Why the Pentagon Is Hiring Wall Street Bankers

Ed Elson speaks with Liz Hoffman about the Defense Department’s new economic defense unit. Then he is joined by Miriam Gottfried to discuss the $10 billion fee the Trump administration received for brokering the TikTok deal. Finally, Ed shares his reflections on his time at SXSW. Miriam Gottfried is a reporter at The Wall Street Journal. Liz Hoffman is Semafor’s Business and Finance Editor, and host of Compound Interest. Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [email protected] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:29Ed Elson?

  Today's number four. That's how many Oscar nominations Timothy Chalamet has received. However, he has still never won. Today's other number is 100,000. That's how many ballerinas celebrated on Sunday night.

• 1:47Speaker 04

  Money markets, Matt. If money is evil, then that building is hell.

• 1:56Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Prof you markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is March 17th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals.

• 2:04Ed Elson?

  The major indices climbed as Trump called on other nations to help secure traffic through the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices declined on that news. The yield on 10-year treasuries also fell and the dollar dropped the most in more than a month. Okay, what else is happening? The Pentagon is seeking unusual hires, specifically Wall Street bankers. The Defense Department is recruiting investment bankers for a new 30-person Economic Defense Unit. The team would be tasked with identifying strategic investment opportunities and deploying as much as $200 billion over the next three years. And the money would be directed towards sectors considered vital to national security, including mineral extraction, drones, and energy.

• 2:48Ed Elson?

  According to the government's presentation, the goal is to prevent China from gaining military superiority, to lure top talent. The Pentagon is offering high salaries, access to foreign contacts, and the chance to manage, quote, "more capital than most investors deploy in their entire careers." Here to discuss this is the journalist who broke this story, Liz Hoffman, Semaphore's Business and Finance Editor and host of Compound Interest. Liz, welcome back to Prof G Markets. First, tell us, what do we know about this new investment banking recruiting operation that Trump has initiated here? What is interesting or striking to you about it?

• 3:28Liz Hoffman?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, through, you know, the military budget, through these trade deals that the Trump administration has been striking with foreign countries, and with a bunch of other things that they're working on to kind of, as the Treasury Secretary calls it, kind of monetize the national balance sheet. You know, the Trump administration is going to end up with a couple hundred billion dollars, maybe more than a trillion dollars, kind of to invest and has a lot of ideas kind of about its priorities, but its challenge is going to be finding things to buy and invest in. And, you know, it's one thing to say, we'll just take 10% stake in Intel. It's a pretty well-known company, pretty important to national security, but there's a long tail of things that they're going to want to go after, and finding those deals

• 4:11Liz Hoffman?

  is what Wall Street investment bankers do for a living. They are explicitly hiring what in Wall Street is called coverage bankers, and every industry has them. So you might be a coverage banker covering industrials companies, or energy companies, or retailers. And there are coverage bankers for private equity firms. Their clients are the Blackstones and K Kars and Carliles of the world. And their job is to know what these guys own, what they might be willing to sell, and then to try to find the money to put those deals together. So that's the unit that's being put together here. And as you correctly know, as the Pentagon correctly dangles, this is a jaw dropping amount of money and could be a very fun playground for Wall Street investor bankers. And judging by kind of the inbound that I received, saying, who do I call to get this job? It is a fairly juicy opportunity, I think.

• 4:56Ed Elson?

  And so what is actually the point of this? It's for the US government to continue to buy up stakes in private companies? I mean, is that essentially what is happening here?

• 5:07Liz Hoffman?

  I think so. I mean, we published what we know. So I, you know, I've been calling around and not gotten a lot more detail. But I think that's the idea. I mean, the government through the Defense Department and the Department of Commerce probably have stakes in 12 or 15 private companies right now. And, you know, they are a way to ensure domestic supply of really important things. They can be a way to provide financing that, for whatever reason, the private sector won't. You know, there's sort of early stage mining things that are pretty hard to finance that the government might say, yeah, we'll do that. And then they are obviously politically a thing that Donald Trump really likes. He likes doing deals.

• 5:51Liz Hoffman?

  And, you know, huge parts of the government have kind of retrofitted themselves and huge parts of the corporate world, too, have kind of, you know, retrofitted themselves around satisfying that impulse.

• 6:01Ed Elson?

