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      Will a Time Magazine Cover Drive a Wedge Between Trump and Musk?

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      The president did not look amused. He was meeting the Japanese prime minister for the first time on Friday when a reporter shouted out to ask if he had a “reaction” to the new cover of Time magazine. The cover, the reporter told Mr. Trump, depicts “Elon Musk sitting behind your Resolute Desk.”“No,” Mr. Trump answered pointedly. He looked down at the floor. The next few seconds stretched like an eternity as a translator related the exchange to the prime minister, Shigeru Ishiba, in Japanese.Just in case any of the sauciness of the moment had been lost in translation, Mr. Trump waited until the interpreter had finished and then cracked: “Is Time magazine still in business? I didn’t even know that.” Everyone around him laughed gamely, if a bit nervously.It is unlikely that Mr. Trump didn’t know whether Time magazine was still in business. His own face had, after all, stared out from its cover only two months ago, when the magazine anointed him its “Person of the Year.” As part of the rollout of that issue, Mr. Trump rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange in front of a blown-up version of the cover.It is pretty much Trumpology 101 that the president has a long-held fixation with the cover of Time, a durable totem of the 1980s, from which most of his cultural touchstones derive even today. He has always held up its cover as an indication of status, going as far as to mock up fake versions featuring himself.The last time he was president, a Time cover in 2017 featuring his adviser Stephen K. Bannon at the height of his powers — “The Great Manipulator,” it read — was believed to have annoyed Mr. Trump. Mr. Bannon left the White House later that year.No one can say if the magazine still holds as much sway over Mr. Trump as it did then. One thing seems certain, though, and that is that Mr. Musk appeared eager to stay on Mr. Trump’s good side. On Friday morning, a few hours after the new Time cover dropped, Mr. Musk posted on the social media platform he owns to flatter the president, writing, “I love @realDonaldTrump as much as a straight man can love another man.” More

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      Deep Cuts to Medical Research Funds Could Hobble University Budgets

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      The National Institutes of Health announced a new policy Friday to cap a type of funding that supports medical research at universities, a decision that most likely will leave many with a large budget gap. The policy targets $9 billion in so-called indirect funds that the N.I.H. sends along with direct funds to support research into basic science and treatments for diseases ranging from cancer to Alzheimer’s to diabetes.Currently, some universities get 50 percent or more of the amount of a grant in indirect funds, meaning a $1 million research award would come with $500,000 to maintain facilities and equipment and pay support staff. The new policy would cap those indirect funds at 15 percent.“I think it’s going to destroy research universities in the short term, and I don’t know after that,” said Dr. David A. Baltrus, a University of Arizona associate professor whose lab is developing antibiotics for crops. “They rely on the money. They budget for the money. The universities were making decisions expecting the money to be there.”Dr. Baltrus said that his research is focused on efforts such as keeping E. coli bacteria out of crops like sprouts and lettuce. He said the policy change would force his university to make cuts to support staff and overhead.The Trump administration has been sharply critical of what it derides as “woke” policies and cultures at universities, which have been bracing for a hit to their budgets. Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals, called for capping these related research funds, saying they were sometimes used to fund diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. Cutting such costs would “reduce federal taxpayer subsidization of leftist agendas,” Project 2025’s authors said.An N.I.H. social media post said the change could save the federal government as much as $4 billion and sharply cut payments to Harvard, Yale and Johns Hopkins Universities, which have overhead rates above 60 percent of their grant sums.Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat of Washington, said in a statement late Friday that the move could “dismantle the biomedical research system, stifle the development of new cures for disease, and rip treatments away from patients in need.”She said the change could shut down some clinical trials at institutions in her state, such as the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center and University of Washington.The N.I.H. spent about $35 billion in 2023 on about 50,000 competitive grants to about 300,000 researchers at 2,500 universities, medical schools and other research institutions nationwide, according to the new policy. Of that, about $26 billion directly funded research and $9 billion covered indirect costs. The policy is set to take effect Monday. More

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      When It Comes to Investing, Is A.I. Worth the Hype?

