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Both sides gave it their best shot. Now it’s up to a jury—and U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers—to determine a winner in the titanic fight between AI kingpins Elon Musk and Sam Altman.

The world’s richest man jetted off to China as President Trump’s restored “First Buddy” while the third and final week of his trial against OpenAI and cofounder Altman played out in an intense fourth-floor courtroom in Oakland, Calif. There, the diminutive Altman testified, against one Musk lawyer’s portrayal, that he was not in fact a liar.

The billionaire also defended converting OpenAI from a nonprofit to a commercial entity—a move that sparked the lawsuit by Musk, a onetime major donor, alleging breach of charitable trust and unjust enrichment—as essential for continued growth.

Altman skipped the final day of testimony Wednesday, missing a welcome comedic break when the judge kicked things off with a lawyerly debate on whether to admit one of the most talked-about items in Silicon Valley: a trophy of a golden donkey’s hind quarters, awarded to an OpenAI intern after Musk called him a “jackass” during an argument over safety. (The intern is now OpenAI’s chief futurist.) Gonzalez Rogers held the statue with mock, or perhaps real, disgust.

After closing arguments Thursday, the next move is jury deliberations Monday.

In 1950, Robert Doisneau photographed a kiss you’ve surely seen. The man and woman seem to have been stopped by ardor amid the midday rush, in front of the Hôtel de Ville, Paris. Though staged, it became, nearly immediately, one of the most iconic images of the 20th century.

Surely unknown to Mr. Doisneau, nine years earlier, there was another kiss captured on film in Paris that was much more spontaneous, just as passionate — far more desperate — between two Jews about to be separated by Vichy police. This kiss, found on a contact sheet of Nazi propaganda images in a Reims flea market six years ago, is now at the heart of a new exhibition of 98 Nazi propaganda photos at the Shoah Memorial in Paris curated by Lior Lalieu and me. This kiss, perhaps destined to become just as iconic, reveals a very different midcentury Parisian moment.

The photos provide a detailed visual account — almost minute by minute — of the very first, and little known, roundup of Jews in France on May 14, 1941. That day, some 3,700 foreign-born Jews obeyed a summons by Paris police with a notice, printed on light green paper (it became known as the “green ticket roundup”), for what they believed would merely be a check of their immigration and identity papers. The operation was organized by a man named Theodor Dannecker, the envoy of Adolf Eichmann in Paris. A photographer with the Nazi propaganda unit in the city was on hand to observe.

What gives these newly discovered photographs their singular power is not only what they show but the fact that they survived at all. They remind us that the past is never entirely buried, and that images can unexpectedly return to challenge the void of memory and representation. They function today not as propaganda, the purpose for which they were originally produced, but as fragments of truth — painful, incomplete and indispensable — that allow us to better understand the way the roundup was organized and conducted and also to get a glimpse of the victims’ shock, fear and pain.

There are only a few hundred photographs of roundups or murders of Jews from the 1930s and 1940s, a disparity of mass proportion considering the extent of the genocide. Some were taken by victims as acts of resistance, some by bystanders, and others, like this collection, were by an authorized photographer for the Nazi propaganda machine. From time to time, grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators find these images in attics and boxes when the older generation passes away.

This particular group of photographs was meant to document a Nazi success story. They begin with the trap: Jewish men and their spouses were summoned to over 60 locations in Paris: police offices, various administrations and a sports facility in the 11th Arrondissement. Women, we know from eyewitness testimony, were asked to return home to gather items; a list was provided. When they returned, as the images we now have on hand show, they were barred from reuniting with their male relatives. The doors were closed and guarded by French policemen. We can see the women’s pain, their bewilderment, many with bundles in their arms. We see couples as they part from each other.

Other photos document the departure of guarded buses, commandeered from the Paris bus company, filled with the captured men. We see the arrival of the internees at Paris’s Austerlitz train station. The same photographer captures the imprisonment of these Jews a few days later at the French internment camps Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Some 700 of those Jewish men were later liberated, or escaped, after the green ticket roundup. About 3,000 of those taken that day were later deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau; of that group, just a scant few returned.

Taken months before the decision to annihilate the Jews of Europe was made, these 98 photos do not show extermination camps, gas chambers, shootings or even starvation. What they do show is the careful, methodical beginnings of racially motivated separation that later enabled the mass murder. The noted historian Raul Hilberg called this phase of the Nazi genocide “concentration.” There is no sign of outright violence; indeed, the despair of the ensnared Jews and their bewildered spouses is shown with a strange sensitivity by the German photographer.

