Odd Lots - Nick Denton's Big Bet Against the United States

Episode Date: March 31, 2025

Legendary media mogul Nick Denton, the founder of Gawker, is done with the US. He’s leaving New York City for good, and moving with his family to the Buda Hills near Budapest. And when it comes to his stock portfolio, he’s done with the US as well. On this episode of the podcast, he tells us why he’s bullish on China, and says that the fall of Elon Musk may be the biggest business story in the entire world. We also talk about the end of the Atlanticist dream, why European elites are turning so sharply against the US, and his investment approach.Read more: BYD Sales Top Tesla as Tech Focus Wins Over Chinese DriversXiaomi Plans to Expand Beijing EV Factory to Meet Surging Demand Only Bloomberg.com subscribers can get the Odd Lots newsletter in their inbox — now delivered every weekday — plus unlimited access to the site and app. Subscribe at bloomberg.com/subscriptions/oddlotsSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, what do you think the rich people are doing these days? You know, like I know there's a lot of like big business people lining up or who have lined up behind the Trump administration. But they have to be kind of anxious, right? because things like mass tariffs and so forth talk about reducing the role of the dollar

and global trade, it's got to make them kind of anxious. I actually know the answer to this. Oh, yeah? As a rich person, no. No. Because the New York Fed publishes a survey of consumer sentiment where you can break it out by pay bracket. And so the highest pay bracket, it's probably not the super super rich, but it is pretty rich.

And yeah, they're getting worried for all the reasons you just like. out. But I do think if you exist in a pay bracket that already sort of suggests that you're not that rich. You're not the real. You're not the real, you know, you're getting a pay. What high standards you have, Joe. But anyway, I think these are really interesting times. Needless to say, for the globe, for people who have money, for people who have feet around the world where they want to bet, you know, one of the things I wrote about it last week were recording this March 25th, you know, one of the big trades that really had been characterized for the last 15 years, like bet on the U.S. literally against everything else. Right. By the S&P 500. And just, you know, you get no payment for global diversification. You

didn't make any money in China. You lost money. You didn't get any pay for EM. You didn't really get anything in Europe. At least for a couple weeks so far this year, that's reversed pretty sharply. So one question is like, if you want glory, should you look outside the U.S. borders that you Right. Diversification finally, potentially paying off. Although again, it's only been like three weeks. But we have seen a lot of people. In fact, we've recorded episodes about this talking about how this is a huge sea change in global politics, potentially in global markets as well. This big moment similar to the fall of the Soviet Union, something that could forever alter

Europe's economic and political and security paths. So we'll see. Big things are happening. Germany is like, we're going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on defense, which they've really never done. That's a big deal. So anyway, I'm really excited about our guest. Someone I've known and talked to numerous times over the years, but we've never had on the podcast.

Luminary in the Worlds of Journalism, previously a financial journalist, an interesting guy who suddenly popped up. He started posting again recently. And so I was like, oh, maybe he's in New York City these days. We're going to be speaking with Nick Denton. He used to work at the FT. We used to work. And he wrote a book. And most people would probably know him as the founder of.

of the Gawker family of websites. He currently is a new thing called a Futura Chiado, which is going to be some sort of journalism, trading kind of hybrid. Maybe we'll find out what that is. Nick, thank you so much for coming on odd lots. It's going to be fun. I can tell it right. I have a question.

I've known you for a long time, but I've never asked you this. I actually don't know the answer to this. How would you describe your political ideology? The reason I ask is that, you know, like... Starting with an easy question, right? I'm just going to say like the most awkward intro to a guest. your former company Gawker was put into bankruptcy in large part due to Peter Thiel. But then I've talked to him.

I was like, I kind of think he has like some like tealite sympathies at times, which is a weird thing to say. But I'm like, oh, I'm sort of picking up on some of that. But I don't know if I'm wrong. Are you like quietly based? How would you describe yourself? I remember a conversation with you actually on Twitter. I mean, a DM conversation and maybe 2016, 2017.