  What do you make of the crossover here that we're seeing between the public sector and the private sector, which is usually the kind of thing that people are worried that a socialist or a communist would be responsible for? This idea that we will go in and seize the means. We will buy up stakes in private companies. Now we own the private company. Now we control it. We're going to have golden shares in US Steel to give government more control. And now the plan is to deploy $200 billion, pay these bankers huge amounts of money to essentially, I mean, I don't think I'm saying this incorrectly, give the US government control of critical infrastructure and private companies that have historically been owned by

• 6:46Ed Elson?

  The private sector.

• 6:47Liz Hoffman?

  Yeah, I should say sadly, I did not see an employment term sheet for this, this, this job. I guess it's actually they're probably not going to pay them huge sums of money. You know, and again, I'm not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, but I do think that if you go into government for a term of service, you can sell a lot of your stock on a tax deferred basis, which is very attractive to these people. And then the other thing they're dangling is you will make connections in government that you can then turn around and go back to the private sector and monetize. So my guess is that this is probably not hugely expensive for the taxpayer on the personnel side.

• 7:19Liz Hoffman?

  I mean, the concern you have in this situation, if you go back, what was this, 15 years to the Obama administration, there was a deal that they did to the Department of Energy, they lent money to a company called Solyndra, it was a green energy company and it fell down and it became just an albatross around the neck of the Obama administration. And the lesson out of that, which is sort of a textbook lesson, which is that you don't want government picking winners and losers, because A, it's not very good at it, and B, even if it is good at it, like, to whom does that benefit accrue? It's, it's not clear that if they buy, by the way, they're up on their stake in Intel, but like, I'm not getting a check as a, as a taxpayer, right? And so you have to think about what you're trying to solve for.

• 8:02Liz Hoffman?

  And so generally, it's the places where you might be able to justify it, sort of in a more academic setting, is things that for whatever reason, the market just isn't willing to finance. No, the government has lots of ways to help that happen anyway. Think about like, no one would build missile systems if the Pentagon wasn't, didn't have a huge contract to buy them, right? They, you know, the government spends money in ways that make things financeable. So, I don't know, you know, when I talked to some folks about this, they said, is this interesting to you? And the answer is, yeah, it sounds fun, but you do have to worry about adverse selection. And the other thing I would note is that private equity firms are sitting on And an epic historic backlog of companies that they have been unable to sell, like something like three or four trillion dollars worth of stuff sitting in their portfolios

• 8:46Liz Hoffman?

  because the IPO market has been sluggish, the particular kinds of M and A have been sluggish. And, um, and they are desperate to offload this to somebody. And, um, and you'd have to worry a little bit if you're Pentagon that you become the dumb money here. And bringing in people who speak that language should probably help with that, I guess.

• 9:03Ed Elson?

  Right. And ultimately, those investments, I mean, you, you mentioned that the taxpayers probably aren't paying the salaries of the bankers, but if we're deploying $200 billion of capital from the treasury, and that's taxpayers' money, or at least that's going to be funded by deficit spending, that's what's going to fund the investments in these companies ultimately, is that right?

• 9:23Liz Hoffman?

  It certainly is. And I, you know, I guess on the front end, it's not totally clear to me where the money is coming from. Perhaps the NDAA, the, the military authorization, you know, the appropriations to fund the US military may have some money for this. You know, the Trump administration looks at these trade deals they're doing with Japan and Korea and Taiwan and saying, it's another couple hundred billion dollars that will likely get funneled through commerce and not the Defense Department. I don't really know. I mean, I, I don't think the ideal outcome here is to have a profitable, kind of constantly fundraising, self-sustaining private equity firm inside the Pentagon.

• 9:58Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 9:59Liz Hoffman?

  But the other thing I should note, by the way, is that, you know, the undersecretary at the Pentagon came from private equities, the former CEO of, co-founder of Cerberus. And there has been this really interesting tension, actually, inside the Pentagon between sort of two warring factions in finance and on Wall Street. And one is private equity and one is sort of Silicon Valley Venture, which has been playing a huge role in, uh, in the Defense Department and procurement. And actually, since you very graciously mentioned, we do have a new podcast and our episode coming out Tuesday is with, um, the partner in Andreessen Horowitz, who's been running their kind of America First Investments. And we talked a lot about why venture capital. Which has this kind of very capital light code DNA, like, why is it playing in these, like, bombs and drones and really heavy CapEx businesses?

