--:-- Alex Osola: Behind those warm and cozy nights at home, thousands of employees at BP go to work every day. People producing more U.S. natural gas. People building grid-scale solar capacity. People turning landfill waste gas into pipeline-quality renewable natural gas. And people delivering all of that power where it's needed. They're part of almost 300,000 jobs BP supports across the country. Learn more at BP.com slash investing in America.
--:-- Alex Osola: The government shutdown will extend into the weekend after a vote to fund it failed in the Senate. Plus, a delay on a chips deal is frustrating Trump administration officials, NVIDIA and the United Arab Emirates. I think they're just concerned that it won't be a priority and won't get done in a timely manner, which in AI world, if a deal sits on the shelf for six months, nine months, a year, That's a long time, given how quickly the tech is progressing.
--:-- Alex Osola: And Hamas agrees to release the remaining hostages in Gaza with conditions. It's Friday, October 3rd. I'm Alex Osola for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.
--:-- Alex Osola: President Trump set a Sunday deadline for Hamas to agree to a ceasefire in Gaza, giving the group an ultimatum that otherwise, quote, all hell, like no one has ever seen before, will break out. The warning comes as Trump aims to have the U.S.-designated terrorist group sign onto a peace deal that the U.S. and Israel agreed to on Monday.
--:-- Alex Osola: Late today, Hamas responded to Trump's peace plan, saying that it was ready to release the remaining hostages in Gaza as long as certain conditions of a broader peace agreement were met. The group offered no clear position on other elements of President Trump's 20-point plan and asked for several clarifications, including a timeline for Israeli forces to withdraw from Gaza, clarification over defensive and offensive weapons, as well as guarantees over ending the war.
--:-- Alex Osola: Apple said today that it has blocked apps that enable users to track U.S. immigration and customs enforcement agents after pressure from the Justice Department.
--:-- Alex Osola: Rolf Winkler covers Apple for the journal and joins me now. Rolf, there's this one popular app called IceBlock that's at the center of this conversation. Why did the Justice Department ask Apple to remove it specifically?
--:-- Rolf Winkler: The Justice Department has said a recent shooting outside of an ICE facility, the perpetrator of that shooting had searched for ICE tracking apps. So I think they felt that an app like this could be a threat to law enforcement.
--:-- Alex Osola: The developer behind ICE block, what did they say about this move?
--:-- Rolf Winkler: The app developer in an email to us said this is capitulating to an authoritarian government. Their feeling is this is no different than the Waze traffic app. You can report that there's a policeman there to allow people to avoid law enforcement. That's their argument.
--:-- Alex Osola: And so Apple which of course agreed to remove this app from its app store I really curious what this shows about Apple relationship with the Trump administration Tim Cook in particular Apple CEO has worked hard to stay close to the administration. Apple are in the crosshairs in some respects when it comes to Trump's trade policy. They have a foreign supply chain based largely in China, and they're worried about tariffs. So they need to stay close to the administration to make sure they get tariff
--:-- Alex Osola: Thanks, Rolf. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Alex Osola: Senate Democrats this afternoon blocked Republicans' seven-week stopgap spending bill, effectively guaranteeing that the government shutdown will stretch into next week. The GOP measure failed with 54 in favor and 44 opposed. Republicans control the chamber 53 to 47, but needed 60 votes to advance the measure under Senate rules.
--:-- Alex Osola: Earlier in the day, the Trump administration froze $2.1 billion in federal funds allocated for subway projects in Chicago. It's the latest budgetary maneuver targeting Democratic priorities and projects during the continuing government shutdown.
--:-- Alex Osola: Major U.S. indexes were mixed today, a day after all three closed at fresh peaks. The Dow climbed about half a percent to a new all-time high. The S&P 500 also cinched a new record close, rising by less than 0.1 percent. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq slipped by about 0.3 percent.
--:-- Alex Osola: We're exclusively reporting that a multi-billion dollar deal to send NVIDIA's artificial intelligence chips to the United Arab Emirates is stuck in neutral nearly five months after it was signed. People familiar with the matter say the delay is frustrating NVIDIA CEO Jensen Wang and some senior administration officials who hope to see the deal advance quickly to highlight a new U.S. tech strategy focused on exports.
--:-- Alex Osola: WSJ tech policy reporter Amrith Ramkumar is here now with more. Amrith, this deal was announced back in May. What do we know about what it entails?
--:-- Amrith Ramkumar: We still actually don't know a lot about this deal. But basically, the high-level idea is NVIDIA is going to send a lot of chips to the UAE, and U.S. companies mostly will operate there, like Microsoft, OpenAI, etc. They will use those chips to build data centers for trading AI models. And then a UAE company called G42 will be working with the U.S. companies, and they may or may not get chips directly themselves.
--:-- Alex Osola: And what is the holdup?
--:-- Amrith Ramkumar: It's not really clear what the holdup is, and it depends what day you're asking. Howard Lutnick, the Commerce Secretary who's champion of the deal, he's key to getting the deal done. We heard that he and others were a bit concerned about G42, this UAE firm, potentially getting up to 500,000 chips a year, given that the country has a close relationship with China.
--:-- Alex Osola: The worst case scenario with all of these deals is chips somehow end up in the wrong hands and end up benefiting China, the U.S. adversary and top competitor in the AI race.
--:-- Amrith Ramkumar: More recently, we've been hearing that Lutnik wanting to make sure the UAE finalizes its investment in the U.S. as part of the deal, basically at a one-to-one ratio. That's not a huge commitment for the UAE because they had already committed to invest trillion over 10 years
--:-- Alex Osola: Are there some fears floating around that this deal ultimately won't go through?
