Good morning. Andrew here. Yesterday, I spoke here about the need for C.E.O.s to speak up after this weekend’s tragic shooting in Minneapolis. Credit to Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, who wrote in an internal Slack message to the company: “What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right.” We’ve got the full note. That, and much more, below. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
“Going too far”Yesterday, DealBook raised the question of whether business leaders would begin to speak out against the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown after federal agents killed two Americans in Minnesota. More have started doing so — including Sam Altman of OpenAI — as corporate America is forced to confront the matter. “What’s happening with ICE is going too far,” Altman wrote in an internal Slack message to OpenAI employees, DealBook has learned. Here’s the full text of his message: I love the US and its values of democracy and freedom and will be supportive of the country however I can; OpenAI will too. But part of loving the country is the American duty to push back against overreach. What’s happening with ICE is going too far. There is a big difference between deporting violent criminals and what’s happening now, and we need to get the distinction right. President Trump is a very strong leader, and I hope he will rise to this moment and unite the country. I am encouraged by the last few hours of response and hope to see trust rebuilt with transparent investigations. As a company, we aim to stick to our convictions and not get blown around by changing fashions too much. We didn’t become super woke when that was popular, we didn’t start talking about masculine corporate energy when that was popular, and we are not going to make a lot of performative statements now about safety or politics or anything else. But we are going to continue to try to figure out how to actually do the right thing as best as we can, engage with leaders and push for our values, and speak up clearly about it as needed. The post garnered hundreds of supportive responses, including heart and “THANK YOU” emojis. His comments illustrate the fine line many executives have sought to walk in speaking out against the Trump administration. Altman has become close to the president as he pushes for A.I. policies that are friendly to the industry; Greg Brockman, a fellow OpenAI co-founder, has become a major Trump donor as well. Other top executives have also spoken about the shootings:
Fissures are appearing elsewhere in Silicon Valley. Consider:
What’s next: Part of the federal government could shut down by the end of the week, as Democrats seek to strip out funding for the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, before approving a huge funding bill before a Friday deadline. That comes as President Trump has shaken up the ICE operation in Minnesota, saying he will put in charge his border czar, Tom Homan, who will report directly to him.
President Trump threatens to raise tariffs on South Korean goods to 25 percent. The president’s warning comes as he accuses the country’s legislature of taking too long to ratify a trade deal the countries reached last year. Separately, the European Parliament delayed a decision to unfreeze a U.S.-E.U. trade deal despite Trump walking back tariff threats tied to his efforts to acquire Greenland. Michael Burry, of “The Big Short” fame, bets on GameStop. Shares in the video game retailer jumped over 4 percent yesterday after Burry wrote that he was building a position in the stock, a frequent favorite of meme-stock traders. Burry backed efforts by Ryan Cohen, GameStop’s C.E.O., to turn around the company. General Motors reports a $3.3 billion loss after writing off E.V. investments. The automaker took a $7.2 billion accounting charge related to electric vehicles and other items, which more than erased a fourth-quarter operating profit. But its shares rose as much as 5 percent in premarket trading as the company predicted that profit this year would meet or exceed analyst estimates. Separately, sales of E.V.s surpassed those of gasoline-powered vehicles in the E.U. for the first time in December. Addictive algorithms?Tech giants have fought for years against legal broadsides by regulators and users alike over the content featured on their social networks. Starting this week, they face a new front: trials over how addictive their products are. The lawsuits are the latest effort to bring multibillion-dollar businesses like Meta, TikTok and YouTube to heel. The latest: Jury selection will start today in a lawsuit against Meta, TikTok and Google’s YouTube filed by a now-20-year-old Californian, identified in court documents by the initials K.G.M. She has argued that she became addicted to social media as a child and experienced anxiety, body-image issues and depression as a result. (Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, settled with K.G.M. last week for an undisclosed amount.) Prominent executives are expected to take the stand, including Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Adam Mosseri of Instagram and Neal Mohan of YouTube. A new legal tactic against the tech titans: K.G.M.’s lawyers are drawing on the playbook used against Big Tobacco last century, and plan on citing social media features like infinite scroll and algorithmic content recommendations as intentional ways of addicting users. They also plan to cite internal documents that appear to show concern about aspects of the social networks’ design. The defense: To date, companies like Meta and Google have argued that their platforms are protected by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields websites from legal liability for content posted by users. (Worth noting: President Trump moved to narrow that protection