• 10:44Liz Hoffman?

  And so there's a little bit of tension inside the Pentagon about this. And I think that their request specifically for private equity, Wall Street's are really dyed-in-the-wool, you know, Wall Street finance guys is probably, you know, telling to Deputy Undersecretary Feinberg's sort of personal experience.

• 11:01Ed Elson?

  Well, it does seem that if you're in the investing game, if you're in Silicon Valley and then you learn that we're going to see $200 billion in capital inflows basically overnight because of what Trump has decided to do, you probably should get to investing in these companies. I mean, $50 billion invested in defense tech in the whole of last year. Now we've got $200 billion in the pipeline coming from the government alone. You have to think that this is a great time to be a defense tech company. And then on top of that, something that I also just wanted to bring up to you and see what you see what you make of it. Trump's sons, Don Jr. and Eric, they recently invested in a drone company.

• 11:39Liz Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 11:40Ed Elson?

  Whose customers or one of his, one of its largest customers is the Pentagon, this company called Powerless, which they're now working on taking public. I read this headline or read this news that you reported here, that we're now planning to have $200 billion deployed at the direction of Trump that's going to go into defense companies, into defense tech companies, specifically drone companies. And it makes me think, well, is this money just going to go into the pockets of his sons?

• 12:07Liz Hoffman?

  I do not have a good answer for you on that. And I do not know, like, what level of outrage that would, that would spark. My guess is, like, some for some period of time and then, like, everything else, it would kind of just be absorbed into the ether. Yeah, you know, it's interesting. We had a story a couple of months ago, actually, my colleague Rachel Jones wrote this great story about companies sort of particularly looking to go public via SPACs and kind of twist themselves into, basically show a little leg for the Trump administration, trying, in fact, to get the government to buy 5% or 10% of their company. The other thing you got to wonder is, like, a lot of these stakes are just kind of being given, right? It's not totally clear what the economics are. And the Intel stake, this was money that was, had already been authorized to be granted

• 12:50Liz Hoffman?

  mostly or lent mostly granted to Intel under the CHIPS Act and the Biden administration. You know, Trump's Commerce Secretary Howard Lutney came along and said, well, what are we getting for that? And they got 10% of the company. So, you know, stock's up, you know, and that actually, I think, is sort of a textbook example of something. I was a little skeptical of that on the way in, but it seems to have marshaled private money followed, right? You know, government money is good when it, when it sort of sets a floor under something and encourages the private sector to take the first steps and then kind of do its due diligence, which obviously the market does on Intel every day. So.

• 13:25Ed Elson?

  Do you think this is the, the first step on the path towards a sovereign wealth fund in America?

• 13:31Liz Hoffman?

  I do. And, you know, my own personal view is that we don't need one. Like, countries that have sovereign wealth funds, they have them because they don't have all of the things that we have, which is like a really thriving private sector and a lot of very dynamic price discovery. And what they do have is like a lot of oil.

• 13:46Ed Elson?

  And usually a big pile of money that they can rely on versus a giant pile of debt.

• 13:52Liz Hoffman?

  Correct. Correct. And it doesn't usually end that well, because they tend to entrench, you know, strongmen and other, other things. But I do think that if you look at, again, you've got money coming in from trade deals. We'll see how real that is, but the Japanese seem serious about, about it. I think there's a meeting this week between the US and, and South Korean officials to kind of hammer that one out. You have a lot of money coming in on trade deals. You've got whatever they get to keep on the tariffs. You got whatever they raised by taking Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac public. You know, there's talk of privatizing the postal service. Like, I don't know exactly, but there are these national assets and, and Treasury Secretary Scott Besant has talked about monetizing the asset side of the national balance sheet. I don't know if this ends with us selling the Grand Canyon

• 14:34Liz Hoffman?

  or naming rights to Mount Rushmore or whatever. But, but you can start to see these, these piles of money. There's a $10 billion fee apparently coming to the US government from the TikTok deal, story in the Wall Street Journal the other day. So you start to put these things together, and it's a trillion dollars, which is the size of the largest sovereign wealth fund in the world, which depending on the day is either, I think, Saudi Arabia or Norway. So, I don't know. Again, I don't think that we need one because those exist generally to do things that the market does pretty efficiently here. But Donald Trump obviously wants one. And so you're starting to see the pieces get put together, whether it gets like organized in some. Some cohesive fashion, I don't know. It may end up being a bit of a tug of war between the Defense Department and Commerce and some various other agencies.

