Top Trump administration health officials are expected to bring tech companies to the White House this week to roll out a plan to encourage more seamless sharing of health-care data, according to people familiar with the matter.
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Mehmet Oz are expected to host executives at an event on Wednesday, said the people, who did not provide names of the attendees and asked not to be named because the details haven’t been made public.
The plan was developed in coordination with the White House, building on a May effort by CMS to get public input on addressing barriers to sharing patient data.
The initiative was led by Amy Gleason, acting administrator of DOGE, the initiative known as Department of Government Efficiency, and Arda Kara, a senior adviser at CMS. Both worked for health-tech startups before joining the Trump administration.
“This initiative aims to build a smarter, more secure, and more personalized health care system — one that improves patient outcomes, reduces provider burden, and drives greater value through private-sector innovation and aligned federal leadership,” CMS spokesperson Catherine Howden said in a written statement.
Clear, a company known for its identity verification services frequently used within airports, is planning to attend, according to people familiar with the matter. The company has previously targeted the healthcare industry for expansion. A company spokesperson declined to comment.
Companies will commit to a voluntary framework around what’s known as interoperability, or how different health technology systems connect to one another and share data, the people said. Improving the flow of data across the fragmented US health-care system has long been a policy goal of both Democratic and Republican administrations seeking to improve quality and reduce waste.
The pledges will involve principles around patient and provider access to health information, and data sharing standards, among other elements. CMS will share additional information next week about the timeline for the plan, Howden said.
It was once a symbol of rebellion against the well-heeled Wall Street establishment. Today, it’s just another day in markets.
This week proved the point. Opendoor surged 43% in a single day. Krispy Kreme rallied 39% in a matter of hours. GoPro briefly spiked 73%. Reddit message boards lit up once again with rocket emojis and call-option bravado.
Yet it wasn’t the magnitude of the surges that mattered — but the indifference they met. Customary warnings about speculative excess fell on deaf ears. What once felt seismic now feels like a normal part of daily trading — another episode in a US financial system where bursts of retail speculation are routine, expected, and largely unremarkable.
By the end of the week, with the quick rallies faded, the broader market ended with modest moves after a record-setting run. Meanwhile, crypto — once cast as the financial resistance — continued its steady march into the mainstream. A new blockchain-based project involving the likes of Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc. was announced. Crypto funds posted their biggest four-week cumulative inflow ever. Michael Saylor’s Strategy clinched another $2.8 billion in capital markets to fund additional Bitcoin buying.
Taken together, the week offered a broader lesson: retail-driven speculative behavior no longer signals generational angst or post-pandemic distortion. It has instead become a settled feature of the current cycle. Short-dated options are part of the retail toolkit, trading platforms span everything from sports betting to complex stock bets, and manic episodes rarely require justification to take hold.
Peter Atwater, an adjunct professor at the College of William & Mary who studies retail investors, said the current wave of activity reflects a shift in both market sentiment and investment toolkit. Meme stocks trading, he says, has lost its sense of novelty — and that’s precisely the point. “We’ve normalized memeing,” he said. “There’s a yawn to it now.”
In Atwater’s view, the most aggressive traders have already moved on to riskier frontiers – digital tokens, leveraged ETFs, prediction markets — while meme stocks have become more of a cultural rerun. “It’s like 30-year-olds dancing to music 20-year-olds used to party to,” he said.
That meme stocks can rip without stimulus checks, lockdowns or zero rates isn’t especially surprising anymore. It is, in its own way, a marker of the moment: everyday speculation, embedded in the architecture of modern markets. Contracts that expire within 24 hours made up a record 62% of the S&P 500’s total options so far this quarter, according to data compiled by Cboe Global Markets Inc., with more than half of the activity being driven by retail trading.
“This generation is far savvier about options and market structure,” said Amy Wu Silverman, head of derivatives strategy at RBC Capital Markets. “While my generation was perhaps taught to ‘buy a house’ this one knows to ‘buy the dip.’”
It’s not happening in a vacuum. This week earnings season offered few surprises. Tariff deadlines slipped again. Noise from the White House blurred into the investment backdrop. The S&P 500 climbed 1.5% on the week and closed at a record high.
And in the end, a group of volatile stocks became yet another playground where regular investors aimed to quickly turn a profit, often by cornering short sellers or leveraging options. Opendoor Technologies Inc., capped a six-day winning streak with a 43% pop on Monday. The following days saw stocks with high short interest such as Kohl’s Corp., GoPro Inc., Krispy Kreme Inc. and Beyond Meat Inc. surge intraday then pare into the close.
