Good morning. Andrew here. This will be a big talker in the tech industry: My colleague Cade Metz has the scoop on Jeff Bezos’ new artificial intelligence company. The Amazon founder has become the co-C.E.O. of Project Prometheus, which is developing A.I. focused on engineering and manufacturing. We’ve got the details below. Also: The stock market is on high alert ahead of Nvidia’s earnings on Wednesday. And Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, is headed to Washington tomorrow where he will be the guest of honor at a White House dinner that is likely to be a C.E.O.-palooza. Speaking of C.E.O.s, we’ll have Alex Karp of Palantir, Mary Barra of G.M., Larry Fink of BlackRock, Brian Armstrong of Coinbase and others at the DealBook Summit on Dec. 3. We hope you’ll join us. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
A multibillion-dollar A.I. start-upJeff Bezos hasn’t held a formal operating role since stepping down as Amazon’s C.E.O. in 2021. That’s changing, according to The Times’s Cade Metz — and it’s a sign of how much the world’s third-richest man is betting big on artificial intelligence. Bezos is co-C.E.O. of a new A.I. start-up, Project Prometheus, Metz reports. The company has already raised $6.2 billion, much of which comes from the billionaire himself. That sizable financial backing could give it an edge on a rapidly growing field of competitors, given the costs of developing and running A.I. For context, while Bezos is deeply involved in the rocket maker Blue Origin — he was on site for one of its notable recent launches — and his title there is “founder.” Project Prometheus is focusing on A.I. with real-world applications, including engineering and manufacturing in fields like computers, aerospace and automobiles. Bezos’ co-founder and co-C.E.O. is Vik Bajaj, who previously worked at Google and founded the A.I. incubator Foresite Labs. Project Prometheus has already hired nearly 100 employees, Metz adds. Other details about Project Prometheus, including when it was founded or where it’s based, haven’t been made public yet. Bezos has already expressed interest in physical sciences A.I. DealBook was the first to report last year that he led a $400 million investment in Physical Intelligence, a start-up that creates brains for robots. (Physical Intelligence’s co-founder and C.E.O., Karol Hausman, noted that his company and its competitors develop A.I. software that, unlike OpenAI’s ChatGPT, has to operate in the real world.) Bezos believes A.I. will be big — even if it’s in an “industrial bubble.” At a conference last month, he noted that bubbles involve stock prices getting “disconnected from the fundamentals” of a business. (More on that below.) And he added that virtually every idea — “the good ideas and the bad ideas” alike — gets funded, for better and for worse. But, Bezos added, “A.I. is real, and it is going to change every industry.” He’s also in favor of bold A.I.-related bets, including putting data centers in space.
President Trump tells House Republicans to approve releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. The president reversed his previous stance, saying it was time “to move on” from the matter, as he faced the prospect that dozens of Republicans could vote to force his administration to release files related to the disgraced financier. Trump’s ties to the convicted child sex offender have come under increased scrutiny, even as he has demanded that the Justice Department investigate ties between Epstein and prominent Democrats. The Trump administration eases flight restrictions. The Transportation Department announced yesterday that it will end reductions it had imposed during the government shutdown, which had led airlines to cancel thousands of domestic flights. The move will allow normal operations to resume ahead of the busy Thanksgiving holiday travel period. A former Fed official admits a violation of trading rules. Adriana Kugler, who abruptly stepped down as a Fed governor in August, said in new disclosure forms that her husband had traded shares in companies, including Apple, Southwest Airlines and Cava, without her knowledge. Many of the transactions occurred during the so-called blackout period ahead of Fed policy meetings, when officials, their spouses and their children are not allowed to make trades. A high barS&P 500 futures are up slightly this morning after a topsy-turvy week. That comes as investors brace for more consequential corporate earnings, capped by Nvidia’s quarterly results on Wednesday. The stakes and expectations are again sky-high for Nvidia, the company at the center of the artificial intelligence boom. Investors have been debating for months: Are A.I. companies overvalued, especially the $4.6 trillion chipmaker, whose shares have soared since the debut of ChatGPT in November of 2022? Or will the huge sums flowing into the technology usher in profound economic growth?
