🌏 The billionaire breakup

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He said, Xi said. President Donald Trump says he had a “very good call” with Chinese President Xi Jinping — believed to be the leaders’ first amid an economic boiling point.

China’s driving a hard bargain. Largely as a result of the trade war, the country has curbed exports of critical rare earth minerals, hurting auto production lines across Europe.

Tesla is charging off a cliff. Its stock has dropped 20% in a week (and 14% on Thursday), and trading volumes suggest the sharp sell-off is related to CEO Elon Musk’s behavior.

Microsoft’s Excel-lent growth. The company remains one of the big winners of the AI boom — its stock just hit a record high — and, increasingly, Big Tech’s most convincing bet.

Bot off more than they could chew? Reddit just sued AI startup Anthropic for allegedly siphoning data from the social media site — over 100,000 times — to train its AI.

Amodei seeks a different approach. Anthropic’s CEO said he isn’t a fan of the GOP’s push to stop state regulation of AI because a 10-year embargo is “too blunt an instrument.”

Power couple blows a fuse

What began as a tax policy disagreement between “first buddies” Elon Musk and President Donald Trump short-circuited into a full-blown public feud on Thursday — and the sparks were very much not clean energy.

On Thursday, the former allies traded insults over Trump’s sweeping domestic policy bill, which, among other things, slashes EV and solar incentives while preserving subsidies for fossil fuels. Musk accused Trump’s GOP of sneaking in “a MOUNTAIN of DISGUSTING PORK.” The president responded by saying he was “very disappointed” in Musk and implying that the Tesla CEO’s criticism was self-serving — tied to fears over losing federal money.

“Elon and I had a great relationship. I don’t know if we will anymore,” Trump told reporters.

And then the real pork flew. Trump threatened to axe Musk’s federal contracts — including the “Billions and Billions” flowing into Tesla and SpaceX — and Musk essentially dared him to do it, delivering a Clint Eastwood–flavored “Go ahead, make my day.”

It’s a striking reversal for the two. Musk had been granted sweeping authority to cut government costs under the administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and even got a gold-key sendoff at the White House last week. But now, Musk is floating a full GOP breakup after reminding Trump that his $288 million in political donations “basically saved the Republican Party.” Quartz’s Joseph Zeballos-Roig has more on the EV king’s very public ex-communication.

Exit interviews everywhere

The job market is slowing down — and not in the “soft landing” way.

U.S. employers announced nearly 100,000 layoffs in May, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, marking a 47% jump from the same month last year. That brings the 2025 total to nearly 700,000 cuts — a little shy of all layoffs recorded in 2024, and we’re only six months in.

Blame it on a brutal cocktail of tariffs, federal funding cuts, slowing consumer spending, and just general economic dread. What used to be “selective restructuring” now feels like corporate cannon fire across services, retail, tech, and nonprofits.

The services sector saw its worst layoff month since early pandemic days, and retailers aren’t far behind, with layoff announcements up a staggering 274% year-over-year. Then there’s the government — or what’s left of it: DOGE has driven more than 284,000 job losses across direct and indirect public-sector roles, making it the single largest source of 2025 layoffs to date.

Tech, too, is bleeding: Companies such as Panasonic, Microsoft, and Walmart helped push the sector to nearly 75,000 cuts this year, up 35% from 2024. Meanwhile, Procter & Gamble is planning to axe 7,000 white-collar roles over the next two years as it ditches underperforming regions. Long story short? The job market has gone from “cooling” to refrigerated. And there’s still half a year to go. Quartz’s Catherine Baab has more on 2025’s sharpest economic trend: letting people go.

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