 | May 27, 2025 | | | | Supported by  | | | | | Welcome back! Softbank's Masayoshi Son proposes a joint U.S.-Japan sovereign wealth fund. President Donald Trump threatens to impose 25% tariffs on Apple devices imported into the U.S. OpenAI opens an office in South Korea, the third in Asia after Japan and Singapore.
| | | | SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son has floated the idea of creating a U.S.-Japan sovereign wealth fund for investments in technology and infrastructure in the U.S., the Financial Times reported. The move could help the U.S. Treasury Department earn revenue without raising taxes, the newspaper said, citing a person briefed on the situation. Son, who knows President Donald Trump personally, discussed the joint fund idea with U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Top government officials in Washington and Tokyo also are aware of the proposal, according to the newspaper. For the fund to be effective, its size would have to be "enormous," with potentially $300 billion in initial capital, the newspaper reported, citing another person familiar with the discussions. The fund would be jointly owned and operated by the U.S. Treasury and Japan's Ministry of Finance. But it could also accept investments from limited partners, including retail investors in the U.S. and Japan, it said. | | | | President Donald Trump threatened to impose a tariff of at least 25% on Apple devices imported into the U.S. until it makes iPhones in the U.S., rather than overseas. "I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone's that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else," Trump posted on Truth Social on Friday morning. His threat comes a week after Trump said he confronted Cook about ramping up its manufacturing base in India instead of the U.S. In recent months, Apple has been moving fast to shift its manufacturing to India for devices bound for the U.S. market. | | | | OpenAI said Monday it was opening an office in Seoul, its third office in Asia after Tokyo and Singapore. In a LinkedIn post, chief strategy officer Jason Kwon said weekly users of its ChatGPT have grown 4.5 times in South Korea over the last year. The country has more paid subscribers to the chatbot than any other country except the U.S., he said. The rapid growth of ChatGPT in 2022 spurred several countries to promote domestic artificial intelligence startups so that their economies are not reliant on U.S. tech giants for what could be the dominant technology in years to come. ChatGPT's head start, however, has made it tough for domestic apps to catch up. A recent survey found ChatGPT was most popular among all age groups in South Korea, outflanking local apps like Wrtn, according to the publication Business Korea. | | | | Readers of The Information said they are overwhelmingly optimistic about the operating environment for technology companies for the coming six months, according to our April survey. In all, 54% of readers said they expect conditions to improve, while 15% said they expect conditions will worsen and 31% said things will stay the same. It's the highest our sentiment score has read since February. In March and April, uncertainty around President Donald Trump's tariffs sent the sentiment measure to the lowest levels in more than two years. Readers feel most bullish about Microsoft and Nvidia, while Apple and Tesla were the companies respondents said they are most bearish about. More than 400 people responded to the survey this month. Check out our Tech Sentiment Tracker for the full data. | | | | OnlyFans' owner Fenix International is in discussions to sell the subscription platform, best known for explicit content, to an investor group at a valuation of about $8 billion, Reuters reported. The investor group is being led by Los Angeles-based investment firm Forest Road Company, but it's unclear which other investors are part of it. A spokesperson for OnlyFans didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. OnlyFans revenue rose 20% to about $1.31 billion for the fiscal year ending November 2023, compared to the previous year, according to a U.K. filing. Gross payments for chats, photos and videos totaled $6.6 billion, up by $1 billion year-over-year. | | | | Salesforce, after unsuccessfully trying to acquire Informatica last year, is back in talks with the data management software provider, according to Bloomberg. Informatica, which has a market capitalization of $6.8 billion, would be Salesforce's largest acquisition since its $27.7 billion purchase of collaboration software provider Slack in 2020. An acquisition could help Salesforce address one of the biggest obstacles to customers adopting its AI agent-building software, which is managing and organizing corporate data stored across different databases and applications. Buying Informatica could also give a boost to Salesforce's revenue growth, albeit a modest one: Informatica's revenue grew 3% to $1.64 billion in the twelve months to Dec. 31 compared to the previous year. Salesforce's revenue grew 9% to $37.9 billion in the twelve months to Jan. 31, and it is forecasting growth of 7% to 8% for its current fiscal year. | | | | | Popular articles
By Stephanie Palazzolo, Natasha Mascarenhas and Sri Muppidi
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