• 15:19Ed Elson?

  Yeah, it seems like you like the sound of it. And that's really what matters here. At least that's my view.

• 15:23Liz Hoffman?

  That does seem to be the operating principle in Washington.

• 15:26Ed Elson?

  Okay, Liz Hoffman, Semaphore's Business and Finance Editor and host of Compound Interest. Liz, thank you very much.

• 15:33Liz Hoffman?

  Thanks, always a pleasure.

• 15:36Ed Elson?

  After the break, the Trump administration collects their TikTok bag. And for even more markets insights, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter, Simply Put, at simplyput.profgmedia.com.

• 15:56Speaker 00

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• 17:29Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof. Markets. The Trump administration is set to collect one of the largest M&A fees in history. The government will reportedly pocket $10 billion for brokering the TikTok deal. That fee will be paid by the investors who took control of TikTok's US operations, including Oracle, MGX, and Silver Lake. The group has already put $2.5 billion into the US Treasury when the deal closed in January. Further payments will follow until the total hits $10 billion. To put that into perspective, the biggest M&A fee ever disclosed went to Bank of America for advising Norfolk Southern on its sale to Union Pacific last year. The total fee for that transaction was $130 million.

• 18:11Ed Elson?

  So here to break down what this $10 billion fee means for deal making under Trump, we're joined by Miriam Gottfried, Wall Street Journal reporter, who broke this story. Miriam, let's get right into this. Right off the bat, the number is astounding, especially if TikTok is valued at $14 billion, around 70% of the deal size. That's the broker fee. Have we ever seen anything like this before?

• 18:40Speaker 09

  I would say it's pretty much unprecedented. I hate to say it's the biggest ever because I'm not a deal historian, but it's certainly among the biggest ever. It's all but unprecedented.

• 18:50Ed Elson?

  This is strange that they are asking for money to be paid for brokering the deal as the government, right? Is that something that is new as well?

• 19:01Speaker 09

  It's certainly not something that I've heard of before, but you have to remember that the government, that Congress effectively banned TikTok in the US. So the situation was this app is going to go dark unless a sale to a US investor group happens. It was a unique situation to begin with that needed the government's help to facilitate a transaction. It needed government approval. The government had to say, this deal passes muster and satisfies our security concerns and will prevent the app from going dark.

• 19:34Ed Elson?

  The way you describe that, that makes sense. It's like it's the government's job to decide whether it's secure, whether the deal makes sense, whether it's figured out all of its national security concerns. But then it almost sounds like they're getting paid to say yes.

• 19:49Speaker 09

  Yeah, I mean, and that's what we don't know, right? I'm not a security expert. I didn't dig into the TikTok algorithm. I don't know the level of the plan that was put in place. But it's sort of like, oh, we got this really valuable app here. You guys want this valuable app? How much would it be worth for you to make this happen? You know, for, you know, for us to let this happen? It gives you that feeling that sort of, you know, this investor group needed the government and so it was sort of a price that had to be paid.

• 20:23Ed Elson?

  Right, which sounds concerning, at least to me. It also seems concerning the fact that the company's been valued at around $14 billion, or at least that's what JD Vance told us.

• 20:35Speaker 09

  Right, but analysts have said that that valuation is significantly lower than what it should have been. So that's something to keep in mind.

• 20:43Ed Elson?

  Right. That's the part that seems to be suspicious, which is, I wonder if the valuation was so low. I mean, the valuation makes no sense to me. This is a company that's worth $300 billion. We don't know what the revenue of TikTok US actually is, but I've heard that it's certainly higher than $10 billion, maybe close to $20 billion. If you're valuing this company at $14 billion, that just makes no sense at all when you compare it to other social media platforms. So I wonder if the valuation was artificially suppressed and then maybe this $10 billion is the price you pay to get in at such a ridiculous valuation? I mean, is that also what they're paying for?

• 21:24Speaker 09

  It's, it's hard to say. I mean, For sure, it seems like 10 billion is the price that you pay to get this, to make this happen. The question is, is the real valuation 10 billion plus 14 billion? Maybe that's what the real valuation is, or maybe it's even higher than that. I guess we'll find out how much the company is worth when they IPO it, which, you know, is soon to happen, probably, I'm guessing. And, and I think that we'll, I mean, we'll never know what the true valuation should have been at that point in time, unless we get access to the financials and can maybe put an appropriate multiple on it.

