Jonathan Guilford

Elon Musk has arrived. Shares of his electric car-maker Tesla added roughly $100 billion in value when markets opened Wednesday following Donald Trump’s presidential election victory. Musk backed the Republican to the hilt, and his vast web of business interests overlap – worryingly – with his new political role. The converse risk is that this puts him in the firing line of not only the trade war,

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Follow on Apple or Spotify. Listen on the Reuters app. Read the episode transcript.

With a trustbusting renaissance probably winding down, President Joe Biden’s team is trying to make the most of the era before it's gone. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit this week, after the electorate voted to put Donald Trump back into the White House, seeking to block healthcare titan UnitedHealth from buying home-care rival Amedisys for $3.3 billion. Competition authorities argue it would hurt patients, again going beyond the orthodoxy of using prices as the arbiter of harm.

Everyone investing in private markets agrees: to go big, you have to go small. Alternative asset managers which dabble in private equity, real estate, and infrastructure grew large and rich by raising money from pension funds, endowments, and other big custodians of cash. Now they are increasingly turning to smaller individual investors. Their estimates of how much is up for grabs range from tens to hundreds of trillions of dollars. The discrepancies betray difficult trade-offs inherent in designing new products - and in squeezing into tight regulations. No wonder investors are taking a wait-and-see approach.

Once seemingly outrageous predictions about the trajectory of cryptocurrency bitcoin now look much less crazy.

With $31 bln of debt, deep links to the banking system and a star role in India’s energy transition, the tycoon’s empire is a crucial part of the fifth-largest economy. In this week’s Viewsroom, Breakingviews columnists discuss how US bribery charges will test those dependencies.

BlackRock , oddly enough, is looking a lot more like a streaming service. The index-fund goliath agreed to buy private lender HPS for $12 billion, to get its hands on the hottest new content to push through its formidable pipes. It’s a strategy that sometimes only partly works. Just ask Apple.

Dealmakers are getting excited after two years of middling M&A. For one thing, they’re happily waving goodbye to a consolidation-skeptical agenda that has contributed to the sluggish growth in merger activity. A judge’s decision on Tuesday to block grocer Kroger’s $25 billion acquisition of rival Albertsons , however, suggests that chief executives and their consiglieri are getting ahead of themselves.

Threats of tariffs or banning telecommunications equipment were the easy part. TikTok illustrates what happens when the trade war gets difficult.