Philippa Larkin

A startup is hosting the world's first sperm race. I love this bold initiative and clever gimmick to help highlight a serious issue. Innovation lights the way. I must say amid all the irritating American nonsense it was fun to report on this. iol.co.za/business-repor…

Investors will be closely monitoring potential turbulence in the South African rand on Tuesday following reports that the White House could reject South Africa’s newly appointed special envoy to the US, former deputy finance minister Mcebisi Jonas. iol.co.za/business-repor…

Troubling times. I wish Jonas all the best in this important role. We are in an unprecedented moment in history and SA needs to keep its middle ground to enable prosperity ahead. "When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers." - African proverb iol.co.za/business-repor…

South Africa has named Vuyani Jarana, a veteran business leader, as chairperson of the Startup20 Engagement Group for its Group of Twenty (G20) Presidency. iol.co.za/business-repor…

@elonmusk Thanks to POTUS I am on book 2. 3 to go from David Sacks and now this. My friends will be a distant memory. Most dull. America really should really dole out spa vouchers for the extra stress.

Worth reading the book 1493

Stablecoins are brilliant, especially in Africa. They solve cross-border payment issues and remittances, which can cost up to 20% in Africa - Sonya Kuhnel iol.co.za/business-repor…

Old Mutual presentation: why sanctions are ineffective. look at middleman Singapore. US new measures aimed at securing the AI landscape?

@elonmusk Surely this is in your scope to simplyfing in AI race?

Semiconductors in geopolitical control

@ThisWeekABC @jonkarl Smart move.

After Pres. Trump exempts tech like phones, computers and chips from new tariffs, Commerce Sec. Howard Lutnick tells @JonKarl they will be included in semiconductor tariffs to be released in coming months. “This is not a permanent sort of exemption.” abcnews.link/tHCEJjA

@CGasparino @WhiteHouse @howardlutnick Isn't the point more backroom deals on Liberty and geopolitics than economics which affects economics at the end of the day? One on ones amid showerheads etc.

Scoop: There is significant division inside the @WhiteHouse over @howardlutnick’s comments on the temporary nature of the tariff exemptions, an apparent 180 from where the world thought the trade negotiations were going, sources tell me. Of course the only opinion that really matters in the president’s but I am told plenty of people really believe he is “off message” of trying to create a trade regime that involves negotiations even with China and actions that don’t roil the markets including the all important bond market. This story is developing

My Editor's Interview in BR tomorrow. Go to: iol.co.za/business-report

Speaking exclusively to BR, Michael Walsh at US think-tank the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said Trump was signalling that he valued the G20 as an important forum for the US despite being not known for putting much value on international forums. iol.co.za/business-repor…

@joelpollak @HudsonInstitute @YouTube I liked the end message of G20. But in reference re Eskom. infrastructure is a bit of a sore point in USA too, aka 2000–2001 California power crisis via fraud. Latest LA fires fiasco lack of water, bad regulation. Death. Both nations have cautionary tales of needless disfunction

“The Future of US-South Africa Relations” with me, Joel Pollak, at @HudsonInstitute youtu.be/fszh23BuW5U?si… via @YouTube

WHY $GOOGL IS ON MY RADAR Google is on my radar -- not because the narrative is clean, but because it’s not. And that’s where mispricing lives. We’re in the middle of a structural reset, not just in the market, but in how computing itself is defined. And Google sits squarely at the center of the storm -- not just exposed to it, but positioned to shape it. The headlines are focused on the obvious: search is under threat. The ad machine that printed money for decades is now up against an existential question. Not a product cycle. A paradigm shift. In a world where users don’t search but delegate -- where agents retrieve, decide, transact -- the monetizable surface area for traditional ads starts to collapse. And that’s not just a business model tweak. That’s a compression of the oxygen Google has lived on. The margins that powered Alphabet’s expansion into every frontier of tech suddenly look less certain. Less defensible. But that’s the mistake. That’s the part of the story everyone sees -- and where most investors stop looking. The deeper shift is happening below the surface. Because while Google’s consumer moat may be softening, its infrastructure moat is hardening. The market is fixated on the erosion of the front-end, but blind to the momentum underneath: a growing AI-native stack that may quietly become foundational to the agentic future. This isn’t about keeping pace with OpenAI or winning headlines with Gemini. It’s about laying the rails. Google Cloud isn’t chasing the future -- it’s building the back-end that makes the future operational. Vertex AI, TPUs, AlloyDB, Workspace, Android -- this isn’t a portfolio of products. It’s an end-to-end operating system for the post-search, post-indexed world. And now with Wiz, Google has made it clear that AI infrastructure without security is worthless. Because when agents start writing code, executing logic, and pulling sensitive data across multi-cloud environments, cybersecurity stops being a checkbox. It becomes existential. Wiz doesn’t just plug a hole -- it completes the circle. And it makes Google the only cloud provider offering first-party AI, custom silicon, and now full-stack security. Meanwhile, $MSFT is still ahead in narrative tempo. And OpenAI remains the center of gravity for consumer-facing language models. But Google's advantage isn't about the flash. It's about control. Control of compute. Control of orchestration. Control of security. Control of distribution. That’s why I’m paying attention now. Not because the risk is gone. But because we’re reaching the part of the cycle where optionality is being mispriced. The selloff in mega-cap growth wasn’t just about rates or recession fear -- it was about narrative fracture. And Google’s narrative is fractured. But beneath the noise is a company pivoting harder, faster, and deeper than almost anyone else in big tech. And if they land it -- if they make the leap from search-era cash engine to AI-native infrastructure provider -- then the multiples today won’t just be low. They’ll look laughable in hindsight.

