Good morning. Andrew here. Well, the mood music on Wall Street has changed. Instead of investors rewarding big tech companies for investing huge amounts of money in data centers for A.I., they’re now anxious about that spending. Also: Bitcoin is coming off its worst drop yesterday in years. Can it go lower? Or is this the bottom? We also take a look at what’s happened to the maker of Ozempic, Novo Nordisk. And we spoke with Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI and the C.E.O. of Sierra (and who played a leading role in the creation of Google Maps and Facebook’s “like” button) about this moment in tech. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Sign up here.)
A sea of redTechnology stocks and crypto are nearing the end of a very bad week. It didn’t help matters yesterday that Amazon announced plans for a higher-than-expected $200 billion in capital expenditures, largely tied to artificial intelligence. Nor that Bitcoin plummeted to nearly $60,000 yesterday; it has lost all gains it had made during the second Trump term. What markets are left to ask is when will the pain stop. The latest:
For now, there’s a slight reprieve — for tech investors at least. U.S. stock futures are up slightly; so too are shares of SaaS companies in premarket trading. For days, some tech executives and analysts have argued that the sell-off was overdone. How long it may last is another matter. Sam Altman, the co-founder and C.E.O. of OpenAI, told the popular tech talk show TBPN that he expects “there will continue to be more” sell-offs in SaaS stocks. (Bret Taylor, the chair of OpenAI and the co-founder of the agents start-up Sierra, offers his own view below.) A.I. companies aren’t standing still: Just yesterday, Anthropic unveiled an updated Claude model that it says is better optimized for agents. The outlook for crypto remains uncertain, too. The sector has tended to prosper when markets’ risk appetites are high. Investors have instead swung to precious metals as safe havens, and have been unnerved by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s suggestion that the federal government wouldn’t bail out the crypto industry. One of the big questions is how much of the crypto sell-off is tied to leveraged bets (i.e., those made with borrowed money). Some estimates point to billions of dollars’ worth of such trades being unwound.
Rio Tinto drops its takeover bid for Glencore. Rio Tinto said it was no longer seeking to buy its smaller mining rival, ending plans to create the world’s largest mining company with a market value of around $200 billion. The two companies were reportedly unable to agree on a price or roles for their top executives; the decision bucks the trend of growing consolidation in the mining sector amid strong demand for metals like copper. Uber is found liable in the rape of a passenger by one of its drivers. A federal jury in Arizona awarded $8.5 million to Jaylynn Dean, who said her Uber driver had raped her in 2023. (It did not find that the company’s actions were “outrageous, oppressive or intolerable” or created substantial risk.) The verdict sets the stage for more than 3,000 pending sexual assault and misconduct lawsuits against Uber; a company spokesman said it plans to appeal. Stellantis takes a $26 billion write-down, tied largely to electric vehicles. Shares in the company tumbled 19 percent in Europe today after it became the latest carmaker to announce an accounting charge tied to what it said was overinvestment in E.V.s. (Stellantis’s is the largest write-down in the industry announced so far.) In other car news, Toyota replaced Koji Sato as its C.E.O. with Kenta Kon, its C.F.O. A start-up’s view of the A.I. shake-upThis era of the artificial intelligence boom may be hammering incumbent software companies. But it’s a great time for A.I. start-ups. The latest sign of that comes from Sierra, a three-year-old company that creates customer service agents. Bret Taylor, Sierra’s co-founder — and the former co-C.E.O. of Salesforce and current chairman of OpenAI — spoke with Michael de la Merced about Sierra’s performance and his view of what’s going on in the A.I. arena. Sierra says it is growing rapidly, hitting $150 million in annual recurring revenue this year, Taylor told DealBook. That’s just a few months after reaching $100 million in A.R.R. in November, after just seven quarters. (Sierra was valued at $10 billion in September.) Sierra now counts major companies on both sides of the Atlantic as clients, including Cigna, Gap, SoFi and the British retailer Next. “We’re just feeling a ton of momentum in the business,” Taylor said. What A.I. agents can do now: While 2025 began with the promise of so-called agentic A.I., software that can take actions autonomously for a user, many experts ended the year feeling that the technology had been vastly overhyped. Taylor argued that companies like Sierra are now demonstrating an actual use for agents, rather than pushing the tech for its own sake. One successful use case for Sierra’s agents, he said, was Rocket Mortgage and Redfin, which are both owned by Rocket Companies: People can now search for a home with Redfin, get a mortgage via Rocket Mortgage