Category: Commentary

Recently in the news was the fact that managers of Donald Trump’s financial assets in 2025 made him a lot of money.

Trump said last April 8 with respect to his foreign policy in Iran: “big money” is to be made by the U.S. “hangin’ around” the Strait of Hormuz.  This followed a two-week ceasefire agreement reached between the U.S. and Iran.  Trump wrote on Truth Social: “The United States of America will be helping with the traffic buildup in the Strait of Hormuz.  There will be lots of positive action!  Big money will be made.  Iran can start the reconstruction process.”

He added, “We’ll be loading up with supplies of all kinds and just ‘hangin’ around’ in order to make sure that everything goes well.”  Trump said he felt confident that all goes well, writing, “Just like we are experiencing in the U.S., this could be the Golden Age of the Middle East!!!”

These statements, as well as others, led me to wrestle with the question: is Donald Trump a “moneyist” or a capitalist?

I would be very interested in your thoughts and feedback.

In January, I sent you four commentaries on Donald Trump as a leader (here, here, here and here).

On June 16, I read Walter Russell Mead’s commentary in the Wall Street Journal which added a different way of understanding Donald Trump, but one consistent with my observations of his modus operandi as a person, a politician, a dealmaker and a leader, of sorts.

Here is part of what Mr. Mead wrote:

Mr. Trump’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness.  The president is a cynic.  Unencumbered by deep convictions and free from the constraints imposed by conventional morality or codes of honor, he can alter his tactics to the exigencies of the moment without hesitation or scruple.  Cynicism has its uses.  No statesman can succeed without a healthy dose of it.  But like most potent drugs, it works best in small doses.

Mr. Trump comes by his cynicism honestly – his career in New York real estate, casinos and reality television led naturally to a dark view of human nature.  As his political power grew and so many early critics and opponents swallowed their principles to kiss his ring, Mr. Trump’s intuitive belief that ideas and ideals don’t matter was powerfully reinforced.

But cynicism has limits.  A cynic would have predicted that Britain would throw in the towel in 1940.  Adolf Hitler held more cards than Winston Churchill did.  But Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offers and fought on to the end.

Mr. Trump’s disregard for ideas, ideals and people who claim to believe in them leads him to underestimate the strength and determination of people who mean what they say.  His failure to understand the power of nationalism blinded him both to the resilience Ukraine has demonstrated in its conflict with Russia and to Vladimir Putin’s determination to pursue the struggle regardless of cost.  Mr. Trump’s peacemaking efforts as a result have fallen flat.

Ideas matter in the Middle East as well.  However perverse and depraved the ideas that animate the Islamic Republic and Hezbollah, they inspire the kind of conviction that motivates people to fight grimly on against the odds.  In the end, Mr. Trump underestimated Iran’s determination and resilience and launched a war that is proving much costlier and harder to end than he’d expected.

Mr. Trump’s apparent contempt for ideals like democracy and the rule of law also costs him. Threats to conquer Greenland reduced his ability to call on allies in the Iran crisis.  And the American failure to work more closely and effectively with pro-democracy Iranians gives the regime one less problem to worry about.  Additionally, Mr. Trump’s penchant for aggressively unpredictable course changes weakens the confidence of allies and bolsters cohesion among his opponents.

Mr. Trump is a supreme and often supremely successful opportunist.  But that quality alone won’t see him through the tests that lie ahead.

I have not paid attention to the current lawsuit brought by Elon Musk against OpenAI and its now private shareholders.  I rather cavalierly dismissed it as an expression of egomania on the part of two very smart and driven men facing off against one another.

But an article on the trial caused me to rethink and conclude that this litigation was brought by Musk to champion moral capitalism.

The importance of the moral issue of taking responsibility for development and deployment of product and technology has just been given deep theological and philosophical importance by Pope Leo XIV in his new encyclical on AI.

Both Pope Leo and Elon Musk worried about the consequences for humanity of machine thinking – a new technology. Economists call such consequences “externalities” of a product or a service – what does the product or service cause to happen?  Usually, the concern is about price.  Does the price charged for a good or service include the costs to users, society, the community and the environment of any negative effects brought about by that product or service?  Here is the issue of who should pay for the costs of pollution?

