TheChek News Flow

The nonstop news from the White House didn’t shake investors in January. Also: A Financial Flashback to 40 years ago, the ‘Volcker rally’ that sent the dollar to a high.

Fund investors in January absorbed the fast and furious news coming out of the new administration in Washington, rewarding their patience with solid gains.

The average U.S.-stock fund posted a return of 3.6% in January, according to data from LSEG, formerly Refinitiv Lipper. That built on the 17.4% gain that stock funds registered for all of 2024. (See funds-data tables including Mutual-Fund Yardsticks.)

Tariffs… interest-rate uncertainty… the DeepSeek artificial-intelligence bombshell. Investors watched it all, with heads spinning, but largely stuck by their guns.

“Tariff news is developing on top of a U.S. economy that is still very strong. This should provide some ballast against trade developments in the near term,” says Lauren Goodwin, economist and chief market strategist at New York Life Investments.

“The U.S. election results in November have boosted both business and consumer confidence,” says Linda Bakhshian, deputy chief investment officer of equities and multi assets at Macquarie Asset Management. That said, stock valuations “remain elevated,” Bakhshian says, so “earnings growth will be crucial to support stock performance in 2025. And be prepared for volatility.”

International-stock funds were up 4.5% in January—nearly as much as in all of 2024, when the funds gained only 4.8%, significantly lagging behind their U.S. counterparts.

Bond funds were also up for the month. Funds focused on investment-grade debt (the most common type of fixed-income fund) posted an average return of 0.6%, adding to the 1.8% gain for all of 2024.

FINANCIAL FLASHBACK

A look back at Wall Street Journal headlines from this month in history

40 YEARS AGO: The Dollar’s ‘Volcker Rally’

After World War II, the U.S. dollar became the world’s top reserve currency, and the global economy flourished. But fast-forward to 1985, and things got a bit out of control.

The dollar index—a measure of the greenback’s value against a basket of major currencies such as the British pound and the German mark—hit an all-time high of 160. There seemed to be “no end in sight to the dollar’s strength,” as The Wall Street Journal quoted one banker in late February of 1985.

It was called the Volcker Rally, recalls Win Thin, chief strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman. Paul Volcker headed the Federal Reserve and successfully crushed U.S. inflation by raising short-term interest rates to 20%.

Deregulation from the Reagan administration and corporate tax cuts helped boost stocks. And higher U.S. rates meant the dollar became a magnet for foreign capital, sending the dollar sky-high, Thin says. “It was sort of exceptional.”

The good news was that a strong dollar meant cheaper U.S. imports. But exports became massively expensive. At the same time, dollar-denominated commodities sank, with wheat prices shedding 29% from $3.89 a bushel in August 1983 to a low of $2.75 in 1985.

U.S. farmers, manufacturers and tech firms suffered under the rally, and they demanded change. The result was a September 1985 meeting at the New York Plaza Hotel, where an agreement was made to depreciate the greenback relative to the other major currencies. It became known as the Plaza Accord and resulted in avoiding new tariffs on imports.

Trump’s nominee for SEC chair has been critical of regulatory burdens for public companies

Wall Street is holding out for a hero to revive a beleaguered IPO market. Enter Paul Atkins, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Investors are hopeful that the agency’s next chairman will ease regulatory burdens for publicly traded companies and help spark a rebound in stock-market debuts. Former SEC Chair Gary Gensler was viewed by bankers as an impediment to the U.S. market for initial public offerings, given his penchant for enforcement actions and support for tighter disclosure rules on a range of corporate issues.

“It’s part excitement, and it’s also part relief,” said Jim Toes, president and CEO of the trade group Security Traders Association. “The most recent chair did very little in this role to encourage companies to go public.”

Atkins is a conservative lawyer who served as a Republican member of the SEC under former President George W. Bush. If confirmed as the new chair, he is expected to re-examine the agency’s actions during the Biden administration.

Just how much he and the SEC can do to reverse a decadeslong trend of fewer companies listing on public markets is unclear. Sharp stock market swings—such as those in the first weeks of Trump’s presidency—are also bad for IPOs because they make valuing companies tricky.

U.S. companies raised just $32 billion in traditional IPOs in 2024, well below the 10-year average of around $49 billion, according to data from Dealogic. There were fewer than 4,000 publicly traded companies in the country last year, down from more than 7,000 in 1998, according to the Center for Research in Security Prices.

Access to seemingly endless investor cash and concerns about the costs of public listings have kept companies private longer. The Federal Reserve’s interest-rate hikes during the pandemic also put a huge damper on new listings.

“Many of the rules that we’ve done over the past four years, there have been burdens associated that one worries at the margin could have a negative effect on companies’ willingness to go public,” said acting SEC chair Mark Uyeda in an interview last month.

Atkins has yet to reveal any specific plans for the SEC. His confirmation is expected to take place this month, though he may not step into the role until March, according to people close to the situation. But he has also cited factors creating an unfriendly environment for discouraging companies from going public.

“One is the cost of regulation and two, other things like the fear of litigation,” he said in a 2017 interview on Bloomberg TV.

A hallmark of Gensler’s tenure at the SEC was his targeting of crypto companies, which he sought to regulate more closely. Gensler also pursued legal actions that led to billions of dollars in fines for other companies.

The SEC won’t be able to enact sweeping changes without new legislation. But some bankers are hopeful the agency will take steps to make it more appealing for companies to go public.

For instance, the SEC could look at reducing disclosure requirements in areas such as stock buybacks and financial risks from climate change. The agency is also expected to ease restrictions on special-purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs. These firms boomed during 2020 and 2021, but increased scrutiny from the SEC effectively shut down the market.

For now, bankers have been tempering their hopes for an IPO market comeback in 2025.

Trump’s tariffs are fueling uncertainty over how much more inflation and interest rates might come down this year.

