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Humanoid robots danced hip-hop, performed martial arts and played keyboard, guitar and drums at the opening ceremony of the first World Humanoid Robot Games in Beijing on Thursday evening.

The competition begins Friday with more than 500 humanoid robots in 280 teams from 16 countries, including the U.S., Germany and Japan, competing in sports including soccer, running and boxing. The event comes as China has stepped up efforts to develop humanoid robots powered by artificial intelligence.

During the opening ceremony, the robots demonstrated soccer and boxing among other sports, with some cheering and backflipping as if at a real sports event.

One robot soccer player scored a goal after a few tries, causing the robot goalkeeper to fall to the ground. Another player fell but stood up unassisted.

The robots also modeled fashionable hats and clothes alongside human models. In one mishap, a robot model fell and had to be carried off the stage by two human beings.

Teams from robot companies and Chinese universities including Tsinghua University and Peking University are competing in the games. Three middle schools are also participating.

China’s official newspaper People’s Daily quoted a government officer in Beijing as saying that every robot that participates “is creating history.”

The event will last three days, concluding on Sunday. Tickets sold to the public range from 180 yuan ($25) to 580 ($80).

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Olivia Zhang contributed to this report from Beijing.

OMAHA, Neb. (AP) — Berkshire Hathaway revealed four new investments Thursday in steelmaker Nucor, insurer UnitedHealth and two of the nation’s biggest homebuilders — Lennar and DR Horton — but it’s not clear if the investments are big enough to ensure that legendary investor Warren Buffett handled them.

Buffett, who plans to retire as CEO at the end of the year after six decades of building Berkshire, handles all of the conglomerate’s biggest investments worth $1 billion or more. Three of the new investments disclosed Thursday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission are worth less than that, so they could be the ideas of one of Berkshire’s two other investment managers.

But Berkshire’s new UnitedHealth stake that was also revealed Thursday was worth $1.57 billion, so that one could be big enough to be Buffett’s handiwork. Berkshire got permission from the SEC to keep the other three investments confidential earlier this year while it built those stakes, but it apparently bought nearly 5 million UnitedHealth shares just in the second quarter. That stock jumped nearly 8% in aftermarket trading.

Berkshire’s filings simply offer a snapshot of its $258 billion portfolio at the end of the second quarters. Many investors comb through Berkshire’s filings every quarter because they like to follow Buffett’s moves. His record of trouncing the S&P 500 for decades has inspired legions of followers.

The filing doesn’t make clear who at Berkshire handled each investment. Besides Buffett, Ted Weschler and Todd Combs also pick stocks, but they generally handle smaller portfolios and Combs also serves as Geico’s CEO. But Buffett has had a hard time finding stocks or any other investments in recent years that he wants to invest much of Berkshire’s $344 billion cash in.

Berkshire’s Nucor stake of 6.6 million shares was the biggest new investment worth roughly $857 million at the end of the quarter. Shares of that company rose more than 6% in extended after-hours trading.

The Lennar investment was worth nearly $800 million. While the DR Horton stake was much smaller worth $191.5 million. Those companies’ stocks also saw gains in late trading

Buffett already knows quite a lot about the home building business because Berkshire owns the nation’s largest manufactured homebuilder, Clayton Homes.

Besides stocks, Berkshire owns dozens of companies in a variety of industries including Geico insurance, BNSF railroad, several major utilities and an assortment of manufacturing and retail companies. The Omaha, Nebraska-based company’s holdings include many well-known brands like See’s Candy and Dairy Queen.

When Terrence Dwyer received a knock on his door and a flyer for a solar panel system small enough to fit on his deck, he was quickly sold. Solar systems that plug into regular wall outlets have been popular in Europe for years and are gaining traction in the U.S. for their affordability and simple installation.

“We thought absolutely, let’s do this right away,” said Dwyer, who lives in Oakland, California.

These small-scale solar systems could become attractive to more homeowners now that President Donald Trump’s sweeping budget-and-policy package will scrap residential rooftop solar tax credits and may shift interest to cheaper alternatives. Even before the GOP bill passed, manufacturers of the smaller systems known as plug-in or balcony solar were seeing increased demand and other positive signs such as a new Utah law streamlining regulations for homeowners to buy and install them. The systems about the size of a door haven’t been as widely adopted in the U.S. as in Europe because of lack of awareness, patchwork utility rules and limited availability.

