On Thursday, Donald Trump will walk into the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, shake Xi Jinping's hand, and declare it a great meeting. There will be announcements. There will be numbers — billions of dollars in Chinese purchase commitments, a new bilateral mechanism with an important-sounding name, possibly a joint statement on Iran. Trump will post on Truth Social. Markets will rally briefly. Pundits will argue about who won. None of that will tell you what actually happened. What is actually happening in Beijing this week is something more consequential and more uncomfortable than the summit theatre will reveal: two leaders of two deeply mutually dependent superpowers, both of whom need this meeting to succeed for entirely different reasons, sitting across a table in a world that has already moved past the assumptions that defined their last nine months of negotiations. The Iran war changed the equations. The rare earth gambit changed the power balance. Taiwan is sitting in...
The tech world woke up buzzing this week after an unlikely challenger stepped into the ring: AI startup Perplexity has made a bold, unsolicited, $34.5 billion all-cash offer to acquire Google Chrome , the world’s most widely used web browser. The bid wasn’t whispered in back rooms — it landed squarely on Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai’s desk, laying out a grand vision of what Perplexity claims would be a “neutral, open, and innovation-friendly” future for Chrome. But there’s a catch: this deal only makes sense if the courts force Google to part with its crown jewel. Why Now? Timing Is Everything The move comes in the shadow of a major U.S. antitrust ruling, where a federal court determined that Google unlawfully maintained a monopoly in search. While remedies have yet to be finalized, some of the most extreme proposals include forcing Google to divest Chrome to reduce its market dominance. Perplexity, a rising star in the AI-driven search space, clearly sees this as a once-in-a-gen...