Thursday, May 14, 2026 · 169 newsletters

Trump in Beijing, Jensen in Tow

trump-china · jensen-huang · iran-war-powers · ppi-inflation · warsh-fed · anduril-defense · redistricting · anthropic-valuation · chinese-evs · agent-economy

Published on Thursday, May 14, 2026.

Pulled from 158 newsletters sent to read@madho.net yesterday. A dense midweek inbox, with two stories pulling all the gravity: Trump landing in Beijing with Jensen Huang scrambled onto Air Force One mid-flight, and a Senate day that produced both the seventh failed Iran war powers vote and a hot PPI print as Kevin Warsh was confirmed to replace Jerome Powell at the Fed. Here is the signal organized by trend.

The Big Story: Trump in Beijing, Jensen in Tow

By volume and by significance, the dominant thread of the day. Techmeme led with the spectacle: Nvidia confirmed Jensen Huang has joined Trump on the China trip, with a source telling CNBC that Trump called Huang to ask him aboard after seeing media coverage of his absence. Elon Musk posted from Air Force One: "Just Jensen and I are on AF1." Trump then posted that "CNBC incorrectly reported that the Great Jensen Huang, of Nvidia, was not invited," before pivoting to ask Xi to "open up" China for American business. Bill Bishop at Sinocism ran a long Sharp China episode walking through 360 degrees of the trip with Andrew Sharp: 10 questions and modest expectations, with the FT quoted as describing "a weakened Trump arriving at Xi's court."

Matt Berg at Crooked's What A Day took the auto angle. The Vroom of Doom caught what other writers missed: members of Congress are panicking that Trump's deal-making will open the gates to Chinese EVs at the precise moment his Iran war has pushed gasoline prices up and conventional car owners are considering other options. Chinese EVs already account for two-thirds of global EV sales in 2024, and some retail for as low as $10,000. Semafor DC framed the broader scene through Burgess Everett and Morgan Chalfant: Beijing talks begin, Murkowski joins the Iran vote, and a Kennedy crypto deal clears the path for a market structure bill, all on the same afternoon. Jim Cramer, gamely: thrilled Huang is going, because the only way to stay ahead is to have Nvidia as the dominant choice worldwide.

Reading these together, the picture is not a coherent China strategy meeting a coherent counterpart. It is a president inviting a chip CEO onto the plane after a media cycle, asking Xi to open up while flirting with letting Chinese EVs in, all while his own war keeps the gas price line rising. The meeting is the message, and the message this time is improvisation. (Wall Street already decided to ignore it: the S&P and Nasdaq closed at new record highs per Sherwood's The Wrap.)

Macro: A Hot PPI Print, a New Fed Chair, and Markets That Did Not Care

A surprisingly tight cluster. Matt at WTF Just Happened Today led Day 1940 with the day's PPI shock: U.S. producer prices rose 1.4% in April and 6% year over year, with the Senate confirming Kevin Warsh as Fed chair in a 54-45 vote on the same afternoon. Warsh replaces Jerome Powell on Friday, with Powell planning to remain at the Fed in an unprecedented arrangement. Matt Klein at The Overshoot ran the cleanest analytical companion: the U.S. job market is (still) inflationary, arguing locally-produced services prices keep rising 1 to 1.5 points faster than pre-pandemic, that the pace has been accelerating, and that even without the Strait of Hormuz disruptions and cloud-driven data center equipment demand, underlying inflation would be just as far from the Fed's goals as three years ago.

Brew Markets and Sherwood's The Wrap both flagged that traders ignored the PPI surprise and piled back into the AI trade. Ford had its best day since March 2020 on bullish options activity and a Morgan Stanley note praising the battery business; Nebius soared after boosting year-end contracted power guidance to over 4GW; Tower Semiconductor signed $1.3B in 2027 AI chip deals; and EchoStar jumped on a $40B FCC-approved spectrum deal with SpaceX and AT&T.

The thing markets did today is more interesting than the print itself. PPI at 6% YoY, a new Fed chair confirmed alongside an incumbent who is not leaving, and a sitting war in the Gulf, and stocks notched record closes on the AI trade. The split between the macro story and the equity tape is the story. The market is treating the AI capex cycle as if it operates outside inflation entirely, which historically has been a fine assumption right up until it suddenly is not.