• 22:00Ed Elson?

  Just before we let you go, I want to discuss this Truth Social post that Trump put out over the weekend. President Trump is reshaping the media, has a list of things that are gone. PBS, defunded, NPR, defunded. Jim Acosta, out at CNN, end of the reforms. New ownership for CNN, apparently that means that, you know, this is, this deal is all said and done. Free speech on X, and then also TikTok saved. I just wanted to get your reactions. What do you make of this post? And what does it say about the media landscape under Trump going forward?

• 22:37Speaker 09

  Well, I mean, I would say that, you know, Trump has done a lot to make a point to Americans that he saved TikTok. That this was, you know, he wanted to, he, he decided that he loved the app during the run up to this past election, because he, a lot of his supporters were very active on it. He garnered a lot of support from young people on TikTok. And so I think he basically developed a special place in his heart for TikTok, and he knows that Americans love it. So he wanted to use it to score political points. The, the ability to save it was something that he wanted to, you know, show that he had done.

• 23:16Speaker 09

  And I think that he's trying to, you know, continue to reinforce that, probably as we head toward the midterms.

• 23:24Ed Elson?

  Yeah. All right. Miriam Gottfried, Wall Street Journal reporter. Miriam, really appreciate your time.

• 23:30Speaker 09

  My pleasure.

• 23:36Ed Elson?

  Well, everyone's talking about the Oscars right now, but there was another very significant live event that took place this weekend as well, that was arguably more significant than the Oscars. And that was, of course, Prof G Markets Live from South by Southwest. Yes, Prof G Markets went live in Texas, our third ever live taping of the show. Everyone's dying to know what happened, how it went down, who we were wearing. Many are even calling it the Oscars of business. I think that's generous, but it's not entirely wrong. Jokes aside, I thought we would end here with a detour

• 24:15Ed Elson?

  from the news cycle and a quick reflection on this live show at South by Southwest, which was genuinely so much fun for us. As I've said before, when you're putting out this many episodes as we're doing, and when we're analyzing our performance and we're tracking the downloads, sometimes I get so caught up in the numbers that I forget that you guys, the audience, are actually real, that there are actually real people listening to the show. And I know that sounds strange, but this is one of the weird things about building on the internet, especially building a media company on the internet. You technically know that you're interacting with other people, but you don't

• 24:58Ed Elson?

  necessarily feel that. It doesn't always feel, well, real. And so that was what I loved about South by. I actually got to meet all of you guys and interact with you and indeed see that you're all real. And I just love how this show brings all these different types of people together, which is what we saw. I mean, we met with people who work in finance, people who work in tech, people who work in law. We met with college professors, college students, startup founders, even high schoolers, all kinds of people. But there were a few things that I noticed that seems to bring us all together that we all had in common. And one,

• 25:40Ed Elson?

  Was that we were all very intellectually curious, which I wasn't particularly surprised by. Two, everyone was a little bit nerdy, including myself. And three, and this is the thing that struck me most. Three, everyone at this event was incredibly ambitious. I mean, no matter who you talk to, no matter where they worked, everyone seemed to have their shit together, for lack of a better term, or at the very least, they were getting their shit together. And everyone was making their next move. Their next move to progress in some way as an employee, or as a boss, or even as a parent. We had a lot of those discussions, too. This was clearly a group of highly ambitious people. And this ambition

• 26:24Ed Elson?

  that I felt in the room was honestly infectious. I mean, it made me want to work harder. It made me want to make the show even better, because I could see what kinds of people we're making this show for. And what I learned, or I guess re-learned, is that the bar is actually quite high. So, thank you for coming to the show. And as we close here, here is to being more ambitious. We've got a lot more ideas we're working on. You might have seen, we're also launching on Substack now. I will be doing a live stream on that platform tomorrow. So if you want to watch that, go subscribe to Prof G Plus at profgmedia.com/subscribe. And we're also going to be having many more live events in the future, including a Prof

• 27:09Ed Elson?

  G Markets tour, which I am very excited about. And I will be telling you more about that very soon.

• 27:18Ed Elson?

  Okay, that's it for today. This episode was produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson, and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalane, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodden, Hugh and Mia Silverio. And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.

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