Yeah. At the end of which you said, oh, maybe preference falsification has happened. on a very, very wide scale. So I think you may have been surprised back then. At the time, I would call myself a libertarian back in Gorka Day's. But I don't think that's really accurate. Okay. Because I think...

So what do you know, just a liberal? No, I'm probably an authoritarian growth-oriented follower of Likuan Yu and to a lesser extent. But not Deng Xiaoping. Benevolent authoritarianism. Okay. Okay. So, helpful contact.

All right, Tracy. So Joe mentioned that you are a long-time journalist, a veteran journalist. And I think you started your career in 1989 covering the fall of the Soviet Union. And as I mentioned in the intro, a lot of people are kind of reaching for that analogy in describing this moment in Europe. Do you think that holds? Are we seeing a shift on that kind of scale? Well, I guess Naya Ferguson's piece, we are all Soviets now, was the one that got

people thinking in these terms. And then, you know, yes, I was in Eastern Europe in 89, and that was a very classic empire, Soviet empire, and a very classic uprising against it, demonstrations, unions, protests, and eventually a complete collapse of legitimacy. This American empire is definitely more subtle. And been around twice as long. Did you say more subtle? More subtle. Yeah, keep going. A hidden empire. In fact, I think there's a book with that 80 years rather than 40. It's been a lot longer. It didn't end immediately with the fall of the iron curtain. And I think it's been in all our heads as Europeans for a long time. I come from, my father was an Atlantisist. I was an Atlantisist. I saw the United States

as being an extension of Europe, a place where Europe had gone to seek new adventures and new continents and new industries. And that dream is utterly gone. Hmm. Because you still, you know, you have the world economic forums of the world. Does anyone believe it anymore? I mean, I guess the polls. If you're trying to Christine Lagarde or something like that, right? The polls still seem to believe it for a while. Oh, the polls. And, you know, and some English. But, you know, I think for me the two key incidents, not the abuse of Zelensky in the Oval Office, but the abuse of Denmark. a loyal, small, but loyal American ally.

A country that actually is arguably very much an alignment on immigration policies. Well, if you're going to talk about civilizational suicide, I don't exactly know how you fit Denmark into that, where the social Democrats have actually stolen the entire agenda of the right wing in Denmark. And as a result, there is really not much of a right wing resurgence anymore in Denmark. So Denmark totally chose the way for a lot of social. Democratic parties in Europe. So there was that. And then there was the abuse of Radik Sikorski, one of the prime Atlantisists in Poland calling it, you know, Elon Musk, you know, with an assist from Marker Rubio telling him to be quiet little man. Now, that might just seem petty on

my behalf to focus on that. But you're talking about, you know, somebody who was absolutely in the American camp. And so if they're abusing somebody like Rada Sikorski, they clearly don't care at all about the Western Alliance. And you're actually leaving. the U.S. now, right? Why? Have you been here? Sorry. Yeah, to some extent, I've been gone since the end of 2016. We came back for family reasons, and now we're going for good, selling the apartment.

How come? I mean, I was 100% in U.S. assets pretty much in January, both in terms of stocks, real estate, and everything. And now it's pretty much, stocks are 100% China and Southeast. Asia. Wow. And the real estate, we just got a nice, lovely little house in the Buddha Hills. So you're diversifying in your portfolio and in real life? I guess the diversified portfolio would be something like, I don't know, US 15%, China, 50%, the rest of the world, 35%, something like that. So I'm obviously not doing that because I think the adjustment is going to be, you know, an opportunity for people to make money.

So I guess it's going to end up more or less where electricity production divides up in the world. I come from an emerging markets reporting background too where you couldn't really believe any of the statistics. You couldn't believe the GDP numbers. The only numbers you could really believe maybe output and tradable sectors, electricity output, that kind of thing. And so that tends to be how I've looked at the markets now.

So you're going to be living full-time. The Buddha Hills looks very, very nice part of Budapest. Who should I believe about Orban? Should I believe Tucker that he's a great defender of civilization? Or should I believe the liberals that he's completely corrupted, not a friend at all? I mean, something in between. I knew Orban a bit early on back in 89 when I was with the FT for whatever, four years in Budapest.

