Trump Wants to Kill Carried Interest. Wall Street Will Fight to Keep It.

New York Times

08-03-2025

Nearly a month has passed since President Trump last spoke publicly of his desire to kill the carried interest loophole. (Yes, we know, some of you don't consider it a 'loophole.') And yet the private equity industry, which stands to lose big if the president upends the tax break, is still bracing for a fight.
This is the biggest challenge to the provision since it was nearly neutered three years ago under former President Joe Biden.
A reminder: the carried interest rule means that executives at hedge funds and P.E. and venture capital firms pay roughly 20 percent tax on their profits, a rate that's so low it's drawn criticism from Warren Buffett and from progressive senators like Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts.
One Washington lawyer described the lobbying effort to DealBook as 'significant,' a sign of the escalating stakes.
Consider what's happened in the past month: The American Investment Council, the private equity lobbying group, is reportedly circulating memos on Capitol Hill reminding lawmakers that private equity is a jobs creator. Venture capitalists, seemingly omnipresent in Trump's Washington, grumble that they have to keep returning to Congress to 'educate lawmakers' about the rule's benefits. So-called free market groups, meanwhile, have banded together to ask Congress to maintain the status quo.
'They'll fight tooth-and-nail on any sort of change,' said Jessica Millett, a tax partner at Hogan Lovells.
The carried interest lobby is made up of wealthy real estate, venture capital and private equity groups, including Blackstone and the Carlyle Group. The American Investment Council, the National Venture Capital Association, and the Real Estate Roundtable have long gone to great lengths to defend their favorite loophole.
'It's really an evergreen point of contention for these trade groups,' Jonathan Choi, a law professor at the University of Southern California, told DealBook.
What's different this time: It's hard to decipher how serious Trump is about killing it. Trump has long railed against carried interest, saying a decade ago that hedge fund managers exploiting the tax code were 'getting away with murder.'
Behind the numbers: Eliminating carried interest would save the government an estimated $14 billion over 10 years, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. Trump is on the hunt for far bigger savings if he is to pass his 'big, beautiful' tax bill in coming months without blowing up the deficit.
Trump wanted to kill carried interest in his 2017 tax bill, only to give up amid opposition from lobbyists and Republican lawmakers, said Victor Fleischer, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine.
And now? 'People think that it's cheap talk,' Fleischer said.
But there are some in Democratic circles who believe that Trump may be more serious now than he was in 2017, DealBook hears — not least because those are the signals that they're getting from the White House.
Trump's disdain for carried interest is a rare fracture between him and Republican lawmakers. Traditionally, Democrats have been behind efforts to kill it, and when Trump renewed his call to eliminate carried interest this month, congressional Democrats — not Republicans — were ready with stand-alone bills to do just that.
But Trump may finally be eroding G.O.P. unity. Republican senators John Cornyn of Texas and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, both members of the Senate Finance Committee, said in recent weeks that they were open to considering changes to the rule.
The last threat to carried interest came in 2022 when former President Joe Biden's Inflation Reduction Act included a provision to kill it. But before the vote, lobbyists bombarded the office of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the former Democrat (and then Independent) of Arizona, with calls urging her to vote against the bill. Sinema ultimately voted for the bill, but only after carried interest was spared.
Lobbyists worry about G.O.P. defections, but see holding Republicans as easier than the last go around when they had to flip a pivotal on-the-fence senator. 'They don't need a Sinema to save them,' said Fleischer.
Short of killing the rule, Congress could reform it as a way to pacify Trump. Hogan Lovells' Millett said there's significant industry concern that Congress will gut much of the rule's usefulness by including measures like extending the qualifying holding period from three years to five years before the carried interest tax break kicks in. Such an extension could scramble the way these firms do business. Private equity firms, for one, are often able to hold onto investments for five to eight years, Millett said.
Fleischer, the law professor, kick-started the debate on carried interest two decades ago when he detailed how the provision works in a widely read academic paper. Reform or no reform, he believes the loophole is here to stay.
It 'will outlive us all,' he said.
The labor market continued its steady growth. The nonfarm payrolls report showed employers had added 151,000 jobs last month, roughly in line with Wall Street expectations, and extending the job-growth streak to 50 months. That said, the effects of the Elon Musk-led job cuts by his Department of Government Efficiency will likely not show up in the labor market data for another month or two.
Tariff uncertainty prompts a major stock sell-off. Despite yesterday's late-afternoon rebound, the S&P 500 ended the week sharply lower. A variety of factors have spooked investors, including fears of a downturn and concerns that President Trump's on-again-off-again tariffs policy will create a major disruption to global trade. A recap: Trump gave Mexico and Canada a partial tariff reprieve — exempting levies for one month on products covered by the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, the trade pact Trump signed in his first term. But more levies, including on aluminum and steel, are set to go into effect next week.
Elon Musk blew up at Cabinet officials at a White House meeting. One of his targets was Marco Rubio, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report for The Times. The tech mogul turned President Trump's cutter-in-chief fumed that the secretary of state had fired 'nobody.' Trump eventually defended Rubio, and set ground rules. Cabinet chiefs are to run their departments, and Musk is to act as an adviser, the first clear sign the president is willing to put limits on the billionaire's power in Washington.
