TheChek News Flow

A Democratic senator faces more charges and a former Trump adviser admits wrongdoing over pushing Gulf state’s interests in Washington

Tiny Qatar has managed to punch above its weight in mediating some of the world’s biggest disputes, including the war in Gaza. Yet as it raised its profile in Washington, the Gulf state has landed some of its American advocates in legal troubles of their own.

In recent years, Qatar has ramped up its lobbying operations in the U.S., a key military ally and commercial partner, to better position itself in relation to its bigger neighbors Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan alleged this month that Qatari officials gave a relative of New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez tickets to the Formula One Grand Prix in Miami the past two years and invested tens of millions of dollars in a real-estate venture of a friend of Menendez’s. As chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Menendez was in a position to promote Qatar’s interests, and prosecutors say he did so. The Qatari officials aren’t accused of wrongdoing, and Menendez, who was already charged with being an illegal agent of Egypt, has denied the allegations against him.

In a separate case, a Republican lobbyist and onetime unpaid campaign adviser to former President Donald Trump admitted to illegally failing to register an advocacy group he set up on Qatar’s behalf to tarnish Saudi Arabia. The Gulf kingdom, along with the U.A.E., had cited Qatar’s alleged support for Iran and its proxies in the region, including U.S.-designated terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah, as grounds for imposing a full-scale blockade on Qatar from 2017 to early 2021. The lobbyist, Barry Bennett, agreed to settle charges with

Documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show that in a third instance, Qatari lobbyists worked to kill U.S. legislation that would hurt its interests by secretly tainting the bill as a product of its rivals’ “unsavory lobbying.” Those efforts led to a thicket of civil litigation still under way.

“Part of foreign-influence operations is to expose the foreign-influence operations of other countries,” said Ben Freeman, a director at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a Washington think tank. “In the last few years, especially, everyone is using the same playbook of exposing the dirty deeds of your rivals.”

Qatari officials have said their lobbying efforts were necessary to counter those of the country’s regional antagonists. Qatar’s embassy in Washington didn’t respond to requests for comment on the new cases.

The new details have emerged as Qatar has taken on a high-profile role as mediator in some of the world’s most challenging conflicts, including Afghanistan and Gaza. It has helped to negotiate the return of Ukrainian children from Russia and of Americans detained in Venezuela.

The emirate has long walked a tightrope between the U.S. and its adversaries. It hosts the largest U.S. military base in the Middle East as well as Hamas’s political leadership and, for years, that of the Taliban. It has purchased billions of dollars in arms from the U.S. and Europe, while also providing hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid for Gaza, in coordination with Israel and the U.S.

The Gulf state has acted like many others by pouring money into a range of campaigns in Washington to further its national interests. “If they have any issue, it’s that they have a hard time saying no,” said Jim Moran, a former Democratic representative who has lobbied for Qatar since 2017.

Prosecutors say some of those lobbying activities weren’t properly disclosed. Bennett, the Republican lobbyist, admitted in an agreement with prosecutors filed last week that he had secretly run an advocacy group on behalf of Qatar in 2017 called Yemen Crisis Watch, designed to tarnish Saudi Arabia and the U.A.E., which at the time were enmeshed in a military campaign against Houthi rebels in Yemen. That war left thousands dead and fueled what the United Nations described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis.

The Journal reported in 2021 that Yemen Crisis Watch’s activities had come under scrutiny by prosecutors.

Bennett was charged with violating a law requiring lobbyists for foreign governments to register all of their work, but prosecutors said they would defer the charges for 18 months and drop them if he acknowledged wrongdoing, paid a fine and abided by the other terms of the deal.

Neither Bennett nor a lawyer for him responded to requests for comment.

In 2017, as the blockade took effect, Qatar embarked on a $200 million lobbying campaign to influence Trump by winning over his friends and associates with trips to Doha. One aim of that effort was to kill legislation that would impose sanctions on Hamas’s supporters, according to emails reviewed by the Journal. As a host for Hamas’s political leadership, Qatar was singled out for punishment in the bill.