The $2,000 plug-in solar system installed on Dwyer’s backyard deck in March consists of two 400 watt panels, an inverter, a smart meter and a circuit breaker. It saves him around $35 per month on his power bill because he is consuming less energy from the grid, but he said reducing his carbon footprint was his primary motivation.

“We like the environmental benefits of solar and wanted to engage with solar in some fashion,” Dwyer said.

Had Dwyer opted for rooftop solar, he would have paid $20,000 for the system and $30,000 to upgrade his roof to support the panels.

Installing a plug-in solar system requires some homework. What power companies let customers do with energy-generating equipment varies, which is why prospective purchasers should check their utility’s policies first. Building permits might be required depending on the municipality. Some systems can be self-installed, while others may require an electrician. For example, some kits have meters that must be wired into a home’s circuit breaker.

Dwyer bought his system from Bright Saver, a nonprofit company in California that advocates for plug-in solar. In addition to the type Dwyer bought, the company also offers a smaller model costing $399 that recently sold out in six days.

“The interest and demand have been overwhelming,” said Cora Stryker, a founder of Bright Saver. “It is clear that we are hitting a nerve — many Americans have wanted solar for a long time but have not had an option that is feasible and affordable for them until now.”

Kevin Chou, another founder of Bright Saver, said wider adoption of the systems in the U.S. has been hindered by utility policies that create uncertainty about whether they’re allowed and a lack of state and local policies to make clear what rules apply.

Some utilities contacted by The Associated Press say plug-in solar systems require the same interconnection applications as rooftop panels that send electricity back to the wider network. But Steven Hegedus, an electrical engineering professor at University of Delaware, said he doesn’t understand why a utility would need to require an interconnection agreement for plug-in solar because, unlike rooftop systems, they are designed to prevent energy from flowing to the grid.

Still, if in doubt, a customer should follow their utility’s policy.

During the early days of plug-in solar’s growth, some opposition from utilities is likely since customers are buying less energy, said Robert Cudd, a research analyst at the California Center for Sustainable Communities at the University of California, Los Angeles.

“Utilities really prefer everyone being a predictable and generous consumer of the electricity they sell,” Cudd said.

This year, Utah enacted a novel law supporting plug-in solar by exempting certain small-scale systems from interconnection agreements and establishing safety requirements such as being certified by a nationally recognized testing organization such as Underwriters Laboratories. It appears to be the only state that’s passed legislation supporting plug-in solar, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Republican state Rep. Raymond Ward, who sponsored the legislation, said the smaller systems allow people to better manage where their energy comes from and what they pay.

“Europe has these things. You can go buy them and they work and people want them. There is no reason why we shouldn’t have them here in the United States,” Ward said.

Bright Saver says they are lobbying other states for similar legislation.

Alexis Abramson, dean of the University of Columbia Climate School, also applauded Utah’s move.

“We actually need more localities, more states putting in allowances for this type of equipment,” she said.

Some questions remain about how much customers could save. Severin Borenstein, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said the cost of some portable solar systems in the U.S. would make it hard for customers to come out ahead on their utility bills over the time they own them. He estimates the price of a $2,000 system in the U.S. works out to paying about $0.20 a kilowatt-hour over a 25-year period, which only saves people money if they have high utility costs. By comparison, Borenstein said the cost of systems sold in Europe, typically around $600, is equivalent to paying about $0.05 or $0.06 per kilowatt-hour over 25 years.

Baltimore resident Craig Keenan said saving money was only part of why he installed one of the smaller Bright Saver models on his balcony in July.

“I’m interested in renewable energy because the amount of carbon emissions that we produce as a species is very, very unsustainable for our world,” he said.

He said he expects the system will save him about $40 per year on utility bills, so it would take him about 10 years to recoup the cost of the kit.

Keenan, a mechanical engineer, said installation took him 10 to 15 minutes.

“I think anyone can install this,” he said. “It’s not complicated. It doesn’t require a technical degree.”

Other companies selling plug-in solar kits include Texas-based Craftstrom. It has sold about 2,000 systems in the U.S. since 2021, mostly in California, Texas and Florida. The company’s basic kits contain a solar panel that can fit in a backyard or other sunny space, along with equipment to maintain and regulate the flow of energy including an inverter and smart meter.