Iran: Seven Votes, One Defection, One Toll Regime

WTF Just Happened and Semafor DC both opened on the same number: Senate Republicans blocked a war powers resolution to stop Trump's war with Iran for the seventh time, with Lisa Murkowski breaking ranks to join Rand Paul and Susan Collins in a 49-50 defeat. Murkowski told Semafor's Burgess Everett she does not buy Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's claim that Trump retains "all the authorities necessary" to restart strikes. "I think that there is room for reasonable disagreement to that," she said. The administration's position remains that the April ceasefire terminated hostilities, even as U.S. forces stay in the region, the Hormuz blockade continues into month two, and Hegseth tells Congress Trump can resume the war on his own.

The political shape here is a slow Republican turn that is still not moving the votes. Three Senate defections is not a coalition, but it is the highest count yet. Murkowski's holding-pattern AUMF resolution is the thing to watch; the question is whether a Hormuz toll regime or another disabled ship pushes a fourth or fifth senator into the column before the next vote.

Politics: A 4:30 a.m. Vote, a Map Being Redrawn

Democracy Docket tracked the night that wasn't covered anywhere else. South Carolina revives the Trump-backed redistricting push is the headline, with Mississippi and Georgia also planning to redraw congressional maps for 2028. The buried detail: at 4:30 a.m., a Louisiana Senate committee voted to advance the map, stripping Black voters of representation in the South. The hour says the quiet part out loud.

Sarah Longwell at The Bulwark marked a milestone of a different kind: 1 million Bulwark subscribers, a number that landed the same week independent media is being measured against legacy outlets being "gobbled up by Trump-aligned oligarchs." Lincoln Square ran Susan Demas with Media Matters president Angelo Carusone on their win after the FTC began investigating them for covering Elon Musk's pro-Nazi-content problem on X. Matt at Crooked flagged the day's most quotable line, Trump saying he does not think about Americans' financial struggles. Rick Wilson ran The Wolves of Fraud Street.

What ties this set together is not any single outrage but the speed at which the structural moves are happening: a pre-dawn committee vote in Louisiana, three states redrawing maps for 2028, an FTC weaponized against an accountability outlet, all on a Wednesday. The off-news days are doing more political work in 2026 than the news days.

Defense Tech: Anduril at $61B

The day's other industry-shaking story. Techmeme reported Anduril raised a $5B Series H led by Thrive and a16z at a $61B valuation, up from $30.5B in June 2025, with total funding now at $6.82B and a possible 2027 IPO. Sheera Frenkel in the New York Times had the underlying story; CEO Brian Schimpf's investor letter, shared by Shashank Joshi, framed the round as a year of "scaling production." A defense-tech valuation roughly doubling in eleven months while Trump is in Beijing and the Hormuz blockade enters month two is a clear capital signal, and the timing here is not subtle.

Anthropic at Almost a Trillion

The Wrap and others surfaced the day's blockbuster: Anthropic in talks for funding at a valuation as high as $950 billion, which would make it bigger than OpenAI. The Wrap called it an "improbable, parabolic rise" and noted Anthropic has now rocketed past the presumed leader. Bankless covered the crypto market structure bill grading decentralization on the same Senate day Warsh was confirmed and Kennedy cut his crypto deal with Tim Scott. The Breakdown ran Byron Gilliam on Eli Ben-Sasson's Zero-Knowledge, Infinite Trust, framing crypto as zero-knowledge proofs maturing from theoretical math into deployable trust infrastructure.

A $950B valuation in private markets at the same hour PPI prints 6% is the perfect snapshot of where capital allocation actually sits in 2026: AI risk is the only risk being priced as if it has bounded downside, and every other risk is being treated as transitory. That asymmetry is going to break in one direction or the other.

Ideas Worth Reading

Sacra on Muck Rack hitting $108M ARR. Jan-Erik Asplund's deep dive on how a Twitter-native 2009 PR platform leapfrogged Cision and Meltwater, and is now betting on answer engine optimization for the ChatGPT-Claude-Google-AI-Overviews era. The most interesting "second act" framing I've read this month.