At first the photos were kept on file by the German Propaganda Unit in Paris. After the war, six of the 98 photos were found in the archives of the N.I.O.D. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, an indication that they were shared among the various propaganda units across Western Europe. A few others circulated among archives. But the vast majority were languishing, unseen, on contact sheets, until 2020, when two amateur collectors came upon them at a flea market. They brought the sheets to Ms. Lalieu, the director of photo collections at the Shoah Memorial in Paris, who analyzed the images in an effort to identify as many people as possible. Ms. Lalieu also identified the photographer as Harry Croner, a man from Berlin, who had gone on to have a stellar career in postwar West Berlin, as a famous cinema and opera photographer. (Half Jewish himself, he spent the end of the war in a labor camp.)

After the photos were found, Ms. Lalieu invited first and second-generation survivors to the memorial in an attempt to identify their parents or grandparents in the pictures. There were some extraordinarily moving moments. Though only five attempts at identification were successful so far, each marks a small victory against the backdrop of Nazi cover-up and of the looming loss of memory. A few of the photographs were shared publicly for the first time in 2021.

One year after these photos were taken, in mid-July 1942, about 13,000 Jews — mostly women and children — were rounded up, pulled out of Paris apartments and taken to an indoor sporting arena, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, in southwestern Paris. They received little food or water and were subject to abject conditions. Depleted and distraught, they were sent from there to the internment camps of Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Later, a majority were sent on to Auschwitz.

It was an arrest of mass proportions, a stain on French history. We know this history from eyewitness testimonies, from memoirs of the few survivors and from the mass of police documents. Only a single photograph of the roundup is known. In it five buses are parked alongside the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The image was most likely taken clandestinely from an overlooking window. With the discovery and exhibition of this new group of photographs, the picture and understanding of the Holocaust in France have deepened.

The value of an image is entirely dependent on context. Taken to prove racial superiority, these 98 photos on display through December now show depravity. They also jar awake memory, shore it up against time. In an ephemeral era of mass documentation — of our own lives, of our public and private existence — the re-emergence of these photographs is a tangible reminder that some images refuse to be erased from our collective past.

The stock-market surge has propelled the use of a new kind of tax-loss harvesting. We break it down.

With the stock market near record highs, it isn’t enough to be winning anymore. Wealthy investors are now obsessed with losing, too.

The hottest investment on Wall Street promises a magical-sounding mix of both: Index-beating performance that also comes with losses to offset capital-gains taxes.

Millions of investors are sitting on big gains in concentrated stockholdings, be they shares of Magnificent Seven tech giants, plain-vanilla index funds or employee shares of hot tech companies.

The traditional move would be to turn to direct indexing, a form of tax-loss harvesting that has been an investing mainstay since the early 2000s. There is now $1.1 trillion invested in that strategy, according to research firm Cerulli Associates.

But for many investors who have ridden this ebullient stock market, direct indexing is no longer generating the losses it once did.

So financial advisers are trying to turn up more losses for their clients by employing strategies that use leverage. Over $150 billion has flowed into this newer breed of tax-loss harvesting, known as long-short tax-aware, or tax-aware alpha, according to Brent Sullivan, who writes about the industry on his Substack, Tax Alpha Insider.

The strategy comes with some risks for investors.

Let’s start by looking at how direct indexing works.

If the S&P 500 is up 15% for the year, the goal is for the client’s portfolio to rise that much, while also distributing losses. These losses could be used to offset gains in highly appreciated securities elsewhere in the portfolio.

But direct indexing gradually loses steam as a method of generating losses as the market continues to rise. Around half of such portfolios industrywide are now “ossified,” meaning they are no longer generating losses, estimates Jon Diorio, head of U.S. wealth product at BlackRock.

A new strategy took shape. Hedge-fund firm AQR Capital Management developed the tax-aware long-short strategy for clients such as family offices and ultrawealthy individuals. Around five years ago, the firm and its rival, Quantinno Capital Management, began allowing individual investors and their advisers to tailor the strategy inside their own separately managed accounts, or SMAs.

Custodians, most notably Fidelity Investments, made the strategy accessible by lowering the investment minimums. It was a hit. AQR now manages nearly $70 billion in tax-aware long-short strategies, roughly 80% of which is in SMAs. Quantinno manages more than $48 billion. They have spawned numerous imitators.