Kenneth Hutchings, Craftstrom’s chief revenue officer, said their U.S. sales rose this year even before the passage of the GOP tax bill, and he expects demand for plug-in solar to increase further as federal rooftop solar credits expire.

The company advises customers to notify their power company before installation, but it has “never had any pushback from any utility,” said Michael Scherer, one of the founders of Craftstrom.

China-based EcoFlow plans to begin selling plug-in solar systems in Utah and expand to other states if supportive legislation is passed, said Ryan Oliver, a company spokesperson.

“This is an example of where technology is sort of ahead of the regulators,” Oliver said, adding: “As this rolls out to more of a nationwide product, we expect it will become more mainstream as people understand it better.”

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Associated Press video journalist Mingson Lau in Baltimore contributed to this report.

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The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

NEW YORK (AP) — Shoppers spent at a healthy pace in July, particularly at the nation’s auto dealerships, as they appear to shrug off President Donald Trump’s tariffs, which are starting to take a toll on jobs and lead to some price increases.

Retail sales rose a solid 0.5% last month, and June spending was stronger than expected, according to the Commerce Department’s report released Friday. June’s retail sales were revised upward to 0.9%, from a 0.6% increase, the agency said. The pace in July matched economists’ estimates.

The increases followed two consecutive months of spending declines — a 0.1% pullback in April and a 0.9% slowdown in May.

Excluding auto sales, which have been volatile since Trump imposed tariffs on many foreign-made cares, retail sales rose 0.3% in July.

Auto sales rose 1.6%. They appear to have returned roughly to normalized spending after a surge in March and April as Americans attempted to get ahead of Trump’s 25% duty on imported cars and parts and then a slump after that, according to Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. Economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics.

The data showed solid spending across many retail sectors. Business at clothing stores was up 0.7% while online retailers saw a 0.8% increase. Business at home furnishings and furniture stores rose 1.4%.

However, at electronics stores, sales were down 0.6%. And business at restaurants, the lone services component within the Census Bureau report and a barometer of discretionary spending, fell 0.4%, however as shoppers are focusing on eating at home to save money.

A category of sales that excludes volatile sectors such as gas, cars, and restaurants rose last month by 0.5% from the previous month. The figure feeds into the Bureau of Economic Analysis’s consumption estimate and is sign that consumers are still spending on some discretionary items

July’s spending likely got a boost from Amazon’s Prime Day sales and competing online sales at Target, Walmart and other retailers, analysts said.

“Consumers have a little more spring in their step,” said Christopher S. Rupkey, chief economist at FWDBonds LLC, a financial markets research firm. “Whether this is simply whistling in the dark, time will tell, but the tariff headline chaos did not keep consumers at home in July with the one caveat that they reduced their dining out spending. Retail sales do not give the economy a complete bill of health, but at least the consumer is not in headlong retreat.”

But Rupkey noted that time will tell how consumers will react when they see higher prices on goods in shops in the mall in the months to come.

Tariffs are starting to take a toll in other parts of the economy.

Earlier this month, the Labor Department reported that U.S. hiring is slowing sharply as Trump’s trade policies paralyze businesses and raise concerns about the outlook for the world’s largest economy. U.S. employers added just 73,000 jobs last month, the Labor Department reported, well short of the 115,000 expected.

Another government report, issued Tuesday, on U.S. inflation showed that inflation was unchanged in July as rising prices for some imported goods were offset by declining gas and grocery prices, leaving overall prices modestly higher than a year ago.

Consumer prices rose 2.7% in July from a year earlier, the same as the previous month and up from a post-pandemic low of 2.3% in April. Excluding the volatile food and energy categories, core prices rose 3.1%, up from 2.9% in June. Both figures are above the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.

On a monthly basis, prices rose 0.2% in July, down from 0.3% the previous month, while core prices ticked up 0.3%, a bit faster than the 0.2% in June.

The new numbers suggest that slowing rent increases and cheaper gas are offsetting some impacts of Trump’s sweeping tariffs.

Many businesses are also likely still absorbing much of the cost of the duties. The consumer price figures likely reflect some impact from the 10% universal tariff Trump imposed in April, as well as higher duties on countries such as China and Canada.

But that may change. U.S. wholesale inflation soared unexpectedly last month, signaling that Trump’s taxes are pushing costs up and that higher prices for consumers may be on the way.

