Enrique Abeyta:

Trump Family Made Upward of $6 Billion in a Day Thanks to Its Crypto-Coin Launch

President Donald Trump and his family amassed as much as $6 billion on paper after their crypto venture opened trading for a new digital currency.

The Trump family launched the new cryptocurrency called WLFI on Monday in the crypto equivalent of an initial public offering. Before now, people who had bought the currency, which is from World Liberty Financial, had not been able to trade the tokens.

The Trump family holds about a quarter of all the tokens in existence. Trump’s three sons – Donald Trump Jr, Eric Trump and Barron Trump – are co-founders of World Liberty, while the president is named as a “Co-Founder Emeritus.”

While World Liberty says that founders and team members’ tokens remain “locked” and they cannot sell them. But trading allows for real-world valuation on their holdings, which were previously based on private sales.

Some fear that World Liberty creates an avenue to influence the Trump family and investors and investors use it to seek help from the Trump administration.

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Alan Knuckman:

U.S. Revokes TSMC’s Fast-Track China Export Status As Controls Tighten

The U.S. has revoked Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co's authorization to ship key equipment to its main China facility, the chip manufacturer said today.

The change removes a fast-track export privilege known as Validated End User (VEU) status, effective December 31, TSMC said, meaning future shipments of American chipmaking tools to TSMC's Nanjing site will require U.S. export licenses.

TSMC said it was evaluating the situation and communicating with the U.S. government, adding that it remains "committed to ensuring the uninterrupted operations of TSMC Nanjing."

The U.S. granted waivers to TSMC and other foreign chipmakers operating in China after issuing sweeping restrictions on chipmaking equipment to China in 2022.

The authorizations for Samsung and SK Hynix's China plants were revoked on Friday with an effective date 120 days later.

The revocations come despite a series of decisions by President Donald Trump to loosen export restrictions on technology, with his administration pledging to rescind Biden-era curbs on global access to AI chips in May and approving licenses last month to sell certain advanced semiconductors to China, including for Nvidia's H20 chips.

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Ari Goldschmidt:

Musk Looks Past Tesla Sales Slump, Says 80% of Value Will Come From Optimus

In a post on X on Monday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk predicted that "~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus." In mid-2024, Musk predicted that Optimus robots would someday turn Tesla into a $25 trillion company, which was equal to more than half of the entire value of the S&P 500 at the time of his comment.

With Tesla in the midst of a multi-quarter sales slump due to competition from lower-cost Chinese competitors, an aging lineup of electric vehicles and Musk’s incendiary political rhetoric and involvement with the Trump administration, the world’s richest person has been trying to convince Wall Street to look to the future.

For Tesla, that dream revolves around a world filled with robotaxis and humanoid robots, powered by artificial intelligence.

“It is important to note that Tesla is by far the best in the world at real-world AI,” Musk said in the company’s second-quarter conference call with analysts in July.

The problem for Tesla is that it’s behind in those key markets.

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