Marge Incall | Wall Street Memes

You might have seen the reveal of Donald Trump’s insane number of trades recently, with over 3,700 trades just in the first quarter of this year.

The President has since been accused of insider trading, given that a number of moves seem to have benefited from his political decisions.

BUT what you might have missed is that some of those moves were also in stocks that Trump openly campaigned against.

So, what gives?

Di-vestment Portfolio

Just to lay them all out, first we have Trump’s account trading $6 million in shares in Disney, all whilst he was embroiled in that whole Jimmy Kimmel feud.

Then you’ve got investments in JPMorgan worth between $500,000 and $1.2 million, even though Trump was suing (and technically is still suing for $5 billion) JPMorgan for “deban king” him. Bank of America is the same story.

Caterpillar and John Deere have also been bought and sold despite Trump’s open critique of the farming manufacturers. And Trump also criticised MSNBC’s rebrand as MS NOW, yet continued to buy stock in its parent company.

Finally, you have the Netflix/Paramount/Warner Bros saga in which Trump’s investors seem to have been hedging their bets.

Netflix had $1.9 million in trades, Paramount just $50,000, and Warner Bros stock was also traded for an undisclosed amount.

Trumped Up Charges

So, is Trump playing 6D chess? Is he deliberately tanking the stock for some sweet bargains? Or is this all a big coincidence?

Well, we don’t know.

But the party line is that this is all kosher. As the Trump Organization and JD Vance have assured people, Trump himself isn’t actually in control of these accounts.

“Neither President Trump, his family, nor The Trump Organization plays any role in selecting, directing, or approving specific investments,” the Trump Organization has said in a statement. “They receive no advance notice of trading activity and provide no input regarding investment decisions or portfolio management of any kind.”

If anything, all this shows is just how prolific Trump’s traders have been and just how prolific Trump is at his criticisms.

An unexpected crossover was bound to come up sooner or later.

But then again, he would say that

The founder of Interactive Brokers Group, Thomas Peterffy, is making the ‘bad guys with guns’ argument, but for insider trading, suggesting the only way to combat it is to make it legal.

“I’m in favor of not having any rules against insider trading. I would like all the information out there as soon as it’s available,” Peterffy said on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast. “Because look, as a society, we are better off knowing as soon as possible anything that is knowable.”

Are we though? And is this just all an advertisement?

The answer is yes (I’ll let you pick the question). You see, Peterffy (which is how someone called Peter introduces themselves when they’re also trying to spit out a fly they’ve just accidentally swallowed) happens to own a prediction market called ForecastEx.

Prediction markets essentially rely on insider information in order to make more accurate bets and have more people gamble on events. In practice, however, it means that some people have an unfair advantage and end up making a lot of money from real-world events that maybe they shouldn’t.

Insider Trading? I hardly know her!

The issue seems to be on the rise with a large bet on Maduro’s capture, the Iran war, and whether the price of eggs will go up (there’s a mole at Big Egg, I just know it).

But Peterffffttty (sorry, fly), seems to think that the problem isn’t the insideyness of it, it’s that we pretend that isn’t going on all the time anyway.

Imagine two companies are about to merge. The employees who are in the know can now profit off that information, “the secretaries, the lawyers, everybody knows about it. They go home, they tell their wives, their husbands. So it eventually always filters out.”

But Peter(ffy) suggests that prediction markets and legalising the practice would even the playing field. “Why don’t we just do away with it and let the information come out as soon as possible?” This way, the “sharks” can’t profit because that information isn’t special, and in theory, everyone gets a fair shake.

And it seems that Pete’s crusade might have personal stakes, considering that he lost out to insider traders in the 70s. “I was really traumatized. I lost $90,000 and it was horrible,” he said. But does he react to this trauma by seeking revenge? By wanting to ban all insider trading? No, P-Dog says, kill ‘em with kindness.

“But I still say to you that I think the best thing we could do about inside information is just to get the news out there as fast as possible and forget about persecuting people.”

Well, well, well. It seems that the insider has become the insidee.

AI? More like AAAAAAAHHHHH (I)!

There have been a lot of predictions hailing the end of work as we know it, thanks to AI.

Just this month, Microsoft AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, predicted that all white-collar workers would disappear in 18 months. Goldman Sachs just released data showing that AI has eliminated 16,000 jobs this year. And in February, the creator of Claude Code said manager and coder jobs will effectively merge because AI coding will be so easy.

And OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was firmly on that doomsday bandwagon, saying last year, “A lot of jobs will go away.”

But just this week, he seems to have changed his tune.

“I’m delighted to ⁠be wrong about this,” Altman said in an interview with the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.”

But despite the admission, he doesn’t regret his tubthumping.

“People are like, ‘Oh, you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom,’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ And it still may [happen].”