The Labor Department reported Thursday that its producer price index — which measures inflation before it hits consumers— rose 0.9% last month from June, biggest jump in more than three years. Compared with a year earlier, wholesale prices rose 3.3%. The figures were much higher than economists had expected.

The report comes as major retailers like Walmart and Target are slated to report their fiscal second-quarter earnings reports starting next week. Analysts will stud the reports to see how much retailers are absorbing the costs and how much they’re passing on to shoppers. They’ll also want to get insight into the state of consumer behavior heading into the critical fall and winter holiday seasons.

In May, Walmart, the nation’s largest retailer, warned t hat it had increased prices on bananas imported from Costa Rica from 50 cents per pound to 54 cents, but it noted that a large sting for shoppers wouldn’t start to appear until June and July. The retailer’s chief financial officer, John David Rainey, told The Associated Press that he thought car seats made in China that were selling for $350 at Walmart would likely cost customers another $100.

But a growing list of companies including Procter & Gamble, e.lf. Cosmetics, Black & Decker and Ralph Lauren told investors in recent weeks that they plan to or have already raised prices.

Some, like eyewear retailer Warby Parker, are trying to be selective and are trying to focus on raising prices on just their premium products as a way to offset the higher costs from tariffs.

Warby Parker told analysts last Thursday that it plans to keep its $95 option. But it’s increasing prices on select lens types. It also wants to cater more to older shoppers who need more expensive progressive lens. Warby Parker said that progressives, trifocals and bifocals make up roughly 40% of all prescription units sold industrywide.

But just 23% of Warby Parker’s business now is made up of progressives. Company executives said progressives are its highest priced offering and offer the highest profit margins.

“We were able to quickly roll out select strategic price increases that have benefited our growth,” Neil Blumenthal, co-chairman and co-founder and co-CEO of Warby Parker, told analysts last week.

The U.S. economy is in a strange place. Inflation is stubborn at 2.7%, job growth numbers have been revised down, trade barriers are up, investment sentiment is dropping in some quarters like the global market for U.S. bonds, and yet the stock market keeps climbing to fresh records.

Is the U.S. economy in its weird era? Are we about to go into a recession? Or are we set for a fresh round of market records?

To figure it all out, BBTW editor Peter Green spoke with Claudia Sahm, Chief Economist for New Century Advisors, and a former economist at the Federal Reserve. She is best known for the “Sahm rule,” a Fed economic indicator for identifying recessions in real-time.

Claudia Sahm: There’s data out there for everyone. Growth has slowed this year, and some of that is we’d had a few years of really remarkable growth in the U.S., far exceeding our peers. So some of that slowing down probably was getting back to something more typical. In addition, there have been policies put in place — not just the tariffs, but also immigration, that have a big effect on slowing the growth of the labor force. That’s an absolute key input into how much the economy grows. Then we’ve had a lot of uncertainty, and that also tends to slow down business decisions and household decisions, and so in the first half of the year, real inflation-adjusted GDP growth slowed considerably relative to last year. We have seen inflation start to pick up, and we’re moving in the wrong direction.

A lot of that has to do with the tariffs, which are slowly being passed through to consumers as a price increase that shows up as inflation. You could look at this economy and point to a very mild case of what we call stagflation: Growth slowing and inflation moving up. It’s not a given that [the Fed] starts cutting interest rates quickly, because inflation still is and has been for over four years above their target.

It’s a very persuasive narrative, and it’s what people would like to hear. The piece missing from the narrative is that inflation is still elevated. The Consumer Price Index and the Personal Consumption Expenditure Index that the Fed focuses on are elevated. So if the Fed were to cut interest rates aggressively, then you could be in a situation where it would stimulate demand and that could be a problem in terms of inflation taking back off.

The Fed is in risk management mode. It’s considering the risks of inflation becoming persistent, or even moving higher, and the risks of employment falling further. The unemployment rate at 4.2% is still very low. Inflation is going to move back down to target. The Fed knows that if we keep putting on this much pressure, we might lose the labor market. So it’s a timing question within the Fed.

Not in the near future. While [unemploiyment] moved up in July, it’s been relatively stable over the past year, between 4% and 4.2%, so the Sahm Rule calculation is far from its trigger now. We went from having very high immigration to now the reverse, and as you have fewer workers out there looking for jobs, you don’t have to create as many jobs to keep the unemployment rate low.

