The Week: Who Does the Market Actually Work For?

**Scott Galloway** (0:01)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:42)
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**George Hahn** (1:29)
Welcome to The Week from Prof G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn and it's Friday, July 10th. Today, the government wants a piece of open AI. Then, America turns 250 and can't seem to enjoy the party. Finally, the hottest media deal of the year is a podcast that didn't exist 18 months ago.
Let's get into it.
There's an old idea that companies win by building something people want. This week offered a slightly different theory. Get the right person to want you to win. Take Dell. On Tuesday's Prof G Markets, Ed Elson laid out what happened when the president gave the company a little free advertising.

**Ed Elson** (2:26)
Dell stock surged as much as 8% yesterday, not because of any material information or any news related to the company, but instead because the president pumped it. Yes, yesterday on live television, Trump encouraged Americans to, quote, go out and buy a Dell computer. And it was exactly at that moment that shares of Dell soared. Does President Trump own any Dell shares, you might ask? The answer is, of course, yes. According to his recently released financial statements, Trump purchased nearly a million dollars worth of Dell last year, and now he is actively pumping it on TV. This is yet another example of a dynamic that we are calling the kingmaker economy, and that is the best way to increase your stock price in America today isn't to improve your product or to sell more goods and services, it is to have your stock anointed by the high priest of American markets, aka the president. If you can do that, great things will occur. You might get a shout out in a national address, you might even get a government contract, who knows. The point is, it pays to kiss ass, not metaphorically, but literally. And that's why so many leaders are now doing it, from Tim Cook and his Golden Apple Trophy to now Sam Altman and his benevolent offer to sling OpenAI stock onto the balance sheet of the US government and hopefully get a bailout. Is this how free markets are supposed to work? Is this what capitalism is supposed to look like?
Absolutely not.
But that doesn't matter anymore.

**George Hahn** (4:15)
Now, a presidential endorsement moving a stock is one thing. The government owning part of a company is something else entirely. This week, OpenAI floated giving the federal government a 5% stake in the company worth around $43 billion at its latest valuation. Their idea, if AI creates enormous wealth, the American public should share in some of it. But there's an obvious complication. Once the government becomes a shareholder, it also has an interest in the company succeeding, and the government happens to write the rules.
That's the part Scott focused on in Monday's markets episode.

**Scott Galloway** (5:01)
I predicted this six months ago, that the biggest bailout in corporate history was about to happen, and it was going to be the bailout of Nadella, Altman, Dario Amadei, and it would be dressed up as investment or growth. It's not, it's a bailout.
If the government were to take a 5 percent stake in OpenAI, great. They're going to favor OpenAI. They're going to overregulate their competitors and underregulate OpenAI.