and then service that loan — “all with A.I.” The best-case scenario for what agents can do, Taylor added, is that they both lower costs and increase revenue for their clients. That frees companies to invest further in their business or ways to attract and retain users. Will A.I. really eat up software companies? Tools like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s Codex make it far easier to develop software than ever before, Taylor said, bringing down the cost and risk of creating new products to challenge existing offerings. And A.I. agents that can act on users’ behalf can drastically enhance productivity, such as by generating sales leads and then tracking them. The key question, Taylor said, is how much can existing companies adopt A.I. and still defend their competitive moats. “I don’t believe it’s zero-sum,” he said, “but in my view it’s not clear who the winners and losers will be.” Still, he added, “I think it’s a changing of the guard where A.I.-native firms are defining the next era of software.” New woes for Novo NordiskNovo Nordisk investors were dealt a brutal one-two punch this week, after the Danish pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic and Wegovy delivered a pessimistic forecast — and then faced the threat of cheaper competition. The developments underscore how Novo Nordisk, which pioneered the use of GLP-1 treatments for weight loss, is facing an uphill battle to regain its crown as the leader of the fast-growing category, Niko Gallogly reports. What happened:
Novo Nordisk’s U.S.-traded shares are down about 27 percent for the week through yesterday. The battle for GLP-1 supremacy has big stakes. About one in eight American adults are currently taking a GLP-1 drug, according to a recent poll, and analysts have estimated the market could reach $150 billion in the next decade. Yet Novo Nordisk, which just two years ago was Europe’s largest publicly traded company, has shed roughly $400 billion in market value since its peak. First came competition from Eli Lilly, whose Zepbound was found to be more effective than Wegovy and which was first to introduce a direct-to-consumer site. Then the Trump administration also applied pricing pressure in the U.S., a huge market for GLP-1s. (Of note: TrumpRx, the government’s direct-to-consumer platform, opened for business yesterday.) That makes the fight over oral GLP-1 treatments all the more important. Swallowing a Wegovy pill is much easier than patients injecting themselves, and Novo Nordisk appeared to clinch a victory by beating Lilly to the market. But the prospect of vastly cheaper generic rival treatments is worrisome to Novo Nordisk investors. “There is a real sense of urgency here for them” to win a legal dispute against Hims & Hers, Karen Andersen, an analyst at Morningstar, told DealBook. She added that the Wegovy pill’s debut is “kind of the one real bright spot” for the company. Novo Nordisk may get some help from the Trump administration. Dr. Marty Makary, the F.D.A. commissioner, wrote on X that his agency would “take swift action against companies mass-marketing illegal copycat drugs, claiming they are similar to FDA-approved products.” “This is a democracy, and we’re with whoever wins.”— Kathy Wylde, until recently the head of the Partnership for New York City, a group of 300 C.E.O.s, on her decision to meet and support Mayor Zohran Mamdani after his primary win, despite his democratic socialist policies clashing with business leaders. Wylde’s successor, Steve Fulop, has been more confrontational, calling Mamdani’s proposal for a corporate tax increase “suicide for New York City.“ Talking A.I. with the C.E.O. of CrunchbaseEvery week, we’re asking a leader about artificial intelligence. Jager McConnell, who leads the private market data company Crunchbase, told DealBook that A.I. empowers him to be a better leader. His answers have been condensed and edited. How do you use A.I. personally? We had an off-site yesterday. I used A.I. to build a prototype of the thing that I think we should do next. And I built it myself in four hours. The ability to have every employee touch it and use it and interact with it — that completely aligned the company on this vision of where we’re going as a business. In the old days, if I even had the time to do that, I would have to involve engineering and design and all these different folks. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Instead I was able to do it in minutes. It makes me the C.E.O. that I’ve always wanted to be, by being able to show more than just tell. What have you told your direct reports or employees about how you want them to use A.I.? We’ve reworked our mission, vision and values to include A.I., so that’s as strong a directive as I can give employees. I hear so much of this narrative being about, I get the answers I need. Or, it helps me think. But that’s not the interesting stuff. The interesting stuff is, how do you do things that you were never able to or couldn’t imagine doing before? And I think that’s where the puck is going. It’s not about efficiency. We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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