Will Trump Fire Powell? ASML Sinks on Tariff Fears & An Interview with Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang

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Today's number?

211.

That's how many Republicans voted not to release the Epstein files.

According to Representative Virginia Fox, most people believe the president will release the files when it's, quote, time to release them.

We weren't so sure of that claim.

However, we retract our doubts as the statement was later fact-checked and verified by the Center for Little St.

James.

Money markets, man.

If money is evil, then that building is hell.

Show goes up!

Shell!

Welcome to Profit Markets.

I'm Ed Elson.

It is July 17th.

Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

The major indices whipsawed as Trump's beef with Powell roiled the markets.

We'll talk more about that in a second.

Still, the Nasdaq managed to hit its third straight record close.

Meanwhile, the dollar failed to recover from the drama, ending the day lower and giving up its four-day winning streak.

Johnson ⁇ Johnson stock rose 6% after the company posted better-than-expected second-quarter earnings and tempered its outlook for tariff impacts.

And finally, Bitcoin climbed on renewed optimism for the crypto legislation we've been following, even as the bill stalled again in the House.

Okay, what else is happening?

Trump to fire Jerome Powell?

Or will he?

That is the question that seesawed the markets yesterday.

Late Wednesday morning, news broke that Trump had drafted a letter to fire Jerome Powell and had shown it off to lawmakers.

Meanwhile, a White House official said Jerome Powell was likely to get fired.

Markets fell very sharply on that news until, right after that, Trump held a press conference where he told reporters, no, he wouldn't fire Jerome Powell.

The president said, quote, we're not planning on doing anything.

I don't rule out anything, but I think it's highly unlikely.

Markets immediately rebounded after Trump denied those firing rumors.

So,

more drama between Jerome Powell and the president.

More drama that, unfortunately, we have to cover because of the implications it has on the markets.

This is lowbrow, tabloid, daily mail gossip-type news.

However, it is happening inside of the White House and it involves the chair of the Federal Reserve and the President of the United States.

So, yeah, we have to talk about it.

Even if it is, in essence, not really any different from beef between Drake and Kendrick or name your celebrity gossip drama.

This is just the world we live in.

So we're going to bring in Scott because we want to see what he makes of this news.

Scott, where are you?

I am in Colorado.

Which is my self-conscious way of saying Aspen.

I'm in Colorado.

My boys.

You're out West.

I'm out West.

My boys, of course, are walking ahead of me because they want nothing to to do with me because I, according to them, than the lamest person in the world and substantially erode their Riz

in the town of Aspen.

They're expecting to be kind of little players here.

Not sure it's working.

Anyways, they're walking about 20 feet ahead of me.

I want to get your take on this beef between Jerome Powell and Donald Trump.

What are your initial reactions?

Okay, so first off, we need to stop referring to Jerome Powell's chairman Powell.

He's Jerome Epstein.

He's Chairman Epstein because this is nothing but a sophomoric yet effective attempt to get people to look away from the Epstein drama of Trump and Magazine making.

This is ridiculous.

He does not have the authority to remove Chairman Powell.

He does not have the legal standing to take away someone's citizenship because he doesn't like them.

But what you're going to see is every day he's going to come up with something more and more ridiculous that grabs headlines, whether it's declaring economic war on Canada.

But every day, just wait for it tomorrow.

It'll be something else because he wants something that the media, which they will do, will take the bait and not talk about.

See above the Epstein files.

I was watching CNBC while I was working out this morning.

And of course, it was the taco trade again with Powell.

The markets dipped.

Then they realized he couldn't fire Jerome Powell.

He got a twofer the next day.

He backtracked, which made more news.

But again, every time he makes news,

they have something to shove aside the real news here.

And that is he has spent the last seven years convincing his cult to worship the sun, which is that the deep state was involved in some sort of pedophile ring on an island that would implicate a bunch of Democrats.

He's encouraged these acolytes to worship the sun, and then all of a sudden has said, put on sunglasses and never look at the sun again.

And they're not having it.

But this is nothing but pure distraction, Ed.

So does this bring more meaning to taco then?

I mean, it sounds like there is even more incentive now to create stupid, headline-worthy executive orders or threaten to make those executive orders, cause a lot of frenzying, get the news

hopped up.

