USA INC

THE BUSINESS WORLD IS ADJUSTING TO DONALD TRUMP, CEO-IN-CHIEF. HIS ONE OVERARCHING GOAL: MAKING DEALS.

- BY GEOFF COLVIN

ON DEC.3, 2025, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang walked into the Oval Office for a one-on-one meeting. The only other person privy to the conversation was the current occupant, Donald Trump. Huang later said only that they “talked in general about export controls,” and Trump said almost nothing about the meeting. But five days later, Trump and Nvidia announced an extraordinary policy shift: Rather than continue to be classified as a serious crime, sending Nvidia's H200 chips to China was suddenly not just allowed—it was a welcome new source of revenue, with the U.S. government extracting a 25% share of every chip sold.

The deal was vintage Trump and a telling anecdote for business leaders about how the business world now works under Trump 2.0. In the first year of his second term, Trump has rewritten the government's relationship with business more radically than any predecessor. He started by imposing new tariffs on scores of countries, scrambling business models at millions of companies big and small. He has intervened in other ways. Think of Skydance’s August purchase of Paramount, which required federal government approval; the deal went through after Paramount agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit he had brought. When Netflix announced a plan to buy Warner Bros., Trump said, “I’ll be involved in that decision.” He and his family have made deals in industries heavily shaped by government policies, including crypto, defense, and chips.