S&P 500 Edges Closer to Record, Shrugging Off Bond & Oil Risks

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This is Bloomberg Businessweek Daily. Reporting from the magazine that helps global leaders stay ahead. With insight on the people, companies, and trends shaping today's complex economy. Plus, global business, finance, and tech news as it happens. The Bloomberg Businessweek Daily Podcast. With Carol Masser and Tim Stenebeck.

So a rally in giant tech companies, we've been talking about that, overshadowing a lot of concerns that, to be fair, have been out there, whether it's higher bond yields, whether it's elevated oil prices, whether it's geopolitics, whether it's concerns about the AI spend. I mean- The list goes on. And some days the market is okay with it. Some days the market- We're not feeling it. Doesn't like it, right?

It's not feeling it. We've also got some renewed political upheaval in Europe and concern over public finances that did send the euro to its weakest since May of 2025. So once again, we've seen The dollar as a safe haven. That's happening on, should we get to Ed Harrison?

Let's do it.

Edward Harrison. He's a senior strategist. He is the author of the Everything Risk newsletter at Bloomberg News. He is there in Washington, D.C. Ed, gosh, where to begin? I feel like today, I keep saying this, that unless you're in France, if you're a U.S.-based investor, you kind of feel like everything is awesome in the U.S.

The U.S.

Is back on, at least for today.

It does seem that way, Carol.

The NASDAQ is looking like it's going to have a new all-time high, even despite the fact that yields across the curve are going up, particularly at the long end. My view is that we're in a boom, and that boom is so great that equities can do well, even despite the fact that we have yields going up.

And, you know, Ed, you've been writing a lot about when yields get to 6%. Right now, at least with the 10-year, the benchmark 10-year today, we're not at that 6%. But we're already, you know, more than 5% on the 10-year. So what starts to break if we keep moving higher?

Yeah, so I'm looking at... all the things that potentially could break the market that could slow down the economy.

And basically, it's about the.

Federal Reserve getting on a rate hiking train to stop an overheating market. Basically, what we have is we have AI, and we also have 6% deficits. Those two forces are so great that it's adding a huge spend. It's adding a lot of earnings equity to stocks. And as a result of that, unless you get a rate hike train, you're going to see yields go higher, but without a negative impact on equities. I think that the numbers that I'm looking for are 2.5% on long-term.

Inflation expectations.

So I'm talking about the break-even between tips and treasuries. When we get to 2.5% on the 10-year, that's high enough beyond the 2% target that the Fed has to cause them to get into the hiking mode.

You know, I always wonder, when there is some enthusiasm back or there is this feel of American exceptionalism, like, what are we missing? Because I feel like there's a laundry list ahead. You know, and especially when I even think about the story out in France, you know, worries about their fiscal house. I mean, the U.S. has its concerns too, especially... if growth starts to slow, if earnings aren't there, if we continue to limit immigration, that kind of keeps a lid on economic growth. You can't expand the labor pool. There are a lot of things you could point to.

Well, you know, it's interesting you mentioned that right before I got onto the program, I was looking at the employment report that came out.

On Friday.

And the interesting bit is if you look at the last two months and you compare it to last year, what you see is civilian labor force that declined, actually, between September of last year and September of this year. And you also see an employment number that's lower in terms of the household survey. But the interesting bit is that's because of exactly what you were talking about, Carol, in terms of immigration.

It's also in terms of retirement.

But over the last two or three months, we've seen a steady tick up in the labor force participation rate. We've seen in the household survey a huge number of jobs that aren't reflected in the nonfarm payrolls. So what we're basically seeing is a tighter labor market than the numbers would imply. And that's helping consumers continue to spend.

So It's actually a relatively positive picture for the U.S.

Right now.

I mean, you know, they always say never bet against the U.S.

Consumer.

Yeah, no, but whether it's buy now, pay later, it is interesting. The retail numbers are strong, but I always think about, we had on Sumit Roy, CEO of Realty Income, massive REIT, lots of exposure to retail, and he said anything to do with discretionary retail, he talked about not doing so well, even the higher end. So that was surprising to me.