And it's all basically just to distract us from the real issue, which is his involvement with pedophile.

I mean,

does this mean more taco?

Well, 100%.

And what's interesting is the market continues to fall for it, but with less volatility.

So again, yesterday the markets dipped

when the prospect of the president tried to remove Chairman Powell, who has been a steady hand.

And then what do you know?

He backtracked because he got another chance to distract us the next day.

This is.

This is the equivalent of a magician sawing a woman in half and then yelling out Benghazi, trying to focus on the fact that he's not actually sawing her in half.

Or if we were at the Nuremberg trials and somebody whipped out and started playing a kazoo.

This is so ridiculous.

Rosie, I mean, I'm going to revoke the citizenship of someone I hate.

Oh, good.

CNBC and CNN and Fox all fall for it and go there.

This is a tactic from the magicians and the GRU.

Flood the zone with bullshit.

Get them talking about anything else other than the following.

If the president had gone down to an island of a wealthy man who loved to have parties and surrounded himself with famous people and threw great parties and Trump partied and he said,

it was an error in judgment.

I shouldn't have gone down, but he did not engage in the rape of children.

America and his acolytes would accept that.

He has done a lot worse.

People have forgiven him for

things that are much worse than that.

For rape of adults.

Yeah.

That's right.

Fair point.

They forgave him for the rape of an adult.

Convicted for the rape of an adult.

The line is children.

So chances are, if he was just down there partying and erring judgment, like a lot of very famous people have owned up to, the market and the media and

his cult would have moved on.

But the fact that he has clearly instructed his AG to not let this list out, it reeks of something much more.

much more nefarious, much more mendacious, much more serious.

So he has handled this really poorly yeah he is creating so much smoke around this fire he's it's just uh staggering and my favorite is when he going back to jerome powell when he threatened to replace jerome powell with mike lindell it's like trying to diffuse a bomb by duct taping it to your ex-wife i mean it's just

that's good ed you like that one you'll get it you'll get it it'll have more meaning if you if you finally put a ring on it and then it doesn't work out seven or 10 years later.

You'll get that joke.

This is again

America.

Keep your eyes on the prize here.

This is Rosie Epstein.

Yes.

This is Chairman Jerome Epstein.

You are being played.

And my prediction here, you can bet in the next 24 hours, there's going to be another stupid, insane headline grabbing.

He has a comms group right now, and the instruction is simple.

Come up with a headline every day that crowds out the word Epstein.

Full stop.

Yes.

That is entirely what this administration is focused on right now.

Announce a 200% tariff against Myanmar.

Say that you are going to ban David Hasselhoff from all future TV shows.

Whatever it is, it can be ridiculous.

It can be stupid.

Just make sure it doesn't have the word Epstein and all of media just follows it like the fucking idiots they are.

Too much, Ed?

Too much?

No, I think at some point we're going to have to change this name, the the name of this podcast to the Epstein podcast.

We need to really keep our eyes on the prize.

We need to get focused.

The Epstein files with Ed Olson.

I love it.

Okay, Scott, enjoy your walk.

Thanks for calling in.

Cheers, brother.

ASML shares plunged yesterday after the chip infrastructure company reported second quarter earnings.

The quarter showed a strong beat on both the top and the bottom lines.

The dark spot, however, was the company's growth forecast for 2026, which, according to the CEO, could not be confirmed because of, quote, increasing uncertainty driven by macroeconomic and geopolitical developments, end quote.

As the call went on, it became clear that those macro concerns were indeed the tariffs, and that is why they couldn't give a growth forecast.

Shares in ASML fell nearly 10%.

Okay, so ASML, one of the biggest AI companies in the world, has shed a tenth of its value in one day, one of the biggest drops of the week.

And not because of the earnings, the earnings were actually pretty great, but because of the CEO's concerns about the future, or more specifically, the macro environment, the geopolitics.

the tariffs.

Now, as a reminder, ASML is a Dutch company.

They make the machines that make the chips that make AI.

So they are in a way ground zero for the AI ecosystem, a great place to be right now.

But as a Dutch company, it also leaves them quite exposed to the tariffs.

And as you know, Trump just threatened a 30% tariff on Europe this week, which would have major implications for ASML.

America makes up a significant share of their revenue, almost 20%.