“This is top priority and should be the sole matter everyone is working on for the next two days,” a Qatari official told a team of lobbyists in November 2017, as the bill moved through Congress.

The lobbyists planned to discredit the bill’s supporters in Washington, namely those aligned with Qatar’s rival, the U.A.E.

“If we can taint that bill as being the product of unsavory lobbying, we can stop it in the House,” one lobbyist, Nick Muzin, wrote to another. If they could link the bill to Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy, whose security business was developing contracts with the U.A.E., they might have some success, he wrote. Broidy had sponsored conferences in Washington examining whether Qatar was supporting terrorists. A representative for Broidy didn’t respond to a request for comment.

The lobbying feud became intensely personal and lasted for years. Hackers obtained access to Broidy’s emails and anonymously distributed them to reporters. Broidy accused Qatar’s agents of orchestrating the hack, which they have denied.

The bill ultimately didn’t advance.

More recently, as Qatar in 2021 was helping the U.S. evacuate its troops and local supporters from Afghanistan, its officials turned to Menendez, who prosecutors allege did favors for them.

According to the most recent indictment, the then-chair of the Senate foreign relations panel introduced his friend Fred Daibes to a member of the Qatari royal family who ran an investment company tied to the Qatari government. Daibes was looking for investors for a real-estate project and was giving gold bars, cash and other bribes to Menendez and his wife for a range of favors, prosecutors have alleged.

Two months later, Menendez shared with Daibes a draft of a press release in which Menendez said allies in Qatar were serving as “moral exemplars.” That nod from a powerful American lawmaker for accepting U.S.-bound Afghan refugees was a boon for the Gulf state.

“You might want to send to them. I am just about to release,” Menendez texted Daibes.

In January 2022, before Daibes was to meet with the Qatari investor in London, Menendez texted both men, according to the indictment. “Greetings. I understand my friend is going to visit with you on the 15th of the month,” he wrote. “I hope that this will result in the favorable and mutually beneficial agreement that you have been both engaged in discussing.”

A lawyer for Menendez said the lawmaker acted appropriately, dismissing the allegations as a “string of baseless assumptions and bizarre conjectures.” A lawyer for Daibes declined to comment.

The conditions are ripe for shareholder agitation

The Scottish writer and poet Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote that “to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive”. While Stevenson was referring to the hunt for El Dorado, he could easily have been reflecting on 21st-century investing in the European bank sector.

For much of the decade up to 2022, the standard playbook for a European bank presenting its strategy to its investors was some version of “our current levels of profitability are rubbish, but over the next few years it will improve and so will our valuation”.

Today, management has delivered. The key profit metric — return on equity — has almost doubled from about 7 per cent in the decade to 2022, to nearer 13 per cent. This is thanks to the ending of the zero interest rate era, continued good asset quality and decent cost control despite high inflation.

Yet while the banks have honoured their promises, the equity market hasn’t delivered on its side of the bargain. Share prices of banks have increased, yet in most cases by much less than the upgrade to their profits. Put another way, the valuation has got cheaper, which is not what management might have reasonably expected when it made its commitments. Today, banks in Europe are trading on 6x price earnings multiple, compared with a two-decade average of nearer 10x.

This is of course deeply frustrating for banks. It is also disappointing for any investors who bought into the promised improvement. But perhaps it could prove the catalyst for something more dramatic.

The European bank sector has long looked like fertile terrain for activist shareholders. Many banks are in effect conglomerates, owning businesses across loosely connected parts of financial services and often in disparate countries. They have high cost bases, fragmented market shares and low valuations. Most so-called “sum of the parts” valuation measures conclude that a division or two of the bank is in effect available “for free”.