--:-- Amrith Ramkumar: I think they just concerned that it won't be a priority and won't get done in a timely manner which in AI world, if a deal sits on the shelf for six months, nine months, a year, that's a long time given how quickly the tech is progressing.
--:-- Alex Osola: And then some administration officials tell me they're worried it makes the U.S. look like an unreliable partner to these countries. They say that sort of incentivizes these countries to go ask China what they can do.
--:-- Alex Osola: Okay, stakes are definitely high for the U.S. then. What is the significance of this deal for NVIDIA and for the UAE?
--:-- Amrith Ramkumar: The export strategy and making inroads in some of these other markets is huge for NVIDIA's growth potential. When you do have a near monopoly in like the U.S. and a lot of the Western world, it is hard to look at what other markets there are that you can go and account for pretty strong growth rates.
--:-- Alex Osola: For the UAE, they're desperate to get their hands on the best U.S. technology, trying to modernize their economy and diversify away from oil, and they're trying to play a role in the AI race.
--:-- Alex Osola: So everyone's definitely on edge, waiting for progress.
--:-- Alex Osola: That was WSJ tech policy reporter Amrith Ramkumar. Thanks, Amrith. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Alex Osola: Coming up, what's better than one CEO? Some companies say two CEOs. More on that after the break.
--:-- Alex Osola: And explore a different kind of schizophrenia treatment. Discover your possibilities at TreatingSCZ.com.
--:-- Alex Osola: In other news, a federal judge sentenced Sean Diddy Combs to just over four years in prison today for his conviction on prostitution offenses. Combs was convicted of two counts after a seven-week trial, during which his former girlfriends testified about days-long, drug-fueled sex sessions involving prostitutes. But jurors rejected more serious charges that Combs ran a criminal enterprise and committed sex trafficking, allowing him to avoid a maximum potential sentence of life.
--:-- Alex Osola: President Trump ordered another lethal military strike on an alleged drug trafficking boat in the Caribbean early today. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in a social media post that on Trump's orders, he had directed a strike on a, quote, narco-trafficking vessel that he said was affiliated with designated terrorist organizations.
--:-- Alex Osola: He wrote that the strike was conducted in international waters just off the coast of Venezuela and killed four men aboard.
--:-- Alex Osola: And BlackRock's new artificial intelligence infrastructure consortium is close to an agreement to acquire aligned data centers for about $20 billion. That's according to people familiar with the matter. A deal of that size would be the latest sign that the AI build-out is consuming capital at a historic pace and drawing attention from deep investors around the world
--:-- Alex Osola: As we reported on the show earlier this week Spotify CEO Daniel Ek is stepping down to be succeeded by two people the company current co Spotify is far from the only company that has recently decided that two heads are better than one. Oracle and Comcast are two others.
--:-- Alex Osola: Chip Cutter covers workplace management and leadership for the journal and joins me now. Chip, what is the argument in favor of having two CEOs instead of one?
--:-- Chip Cutter: The rationale for this is that the CEO job is really demanding. So why not split that job up and have some people take on, say, the tech and engineering responsibilities others might handle, the more creative sides of the job, the sales sides of the job. So the idea is let people with different expertise both do their thing.
--:-- Alex Osola: Is this a common setup?
--:-- Chip Cutter: It's pretty rare among the biggest companies. We looked at the Russell 3000, a measure of the largest 3,000 U.S. companies, and there's 33 companies who've had co-CEOs this year. What was interesting was that chiefs at two-thirds of those included or replaced a founder. So this is particularly common among founders who say, listen, I started this company. I don't know how I feel about passing the baton to one person. I might want two people to be my replacement.
--:-- Alex Osola: So these, granted, not too many examples that we have of co-CEOs, what has the track record been? How has it gone?
--:-- Chip Cutter: Companies typically abandon the model after oftentimes just a short period of time so we've seen salesforce try this twice in recent years mark benioff has then ended up holding the sole ceo job after these experiments we've seen other companies pull back just realizing it was too difficult or just thinking it wasn't the right structure for the most part you see there's a bit of a power struggle here where employees don't know who to go to to get answers there's sometimes questions about who bears ultimate responsibility if something goes awry and so that's why you typically see companies shy away from this.
--:-- Alex Osola: And yet, as you write in your story, shareholders really seem to like it. Why is that?
--:-- Chip Cutter: There was an analysis published in Harvard Business Review in 2022, and it looked at 87 companies with co-CEOs. Found, on average, they posted total shareholder returns that were better than those led by just one CEO. The best example recently is Netflix. Netflix has now had this model for a number of years. From everyone we've talk to, it seems to largely be working. The way that they do it, one CEO inside Netflix is largely focused on data and product. And then there's another CEO who really is the Hollywood czar, the one who knows how to work with talent and has that savviness for dealing with content. So you put both of them together, it seems to work.
--:-- Alex Osola: That was WSJ reporter Chip Cutter. Thanks, Chip. Thanks for having me.
--:-- Alex Osola: And that's what's news for this week. Tomorrow, you can look out for our weekly markets wrap-up, What's News in Markets? Then on Sunday, as recent drone incursions in Europe have shown, drone technology has evolved a lot on the battlefields of Ukraine. We'll dig into how they got there, what drones can do, and how they're shaping the business of war. That's in What's New Sunday.
--:-- Alex Osola: And we'll be back with our regular show on Monday morning. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bien-Aimé and Rodney Davis, with supervising producer Jana Heron. Michael LaValle wrote our theme music. Aisha El-Muslim is our development producer. Chris Zinsley is our deputy editor. And Falana Patterson is the Wall Street Journal's head of news audio. I'm Alex Osola. Thanks for listening.
