• In today’s CEO Daily: Diane Brady talks to Sunrun CEO Mary Powell about the future of energy in the U.S.
• The big story: Trump caves on Powell and China
• The markets: Investors love it when the president does a U-turn.
• Analyst notes from Convera on the dollar, JPMorgan on Alphabet, and Oxford Economics on tariff uncertainty.
• Plus: All the news and watercooler chat from Fortune.
Good morning. Sunrun CEO Mary Powell shared an interesting video with me when we met recently after the Los Angeles wildfires. It showed some of her customers talking about having electric power in neighborhoods with outages because they had Sunrun’s solar and home backup storage. The company now has a partnership with Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) to tap such homes for load relief in neighborhoods with constrained electric grids. But this is a challenging time to be in the renewable energy industry. While solar is being whacked by tariffs, wind power has arguably been especially hard hit as the Trump Administration has made moves such as halting Equinor’s turbine project in New York.
Powell likes to talk about Sunrun as “America’s clean energy company” by embracing a storage-first strategy that brings a gigawatt of capacity to the grid each year. Her message to policymakers: “We are about bringing Americans not just energy independence, but control of their energy future,” she says. “I also say we are building America’s largest distributed power plant because all those residential customers can export energy back to the grid when the grid needs it the most.”
Talking about energy security resonates in a way that climate change and “clean” energy do not. (Raise your hand if your company trumpeted its sustainability efforts to mark Earth Day yesterday.)
That’s not always the case in the rest of the world. Earlier this week, I met with Sumant Sinha, chairman and CEO of India’s ReNew Energy before he headed to Washington for the IMF World Bank Spring Meetings. Like Sunrun, he listed the company on Nasdaq, only to see its stock price fall amid headwinds from inflation to shifting trade policies. That’s why Sinha has taken part in discussions to go private. But he’s optimistic about the growth picture for renewable energy in his home market.
While the U.S. may be pulling back on some types of renewable energy, he argues, “I think the rest of the world is just going to carry on.” What gives me hope are initiatives like Yes SF, an innovation challenge launched by the World Economic Forum, Citi, Deloitte, Salesforce, and the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce to revitalize downtown San Francisco. Yesterday it announced its second cohort of innovators and is now going global.
More news below.
Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com
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Trump says he will back down on China. The trade tariffs will “come down substantially, but it won’t be zero,” he said yesterday.
Bessent calls China standoff unsustainable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s comments came at a closed-door investor summit hosted by JPMorgan. Bessent will deliver further remarks on “the state of the global financial system” at the IIF this morning.
Trump won’t fire Powell. A day after threatening to fire Fed Chair Jerome Powell, Trump said, “I have no intention of firing him.”
Fitch Ratings’ chief economist fears stagflation. Brian Coulton, the chief economist at Fitch Ratings, told Fortune that Trump’s tariff push will lead to higher inflation and interest rates and could bring about stagflation. Read the full interview here.
Putin offers to halt the invasion of Ukraine. Moscow’s proposal is to freeze the war along the current frontlines. The plan would require Ukraine to accept the permanence of Russia’s invasion. Zelensky says it is unacceptable to reward Moscow this way.
Tesla reports Q1 earnings. Tesla reported a 20% drop in auto sales in Q1 earnings on Tuesday. The company pointed to “uncertainty in the automotive and energy markets” as the reason for the losses, but shares in the company jumped 3.5% in after-hours trading as the company announced its anticipated Model Y will launch by mid-2025, along with robotaxis in Austin in 2026.
Musk said he would restrict his work at DOGE to one or two days per week starting in May, and refocus on running Tesla. He also blamed trade restrictions and “political sentiment” for holding back sales.
Instagram founder Kevin Systrom said Mark Zuckerberg deliberately throttled his app by starving it of development resources in 2018 because Zuckerberg believed it was threatening Facebook's audience growth. Systrom was testifying in the FTC’s case against Meta, in which the government alleges that the social network functions like a monopoly that symies competition.
New investigation into Davos chief. The World Economic Forum received a new set of whistleblower allegations against founder Klaus Schwab: “It included allegations that Klaus Schwab asked junior employees to withdraw thousands of dollars from ATMs on his behalf and used Forum funds to pay for private, in-room massages at hotels. It also alleged that his wife Hilde, a former Forum employee, scheduled ‘token’ Forum-funded meetings in order to justify luxury holiday travel at the organization’s expense,” the WSJ reports. Schwab denies the allegations.
The markets
Investors liked the softening tone they heard yesterday from Trump and Bessent on the trade war and the Fed, and markets are rising globally on the news. The S&P 500 rose 2.51% yesterday. Futures contracts on the S&P were up 2.16% this morning, pre-opening. (The S&P is nonetheless down 10% YTD.) The Nasdaq Composite closed up 2.71%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 1.89% this morning. Mainland Chinese indexes are flat. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng was up 2.37%. The Stoxx Europe 600 and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 were both up 1.6% in early trading.
From the analysts
• Convera on the dollar: “Trump’s remarks have intensified fears about the independence of the US central bank, undermining confidence in the dollar’s safe-haven status,” per George Vessey.
• JPMorgan on Alphabet: “Macro and tariff-related concerns continue to weigh on advertising names, including Google, and after assessing the impact across sub-sectors we recently reduced estimates across our coverage, including taking Google down to a hopefully-too-punitive 3% reported Search growth this year,” per Doug Anmuth et al.
• Oxford Economics on tariff uncertainty: “Those factors are likely to sustain the breakdown in the usual correlations between Treasuries and risk assets. That is, Treasuries may see less benefit from global safe-haven flows until market participants have more confidence in the outlook for future policy,” per John Canavan.
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