Thus, to have the work of developing AI, Musk thought of using what some call a “benefit corporation,” where the ability of owners to place profit above all other considerations is restrained.  The purpose of the entity must be to generate benefits for specified stakeholders.  Musk chose the form of a non-profit corporation.  Money was raised and staff were hired.  Later, the CEO, Sam Altman, working with Microsoft, took the capital of the non-profit and moved it to a for-profit company.

Musk sued for breach of contract and specific performance of the original contract provision to benefit humanity and not owners.

Here are relevant excepts from Musk’s complaint:

Mr. Musk has long recognized that artificial general intelligence (AGI) poses a grave threat to humanity – perhaps the greatest existential threat we face today.  His concerns mirrored those raised before him by luminaries like Stephen Hawking and Sun Microsystems founder Bill Joy.  Our entire economy is based around the fact that humans work together and come up with the best solutions to a hard task.  If a machine can solve nearly any task better than we can, that machine becomes more economically useful than we are.  As Mr. Joy warned, with strong AGI, “the future doesn’t need us.” …

With the DeepMind team, Google immediately catapulted to the front of the race for AGI.  Mr. Musk was deeply troubled by this development.  He believed (and still does) that in the hands of a closed, for-profit company like Google, AGI poses a particularly acute and noxious danger to humanity.  In 2014, it was already difficult enough to compete with Google in its core businesses.  Google had collected a uniquely large set of data from our searches, our emails and nearly every book in our libraries.  Nevertheless, up to this point, everyone had the potential to compete with Google through superior human intelligence and hard work.  AGI would make competition nearly impossible.  …

The Founding Agreement of OpenAI, Inc.

Mr. Altman purported to share Mr. Musk’s concerns over the threat posed by AGI.  In 2015, Mr. Altman wrote that the “development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.  There are other threats that I think are more certain to happen . . . but are unlikely to destroy every human in the universe in the way that SMI could.”  Later that same year, Mr. Altman approached Mr. Musk with a proposal: that they join forces to form a non-profit AI lab that would try to catch up to Google in the race for AGI, but it would be the opposite of Google.  …

Together with Mr. Brockman, the three agreed that this new lab: (a) would be a non-profit developing AGI for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits and (b) would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations and would not keep its technology closed and secret for proprietary commercial reasons (the “founding agreement”).  Reflecting the founding agreement, Mr. Musk named this new AI lab “OpenAI,” which would compete with and serve as a vital counterbalance to Google/DeepMind in the race for AGI, but would do so to benefit humanity, not the shareholders of a private, for-profit company (much less one of the largest technology companies in the world). …

The founding agreement was also memorialized, among other places, in OpenAI, Inc.’s December 8, 2015, certificate of incorporation, which affirmed that its “resulting technology will benefit the public and the corporation will seek to open-source technology for the public benefit when applicable.  The corporation is not organized for the private gain of any person.”  The certificate of incorporation further affirmed that all of the corporation’s property was “irrevocably dedicated” to these agreed purposes. …

Mr. Altman became OpenAI, Inc.’s CEO in 2019.  On September 22, 2020, OpenAI entered into an agreement with Microsoft, exclusively licensing to Microsoft its Generative PreTrained Transformer (GPT)-3 language model.  However, OpenAI published a detailed paper describing the internals and training data for GPT-3, enabling the community to create similar models themselves.  And most critically, the Microsoft license only applied to OpenAI’s pre-AGI technology.  Microsoft obtained no rights to AGI.  It was up to OpenAI, Inc.’s non-profit board, not Microsoft, to determine when OpenAI attained AGI. …

In 2023, defendants Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and OpenAI set the founding agreement aflame.  In March 2023, OpenAI released its most powerful language model yet, GPT-4.  GPT-4 is not just capable of reasoning.  It is better at reasoning than average humans.  It scored in the 90^thpercentile on the Uniform Bar Exam for lawyers.  It scored in the 99^th percentile on the GRE Verbal Assessment.  It even scored a 77% on the Advanced Sommelier examination.  At this time, Mr. Altman caused OpenAI to radically depart from its original mission and historical practice of making its technology and knowledge available to the public.  GPT-4’s internal design was kept and remains a complete secret except to OpenAI – and on information and belief, Microsoft.  There are no scientific publications describing the design of GPT-4.  Instead, there are just press releases bragging about performance.  On information and belief, this secrecy is primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety.  Although developed by OpenAI using contributions from plaintiff and others that were intended to benefit the public, GPT-4 is now a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm, which it has integrated into its Office software suite.  …

