Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is using a high profile trip to Elon Musk’s Starbase complex to sharpen his attack on what he casts as a timid, process bound Pentagon culture. Framing the visit as a test of whether the defense establishment can keep pace with commercial rocketry, he is signaling that the era of slow…
Investors and workers are heading into 2026 with whiplash. On one side, artificial intelligence is being sold as a once‑in‑a‑century productivity revolution. On the other, the labor market is stuck in a “Great Freeze” that feels more like a slow grind than a boom. The gap between AI euphoria and everyday economic reality is exactly…
The United States military has quietly locked in a sweeping artificial intelligence partnership with Elon Musk’s startup xAI, positioning the company’s Grok models at the center of a new generation of battlefield and bureaucracy tools. The arrangement, struck with the Pentagon and the revived War Department, folds a private frontier AI system into some of…
The clash between the White House and Big Oil over who gets paid to rebuild Venezuela’s shattered energy sector has moved from quiet lobbying to an open confrontation. President Donald Trump is promising a bonanza of investment and cash flow while threatening to sideline some of the industry’s biggest players, turning a foreign policy gamble…
President Donald Trump has turned a long-running fascination with Greenland into a central talking point about American security, insisting that controlling the vast Arctic island is essential to defending the United States. Military insiders and allied officials are now pushing back, arguing that the United States already has the access it needs and that trying…
When the Iranian government hits the switch on nationwide connectivity, protest videos do not stop, they simply reroute. The secret is a mesh of suitcase-sized dishes and low-orbit satellites that let Iranians bypass the state’s chokehold and push footage of crackdowns onto global platforms. I see Starlink turning into a parallel information infrastructure, fragile and…
A little known prediction market trader turned a high risk wager on Nicolás Maduro’s downfall into a life changing windfall, and now regulators and lawmakers in Washington are treating the case as a test of how far online betting on geopolitics can go. The mystery account’s roughly $400,000 profit on Polymarket has become a Rorschach…
President Donald Trump has turned a long‑running feud with Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell into a full‑blown confrontation, betting that criminal pressure will finally bend monetary policy to his will. Instead, the campaign risks hardening institutional resistance, rattling markets, and leaving Trump looking less like a strongman and more like a president who misread the…
President Donald Trump’s second term is being bankrolled by a new class of political investors, a mix of artificial intelligence executives, tech power brokers and families entangled in serious criminal cases. Their checks are large, their interests are specific and their proximity to federal power raises sharper questions than in his first run. I see…
President Donald Trump has turned Cuba into the next test case of his hard-edged energy diplomacy, telling Havana to make a deal with Washington “before it’s too late” and tying the island’s economic survival to decisions made in Caracas. His message is blunt: with a key ally in Venezuela shaken, Cuba must choose between accommodation…