A chilling effect in terms of participating in the survey could absolutely be at play, [and] you are taking a number of people seeking work out of the labor force. Typically, the changes are gradual. Aging happens slowly. When you have abrupt changes in the labor force survey, like with these immigration changes, which were very large increases in immigration followed by a very big decrease in immigration, that’s a different kind of shock. It’s not a recession, it’s just the economy will grow more slowly.

That risk is there, but as policies change and the administration walks back and tones down some of the more aggressive tariffs, not so much. The U.S. was really outperforming the rest of the world in growth and in productivity, and we’ve seen a regression to the mean, but the risk of a structural decline is more prominent than we should be comfortable with. When it becomes part of the conversation, you have a problem.

This interview has been edited and condensed for brevity and clarity.

—Peter S. Green

• Where’s the Vig? After loudly protesting that the sale of high-powered computer chips to Chinese firms was undermining U.S. national security and U.S. efforts to become the world’s biggest AI player, the Trump Administration has agreed to let chipmakers ADM $ADM and Nvidia $NVDA sell chips to China, albeit for a 15% fee. The U.S. Constitution forbids taxes on exports, so the deal is structured as a voluntary agreement, CNN reported. Instead, Nvidia and AMD will voluntarily send funds to the U.S. government. “It’s hard to identify any historical precedent for this sort of arrangement,” Sarah Kreps, director of the Tech Policy Institute at Cornell University’s Brooks School of Public Policy, told CNN. Foreign trading partners are looking askance at the arrangement. “Trump’s Nvidia shakedown is unprecedented and scary,” wrote Australia’s leading business publication, the Australian Financial Review. “The chip maker is the latest firm to learn about the U.S. president’s new corporate playbook: threaten a company and then watch them agree to a ‘deal’.”
• Chrome-plated? With Google $GOOGL facing a possible court-ordered breakup in the next few weeks that could force it to separate its browser business from its search engine, AI start-up Perplexity is offering to buy Chrome for $34.5 billion. That’s a lot, considering Perplexity is valued at only $18 billion. Google’s 90% share of the search market has the Justice Department arguing that forcing it to divest Chrome would create a more competitive playing field. But Google, Perplexity, OpenAI, Microsoft $MSFT and others are locked in a battle to use AI chatbots to offer users short sentences rather than just a list of links. Owning Chrome would simplify things for Perplexity.
• The appliance of science. GE Appliance, the washing machine, stove, and fridge-maker that GE sold to China’s Haier Smart Home in 2016, said it’s planning to spend $3 billion to modernize its U.S. plants over the next five years, creating 1,000 jobs.
• There’s a ($30,000 Electric) Ford in Your Future: Ford $F is about to shake up the EV business, with a promise to introduce a $30,000, mid-sized, four-door pickup in 2027. The key is a new assembly line concept that splits production into three simultaneous lines and which CEO Jim Farley called “The most radical redesign of how we manufacture cars since the Model T.” High production costs mean Chinese players like BYD have amassed massive market share with their cheaper assembly lines.
• Cage fighter: Paramount’s $PSKY new CEO, David Ellison (son of Oracle co-founder and Trump bestie Larry Ellison), has just grabbed America’s most vicious sport by the jugular, signing a $7.7 billion, seven-year exclusive streaming and broadcast contract with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, knocking out Disney’s ESPN, which was paying half that. A top challenge for Ellison is boosting Paramount’s streaming services. They gather only about 2% of U.S. viewers’ eyeball hours, versus 8.3% for Netflix $NFLX and 12.8% for YouTube $GOOGL.
• About that stock market: Both the Dow $DJI and the S&P 500 $SPX hit records this week, suggesting investors see stock prices continuing to rise, fueled partly by a cut in interest rates. Citigroup $C and Goldman Sachs $GS both predicted interest rate cuts of a quarter point each in September, October, and December, and traders are reportedly seeing a 94% chance of a rate cut next month. If that continues into next year, the Spring could see rates as low as 3% to 3.25%. But those bad jobs numbers, stubborn inflation, and the effect of tariffs on consumer prices have others worried.
• Intel’s back Inside: After a meeting with Pres. Donald Trump on Monday, Intel $INTC CEO Lip-Bu Tan may have lifted one burden from his shoulders as he attempts to revive the stumbling U.S. chipmaker. Last week, Trump grew upset over Tan’s supposed links to the Chinese Communist regime. “The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately. There is no other solution to this problem. Thank you for your attention to this problem!” Trump thundered on his own social media channel. After the meeting, Trump called their discussion “a very interesting one.” Tan is a U.S. citizen who was born in Malaysia and grew up in Singapore. Intel’s shares have fallen 55% in the last five years, though they are up about 10% since Tan took over in March.