So if you slap...

a 30% tariff on Europe, you're going to see a huge drop-off in demand for those ASML machines that are indeed built in Europe.

And so that is why yesterday on the earnings call, the CEO issued this warning.

He is very worried about the tariffs and what those tariffs might do to the business.

And that is also why we saw this huge sell-off, because Wall Street saw his concern and that made them concerned too.

And, you know, fair enough, 30% tariffs would be terrible for this company.

But there's also something missing here.

And you might see where I'm headed with this.

There is an elephant in the room that Wall Street seems to be ignoring on this news.

And that is the taco trade.

The belief that these tariffs are just threats and that ultimately they're not actually going to happen.

In fact, that is exactly what the market told us when Trump first made those tariff threats on Europe.

We barely saw a reaction from the market, both in America and in Europe.

Investors said, no, we've seen this movie before.

We don't believe you.

So why is it that when Trump talked about tariffs, the market shrugged, but when the CEO of this Dutch lithography company talks about tariffs, suddenly the markets buy it?

How could that be?

Well, to be honest, we don't have an answer here.

The market appears to be contradicting itself.

On the one hand, it's saying taco.

And then on the other hand, it's saying, actually, no, we believe it.

The tariffs are real, but only for ASML.

And so our conclusion here is that we might have some dislocation on our hands.

And as a result, we think this is probably a buying opportunity.

Because if you believe that those EU tariffs will not hold as the markets have expressed, then there is no reason you should reverse that belief just because some executive in the Netherlands got freaked out.

That's just not enough evidence to change your thesis.

And in fact, if you look at ASML's earnings history, this is actually a company with a long track record of under-promising and over-delivering.

They are frequently quite concerned about the future.

They are often expressing doubts about the macro environment.

And at the same time, their earnings continue to impress every quarter.

And that's exactly what we saw this quarter too, a major beat across every relevant metric from sales to margins to income.

It was an excellent quarter for ASML.

The only problem was that the CEO got spooked out by Trump's threats.

So non-investment advice, blah, blah, blah.

But if you are a believer in taco, then our thesis is that ASML just got put up for sale.

As of market close on Wednesday, July 16th, yesterday, it is 8% off on ASML.

And for no other reason, other than the CEO is buying into the tariff drama while the rest of America isn't.

And that to us spells buying opportunity.

After the break, what's really going on behind the scenes at the AI company Windsurf.

Stay with us.

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There is a lot to talk about when we talk about Donald Trump and Jimmy Kimmel.

One big question I've got is why in 2025 are late night TV shows like Jimmy Kimmel's show still on TV?

Even in our diminished times, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, they're just some of the biggest faces of their networks.

If you start taking the biggest faces off your networks, you might save some nickels and dimes.

But what are you even anymore?

What even is your brand anymore?

I'm Peter Kafka, the host of Channels.

And that was James Ponowosek.

the TV critic for the New York Times.

And this week we're talking about Trump and Kimmel, free speech, and a TV format that's remained surprisingly durable for now.

That's this week on channels, wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

We're back with Profit Markets.

On Tuesday, we discussed the latest Aquihire in Silicon Valley, Google's $2.5 billion deal to license the technology of an AI company called Windsurf and also take many of their top researchers as well as their CEO.

It was a highly dramatic event in the world of technology.

For one, the company had just been acquired by Open AI, though apparently that fell through.

But also, it mirrored this theme that we keep seeing in AI, and that is the ever-growing overreach of big tech.

From inflection to scale and now to windsurf, big tech is paying billions to capture talent from the AI startup world, to reorganize their structures, and in many cases, shut them down, all under the guise of investment.

Now, there was another piece to this story that we didn't fully unpack on Tuesday.

And that is, right after the Google deal was announced, Windsurf was suddenly scooped up and acquired by a separate company called Cognition.

And although the price was not disclosed, Cognition bought everything that was left of Winsurf, the product, the IP, the remaining employees, and the brand as a whole.

A crazy twist in this already crazy story.

And so we wanted to find out what happened here.

Why was this AI company passed around from Open AI to Google and now to Cognition?

And what does all of this say about the future of AI?

Well, joining us now to answer those questions is Jeff Wang, the CEO of Windsurf.