And Altman’s insight comes from experience. Recently, he outsourced his Slack and email replies to AI, then quickly reverted to doing it himself.

“We really do care about our interactions with people,” he said. “[It’s] not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon. It really updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought.”

BREAKING NEWS: CEO Uses Own Product, Realises It’s Not As Good As He Thought

But Saltman’s not the only CEO to walk back their AI prediction.

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei previously said that AI could eliminate half of white-collar jobs, like Thanos snapping his fingers. But now he’s saying that AI will increase the amount of work people can do, not removing jobs at all.

“If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job. And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity.”

You follow all that?

Meanwhile, Goldman Sach’s CEO David Solomon has been saying from the start that the panic is way out of proportion. He points to historical examples of industrial change, such as the move to electricity in the 1900s and the digital revolution in the 1990s.

“The United States has a long track record of creating new jobs in response to disruption… I don’t see any reason to think this dynamic will stop now.”

So what’s actually going to happen?

Are we looking at the end of work as we know it, or will the global economy adapt and change? Or maybe it’ll be somewhere between the two.

Whatever actually happens, no one knows the future, and all we can do is find out the (hopefully) not-so-hard way.

New research from Goldman Sachs (of ‘08 financial crisis fame) has managed to separate out jobs that are at risk of being replaced by AI from those augmented by AI and the data is staggering.

Roughly 16,000 jobs have been trimmed from payroll this year, increasing the unemployment rate by 0.1%. So it’s not quite taking everyone’s jobs just yet, but it sure is starting.

Most at risk are telephone operators, insurance claims clerks, and bill collectors, according to the research. But also listed are billing clerks, telemarketers, payroll clerks, legal assistants, procurement clerks, proofreaders, and word processors.

Wait, hold on, what was that last one? Now come on, I’m pretty sure AI can’t replace m–

For years, tech CEOs promised AI would “augment” workers. You know, like Iron Man’s suit. Instead, corporate America looked at ChatGPT and said, “Wait… we’re paying humans for this?”

Now banks, consulting firms, customer support departments, and basically every company with a Slack subscription are racing to replace junior workers with algorithms that never sleep, never unionize, and don’t spend half the day pretending to update spreadsheets.

Even Goldman Sachs admits the biggest impact is hitting younger white-collar workers entering “knowledge and content creation sectors.”

In other words, the exact people who went $200,000 into debt for communications degrees.

Meanwhile, the winners in the AI economy may end up being electricians, HVAC workers, construction crews, and anyone capable of physically existing in the real world. Goldman Sachs says the AI boom is creating huge demand for data centers and power infrastructure, with hundreds of thousands of jobs tied to building the electrical backbone for AI systems.

So after two decades of parents saying:

“You don’t want to work trades. Go work in an office.”

The economy has apparently responded:

“Actually, the office is not interested in you now.”

The funniest part is that Wall Street still can’t decide whether AI is an economic miracle or the opening scene of a dystopian Netflix series.

One week, Goldman Sachs warns AI could raise unemployment and hammer labor markets. The next, executives insist fears of mass unemployment are “overblown.”

Classic Wall Street behavior:

Create panic
Buy the dip
Tell everyone everything is fine

Other banks are already moving. HSBC has openly discussed AI-driven restructuring, while JPMorgan Chase executives say the future means hiring more AI engineers and fewer traditional bankers.

And let’s be honest: everyone already sees it happening.

Why hire 12 entry-level analysts when one caffeinated associate with GPT-9 can crank out the same PowerPoint in 15 minutes?

The scary part isn’t that AI will replace all jobs. It’s that it may hollow out the bottom rung of white-collar careers entirely.

That first miserable corporate job used to be where people learned how industries worked. You survived Excel abuse, got yelled at on Zoom, mastered fake enthusiasm, and eventually climbed the ladder.

But if AI kills the ladder itself, what happens next?

Wall Street’s current answer seems to be:
“Have you considered becoming an electrician?”

Of course, markets still love the AI story because investors see lower labor costs and higher margins. AI doesn’t ask for raises, healthcare, or “mental health days.” It just quietly consumes electricity and shareholder value.

And the spending frenzy is massive. Big Tech companies are pouring hundreds of billions into AI infrastructure while banks scramble to figure out whether this is the next Industrial Revolution or just the dot-com bubble wearing a hoodie.

Either way, one thing is becoming clear:

The AI trade isn’t just about Nvidia chips anymore.

It’s about whether the modern white-collar economy was basically one giant automatable middleman layer all along.

God And The Machine

Pope Leo XIV just released an encyclical (a Pope-y version of an open letter) to the world, cautioning against the dangers of AI. …but AI sent its own ambassador.

Anthropic’s co-founder, Chris Olah, was invited to speak after the Pope and also advocated for those outside the AI field to hold tech accountable.