Long-short managers generally aim for “alpha,” meaning they want to outperform the benchmark in addition to harvesting losses. The strategy must balance these aims.

The strategy has become so popular that Fidelity and Charles Schwab have recently instituted limits on new accounts.

Both strategies come with risks. Direct-indexing managers might not succeed in tracking the index if they can’t find appropriate substitutes for the stocks they sell. The Internal Revenue Service’s “wash sale” rule limits the ability to recognize a loss on the sale of stock if the same stock is purchased within 30 days before or after the sale.

Neither direct indexing nor long-short SMAs are likely to eliminate all capital gains in a bull market like this one. The losses they generate are often used to offset gains in other areas of the portfolio. For example, someone selling a stake in a business at the beginning of the year could invest the money into a long-short SMA to generate losses to offset some of their capital gains by the end of the year.

But holding on to the winners means new gains can build up over time within the strategy. Investors must eventually pay taxes on these if they cash out.

Michael Paulus, founder of wealth manager PCM Encore, recommends direct indexing for nearly all his clients, particularly those close to retirement who will need to sell highly appreciated stocks to fund it. Direct-indexing managers charge annual fees as low as 0.05%.

But he is more cautious about using long-short SMAs. He has used them for clients expecting a major one-time gain such as from the sale of a business or for clients who work in tech and get a large portion of their pay in stock. He otherwise avoids them.

Tax-aware long-short strategies can cost as much as 1.5% to 3%, including investment management, financing and borrowing fees.

“All else being equal, I’d probably rather cut the government a check than a hedge fund in Connecticut,” Paulus said.

AI Chip Mania Sows Seeds of Its Own Destruction

Investors already factor in cyclicality in the chip industry. The bad news is that they’ve frequently been wrong before.

Investing in artificial intelligence involves a strong belief that it’s different this time, and memory-chip makers are a particularly extreme example.

Micron Technology MU -6.62%decrease; red down pointing triangle recorded its biggest-ever loss just three years ago, and is now forecast to become the sixth-most profitable U.S. stock. It will make just under $100 billion over the next 12 months, more than Meta or Berkshire Hathaway. Micron and its rivals are big winners from runaway AI demand and soaring prices for the high-bandwidth memory Micron makes.

Like Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, it’s in the sweet spot of the chip cycle, boosting prices, profits and their stock. It goes outside chips, too: Micron made a notable contribution to Wall Street’s upgrades of the S&P 500 earnings outlook, while the two Korean stocks have made the country’s market by far the world’s best-performing this year.

The question is how long booming demand for memory chips can last.

Memory chips are a perfect example of a highly cyclical industry. Heavy investment is required to build a fabrication plant, or fab. When demand rises, it takes several years for supply to catch up, during which prices and profits jump. Those high profits encourage CEOs to expand supply. And the high fixed costs encourage producers to run fabs at full capacity—even when supply overshoots demand. The cycle turns when excess supply pushes down prices and profits plunge, as they did in 2022-23.

Already the high profitability has encouraged heavy capital spending. Micron is spending $150 billion to build or expand fabs in New York, Idaho and Virginia, and new Korean fabs are opening.

The good news is that investors already factor in cyclicality. The bad news is that they’ve frequently assessed the cycle wrongly at key moments in the past.

The risk of a downturn is embedded in Micron’s valuation. Two weeks ago it was the S&P’s third-cheapest stock measured by price to forward earnings, and it’s still at under 10 times, tame for a highflying stock. That doesn’t make it cheap, though. It just means investors recognize that the boom times in memory chips never last.

History shows how this works. In the last cycle Micron stock peaked at the start of 2022, with the forward P/E at just nine times, ahead of a halving in the shares that year. The stock bottomed out and subsequently doubled after the loss was baked into predictions.

Something similar happened in the mid-1980s and 1990s cycles. When the stock peaked in 1984—at a level it took another nine years to surpass—it traded at only 15 times forward earnings. In the 2018 cycle the stock peaked at just 5.5 times. Losses for investors who were fooled into thinking they were buying a bargain were vast.

For now, any danger comes from demand, not supply. New capacity due this year and next isn’t enough to crush profits, so long as demand holds up. So what could go wrong?