Yeah, I think that we have a bifurcated economy because we have certain pockets, a large swath of the population that's not doing well in real terms. That is, even if they have jobs and they're getting pay raises, inflation is eating away at that. And I think that's what's causing a lot of angst at what people are thinking about change, incumbents losing their jobs in Congress. But at the same time, the top end of the economic spectrum, they're doing so well, and they have so much spend that it's overwhelming all of that, and it's keeping the overall economy higher. And I think that that's a dynamic that will continue to play out until we get to that point where inflation expectations are so high that the

Fed is forced to react. What level of tenure or 30-year bonds would obviate that.

Who knows?

It could be into the 6%, 7% range. But until the Fed starts to ratchet up, the rate hikes, really, I think that the economy will continue to chug along in the way that it has done.

Okay. You had me at 6%, but you also really had me at 7%. Is that a reality? Alarming.

Yeah.

If you were a betting man, how likely is that, Ed?

Well, you know, when I said the 6% 30-year bonds, we were at 525. Now we're at 570. And we have a record NASDAQ. In NASDAQ, they have backdated earnings profiles. So they're the ones that should be hit the most. That's telling you that nothing is stopping this freight train of bullishness until we get to extremely difficult levels.

Yeah.

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this. All right, this segment, we're going to get to kind of the latest on the world of AI. There are a couple of different stories that were coming at us. We do want to start, though, by heading to downtown New York City and City Hall. This is a former anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, who warned that AI could become too powerful to for humans to control. It was among those testifying today at a New York City Council hearing alongside representatives of some of the world's biggest AI companies. So let's get to it. Laura Namias is with us, Bloomberg News senior reporter. She is live from City Hall and was following all the comings and goings.

All right, Laura, so where are we in this process? And welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. We are currently still on the second leg of a 12-leg hearing that could last a very long time. City council members are individually questioning representatives from four of the five major AI developers. But the first panel of the day was whistleblowers, including Jacob Coxon. And there was a tremendous amount of interest in what these whistleblowers did. were going to say. And they largely repeated the sentiments that some of them have already made public about their deep and alarming concerns over the potential capabilities of the technology that they themselves were working on until very recently.

Laura, walk us through what the council's actually proposing. What would change for an AI company that's doing business in New York City exactly?

So the city council repeated, members repeated today that they are the first body to hold such a significant sort of regulatory convening with representatives of the AI industry testifying under oath since some of the more recent concerns about the AI capabilities have become public. But they're proposing a raft of legislation, almost a dozen bills, that would require increasing transparency for AI companies, that would implement a so-called kill switch that would allow a user to turn off the technology.

Okay, that just freaked me out. But okay, I understand. We're thinking about weapons and AI.

Got it.

Keep going, Laura. Keep going.

Yes, so those are some of the... things that are being proposed. Similar ideas are being proposed in California, and I believe at the state level in New York, the idea of a kill switch. But interestingly, Jacob Coxon, the former anthropic researcher who kicked off a lot of the recent concerns with his open letter posted on social media, said that a kill switch may help in the short term, but would effectively be tinkering around the margins in the long term. All of these whistleblowers were calling for a significant slowdown, if not a total stop to the development of these technologies, which they said are rapidly coming to the point where they are so intelligent that they are improving themselves and no longer need humans to control or

manage them.

I woke up Monday, not too freaked, just a little tired, a little sick, but now I'm freaked out again. Hey, Laura, who else is there? You mentioned Jacob Coxon, the anthropic researcher, but who else is there? We mentioned that they're supposed to be reps from some of the world's biggest AI companies.

Just tell us who else is there.

Yeah, there are representatives, policy representatives from Google, from Meta, from Anthropic, from OpenAI. And then theoretically, at some point today, we'll get to hear from representatives of the city government in charge of, under the Mamdani administration, in charge of regulating technology. And then from some skeptics and other people involved in efforts to rein in or regulate the technology, including a former congressional candidate, Alex Boras, who I ran a campaign over the summer for Congress largely on the platform of regulating these technologies.