So where are the activists? There have been occasional flickers of interest. In the mid-2000s, Knight Vinke tried to force HSBC to exit its US business, but had to retire defeated. More recently, the global private equity firm Cerberus tried to force the merger of two German banks that it owned — Deutsche Bank and Commerzbank. Again, that proved unsuccessful. Among the factors holding back activists in the past were low levels of profitability.

But in a world of higher profits and consistently low valuations, 2024 might be ripe for a fresh wave of bank activism. Indeed, the conditions for activists might even improve further. With most analysts expecting bank returns on equity to modestly decline as rates start to fall, investors might get scared off, leaving valuations looking even more enticing.

In late December 2023, Cevian — a more behind-the-scenes activist — disclosed a €1.2bn stake in UBS. Publicly it remains supportive of UBS management as the bank integrates Credit Suisse, but it has clearly seen something that it finds attractive.

However, it’s not just rubbish returns that have put activists off. Regulators must approve anyone who seeks “control” of a bank — typically interpreted as owning 10 per cent or more — and historically regulators have been nervous of activists. The fact that these investors often agitate for large corporate change can be seen by regulators as introducing unwelcome instability.

But that attitude may be changing, as regulators appear increasingly open to the role such activists might play. This is evidenced in part by their apparent willingness to allow such investors to start joining the shareholder register of banks and their recognition that better-run banks are healthier for the economy.

With the treacherous journey to higher profits now complete, and valuations still depressed, 2024 may be the year that activists may finally drive the European bank sector out of its slumber.

A Russian oligarch said to be worth more than $6 billion is taking Sotheby’s to court after claiming the famed auction house helped his art dealer dupe him into buying more than a dozen rare works of art for $1 billion more than what they were actually worth.

Dmitry Rybolovlev, who made his wealth as head of Russian fertilizer producer Uralkali, alleged in court documents that he was defrauded by Yves Bouvier, an art dealer who helped him buy 38 artworks for about $2 billion over 12 years.

Between 2002 and 2014, Bouvier helped the Russian businessman amass an art collection that included classic pieces such as a depiction of Christ attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, and works by Gustav Klimt, Rene Magritte and Amedeo Modigliani.

But the relationship ended when Rybolovlev heard from an art adviser who represented a previous owner of a Modigliani painting that he overpaid for the work by millions of dollars.

Bouvier allegedly passed himself off to Rybolovlev as a go-between who would facilitate the sale between the oligarch and the owner of the sculpture — when in reality Bouvier was the owner who sold the piece at an inflated price, it was alleged in the lawsuit.

In 2013, Rybolovlev bought Leonardo da Vinci’s “Christ as Salvator Mundi” for $127.5 million at the insistence of Bouvier, who pocketed a 1% commission, according to court papers.

Rybolovlev alleged that Bouvier bought the artwork for $83 million and marked up the price.

The da Vinci piece is the most expensive painting ever sold at auction.

In 2017, Saudi Prince Badr bin Abdullah Al Saud paid $450 million for it at an auction held by Christie’s in Manhattan.

Rybolovlev also alleged in the lawsuit that in 2013 he paid Bouvier $83 million for “Tête,” a sculpture by Amedeo Modigliani — even though Bouvier paid half that sum for the statue just months earlier.

Two years prior, Bouvier was tasked to acquire Modigliani’s famous painting “Nu Couché au Coussin Bleu” on Rybolovlev’s behalf, according to the lawsuit.

The oligarch alleged that Bouvier paid $95 million for the painting and then turned around and sold it to him for $118 million, according to the complaint.

Bouvier is then alleged to have paid a $5 million kickback to Tania Rappo, the godmother of one of Rybolovlev’s daughters who was working in tandem with the Swiss art dealer to acquire pieces for the Russian businessman, without him ever knowing about it.

In all, Bouvier is alleged to have covertly marked up the prices of 15 works of art by an aggregate value of more than $1 billion in his dealings with Rybolovlev.