The biggest risk is impossible to quantify: AI technology could become far more efficient in its use of memory, meaning data centers need less of it. Memory stocks took a hit in March when Alphabet researchers published a paper showing dramatic improvements in memory efficiency, but have recovered. Large language models are an immature technology, and engineering improvements for specialized data centers should be expected—but how big they are and when they come is unknowable in advance.

Other risks apply to the whole AI supply chain: Data-center plans may be scaled back, AI uptake prove slower than hoped, or a political backlash may hinder expansion. All are plausible; none are considered that serious by the AI bulls driving stock prices.

A final risk is that supercharged profits attract new rivals to enter the market. For now, that seems unlikely in the superfast memory Micron makes, but it’s already happening with other highly profitable chips used in AI.

The economics of chip makers outside memory chips are similar, but as their products are more differentiated—think Nvidia versus AMD—they are much less cyclical.

Fat margins on Nvidia’s chips have persuaded Alphabet to develop what it calls tensor processing units, or TPUs, dedicated to training AI, one of the big uses of Nvidia’s expensive graphics processing units (GPUs). Amazon’s Graviton chips provide the central processing unit (CPU) for the “inference” involved in using AI models, demand for which has boosted Intel.

Recent entrant Cerebras, which launched the first of its giant chips for both training and inference only in 2019, raised $5.55 billion in its IPO on Thursday, and its shares more than doubled immediately.

While AI demand is soaring, all this extra supply can be absorbed without much effect on profit margins. But the longer it goes on, the more competitors enter, and the more capacity is built.

As with all commodities, success sows the seeds of its own destruction—even if AI hopes are fulfilled.

How Britain can tackle its mountain of unpaid energy bills

A long-term plan such as a social tariff could stop vulnerable households from running up debt

There are some things UK households pay for out of their own pockets — like food, petrol and holidays. Then there are things the government is expected to fund, such as schools and healthcare. Gas and electricity fall somewhere in between. And because of this ambiguity, the country is racking up unpaid bills with alarming speed.

The UK’s energy retailers — companies including British Gas and Octopus — are collectively owed £4.6bn in bills, according to energy regulator Ofgem, up from about £1bn at the beginning of 2018. The Iran war will raise household gas and electricity prices come July, adding to the strain.

This needs fixing, not least because the cost of non-payment is, in effect, socialised. Debt-related costs are factored into the price cap — the maximum price that the regulator allows retailers to charge their customers — weighing on the nation’s already expensive bills. But what the fix should be depends on the cause of the build-up, and there is more than one factor at play here.

Financial distress is clearly part of the story: one out of every four households currently in energy debt is at or below subsistence living levels, consultancy Baringa thinks, while a further two are considered “vulnerable”. Ofgem has proposed writing off about £500mn owed by those who really cannot pay, and adding the cost to everyone else’s bills.

It would be better to stop those who struggle from running up debts in the first place. Crucially, there should be a long-term plan, such as a social tariff, to make sure that the most vulnerable households can access heat and light. And this should be run by the government, rather than energy companies and their regulator.

The catch is that those who want to game the system have plenty of opportunity. There is some evidence that households are “prioritising other payments” as industry body Energy UK puts it. Giving suppliers some bite would help. Pre-payment meters are a useful tool, but having seen one of their own rightly walloped for inappropriately forcing them on vulnerable customers, they currently do not install many.

On top of that, a huge one-third of total energy debt has been built up by those moving house. Since disconnection is vanishingly rare, new residents can access the property’s gas and electricity without setting up an account. Sorting this out should be within the limits of human ingenuity: Ofgem is consulting on the idea of giving unnamed occupiers energy through pre-payment meters, switching to direct debit once a new account is set up.

Suppliers can do their bit to help, by billing more frequently and more accurately, for example. But as long as the UK faces a broader affordability crisis, some people will simply be unable to pay for essential services. That is a problem for government, rather than the energy sector, to solve.

EU plan to slash steel imports will hurt Ukraine, officials warn

Brussels’ proposed quota reduction could cost Kyiv up to €1bn in lost export revenue

The EU’s plan to slash steel imports by half would hurt Ukraine at a time the country struggles to finance its defence against Russia’s aggression, Ukrainian manufacturers and officials have warned.

Brussels has announced it will cut its steel import quota 47 per cent from July 1 and add a 50 per cent tariff to any additional imports. The measure comes in response to global overcapacity causing a surge in imports that has cost tens of thousands of jobs in European factories, forcing them to operate at reduced capacity.

But a leading Ukrainian steelmaker warned the measure would deprive Kyiv of vital export revenues.