And he was always the most talented of his generation as a politician. I clearly knew how to play the game and clearly knows how to play the game now of having channels open to China, Russia and the United States and playing a small country's hand really rather well. There's a giant B-YD factory in Hungary, there's a giant CATL factory in Hungary. If it actually comes down to it,

I think most of Hungary's economic interests are actually China aligned. So I think that's where they'll end up forced. But there's no harm in maintaining channels with the other powers. Just going back to the intro, we were talking about whether or not, let's call them, the global elite, are feeling anxious at the moment. I think it's fair to say you probably move in some of those circles, ultra wealthy. What are people saying right now?

Like, what's the mood music that you're hearing? Well, are we going to talk about anti-Semitism or not? Definitely. Okay. It's a free space. So when globalists get the blame for, you know, what was actually? at that time, I think, only a 5% or 7% correction when Trump blamed globalists. I think there's a foretaste of what will happen if there is a significant repricing of assets

in America. The globalists, quote, unquote globalists, or is it like four brackets? I forget what the code is. Yeah, the three parentheses, yeah. So the cosmopolitans, the internationals, the quote unquote European Wall Street Journal, anything that seems international, anybody who's ever been to Davos, or maybe just the Swiss Alps full stop, is going to come under suspicion. And they are going to be, their life is going to be uncomfortable in the states. I think it's going to be uncomfortable.

They're going to be attacked from the left for being capitalist, and they'll be attacked from the right for being unpatriotic. And I think people are going to find, as they did during the kind of the looting phase of the 2020 protests, that there is no real sympathies. for the Soho Loft dweller in an environment like this. When people are actually asking, so where did all the money go? Where did all the money of the last 25 years? During this period of American exceptionalism, when America was really the only place to put your money if you wanted to invest your time or your money in the future.

So where did it all go? What was left at the end of it? Where's the high-speed rail network? Where are the new companies? And I think those questions are going to be very hard for people to answer. These are the thoughts that I have, like, late at night scrolling at my phone. And then I wake up and I'm like, oh, I make my kids breakfast and I go to the work and it's fine and it's fun. I love coming here.

And then, like, 10 o'clock at night, this is like where my mind drifts to. So, like, I was hoping, you know, I want to eat someone to say. Have you spent much time just playing around with AI? Yeah, of course. Yeah. He spends so much time playing around with AI. So much office time. No, what were you going to say?

Well, under normal circumstances, I'd said, like this transition would take a good long time. Historically, it takes decades, not years. But since January 20th, and I don't mean the Trump inauguration, and I don't mean the Roman sloop by Elon Musk, but I mean the deep seat drop. Since January 20th, I think it's actually clear that AI is universal. It's going to be everywhere in every country, on every chip. And one of the first things that people are going to do with it is they're going to, ask how to make money. And then they will ask more sophisticated questions

and have more sophisticated methods of working out how to make money. You're doing something with this, right? Like you have a new venture where you're using AI to trade or to research for trades. Yeah, I started actually doing a simple analysis of the electric car market projecting forward BYD and Tesla sales into 2030 just to see where it would end up. And to look at the, you know, who is in the lead at every single level.

of the value chain. And then, you know, when you've got an army of researchers at your beck and call and you know how to manage them well enough, you can get pretty robust answers pretty quickly. You know, answers that then lead to you to make trades that maybe you wouldn't have had the confidence to make otherwise. And I think I'm not the only one. So I think it's recursive. So we all know that we're all working more and more like this. And as we recognize this in other people, so the feedback loops accelerate. And so system changes, that might have taken decades get compressed into months or years. That's my theory.

