Good morning. Andrew here. The DealBook Summit is tomorrow, kicking off with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. We’ll bring you all of the news throughout the day on nytimes.com, and we’ll also send a series of special newsletters over the next two weeks that go deep on the highlights and takeaways. We hope you’ll follow along. Of course, we’ll also give you the latest news and analysis of the day’s business and policy headlines — check out today’s below. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
A new kind of donationMichael Dell remembers watching the quarters and dollars he put into a passbook savings account as a young child grow through the power of compound interest. It was a lesson that helped set him on a path to becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs in the United States. A half-century later, Dell and his wife, Susan Dell, are worth an estimated $150 billion, and they want children around the country to have a similar experience. This morning, they announced that they planned to give $250 to roughly 25 million children through the so-called Trump accounts created in this year’s tax bill, Nicholas Kulish reports. The total amount will be $6.25 billion, one of the largest gifts ever to go directly to Americans. Some background: This year’s tax bill created a new type of investment account for children that allows deposits (with certain limits) to grow tax-free. The bill called for the government to give $1,000 each to babies born from Jan. 1, 2025, to Dec. 31, 2028, to seed their accounts. The Dells’ pledge applies to older children, born in 2016 through 2024, who live in ZIP codes where median household incomes are below $150,000 per year. They are working with the Treasury Department to deposit the money into the new individual investment accounts, which they hope the recipients will use to help pay for college or trade school, to start a business, or to put a down payment on a house. Many details have yet to be determined, but here’s what we know so far. It’s a different approach to philanthropy. While most large donations go to universities or big nonprofit groups, the Dells hope to give more directly. “There’s been lots of studies that show that even relatively modest sums, with accounts like this, children are more likely to graduate from high school and college, they’re more likely to buy a home, to start a business,” Michael Dell said in an interview. Will others follow? The Dells said that they believed that their donation would encourage others to contribute to the accounts. “Our philanthropy work is the most important work that we do, period,” Susan Dell said.
Costco sues the Trump administration for tariff refunds. The retail giant became one of the largest companies to sue for reimbursement on the levies it has paid, as the Supreme Court weighs the legality of some of President Trump’s steepest tariffs. The case is likely to be closely watched on Wall Street, where some firms have been trading in companies’ tariff-refund contracts. Apple turns to a rival to find a new artificial intelligence chief. The iPhone maker said that John Giannandrea, who joined Apple in 2018, would be replaced by Amar Subramanya, a former Microsoft executive. The move comes as Apple is seen to have fallen behind OpenAI and Google in the A.I. race. OpenAI is also feeling the heat: Sam Altman, the company’s C.E.O., told employees yesterday that the company was declaring a “code red” to improve ChatGPT in the face of rising competition, according to The Information. The European Central Bank is said to demur on a Ukraine loan. Europe’s central bank refused to backstop a “reparations loan” backed by frozen Russian assets, saying the guarantee would violate its mandate, according to The Financial Times. The reported decision comes as Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, is set to meet President Vladimir Putin of Russia in Moscow today to discuss a peace proposal to end the war in Ukraine.
Exclusive: Kalshi raises yet another fund-raising roundLess than two months after Kalshi raised capital at a $5 billion valuation, the prediction market operator has collected yet more money — and more than doubled its valuation, Michael de la Merced is the first to report. It’s the latest sign that prediction markets are a hot business, even as the industry faces more regulatory uncertainty. The news: Kalshi has raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation, the company plans to announce today. It’s the start-up’s third fund-raising round this year. The effort was led by the investment firm Paradigm, with other participants including Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. The effort has also made billionaires of its co-founders, Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara, at least on paper, DealBook hears. Kalshi has continued to see its growth soar, particularly after it introduced the complex sports wagers known as parlays. Kalshi oversaw about $5.8 billion in trading volume last month, a record and up 32 percent from October, according to The Block. The company plans to use the new funds to continue expanding, via fresh products, further international growth and more distribution deals. “We’re in a massive market with a massive opportunity,” Mansour told DealBook. “We have to scale up to rise to that opportunity.” (The company is also moving to form more partnerships, including one with CNN, DealBook hears. A Kalshi spokeswoman declined to comment, and a representative for CNN did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) But Kalshi faces competition. There’s Polymarket, which has also raised billions of dollars. Others want to get into prediction markets, too, including sports betting sites like FanDuel and DraftKings. And state regulators continue to demand a piece of the action, arguing that sports betting on prediction markets falls under their jurisdiction (and entitles them to a cut). Kalshi had a legal setback last week when a federal judge ruled that it was subject to Nevada gaming rules, something it has argued against. Kalshi plans to appeal.