Jeff Wang, thank you so much for joining me on Profit Markets.

Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, it's great to have you on.

It's been an insane week for you i'm sure and i'm sure that there is a lot that you can't say which i also want to be uh i want to acknowledge but to the best of your ability jeff just give us the rundown what happened this week yeah i would say um i walked into the office uh tuesday last week so about a week ago from filming i was told hey um

you're running running the company now and there's a lot of people that are also gonna leave the company, and good luck.

And on Friday, we have to tell everybody, right?

Um, so I had to kind of find the right people that were remaining to like continue running the company.

And then Friday comes, we have to tell like 250 people the situation with with the acquisition from Google.

Um, and uh, you know, it was really tough.

I mean, there was a lot of people that, that probably thought it was just all over.

Um, And I had to give like a very achievable kind of goal, right?

And a lot of people honestly didn't believe it.

I had a lot of phone calls.

In fact, I was on the phone like 24 hours after the all hands, just trying to find options.

And then afterwards, we talked to Scott Wu from Cognition as one of the options.

And he,

it seemed like a perfect fit.

And we can get into that in a bit.

But after that was a lot of just getting this done before Monday because like time was our enemy here.

Uh, customers were already confused.

A lot of reps were panicking.

Recruiters were reaching out to everybody in the company.

So, uh, we can go into a little more detail, but on Monday, uh, we announced that Cognition had acquired Windsurf, and we literally signed the paper 30 minutes before the all-hands.

Like, we were just to the last minute and got the definitive agreement.

And I'm pleased to say that today, um, it is officially all done.

Yeah, let me just tell you, like, the way that we see it, this whole, all the events that have unfolded.

We kind of see it as

there is this power struggle among big tech, basically to capture the best AI startups and do that without triggering antitrust enforcement.

And our view is that you guys, Winsurf,

you were the object of that power struggle this week from OpenAI trying to acquire you and then OpenAI disagreeing with Microsoft about the rights to your IP and then Google coming in, paying $2.5 billion

to essentially take a bunch of your people.

And it was all this sort of Shakespearean drama between the big tech giants to capture AI, not be scrutinized by the FTC.

And then it ended with this kind of rabbit out of the hat masterstroke agreement that you appear to have brokered, which has allowed Windsurf to find a real home and a real backer in cognition.

That's sort of the way we've seen this.

So is there anything in there that you would disagree with, that you would maybe amend, or anything in there that you would want to comment on?

I think one way to look at it is if you look at a startup, how valuable kind of the components are, right?

And if you over-index on the founders, maybe the founders are the most valuable piece of the startup.

And if you look at VCs, that's certainly what they index on.

Then you can imagine a lot of big tech is going to go after the founders.

But I think people forget that the other components are also very valuable too.

And if you have a team that is this good at what they do and the product is actually still there, we own everything still.

We own the trademark, the IP and everything, the customer base.

It's still there.

It's still very valuable.

And then now you've kind of taken away all the investors and the founders off the cap table.

Actually, it's a very interesting like case study of like, every, this is like now an employee-owned company.

And you could even think about like, okay, if the if the investors or big tech over-indexes on the founders, even the remainder of the company, everybody can be very happy, right?

Even if there's a smaller valuation than when the founders left.

So I think there's like two ways of looking at it.

One is like, yeah, big tech is getting some really good talent, but they're not getting everything there because everything that's still there is very valuable.

Yes, but it is, it sounds like it is a war for talent that they have perhaps not executed to perfection because as you say, there's still a ton of talent that remains that they didn't get their hands on.

They got their hands on a few people and perhaps that was an attempt to attempt to,

in my view, it looks like they're trying to kind of get rid of the competition.

But perhaps it didn't work out on this one.

But I just want to pose another question to you.

We've seen so many deals in AI

that have told a very similar story to what's happened here.

We had Meta acquiring, not acquiring, but investing in scale and then taking the CEO.

We had Microsoft doing the same thing with Inflection, and then the CEO of Inflection becomes the CEO of Microsoft AI.

Google licensing character AI's business.

This business of investing or licensing and then hiring a bunch of staff is becoming so common.

I'm wondering if you think that that is sort of the future of deal making in Silicon Valley.

Is this something

that we can learn from in terms of what acquisitions look like in tech moving forward?