Last month, Venture Global cut the target price for its IPO by more than 40% due to muted investor demand. Shares of pork producer Smithfield Foods also got a tepid reception.

“Given macroeconomic forces, I’m not sure someone new at the top job at the SEC lights the match for a flaming IPO market this year,” said David Peinsipp, co-chair of Cooley’s global capital markets group.

The activist hedge fund is encouraging BP to consider more dramatic moves than it has made so far to restore the once venerable company’s fortunes

Activist hedge fund Elliott Management has built a stake in British oil major BP BP 0.99%increase; green up pointing triangle and will push for transformational changes to improve the company’s performance, according to people familiar with the investment.

The U.S. hedge fund, which manages around $70 billion in assets, is one of Wall Street’s most influential investors, known for pressuring companies to fire management, break apart and spin off businesses, all with the goal of increasing shareholder returns.

The size of Elliott’s BP stake couldn’t be learned. Elliott is encouraging BP to consider more dramatic moves than it has made so far to restore the once venerable company’s fortunes, the people said.

The U.K. oil company’s strategy has whipsawed in recent years. It pivoted away from its traditional oil and gas businesses five years ago in favor of low-carbon energy investments such as wind, solar and electric-vehicle charging.

BP shares have lagged behind those of bigger rivals such as Shell and Exxon Mobil, spurring many BP investors privately to call for a new battle plan. Its market value of around $87 billion is less than half of Shell’s and less than one-fifth Exxon’s.

BP sharply cut its dividend in the pandemic and has been battling back ever since. It has struggled to reduce high debt levels and cut costs. Elliott’s arrival will add to executives’ concerns that the clock is ticking to improve BP’s performance.

BP has trumpeted what executives see as meaningful signs of progress and growth in areas like Iraq and the Gulf of Mexico, where BP is a dominant player. Executives have argued for more time to show they are on the right track, according to people involved in discussions with investors.

Last month BP said it would cut about 4,700 jobs, or more than 5% of its global workforce, and slice contractor numbers. It also warned that disappointing refining margins and other factors could leave as much as a $300-million hole in fourth-quarter profit. Its full earnings release is scheduled for Feb. 11.

The company has looked to cut costs further by bringing in partners for offshore-wind projects and by putting a Germany refinery and U.S. onshore-wind business up for sale.

Elliott’s stake, earlier reported by Bloomberg News, adds to the mounting challenges facing BP Chief Executive Murray Auchincloss, a veteran company finance executive named to the top job 13 months ago. He took over as interim boss after the previous CEO, Bernard Looney, was ousted over his failure to disclose details about past relationships with colleagues.

Auchincloss was widely labeled by investors and analysts as the continuation candidate for the role. BP’s chairman and other key board members stayed, underscoring the efforts by BP and Auchincloss to squelch expectations for a drastic change in course.

In private meetings with investors late last year, Auchincloss and other senior BP officials signaled that the company wasn’t planning dramatic strategic changes. They were responding to stepped-up criticism of the company’s performance, according to people who attended the meetings.

At a strategy update scheduled for Feb. 26, Auchincloss is expected to try to reassure investors that BP will rejigger how it spends money to take more advantage of its global oil and gas footprint and massive trading business.

With a 48-year record of shaking up companies, the Florida- and New York-based Elliott, which also has a London office, is famous for its deep dives into corporate structures and management and its knack for rallying other investors to its causes. Recent targets have ranged from Starbucks and Southwest Airlines to sprawling industrial icons.

Last year, Elliott amassed a $5 billion stake in Honeywell International and sought to break apart one of America’s last surviving industrial conglomerates. Honeywell’s shares had underperformed the broader market. Earlier this month, Honeywell said it would split into three independent companies.

Elliott isn’t the first to agitate against BP. Last year a tiny London hedge fund, Bluebell Capital Partners, attacked BP’s commitment to shrinking oil-and-gas production while boosting investment in less-profitable green-energy sources. Bluebell also called for replacing BP’s chairman, Helge Lund, a key backer of BP’s earlier pivot to low-carbon energy. Lund didn’t respond to a request for comment Sunday.

BP largely brushed off the criticism, telling investors it had shareholders’ support and didn’t need an activist weighing in. Though small, Bluebell struck a chord with other investors. Bluebell later closed its public funds.

Summary

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is issuing this Health Alert Network (HAN) Health Advisory about a recently confirmed outbreak of Ebola disease in Uganda caused by the Sudan virus (species Orthoebolavirus sudanense) and to summarize CDC’s recommendations for U.S. public health departments and clinicians about case identification, testing, and biosafety considerations in clinical laboratories.

Currently, no suspected, probable, or confirmed Ebola cases related to this outbreak have been reported in the United States, or outside of Uganda. However, as a precaution and because there are other viral hemorrhagic fever (VHF) outbreaks in East Africa, CDC is sharing best practices for public health departments, public health and clinical laboratories, and healthcare workers in the United States to raise awareness about this outbreak.

On February 5, 2025, CDC issued a https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/level2/ebola-uganda" target="_blank">Travel Health Notice Level 2: Practice Enhanced Precautions for people traveling to Uganda. Currently, CDC has not issued any interim recommendations to health departments for post-arrival risk assessment and management of travelers, including U.S.-based healthcare workers, arriving from Uganda. CDC recommends that travelers monitor themselves for symptoms of Sudan virus disease (SVD) while in the outbreak area and for 21 days after leaving. Travelers should also self-isolate and contact local health authorities or a clinician if they develop symptoms (early “dry” symptoms may include fever, aches, pains, and fatigue and later “wet” symptoms may include diarrhea, vomiting, and unexplained bleeding).