I'm actually not still totally convinced. You know, like, I use AI, Tracy used, I'm kidding. I mean, I do, and I've used, like, deep research and many of them. I still think it's just a tremendous amount of garbage. And I don't say this, but I also want to, it's funny, when you are answering, when you're talking about AI, I could only imagine if Chad GPT had come out in, like, 2013, what you would have devised to 20,

torment gawker writers about making them compete with AI and very, you know, because all media orgs have this like anxiety about, well, this is actually pretty good at writing stuff. And then the journalist, like, you would have loved, you would have loved torturing your writers in some way by making them compete with the AI. I actually prefers to torture the AI's to compete with each other. But you would have, they, you would have gotten a kick out of it, I feel like, and they would have really hated you for it. Okay.

I think that some kinds of journalists, I wouldn't say you're absolutely run-of-the-mill journalists, but some kinds of journalists are extremely well-equipped. I don't think they recognize the talents they have and their ability to ask good questions or to play games with somebody else who actually has information that you want to get out of them. That their skill in playing that game is actually very powerful right now, that they could be traders if they wanted to be. Especially you.

No, especially not me. I don't have to go. I'm Francie Lacquah, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast. Leaders with Francine Lacroa from Bloomberg podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious who are these people as leaders. I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision.

Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts. What's been your best trade so far this year? Yeah, good question. I guess BYD and Zami. And that was based on your AI research. Yeah, look, I've been into electric cars for a while. I'm a gadget head.

I look at things from a consumer standpoint, not a producer standpoint. That's always what we sought to do with Gizmodo and Kataku and Jolopnik and the other consumer technology properties that we had. And you look at these cars side by side, especially when you're talking about the SU7, not a BYD car and a Zami car. BID is a battery factory company and Zami a phone company and they both come into the car sector. Zami's very first car out the gate is really quite exceptional with a very nice design, totally automated or as automated manufacturing processes you're likely to get. And anybody who's had their hands on it, including the CEO of Ford, does not want to let it go. Yeah.

It is clearly either half the price for the same quality or twice the quality for the same price, but we're not talking about 20% Japanese. advantages as they had in the 80s, but we're talking about 50 to 100% advantages in many areas, and the lead of the Chinese manufacturers is extending. So that seems pretty obvious to me. Why do you think now one of the interesting things, like I just pulled up a chart of a show me, and BYD is a little similar. I wrote about it. For a long time, for like the last 10 years, Chinese stocks have kind of been dead money.

So even though like the rise of Chinese manufacturing dominance has been a story that's existed for several years. I wrote about it this week in the newsletter, too. It has not redounded to the benefit of Chinese shareholders. This is a phenomenon. And there's actually been this incredible amount of, you know, they talk about like overcapacity. And I don't really like that term. But, you know, things that have not benefited shareholders. Do you think something's changing on that front, such that the lead that these companies have now developed will be monetized in a real way? There are signs that China is opening up its capital markets.

Small signs to begin with, but you know, they've got mainland funds investing in Hong Kong stocks. You've got the anointing of various Chinese companies by Xi Jinping at the meeting that they had whenever it was three weeks ago, four weeks ago. You have the, I think, the recognition on social media that the strongest PR that China has, aerial nighttime videos of cyberpunk cities, which cannot be argued with. and, you know, YouTubers going for a ride in the SU7 and being blown away by the acceleration. I actually don't think it's in a total accident

that's black YouTubers who seem to find the easiest to embrace the quality of Chinese products. But I think you're going to have two different debates. You're going to have, if there's the Tesla narrative, which seems to be almost exclusively political at this point. There's very little product content in the pitch at all. In fact, the only photographs you see.