All right.

So it's a 12-inning game and we're just in inning two. So there's just going to be a lot more testimony, a lot more questions, and we're just going to kind of be following what everybody has to say. Is that kind of what's to come?

That's essentially it. But this is the first time that we've heard some representatives of these companies testify under oath about what they're seeing, what incidents they're reporting. So the council is trying to hold them to account They've been questioned a lot about what they can actually do as a city government, but the city council speaker said, what else are we going to do? Are we going to throw up our hands and not do anything?

Well, and then there's news organizations like us who cover it. So, you know, certainly this stuff gets out there. We will be following. Laura, thank you so much for setting the scene. Laura Namia, she's Bloomberg News senior reporter. She is at City Hall in downtown New York City. We want to stay on AI. There's that going on. We've got an OpenAI employee who's quit AI. Also warning that top AI firms aren't doing enough to mitigate the technology's risks. And then you've got President Trump appointing Jay Clayton, his director of national intelligence, to help lead a White House task force on AI. So there's a lot going on. Back with us is Seth Figerman. He is AI editor at Bloomberg News. He's here. in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio

with Nora and me. So let's start with the hearings downtown. Maybe a city council can't do a lot, but it does, once again, keep the narrative kind of going and maybe gets and talks to people that haven't had a chance to get their voice out there.

Yeah, you know, it's kind of remarkable to see, you know, here's a marathon session that brings in some of the biggest names that have been raising concerns about this technology in recent weeks, getting national attention. but it's not a special session of Congress. It's a local, granted it's New York, but it's a local city council meeting. And so I think that speaks to certainly the heft and the ambition that this state and the city's government has for AI regulation.

But also you could argue it's a kind of indictment about what's happening in Washington DC right now, where they're not really mobilizing in a meaningful way here. And it stands in stark contrast to what we saw about a week ago, where Trump met with the CEOs of a lot of the big firms and what mainly came out of that was a quote unquote morally binding suggestion or policy measure as well as a rebranding of AI as super intelligence. So it's a pretty stark difference, I would imagine.

And Seth, what's particularly interesting to me is that we're seeing a growing number of people that are actually inside these companies warning about the technology.

Agreed.

What's changed or why are these concerns becoming so much more public now?

Yeah, I think it's a combination of things. One, I think there is an earnest belief in certain corners of the industry that technology is getting better faster and starting to take early steps towards improving itself. A lot of the people that we've heard come forward are not so much reacting to the technology as it stands today, but sort of how they're forecasting it might be in 12 months or 18 months if the pace of development keeps increasing.

And then certainly, I think the second part is once one or two people go public, it does kind of create a little bit of a snowball effect. It opens the door for more people to.

Do the same.

It's certainly not clear to me that people have never quit before because of earning a safety concerns, but it's seeing the intense amount of interest, uh, gives more people license to talk.

Yeah.

Well, let's, let's kind of, um, connect this to what president Trump said he has done appointing Jay Clayton, uh, his director of national intelligence to help lead a white house task force on artificial intelligence. Um, How does that roll in? I mean, I was thinking about this. Is this for the White House looking to lead, help the world lead or come together when it comes to global rules around AI? Or is this just to make sure that the United States wins the AI race? And I'm not quite sure what wins means anymore.

It does certainly feel like the top objective for this administration, the top stated objective, is more the latter, that they want to win the AI race. I think they're aware, certainly, that this has become an issue that's captured a lot of the public's attention. And so saying and doing absolutely nothing on it may not be a smart idea. But it seems like they've also maybe punted a little bit, that they plan to put forward a study or a proposal, but after the election in January. It gives them time to think about it thoughtfully, but also kind of delays the impact of it. I don't know that there was another person in consideration who would have had a tougher or harder line here. It feels like a lot of

the activity, a lot of the rhetoric has come from within the industry. and from certain members of Congress. But as far as like the White House itself goes, I think there's been a desire to just kind of maybe move past this issue to the extent that they can.