Warner Bros. Discovery bidders make their casesNetflix, Comcast and Paramount have submitted second-round bids for all or parts of Warner Bros. Discovery. As the bidders pitch Warner Bros. Discovery’s board, they’re not only arguing that their bid is best from a strictly numbers perspective, but also that theirs is the only one that can actually get government approval. Antitrust experts say all three face regulatory issues — but also have potential paths to success. Warner Bros. Discovery’s decision will partly depend on where it thinks regulators believe the media industry is headed, Lauren Hirsch reports. Netflix argues that the battle is over eyeballs. While the company, which submitted a largely cash bid, is among the biggest streaming services over all, it is arguing that it faces much broader competition, including from YouTube, traditional cable channels and TikTok. Viewers also subscribe to multiple platforms. In fact, Netflix argues that its subscriber overlap with HBO could mean a deal is good for consumers, because they could then get both for less than if they had to pay for each separately. Paramount says it is a battle against Big Tech. Allowing it to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery would create a new studio giant — a “scaled Hollywood champion,” David Ellison, Paramount’s C.E.O., said in one proposal — which it argues is necessary to compete with tech companies putting out their own content. That pitch may win over some Hollywood talent like the director James Cameron, who took aim at Netflix’s bid in an interview with Puck last week. That labor perspective may matter: During the Biden administration, a federal judge blocked Penguin Random House’s takeover bid for Simon & Schuster over its potential effect on authors. Comcast says it won’t have a cable problem. The telecom giant, which owns Universal, wants only Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming service, sidestepping regulatory concern about it owning too many cable networks. Like Paramount, Comcast would face questions about owning two major movie studios. But it may also argue that the combined company would still be dwarfed by tech giants. The Trump factor: Larry Ellison, David Ellison’s billionaire father, has a close relationship with President Trump, potentially aiding Paramount’s bid. But other rivals are looking for ways to endear themselves to the transactionally minded president. And remember that any effort by the Justice Department to block a deal can be appealed, as AT&T successfully did during Trump’s first term to buy Time Warner. The question is how much appetite there is for the time and money involved. What’s next? It’s all on the Warner Bros. Discovery board, which could soon pick a winner — or request yet more bids. The S.E.C. loses its lone Democratic voiceThe S.E.C. will soon be without its one remaining Democratic commissioner, Caroline Crenshaw, as her term is set to come to a close on Jan. 3. And Crenshaw is worried about the partisan future of the nation’s leading securities watchdog, Niko Gallogly writes. Crenshaw was left as the lone Democrat in the role after the S.E.C.’s former chair, Gary Gensler, and Jaime Lizárraga, another Democrat, resigned in January. Paul Atkins, a Trump nominee, was sworn in as chair in April. He is joined by two other Republican commissioners, Mark Uyeda and Hester Peirce. A historical rarity. The S.E.C., which was established as a five-member bipartisan commission, will operate with a 3-0 partisan makeup when Crenshaw departs. The agency has done so only a handful of times in its history. It’s unclear if or when President Trump plans to choose a Democrat to replace Crenshaw or to fill the S.E.C.’s fifth seat. Congress established the S.E.C. after the 1929 stock market crash to protect investors and restore trust in the markets. Its bipartisan makeup — with no more than three members from a single party — was intended to hedge against politicization that might disrupt those aims. “The deliberation and consideration of different perspectives is just kind of wiped away for whatever period this will last,” Alex Platt, a securities law professor at the University of Kansas, told DealBook. “If you don’t have the other side there, it’s like, who’s watching the watchdogs?” Crenshaw has been a voice of opposition on the Trump administration’s S.E.C., which has sought to undo crypto regulatory enforcement, loosen the guardrails on retail investors’ access to private markets and reduce compliance and reporting mandates for public companies. While Crenshaw cannot block or undo rulings made by the majority, she can force topics into open meetings, help shape internal discussions and issue public dissents. Crenshaw told DealBook that the S.E.C. was pursuing “a shift back to a world where there is reduced information” for investors. She cited Atkins’s embrace of a Trump proposal that the S.E.C. stop requiring publicly traded companies to file quarterly reports as an example of that trend. Without bipartisan membership, she fears that the agency’s embrace of fewer disclosure requirements for investors will only accelerate, and that the results could be catastrophic: “No disclosure, no real information,” Crenshaw said. A lack of transparency, she added, was “one of the problems we had in 1929.” We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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