giant McKesson, and oil companies Exxon Mobil and Chevron, were the top three Texas companies on the list. Apple, Alphabet, and Nvidia took the top positions in California.

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Tesla, which relocated to Austin from Palo Alto in 2021, ranked 43rd on the list. Other major Fortune 500 companies that left California included Oracle, Charles Schwab and Chevron.

California’s population exodus has yet to fully recover from the pandemic times in 2020. The state’s high cost of living and regulatory environment are often cited as reasons for residents opting to move.

More recently, California’s proposal for a one-time tax on billionaires prompted some, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page, to open new offices outside the state.

Some smaller companies are also leaving the state, but nearly the same number are being set up. From 2011 to 2021, the state lost a net 2% of its total of around 47,000 headquarters, according to the Public Policy Institute of California.

“There is some indication of an uptick in headquarters leaving California, but it is really small in comparison to other firm trends,” said Sarah E. Bohn, vice president of the Public Policy Institute of California. “The rate of leaving is slightly higher among bigger firms.”

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Bohn, in a recent report, cautioned that focusing solely on relocations overlooks the range of positive and negative forces driving headquarters activity and can misrepresent businesses’ desire and ability to operate headquarters in California and the broader impact on jobs.

Behind Texas and California was New York, home to 53 Fortune 500 companies this year. The fourth spot was tied between Illinois and Ohio, with 29 companies each.

Amazon was the top company on the list, ending Walmart’s 13-year reign at the top of the annual Fortune 500 companies list. Amazon’s 2025 revenue was $716.9 billion, compared with Walmart’s $713.2 billion.

Seattle-headquartered Amazon joined Exxon Mobil, General Motors, and Walmart as the only four companies to have ever held the top position since Fortune began publishing the data in 1955.

Together, the 500 companies on the list roped in $21 trillion in revenue and $2.1 trillion in profits last year, employing 30.5 million people worldwide.

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