Competition for gambling dollars is more brisk than it used to be. Since the post-Liberation Day selloff, a Goldman Sachs basket of the most shorted stocks has jumped more than 60%. In credit, CCCs, the riskiest tier of the junk bond universe, are on track to rack up a seventh week of gains. Crypto funds took in $12.2 billion in the past four weeks, their biggest cumulative inflow for such period, according to Bank of America Corp. citing EPFR Global data. US leveraged-loan market just had one of its busiest weeks ever with junk-rated companies rushing to reprice their borrowings multiple times.
And while the latest frenzy was reminiscent of 2021’s pandemic-era burst, there were a few key differences. This week’s action was fleeting, lasting one or two trading days before petering out. Concerted campaigns in the options market played a smaller role. More than half of the top 100 stocks in the S&P 500 index were trading with inverted one-month call skew in 2021, a sign of bullish intent, according to Cboe. This week it got only as high as 21% for the group.
“The market makers and institutions have really adjusted to this phenomenon,” said Garrett DeSimone, head quant at OptionMetrics. They’re “able to hedge their risk and they know how to price these options in across these scenarios,” he said.
If it signaled anything, enthusiasm for memes is more evidence that an ever-more-empowered retail cadre is a fact of Wall Street life that isn’t going anywhere, at least not soon.
“I don’t think it’s the beginning of a new trend, but it is very interesting to watch because it speaks that the retail investor really wants to be involved in this market,” said Jay Woods, chief global strategist at Freedom Capital Markets. “This is bullish. This is not bearish. This is not significant of a top.”
Mark Zuckerberg has named Shengjia Zhao, an artificial intelligence researcher who joined Meta Platforms Inc. from OpenAI in June, as the chief scientist for the social media company’s new superintelligence AI group.
Zhao was part of the team behind the original version of OpenAI’s popular chatbot, ChatGPT. He will help lead Meta’s high-profile group, which is aiming to build new AI models that can perform tasks as well as or better than humans. Zhao will report to Alexandr Wang, the former chief executive officer of Scale AI who also joined Meta in June as Chief AI Officer.
Meta has been spending aggressively to recruit AI experts to develop new models and keep pace with rivals like OpenAI and Google in the race for AI dominance. The company has been looking for a chief scientist for the group for months. Zhao is one of more than a dozen former OpenAI employees who have joined Meta’s AI unit in the past two months.
“Shengjia co-founded the new lab and has been our lead scientist from day one,” Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, wrote in a post announcing the news on Threads. “Now that our recruiting is going well and our team is coming together, we have decided to formalize his leadership role.”
Zhao was a co-author on the original ChatGPT research paper, and was also a key researcher on OpenAI’s first reasoning model, o1, which has helped popularize a wave of similar so-called “chain-of-thought” systems from labs such as DeepSeek, Google, and others. He was listed as one of over 20 “foundational researchers” on the project.
Yann LeCun, another AI researcher who has been at Meta for over a decade and holds the title of chief scientist, will continue to work at the company as chief scientist of an internal AI research group known as FAIR, according to a person familiar with the matter. He will report to Wang, they added.
Crypto traders are taking a more defensive posture amid speculation long-term holders are offloading tokens with Bitcoin trading just below all-time highs.
The largest cryptocurrency by market value was down about 2% to $116,200 on Friday, or around 5.7% below the record of more than $123,000 reached on July 14. Smaller tokens fared worse, with XRP and Dogecoin both down more than 5%.
The pullback has cooled expectations that so-called alternative digital currencies are poised to outperform the market bellwether following its recent record breaking run.
Close to $400 million in long positions were liquidated in the last 24 hours — Bitcoin leading the cuts with $159 million, according to data compiled by researcher Coinglass.
The crypto market’s decline is “a healthy and necessary correction” from previous highs, according to Alex Kuptsikevich, chief market analyst at FxPro. The total value of all cryptocurrencies in circulation briefly topped $4 trillion in July, according to CoinGecko data.
Even a decline to the $3.4 trillion mark would be viewed as profit-taking, Kuptsikevich said in a note on Friday. “As long as the market remains above this level, there is no point in talking about a change in the medium-term trend,” he added.
