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President Donald Trump plans to use a key address Wednesday to try to convince Americans he can make housing more affordable, but he’s picked a strange backdrop for the speech: a Swiss mountain town where ski chalets for vacations cost a cool $4.4 million.On the anniversary of his inauguration, Trump is flying to the World Economic Forum in Davos an annual gathering of the global elite where he may see many of the billionaires he has surrounded himself with during his first year back in the White House.Trump had campaigned on lowering the cost of living, painting himself as a populist while serving fries at a McDonald’s drive-thru. But in office, his public schedules suggest he’s traded the Golden Arches for a gilded age, devoting more time to cavorting with the wealthy than talking directly to his working-class base.“At the end of the day, it’s the investors and billionaires at Davos who have his attention, not the families struggling to afford their bills,” said Alex Jacquez, chief of policy and advocacy at Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank.Trump’s attention in his first year back has been less on pocketbook issues and more fixed on foreign policy with conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine and Venezuela. He is now bent on acquiring Greenland to the chagrin of European allies a headline likely to dominate his time in Davos, overshadowing his housing ideas.Trump noted the Europeans’ resistance, telling reporters Monday night, “Let’s put it this way: It’s going to be a very interesting Davos.”The White House has tried to shift Trump’s focus to affordability issues, a response to warning signs in the polls in a year where control of Congress is at stake in midterm elections.About six in 10 U.S. adults now say that Trump has hurt the cost of living, according to the latest survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. It’s an issue even among Republicans, who have said Trump’s work on the economy hasn’t lived up to their expectations. Only 16% say Trump has helped “a lot” on making things more affordable, down from 49% in April 2024, when an AP-NORC poll asked Americans the same question about his first term.The president is banking on investment commitments from billionaires and foreign nations to create a jobs boom, even as his broad tariffs have crimped the labor market and spurred inflation. Trump supporters who attend his rallies which the president resumed last month are left to trust that Trump’s business ties can eventually help them.This strategy carries political risks. Voters are more interested in the economy they’re experiencing in their own lives than in Trump’s relationships with billionaires, said Frank Luntz, the Republican-affiliated pollster and strategist.“If you’re asking me, ‘Are billionaires popular?’ The answer is no and they’ve haven’t been for some time,” said Luntz, who last year identified “affordability” as a defining issue for voters. Wooing billionaires instead of the working class Since Trump’s first term in 2017, the wealthiest 0.1% of Americans have seen their wealth increase by $11.98 trillion to $23.46 trillion, according to the Federal Reserve.The magnitude of those gains dwarfs what the bottom 50% of households the majority of the country received during the same period. Their net worth rose by $2.94 trillion, roughly one-fourth what the top 0.1% got.One of the biggest concerns for voters is the cost of housing. In recent weeks, Trump has floated proposals like reducing interest rates on home loans by buying $200 billion in mortgage debt and banning large financial companies from buying homes. Yet those efforts would do little to address the core problem in the housing market: a multi-year shortfall in home construction and home prices that have generally risen faster than wages.Trump regularly points to the investments made by the wealthy and powerful as signs of economic growth to come. To encourage billionaires to deliver, Trump in his first year pursued policies on artificial intelligence and financial regulation that can benefit the wealthy, along with tax cuts, reduced IRS enforcement and fewer regulatory burdens for large-scale investments.“Most billionaires don’t share the interests of the working class,” said Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who has written about the “wealthification” of U.S. politics. “The ultrawealthy love tax cuts and deregulation, and those preferences make it difficult for government to provide the help that working class people want.”Trump has been trying to sell tax breaks on tips and overtime pay from what is known as the ” One Big Beautiful Bill ” as benefiting workers. But a Congressional Budget Office analysis indicated that middle-class families may only see savings of $800 to $1,200 a year, on average, while the top 10% of earners would receive $13,600. A separate analysis by the Tax Policy Center, a think tank, said those earning above $1 million would save on average $66,510 this year. The company Trump keeps Trump regularly holds public events with the wealthy and powerful at the White House and beyond. He jetted to the Middle East and Asia with billionaires in tow as he had foreign countries announce investment commitments, promising that the money would flow down into factory jobs for the middle class.At a September dinner with tech billionaires, Trump said it was an honor to be surrounded by the likes of Bill Gates, Tim Cook, Sergey Brin and Mark Zuckerberg.“There’s never been anything like it,” Trump said. “The most brilliant people are gathered around this table. This is definitely a high-IQ group and I’m very proud of them.”The White House said the previous Biden administration had alienated the business community to the detriment of the economy. “President Trump’s pro-growth policies and friendly relationships with industry titans, on the other hand, are securing trillions in investments that are creating jobs and opportunities for everyday Americans,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said.Last month, Trump celebrated a charitable contribution of $6.25 billion to the “Trump” investment accounts for children by Michael Dell. It was a chance to talk about economic inequality but also another opportunity for Trump to showcase his relationship with billionaires.Trump takes phone calls from billionaires and CEOs to chat about business, politics and interests such as his planned White House ballroom. He regularly peppers his speeches with shoutouts to Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, whose net worth was estimated by Forbes at roughly $162 billion as of Sunday.He’s installed billionaires in his inner circle such as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (net worth: $3.3 billion) and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff (net worth: $2 billion). He put Elon Musk (net worth: $780 billio) in charge of slashing government payrolls before a dramatic falling-out and, later, a public reconciliation.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt at a briefing last month portrayed Trump’s own status as a billionaire as a positive for him with voters.“I think it’s one of the many reasons they reelected him back to this office, because he’s a businessman who understands the economy and knows how to fix it,” she said. Josh Boak, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
