Money, Wealth & Power—A Daily Look at the Financial World
Saudi Arabia’s state-backed artificial intelligence company Humain announced on February 18, 2026, that it invested $3 billion into Elon Musk’s xAI as part of the startup’s Series E funding round. The deal, which closed just before SpaceX formally acquired xAI, converted Humain’s stake into SpaceX equity and made the Saudi entity a significant minority shareholder….
When Donald Trump sat in the Oval Office to announce Project Vault, the headline number did much of the talking: a $12 billion financing blitz, anchored by a $10 billion federal loan and supplemented by private capital, to build a Strategic Critical Minerals Reserve. The initiative is framed as an emergency response to U.S. Geological…
Russia’s talk of bringing back the dollar through a Trump-Putin business deal runs into the hard rules of U.S. sanctions and entrenched global reserve habits. Any such move would have to cut through formal restrictions built to keep many Russian entities away from easy dollar clearing, and those rules now shape almost every Russian transaction…
Cuba is running out of fuel, and with it, time. As the island’s reserves dwindle to what officials describe as only days of supply, President Donald Trump is under mounting pressure from Republican lawmakers to close a remaining embargo loophole that still allows some licensed trade. The fight over that gap is no longer an…
President Donald Trump is tying his second-term foreign policy tightly to oil, and nowhere more dramatically than in his push to put Washington at the center of Venezuela’s vast reserves. He has repeatedly suggested that the United States can effectively direct how that crude is sold and who benefits, casting the strategy as a windfall…
The fight over who controls the ports at each end of the Panama Canal has erupted into a full‑blown geopolitical clash, with China warning that Panama will pay a “heavy price” after a court decision that President Donald Trump is touting as a strategic win. At stake is far more than a single concession: the…
Cuba is hurtling into a fuel emergency just as President Donald Trump openly predicts that the island’s communist government is nearing collapse. With its subsidized Venezuelan crude cut off and new pressure on alternative suppliers, Havana is confronting a shortfall that officials say could leave the country without oil within weeks. Trump, fresh from military…
President Donald Trump’s decision to seize and rapidly sell Venezuelan oil after the military capture of President Nicolás Maduro has detonated a political fight over who really controls the money and whose interests are being served. What began as a dramatic foreign policy move is now colliding with basic questions of transparency, legality, and personal…
President Donald Trump’s abrupt decision to retreat from his hard line on Greenland stunned both allies and critics, not least because it appeared to reverse years of escalating rhetoric about strategic control of the Arctic island. The public story has focused on diplomacy and party unity, but the emerging record points to a more concrete…
The global economic system that took shape after World War II is being rapidly rewritten as President Donald Trump leans into an aggressive America First agenda. Longstanding assumptions about open markets, shared security and predictable U.S. leadership are giving way to a more transactional order in which tariffs, threats and sudden policy shifts are tools…