Liberation Day? Dmitri Alperovitch. Hmm

My Saturday homework that I just downloaded. Luckily my superpower is speed reading. Is the threat of WW3 closer than the world is awake to? This market and economic disruption is much deeper than money. Trump has said Liberation Day. What does he mean. This is the question.

@simplybitcoin Absolutely

JUST IN: 🇬🇧 Former UK Prime Minister Liz Truss says Bitcoin is “a tool for taking power away from government.” “The bureaucracy know perfectly well that it is an antidote to their power which is why they hate it.”

🚨NEW: Peter Thiel with @JTLonsdale on tariffs, trade policy, and China. "You need a very drastic reset with China. In theory, you need to reset with other people, but what we really need to get them to do is also reset things with China." Full episode drops next week! JOE: We've been talking about China on and off for over 20 years, and their imbalances. This week the President declared trade war on them, effectively, with 125% tariffs as of now; it'll probably change in the next few days. What do you think of the trade and tariff policy? What's gonna happen? Bond yields sold off more than I expected. The yields went higher than I expected so far. What's going on? PETER: I'm hesitant to comment since obviously it's a very, very fluid situation, but something like the sort of reset that they're talking about now seems where we're going, where you need a very drastic reset with China. In theory you need to reset with other people, but what we really need to get them to do is also reset things with China. I think the rough numbers are that about a quarter of the US trade deficit is bilaterally with China, but another quarter is indirectly with China. So China is sort of half the problem... And then China is the geopolitical rival. So there's a way in which people in Mercedes in Germany are selling cars to the US. We might want to have those pretty well paying jobs in the US and, and not in Germany. And there are all kinds of sort of mercantilist policies that at the margins Germany engages in. But, you know, it's probably not gonna repurpose the Mercedes factory to build tanks to invade the US or something like this. Whereas this sort of dual use problem is the problem with China. ...There are ways the economic relationship with China is fairly efficient.... if people are working for a dollar and a half an hour in a Foxconn factory, we don't really want to get those jobs in Wisconsin. But it is this geopolitical rivalry where... you have to somehow factor in that the economists never are able to factor in properly with China. I'm not sure I would call this the optimistic plan, but the reset in trade that seems desirable to me would be that we radically changed the relationship with China and we sort of induce a lot of other countries to radically change their relationship with China. And that's how we, you know, maybe that's how we build a stronger western alliance of the free world. JOE: Well there's going to be some interesting negotiations in the next few months. Did you think that we could bring, maybe using AI, some more advanced manufacturing here that was in China? Is that a real thing the next decade to do a bunch more here, thanks to our more efficiencies and productivity? PETER: There's probably always a decent amount of things like that. You have to always be extremely granular on how expensive the robots are, how expensive the equipment is, because in some sense, manufacturing has been getting steadily more automated for 250 years. And you've had the machines that make the machines. The machines that make the machines are getting sort of smarter and more complicated. And there are ways in which AI is a quantum leap. There's a way in which it's just, you know, a natural continuation of this, you know, two century long process. I think there are some parts that can be moved to the US with AI. Maybe also if you change some of the environmental rules and some of the other anti-industrial policies we have in the US. But then if parts of this are moved to other emerging market countries. Vietnam is a communist country. It has bad mercantilist policies, but it's not planning to take over the world. And so at the margins, if we can move things from China to Vietnam, that's a big win.

BREAKING: The Fed is reportedly "absolutely" ready to stabilize the market if needed, per Financial Times. Never discount the power of the bond market.