Bearish sentiment was also evident in the derivatives market where an unidentified speculator paid about $5 million in premium on the Deribit exchange to buy Bitcoin put options expiring on Aug. 8 at the strike price of $110,000, according to prime broker FalconX, which facilitated the trade.
“We expect to see further consolidation while Bitcoin remains below monthly trendline resistance, currently at around $125,000, which capped Bitcoin’s advance last week,” said Tony Sycamore, an analyst at IG Australia.
Still, most crypto observers remain bullish over the longer term. Citigroup analysts wrote in a note this week that they estimate Bitcoin could hit $135,000 by the end of the year.
“The broader uptrend remains intact, but momentum has cooled and traders are cautious,” said Rachael Lucas, a crypto analyst at BTC Markets.
— With assistance from Suvashree Ghosh and Emily Nicolle
Updated, July 25, 2025: Freshens up article for U.S. audience.
European Union and US negotiators are heading into another week of intensive talks, as they seek to clinch a trade deal by Aug. 1, when US President Donald Trump has threatened to hit most EU exports with 30% tariffs.
Officials in Brussels are prepared to stomach an unbalanced agreement that favors the US if that’s what is required to break the impasse before the deadline. But the two sides have yet to yield a decisive breakthrough despite an earlier round of negotiations in Washington last week, according to people familiar with the matter.
Because of that the EU is also stepping up preparations to retaliate in a scenario where there is no agreement. EU envoys are set to meet as early as this week to formulate a plan for measures to respond to a possible no-deal with Trump, whose tariff negotiating position is seen to have stiffened ahead of the deadline.
The US is now seen pushing for a near-universal tariff on EU goods higher than 10%, with increasingly fewer exemptions limited to aviation, some medical devices and generic medicines, several spirits, and a specific set of manufacturing equipment that the US needs, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.
A spokesperson for the European Commission, which handles trade matters for the bloc, said they had no comment to make on the ongoing negotiations.
The two sides have also discussed a potential ceiling for some sectors, as well as quotas for steel and aluminum and a way to ring-fence supply chains from sources that oversupply the metals, the people said. The people cautioned that even if an agreement were reached it would need Trump’s sign off – and his position isn’t clear.
“I am confident we’ll get a deal done,” US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. “I think all these key countries will figure out it is better to open their markets to the United States of America than to pay a significant tariff.”
Lutnick added that he had spoken to European trade negotiators early Sunday.
Trump’s Letter
The US president wrote to the EU earlier in the month, warning that the bloc would face a 30% tariff on most of its exports from Aug. 1. Alongside a universal levy, Trump has hit cars and auto parts with a 25% levy, and steel and aluminum with double that. He’s also threatened to target pharmaceuticals and semiconductors with new duties as early as next month, and recently announced a 50% levy on copper. In all, the EU estimates that US duties already cover €380 billion ($442 billion), or about 70%, of its exports to the US.
Before Trump’s letter, the EU had been hopeful it was edging toward an initial framework that would allow detailed discussions to continue on the basis of a universal rate of 10% on many of the bloc’s exports.
The EU has been seeking wider exemptions than the US is offering, as well as looking to shield the bloc from future sectoral tariffs. While it’s long accepted that any agreement would be asymmetrical in favor of the US, the EU will assess the overall imbalance of any deal before deciding whether to pull the trigger on any re-balancing measures, Bloomberg previously reported. The level of pain that member states are prepared to accept varies, and some are open to higher tariff rates if enough exemptions are secured, the people said.
Any agreement would also address non-tariff barriers, cooperation on economic security matters, digital trade consultations, and strategic purchases.
Move Quickly
With the prospects of a positive outcome dimming and the deadline looming, the EU is expected to start preparing a plan to move quickly if it can’t reach a deal, said the people. Any decision to retaliate would likely need political sign-off from the bloc’s leaders because the stakes are so high, the people added.
Countermeasures of any substance would likely provoke an even wider transatlantic trade rift, given Trump’s warnings that retaliation against American interests will only invite tougher tactics from his administration.
The bloc has already approved potential tariffs on €21 billion of US goods that could be quickly implemented in response to Trump’s metals levies. They target politically-sensitive American states and include products such as soybeans from Louisiana, home to House Speaker Mike Johnson, other agricultural products, poultry, and motorcycles.
The EU has also prepared a list of tariffs on an additional €72 billion of American products in response to Trump’s so-called reciprocal levies and automotive duties. They would target industrial goods, including Boeing Co. aircraft, US-made cars, and bourbon whiskey.