And, you know, you talked about the AI race, and we don't know exactly what counts as winning it, right, yet. But I feel like there is a bit of tension between, you know, the administration really wanting to push ahead and they want us to build out artificial intelligence, beat China as quickly as possible. But then you've also got the folks on the inside maybe saying that we might need to slow down. What do you make of this tension?

Yeah, I mean, I think there's certainly a line of criticism around the industry right now that says, how much is China being used as sort of a scapegoat or an excuse not to take you know, more caution here not to slow down. And it's tough to say. I mean, every, you know, assessment suggests that the U.S. remains ahead of China, perhaps significantly ahead. Perhaps that lead has narrowed some extent.

But also, at least within the industry, the allegations are that China's advancements are in part by piggybacking on U.S.

Advancements.

And so, like, a particular line of pushback would say, well, if you slow down your advancements, it'll slow down China as well. I think what's clear is we as a country want to be at the vanguard. We want to set the standards both in terms of the pace of development and the safety standards therein. And I think the Trump administration clearly recognizes that there's a lot of economic activity around this technology right now. And a lot of the stock market is certainly being buoyed by this technology.

And so they don't want to do anything that risks undermining those factors.

You know, I don't know how you guys do it. I mean, I don't know how we try, like we just try to keep on top of the latest when it's AI and the different companies and the new companies and what's going on. We threw a couple of stories at you. I know there's another one. There's just others at the terminal. What's top of mind for you right now on this Monday when it comes to AI? Like what is it that you guys are constantly kind of on to kind of figuring out like this is the next story or strong narrative when it comes to AI?

I think we're very keenly interested right now in the tension between between the rising safety rhetoric and concerns in the industry and the very clear push right now to take a couple of the bigger companies public and ultimately the shareholder pressure that will ensue from that. Based on our own reporting, Anthropic is really getting quite close to flipping its S1 with the expectation that the IPO happens before the end of next month. These things are deeply related to each other, and I think that they create very clear tensions within the industry over capitalizing versus cautioning against the technology. That's not going to stop after it goes public, but those things are very much paramount in

that moment.

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this. We're going to kind of whittle it down a little bit to a sector that's really interest rate sensitive. And this is, as we've talked about, what's been going on in the treasury market. We're above 5%. We wonder what's going to happen next. We've got a great guest.

It is one of the.

Biggest REITs in the world.

I mean, this is a massive company and really focused on retail. You're talking about one of the biggest REITs, as you said, in the world. This is Realty Income Corp. And we are joined today by the CEO, Suman Roy, and he is joining us on Zoom out of San Diego. Suman, thank you so much for joining us. We've been talking so much about this rate environment when it comes to the bond market and just broadly seeing the benchmark 10-year still elevated above 5%, currently at about 5.3%. Talk to us about how you're thinking about this in your business.

Thanks for having me, Nora.

It's obviously something that we're keeping a very close eye on.

On.

The tenure today is hovering right around the 5.3%. What we've historically noticed is when you have expectations of tenure, so it's not really what the current rate is, but once that expectation of whether tenure ought to be sort of settles in, the cap rate environment in our business starts to adjust to reflect what the new cost of capital environment is going to be. And so, you know, for us, we are oftentimes viewed as a bond proxy, given the long duration of our leases, etc. And REITs at large, commercial real estate at large, tends to be very rate sensitive. But the net lease business in particular tends to be the most sensitive to what happens to the rate environment. But I think this is where realty

income really stands out because we've obviously created multiple channels where we have the ability to invest in Europe. We have the ability to invest in other markets like Mexico and the UK and therefore are able to take advantage of where do we have the best risk adjusted returns.

So despite what's.

Happening here in the U.S., there are obviously multiple channels for us to lean on and continue to grow our business.

Sumit, before we talk about what's going on, though, in the U.S. a little bit more, you mentioned these multiple markets. So what's the most opportunistic for you right now? Is it non-U.S.? Is it Europe? Is it Mexico? Is it the U.K. or elsewhere?

Yeah.