CEO of Tesla products usually involve them being in flames. And I'm talking about Elon Musk's own account. Meanwhile, the CEO of Xiaomi is posting up product porn all around the clock. And just in terms of a product battle, in terms of features and in terms of marketing and terms of price point, the Chinese have won. It's as simple as that. And if you don't recognize that, well, you're just not paying attention. How do you actually go about valuing political risk or change?

trading on political risk because when I think about journalists potentially trading, the competitive advantage isn't really number crunching, right? It's kind of looking into the company and feeling the vibe and figuring stuff out that no one else has seen yet. It's a multi-dimensional approach. So I mean, I assume that the earnings forecast are priced into the stock already. So there's no point re-analizing that. You might as well just take that as a given. The question is, what do you see that other people do not? And journalists tend to have an idea of the momentum of a story. So, for instance, right now, I would say speaking as a journalist and editor, that the fall of Elon Musk is the greatest business story of my entire life, absolutely worth

getting out of retirement for, because here you have somebody who was a real life Iron Man, you know, absolutely genuinely has three world beating major achievements under his belt. I don't care whether other people helped him do it. But he made it happen more than anybody else in the Western world. But the problem is there's only one of him. And he's up against a lot of Chinese competitors in cars, in robotics, in batteries, in mobile phones, in a whole bunch of different fields. And I think he's going to lose.

We should sit on this for a second. Or we should stay with this for a second. Because I think there are a lot of people kind of like the people who have called for, let's see Trump wriggle out of this one again, like, who've convinced themselves that actually this could never happen, that Trump will always wriggle out, that Elon Musk will always wriggle out, that he's always able at the last second to find something because of his cult of personality or genuine managerial skills or the genuine managerial skills of the people at right below his level. You say the story now is that the big, this is the fall.

I mean, I think this is the fall. I think he may have a couple more tricks. up his sleeve. But if you think about the gap between the Tesla fundamental value, now as an electric car company, that it is X growth, like, just think about that. Think how much the valuation depended on extrapolations of growth and the interruption of that growth, what that means to any net present value calculation. The international markets are plainly being torched by Elon Musk himself, with all of the PR and propaganda that he puts out that might shore up the Maga base, but every single thing that he does, every single pitch on the, you know, in front of the White House is turning off both natural Tesla buyers on the big blue cities and also the

international market. Everybody except for the Maga base. You know, so you're going to. Who probably don't buy that many EVs anyway. Well, apparently they are buying some. So it's not entirely, it's not entirely a fiction. But every single one that they buy further cements this image as the. MagaMobile and kills the international story, an international story which is in any case

in trouble, and because Tesla in China doesn't have very exciting cars compared with the ones that its competitors come out with. So I don't think the international market is going to work, which means that it's pretty much all down to robots. And he's pretty much put all his chips on the optimus, which seems incredibly dangerous to me. And the mark of somebody who's really desperate and putting it. all behind a very, very risky race in which he is starting from behind.

How did you get so into cars out of curiosity? How do I get into cars? Isn't that just something that just is? You were born with an interesting car. Like the cyber truck. I mean, I was very disappointed when I saw the metal panel. I thought somehow, I guess I didn't research enough. I thought it looked like it had been forged somehow.

Like a single... And then to see... So I think the most damaging thing for Tesla, the most damaging video for Tesla, apart from the I love speed video, but the most damaging video for Tesla is actually seeing the metal panels come off because the glue isn't. Oh, yeah, they didn't use the right glue. And that just sort of kills the mystique of something that was sort of pitched as a Mars rover that you can die.

Oh, like a tank almost, yeah, yeah. So I think the, you know, the optimist hasn't been seen since the video they put out in December. of it rather gingerly working its way down a slope. A little bit better than Joe Biden, but not that much. And meanwhile, if you follow it, the pace of videos released onto social media by Unitary and other Chinese robot makers. Oh, God, another conversation about, I know, they're beating us, I'm aware.

No, no, keep going. I know, it's a big deal. I mean, you can't spin that one. Yeah. It can't be sperm. Like, a demo is a demo, and they're doing demos, and those demos, they're kicking ass. They're doing side flips.

There's a race in Beijing next month, like a humanoid robot race. If Musk was really feeling it, he'd have an entry. There's no way that Optimus is going to go up against however many hundred robot competitors there are in China that are going to show up to that. The race is lost already. It is crazy, though, even with all the social media evidence and demonstrations of what the cars can actually do, You still have people who are kind of conspiratorial about the social media videos. So I remember one came out two or three weeks ago.

