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Greetings! All those techies and bankers hoping the new Trump administration will relax Joe Biden's tough antitrust approach might want to think again. Donald Trump on Wednesday said he would nominate Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz as attorney general, putting forward someone who has appeared supportive of Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan and has called for the breakup of big tech companies. The timing is propitious, coming the same day that a judge ruled the FTC's antitrust case against Facebook owner Meta Platforms should proceed, dismissing an effort by Meta to have the case thrown out. The FTC argues Meta used the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to gain an illegal monopoly in social media, and has said it may seek the divestiture of both apps if it wins the case. While Gaetz's nomination may not be good for Meta, it could be happy news for TikTok. Gaetz voted against passage of the TikTok ban-or-sell law, although he said at the time he supported a ban but didn't like the bill. Trump, of course, has said he opposes a ban of TikTok, so the two of them together may look for ways to avoid implementing the law. Gaetz isn't Lina Khan's only friend in the new administration. Vice President-elect J.D. Vance has also signaled support for her. All up, no one can be sure how the new administration will deal with tech regulation. Meanwhile, today we got big news on the retail front: Amazon just launched an ultracheap bargain store that takes aim at rivals Temu and Shein. Just don't look for it on your computer—Amazon is keeping the new store largely separate from its main site, for good reason. In fact, American shoppers can only find the beta version of the new store by searching for the word "Haul" on Amazon's mobile site or app. Haul products don't show up in regular Amazon search results, and the service even has a separate shopping cart. Once you find Haul, you'll see an array of dirt-cheap items like $2 iPhone cases and $20 shoes that's very similar to what's available on Temu. While the setup might be confusing for some shoppers, it makes sense for Amazon to sequester Haul. For one, it's clearly targeted at a younger, TikTok-addled subset of Amazon's overall customer base—fire emojis abound, and shoppers with empty carts are told: "Your cart is giving lonely vibes." More importantly, Haul's shipping and return policies are way out of line with what Amazon has trained its customers to expect. Instead of the one- or two-day delivery times Prime members are used to, Haul orders can arrive in two weeks or more. And instead of allowing shoppers to return most items for 30 days—even if they've been opened and used—Haul has a 15-day window for returns and requires items to be unused with tags attached. Of course, those stricter policies are a big part of the reason Haul is so cheap. And the rise of Temu has shown that some shoppers care more about cost than about fast shipping and easy returns. If Amazon is going to keep growing its e-commerce business, it needs products like Haul to reach those customers. But many of Amazon's biggest businesses—including its seller services, advertising and subscriptions segments, which together brought in about $60 billion last quarter—primarily owe their existence to Amazon's main e-commerce marketplace being the first place many people go to shop online. If Amazon wants to preserve those businesses, it needs to make sure its new experiment doesn't haul too many shoppers away from its core marketplace.—Theo Wayt There's an adage on Wall Street that to make money you buy low and sell high. It seems obvious, of course, but Instacart appears to be taking a different approach with its share buybacks. The grocery-delivery firm has adopted an aggressive buyback strategy since last November, just two months after its IPO. Through Sept. 30 of this year, the company has repurchased more than $1.4 billion worth of stock, which is a lot for a company with a market capitalization of about $11 billion. That compares with $575 million raised in the IPO and an accompanying private placement of stock. Most notable, though, is that for the past couple of quarters, Instacart has been buying back stock well above the $30 price at which it sold shares in the IPO. It paid as much as $34.38 a share in the second quarter, Instacart has disclosed, and an average of around $33 in the third quarter. While it bought back stock as low as $23.81 earlier this year, its average buyback price for all the shares it has bought back in the past year was $30.27. Still, Instacart's strategy has its benefits. While the buybacks soak up shares issued to employees as compensation, they go further than that. In the past 12 months, Instacart had shrunk its share count by about 8.5%. That's helping lift Instacart's share price, which is now trading around $43. So from the point of view of Instacart's current price, the company is buying back shares at a bargain price! - The percentage of Americans who say they use Elon Musk's X platform has dropped slightly in the past couple of years, while usage of Meta's WhatsApp has grown, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Pew Center. The survey was conducted between February and June of this year (more here).
- OpenAI said Wednesday it had shared information with U.S. government officials about how to build a data center for artificial intelligence five times larger than any data center that's currently being developed.
- Marc Lore's food-delivery company, Wonder, plans to acquire Grubhub in a deal valued at $650 million including debt, the companies said Wednesday (more here).
- Installment lender Klarna has filed confidentially for a U.S. IPO, the company announced Tuesday.
- Greg Maffei, the veteran dealmaker atop John Malone's Liberty empire of media and commerce companies, is stepping down as CEO of Liberty Media Corp. at the end of the year. Malone, who is 83, will become interim CEO. Maffei, who has run Liberty since 2005, is leaving after a series of deals in the past year or so have shrunk Liberty Media's range of assets. (more here).
- Advertising technology company Viant has acquired Iris, a firm that sells data about streaming services to both advertisers and publishers, Viant said on Tuesday. The deal is partly an effort by Viant to use AI to automate ad buying (more here).
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