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      After the arrival of a less costly A.I. model from China, U.S. markets and academics are wrestling with the ultimate economic value of the technology.A.I. chatbots are fun, sometimes even useful and, until recently, endowed with the uncanny ability to mesmerize investors and fuel the U.S. stock market.But the excellent performance of a new, relatively cheap artificial intelligence engine from a Chinese start-up, DeepSeek, has perturbed the market and complicated the A.I. story.Investors are re-evaluating prominent companies swept up in A.I. fever, including Nvidia, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Tesla and the private start-up OpenAI. The notion that full-blown superhuman intelligence is imminent has spurred the-sky-is-the-limit valuations, as well as concerns about the political and social risks posed by advanced intelligence.One immediate question: Is the main approach to developing A.I. in the United States — pouring billions of dollars into chips and infrastructure — worth the expenditure for all companies if similar results can be achieved far more cheaply? DeepSeek’s lower-cost innovations add urgency to bigger, longstanding financial questions: How much are artificial intelligence companies really worth, and what will the broader economic value of A.I. ultimately be?Daren Acemoglu, a winner of the 2024 Nobel in economic science, gave me some answers. “There is a lot of hype in the industry,” he told me in a telephone conversation. Yes, he said, A.I. companies have made some “impressive achievements,” but he added that many financial and economic calculations were being based on mere “projections into the future that are sometimes exaggerated.”Professor Acemoglu, an M.I.T. economist with an interest in the impact of technical innovations on global economics, is skeptical about the more fervent A.I. claims. He ranks A.I. as a significant advance, perhaps with a macroeconomic effect akin to the telephone, which was no small thing.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Sam Altman on Microsoft, Trump and Musk

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      The OpenAI C.E.O. spoke with Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit.Since kicking off the artificial intelligence boom with the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, OpenAI has amassed more than 300 million weekly users and a $157 billion valuation. Its C.E.O., Sam Altman, addressed whether that staggering pace of growth can continue at the DealBook Summit last week.Altman pushed back on assertions that progress in A.I. is becoming slower and more expensive; on reports that the company’s relationship with its biggest investor, Microsoft, is fraying; and on concerns that Elon Musk, who founded an A.I. company last year, may use his relationship with President-elect Donald Trump to hurt competitors.Altman said that artificial general intelligence, the point at which artificial intelligence can do almost anything that a human brain can do, will arrive “sooner than most people in the world think.” Here are five highlights from the conversation.On Elon MuskMusk, who co-founded OpenAI, has become one of its major antagonists. He has sued the company, accusing it of departing from its founding mission as a nonprofit, and started a competing startup called xAI. On Friday, OpenAI said Musk had wanted to turn OpenAI into a for-profit company in 2017 and walked away when he didn’t get majority equity. Altman called the change in the relationship “tremendously sad.” He continued:I grew up with Elon as like a mega hero. I thought what Elon was doing was absolutely incredible for the world, and I’m still, of course, I mean, I have different feelings about him now, but I’m still glad he exists. I mean that genuinely. Not just because I think his companies are awesome, which I do think, but because I think at a time when most of the world was not thinking very ambitiously, he pushed a lot of people, me included, to think much more ambitiously. And grateful is the wrong kind of word. But I’m like thankful.You know, we started OpenAI together, and then at some point he totally lost faith in OpenAI and decided to go his own way. And that’s fine, too. But I think of Elon as a builder and someone who — a known thing about Elon is that he really cares about being ‘the guy.’ But I think of him as someone who, if he’s not, that just competes in the market and in the technology, and whatever else. And doesn’t resort to lawfare. And, you know, whatever the stated complaint is, what I believe is he’s a competitor and we’re doing well. And that’s sad to see.Altman said of Musk’s close relationship with Trump:I may turn out to be wrong, but I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly un-American to use political power to the degree that Elon has it to hurt your competitors and advantage your own businesses. And I don’t think people would tolerate that. I don’t think Elon would do it.On OpenAI’s relationship with MicrosoftMicrosoft, OpenAI’s largest investor, has put more than $13 billion into the company and has an exclusive license to its raw technologies. Altman once called the relationship “the best bromance in tech,” but The Times and others have reported that the partnership has become strained as OpenAI seeks more and cheaper access to computing power and Microsoft has made moves to diversify its access to A.I. technology. OpenAI expects to lose $5 billion this year because of the steep costs of developing A.I.At the DealBook Summit, Altman said of the relationship with Microsoft, “I don’t think we’re disentangling. I will not pretend that there are no misalignments or challenges.” He added:We need lots of compute, more than we projected. And that has just been an unusual thing in the history of business, to scale that quickly. And there’s been tension on that.Some of OpenAI’s own products compete with those of partners that depend on its technologies. On whether that presents a conflict of interest, Altman said:We have a big platform business. We have a big first party business. Many other companies manage both of those things. And we have things that we’re really good at. Microsoft has things they’re really good at. Again, there’s not no tension, but on the whole, our incentives are pretty aligned.On whether making progress in A.I. development was becoming more expensive and slower, as some experts have suggested, he doubled down on a message he’d previously posted on social media: “There is no wall.” Andrew asked the same question of Sundar Pichai, the Google C.E.O., which we’ll recap in tomorrow’s newsletter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      OpenAI Fires Back at Elon Musk’s Lawsuit