*Link: https://www.cdc.gov/han/2025/han00521.html

The last time Poornima Ramarao spoke to her son, a 26-year-old software engineer named Suchir Balaji, was on his birthday, Nov. 21. He was on a backpacking trip with a few friends on Catalina Island, right off the coast of Los Angeles. It was a quick call. Ramarao wanted to let him get back to celebrating with his friends. “I blessed him, but my blessing didn’t protect him,” Ramarao tells Fortune.

After Balaji returned the next day, he spoke with his parents one more time—a brief call with his father, who told Fortune his son sounded normal, despite what would soon happen. But after not hearing from Balaji for a few days, Ramarao began to worry. On Nov. 25, she went to his home by San Francisco’s Hayes Valley neighborhood and knocked on the door but didn’t get a response. She still had not heard from him the next day, and decided to go to the police department and file a missing person’s report. When the cops finally gained entrance to his apartment, they brought out Balaji’s body on a stretcher. He had died from a gunshot wound to the head.

San Francisco medical examiners initially ruled Balaji’s death a suicide, although many questions persist for his parents––and for the wider public. Because Balaji was not just a software developer, but a former researcher at OpenAI who had gone to the New York Times just a few months before to decry what he viewed as the AI’s company’s illegal copyright violations. At the time of his death, Balaji was prepared to testify as a witness at a landmark lawsuit brought by the newspaper against the artificial intelligence behemoth.

Since Balaji’s death, Ramarao and her husband, Balaji Ramamurthy, have been looking for answers. Ramarao made a January appearance on The Tucker Carlson Show to express concerns about how her son’s case has been handled by authorities. And on Jan. 31, she and Ramamurthy filed a lawsuit against the San Francisco Police Department, demanding it release its full report into their son’s death.

Balaji himself has become a symbol of fears about OpenAI’s creeping power and his death a source of rampant conspiracy theories, spurring online speculation, prodding tweets from Elon Musk and elected officials, and even a memecoin launched by an anonymous figure allegedly raising funds to support the parents’ legal effort.

But beneath the most salacious headlines is the tragic death of an exceptionally gifted programmer and researcher, described by family and friends who spoke with Fortune as a prodigy with a firm moral compass. His parents are still searching for closure.

“We will take this to the public,” Ramarao says. “We will be taking it everywhere. We will even send it to President Trump.”

Before Balaji left OpenAI last August, he had spent four years among the company’s top researchers, having helped develop its flagship GPT-4 large language model, the underlying technology to the commercial blockbuster ChatGPT. That vantage point helped build his view that OpenAI was breaking the law by making copies of online content.

OpenAI was Balaji’s first job out of college, a prodigious leap that was, for his parents, completely expected. From the time he was little, Ramarao knew her son was exceptionally smart. At two years old, Balaji was already showing an interest in programming. “He would take us to Barnes and Noble and show us the Java book section,” Ramarao recalls.

Balaji grew up in Cupertino, Calif., the heart of Silicon Valley and home of Apple. By 11, he was programming on his own—a skill he used to playfully torment his friends. One remembers Balaji’s idea of a middle school prank: writing code that deleted a friend’s Skyrim save file. (Skyrim, a popular video game, usually sees its players pour hundreds of hours into their games.)

Before starting at UC Berkeley as an undergrad, Balaji took a gap year to work at the online forum Quora as a software engineer. While other new employees hired out of high school struggled, one coworker who spoke with Fortune says that Balaji fit right in. “He was mature beyond his years,” says the coworker, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy. They remember that Balaji had a knack for reading people at the poker table. “He always took our money,” the coworker says.

Even at the brainy mecca of Berkeley, Balaji stood out. One friend recalls being in a computer science class with him, and in a famously difficult midterm, Balaji got one of the highest scores without studying: “Something insane, like, four standard deviations above the mean,” says the friend, who like most of the acquaintances who spoke with Fortune did so on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy given the conspiracy theories that have proliferated. “I thought, ‘Who is this guy?’” the friend tells Fortune. “I’m not his intellectual equal by any means.”

Balaji was also one of a select few accepted to Berkeley’s Accel Scholars Program, a mentorship program founded by elite Silicon Valley venture capital firm Accel supporting young software engineers looking to pursue careers in tech. “He was a really brilliant, thoughtful person with a lot of confidence and courage,” said Amit Kumar, the Accel partner who founded the program. “In a university full of outliers, he stood out in terms of raw intellectual horsepower…He would have been great at anything he applied himself to.”

Balaji was drawn to the frontier technology of artificial intelligence, interning at the rapidly growing startup Scale AI in 2019 while he was in college. One friend who worked with him says Scale seemed to hope he would return. Balaji became drawn to OpenAI, where he’d also interned. Its cofounder, John Schulman, directly recruited Balaji out of college for a full-time job.

Balaji would spend his first four years out of college with OpenAI, helping gather digital data to train the company’s growing neural network. Still, he would later tell the New York Times that he viewed his work as a research project, not as the foundation for OpenAI’s later smash hit, ChatGPT. Over time, three friends tell Fortune that Balaji seemed to become disillusioned slowly, sharing memes to communicate his displeasure with OpenAI’s trajectory. One friend says that Balaji disagreed with OpenAI’s approach to achieving artificial general intelligence, the north star for the AI sector. The friend remembers Balaji complaining that OpenAI, which began as a non-profit lab and has gradually evolved into a commercial enterprise, was too focused on software sales and wasn’t willing to invest enough on the research side. Balaji joked to several friends that AGI, or artificial general intelligence, stood for “adjusted gross income.” They don’t remember Balaji bringing up concerns with OpenAI’s approach to copyright.

When he quit OpenAI, some longtime friends were surprised, while others felt it had been coming. Balaji left in August 2024, the same month that Schulman also made his high-profile exit. All the friends and family that Fortune spoke to said that Balaji’s first few months out of OpenAI were surprisingly normal, as he advised at least one AI startup and rode his Yamaha motorcycle around San Francisco, contemplating what he’d do next.