If you see what we did last year, we had a similar situation where there was a lot of volatility in the rates environment, which then started to have an impact on our cost of equity. We pivoted to doing a lot more investments in Europe and Europe accounted for about 50 percent of the investments we made in 2025.

And so on the equity side, on the monetization of real estate side, we are willing to go and pursue transactions where we find the best risk adjusted returns. But a higher rate environment also allows us to lean into one of the avenues that we've created for ourselves, which is on the credit side of the equation. And so we find very interesting credit opportunities here in the US, again, working with our partners, trying to lend our balance sheet, And and basically, you know, take advantage of what we see on the on the higher rate side by lending to our clients at at, you know, very good risk adjusted rates overall. So we can we can play either on the equity side or on the on the credit side.

You're not going to pick a market. You're not going to pick a favorite.

Market right now.

Right.

Well, look, I was listening to your previous guest. The 10-year bond rate is 160 basis points inside of the U.S. And so clearly on the equity side, that's where we're seeing a lot of opportunities.

See, but what's also interesting about your business is it's largely focused in retail. So that gives you a really fantastic read on the consumer. What are your tenants really telling you right now about the health of the consumer?

Yeah. You know, this K-shaped recovery is real.

We've obviously seen a lot of the businesses that we are exposed to, the quick service restaurant, the discount stores.

The grocery business.

Those are the business that tends to do well when you have this K-shaped recovery. And we see that in terms of the earnings guidance, in terms of performance of some of our clients who happen to.

Be in these subsectors.

And casual dining tends to suffer. We're not talking about the highest end of casual dining. The K-shaped recovery is real there and they continue to do well. But some of the more national names that you would expect to feel the brunt of this K-shaped recovery, you start to notice that. And we are seeing that in our portfolio of names that we are exposed to.

So it's a real issue.

And thankfully, the way we've constructed our portfolio is very defensive in nature. And essential retail is what we are exposed to. And they tend to do well at times of economic uncertainty.

Yeah.

And speaking of essential retail, your portfolio, of course, is exposed to grocery stores, convenience stores, home improvement, dollar stores. Are there certain parts of the retail space, though, that you're more cautious on right now?

Yeah, anything to do with discretionary retail, big, you know, when you talk about furniture stores, when you talk about higher end discretionary items. those tend to suffer at times like this. And we have, again, been very deliberate about how we've constructed our portfolio. And one of the things that we've tried to stay away from is apparel and fashion and areas that do tend to suffer at times of economic distress. And so you're not going to find a whole lot of that. If you look at our retail portfolio today, it's above 90%. in areas of low price points, service-oriented businesses, and non-discretionary retail. And that's the profile of the business that we are exposed to.

So if you were creating a company today, Sumit, and you could put as much money as you wanted anywhere, would you still do retail or would you much rather double down on data centers? Because you guys have done a big joint venture looking to move much more aggressively into that area.

Yeah, that's a great question, Carol.

Look, I think what has defined us is our ability to continuously redefine who we are as a business. You know, what is sacrosanct to us is our ability to continue to grow our dividends, which we have done for over 30 years today, you.

Know, quarter in, quarter out.

And so, our ability to look for patterns and look for, you know, trends that we believe will help us continue to be the business that people associate with realty.

Income is paramount to our success.

And what we saw on the data center side is a once-in-a-generation type environment where there is so much focus on building out the infrastructure required for this digitization of everything that we are doing from AI to cloud computing to streaming, et cetera, to self-driving cars.

You know, you're going to need this infrastructure.

And we believe that, you know, the build out of this particular infrastructure lends itself to that net lease singleton and freestanding buildings.

And that has been the.

Thesis that we are leaning into to try to continue to grow that piece of our business today. small portion of our business. It's circa 1%. But the hope is it's going to be a much bigger portion. And so by definition, we are certainly going to be leaning into this particular area of the opportunity set that we have available to us. And we hope that this will become bigger.

Having said all of that.

Oh, go ahead.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, no, finish, please.

I was just.