It’s also working on potential measures that go beyond tariffs, such as export controls and restrictions on public procurement contracts.
Anti-Coercion Tool
Bloomberg reported last week that a growing number of EU member states want the bloc to activate its most powerful trade tool, the so-called anti-coercion instrument (ACI), against the US should the two sides fail to reach an acceptable agreement and Trump carries through with his tariff threats.
The ACI would give officials broad powers to take retaliatory action. Those measures could include new taxes on US tech giants, or targeted curbs on US investments in the EU. They could also involve limiting access to certain parts of the EU market or restricting US firms from bidding for public contracts in Europe.
The anti-coercion tool was designed primarily as a deterrent, and if needed, a way to respond to deliberate coercive actions from third countries that use trade measures as a means to pressure the sovereign policy choices of the 27-nation bloc or individual member states.
The commission can propose the use of the ACI, but it’s up to member states to determine whether there’s a coercion case and if it should be deployed. Throughout the process, the EU would seek to consult with the coercing party to find a resolution.
Member states were briefed on the status of trade talks with the US on Friday.
The U.S. is now seen pushing for a near-universal tariff on EU goods higher than 10%, with increasingly fewer exemptions limited to aviation, some medical devices and generic medicines, several spirits, and a specific set of manufacturing equipment that the U.S. needs.
Siemens AG Chief Executive Officer Roland Busch said Germany must leverage the loads of data across its industrial companies to take advantage of artificial intelligence.
“We are sitting on a massive amount of data,” Busch said Monday during a Bloomberg TV interview. “This is one of the most industrialized economies in the world, and again, small and medium sized enterprises, large ones, they’re creating data from their buildings, their manufacturing sites, their engineering.”
Siemens is deploying AI to make industrial producers’ manufacturing systems more efficient. The company has a partnership with Nvidia Corp. for its AI applications and recently acquired software makers Altair Engineering Inc. and Dotmatics.
Busch reiterated that Europe needs to make significant changes to its regulatory structure if it wants to compete with US software companies.
The interview, done jointly with Deutsche Bank AG CEO Christian Sewing, focused on an initiative by more than 60 of Germany’s leading companies to bring at least €100 billion ($116 billion) in new projects to help spark growth in Europe’s biggest economy.
Life at the top is proving complex for China’s leading automaker, and there are fresh challenges on the horizon.
BYD Co.’s monthly sales have stagnated of late and with the summer months being a traditionally slower time for consumer purchases, that trajectory isn’t expected to reverse any time soon.
Discounting is also now being looked sternly upon by Beijing, with China last week pledging to rein in “irrational competition” in the electric vehicle sector, reflecting authorities’ wish to tackle the deflationary price wars that are threatening economic and industrial growth.
Some of BYD’s international forays are also proving more challenging than expected, raising the question, is China’s No. 1 automaker on shaky ground?
The Shenzhen-based behemoth currently looks like it will undershoot its annual sales target for 2025, in what would be a rare miss after a multi-year bull run. The number of electric and hybrid vehicles BYD needs to sell each month through December has hit 560,000 units, in excess of levels it could hope to achieve typically in a single month. The most vehicles BYD has ever sold in a month was just shy of 515,000, in December last year.
Analysts are now doubting whether BYD can hit 5.5 million units in 2025. Consensus estimates continue to be downgraded.
Deutsche Bank AG earlier this month said it now expects 5 million in wholesales, or deliveries to dealers, for this year, comprised of 4 million domestic units and 1 million overseas, while Morgan Stanley last month lowered its projection to 5.3 million, pointing to a smaller number of new models. Bloomberg Intelligence’s Joanne Chen says BYD will need to sacrifice some profit and maintain its hefty discounting in the second half if it wants to stay on track.
“Regulatory scrutiny will temper direct cuts to vehicle sticker prices but competition isn’t going away and retail promotions are still needed to sustain sales momentum,” she said. “New model roll outs and steady tech upgrade are also crucial.”
Bing Yuan, a fund manager at Edmond de Rothschild Asset Management, said many market watchers now realistically expect sales of around 5 million. “My sense is that is the consensus,” she said.