in his first term — for his own reasons.) Indeed, the companies plan to cite Section 230 as part of their defense here. The stakes: A win for K.G.M. could expose tech companies to hefty punishments — tobacco companies reached a $206 billion legal settlement in 1998 — and the threat of more lawsuits, as well as forced changes to their businesses. Other lawsuits are on deck, including in state court in Los Angeles and federal cases brought by school districts and state attorneys general in Oakland, Calif. Social media companies have already been feeling heat. Australian regulators last month blocked users under 16 from social media, a model that other authorities around the world are now weighing. Officials in Britain and the E.U. have limited some features. Social networks are facing pressure on other issues, too: Yesterday, E.U. officials opened an investigation into Elon Musk’s X over sexualized images generated by the Grok chatbot. And some TikTok users who have accused the platform of suppressing anti-Trump videos — after a new entity that includes some allies of the president took over its U.S. operations — have flocked to an upstart rival, Upscrolled. Dollar dilemmaThe U.S. dollar rebounded against a basket of currencies this morning. But the greenback’s slump during President Trump’s second term continues to grip Wall Street as international investors weigh how much money to put in the country. Usually, investors seek out the dollar in times of rising geopolitical uncertainty, inflation and government deficits — economic conditions that check boxes across the globe. But the U.S. Dollar Index is down nearly 10 percent in the past year, while gold and silver, other safe haven assets, are hitting records. The buck’s latest swoon may be by design. The dollar fell precipitously yesterday against the Japanese yen on reports that the U.S. Treasury and the authorities in Japan could be working together to bolster the yen and stabilize demand for Japanese bonds. The goal ostensibly would be to prevent another sell-off in Japanese debt, like the one that jolted the global bond market last week. A big sell-off in bonds risks driving up borrowing costs for businesses and households, a scenario that governments, including the Trump administration, are keen to avoid. The rout in Japanese bonds, and its effect on Treasury notes, prompted Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent to call his counterpart in Japan in an apparent effort to calm the markets, he said last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. It’s unclear if Washington and Tokyo have backed that up with any big dollar-yen trades. But speculation that such an extraordinary move could be on the table has become the talk of the currency markets. It has also heaped attention on the finances of Japan, a key U.S. ally and trading partner, under Sanae Takaichi, its new prime minister. As John Authers of Bloomberg Opinion asks in his column today: Was the Japanese bond market swoon a blip, or the a sign of deeper instability in global markets? And what does this portend for the dollar? Over the years, Trump has shifted his position on whether he prefers a strong or a weak dollar. The latter scenario could bolster the competitiveness of American exporters, but also dent the profits of U.S. importers and drive up costs for consumers. Dominic Bunning, the head of G10 FX Strategy at Nomura, told Bloomberg TV this morning that the dollar could slump another 5 to 10 percent. That said, he called talk that we may be glimpsing an end to dollar dominance “nonsense.” A.I. is eating software stocksThe market’s attention will be trained on the Magnificent Seven starting this week, with Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Tesla set to report earnings. But even as investors look to the technology giants to gauge the progress of the artificial intelligence boom, some former tech darlings are falling out of favor: software stocks. Major software companies, including Salesforce, HubSpot and Atlassian, have seen their shares fall by 30 percent or more over the past year. The reason, Niko Gallogly reports, is the accelerating threat posed by A.I. D.I.Y. danger: The rapid rise of so-called vibe-coding tools like Anthropic’s Claude Code, which allow users to generate websites and apps from simple language prompts, have prompted concerns that more companies will choose to build, not buy, software. There is a “crisis of confidence” among investors about software companies’ competitive edge, Jordan Klein, an analyst at Mizuho Americas, told DealBook.
Even solid growth numbers haven’t eased concerns. In December, for example, Adobe reported $6.2 billion in revenue for its last fiscal quarter of 2025 — a 10 percent gain over the same period for the previous year. Adobe’s stock is down more than 10 percent since that report. And the Army just awarded a $5.6 billion, 10-year contract to Salesforce. Some investors don’t want to “wait around to find out” how A.I. might undercut the business model of software-as-a-service companies, Klein said. Instead, many are seeking safe harbor in the companies supplying the picks and shovels for the A.I. buildout. One such winner is the computer chip memory producer Micron; its stock has risen more than 300 percent over the past year. Earnings season will be a big test. Investors will be closely attuned to what software executives say about the competitive outlook, and how conservative they are in their own earnings projections. Until they see some new bullishness from the companies, Klein predicts, investors won’t be ready to take a bet on software. The first major test will come tomorrow, when the business software provider ServiceNow releases its full-year 2025 results. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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