Sean Ellis on why growth advisory engagements fail in month two. The Vector Problem and the three-week advisory honeymoon. Past the honeymoon, the advisor is "just another asshole asking people to do things they do not really want to do." A useful frame whether you advise or hire advisors.

McKinsey with Oxford economist Jean-Paul Carvalho. Andy West and Sebastien Lacroix sit Carvalho down on AI, strategy, and the future of cognitive work. More technically honest than the usual McKinsey AI fare.

David Callaway on profit and purpose. A new University of Manchester study finds firms with the strongest market cultures also have the lowest carbon footprints. The dichotomy investors have been pricing for a decade may simply not exist.

Your Chief of Staff on the fractional work starter pack. Elise Kennedy's curated list of 14 fractional-work resources to know. A practical map of a labor market that keeps growing while the discourse keeps missing it.

Ted Rubin via Jack Neff on brand safety silence. On the corporate silence around the Meta and Google verdicts for harming kids. The "tobacco moment" for Big Social keeps not arriving because the advertisers who would have to drive it cannot afford to.

Outside Interests

Bill Bishop's Sharp China podcast. Bill and Andrew Sharp on the trip, the Huang ride-along, and the "limits of upper hand analysis." Three years in, still the best China explainer in any inbox.

Gothamist on the LIRR strike. Hochul tells Long Islanders to plan to stay home if the strike hits. The MTA's shuttle plan would cover only a fraction of the 270,000 daily LIRR riders. A real test of the new governor's transit posture.

Skimm Well Played on the WNBA's seven-year CBA. Mallory Simon's frame: the deal raises the salary cap from $1.5M to $7M, locks in charter flights and housing, and adds a revenue-share. Now hockey, soccer, rugby, and baseball are watching. A Roger Bannister moment for women's sports labor.

DesignTAXI on Google's Googlebook line. A new AI laptop line built around Gemini, plus James Webb capturing the clearest map yet of the cosmic web. A reminder that the consumer hardware story has quietly bent toward bundled AI.

The Vibe Marketer's three-hot-seat rundown. A jiu-jitsu directory with no revenue, a fintech that compresses a 3-month process to 5 seconds, and a one-client AI agency. The diagnostics are tight enough to apply to almost any small operator.

Data Worth Noting

U.S. producer prices up 1.4% in April and 6% YoY. A hot number that the equity market chose to ignore. The Klein piece argues the underlying services-inflation story has been bad for a year regardless.

Anthropic in funding talks at up to $950B valuation. Bigger than OpenAI if it closes. The Wrap called the rise "parabolic." It is.

Anduril at $61B, up from $30.5B in eleven months. Total funding now $6.82B. A defense-tech doubling during an active Gulf war is the cleanest read on how capital is sorting the next decade.

Three Takeaways for You

The day's macro setup is genuinely strange and worth holding in your head: hot PPI, a new Fed chair confirmed alongside an outgoing one who is staying, a seventh failed war powers vote with a third Republican defection, and equities hitting record highs on the AI trade. Each leg of that combination is unusual; together they describe a market that has decided the AI capex cycle operates outside normal macro physics. That assumption is the thing to test, not assume.

The political tape is moving on two clocks at once. The visible clock is Trump in Beijing with Jensen Huang scrambled aboard, Warsh confirmed, a crypto bill clearing committee. The faster, quieter clock is the 4:30 a.m. Louisiana committee vote on a Trump-backed map, Mississippi and Georgia planning to redraw for 2028, and an FTC weaponized against Media Matters. The visible clock is the one the press covers; the quieter one is doing more of the structural work.

If you only read three pieces today, I'd suggest: Matt Klein at The Overshoot on the U.S. job market being still inflationary (the cleanest macro read of the day), Bill Bishop's Sharp China on the Beijing trip (the most adult China analysis you will find), and Matt Berg's What A Day on the Chinese EV opening (the auto angle no one else is connecting to the Iran-driven gasoline price line).