“They will completely kill any possibility of Ukrainian companies to deliver on the European market,” said Oleksandr Vodoviz, head of the CEO’s office at Metinvest, a steel and mining company responsible for more than half of Ukraine’s steel exports to the EU.

To comply with WTO rules, the reduced quota will apply to all of the EU’s trading partners, including countries such as Ukraine that have free trade agreements with the bloc.

The measure was agreed earlier this year after pressure from members led by France, Spain and Poland to respond to a glut caused by Chinese overproduction.

The European Commission has leeway to distribute the diminished quota across trading partners and is negotiating with Kyiv and some 20 other countries a preferential rate of reduction in their steel quota. 

In initial negotiations in Geneva last month, the Commission proposed applying a tariff-free bilateral quota of 713,000 tonnes to Ukraine’s steel exports, officials said. Last year, Kyiv sold 2.65mn tonnes of steel to the bloc, with the EU being Ukraine’s primary export market for the metal.

Ukrainian officials have warned that such a steep reduction — representing 70 per cent compared with last year — could cost Kyiv as much as €1bn in lost export revenues at a time when Russia is intensifying its attacks against Ukraine.

They also argue the quota reduction would be in breach of the EU trade agreement, which foresees no customs duty restrictions.

The Commission said Brussels “will take into account Ukraine’s difficult situation” and that “⁠Ukraine will receive a country-specific quota guaranteeing its steel exports to the EU, though at a lower level than in past years”.

Ukraine also has no immediate alternative buyers to turn to, Metinvest’s Vodoviz said.

“We are looking at different markets, but on those markets [there] are Russians, Turkey, and they have electricity 10 times cheaper than we are and they are not being shelled and bombed every day . . . we don’t see any possibility to compete with them on their core markets. Our core market was always Europe,” he said.

The European parliament insisted on granting Ukraine special treatment due to its “exceptional and immediate security situation” during talks with EU countries on the quota reduction, said Karin Karlsbro, the MEP responsible for file.

“Ukraine should have very special treatment as a candidate country under very special security concerns — we have very very high expectations on the Commission to deliver on this,” she said.

Buyout firm raised $2.1bn more from external investors than had been targeted

Bain Capital, one of the world’s most prominent buyout firms, has closed its largest Asia-focused private equity fund after raising $10.5bn.

The firm said that $9.1bn committed to its sixth Asia fund came from external investors, exceeding its original target of $7bn. The balance is being invested by Bain Capital partners, employees and related entities. 

Bain Capital, which has about $225bn in assets under management, has operations across Asia including Japan, India, China, Australia and South Korea. 

“We continue to see significant opportunity across the region, and we are investing in our people, our technology and the broader capabilities of the platform,” said Yuji Sugimoto, a partner and head of Asia private equity at the firm.

However, Japan is increasingly considered the most important market in the region for Bain and the wider private equity community in Asia. 

According to consultancy Bain & Co, which shares roots with the PE firm, Japan is the only market in the region “to deliver growth in both deal value and count”, while last year it led in deal activity and captured the largest share of fundraising.

Bain plans to deploy a large portion of its new Asia fund in Japan, a market it entered 20 years ago.

The firm has also raised roughly $2bn for a mid-cap buyout fund in Japan, according to people familiar with the matter.

In Japan, corporate governance reforms championed by regulators, the stock exchange and the government have pushed companies to improve returns, driving them to sell underperforming businesses. 

A cohort of ageing founders looking for exits is being courted in particular by private equity executives who want to avoid expensive auction processes.

Activist activity is also on the rise in Japan, driving more buyouts as investors take positions in companies they believe are undervalued before pushing for sales. 

Critics of private equity believe that Japan’s public markets could be damaged if buyout activity penetrates too deeply, although the Japanese government has largely welcomed the sector’s growing influence in the country.

That is a stark contrast to when Bain, and rivals such as KKR, first entered the market after Japan’s stock market bubble burst and when mostly highly distressed assets were for sale.

Having begun with relatively minor deals and then moving on to big-name businesses such as Domino’s Japan and restaurant chain Skylark, Bain has gradually increased the size and importance of the companies being taken private.

Its most recent large-scale activities include the buyout of a major carve-out of part of retailer Seven & i and the listing of Kioxia. The flash memory maker has surged in value since it went public at the end of 2024 as demand for its memory chips has soared along with global investment in AI.