No one that Fortune spoke to, including his parents, knew of his plans to become a public advocate for what he viewed as egregious legal violations by his former employer.

Ramarao never expected her son to speak out against OpenAI, especially in such a public way. She had gotten the sense he wasn’t happy with OpenAI at the time he’d left. But when the New York Times article came out, it caught her off-guard.

“He just said, ‘It’s unethical, and I feel it’s wrong,’” says Ramarao. “‘We need to speak up.’”

In a series of interviews, Balaji told New York Times tech reporter Cade Metz that he believed OpenAI would cause more societal harm than good, making the case that the company was violating copyright laws based on his own intricate understanding of how its models are trained. Metz published his article in October, with Balaji posting a detailed essay on his personal website the same day laying out his case that OpenAI was breaking fair use laws.

Balaji isn’t the first former OpenAI employee to speak out against the company. A group of nine had come forward to the New York Times just a few months before, alleging a culture of recklessness and deteriorating safety protocols, accelerated by the dramatic firing, and immediate return, of cofounder and CEO Sam Altman the year before.

Unlike the other group of OpenAI employees, Balaji wasn’t divulging any previously unknown inside information about the company—a distinction that has caused some to take issue with his classification as a “whistleblower.” And one intellectual property lawyer, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity because of the conspiracy atmosphere around the death, says Balaji’s own analysis “misunderstands the law in some fundamental ways.” Another, the intellectual property attorney Bradley Hulbert, tells Fortune that Balaji’s post reads like “the argument of a really smart non-lawyer who read up on the subject but does not have a thorough understanding.”

But Balaji’s decision to come forward still served as a potent alarm against OpenAI’s seemingly unstoppable momentum—here was one of its young, phenom engineers helping explain to the public how the technology actually worked and the harms it could cause. The New York Times, which has sued OpenAI alleging unauthorized use of millions of its articles by the company to train its AI models, even named Balaji as a witness in its ongoing lawsuit against OpenAI. Balaji’s testimony, reckons Hulbert, would likely have been used “for color” to help the newspaper make its case to a jury,

Even though Balaji had been secretive about his life-changing decision, people who knew him weren’t surprised. His former coworker at Quora, who hadn’t spoken to Balaji since their time at the company years earlier, remembers following the news. “I always felt he had a good head on his shoulders,” they tell Fortune. “He knew what was right and what was wrong.”

And while it may have seemed impulsive to go to the New York Times without even telling his parents, friends say that Balaji wouldn’t have made the choice without his characteristically methodical consideration.

“He seemed like he was making all these impulsive decisions, but no––they’re impulsive to people who aren’t in the loop or to those he’s not specifically talking about these decisions to,” one close friend who’d previously worked with him said. “I saw him as someone who was very systematic and thoughtful, kind of about everything.”

Balaji had a crew of ten close friends from high school. They kept an active group chat where they shared memes, and ever since the pandemic, went on two backpacking trips a year together. One friend, who was on the final Catalina trip before Balaji’s death, remembers that they would all joke together about Balaji’s decision to go public.

They were all big fans of Dune and would compare his action to a famous war in the books—a crusade against computers that ends with the elimination of AI in the story’s universe. “Anytime we talked about it, it would be in a joking manner,” says the friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their privacy.

Even so, Ramarao knew that her son’s very public revelation would come with consequences. She remembers even thinking that as she looked at his picture, stoic and shrouded in shadows, in the New York Times. “My mother’s instinct was very strong,” says Ramarao. “I really felt something grave was going to happen to my son. And he just kept assuring me: ‘Mom, it’s just my opinion. I haven’t done anything wrong.’”

About a month after the New York Times story came out, Balaji was dead. It’s not clear how long Balaji’s body was in the apartment before it was discovered on November 26. From the day she learned of his death, Ramarao had already begun to feel that her son’s case was not being properly investigated.

Her lawyers lay out the case in their lawsuit against the police department, filed on Jan. 31. According to the complaint, a representative from the city’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner (OCME) informed Ramarao 40 minutes after they found his body that Balaji had died by suicide. The lawsuit alleges that no officer or examiner asked her any questions about her son, even when she informed them he had been a whistleblower against OpenAI. The representative also told her she would not be allowed to see his body, and that his face had been “destroyed” when a bullet went through his eye. The gun was registered to Balaji. He had bought it in January 2024.

A spokesperson for the San Francisco Police Department told Fortune that “no evidence of foul play was found during the initial investigation,” but that the investigation remains open as of Feb. 7. The OCME declined comment.

Harboring doubts, Ramarao decided to hire an independent examiner named Dr. Joseph Cohen, a forensic pathologist, to conduct a private autopsy in the middle of December. According to the lawsuit, Cohen determined that the bullet’s trajectory, which went through his mid-forehead, was “atypical and uncommon” in suicides, also noting a “contusion” to the back of Balaji’s head.

Dr. Cohen did not respond to several requests for comment.

After receiving Cohen’s report in mid-December, Ramarao sent a letter through her lawyers to the police department, OCME, and the San Francisco Office of the City Administrator, asking for a criminal investigation into Balaji’s death, describing it as “troubling.” According to January’s lawsuit, they never received a formal response, but police officials “informally” informed Ramarao’s lawyers that detectives had briefly reopened the investigation to review the building’s closed-circuit recordings and then closed the investigation once again. (The police department told Fortune that the investigation has “remained open since its inception.”) Ramarao’s lawyers have tried to get access to the police incident report, without luck.

According to a person with direct knowledge, who was granted anonymity to discuss non-public information, the city’s attorney’s office is going to come out with a a letter soon with detailed facts that are consistent with a suicide. The OCME and police reports are expected in the same timeframe.