Disappointing results could fuel A.I. bubble fears. Unless the company overdelivers, “you might see risk managers, or investors on their own, taking a few chips off the table,” Jonathan Stubbs, an equities strategist at Berenberg, told DealBook. Analysts have set a high bar. They expect revenue and profit to each have grown more than 55 percent year-on-year. Big investors have been betting Nvidia could fall back to Earth. Bridgewater Associates, as well as investment funds run by the billionaire investors Peter Thiel and Stanley Druckenmiller, have trimmed their stakes recently. And Michael Burry, of “The Big Short” fame, is publicly betting against Nvidia. (SoftBank also sold its entire $5.8 billion Nvidia stake, though it chalked up that move to raising money for other A.I. bets.) But Nvidia shares are up nearly 4 percent in the past month, buoyed by retail traders’ fervor for the company and other A.I. stocks. Jobs data and retail earnings loom large, too. Quarterly results from Home Depot (which reports tomorrow), Target (on Wednesday) and Walmart (Thursday) should offer fresh clues to the strength of consumers as President Trump’s trade war threatens to sap their purchasing power. Also on Thursday, investors will get the shutdown-delayed September payroll data, which should give new insight into the health of the labor market. But the big drama in markets has been around crypto, as Bitcoin sank below $95,000 this weekend. Analysts have been watching the $600 billion sell-off to see if it also spills into the equity market.
A crown prince comes to WashingtonMohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler, is set to meet President Trump tomorrow. The gathering comes as Riyadh and Washington — as well as the Trumps and the Saudi royal family — look to forge closer ties. It is the crown prince’s first White House visit since the 2018 assassination in Istanbul of Jamal Khashoggi, a dissident Saudi journalist and critic of the royal family. Bin Salman is expected to look to forge closer ties in three areas:
Will personal business be on the agenda, too? Ties between the Trump family and the Saudi royals have deepened since Trump’s return to the White House, as deal-making and diplomacy have become increasingly intertwined for Trump.
And then there’s PIF. The kingdom’s roughly $1 trillion sovereign wealth fund, which the crown prince chairs, has dealings with the Trump family. Affinity Partners, the investment firm founded by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, teamed with PIF and other investors to buy Electronic Arts, the big video game developer, for $55 billion. The “Delaware premium”A growing number of business leaders are becoming disillusioned with Delaware, the state where the majority of corporations are legally registered. Now, Niko Gallogly writes, academics across the country are at odds over the credibility of one of those grievances: whether Delaware courts are systemically overpaying lawyers in shareholder cases. The stakes are huge and could accelerate the trend of companies fleeing Delaware. Last week, the crypto giant Coinbase announced its departure for Texas, following in the footsteps of Tesla. (The $345 million fee awarded to the lawyers representing Tesla shareholders in a suit that voided Elon Musk’s $56 billion has become a factor in the debate.) A new study offers more evidence of a “Delaware premium” for lawyer fees. The study looked at 527 Delaware shareholder suits from 2017 to 2022 and is the first to account for the relationship between litigation risk — that is, the likelihood a lawyer will be paid back for their efforts — and fee awards, according to its authors. The findings: Delaware lawyers faced less risk in their cases than federal lawyers but were, on average, awarded 2.6 times their hourly rates in cases with monetary recoveries compared to 1.4 the hourly rates in federal cases. And big financial payouts are common. “The court may be tempted sometimes to see stockholder litigation like venture capital investments where you’re going to lose money in most of your investments, so you need really high payoffs,” Jessica Erickson, an author of the study, told DealBook. “Stockholder litigation isn’t like that — more than half of the cases, the attorneys walk away with some sort of fee.” Views differ at Stanford. In June, DealBook examined an analysis by the Stanford law professor Joseph Grundfest highlighting the large number of cases in which Delaware lawyers won fee “multipliers” of more than seven times their hourly rates. Michael Klausner, another Stanford law professor who is also a lawyer in Delaware representing shareholders, recently offered a rebuttal to Grundfest’s research that called those cases outliers. (Grundfest’s response to DealBook: “Outliers matter, especially when they are huge.”) What’s next? The Delaware Corporation Law Council is scheduled to release a report on plaintiff fees for the state legislature by early next year. If researchers convince the council that Delaware has a fee problem, it could be a catalyst for reforms to placate business leaders who might otherwise jump to Texas or Nevada. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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