🥊 UFC Fight At The White House: July 6, Issue 32

📈 Robinhood Provides Access to Private Markets: Robinhood now offers EU investors tokenized “shares” of (the private companies) OpenAI and SpaceX: exposure that mimics equity but isn’t actual stock. While tokenization promises broader access to high-growth private assets, it also strips away disclosure and regulatory safeguards. OpenAI wasn’t a fan in press release on Thursday but we’ll see what retail investors think about it.

📈 Nvidia and Microsoft, the $4T Power Couple: AI frenzy has catapulted Nvidia to chip-dominating growth (32% annual revenue CAGR) while Microsoft’s recent market-cap surge hinges on turning its double-digit AI revenue gains (now ~4% of sales) into ubiquitous, premium Azure services—and navigating OpenAI ties, in-house chip development hiccups and massive layoffs could make or break its bid for an all-time-high valuation. The market cap of Microsoft and Nvidia sits at $3.71 and $3.89 trillion, respectively.

📈 Father-Son $270M Windfall: GemLife Communities Group launched a A$750 million IPO in Sydney—Australia’s largest this year—valuing founder Peter Puljich and son Adrian’s combined stake at A$417 million. The luxury land-lease operator, born from a Gold Coast trailer-park, now commands 32 communities and nearly 10,000 homes. Proceeds will fund a A$270 million Aliria retirement-home community acquistion while tapping into a land-lease sector that’s set to grow 5–7% annually on booming retiree demand.

🌎 Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill Passes: On July 4, Pres. Trump signed a sprawling $3.3–$4 trillion tax-cut and spending package, extending tax cuts and making key business credits (depreciation, R&D, pass-through) permanent—while raising the debt ceiling by $5 trillion. The legislation phases out Biden-era clean-energy incentives (ending EV credits), boosts fossil-fuel support, and saves some $900 million from Medicaid. Passed by slim margins in both levels of parliament, it draws praise for business certainty but sharp criticism for its cost, healthcare cuts, and accelerated energy rollback.

🌎 US-Vietnam Trade Framework Announced: President Trump announced a trade agreement with Vietnam. Trump declared “TOTAL ACCESS” to Vietnam’s markets with zero tariffs on American exports; however, he also simultaneously slapped a 20% tariff on Vietnamese imports, and a 40% tariff on transshipped goods (i.e. Chinese components rerouted through Vietnam). That 20% rate is double the current tariff on Vietnam, and the 40% transshipment tax is aimed squarely at curbing China’s workaround of existing U.S. tariffs via Vietnam. Amid the U.S.-China trade war, Vietnamese imports into the U.S. have more than doubled.

🌎 The Tariff Repreive is Coming to an End: With his three-month moratorium expiring July 9, President Trump announced he’ll notify 10–12 countries of new “reciprocal” tariffs, ranging from 10–20% up to 60–70%, to take effect August 1 if no trade deal is sealed. So far only the UK, China, and Vietnam have signed frameworks. Despite earlier hints at flexibility, the White House now insists no further extensions past the deadline.

🌎 China Closing the AI Gap: Chinese AI firms, DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qwen and Tencent’s Hunyuan are rapidly winning customers from HSBC and Standard Chartered to Saudi Aramco and South African universities by matching ChatGPT-level performance at a fraction of the cost and offering open-source models that developers can customise.

The shift threatens to cost US chipmakers billions (Nvidia’s Hopper 20 ban alone could shave off some $10 billion) and splinters the market into rival AI ecosystems. As Washington tightens controls and Beijing doubles down on indigenous AI, experts warn this decoupling could lock users into bubbles of misinformation, stall global safety standards and pit “democracies vs. authoritarians” in a high-stakes race for AI primacy.

💼 Stirring the Pot: Luckin Coffee, China’s largest coffee chain that recently overtook Starbucks in Chinese revenue, just opened its first U.S. stores in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and NoMad. Luckin is known for its cashless ordering system, rapid pickup booths, and prices about 30% lower than Starbucks, Luckin is brewing up serious competition.

💼 Meta’s $300M Brain Heist: Meta is going all-in on AI, offering jaw-dropping pay packages (reportedly up to $300 million over four years) to ‘poach’ top talent. It’s new “Superintelligence Labs” is led by Alexandr Wang (ex-Scale AI) and Nat Friedman (ex-Github), the lab has already poached at least seven OpenAI researchers. Sam Altman fired back in a leaked company-wide Slack message, accusing Meta of creatinga “cultural problem” and emphasized that the mission-driven culture, not money, is what sets OpenAi apart from the rest.

💼 Trade > Tax: Canada scrapped a digital services tax (a 3% levy aimed at U.S. tech giants like Amazon, Google, and Meta) just a day before it was set to take place in order to revive stalled trade talks with the U.S. The tax would’ve applied to any digital revenue over C$20 million and cost tech giants an estimated C$2 billion annually.

🤪 The ‘America Party’: Elon Musk has launched his own political party (the America Party) after the passage of the president’s domestic spending bill (see above), which Musk slammed as “insane”. The move came just one day after Musk posted a viral July 4th tweet asking if the U.S. needed a new political party, in which 65% said yes. Musk calls the current political system of Democrats and Republicans a “uniparty” and says the American party will represent the vast swath of Americans who, in his view, feel unrepresented by either Democrats or Republicans.

🤪 UFC Fight At The White House: President Trump plans to host a UFC championship fight at the White House for America’s 250th anniversary on July 4 2026. Trump stated Dana White (UFC CEO) would organize the full UFC fight on the South Lawn. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed that Trump is “dead serious” about the UFC event.

🤪 Heavenly Mission, Earthly Consequences: On June 27th, South Korean authorities detained six American nationals who attempted to send approximately 1,300 bottles containing rice, U.S. currency, and Bibles to North Korea via the sea. The group was apprehended near Ganghwa Island before they could launch the 1,300 bottles into the water.

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