Furthermore, on information and belief, GPT-4 is an AGI algorithm and hence, expressly outside the scope of Microsoft’s September 2020 exclusive license with OpenAI. …

A board coup took place in November 2023.  On November 17, 2023, OpenAI, Inc.’s board fired Mr. Altman after losing “confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI” because “he was not consistently candid with the board.”  In a series of stunning developments spanning the next several days, Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman, in concert with Microsoft, exploited Microsoft’s significant leverage over OpenAI, Inc. and forced the resignation of a majority of OpenAI, Inc.’s board members, including Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.  Mr. Altman was reinstated as CEO of OpenAI, Inc. on November 21.  On information and belief, the new board members were hand-picked by Mr. Altman and blessed by Microsoft. …

This case is filed to compel OpenAI to adhere to the founding agreement and return to its mission to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity, not to personally benefit the individual defendants and the largest technology company in the world.

November 2023 To Present: Altman’s OpenAI

The public is still in the dark regarding what exactly the board’s “deliberative review process” revealed that resulted in the initial firing of Mr. Altman.  However, one thing is clear to Mr. Musk and the public at large: OpenAI has abandoned its “irrevocable” non-profit mission in the pursuit of profit.  Numerous leaders and intellectuals have publicly commented on the irony and tragedy of OpenAI becoming “Closed, For-Profit AI.” …

Defendants have breached the founding agreement in multiple separate ways, including at least by:

Failing to disclose to the public, among other things, details on GPT-4’s architecture, hardware, training method and training computation and further by erecting a “paywall” between the public and GPT-4, requiring per-token payment for usage, in order to advance defendants and Microsoft’s own private commercial interests, despite agreeing that OpenAI’s technology would be open-source, balancing only countervailing safety considerations.

Wherefore, plaintiff prays for judgment against defendants as follows: for an order compelling specific performance of defendants’ repeated contractual promises including, without limitation, an order requiring that defendants continue to follow OpenAI’s longstanding practice of making AI research and technology developed at OpenAI available to the public and an order prohibiting defendants from utilizing OpenAI, Inc. or its assets for the financial benefit of the individual defendants, Microsoft or any other particular person or entity.

May the good guys win and moral capitalism be vindicated by law!

Two recent press reports provide information on President Trump or his agents buying and selling shares in companies whose financial fortunes turn on securing profitable contracts or permissions from the federal government working under Trump’s personal direction.

Under the Caux Round Table Principles for Government, “power given by public office is held in trust for the benefit of the community and its citizens.  Officials are custodians only of the powers they hold.  They have no personal entitlement to office or the prerogatives thereof.”

Taking selfish advantage of public power for personal gain or other advantage is an abuse of such trusteeship authority and may constitute, under the U.S. Constitution, an impeachable offence warranting removal from office.

The first report was in Bloomberg, published by Bill Allison and Jessica Menton.

The transactions, spelled out in more than 100 pages of documents filed Thursday with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, list purchases and sales in broad ranges, making it hard to calculate an exact value.  But the volume of trading – more than 40 per day over a three-month period – stands out as much as the potential dollar value. …

“This is an insane amount of trades,” said Matthew Tuttle, chief executive officer of Tuttle Capital Management, in an interview, adding that it looks more like something done by “a hedge fund with massive algo trades” that buys and shorts securities than a personal account. …

In the first quarter, the president bought at least $1 million each in companies including Nvidia Corp., Oracle Corp., Microsoft Corp., Boeing Co. and Costco Wholesale Corp., according to the documents.  Other trades involved eBay Inc., Abbott Laboratories, Uber Technologies Inc., AT&T Inc. and discount store Dollar Tree Inc. …

The disclosure reignites conflict-of-interest concerns that have shadowed Trump’s terms in the White House.  Critics have regularly accused him of mixing his official duties with his business interests.  Unlike his predecessors, Trump didn’t divest or move his assets into a blind trust with an independent overseer.  His sprawling business empire is managed by two of his sons and operates in several areas that intersect with presidential policy. …

