Market Executives Investors

Chip Selloff Drags Nasdaq to Worst Week in a Month; Antitrust Questions Loom Over Semiconductor Dominance

The Nasdaq fell nearly 3% for the week ending July 18th — its worst seven-day stretch in over a month — as investors rotated out of semiconductor and AI-adjacent stocks into sectors like banking that had underperformed during the AI rally. S&P futures on Saturday morning were sitting around 7,497, down roughly 80 points, suggesting selling pressure had not yet exhausted itself. Elon Musk's net worth fell below 800 billion dollars after a failed Starship launch drove SpaceX shares to a post-IPO low; his peak fortune was approximately 1.45 trillion dollars weeks earlier, implying a decline of more than 650 billion dollars from peak.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang predicted this week that semiconductors will become the world's largest industry, driven by AI compute demand scaling to a degree that would surpass oil and gas and financial services in economic magnitude. The prediction arrives against a backdrop of growing antitrust scrutiny: Nvidia controls an estimated 80% of the AI chip market by some measures, though under the Sherman Antitrust Act's Section Two, market share alone does not establish liability. What regulators would need to prove is that Nvidia achieved or maintained dominance through anticompetitive conduct — exclusive dealing, predatory pricing — rather than through superior products, an evidentiary standard substantially harder to meet than simply demonstrating concentration.

The SEC voted to advance a rule allowing public companies to report financial results semiannually rather than quarterly, despite receiving more than 200,000 opposition comments — the largest comment volume in the agency's history. Proponents argue quarterly reporting drives short-termism in corporate management; opponents counter that moving to six-month reporting windows gives insiders a sustained information advantage over retail investors, undermining the disclosure principles the SEC exists to enforce.

Morgan Stanley executives sold millions in dollars of stock following a record quarter, a move that while consistent with planned diversification strategies raised natural questions about whether insiders view the record results as a high-water mark given geopolitical uncertainty in investment banking pipelines. GameStop's Ryan Cohen publicly vowed to pursue eBay 'one way or another,' signaling acquisition ambitions in e-commerce platforms despite the significant gap between the two companies' market capitalizations. Hyundai completed its acquisition of Boston Dynamics' remaining shares from SoftBank in a 325-million-dollar deal that valued the robotics firm at approximately 3.4 billion dollars — more than triple SoftBank's roughly one-billion-dollar acquisition valuation in 2021.