It was Tesla versus, I think it was B-Y-D. There was a Tesla, a Zeroy, race. Maybe. Was that it? Well, this one, it was a YouTuber who was driving a Tesla into a fake wall to test the self-driving technology. And the car just went right through it in a very dramatic fashion. And you had all these people, I assume Tesla fanboys and Musk fanboys,

saying that the video had been faked and that no one should believe it and that Tesla's technology is great. It's very right. I mean, it is very hard to tell truth from fabrication these days. Some of the Chinese videos, one of them had to be repeated in front of a mirror just to kind of prove that it was real. But I don't think anyone's really questioned that, you know, there's one where there was like a slightly smaller humanoid robot

that was actually dancing in sync with a couple of human beings. answers. Oh, yeah, I saw that. And that one looked completely impossible to, it was from two different camera angles. That was impossible to fake. So it's going to be hard for anybody really to compete with that. That's my view. And if that's the whole of your story, after the collapse of the international car market, then what remains beyond that in terms of the Tesla story, apart from maybe military contracts? So you start to get a little bit more science fiction like if you're looking for exit ramps. This is Tom Keene, inviting you to join us for the Bloomberg Surveillance Podcast.

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Bloomberg Surveillance, Essential Listening, each and every business day. What do you think about the dominance of U.S. Internet companies? Because that was actually maybe even more than Tesla, right? Like the story of the 2010s, you know, Facebook, better. And when you get out of the United States, did they still have a sort of lock or still like deep competitive moats the way they were perceived to have in the 2010s?

That's a great question. TikTok exists. So that's a problem for them. But it's improvable that a non-U.S. company can have a gigantic social media. But what do you think – this is where the money is. Well, I think the tech platforms are extraordinarily vulnerable. And they're vulnerable. For the same reason, Tesla is vulnerable.

Yeah, Tesla's biggest factory is in Shanghai. Tesla could be – you know, it could be kind of crippled with a signature on a piece of paper. The U.S. tech giants never – like, to their benefit, They never had a Chinese business. They don't have, you know, like they never made, Facebook's never made money in China. Apple makes all of its fun ones in China and has had almost no success in diversifying its supply chain to India or Vietnam.

And, I mean, look, don't take my word for the people I pay attention to are the right wing. It's Palmer Lucky's recent interview, but he has a long five-minute spiel all about Apple and how easy it would be for the Chinese government just to, you know, basically seize the factories and become the dominant supplier of smartphones to the world. You know, the most valuable company in the existence of the United States could go up like that with a couple of decrees. And I don't think that kind of risk is actually priced into the market. So I have a short on Apple as well as Tesla.

And so I think that, you know, there are some companies that are less vulnerable than that. But, you know, even the companies that have no industrial dependence on. China, you know, a company like, you know, Facebook or X, you know, would it not be reasonable for Europe to say tomorrow that X should be, X in Europe should be divested? As TikTok was, you know, that Europe is tired of, you know, American politicians interfering in its internal affairs. And the full spectrum of free European speech should be absolutely given a platform. But there's no reason why outsiders, non-Europeans, should either participate.

or should actually have ownership, have control in such companies. I think that would be a very reasonable, consistent thing to do. And what about Facebook? There isn't a huge amount of European antagonism towards Facebook right now because Facebook really does comply with local regulations. But all of these companies are very much dependent on goodwill and on the Western Alliance continuing to exist in some form. So speaking of Europe, I mean there is a sense that Europe is way, way behind

when it comes to technology, certainly, versus a place like China. Do you have faith that that's going to reverse, or is it the case that, like, maybe they get good at something else, something non-tech? Like, what is driving some of the optimism here? I'm not actually invested in any European stocks right now. I do think that Europe is sort of a side story here. But the ratios are all off. I do not believe that magically in 2008, the United States economy started to perform brilliantly and Europe just slipped into stagnation.