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      The artificial intelligence start-up argues that Mr. Musk is trying to hamstring its business as he builds a rival company.Earlier this month, Elon Musk asked a federal court to block OpenAI’s efforts to transform itself from a nonprofit into a purely for-profit company.On Friday, OpenAI responded with its own legal filing, arguing that Mr. Musk is merely trying to hamstring OpenAI as he builds a rival company, called xAI.What Mr. Musk is asking for would “debilitate OpenAI’s business, board deliberations, and mission to create safe and beneficial A.I. — all to the advantage of Musk and his own A.I. company,” the filing said. “The motion should be denied.”OpenAI also disputed many of the claims made by Mr. Musk in the lawsuit he brought against OpenAI earlier this year. In a blog post published before Friday’s filing, OpenAI portrayed Mr. Musk as a hypocrite, saying that he had tried to transform the lab from a nonprofit into a for-profit operation before he left the organization six years ago.The filing and blog post included documents claiming to show that in 2017, Jared Birchall, the head of Mr. Musk’s family office, registered a company called Open Artificial Intelligence Technologies, Inc. that was meant to be a for-profit incarnation of OpenAI.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk and DOGE vs. Regulators

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      The billionaire has needled government agencies, armed with potential influence over their budgets. But some of these organizations are also looking into his interests.Elon Musk’s attacks on the agencies that regulate his businesses are raising questions about conflicts of interest.Eric Lee/The New York TimesMusk vs. regulatorsElon Musk remains perhaps the most consequential figure in President-elect Donald Trump’s orbit, with a commission for cutting government spending headed by him and Vivek Ramaswamy — widely known by its acronym, DOGE — promising huge reductions.Federal regulators have become prominent targets for Musk and his allies. But those agencies are continuing to scrutinize the tech billionaire’s interests, raising questions about conflicts.“The SEC is just another weaponized institution doing political dirty work,” Musk posted on X on Thursday, joining a flurry of right-wing attacks on the agency. The impetus for the ire: an appeals court ruling that Nasdaq can’t require diversity on the boards of companies that list on the exchange, a longtime bugbear of conservatives.Ramaswamy wrote on X of the commission: “When an agency like the SEC is so repeatedly & thoroughly embarrassed in federal court for flouting the law, it loses its legitimacy as a law enforcement body.”That comes after Musk took aim at the I.R.S. last month, when he polled his X followers about what to do with the tax authority’s budget. The overwhelming response: “Deleted.”But the S.E.C. is renewing scrutiny of Musk. He disclosed on X that the regulator had given him an offer to settle an inquiry into unspecified charges. A letter from Alex Spiro of Quinn Emanuel Urquhart & Sullivan, Musk’s lawyer, claimed that the agency had given them 48 hours to accept or face punishment, as part of an “improperly motivated campaign.” Spiro’s letter also revealed that the commission had reopened an investigation this week into Neuralink, Musk’s brain-implant start-up.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Canada’s Plan To Avoid Trump’s Tariffs Takes Shape