Stripping out overseas and commercial sales, BYD’s core car deliveries in China are shrinking. In June, they slipped 8% year-on-year as vehicles from brands like Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co., Xpeng Inc. and Xiaomi Corp. won over buyers. HSBC Holdings Plc data show that Geely was the largest gainer of market share in the first half, while BYD was among the biggest losers.
Overseas sales are faring better and those are looking on target to reach BYD’s forecast of 800,000. Indeed, BYD is already almost 60% of the way there. But while higher margin international sales will help BYD offset aggressive domestic discounting, some foreign markets are presenting new difficulties.
BYD has grand plans for Saudi Arabia, for example, hoping to triple its footprint after Tesla Inc. entered the country. But EVs account for just over 1% of total car sales in the kingdom, with high costs, sparse charging infrastructure and extreme temperatures challenging EV adoption.
India, a potentially huge market, has meanwhile consistently blocked BYD’s efforts to expand and despite rapid growth from a low base in Europe, there are substantial tariff headwinds and increasing competition from legacy automakers that already have consumers’ trust, not to mention more extensive after-sales networks.
At home, regulatory scrutiny has also intensified around BYD as it continues to be at the fore of an EV price war. In late May, it slashed prices by as much as 34%, triggering renewed sector-wide discounts. Its moves were later discouraged in a veiled warning by the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpiece the People’s Daily, which slammed the “rat-race competition.”
Whether Beijing can actually stop price discounting by a privately held company is a point of debate.
Tianlei Huang, a China program coordinator at the Peterson Institute for International Economics, said authorities may resort to administrative tools such as price reviews or cost investigations to establish a de facto price floor, or coordinate a concerted capacity reduction among leading EV makers, although he acknowledged those measures won’t be easy.
Regardless, BYD must be careful. As the company gears up to release first-half results later next month and July sales data within weeks, analysts will have their spreadsheets at the ready, waiting to see whether those 2025 targets look even further in the distance.
BYD’s monthly sales have stagnated of late and with the summer months being a traditionally slower time for consumer purchases, that trajectory isn’t expected to reverse any time soon.
President Donald Trump threatened to block the Washington Commanders’ bid to build a new stadium in the District of Columbia, escalating his feud with the NFL franchise over its decision to change its name from the Redskins.
“I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders,’” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.”
Trump has previously complained about the football team’s decision to change its name amid concerns the old name was a slur against Native Americans. Earlier Sunday, he had asserted there was a “big clamoring” to switch it back.
“Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen,” Trump posted. “Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”
The Commanders didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump also leveled criticism at the Cleveland Guardians, the Major League Baseball team that changed its name from the Cleveland Indians in 2021.
Trump has sought to reverse other name changes done in an effort to be racially or culturally sensitive.
Trump is limited in what he can do about sports teams outside Washington, DC. But the Commanders plan to build a new stadium on land that has been managed by the US National Park Service. The tract’s RFK Stadium was home to the team for roughly three decades until 1996.
The 20-month feud between the Western Hemisphere’s two most powerful oil companies over the biggest offshore discovery in a generation hinged on a single clause of a contract few people have ever seen.
The passage in a confidential agreement signed more than a decade ago that governs how producers work together in Guyana’s booming oil field was the basis for Exxon Mobil Corp.’s arbitration case that threatened to undo Chevron Corp.’s $53 billion takeover of Hess Corp.
The ensuing dispute upended Chevron’s and Hess’s strategies for nearly two years and threatened to mar the legacies of both companies’ CEOs. The story behind how it unfolded shows how American oil executives’ usual cordial relationships were pushed to the breaking point when a $1 trillion discovery was at stake.
“It should have been resolved much quicker,” Chevron CEO Mike Wirth said in an interview Friday. “This was a straightforward, plain reading of a contract.”
Exxon said it was obligated to defend its rights under the agreement.
“We had a clear duty to our investors to consider our preemption rights to protect the value we created,” the company said in a statement. “We welcome Chevron to the venture.”
The following account is based on Bloomberg reporting over nearly two years, including on- and off-the-record conversations with more than two dozen analysts, fund managers, traders and current and former company employees.
It began toward the end of 2023, when the US oil industry was basking in the aftermath of the price surge caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In a blow to the clean-energy transition, the war had underscored the continued importance of fossil fuels and furnished producers with record profits.
Keen to take advantage, US executives embarked on a corporate takeover spree that would reach nearly $500 billion over just three years. Exxon scored the biggest of them, buying Pioneer Natural Resources Co. for $60 billion in October 2023.