• CryptoKlepto: When supposed crypto stablecoin TerraUSD $UST.X crashed and burned in 2022, as many as 1 million holders lost a combined $40 billion. Now the coin’s issuer, Stanford-educated Do Kwan has pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud in federal court, faces up to 25 years in prison. “I knowingly agreed with others to engage in a scheme to defraud—and indeed, in fact, did defraud—purchasers of cryptocurrency issued by my companies,” Kwon, wearing a yellow prison jumpsuit, said in federal court this week. Kwon conceded he lied about the price-balancing algorithm that kept the coins worth $1.
• You’ve got…a dial tone? Remember AOL $AOL , whose tagline inspired that Meg Ryan movie, “You’ve Got Mail?” Well, surprisingly, it’s still got the old telephone dial-up service whose whirrs and buzzes were a constant feature of the OG internet. At least, until Sept. 30, when AOL is ending dial-up service. It’s not clear how many people still use it, but in 2015, AOL still had more than 2 million dial-up users, generating revenue of more than $40 million of revenue a month.
• MisMatched: Match.com and Tinder parent Match Group $MTCH agreed to pony up $14 million for love-hunters who found it hard to cancel their subscriptions once they’d found their match. The companies said they admit “no liability,” but the FTC will use the money to pay back users who were forced to keep paying even after they canceled subscriptions. Who says money can’t buy you love?

• It’s kick the can time again for Chinese tariffs. On Monday, Trump said he’d hold off on China tariffs for another 90 days, in part to hold a summit with China’s leader, later this year. U.S. tariffs on Chinese imports are now 30%, while Chinese tariffs on U.S. imports are at 10%. Just before signing the order, Trump made a call on social media for China to buy U.S. soybeans. "Rapid service will be provided. Thank you President XI," Trump said. China imported about 105 million metric tons of soybeans last year, less than a fourth of that from the U.S. and most of the rest from Brazil. But tensions with the U.S. have China looking at Argentine soybean exports, and in the knock-on-effect world of global trade, rising prices in China have locals eating out less often, sapping demand for soybean oil, some of which China is now exporting to the U.S. for use in biofuel. “It’s highly unlikely that China would ever buy four times its usual volume of soybeans from the U.S.,” Johnny Xiang, founder of Beijing-based AgRadar Consulting told Reuters. Soybean futures are up about 4% since Trump put off the trade war with China, but still down 3.2% since Trump took office.
• More than just a bunch of Kevins? CNBC reporters found that Trump is now considering 11 candidates to replace Fed Chair Jerome Powell when his term expires in April. That’s up from four last week, which included two guys named Kevin: Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council and former Fed Governor Kevin Warsh. Treasury Sec. Scott Bessent will interview them all, then pass a list of his faves to Trump. Meanwhile, Trump’s nominee for a suddenly vacant Fed seat, Stephen Miran, has markets on edge, concerned he’ll push the Fed to slash rates too quickly. Miran’s nomination “raises another red flag of risk on U.S. assets” Richard Cochinos, a foreign exchange strategist at RBC Capital Markets, wrote in a research note on Thursday.
• Stats Man Down? President Trump’s nominee to run the beleaguered Bureau of Labor Statistics, which Trump accused without evidence of changing employment data to embarrass him, is raising hackles on the right, with prominent conservative economists doubting the new man’s credentials. The presumed nominee, E. J. Antoni, has spent his career at the right-wing Heritage Foundation, looking at taxes and social security, and not at the labor and macroeconomic issues that are the agency’s focus. Dave Hebert, an economist at the conservative American Institute for Economic Research took a hard swipe at 37-year old Antoni in a post on X: “I’ve been on several programs with him at this point and have been impressed by two things: his inability to understand basic economics and the speed with which he’s gone MAGA. I can only hope the Senate blocks this.”
• Ka-ching! It’s complicated, but the Trump family cryptoventure World Liberty Financial $WLFI.X has a deal with a little-known tech firm called ALT5 Sigma $ALTS (no, that’s not a key on your computer keyboard) to sell $750 million of World Liberty’s $WLFI coin. ALT5 Sigma will finance the purchase by selling $1.5 billion of its own shares and will give an undisclosed number of those shares to the Trumps’ World Liberty. Eric Trump will join ALT5 Sigma’s board. Emulating what firms like Strategy have done with Bitcoin, the concept here is that shares in ALT5 are a kind of proxy for the $WLFI coin.
• Hold the bacon: Meanwhile World Liberty’s $USD1.X coin has generated some $4.5 billion for the firm’s owners, largely through trading on a platform called PancakeSwap, which the Wall Street Journal reports was created by employees at big-league crypto exchange Binance $BNB.X. Binance’s majority owner and founder, Changpeng Zhao, reported to be worth more than $70 billion, recently hired a friend of Donald Trump Jr. to push for a pardon. Zhao spent 4 months in jail last year, and Binance agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines after a federal court found the platform had become a money-laundering hub for terrorists and sanctions evaders.
• AriZona Iced Tea and the demise of the 99-cent can: Since 1997, AriZona Iced Tea $99CENTS.X has kept the price of its signature tall boy 22-ounce can at 99 cents. Its stock ticker symbol is even “99Cents”. Keeping up with inflation would have raised the price to $1.99, but founder and owner Dan Vultaggio, who grew up in Brooklyn where his dad managed an A&P supermarket, told the New York Times he’s long believed in three principles: “Make it taste good, make it look good, and price it right.” But the Trump tariffs on imported aluminum may upend his strategy. While 80% of the aluminum used in his cans comes from recycled U.S. material, 20% comes from Canada, subjected to a 50% import duty.
• Canadian Gentlemen Prefer Hane’s: Montreal-based apparel maker Gildan Activewear $GIL will buy Hanesbrands $HBI , the North Carolina-based underwear maker, for $2.2 billion, in one of the first Canadian acquisitions of a U.S. company since President Trump slapped 35% tariffs on all Canadian imports. The two firms both use mostly U.S. cotton in their clothing, so tariffs would have a minimal effect on their business
• Disspirited: Budget airline Spirit $SAVEQ emerged from bankruptcy protection in March, but budget flyers are not flocking to its bright yellow birds, and the company said there’s “substantial doubt” it can keep going for the next 12 months. In February, Spirit rejected a bid from Frontier Airlines. Last year, JetBlue and Spirit called off a planned merger after anti-trust regulators said the larger airline would reduce competition.