In the meantime, Ramarao has become increasingly convinced that her son was murdered. She says that her lawyers directed her to another investigator, Dr. Dinesh Rao, formerly the chief forensic pathologist in the Legal Medicine Unit at Jamaica’s Ministry of National Security. Rao, who spoke to Fortune from India, says that he has not visited Balaji’s apartment. Still, he was able to analyze photos taken from the apartment and sent to him by Ramarao.

In Rao’s 28-page initial report reviewed by Fortune, he raises a number of questions: Was there a suicide note? Did police take fingerprints at the scene? Based on the limited photographic evidence, he also pointed to anomalies, including hair that did not seem to belong to Balaji, as well as blood spatter that did not seem consistent with suicide.

Barring a more complete report from the police, which her lawyers are still demanding, Ramarao has taken her limited evidence on a public awareness campaign. On Dec. 29, she posted on X that Balaji’s death was a “cold blooded [sic] mu*d*r declared by authorities as suicide,” demanding an FBI investigation. The post received nearly three million views and a response from Elon Musk. “This doesn’t seem like a suicide,” he replied. (Elon Musk, who was a cofounder of OpenAI but who left in 2018 and now runs a competing company, has a longstanding feud with OpenAI’s Sam Altman over the company’s nonprofit status, and the two often spar on social media.)

The conspiracy flames spread when she appeared on Tucker Carlson’s online show in January, in an hour-plus-long episode. “He believed [that] AI––currently without any regulation––is a harm to humanity,” she tells Carlson. “He stood up for a cause, and he lost his life for a cause. He’s a martyr.”

The interview stirred even more outrage, with Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) echoing her call for an FBI investigation the same day, likely spurred when Carlson sent Khanna a text during the episode. “My heart breaks for Suchir Balaji’s family and his mother, Poornima Ramarao, who I spoke to recently,” Khanna said in a statement shared with Fortune. “She provided me with information that inspired me to speak out. They deserve to have their questions answered.” A spokesperson for Khanna declined to share whether they had additional information about any active investigations. An FBI spokesperson said the bureau cannot confirm or deny the existence of any investigation.

Ramarao told reporters shortly after Balaji’s death that she wasn’t “pointing fingers” at OpenAI. Since then, her efforts to make sense of the inexplicable tragedy have collided with a teeming online world of conspiracy theories all too eager to latch onto grief and uncertainty. As Ramarao has pushed for answers, a rash of baseless speculation has thrived alongside the proceedings.

When asked for comment, an OpenAI spokesperson forwarded a statement the company posted on X on January 16, which said that it had reached out to the San Francisco Police Department to offer its assistance if needed. “Suchir was a valued member of the team and we are still heartbroken by his passing,” read the post.

A spokesperson for the New York Times declined to comment.

While Ramarao has jumped to extreme conclusions, Balaji’s friends remain uncertain. Balaji’s last days were the backpacking trip to the Catalina Islands with four other friends from his high school crew—a three-night hike on a trail that was a favorite of theirs. Two friends who spoke with Fortune say they didn’t notice anything amiss with Balaji. They didn’t really talk about work, which was normal for them. When OpenAI came up, they made the same jokes about Dune.

Balaji buying a gun earlier in the year also did not seem out of the ordinary, at least according to one friend. Two others in their high school crew also own firearms for recreation and self-defense and they knew that Balaji had one as well, says the friend. But they’re still haunted by countless questions.

“The thing about moving on is that you need to be able to make some sense of the whole situation,” one of the friends tells Fortune. “With this constantly in the news, it’s been kind of hard to find that.”

Unlike Ramarao, the two friends say they don’t have an opinion of what happened but still want to see a more thorough investigation. One tells Fortune that they never even got a call from the police asking for additional information.

Still, they say that Balaji did seem to be looking toward the future. They were planning another backpacking trip together, this time to Alaska. At the time of his death, he was working on a new project, likely focused on AGI. It may have been a startup, or a nonprofit. Friends didn’t know specific details, and it’s likely they may never have the full picture.

“My thoughts on the matter are that you can never really tell with these sorts of things,” one friend tells Fortune. “Maybe he was [depressed], maybe he wasn’t. I think from all of the times that I’ve known him, or all of the time that I’ve known him, there was nothing abnormal about Suchir, until his passing.”

Until the police release their final report, which is expected by the end of February, it will be impossible to find any closure. That has not stopped online speculation, which has fed off by Ramarao’s quest for answers, about Balaji’s death—a similar phenomenon to the Boeing whistleblower who was found dead by suicide in March.

Daren Firestone, an attorney who works regularly with whistleblowers, tells Fortune that it is common for them to experience loneliness and doubt. It’s partly why he advises his clients to stay anonymous and go through official channels such as government tip lines. “It creates enormous pressure on somebody and a feeling of isolation,” he says. “And if you’re isolated and you feel the world is against you, that can be challenging for even the most robust minds.”

The last day that Ramarao saw her son was Nov. 7, a couple of weeks before his death. They talked about his career plans and went for a hike together in Union City, Calif. where his parents live. “I still remember his body language,” Ramarao tells Fortune. “He was very proud of what he was doing. There was no fear. I wish he had some fear. He could have survived today.”

Data-mining software company Palantir Technologies may be in the right place at the right time as Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency looks to disrupt federal hiring and spending practices.

Shares soared 34% over the past week, closing at $110.85 on Friday, after the company reported strong fourth-quarter earnings and upbeat yearly guidance late Monday.

Palantir is known for putting its AI-powered platforms to work in the defense and intelligence sectors, but it has also been expanding in the commercial space recently. Those gains and its inclusion in the S&P 500 index helped shares surge 340% last year.

In fact, the 64% jump in Palantir’s US commercial revenue last quarter outpaced its 45% gain in government revenue, fueling investor enthusiasm.