Not to be outdone, Chevron announced an agreement to buy Hess for $53 billion less than two weeks later. Hess’s minority stake in Guyana’s massive Stabroek Block was “the industry’s most attractive, long-lived growth asset” Wirth said on the day of the announcement. It was high praise for a project discovered and operated by its arch-rival, Exxon.
The warmth between the Chevron and Hess CEOs was palpable as they sat together for an interview on Bloomberg TV in New York. Wirth is the “best CEO in the energy industry,” John Hess said. Wirth repaid the compliment, praising Hess’s “key relationships with partners and governments around the world.”
But the bonhomie did not extend to Texas. There, Exxon executives bristled at Chevron talking about the Guyana oil field as if they already owned it.
Exxon made the giant offshore discovery back in 2015 after almost 30 other companies – including Chevron – were offered the chance to buy into the first wildcat well but walked away. Hess and China’s Cnooc Ltd. ended up as partners in the Stabroek Block, buying stakes worth 30% and 25% respectively. Exxon remained the lead operator, with 45% ownership. In less than a decade, Stabroek had become one of the biggest and fastest-growing oil fields outside of OPEC, with 11 billion barrels of recoverable reserves.
For Chevron and Hess, the deal was simple. Chevron would buy Hess in an all-stock transaction and assume ownership of the smaller company’s share of Stabroek. But there was a wrinkle. The joint operating agreement governing the Stabroek partnership contained a right-of-first-refusal clause. If one company decided to sell its stake, it must first be offered to the other two partners.
Lawyers for Chevron and Hess had studied the clause in detail during the due diligence process and concluded it did not apply because their deal was structured as a corporate merger rather than an asset sale.
But neither Chevron or Hess had reached an agreement over this interpretation with Exxon before their public announcement. To Exxon, Chevron’s proposed purchase amounted to a change of control in the Hess stake. And thus, the company believed it triggered the right-of-first-refusal.
The companies began talks in private but failed to make much progress. In early 2024, Chevron disclosed the dispute in a regulatory filing. Initially the market reaction was muted, with investors figuring negotiations would be concluded swiftly.
The optimism proved to be misplaced when, on March 6, 2024, Exxon Senior Vice President Neil Chapman announced to a stunned audience eating lunch at a Morgan Stanley conference in New York that Exxon had filed for arbitration. It was a surprise even to Wirth, who learned about the move from Exxon CEO Darren Woods in a phone call only the night before.
“We understand the intent of this language, of the whole contract, because we wrote it,” Chapman said, as the clinking of diners’ plates fell silent. “Most observers in this industry would understand our reputation for rigor, attention to detail in contract language. I mean, it’s a brand we have as a company.”
This time traders went into overdrive, with Hess shares extending losses below Chevron’s stock offer. That created an opportunity for merger-arbitrage funds such as Adage Capital Management, Millenium Management and Balyasny Asset Management, which would reap significant returns if the deal eventually closed. The funds mostly bought Hess and short-sold Chevron, wagering more than $5 billion total by March 2024.
Questions began to grow around Exxon’s intentions. Did it want to buy Hess itself? Or the company’s stake in Guyana’s oil fields? Or was this just a play to torpedo Chevron’s purchase?
Woods attempted to quell the speculation in March 2024 at the energy industry’s big annual conference in Houston, CERAWeek by S&P Global. “If we were interested in doing something with Hess, we wouldn’t have waited for Chevron” to sign its deal, he said.
Instead, Woods said, Exxon’s goals in arbitration were to “secure and confirm” the right-of-first-refusal, understand the value of that right, and “evaluate that value and do what’s in the interests of Exxon Mobil shareholders.”
The thinking appeared to be that the right of first refusal held some value, even if it was not exercised, which should benefit shareholders.
“The channels for dialog remain open,” Woods said in an interview at the time. “This is a business issue — this is not a personal one.”
Wirth and John Hess were becoming frustrated with Woods’s approach. Wirth, who previously had a good working relationship with his Exxon counterpart, considered arbitration an overly aggressive move that effectively ended constructive discussions between the companies. He was confident in his position and did not feel the need to compromise in a settlement.
Five to six months should be “sufficient time” for the panel convened by the International Chamber of Commerce to clarify the issue, Wirth told Bloomberg Television in April, 2024. But within days, Woods countered that arbitration would likely run into 2025, meaning Chevron would be left in strategic limbo for more than a year.