I think it's actually much more likely that Europe went through austerity and has been pretty much going through austerity ever since in some shape before until the recent decision by the German government to finance rearmament. And the United States has basically avoided austerity at every possible juncture. that 2008, rather than being a purge of Wall Street in the way that the dot-com crash was a purge of Silicon Valley. Instead of that being a purge of Wall Street, the economy was immediately re-inflated. And it's been re-inflated after every single minor correction ever since. And so we've basically got 25 years of bubble.

Could you see a world? You know, you mentioned that in the end, it might just make more sense for Hungary to just throw in its lot with China. That's where the future is industrially. that's his biggest trading partner, et cetera. Could you see, I mean, like, that'd be, you know, 20 years from now, Germany, making the same calculation, like core Europe? I mean, I don't think it's going to be 20 years. Okay, so sooner.

But, you know, it's axiomatic. Europe is being bullied by Russia and the United States, sometimes in concert. They want different things. You know, both have territorial demands, and the United States is also trying in a rather belligerent factors. to renegotiate, to negotiate a debt restructuring. It's a strange kind of negotiation, which involves insulting all the people that hold your treasuries, but it is a kind of negotiation.

But in some way it ends up where China is a friend. I think the United States has kind of lost Germany already. I don't know whether even if the tune change, whether the German Atlantis would revive. I think a kind of trust has been broken and a face of America has been revealed. It would be hard for people to forget. And there's also been a nationalist resurgence in Canada, in Mexico, in China, and in Europe. The Chinese don't, you know, the Chinese joke that Trump is the great nation builder, you know, the great nation builder of other nations. And when Donald Tusk says, reminds people that Europe is 500 million people who don't need to be begging 300 million American for help dealing with 100 million Russians who can't even handle.

40 million Ukrainians. When you start to look at it a little bit differently, I think some of that European gravenness falls away. So you mentioned the post-2008 reaction in the market. And I do think there is a tendency on the part of policymakers to reinflate as quickly as possible. And we've seen this over and over 2008, 2020. They moved very, very quickly to get the market back up. And it does seem like a very idiosyncratic characteristic of the U.S.'s political economy is the importance of stocks and asset prices. And this idea, it really feels like everything kind of rests on your portfolio of financial assets. So your retirement, your education probably, the things you buy, housing, basically everything. Are we just doomed to be kind of forever tangled up with the stock

market or is there a realistic path for the U.S. to kind of move away from that, to disentangle itself from financialization? I mean, you're totally hooked. You're totally hooked. It's just, it's been at least 25 years, it's been longer. You know, you look at General Electric. The idea of shareholder value, which seems so modern. You know, can I just, I got a new fridge this week. Yeah. This is GE. I was like, oh, I didn't even know, you still made fridge. It's a GE. Keep going. It's a badge or it's a...

I don't know. I got a new fridge. I didn't ever look at it and I was like, oh, it's a GE logo. I wonder who makes it. Anyway, keep going. I mean, G. Jack Welsh's G is the warning. Yeah.

It's the warning of a company whose earnings were massaged carefully up so that it actually acted like a pension fund rather than a company. And, you know, people warned about the growing importance of G. finance and the financialization of America's prime manufacturing company. And the whole conglomerate was left as kind of a husk at the end of the process. So that is the warning. I don't see how America kicks the habit. China had a policy of hiding its light after Deng Xiaoping, arguably right through up until 2010 or so.

Arguably, its companies have hidden their light subsequently too. You look at their market values, you look at their obstruct trajectories, it's nothing that impressive. But now we've got a moment when you've got America pumped up through marketing and financialization. And you've got China that has quietly built and produced. And they are now being compared directly with one another in B.D versus Tesla, in Zami versus Apple. And the comparison is pretty devastating. Are your children learning Mandarin? No, I'm serious.

Like, because I, some people are doing that. Not yet. I just have one last question. You know, I joked that if AI had been around, I think you would have found a way to torment the Gawker writers. But you did do that because it wasn't AI, but you had this belief that like, oh, the commenters, that's where the real action is. And you're going to make the writers compete with the commenters.