The lawsuit that he filed against Sotheby’s is scheduled to go to federal trial in Manhattan next week.

“Sotheby’s strictly adhered to all legal requirements, financial obligations, and industry best practices during the transactions of these artworks,” Sotheby’s said in a statement. “Any suggestion that Sotheby’s was aware of the buyer’s alleged misconduct or intention to defraud Mr. Rybolovlev is false.”

Daniel Kornstein, an attorney for Rybolovlev, told The Post that his client is “looking forward to the trial.”

“For the first time, all the evidence will be presented,” Kornstein told The Post.

“For the first time in nine years, Mr. Rybolovlev will speak publicly and provide a detailed account of the truth about this case.”

Rybolovlev’s lawsuit will also “show the world how the art market sometimes operates.”

“It can warn other collectors and art enthusiasts to protect themselves,” Kornstein said.

Bouvier is not named in the lawsuit as a defendant.

He has denied the allegations against him. The Post has sought comment from attorneys for Bouvier.

Rybolovlev, who owns an oceanfront Florida property that was once home to Donald Trump, has already sued Bouvier in several European and Asian jurisdictions.

Those disputes ended in a settlement that was reached last year.

Despite the US Treasury Department’s claim that he is an oligarch who enjoys “closeness to the Russian regime,” he has thus far avoided US sanctions which were imposed following the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Rybolovlev made the allegations in a lawsuit filed last year against Sotheby’s auction house, which is being accused of facilitating the fraudulent sales.

Sotheby’s is being accused in the lawsuit of knowingly advancing the fraud on the art works that it handled — an allegation that the auction house has denied.

---> We could see some news in Healthcare sector thisq week

Tracy Palandjian, founder and CEO of Social Finance, was until recently a director at the billionaire’s investment fund

Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman spent months publicly pressuring Harvard to cut ties with its embattled president, Claudine Gay. Meanwhile, a friend of his on Harvard’s governing board was among a small group pushing for change.

Tracy Palandjian is a member of the Harvard Corporation, the insular 12-person group with broad authority to manage the university. Though the group stood by Gay—it accepted her resignation last Tuesday “with sorrow”—Palandjian is one of a handful of its members who had privately questioned whether she could continue as president, people familiar with the matter said. Others who lost faith in her leadership included private-equity executive Paul Finnegan and investor Timothy Barakett.

An alumnus of Harvard’s economics program and its business school, Palandjian, 52 years old, is co-founder and CEO of Social Finance, a nonprofit that raises money from investors for projects meant to reduce government spending. Until last month, she also sat on the board of Pershing Square Holdings, the publicly traded arm of Ackman’s investment firm.

The two met years ago through Harvard’s alumni network. Palandjian launched Social Finance in 2011, modeling it on a similar business her co-founders had built in the U.K. Ackman’s charitable foundation was one of its earliest backers, contributing $1.5 million soon after it launched. His foundation has given millions more in the years since.

After the New York Times reported in late December that Palandjian told a group of academics replacing Gay might not go far enough to get the university back on track, Ackman tweeted a link to the article.

“Now that’s the Tracy Palandjian I know,” he said.

Palandjian joined the board of Ackman’s publicly traded investment fund, known for taking stakes in companies including Chipotle and Hilton, in 2021.

She was added to the Harvard Corporation in April 2022, after serving on the board of overseers—Harvard’s other, larger governing board—from 2012 to 2018. She was also part of the search committees that selected former Harvard President Lawrence Bacow in 2018 and Gay in 2022.

Ackman, a fellow Harvard alum, made his name as an activist investor before morphing into a social crusader in recent years, mainly through lengthy diatribes posted on his X account. He began zeroing in on Gay’s handling of antisemitism on campus soon after the Oct. 7 attack on Israel and sent a handful of open letters that became increasingly critical of her leadership when she was accused of plagiarism.