“We need more of the world—religious communities, civil society, scholars, governments, and indeed all people of good will—to do what His Holiness has done here: to take this seriously, to look closely, and to push events in a better direction.”

“We need informed critics who will tell the labs when we are failing. We need moral voices that the incentives cannot bend.”

Anthropic Catholicism

Some sources are hailing this as a collaboration between our religious overlords and Claude’s corporate overlords, but the Pope himself wasn’t exactly setting up a brand partnership.

“In the era of artificial intelligence,” he wrote in the missive, “When human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human.”

The Pope then highlighted the exploitative global supply chain surrounding AI, from the mining of materials to make computer chips to the numerous “young people, predominantly women, working under demanding conditions for minimal wages” as data labelers, trainers, and moderators.

Along with human trafficking, this was the enslavement that the Pope was referring to, not the science-fiction brain-replicating kind, so calm down.

This is also Pope Leo’s first encyclical since taking the top job, entitled “Magnifica Humanitas” (Magnificent Humanity, but you probably guessed that). Throughout, he reiterated the need to safeguard people in the modern world against growing digitization.

Despite the Pope’s obvious influence, his political power in this field might be minimal. In 2015, Pope Francis’ encyclical urged governments to address the Climate Crisis, but then in 2023, he talked about his disappointment over the inaction that had taken place. Awkward.

We’ll have to wait and see if this Pope will be similarly disappointed, but until then, I’m selling ‘Vatican x Anthropic’ t-shirts if anyone wants one.

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI has been overturned by a jury that says he waited too long to bring his grievance to trial.

…Couldn’t they have said that from the start? Or were they also waiting just to prove a point?

Musk was fighting OpenAI’s transition into a for-profit company following his ousting in 2018. But during the trial, OpenAI’s current CEO, Sam Altman, alleged that Elon was for the idea.

“A particularly hair-raising moment was when my co-founders asked, ‘If you have control, what happens when you die?’” Altman explained. Elon then “said something like, ‘maybe it should pass to my children.’”

Well, now nothing’s passing to anyone anyway, as all of that (and the three weeks of testimonials) was apparently hypothetical because the case has been thrown out on a “calendar technicality” (as Elon describes it).

Elon says he plans to fight the case on appeal, but after a judge and jury have sided against him, it’s unlikely that he’d win a rematch.

An Open(AI) And Shut Case

So what does this mean for the wider tech world?

Well, the ruling means OpenAI won’t have any more roadblocks in its transition into a fully for-profit company, enabling it to keep its place as a flagship AI company.

Sorry, Grok.

Had the lawsuit been successful, however, it would be a very different story. Altmans’ OpenAI might easily have been hangstrung with a purely not-for-profit remit and be forced to step out of the AI spotlight.

That vacuum could have then left room for companies like Anthropic, Microsoft, or Google to take on its market share.

So the impact of this lawsuit is less about what’s happened and more about the scenario that’s been prevented from happening: OpenAI won’t revert to nonprofit status, ChatGPT can continue in its push towards profitability, and Elon likely won’t regain the reins any time soon.

But in an alternate universe where Elon won, the tech world would have been changed forever. Would XAI, sorry, SpaceXAI, have taken the place of OpenAI is this crazy future? Well, I guess thanks to this court case, we’ll never know.

But he would say that, wouldn’t he?

Microsoft AI’s CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, recently predicted that white-collar workers might see themselves replaced within just 18 months.

Suleyman did not clarify whether his job was first on the chopping block, but he did look a little nervous as he said, “human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks” will be done by AI.

Legal, marketing, and project management roles are particularly vulnerable, according to Mustafa, but “anyone writing financial satire is completely irreplaceable”. Huh, weirdly specific shout-out at the end there…

But it won’t just be white-collar workers affected by this change. For example, white-collar shirt manufacturer ‘Whitey Tighty Ltd.’ has spoken out against the news.

“If AI is going to take white-collar jobs, then who will buy all our white collars?” complained Arnold Whitey with tears in his eyes. “What’s that? ‘We could switch to making blue collars?’ What, are you sick? I spit on you. Never in a million years.”

White-collar? More like, wh-AI-te coll-AI-r, amiright?

Of course, the CEO of an AI company might not be completely impartial when he says that AI is ‘pretty powerful, actually.’

A study from the non-profit METR (Model Evaluation and Threat Research) found that AI actually made software developers’ tasks take 20% longer. And while you might have already seen headlines of entire job roles becoming AI-automated, some of these rumors may have been greatly exaggerated.

For example, early this year, Jack Dorsey’s latest startup, ‘Block’, fired 4,000 employees and said it was due to AI, when really they just overhired during COVID.

So is this more AI hype, or will 50%-60% of the global workforce be gone in the space of a year and a half?

CoPilot: Set an alert, ‘Am I fired yet?’ for 18 months.

I’ll get back to you then.