While working as an engineer at Tesla, Niccolo Cymbalist never planned to start a business. But he’d been considering an idea for new technologyan autonomous, wind-powered cargo ship. Then, while on paternity leave in 2024, he discovered a free program that helps scientists and engineers launch businesses for the first time. Weeks after finishing the program, called 5050, Cymbalist had launched a startup called Clippership. The companys first ship is being built in the Netherlands this year. Without the accelerator, he says, the company likely wouldnt exist. The program has now helped scientists and engineers launch 100 businesses, from Huminly, which uses enzymes to make clothing infinitely recyclable, to Plasmidsaurus, which offers ultra-fast DNA sequencing. [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] The course is run by Fifty Years, a San Francisco-based VC firm focused on deep tech that tackles the worlds largest problems, from disease to climate change. Soon after the firm started a decade ago, the team saw that good ideas were stuck in academic labs. The transition from academic scientist to founder is actually much more difficult than the transition from sophomore dropout to founder, for a whole host of reasons, says Seth Bannon, a founding partner at Fifty Years. Because of that, the best people to start these startupsthe scientists that invented the technologyweren’t doing that. So we said, ‘okay, can we help fix that?’ [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] From idea to startup Potential founders go through a 13-week programwith some in-person weekends and weekly Zoom sessionsthat helps them figure out if their idea is worth pursuing and whether it’s ready to commercialize. The founder of Plasmidsaurus, for example, who was a postdoc at Caltech, initially joined the program planning to turn his lab research on synthetic gene circuits into a medical product. But the 5050 team helped him realize that it was around 10 years from being commercializable, and one of his other ideastechnology he’d developed to speed up his own researchwas ready now. The company is growing quickly. “At year one, they just crossed a $50 million run rate,” Bannon says. “They’ve been profitable every month since they started. And they’re now one of the most beloved names in biology.” [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] Participants also learn how to build a startup team, understand what makes founders successful, and decide if entrepreneurship is a fit for them. “One of the workshops that we do is the ‘story of self,’ where it’s a deep dive into their core motivationtheir entire story of life and like what they’re doing today to really make sure that they’re actually pursuing something that they’re really really excited about,” says Ale Borda, who runs the 5050 program. “Then they can use that same story to share about their work and why they will go through walls to enable this to happen.” [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] They learn about how to communicate differently. “In academia, just as one example, you are taught to communicate with data, data, dataand then here are the 10 ways my data might be wrong,” Bannon says. While that’s good for research, “if you communicate that way as a startup founder, you will have trouble hiring anybody, you’ll have trouble raising money, you’ll have trouble getting press,” he says. “And so you have to learn to talk in directionally correct abstractions.” Universities often also have programs to help move tech to the market, but schools are disconnected from the startup world, and Bannon says the programs aren’t very effective. (Mentors might be Fortune 500 executives, for example, rather than other startup founders with direct experience.) There are also conflicts of interest. Universities own the IP for new inventions scientists develop on campus; scientists have to go through a complicated process of negotiating for the rights to the tech. The program at 5050 includes coaching onnavigating that process. Turning scientists into founders So far, the approach is working. “The stat we’re most proud of is that 96% of the teams that went out to raise a round were able to,” says Bannon. “That’s an insanely high stat for a program that accepts people who don’t have companies when they join.” In the current political climate, as federal funding cuts have hit university labs, the program is already seeing an increased interest from scientists at a career crossroads. “A lot of them are seeing that they might not be able to continue their life’s work in academia anymore,” Bannon says. “Some of them happen to be lucky and be in a spot where maybe it could be a startup.” In the short term, he says, funding cuts might lead to more startups, though they’ll slow down future growth. [Photo: courtesy Fifty Years] Of the 100 companies that have launched from the program so far, around half wouldn’t have started without it. Others launched faster than they would have. “I probably would have started a company, but it almost certainly wouldn’t have been at the time that I did,” says Daniel Rahn, a former SpaceX engineer who launched Metal as Fuel, a company that makes metal fuels to decarbonize heavy industry. “These are counterfactual companies,” says Bannon. “These companies are combating the climate crisis, they’re defeating disease, they’re doing important stuff. And so it just feels really, really good to help companies come into existence that wouldn’t otherwise.”
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E-Commerce
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will attend the Supreme Court’s oral argument Wednesday in a case involving the attempted firing of Fed governor Lisa Cook, an unusual show of support by the central bank chair.The high court is considering whether President Donald Trump can fire Cook, as he said he would do in late August, in an unprecedented attempt to remove one of the seven members of the Fed’s governing board. Powell plans to attend the high court’s Wednesday session, according to a person familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity.It’s a much more public show of support than the Fed chair has previously shown Cook. But it follows Powell’s announcement last week that the Trump administration has sent subpoenas to the Fed, threatening an unprecedented criminal indictment of the Fed Chair. Powell appointed to the position by Trump in 2018 appears to be casting off last year’s more subdued response to Trump’s repeated attacks on the central bank in favor of a more public confrontation.Powell issued a video statement Jan. 11 condemning the subpoenas as “pretexts” for Trump’s efforts to force him to sharply cut the Fed’s key interest rate. Powell oversaw three rate cuts late last year, lowering the rate to about 3.6%, but Trump has argued it should be as low as 1%, a position few economists support.The Trump administration has accused Cook of mortgage fraud, an allegation that Cook has denied. No charges have been made against Cook. She sued to keep her job, and the Supreme Court Oct. 1 issued a brief order allowing her to stay on the board while they consider her case.If Trump succeeds in removing Cook, he could appoint another person to fill her slot, which would give his appointees a majority on the Fed’s board and greater influence over the central bank’s decisions on interest rates and bank regulation. Christopher Rugaber, AP Economics Writer
Category:
E-Commerce
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