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      Two weeks after a Mar-a-Lago dinner with Donald J. Trump, details of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s plan to stave off a showdown with the United States are emerging.Canada is working on a broad plan, including drones and police dogs, to address concerns raised by President-elect Donald J. Trump about the shared border between the two nations, underscoring the urgency of avoiding threatened tariffs that would send its economy into meltdown. Mr. Trump has made it clear that he expects America’s neighbors to keep undocumented migrants and drugs from entering the United States. In a closely watched meeting between Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada and the leaders of the country’s provinces on Wednesday, Mr. Trudeau and senior members of his government said that they would come up with measures to fortify the border. The Canadian government will flesh out details, figure out a price tag, establish a timeline and then present the plan to the incoming Trump administration before Mr. Trump’s inauguration next month, according to two officials with knowledge of the discussions, who asked not to be identified describing internal deliberations. Details of the costs of these measures will be shared on Monday, when the country’s finance minister announces an interim budget, the officials said. The measures under consideration include better controlling border crossings by deploying drones and canine units and reducing unnecessary foot traffic between the two countries, according to the two officials, who listened in on the virtual government meeting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      JD Vance, Elon Musk and the Future of America

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      Beneath all the furor around Donald Trump’s appointments — Matt Gaetz down and out, Pete Hegseth down but maybe coming back, the Kash Patel drama waiting the wings — the most important figures in this administration’s orbit have not changed since Election Day: Besides the president himself, the future of Trumpism is still most likely to be shaped and stamped by two men, JD Vance and Elon Musk.Not just because of their talent and achievements, and not just because Vance is the political heir apparent and Musk would be one of the world’s most influential men even if he didn’t have the ear of the president-elect. It’s also because they represent, more clearly than any other appointee, two potent visions for a 21st century right, and their interaction is likely to shape conservatism for the next four years and beyond.Musk is the dynamist, the believer in growth and innovation and exploration as the lodestars of American civilization. His dynamism was not always especially ideological: The Tesla and SpaceX mogul was once a Barack Obama Democrat, happy to support an active and sometimes spendthrift government so long as it spent freely on his projects. But as Musk has moved right, he has adopted a more libertarian pose, insisting on the profound wastefulness of government spending and the tyranny of the administrative state.Vance meanwhile is the populist, committed to protect and uplift those parts of America neglected or left behind in an age of globalization. Along with his support for the Trumpian causes of tariffs and immigration restriction, this worldview has made him more sympathetic than the average Republican senator to certain forms of government investment — from longstanding programs like Social Security to new ideas about industrial policy and family policy.Despite this contrast, the Musk and Vance worldviews overlap in important ways. Musk has moved in a populist direction on immigration, while Vance has been a venture capitalist and clearly has a strong sympathy for parts of the dynamist worldview, especially its critique of the regulatory state. Both men share a farsighted interest in the collapsing birthrate, a heretofore-fringe issue that’s likely to dominate the later parts of the 21st century. And there is modest-but-real convergence between the Muskian “tech” worldview and Vance’s more “neo-trad” style of religious conservatism, based on not just a shared antipathy toward wokeness but also similar views about the intelligibility of the cosmos and the providential place of humankind in history.So you can imagine a scenario, in Trump’s second term and beyond, where these convergences yield a dynamist-populist fusionism — a conservatism that manages to simultaneously aim for the stars and uplift and protect the working class, in which economic growth and technological progress help renew the heartland (as Musk’s own companies have brought jobs and optimism to South Texas) while also preserving our creaking social compact.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More