Ackman called Palandjian a handful of times to rant during his quest to get Gay removed. He tweeted in early December one of his “friends” on the Harvard board had ghosted him and the two haven’t spoken about Harvard since early November, people familiar with the matter said.

While it isn’t unusual for members of the corporation to be in contact with other alumni and stakeholders, critics have accused Harvard of appeasing wealthy donors like Ackman.

On Dec. 13, Pershing Square said Palandjian decided to retire from its board, effective Jan. 1, due to increased demands of her work and other board positions, which include the publicly traded asset-management investment firm AMG. Her departure was also to avoid conflicts as Ackman amped up pressure on Gay to resign, people familiar with the matter said.

People who have worked closely with Palandjian say she is an expert networker who is politically adept in the boardroom, soliciting a range of opinions before making her own known.

“She stays in a safe place until she understands where the chips are going to fall,” one of the people said. “She doesn’t want to be on the losing side of any discussion.”

Another person said she tries to hear everyone out to best steer the group.

Palandjian was raised in Hong Kong and came to the U.S. as a teenager.

While an undergraduate at Harvard, she met her future husband, Leon Palandjian, a doctor who worked and invested in life sciences before becoming chief risk officer of his family’s company, Intercontinental Real Estate Corp. His brother Peter, a former professional tennis player who is married to actress Eliza Dushku, is CEO of the $14 billion real-estate conglomerate.

Tracy Palandjian completed a stint at consultant giant McKinsey & Co. before receiving an MBA from Harvard Business School and working at asset manager Wellington Management. She worked for over a decade at the Parthenon Group, a consulting firm that is now part of EY.

With the help of two fellow Harvard Business School alumni, she launched Social Finance, which raises money from investors for social programs, aiming to improve efficiency in government spending. If the programs are deemed successful, governments pay the investors back, with a profit. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, now a Harvard professor, is a member of its board.

Some of the firm’s work has focused on education, promoting results-based jobs training. In 2022, Social Finance partnered with a $100 million Google fund to help train students for high-tech jobs.

The Palandjians live in a Boston suburb and spend time at a ski condo in the Park City, Utah, area. They have three grown daughters, all of whom have attended Harvard.

At annual gathering, academic economists are surprised and relieved over soft landing, but worry about what comes next

SAN ANTONIO—The good news: the U.S. is headed for growth this year, not recession. The bad news: there is as yet little prospect growth will be any better than before the pandemic.

That, for now, is the consensus of economists speaking at the annual meeting of the discipline’s largest association.

A year earlier, when the American Economic Association met in New Orleans, attendees wrung their hands over their collective failure to spot the rise of inflation before it got out of hand, and assumed it would take higher unemployment and a recession to get it down.

This year, they are grappling with an entirely different question: how did they underestimate the prospects for what increasingly looks like a soft landing—tamed inflation without a recession? On Friday, the Labor Department reported payrolls rose solidly in December and unemployment remained close to a half-century low at 3.7%. Economists polled by Dow Jones Newswires expect the Labor Department to report on Thursday that consumer prices rose 3.3% in December from a year earlier.

“In early 2023, the U.S. economy was in a very different place than it is now,” said Janice Eberly, an economist at Northwestern University.

Since then, much of the damage left by the pandemic has healed: Immigration and labor-force participation, especially among workers ages 25-54, has rebounded, allowing employers to keep hiring and wage growth to cool. Snarled supply chains have mostly normalized, according to an index maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

“We didn’t really understand why inflation spiked in the first place. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that it came down faster than we thought, too,” James Hines, economist at the University of Michigan, said.

Hines noted the U.S. recovery has been stronger than in other developed countries, which he attributed to the U.S. providing the lion’s share of its pandemic emergency support to individuals rather than firms. He said that kept consumers relatively stable while leaving room for new businesses to emerge and old ones to fail.