Going to say that, you know, we are not going to invest in every data center opportunity that is out there. We are hyper, hyper selective in terms of, you know, where we want to invest in the data center space.

And, you know, location is important.

The partner who we are partnering with on the development side is important. The type of leases is very important. Who is the counterparty? Who is the client that we're going to be exposed to for 15, 20 years is very, very important. And all of that is going to come into the fore when we make a decision about, you know, who we want to partner with.

So if you had to pick a percentage of how much data center, just quickly, 20 seconds. Come on, give us something. Would it be 30% of the business? We won't hold you to it. Well, we are Bloomberg. We will hold you to it.

You know, Carol, I wish I could, but I will just answer it this way.

There are trillions and trillions of dollars that will need to be invested in this space. We believe, given the profile of the business that we have, we are going to certainly be part of that solution.

Thank you.

Stay with us. More from Bloomberg Businessweek Daily coming up after this. Bloomberg, you know us well. We love numbers. We love data. So on that, here's something for you all. The world's tech billionaires gained a combined $ 845 billion through September 30th. That is the most ever for the first nine months of a given year. according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. So not too shabby, huh?

What was that number again?

That's a K shape with the K straight up. Let's get to it with Dylan Sloan. He is a wealth reporter here at Bloomberg News. He's in our Bloomberg Interactive Broker Studio. Welcome, welcome, welcome.

Thank you.

First of all, for those who may not know, and shame on you, but if you go to Rich Go, you can look at the wealthy that are within or in our midst or some people's midst. Tell us about the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. How do you guys really figure out wealth?

Yeah, so we have a global team. We've got wealth reporters in bureaus all around the world. And this is an ongoing reporting project. These are updated every single day. We have, of course, the top 500 list at Richco on the Terminal or online. But we maintain active profiles on thousands of people constantly tracking their assets, what they're buying, what they're selling, how they're deploying that wealth. in business in politics elsewhere it's fascinating it touches every corner of the economy and it's useful here and in stories like this people to kind of take a step back and look at some of those dynamics how is wealth growing shifting whether it be in certain industries or around the world and yeah we relaunched the web version of the

index today i'd encourage all of yours go check it out bloomberg.com.

Did it change a bunch it does.

Yeah we've got a lot of new functionality there in terms of it looks looks very fancy it's very pretty but also there's some cool tools there to be able to compare things geographically, look at breakdowns by sector, by age, and it's just a really interesting visual way, I think, to kind of look at, yeah, some of the dynamics of that around the world.

So should we talk tech, oh, where do you want to go?

No, I was going to say, speaking of geography, we were just talking during the break, Carol, you were saying that the top 10 that we have on Rich Go. are all based in the US, right?

Well, tell us exactly what the stat is.

Yeah.

Exactly.

Yeah. So for the first time, we've been covering this here at Bloomberg since 2012. And last month for the first time, since we've been doing it, all 10 of the top 10 were from the US for the first time. And that just speaks to this broader trend, which really was kind of the focus of this story, which is tech and everyone else i mean there has just been you know this is a story that has been playing out in the market more broadly but it really has crystallized in looking at the billionaires on our list.

I was gonna say it's tech bros and texases but you know yeah all the bros in the top 10 it really is technology we've got a chart up and forgive us for everybody who's watching on radio but the world's top five richest elon musk by a wide wide margin followed by larry page jeff bezos Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg, they are all kind of just below $ 300 billion.

Elon at $ 914 billion. He was a trillionaire for a nanosecond.

He was, exactly.

And it's been really kind of waffling right around that mark for the past few weeks. And yeah, so the headline stat for the tech billionaires on the list is of the top 500, about 100 owe their fortunes to the tech industry. And as a group, they've gained $ 845 billion through the end of the third quarter. now worth $ 4. 6 trillion in total. And the names you have just up on the list, I mean, it's really a story of the rich getting richer. Elon Musk alone has gained about $ 300 billion in net worth this year. That's almost half of the gains for the whole index.

Hey, honey, I had a good year.

Yeah, exactly.