The quarterly results prompted Bank of America to raise its price target on Palantir stock to $125 from $90 and reiterate its buy rating.

“The company sees the world ripe for an AI and technology revolution,” analysts said in a note on Tuesday. “We see PLTR enabling and leading this revolution in both Commercial and Defense markets.”

Meanwhile, Musk’s DOGE is looking to slash the federal workforce and spending in moves reminiscent of his takeover of Twitter in 2022.

His team of young DOGE engineers is reportedly bringing beds into government buildings, staking out territory with sticky notes, and questioning workers on their usefulness.

“While not a consensus view, we think the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) could be a major opportunity for government efficiency enablers,” BofA said.

If DOGE ushers in an era of commercial-like contracting, digital-first development requirements, and open-architecture requirements, then Palantir’s line of businesses and approach to government contracts are “already in line,” analysts added.

Palantir executives were similarly bullish during a conference call with analysts late Monday after reporting fourth-quarter earnings.

Chief Technology Office Shyam Sankar said DOGE will bring meritocracy and transparency to government, which fits with Palantir’s business.

“The commercial market is meritocratic and transparent, and you see the results that we have in that sort of environment. And that’s the basis of our optimism around this,” he added. “I think the work that we’ve done in government, it’s deeply operational, it’s deeply valuable, and we’re pretty excited about exceptional engineers getting in there under the hood and being able to see that for a change.”

After trying to dismantle the US Agency for International Development, DOGE is expected to take on some of the biggest areas of government spending.

On Friday, President Donald Trump said he instructed Musk to “check out” the Pentagon, which has a 2025 budget of $850 billion.

For his part, CEO Alex Karp said Palantir loves disruption, which helps expose things that aren’t working.

“There’s a revolution. Some people get their heads cut off,” he told analysts on Monday. “It’s like, we’re expecting to see really unexpected things and to win basically. That’s what we’re going to do.”

MicroStrategy lost money in each of the last four quarters, yet the company has never been worth more.

On Wednesday, the company announced its fourth-quarter earnings for 2024, posting a 3% decrease in revenue and a $671 million net loss that helped it dodge a multibillion-dollar tax bill. Yet, the company has doubled down on its Bitcoin strategy, in part by adding more Bitcoin to its coffers than ever before and by rebranding from MicroStrategy to “Strategy,” with a new logo incorporating the Bitcoin symbol.

“It ties our identity much more closely to Bitcoin and all of the positive aspects of the Bitcoin network in the world,” Saylor said of the rebrand on Wednesday’s earnings call.

The company’s shares fell about 4% Thursday following the release of its earnings results, before rebounding Friday. While its stock has come down to $336 a share as of Friday from an all-time-high close of $473, the dip is merely a drop in the bucket compared to its recent performance. Thanks to executive chairman Michael Saylor’s audacious bet on Bitcoin, the company’s stock has rocketed more than 560% over the past year and boasts an eye-popping market cap of about $85 billion, greater than that of companies like Airbnb, Intel, and Capital One.

The company announced Wednesday that it added $20.5 billion worth of Bitcoin in the fourth quarter of 2024 alone, marking its biggest ever quarterly increase of its Bitcoin holdings. In January alone, Strategy has made four Bitcoin purchases, with two, on Jan. 21 and Jan. 27, worth $1.1 billion each.

Its total holdings of the cryptocurrency now stand at about $30.4 billion. The company owns about 2% of all Bitcoin in circulation, and its holdings have nearly doubled to 471,000 coins from 252,200 in the third quarter of 2024.

“We are a Bitcoin treasury company and we are growing. We are built on an asset, Bitcoin, which is growing 50% a year, and we are growing with that asset,” Saylor said on the company’s third-quarter earnings call for 2024.

Yet, Strategy’s market value defies logic, skeptics say.

Strategy’s market cap stands at just under double the value of its Bitcoin holdings’ market value, or its net asset value (NAV), and that gap is difficult to explain, said Carnegie Mellon University finance professor Bryan Routledge.

“There’s no rational explanation for that difference,” he told Fortune.

MicroStrategy did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Fortune.

The best- and worst-case scenarios

Strategy’s core business still involves business intelligence software and some cloud computing. Yet the company’s EBITDA, a measure of profitability that shows how much of its earnings come from its business operations, has been negative since at least the second quarter of 2023, said Jason DeLorenzo, the founder of registered investment adviser Ad Deum Funds. (EBITDA stands for “earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization.”)

Among its past or current customers, Strategy counts hotel chain Hilton, the fast-food chain KFC, and pharmaceutical company Pfizer, according to its website.

Still, Saylor is more focused on the company’s Bitcoin strategy. Through its “21/21 plan,” the company plans to buy $42 billion worth of the cryptocurrency over the next three years, funded equally by sales of equity and fixed-income securities.

“If Bitcoin grows in excess of 21%, if that happens, MicroStrategy’s capable of BTC (Bitcoin) gains in excess of $10 billion a year within four years,” Saylor said on the company’s third-quarter 2024 earnings call.

The company’s shares are attractive to some because they provide a way to speculate on Bitcoin without having to buy the asset directly or buy an ETF linked to the value of the asset. Yet, by putting money into Strategy, investors face a double whammy of risk, Routledge said.

“You’re not just facing Bitcoin risk. You’re facing whatever is driving this difference between the net asset value and the price of the shares,” he said. “That extra component is an extra source of risk,” he said.

In the best-case scenario, Strategy’s market cap would come back into line with the value of its Bitcoin assets and Bitcoin would remain at a high price. In this case, an investor could short expensive Strategy shares and buy cheaper Bitcoin directly, profiting from an arbitrage opportunity when Strategy’s shares fall back in line with the value of its Bitcoin holdings. Yet cashing in on this disconnect for now, though, could be difficult, Routledge added.