Still, some participants were reluctant to declare a soft landing a done deal, noting that by the broadest measures inflation still isn’t back to the Federal Reserve’s 2% target. That leaves open the possibility of it raising interest rates further, or not cutting them as much as hoped. Investors expect the Fed to start cutting interest rates in March, by a cumulative 1.5 percentage points this year, double what Fed officials projected in December.

“We’ve made a lot of progress towards a more sustainable path for the economy,” said Lorie Logan, president of the Dallas Federal Reserve. But “inflation could pick back up and reverse the progress we’ve made.”

Logan noted financial conditions have loosened since October, in the form of falling bond yields and rising stock prices, in response to softer economic data and comments from the Fed, developments that could bolster demand and inflation pressure. “We can’t count on sustaining price stability if we don’t maintain sufficiently restrictive financial conditions.”

Economists were less optimistic about the long term than the prospects of a soft landing. In a presentation here, Eberly doubted recovering to prepandemic trends will boost long-term growth. That, she said, has to come from sustained boosts to productivity that counteract significant headwinds in the form of an aging population, increased global conflict, and more-fragmented international trade.

She pointed to a surge in hotel and restaurant productivity as the economy reopened, which she anecdotally attributed to practices such as waiters no longer shuttling checks between tables and the cash register and instead bringing a card reader to customers. But changes like that may be just one-off boosts, with productivity growth returning to its sluggish pace afterward.

The top candidates for long-term growth would be artificial intelligence; hybrid work arrangements that keep people, especially early-career women, in the workforce; and sustained higher levels of immigration, she said.

Productivity boosts are difficult to predict but can be long-lasting, said Glenn Hubbard of Columbia University. That makes it even more important that technology potentially as groundbreaking as AI is implemented in a way that complements rather than replaces workers, he said. For instance, federal assistance for workers displaced by trade has in the past stumbled at helping those displaced by labor-saving technology.

Implementation matters for political reasons as much as economic ones. While the benefits of higher productivity are typically diffuse and hard for most beneficiaries to notice, “the losers are concentrated and know who they are,” Hubbard said.

Policymakers also risk reversing some of the productivity gains from globalization and free-trade agreements in recent decades in pursuit of political and national security goals, many economists at the gathering said.

“Most of the things that are going to be helpful are going to come from free markets—lots of trade, lots of investment,” said Hines. “If you inhibit your drivers of growth, what do you think is going to happen?”

Papers presented at sessions about retrenching globalization showed that foreign direct investment patterns have shifted notably in the past few years, with American investors shunning China in favor of its allies, a process called “friend-shoring.” The authors of the papers used United Nations voting records and treaty membership as proxies for aligned countries, and showed how the global investment flows are fragmenting.

In an ominous sign for the effects of degraded trade ties, John Lewis of the Bank of England presented a paper showing that the impact on trade flows from Brexit is as negative as it would have been in a “hard Brexit” scenario, despite the replacement trade agreement reached in late 2021 between the European Union and United Kingdom.

“The outlook over the coming years is negative in terms of global integration,” said Emi Nakamura, a University of California, Berkeley economist, on a separate panel.

This coming week, a ridiculous number of people will be in Las Vegas for the annual extravaganza that is CES. First held in 1967, and originally known as the Consumer Electronics Show, the event now covers so many technology segments and products that it’s either the show about nothing or everything, depending on your perspective. Expectations are that the crowd will top 130,000, which would make it the largest CES since Covid-19, and by a wide margin.

In the debut 1967 edition, which was held in New York City, CES featured modern technological marvels like turntables, TVs, and radios. This year, the show will include cars, boats, helicopters, computers, robots, streaming services, digital ad services, televisions, virtual reality headsets, consumer appliances, semiconductors, the Goodyear Blimp, Mark Cuban, Linda Yaccarino, the Wu-Tang Clan, Robert Downey Jr., and AI, AI, and AI. There will be more than 4,000 exhibitors spread across 2.5 million square feet of exhibit space, up 15% from 2023. And that isn’t counting random private meeting spaces in nearby Las Vegas Strip hotels.