He's got a lot of kids. He's got to take care of them.

How much is that skewing the numbers? It's so interesting.

A lot, a lot.

And it really is the rich and everyone else. And I think the stat that really stood out to me was that, you know, this huge growth in specifically American tech billionaires for the most part. And then everyone else in the top 500 in every other industry lost a combined $ 65 billion. So it's a story that, you know, has been kind of playing out again in equity markets more broadly, maybe across the world, but it really does show here. Tech has been powering the gains and everyone else has been, you know, flatlining or doing a bit worse than that.

Dylan, the wealth giveth and the wealth taketh away. Now, I'm not saying that Larry Ellison has anything to worry about, but he was up and then he was down a little bit. Yeah, exactly.

He's been one of the real interesting characters that we've been spending a lot of time looking at over the past year. I mean, last year, briefly, he was the world's richest man. Oracle had this blowout earnings release. Yeah, where, you know, they were really touting their AI expansion plans and that really sent him shooting up. But he's since given back a lot of those gains. He's lost nearly $ 200 billion in net worth this year. And the timing there is interesting.

I mean.

This was maybe a bigger story a few months ago, but the Warner Brothers Discovery deal is going to be closing any day now. Back at the time, there were some questions about his ability to come up with the liquidity to fund as part of that. Still someone who's very active, both at Oracle and AI, and then in business and culture more broadly. It needs to be able to put some numbers on it.

You know, it's interesting because I feel like we've been spending some time during the show talking about the whole race for artificial intelligence between the U.S. and China. But then you're thinking about the folks of the top 10, most of them in tech in the United States. So I wonder if it's, you know, maybe like I don't want to say a profitability thing, but I'm so curious, you know, not does this mean that we're winning the race by any means, but it's interesting to see most of this really concentrated in tech the same way that we're seeing, you know, the market. gains really being concentrated in tech as well.

Yeah, totally.

And that China you brought up is really interesting. We've been focusing a lot on China and AI in China specifically. We have a team of wealth reporters based out there. And there have been some really fun stories coming out of that. Recently, we profiled Ling Chun-Chi, the founder of Kingslide, this company founded in southern Taiwan in the 80s. Originally, they made furniture hardware, like literally the slides to slide a drawer out in your cabinet. Since then, though, they've kind of repurposed that, and now it's in server racks all over the world. It's become a huge part of this AI trade, and the founder joined the index a couple months ago for the first time. So, yeah, I mean, you know, also a big trend for us within AI

has been growing private wealth as well. Of course, you know, so many of these companies, your anthropics, your open AIs are still private, but the valuations have just been growing so quickly that even folks in those companies are joining the index as well. So we saw seven anthropic co-founders join the top 500.

That's what I was thinking about, right? As they get ready for their IPO.

Exactly.

Yeah.

And what's rare for us is that, you know, even pre-IPO, we're still seeing the valuations grow so quickly that some of these folks are joining the list as well, just based off of their equity holdings.

These kind of stories always trend high when they cross the Bloomberg terminal. But having said that, they also catch the attention of lawmakers and politicians and citizens because we know that there's been a call for a long time for a billionaire tax of some sort. And, you know, that is certainly something against this backdrop, right?

Totally, yeah. I mean, kind of most immediately in California, there's a... uh, ballot proposal that's gonna, you know, go to the vote in early November. Um, there's been discussion of this in other US states as well, internationally as well. This was, you know, a topic of conversation, um, in Europe recently too. So yeah, as this gets more obvious and as the, uh, you know, the richest of the rich keep getting richer. That's definitely a topic culturally, politically that it seems like is going to be at the fore for, for a while.

Just got a few seconds left here. Did I miss, are there any women on this list?

Uh, there are, well, in the top 500, certainly the top 10 are all male right now, but I would encourage you to go to the website and check it out. You can filter it and look at all the women on the list and, uh, That's one of the things we introduced recently in this new web redesign.

You know AI too, you know. Another deck. Great story and really wild to kind of go through all the numbers. I love that you guys crunch them constantly.

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