I think it's possible.

I mean, as CEO, my duty was to maximize the value of the shareholders.

And it just so happens that everybody at the company, you know, all the employees were the shareholders, right?

So I think in some of the other cases, I don't know what their new CEO was thinking and their plan.

Like maybe it is to just run a just normal business.

You don't have to grow 10X because there's no VCs forcing you to.

But for me,

my job is to find as many options as possible, talk to a lot of other companies that were actually interested, talk to some companies that wanted to just liquidate everything.

But I think the whole like talking to Scott Wu and joining with Cognition and using Devon as part of the product, I think it was just so obvious after speaking with them.

And I think that's not going to be so obvious for a lot of other companies that this happens to.

Right.

So I think it does depend on, I guess, what is left after the founders leave.

Right.

If this secondary outcome can be achieved.

Yeah.

It almost feels like the AI startup world needs to join forces like you've done to take on big tech.

That big tech is running around in a lot of ways, pillaging a lot of the value and a lot of the talent that lies in so many of these AI startups.

And that kind of the only way to fight back is for the AI startups to rally together and then compete with big tech.

Is that an accurate depiction of what's happening here?

It might be, but like the one barrier there is there are VCs involved in a lot of these startups and there are founders, right?

And then if you join forces, the question is like who owns what, who's making the decisions.

And I think in this case, it was just a very clear-cut merger here and acquisition.

But it might not always be the case if there's kind of two very famous AI startups that have very kind of like very well-known founders joining together.

I think that is an interesting kind of thing, though.

Yeah.

Well, you've certainly almost pulled it off.

Final question for me.

Any big learnings from this insane experience you've gone through?

What are you taking with you moving forward?

I think just being relentless on finding the best solution is the main learning.

And sometimes that means you don't sleep for 72 hours.

And that means like you

work together with the, you know, me and the cognition team

and my team, of course, work together in the offices all weekend, non-stop with each other other and with the lawyers.

And just having that drive to get to a solution and having a date.

And when Scott Wu puts a date on something,

that is going to happen.

I will tell you that as him, as a founder.

I think the learning there is just you have to be relentless at finding the best solution and you do everything in your power for what's right and for what's good for the employees.

And I do think that

this has been like a moment in history where maybe this may be the model going forward.

I certainly hope not.

But I do understand like the situation before and after, and I understand the incentives.

And then the question is:

will it always work out the way it did with how it did with us?

Right.

And it might not be the same for other companies in the future.

Yeah.

Well, we appreciate that.

And I will let you know, Jeff, you look well rested today.

So

I'm glad you've gotten your sleep.

We really appreciate your time.

Thanks for joining us on the show.

Thanks for having me.

That was Jeff Wang, CEO of Winter.

Before we go, we'd like to play a clip from my other show, First Time Founders, where I interviewed both Jeff and his co-founder, Varun Mohan, almost a year ago.

And I asked them in that interview how their company, then known as Codium, could compete against big tech.

You know, I try to think about what Harvard Business School would say 10 years from now for us as a company.

And I tell people this: it's like, you know, we fail.

And what they write is, in in a world in which technology was changing microsoft had all the distribution in the world they had this property dollar called github it was inevitable that they would win and because of that they won they won the entire space and all of these startups it was a fool's errand why did they even try and then the world in which we win they were going to write in a world in which the technology was getting disrupted so materially there were a set of companies and one of which was codium that had such a technological advantage that there was no no way a slow-moving gorilla like Microsoft could even compete.

So, what I think is very hard, yeah, yeah, exactly.

They will write whatever the future looks like, and the history will be written by the victor, and no one will know exactly what the pages of the book look like, right?

And I think the hardest part about a startup is you do need to be irrationally optimistic to believe that you can win.

Because by default, if you don't, you will definitely lose.

Well, late last week, it seemed like one of those versions of history was right, not with Microsoft, but with Google.

Google was the victor.

Google was writing the history.

But perhaps not.

Perhaps there is another version of history.

Perhaps the startups actually can win.

Fingers crossed.

Okay, that's it for today.

Thank you for listening to Profit Markets from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

I'm Ed Elson.

Join us tomorrow for our conversation with Monica DeBoe.

you had

in kind

reunion.