I have a love/hate relationship with the show. It’s a fantastic opportunity to meet tech companies new and old, to see inventive but often ridiculous ideas, and to generally get up to speed on trends. It’s also completely exhausting—with meetings from dawn into the wee hours—and a logistical nightmare. There was less to see at CES two years ago, when attendance plunged on Covid fears, but at least you could get a cab.

Over the years, CES has been the launchpad for digital watches, camcorders, DVD players, and Atari Pong. There were also spectacular misses like 3-D TVs and Quibi. This year, the story will be the rapid emergence of artificial intelligence software and hardware.

Here’s a rundown on what to watch for at CES 2024:

Keynotes Galore: You can get a sense of CES’ breadth by looking at the long list of keynote speakers this year. There are a couple of tech stalwarts— Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger on Tuesday and Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon on Wednesday. Siemens CEO Roland Busch gets the opening keynote Monday night, a spot once held for 12 straight years by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Walmart CEO Doug McMillon speaks Tuesday afternoon.

Also on the agenda are some unexpected choices: L’Oréal CEO Nicolas Hieronimus will open proceedings Tuesday morning. He’ll be talking about “beauty tech.” Gail Boudreaux, the CEO of Elevance Health, the health insurer once called Anthem, will give a Tuesday evening address on digital health. Wednesday’s roster includes Kisun Chung, the CEO of HD Hyundai, one of the world’s largest shipbuilders.

But also note who isn’t keynoting CES this year: auto makers. Internet companies. Or any of the Magnificent Seven. This show is a big platform, but if you’re Apple, Amazon, Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, or Tesla, you can make news without a glitzy keynote. (Nvidia is holding its own virtual event on Monday, discussing AI PCs, cars, and other topics.)

AI Everything and Everywhere: You don’t need me to tell you that AI will be everywhere at the show. It’s one of four themes laid out this year by the Consumer Technology Association, the trade group that convenes CES, along with mobility, sustainability, and “human security for all.” AI is an amorphous idea for a trade show, but you’ll see evidence of it everywhere, and it all starts with...

...Semiconductors: Intel, Advanced Micro Devices, Arm Holdings, and Qualcomm will all be active at the show, talking about the AI PC, among other topics. Computer hardware makers like HP, Dell, and Lenovo will be there, too.

Both the chip and PC companies have been pushing the potential for “AI at the edge,” the idea that AI software workloads can be handled by laptops and mobile phones—that not everything has to be in the cloud. Synaptics, Silicon Labs, Mobileye, Ambarella, MIPS, On Semiconductor, and Infineon will be there as well, and they’ll all be talking AI.

AI for Cars: Cars, boats, tractors, bikes, trucks, and other wheeled vehicles will fill up the Las Vegas Convention Center’s West Hall—CTA says there will be more than 250 exhibitors in the mobility category, including Mercedes, VinFast, BMW, Honda, Kia, and Volkswagen. (Along with Tesla, General Motors, Stellantis, and Ford are skipping the show this year.)

There will be EVs and autonomous cars and weird personal-transport vehicles. There will also be a host of updates about auto makers’ push for “software defined vehicles.” And that means AI chatbots inside your car.

Expect announcements on automotive AI from Intel, Arm, Nvidia, and others. It’s all part of car makers’ push to add premium services to the in-cabin experience—to make cars an upgradeable platform attached to subscription fees and to wrest back control of the cockpit from Apple and Google.

Handy Tips! If you like big TVs, you should head to the convention center’s Central Hall, where Samsung Electronics, Sony, and TCL Technology will have massive booths. If planes, trains and automobiles are your thing, check out West Hall.

The weird stuff is in Eureka Park, in the Venetian—these are tiny companies with card tables, not giant multimillion-dollar displays.

And did I mention that I’m moderating a panel on AI and content creation? That one is going to be the talk of the show.