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• Is Apple’s $AAPL App Store favoring OpenAI over Grok? That’s what Elon Musk is alleging, saying that after Apple partnered last year with OpenAI to put its AI chatbot into its products, Musk’s own AI agent, Grok is being shut out of the top ranks at the App Store. ”Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation,” Musk alleged. “Why do you refuse to put either X or Grok in your ‘Must Have’ section when X is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps? Are you playing politics?” Musk asked in a second post. (Apple didn’t comment directly). Musk is locked in a bitter feud with OpenAI founder Sam Altman, whom he sued last year for turning the company into a for-profit machine (Musk co-founded OpenAI withAltman in 2015). Altman snapped right back at Musk: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like,” Altman retorted on X. Their feud continues: On Tuesday, Musk lost his bid to dismiss a lawsuit from OpenAi claiming he’s been waging a “years long harassment campaign” using social media, press statements legal claims (see above), and “a sham bid for OpenAI’s assets.” A jury trial is scheduled for this spring.
• The Singularity is coming: Altman is clearly unwilling to let the rivalry drop. The Financial Post of Canada reports that Altman is preparing to start a new company funded by OpenAI to create its own human brain-AI interface. The firm, Merger Labs, will go head-to-head (or implant-to-implant, if you prefer) with Musk’s Neuralink.
• Pass on Gas: In Memphis, where Musk has built a massive data center to power Grok, locals are protesting the pollution from 35 un-permitted temporary gas turbines. A University of Tennessee analysis found peak concentration levels of toxic nitrogen dioxide have increased by 79% since the data center opened, TIME magazine reports, creating a public health crisis. An xAI spokesperson wouldn’t comment to Time, but the magazine says that at a new xAI site in nearby Whitehaven, Tennessee, 66 more gas turbines have been unboxed. We asked Grok: How toxic is AI? It responded: “Training large AI models consumes massive energy, contributing to carbon emissions. For instance, training a single large model can emit as much CO2 as a transatlantic flight.”