And if the commenters are creating better content, then, hey, so be it, that they're better than the writers. And I feel like for several years since then, you've always sort of clung to this belief that that's where, like, the real action is in various ways. It's like the people. Tell us a little bit about what you're building now and does it happen to that spirit?

I mean, I guess I've taken two lessons from the Gawker experience and just the experience of seeing, watching Flame Wars on the internet since God knows when. Echo chambers are very, very dangerous. And arguably, the Gorker writers were in an echo chamber

from maybe 2011 through to 2015 when it blew up. And when I see Elon Musk on Twitter, you know, or Joe Rogan in the podcast world, it all looks extremely familiar. That, you know, here you have somebody who's basically paying a little bit too much attention to the most engaged members of the audience. Audience capture is real.

It's real. And that's actually why I don't think that Musk is capable of getting out of this vortex that he's trapped in because he's playing to that gallery, playing to a gallery of basically extreme right wingers, and they are going to lead him and each other off the edge of the cliff. Nick, thank you so much for coming on, Oddlust. That was one of the gloomiest episodes of you. Oh, really? No, I really think so.

I really think so, but I really appreciate you coming on. It's fantastic. I'm glad we made it happen while you still have a foot. Before you see the country. Well, that was grim. It was a fun conversation. It was fun. But the subject matter was grim.

You know what I realized, as we were. were sort of reminiscing about Gawker. I totally forgot. I wrote like a freelance piece or just a contribution to, do you remember I-09? Yeah, there's a sci-fi one. Yeah. And so I wrote this article about like some Russian billionaire that is trying to like reach eternal life through robotics or something. Obviously, you wrote that for I-09? Yeah. I didn't know you wrote an I-O-9 piece. Well, I'd totally forgotten. Yeah. But obviously, you know, like more than 10 years later, we're still waiting for immortality. So tech can only go so far.

I think we're going to be waiting a lot longer than 10 years. I mean, I think there were two things, three things that I found embracing. One is the industrial divide is massive and growing, right, between the U.S. and China. That seems real. That's really worrisome to me. The description of the ways in which the current administration has, like, insulted even, like, stalwart allies. Like, why mock Denmark and so forth?

That seems like a really big deal. And then obviously, you know, the impulse to, you know, you get a little bit of a wobble in the sell-off and you blame the, and I'm doing the parentheses, the globalists, that is disturbing. Well, the other thing I was thinking about was, you know, Nick mentioned China starting to open up some of its capital accounts. And it's kind of interesting slash ironic. that is happening at the same time that the U.S. seems to be, you know, they haven't done it yet,

but there does seem to be like this isolationist will when it comes to capital markets. Like, maybe they don't want as much foreign capital coming into the country. Like, you get that sense, right? And so the U.S. and China kind of moving in opposite directions and then also like doing some of the same stuff. It's interesting, like building out manufacturing, right? You know what I like about Nick that he's a journalist who can actually just like talk stocks? How many journalists? No, seriously, because there are journalists who are in their specialty can say things.

But how many of them could just like BS with you a while about like stocks? Nick can actually do that. It's actually really impressive. I think you need to be careful about saying that in an office full of at least like a few dozen journalists who can be us on stocks. No, no, for right. I feel like you're right. It's more than like say like, yeah, I'm short that or I'm long that. and they're like actually have a confident trading position.

No, look, a lot of people can tell you a lot about stocks. Whether they're like, I mean, I, well, we can't. We can't short stocks, obviously, at Bloomberg. But like, most journalists I've ever talked to generally don't have like, yeah, I'm short Apple and Tesla. I'm long BID and show me. Like, you know, I just sort of buy the index. Anyway, I really enjoy talking to Nick.

It was fun to reminisce and also think about the very grim future. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. This has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Allaway. And I'm Jill Wisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart.

Follow Nick Denton. He's at Nick, not Ned. And check out his new endeavor Futura Chiado. It's at Futura Keato. Fellow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez, at Carmen Armin. Dashel Bennett at Dashbot and Kale Brooks at Kail Brooks. For more OddLots content, go to Bloomberg.com slash Oddlots,

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