Several tech start-ups weigh going public. CoreWeave, a seller of cloud-based Nvidia processing power, filed to go public on Monday, putting itself in position to become the year's first major technology I.P.O. (The company denied a report that Microsoft, by far its biggest customer, was shedding some of its contracts with the start-up.) Other companies have also talked with bankers about following suit, DealBook's Lauren Hirsch and The Times's Mike Isaac reported, including Discord, the social chat app, and StubHub, the ticketing software company.
The future of news looks niche
In 2013, Jessica Lessin, a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, left the paper to start a competing publication, The Information.
A few years later, her fledgling newsroom had grown to nearly two dozen reporters and editors and booked more than $20 million in sales, as she revealed in a profile I wrote for The Times's Sunday Business. She says she has since doubled her editorial staff and continued to stay profitable, with revenue growing 30 percent in 2024 over the previous year.
But it's her investments outside of The Information that are gaining attention these days.
Her company Lessin Media has put money into Semafor, The Ankler, the former Business Insider editor Nicholas Carlson's Dynamo, Kevin Delaney's Charter Works and other titles at a time when the news business appears bleaker than before. Lessin, however, is optimistic.
I caught up with the entrepreneur about her latest media bet, the tennis publication Racquet magazine, and what she thinks about the changing news landscape. This interview has been edited and condensed.
This investment seems different from your others. How did you come to it?
I actually got introduced to Racquet by a number of fans of the magazine. And it was like the weirdest experience, because I was reading the magazine, and then I wanted to buy, like, all the clothes in the magazine. I went to the website, and I wanted to buy all the merch. And they're hosting an event at the U.S. Open. And I was like I want to go to that. And I want to read this great profile about the mental coach behind the world No. 1 tennis player.
This sounds like it was something that just struck you personally. I assumed you'd be more focused on sales and market size and margin.
It's absolutely both. I'm absolutely all about revenue and controlling your destiny and direct subscription revenue, and that being the true north.
I've also always been about that founder that has the real expertise. And I think big media companies dismiss the niches. They think they're too small. Across all of these investments, the criteria I'm looking for is there's got to be real revenue and a revenue model that is direct and user-driven where the brands can control their own destiny. But also a very passionate founder.
Subscriptions are a big part of your media thesis. Do all the companies you invest in have that component?
Not all do. You know Nich Carlson's new company, Dynamo, that I invested in, I don't think they do yet, but all the companies have plans and road maps.
You mentioned that big media companies are missing the picture on niche publications. Is that the future of news? Or at least one way to be successful?
Yes, absolutely.
Are legacy newsrooms too focused on the old model?
I do think that many of the large media organizations haven't gotten the memo fully. I mean, it's fascinating to watch The Wall Street Journal integrate its tech coverage with its media coverage.
You're talking about how The Journal recently cut some tech reporters and combined it with the media team.
Yeah. Of course, it comes in a landscape where there have been a lot of layoffs across different teams and publications and it's very sad. It's my alma mater, there are wonderful people there. But what's so interesting to me is the idea of consolidating different thematic areas.
At The Information, our formula is just very different. It's going very, very deep into subject matters, into beat reporting. I think the most ambitious, world changing, impactful stories come from gathering string around companies and people and areas of expertise. And I worry, because I see a lot of other newsrooms with very talented reporters put those reporters on very broad and enterprise-like beats. How can we hold companies and leaders accountable without that kind of reporting day in and day out?
You've invested in seven media start-ups. Are you going to do a roll up?
I am very actively trying to do deals that would enhance The Information and that are related to it — being the authority on tech — so rolling up things like that within The Information, absolutely. But most of our investments don't fit into that category. It's just me believing so much in the founder and what they're building. But I am absolutely a believer that there will be opportunities for The Information to acquire a number of companies in a lot of different areas.
The big media story right now is The Washington Post, and since we're talking about investment opportunities, my old boss, Kara Swisher, is out there trying to get people together to buy it. What do you think?
I texted her when I saw it, and I was like, 'You go!' I am all for passionate journalists trying to help shape the future of news businesses. She's certainly one of those. I think she's also a pundit, and I think that can get in the way of some types of journalism. But for people who really love news and love brands and want to shape them, that's the kind of transformation that's going to serve readers really well. But there's no way Jeff Bezos is going to sell The Washington Post.
Do you know something?
I have no inside information. I just think Jeff Bezos is finally flexing a little, and by that I mean his announcement that the opinion pages would now primarily reflect 'free markets and personal liberties' or however he said it.
Do you think it was a good move?
I do believe that as the owner of a publication it makes sense for them to shape a point of view of their opinion pages. But it's way too early to tell.
Let's see what he writes.
Yeah. And that's not a move you make if you're trying to offload something. That's a move you make when you are establishing yourself as a proprietor. He's really digging in.
You can read the full interview here.
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