Netflix Inc. and Paramount Skydance Corp. battled to acquire Warner Bros Discovery Inc. in a months-long fight with both suitors raising potential antitrust concerns.  Trump made investments related to all three companies.  He bought a modest stake in Warner Bros. in March, worth at least $30,000, a stake in Paramount Skydance worth at least $15,000 the same month. He also had 19 transactions naming Netflix, including sales worth as little as $1,000 and as much as $5 million during the first quarter. …

“All of this raises questions that you’d rather not raise as a president,” said Tuttle.  “So, now people are asking why is he buying Nvidia and other companies now?  When you’re the president, you know everything, so any stock you buy, there’s a huge question mark.” …

Trump’s biggest sales came on February 10, when he unloaded holdings in three technology firms: Microsoft, Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., in amounts between $5 million and $25 million.  He also sold a stake in a Vanguard ETF in January, worth at least $5 million.

The second report was written by Edith Olmsted and was published in the New Republic.

On February 10, Donald Trump purchased between $1 million and $5 million worth of stock in Nvidia, a massive AI chip maker.  A week later, Nvidia announced a major computer processing power deal with Meta. …

Trump previously purchased between $500,000 and $1 million worth of Nvidia stock on January 6, after clearing the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips, the company’s second-most powerful AI chip, to China.  A week later, the Commerce Department officially approved the sale.  This week, after Huang traveled with Trump to China, the Commerce Department cleared 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s chips – making way for Trump to make millions more. …

Also on January 6, Trump purchased between $50,000 and $100,000 worth of stock in AMD, another AI semiconductor company, which was authorized to sell their chips to Chinese customers a week later.  Trump purchased at least $740,000 in AMD stock last quarter, according to NOTUS. …

In the first quarter of 2026, Trump also purchased at least $260,000 worth of stock in Palantir, a private weapons manufacturer with hefty government contracts and ties to the president. …

In January, Trump bought between $65,000 to $150,000 of Palantir stock and sold between $1.1 million and roughly $5.3 million of it in February.  That same month, Palantir won a billion-dollar purchasing agreement with the Department of Homeland Security to use the company’s software to aid Trump’s sweeping deportation efforts. …

In March, Trump purchased between $200,000 and $500,000 in Palantir stock.  Last month, Trump made a public call for people to buy stock in Palantir – including the stock’s ticker symbol in his social media post – in an obvious effort at market manipulation.  A few weeks later, Palantir landed yet another major federal contract.

The Caux Round Table has proposed the following schema to describe the moral dynamic of systems of crony capitalism.  It uses philosopher Jurgen Habermas’s construction, where morality emerges in the engagement of normativity (at the top) through human agency, with facticity (at the bottom) and reciprocally, the engagement of facticity with normativity, similarly through human agency.

The contextualizing of capitalism, free markets and innovations has been with us since the dawn of capitalism.  What are we to make of the tulip mania in Holland or the South Sea Bubble in London?  Or worse, the Mississippi Bubble (1718–1720), a massive 18^th century financial crisis in France caused by the rapid inflation and subsequent collapse of shares in the Compagnie des Indes, managed by John Law?

Driven by speculative investments in French Louisiana, share prices soared from 500 to 18,000 livres before crashing, ruining many investors and causing severe economic damage.  Some have thought that the collapse of the company’s stock wiped out the new, precarious, rising middle class in France, which contributed to the extremisms of the French Revolution.

Outcomes are realities which can be scrutinized from moral perspectives.

AI is now creating new realities.  What moral compasses are needed to frame our appreciation of AI?  What modalities are needed to impose that frame on the practices, production processes and products of AI?

In a recent piece for The Economist, Shuwei Fang of Harvard writes of AI from this perspective:

The conversation about AI and the information economy is mostly about supply.  Content is being commoditized.  Journalism is dying.  Intellectual property is being scraped without consent or compensation.  The internet is being flooded with misinformation and slop. …

What’s missing here is that AI’s impact on the information ecosystem is also a demand-side shock and arguably, a demand-side expansion.