A further twist came in mid May, when Senator Chuck Schumer — then the chamber’s majority leader — urged the Federal Trade Commission to pump the brakes on the Hess transaction. Consumers were suffering from high energy costs, and more oil-industry consolidation would only increase inflation, he argued.
Soon after, influential proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services Inc. urged Hess shareholders to withhold their votes, citing concerns about the transaction’s valuation, process and uncertainty on arbitration timing. HBK Capital Management and D.E. Shaw & Co. followed ISS’s advice, publicly announcing their intentions to not back the deal.
Worried he would lose the vote, John Hess embarked on a whistle-stop tour of London, New York and Los Angeles to rally support. Participants in those meetings said he seemed stressed and entertained little debate, aggressively pressing the case that the takeover by Chevron was the best possible deal he could get.
At the same time, Exxon was also making its case to investors, though the stakes were much lower than for its opponents. A loss for Exxon would mean “business as usual,” Chapman later remarked, while a loss for Chevron and Hess would blow apart both companies’ long-term strategies.
While the Stabroek Block’s joint operating agreement was private, investors began to gather clues by looking at a template model contract published by the Association of International Energy Negotiators, upon which the Guyana one was based. It said the right-of-first-refusal clause did not apply when there was “ongoing control by an affiliate” entity.
This appeared to support Chevron and Hess’s case because the Guyana stake would still be held by Hess’s Guyana unit, even if that would now be controlled by Chevron. But Exxon believed the structure of the deal amounted to an attempt to circumvent the intention of the contract, which was to provide a right of first refusal to the other partners.
The contract, however, was written under English law, which typically places higher value on the actual words as written rather than their intent. Wirth and Hess, backed by a legal team in London, continued to express confidence in their interpretation.
John Hess won shareholder approval for the deal in late May 2024, albeit with the slimmest of margins — just 51%, largely due to the hedge funds’ abstentions.
But his relief was short-lived. In July, the Federal Trade Commission was said to be probing whether Hess and other US shale CEOs improperly communicated with OPEC officials about raising the price of oil, especially during the Covid-19 downturn. The FTC said it would approve the deal on the condition that Hess would not join its board. Chevron reluctantly agreed.
Hess vigorously denied the claims and they were later found to be baseless and overturned by the FTC. Critics called the case politically motivated, driven by then-President Joe Biden’s antipathy toward the oil industry.
As the case dragged on through the second half of 2024, Hess could barely disguise his contempt for Woods’s decision to go to arbitration. At one dinner in New York, he expressed his “disgust” at the company’s tactics over what he claimed was a straightforward transaction. He would never have signed a contract that effectively blocked him from selling his company, he said.
By the end of 2024, it had been more than a year since Hess and Wirth sat in front of the cameras celebrating their merger. Investor patience was wearing thin, with a large spread between Hess shares and Chevron’s takeover offer price still evident.
Still, Hess and Wirth continued to express confidence in securing victory, both publicly and privately. RBC Capital Markets analyst Biraj Borkhataria noted “the consistency to which Chevron management has communicated its stance around this deal.” It was crucial, given Chevron “had more at stake with this arbitration than Exxon did.”
Last week, Wirth and Hess were finally vindicated.
Shortly after 5:30 p.m. Thursday in New York, the FTC — now headed by an appointee of President Donald Trump — tossed out the ruling that blocked Hess from joining Chevron’s board. Thirteen hours later, word broke that the ICC panel had ruled in favor of Hess and Chevron. By the time trading on Wall Street opened at 9:30 a.m., Chevron had closed on the takeover.
For President Donald Trump, whose political career has benefited from voter anxiety over Washington elites, the health of his predecessor and the riches of Wall Street, the past week offered a reversal of fortune.
Trump’s efforts to escape the uproar over Jeffrey Epstein failed spectacularly, after the Wall Street Journal published a story alleging he once sent a suggestive birthday letter to the disgraced financier — a claim the president denied.
The White House was forced to make a rare disclosure that Trump wasn’t in perfect health. And Trump whipsawed on the fate of Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, signaling to lawmakers that he would attempt to fire him before relenting after concern about a market backlash.
Now, as Trump gears up for a high-profile trip to the UK next week to finalize a trade deal with Prime Minister Keir Starmer, he finds himself looking slightly vulnerable.