Back in 2018, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman paid a $10,000 deposit to ‘Nectome’, a tech startup looking to preserve people’s brains in the hope that they can one day be uploaded to a computer.

Unlike cryogenic freezing, which is designed to preserve the whole body, Nectome plans to embalm just the brain with aldehyde-stabilised cryopreservation. The brain can’t be unfrozen, but by freezing the neurons in place, Nectome hopes that the brain’s ‘connectome’, and therefore the person’s mind, can be recreated digitally in the future.

As Nectome describes it, they are “archiving your mind.”

But the controversial part is that, unlike cryogenics, the process isn’t done once the person’s dead; the process is done while the person is alive, and it’s “100 percent fatal.”

The company’s co-founder, Robert McIntyre, said the process would feel “identical to physician-assisted suicide.” But, err, how does he know?

More like, Sam Altered-man

According to early reports, Mr. Altman joined a 25-person waiting list with his investment. That deposit is refundable; however, perhaps if Sam decides he doesn’t want to live forever, actually.

However, later reporting clarified that the “waiting list” was in fact 30 “early supporters” of the project who hadn’t been promised anything. However, as McIntyre candidly explains, “Product-market fit is people believing that it works.”

‘Belief’ is the keyword there because if it doesn’t work, they’ll never actually know and literally kill themselves for no reason.

For reference, scientists have only been able to recreate the complete connectomes of fruit flies and worms. But Nectome investors are clearly hopeful that the upward trajectory of the research will one day enable scientists to recreate an entire human mind digitally.

It’s a massive gamble, but hey, the other option is certain death, so maybe $10,000 is a worthwhile bet.

Either way, we’ll probably never know if it pays off.

The mayor of the California city of Arcadia, Eileen Wang, suddenly resigned from her position this week after the Department of Justice charged her with “one count of acting in the United States as an illegal agent” of China.

When reached for comment, the DoJ declined to explain what a ‘legal agent of China’ might be.

The former mayor has pleaded guilty to the felony charge and could face up to 10 years in prison. Now that might seem harsh, but ‘up to’ does mean that ‘zero years in prison’ is still on the cards. She could face ‘up to a billion years in prison’ and be fine. Hopefully, she’s a glass-half-full kind of person.

Before taking office, Wang ran a local Chinese American news website with her then-fiancé, Yaoning “Mike” Sun. According to the plea deal, her website regularly posted propaganda from the People’s Republic of China. Not a good look.

In one example, a PRC official sent Wang a pre-written news article in a WeChat chat.

The article read, “China’s Stance on the Xinjiang Issue – There is no genocide in Xinjiang; there is no such thing as ‘forced labor’ in any production activity, including cotton production. Spreading such rumor to do defame China, destroy Xinjiang’s safety and stability, weaken local economy, suppress China’s development.”

Persuasive stuff.

Within minutes, Wang had posted the article on her website, ‘US News Center’, and received a “So fast, thank you everyone,” from the PRC official.

So, all in all, it’s not really what you want from your local mayor.

This story comes in the wake of the breaking news that Donald Trump is planning a crucial diplomatic trip to China, hoping to secure a trillion-dollar investment in American manufacturing. Trump brings with him a long list of tech CEOs and investors, including Elon Musk, Larry Fink, Tim Cook, and executives from Boeing, Meta, and Visa.

Eileen Wang unfortunately did not make the guest list.

Jerome Powell just made his final address as Fed Chair and surprise, surprise… he held the rates as is (between 3.5% and 3.75%).

Now that’s enough on its own to upset President Trump, but Jay Powell also revealed in his speech that he plans to stay on the board of the Fed until at least 2028 when his term expires.

Powell cited the probe into him and the bank as the reason for his need to stay. “I’ve said that I will not leave the board until this investigation is well and truly over with transparency and finality, and I stand by that.” How very handy.

This means JP will have a say in future interest rates and Fed policy. Sounds like the Powell-shaped hole in Trump’s head isn’t going anywhere.

The President responded to the news saying that Powell was only staying because he “can’t get a job anywhere else.” Which is probably true, what company would want to start beef with the most powerful man in the world by hiring his arch nemesis?

As for the rest of the speech, Powell highlighted the need for central bank independence in a subtle dig at the ongoing attacks from Trump.

“We just work directly for the American people,” said Jay. “We don’t think, oh, I want to do this because the president says it’s a good idea, or because there’s an election coming up and I want to speed up or slow down the economy. This isn’t bipartisan. This is nonpartisan.”

Sorry, did I say ‘subtle’? I meant ‘very direct’.

The front runner for Powell’s chair next month is still Kevin Warsh, who just won the backing of a key Senate committee. And since Warsh has already said he’d fight to keep the Fed’s independence, it looks like the Trump vs. Fed cage fight isn’t ending any time soon.

I’ll go get some more popcorn.

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