Every major information revolution, from printing to mobile, expanded the market for knowledge, often dramatically.  AI is likely to do the same, but is also categorically different: the world is entering the age of machine audiences. …

Consider what happens when someone asks an AI a question about the world.  The system draws on vast amounts of knowledge and other content, synthesizes what it deems relevant and gives an answer shaped to serve that person’s intentions.  That answer is entirely new and may never be seen again. …

But AI does not only create machine demand.  It simultaneously expands human demand too.  The obscure corners of information demand – very specific needs that no article or broadcast could ever serve before – become addressable.  Conversational AI brings latent demand to the surface too, helping people articulate needs they could not previously express.  And AI lowers cognitive barriers: complex information, once comprehensible only to specialists, becomes digestible by anyone who can ask a question. …

This market has barely begun to form.  There are no stable mechanisms to match and price the demand signal against the supply that could serve it.  The information supply chain that could run from how knowledge is sourced, through how agents exchange it, to how AI delivers comprehension to humans, has no common rails and no incentive structure to reward rigor over fluency. …

The disciplines that journalism and the scientific method developed over centuries – of truth-seeking, accountability and self-correction – are the very operating principles that market will require.

Yesterday, President Donald Trump said that his ceasefire agreement with Iran is “on life support” and that the most recent negotiating proposal was “a piece of garbage.”

In Iran: “There is no alternative but to accept the rights of the Iranian people as laid out in the 14-point proposal,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, speaker of Iran’s Parliament, wrote on social media.  “Any other approach will be completely inconclusive; nothing but one failure after another.  The longer they drag their feet, the more American taxpayers will pay for it.”

Napoleon, quite put off by the American conduct of this war, could be heard in the far distance saying again, “Gentlemen, if you set out to take Vienna, take it.”

I recently sat in on a lunch meeting where the agenda was simply “values.”

We were asked to talk about what is good and what is bad.  The comments and questions that followed were unsurprising for Americans these days, but the group anchored itself in respectful listening.

But one member put on the table a list of behaviors associated with good motivations and others associated with “less than helpful” approaches to life.

Here is a list of those latter behaviors.  If they were to be associated with a prominent personality, who might come to mind?

Addictive, acquisitive, prohibiting, conquering, authoritarian, egotistical, competitive, controlling, dominating, insensitive, suspicious, aggressive, self-preserving, hierarchical, isolated, absolutist, contemptuous, closed/secretive, given to pretense, comfort-seeking, divisive.

These expressions of personality were associated with fear-based, materialistic, defensive approaches to life by Demi Miller of St. Paul, Minnesota.

When an earlier generation of Caux Round Table members discussed and settled upon certain ethical principles for a moral capitalism, the encyclical of Pope John Paul II, Centesimus Annus, provided welcome guidance.  Encyclicals provide the Catholic Church with social thought or as some say, social teachings.

The 1991 encyclical was written by Pope John Paul II to mark the 100^th anniversary of the first encyclical – authored by Pope Leo XIII to provide moral guidance for the post-feudal economic system of capitalism.

Such advocacy of what should be for the best in our earthly ambitions, ideals and daily practices reflects theology and intuitions of the divine, but confronts the realities of human-ness.

When, some years after presenting ethical principles for moral capitalism, under the leadership of then-chair Winston Wallin, former CEO of Medtronic, the Caux Round Table published ethical principles for moral government.  These principles were designed to provide moral capitalism with legal and regulatory foundations, drawing forth personal and social endorsement of and the actual practice of the fitting behaviors that would further moral capitalism’s idealism in business and finance.

No reliance was made then on Catholic social teachings.

However, several days ago, Pope Leo XIV spoke to a plenary session of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences convened to consider the uses of power: legitimacy, democracy and the international order.

I attach a copy of the Pope’s message (apologies for it being a little crooked on the page).

I also attach a copy of our Principles for Moral Government.

I am encouraged and reassured by the harmony between our principles and Catholic social teachings as presented by Pope Leo XIV.

Providing foundational rationality for moral government, in all cultures and religious traditions, empowers humanity to rise above abuses of power and the use of political governance as a tool of intolerance and oppression.

Which of these two men is the least admirable as a worthy leader?

When does anyone – president or not – risk going against the first of the Ten Commandments – “You shall have no other gods before me” – not even yourself?