“I don’t know whether that difference is going to get better or worse before it comes back to a one-to-one connection,” he said. “There’s this famous quote, I think it’s from John Maynard Keynes, that is, ‘the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay liquid.’”

Saylor’s Bitcoin strategy has previously taken the company to the brink before and survived. On Oct. 13, 2022, with Bitcoin’s price having collapsed to a two-year low, Strategy’s holdings at the time were worth $26 million less than the debt he was obligated to pay, Fortune reported at the time. Although the price of Bitcoin recovered in 2023 and exploded in 2024, Strategy came close to a possible disaster, but Saylor came out on top.

Yet, in the worst-case scenario, Strategy’s Bitcoin emphasis may put it in a bind. If the price of Bitcoin drops and the company needs to dip into its reserves to cover its debts, it will still have to convert Bitcoin to dollars, incurring both fees and taxes that could reduce its value by about a quarter, said DeLorenzo.

And if Strategy sells a majority of its Bitcoin too quickly, it risks reducing the overall value of the cryptocurrency because the market may not have enough liquidity to maintain its value in light of a major sale, DeLorenzo said. Any drop Bitcoin’s price would also reduce the value of the company’s overall holdings.

“I think that MicroStrategy itself is built on a house of cards based on Bitcoin,” he said.

Michael Saylor and Strategy

Founded in 1989 by Saylor and two MIT classmates, the newly renamed Strategy was once all-in on data analytics. As a business analytics pioneer, the upstart software company helped early customers like McDonald’s parse massive amounts of data to make business decisions.

The company and its young founder, Saylor, who was only 24 when he started the company, quickly rose to become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the late ‘90s tech boom. In 1998, Strategy went public and Saylor became a billionaire on paper almost overnight.

Saylor became known for his lofty ambitions and even loftier predictions. He also garnered a reputation as a man who wasn’t afraid to flaunt his wealth. He famously owns several yachts, including one which was featured in the 2015 movie Entourage.

Yet, in 2000, the company ran into trouble when it announced that its revenue for 1999 was more than 25% less than it previously claimed. Saylor’s personal fortune collapsed by $6 billion as a result, the biggest single-day loss for an individual in history up to then. Saylor paid out $8.28 million later that year to settle a case brought against him, his cofounder Sanju Bansal, and a former chief financial officer by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The SEC accused Saylor’s company of materially overstating its revenues and earnings between the time the company went public in June 1998 until March of 2000. He did not admit to wrongdoing.

The multi-billionaire CEO’s Bitcoin ambitions are just the latest big bet he’s made on a burgeoning technology. In 2012, he wrote a best-selling book, The Mobile Wave: How Mobile Intelligence Will Change Everything, predicting the mobile computing trend brought on by smartphones and other portable devices. Inside of Strategy, Saylor also helped build out two successful businesses the company later sold, including Alarm.com, which lets homeowners and businesses monitor their security systems using the internet.

After saying in 2013 that Bitcoin’s “days are numbered,” Saylor changed his mind on the cryptocurrency during the pandemic. In 2020, Saylor began to worry that the Fed’s policies could stoke inflation, eating into the value of Strategy’s cash holdings.

“We just had the awful realization that we were sitting on top of a $500 million ice cube that’s melting,” he said in an interview at the time with crypto media outlet CoinDesk.

After an initial $250 million purchase in 2020, the company’s stock jumped 10% and Saylor never looked back. He has since led Strategy to accumulate billions of dollars worth of the token. He says he will never sell.

Practice is ‘efficient’ way to pay IHT, experts say

Tax advisers are urging wealthy Britons to consider life assurance as a way to reduce inheritance tax and help future generations pay the levy, a practice that has until now flown under the radar.

Wealth managers told the Financial Times that they expected “whole of life” cover set up in a trust to become much more popular as a result of chancellor Rachel Reeves’ expansion of the inheritance tax regime in the Autumn Budget.

Life assurance held in a trust means the policy sits outside of the person’s estate and is therefore not subject to standard rate inheritance tax at 40 per cent. Whole of life cover pays out a guaranteed amount of money to beneficiaries upon death and can be used to foot an estate’s IHT bill.

Life assurance covers for an entire life, whereas life insurance is restricted to a set term.

Tax experts said the practice was an “efficient” way to pay IHT, because beneficiaries cannot access most other assets until the executors have probate, before which the IHT bill needs to be settled.

Hazel Bowen, a senior wealth planner at Canaccord Wealth, said this life assurance practice was a lesser-known, “secret” way to mitigate IHT, and that the changes to the tax regime in the Budget had been “fairly seismic”.

As life assurance was “a standalone contract with you and the provider, it will not be impacted by future Budget announcements or tax changes”, she added.

Ian Dyall, head of estate planning at wealth manager Evelyn Partners, said life insurance helped “get around the cash flow issue” when the policyholder’s beneficiaries are met with the tax bill.

“It’s definitely increasing in importance in advisers’ minds,” he added. “We’re doing a lot more training around it.”

In her October Budget, Reeves announced that unused pension pots would be included in estates from April 2027 and subject to IHT. She also set out a crackdown on loopholes in the regime that mean some landowners would be hit with a 20 per cent levy from next spring.

From April 2025, wealthy foreigners who have been in the UK for more than 10 of the past 20 years face paying IHT on their worldwide assets, plus a period of exposure to the levy even after they have left the country.

Catrin Harrison, senior associate at Charles Russell Speechlys, a law firm, who advises clients on trusts and estate planning said: “Insurance brokers are inundated with new clients at the moment and are racing against the clock to get cover in place before the April tax changes.”

Many of her clients who have decided not to leave the UK immediately, despite recent reforms to the non-dom regime, were using life assurance to mitigate the potential risk of an unexpected inheritance tax liability.

