The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway
Prof G Markets: Tariffs Blocked by Court, U.S. Steel’s Golden Shares & Neuralink’s Funding Round
Mon, 02 Jun 2025
Follow Prof G Markets: Apple Podcasts Spotify Scott and Ed discuss the trade court’s ruling that Trump lacked the authority to impose most tariffs, Trump Media’s plan to buy bitcoin and Nvidia’s first quarter earnings. Then they discuss Nippon Steel’s acquisition of U.S. Steel, arguing there was no strong reason to block the deal in the first place and debating when government intervention in business is justified. Finally, they explore Neuralink’s latest funding round, acknowledging the technology’s potential while cautioning that widespread adoption may take longer than expected. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets newsletter Order "The Algebra of Wealth," out now Subscribe to No Mercy / No Malice Follow the podcast across socials @profgmarkets Follow Scott on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram and X Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What did the trade court rule about Trump's tariffs?
I think what they're probably thinking is this appeal process, it's going to take some time. It's probably going to climb its way up to the Supreme Court. And throughout that very long and boring and complicated process, the tariffs will probably just remain in place.
What I see is that... A lot of companies are probably beginning to just ignore Trump. I have a friend who's in the import business and thought he was out of business, and now he just sort of takes everything Trump says with a grain of salt. And we should—a quick shout-out to a regular guest, FT journalist Robert Armstrong. He coined the phrase—
the taco trade, and that is Trump always chickens out.
And by the way, Robert Armstrong is going to be joining us on the show on Thursday, so make sure to tune in for that.
And Mia pulled together some notes showing that since he's taken office, he has threatened, implemented, and or reduced tariffs 50 times. And you can validate or nullify this, but I don't think there's, after 50 threats, 50... 50 chickening out, 50 folds. I don't think we have one tangible deal to show for it, do we?
No deals. He says the UK is a deal and that the deal has not been agreed upon and there are no... there's no upside in the agreement that they had there.
I do think as you get more senior in your professional life, you always want to be measured around, you know, if this person does this, I'm going to fire them or something like that. You don't want to make declarative statements like that unless, or we're not going to work with them ever again. You know, be very careful with absolutes. And the few absolutes you make,
follow through, you know, do it, even when it's painful, because the most powerful cop or arsenal or arrow in your quiver is your reputation. And you wanna be known as someone who does what you say, both on the upside and on the downside. And he's lost, he's literally lost all credibility. The markets are now not moving nearly as much.
He announces an Apple tariff and Apple goes down three or 4% and then recovers the next day. If Obama or Biden had recommended a tariff against Apple, anything along the lines that he's recommending, these stocks would be down 10, 20, 30%.
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Chapter 2: How is Trump Media planning to invest in Bitcoin?
He's got to thread the needle with Trump because he went on the grift tour. He went on the Gulf grift trip, but Tim Cook refused. And I don't think it's any accident that a week later, Trump is having a temper tantrum and levying or threatening to levy tariffs on Apple. So at the same time, Jensen is really powerful. Jensen, it's now the most valuable company in the world.
It kind of embodies U.S. innovation. They're a juggernaut. Jensen is arguably the most powerful person in business right now. I'm of two minds here, and it'd be interesting to have a trade expert because—
There's a really solid argument for free trade that, okay, if we give them our chips and they don't have the incentive to develop their own chips and their own LLMs, they end up buying more of our stuff and they don't develop technical equanimity or technical equivalence.
that by sequestering them or creating an embargo against China for our most advanced chips, we just gave them sort of a burning platform to create their own Manhattan Project around developing their own chips and their own LLMs. And in almost no time, they spun up something kind of the Chinese version of AI. 80% is good for 50% of the price or a lot less.
So there's an argument that free trade, that it just makes sense to sell into them. Now, having said that, I just did an interview with Patrick McGee. He had a really interesting point, and that is, Apple, since Apple's gone into China, it has upskilled and trained 24 million people.
So it's upskilled and trained in kind of advanced manufacturing capacity, every job to try and pull together all these parts in what is probably the most complex supply chain in history. And he believes that the echo effect of that or the spillover has essentially built the the Chinese tech community.
100%.
But what if Apple had made that same level of investment in say Mexico or kind of friend shoring? And that is countries that we have a less adversarial relationship with. Would that have been a better idea? So I'm of two minds here. I really don't have an answer around... I mean, Jensen is doing what every CEO.
He's coming up with thoughtful, earnest reasons why he wants to get his stock higher and why he wants bigger markets. But I don't know if this is... I think there's really solid arguments on either side. What are your thoughts?
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Chapter 3: What are the implications of Nvidia's earnings report?
The other thing, in some ways, the Trump administration is more progressive and liberal than Democrats because this one golden share thing where they get a vote, that is the definition of socialism. The notion that somehow bureaucrats know how to run individual companies. The way you have a golden share or government influence is you have systemic regulation.
But to decide all of a sudden that, oh, Stephen Miller or Peter Navarro knows how to run a fucking steel conglomerate. It's the definition of socialism. It's like, if you want laws or input into how an industry or private business behaves, you pass laws that apply to everyone. But this is not, quite frankly, this is not an important company. It's just the rhetoric surrounding it
and some of the jingoism here has manifested itself and pat ourselves on the back. We got this right. We said this would eventually go through because at the end of the day, markets win. The reason that Texas now produces more wind power than any other state in the world is the economics around wind. finally makes sense. They make more sense in many instances than wildcatting for fossil fuels.
The markets and money wins. At the end of the day, global trade will win. Tariffs will come down. There'll be some blips. But the arc of justice bends towards Benjamin's. And the same thing is happening here. This made sense for both parties. And I'm glad to see it's going through.
But this nonsense around a golden share, that just shows that in some ways the Trump administration is much more socialist than any Democrat out there. If Bernie Sanders said, I want the government to have control over NVIDIA, that we should have a say in just this one company, their hair would be on fire. Like, oh, there goes the socialists.
Just to be clear, this isn't without precedent. We have had the government stepping in and owning stakes in companies before. And I'll just go through some examples. In 2008, the government bought a 92% stake in AIG. In 2009, they bought stakes in GM and Chrysler during COVID. They bought not stakes but warrants in many of the airline companies like Delta and United and Southwest.
But in each of those cases, the government was intervening to prevent some sort of structural collapse in the economy. Like with AIG, it was a response to the financial crisis. GM and Chrysler, it's to prevent the auto industry from going under. With the airlines, it's because we're in the middle of a pandemic. and no one could fly.
And so this is a very different situation where there's no real crisis at hand. The only hot-button issue here is this prospect of manufacturing jobs potentially being outsourced into, I guess, Japan. But even still, as you mentioned, Nippon made this commitment that they're going to keep the jobs in America, and actually they're going to add jobs.
They said, we're not going to outsource any of these jobs. And as you also point out, it's not that many jobs. It's 14,000 people. And you compare that to what we saw in 2009 with the auto industry, where it was literally millions of workers whose jobs were at stake. And in this case, it's at most a few thousand. So yeah, I guess it does beg this more...
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