There was much Trump hoped to harness in what he called a “week of wins” — passage of his flagship tax-cut package earlier this month, approval of spending cuts this week, a run of favorable economic data, the signing of a stablecoin bill, and implementation of his aggressive tariff agenda.
Instead, there were suddenly a few punctures in the armor of a president who at times in his second term has seemed irrepressible as he bent rival institutions, countries, and political opponents to his will.
Trump concluded the week posting angrily to social media and suing one of his top allies in the press, Rupert Murdoch, along with Dow Jones & Co. and News Corp. for libel.
The Journal reported Thursday that Trump had prepared a letter for a book compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday. The president said the letter was “FAKE” and called the story “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
Still, the report threw gasoline on a simmering fire, particularly among members of Trump’s base, after the Justice Department claimed it had no evidence that Epstein had blackmailed political figures or kept a client list. That conclusion flew in the face of promises from some of the president’s top aides that they would reveal substantial new details about a case many Trump loyalists see as a smoking gun proving the existence of a so-called Deep State.
‘Weaklings’
Trump supporters and FBI leaders Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are said to be at odds with Attorney General Pam Bondi, while the president has repeatedly tried — and so far failed — to quell the furor.
“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he barked at a reporter earlier this month. “People still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable.”
This week, he dismissed questions from his base and said those worried about Epstein are “weaklings” and that “I don’t want their support anymore!”
But what was once a potent political tool for Trump — stoking conspiracies about Epstein, and Democrats’ involvement — has now backfired, with his own supporters frustrated that his administration may be covering up details they hoped would be released.
“The emphasis on Epstein is truly the best intentions of your most loyal followers,” Charlie Kirk, a conservative media figure, said in a segment on his show addressed to the president. He said the Epstein case was a sort of linchpin in loyal Trump supporters’ questions about the alleged Deep State.
After the release of the Journal story, Trump moved quickly. He directed Bondi to pursue the release of some grand jury transcripts related to the case, though that stopped short of the full release of materials his allies have demanded.
‘Same Scam’
Separately, Trump’s Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, directed the declassification of materials from the Obama administration that she argued showed evidence the former president and aides sought to politicize intelligence around Russia’s role in the 2016 election.
Trump has repeatedly drawn an equivalence between the Russia controversy and the Epstein case, suggesting both amounted to conspiracy-mongering by his political opponents. A special counsel ultimately did not find evidence Trump had coordinated with the Kremlin to interfere with the 2016 contest.
“It’s all the same scam,” Trump told Real America’s Voice in an interview that aired Wednesday.
The Epstein saga is a rare example of Trump struggling to successfully shift the narrative or change subjects in the news, according to one Trump ally, speaking on condition of anonymity. The ally predicted the matter would fizzle out by next year’s elections but criticized the White House’s move in February to hand right-wing influencers a binder called “The Epstein Files” that was largely a rehash of previously released information.
It even overshadowed the president’s escalating campaign against Powell, which has threatened to undermine longstanding conventions about Federal Reserve independence. Trump mused about dismissing Powell in a Tuesday meeting with lawmakers, with one White House official saying on condition of anonymity they expected the president to act soon to fire the central bank chief.
For Trump, his war against Powell serves an important political function, giving voice to homebuyers and borrowers who see lending costs impacting their wallets. But by Wednesday, Trump said he wouldn’t remove Powell unless the Fed chair was forced out for fraud, nodding to increasing efforts by the president’s allies to pressure the chairman over questions about a bank renovation project.
‘Winning Everywhere’
Trump backed off his push to force Powell out in part because of warnings that it would trigger a messy legal fight, according to one person familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The issues are distracting from what the White House wants to steer attention to: a winning streak that includes passage of a package of spending cuts and the stablecoin bill Trump signed Friday.
“We’re winning everywhere,” Trump said at a signing ceremony for the stablecoin legislation. “It’s not even close — not even close — and we’re going to keep it going.”
Even as Trump has notched long-sought policy victories — extending his tax-cut package, gutting government agencies and securing funding for his sweeping immigration crackdown — Republicans know that each carries substantial political risk and that he’ll need to focus on selling his agenda.
Democrats have seized on provisions curtailing Medicaid eligibility and tax cuts benefiting the wealthy, to sharpen their economic critique of Trump. And Trump is now two weeks away from his next tariff barrage due on Aug. 1.
The president has batted away economists’ warnings that his tariffs will threaten growth, upend supply chains and amount to a fresh tax on consumers.
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