“The life insurance companies are one of the winners from the changes to the non-dom regime,” added Tim Stovold, head of tax at Moore Kingston Smith, an accountancy firm. “The fear of losing a chunk of the family’s wealth to IHT is dealt with by insuring the problem away”.

Paying monthly premiums on a life assurance policy also reduces the amount that would otherwise be left in the estate and ultimately subject to the 40 per cent IHT rate.

Dyall said Reeves was “unlikely” to crack down on the practice because “it is an efficient way to pay the tax and so the government is getting its money. It also means people are free to do with their money as they wish knowing that, upon death, there’ll be money to pay the IHT bill.”

Ian Cook, a chartered financial planner at Quilter Cheviot, said that life assurance in trust would “definitely spring back into vogue” as a result of Reeves changes to the IHT regime around pensions and agricultural land.

“I’m going to be encouraging clients to look at taking life insurance, more so than ever before,” he added.  

The Treasury did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Giorgio Armani, Prada Group’s Patrizio Bertelli and Tod’s Group Diego Della Valle, as well as the Del Vecchio family, among others, were contacted by fraudsters this week.

MILAN – A pool of high-profile Italian entrepreneurs — including several fashion players, such as Giorgio Armani, Prada Group’s chairman and executive director Patrizio Bertelli and Tod’s Group chairman Diego Della Valle, among others — have been targeted by a gang of scammers, according to media reports.

People close to the entrepreneurs have been allegedly contacted this week by fraudsters pretending to be representatives of the Ministry of Defense, requesting to be urgently put in touch with the businesspeople and asking for huge sums of money to help the government pay ransoms for Italian journalists caught in captivity in different areas of the world.

According to media reports, only one unidentified entrepreneur, not operating in fashion, has fallen victim to the scheme, reportedly wiring about 1 million euros to a Hong Kong-based bank account.

The criminal ring has allegedly also used AI software in some instances to reproduce the voice of Italy’s Minister of Defense Guido Crosetto and is said to have reassured the entrepreneurs that the Bank of Italy would repay the loan in due time.

As of Sunday, three targeted businesspeople had registered a complaint with law enforcement for the fraud attempt. Milan prosecutors Marcello Viola and Giovanni Tarzia have begun an investigation and Crosetto publicly addressed the case, posting about the scam scheme on X.

In addition to the fashion businesspeople, the scheme targeted the Del Vecchio family, behind the eyewear giant Essilorluxottica; Massimo Moratti, chairman of Saras SpA, an Italian energy company with operations in petroleum refining, marketing, transportation and power generation, as well as the former president of Milan-based soccer team Inter; Marco Tronchetti Provera, executive vice president and chief executive officer of the Pirelli Group; the Aleotti family, behind big pharma company Menarini; the Beretta family, who controls the namesake Italian firearms manufacturing company, and the Caltagirone family, who operates in real estate development and media, as well as top management at supermarket chain Esselunga.

Sonos Finally Hits the Hard Reset Button

App fiasco still hurting sales, but new CEO is charting a way out of speaker-maker’s jam

Sonos SONO -7.47%decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Tom Conrad’s job would be hard enough if he just had to sell expensive speakers. Selling the idea that his speaker company can finally master the software game is a heavier lift.

That, however, is the task at hand for the new CEO. Conrad was named to the post last month, succeeding longtime chief Patrick Spence who took the company public in 2018. The switch confirmed that Sonos is still reeling from a disastrous update to its app in May of last year, which left many customers who shelled out for premium speakers unable to use their products.

Fiscal first-quarter results from Sonos on Thursday confirmed that the damage has lingered. Revenue fell 10% year over year to $550.9 million for the December-ending quarter, while operating income plunged 40% to about $48 million. One particularly telling stat is that the company’s unit sales for the second half of the calendar year fell 14% from a year earlier to about 2.7 million products sold—the fewest for that period since 2016. And that was with the company’s first-ever entry into the premium headphone space.

Those headphones, called the Sonos Ace, should have been a valuable expansion opportunity for a company long confined to home-based speakers. But the launch that took place about a month after the app rollout turned out to be “the worst time possible,” Sonos Chief Financial Officer Saori Casey admitted on the company’s earnings call on Thursday. She also noted that the initial sales of headphones to retailers a year earlier will skew comparisons for the company’s June-ending quarter this year. Analysts now expect Sonos’s revenue to fall 3% for the fiscal year ending in September after an 8.3% drop last year.

Can the new boss eventually turn things around? Sonos is still a strong name in premium audio, despite the damage done to the brand by last year’s app fiasco. And Conrad has extensive experience in product design, software and music platforms, having co-created Pandora and served as the chief technology officer there for 10 years. He has hit the ground running despite the “interim” label on his title as the company conducts a formal search before naming a permanent replacement for Spence. Sonos announced a restructuring effort before its earnings release this past week that will cut the size of its workforce by 12%.

Cuts that extensive can be demoralizing for a company already deep into an extended rough patch. But last year’s botched app rollout also revealed a company with significant structural weaknesses, which means painful changes were also necessary. Conrad said on Thursday’s call that his reorganization of the company’s product teams “revealed organizational layers and redundancies that were not serving us,” adding that the cuts included about half a dozen vice presidents.

“Stepping back, we are impressed by management’s ability to rip costs out of the model,” Erik Woodring of Morgan Stanley wrote in a note to clients on Friday. He kept his sell rating on the stock though, citing “a tough demand backdrop and elevated uncertainty” that hangs over Sonos.

Indeed, only 38% of analysts rate Sonos as a buy, compared with 73% before the app rollout last year, according to FactSet data. And while the stock has picked up some gains over the past few months, it is still down 22% since the new app launched compared with a 16% rise for the S&P 500 in that time.

“The worst seems to be behind Sonos, but they are still early in their transformation,” wrote Brent Thill of Jefferies on Friday. This speaker maker still has a lot of noise to cut through.