At issue is the Trump administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) to justify some of its tariffs, including its baseline 10% duty on almost all nations. IEEPA, passed by Congress in 1977, gives the President “broad authority” on economic issues like tariffs after declaring a “national emergency,” for which the White House has pointed to elevated fentanyl imports from abroad.

Although not guaranteed, it’s possible the Supreme Court will decide the fentanyl crisis can’t be used as an emergency to justify broad tariffs on U.S. trading partners, which would make many of the administration’s tariffs invalid. In that case, the White House will just pivot to another justification to make tariffs permanent, said Bessent during the New York Times DealBook Summit this week. 

“We can recreate the exact tariff structure with 301’s, with 232’s, with the, I think they’re called 122’s,” he said, referring to several sections of various trade acts that could serve as alternatives to the administration’s current justification for its tariffs.

When interviewer and DealBook editor Andrew Ross Sorkin questioned whether these measures could exist permanently, Bessent replied “permanently.” He later clarified that tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 would not be permanent.

In sum, the Constitution gives Congress purview over tariffs, but over the years it has given the executive branch more leeway to levy them through the trade acts mentioned by Bessent. 

Each of the sections Trump’s team may consider comes with its own set of pros and cons. Section 122 would be the quickest method to restore tariffs in the case of a Supreme Court loss because it doesn’t require an investigation on a trading partners’ practices. Using this justification would let the government levy tariffs up to 15%, with certain limits, but only for 150 days before congressional action is required.

The other two sections, as Bessent pointed out, have no time limit or limit on the tariff rate that can be levied, although they have other caveats. To justify tariffs under Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, the administration would need to conduct an investigation into practices by its trading partners it sees as “unjustifiable” or “unreasonable.” Trump did this successfully during his first administration to justify tariffs on China in 2017.

Alternatively, the administration could turn to Section 232 of the Trade of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 and try to justify tariffs as an issue of national security. The White House is already using this justification to underpin its tariffs on steel, aluminum, and autos and those are not being scrutinized by the Supreme Court. 

Finally, experts have previously told Fortune, Trump could also ask Congress to pass a bill giving the president explicit authority to levy tariffs. Although it would require some caveats in terms of scope, and possibly duration of the tariffs, it would likely receive bipartisan support, international trade law expert and University of Kansas Law School professor Raj Bhala told Fortune. 

Despite the options in the administration’s back pocket, Bessent said he was optimistic about the White House’s chances at the Supreme Court. 

He also said a loss in court would be “a loss for the American people,” and pointed to the fact that China agreed to tighten control over exports of precursor chemicals used to make fentanyl earlier this year—a decision which he attributes to pressure created by the administration’s tariffs.

“I have been very consistent on this, that tariffs are a shrinking ice cube. The ultimate goal is to rebalance trade and to bring back domestic production,” Bessent said.

That student was Jensen Huang.

In a recent podcast appearance with Joe Rogan, the Nvidia CEO traced that improbable starting point back to his parents, who had sent him and his brother to the United States in the mid-1970s with almost nothing. The family had been living in Bangkok during one of Thailand’s periodic coups, and his parents decided it was no longer safe to keep the children there. They contacted an uncle they had never visited in Tacoma, Wash., and asked him to find a school in America that would accept two foreign boys with almost no savings.

He found one: Oneida Baptist Institute in Clay County, Ken., one of the poorest counties in the country then and now. The dorms had no closet doors, no locks, and a population of kids who smoked constantly–Huang said he also tried smoking for a week, at 9 —and settled disputes with knives. Huang’s roommate was a 17-year-old wrapped in tape from a recent fight; the “toughest kid in school,” he said. Every student had a job. His brother, was sent to the tobacco fields the school ran to fund the school—“kind of like a penitentiary”—while Huang became the janitor, cleaning the bathrooms for a hundred teenaged boys (“I just wished they would be a bit more careful” in the bathroom, he joked.)

That indefatigable cheerfulness, even when describing scenes that sound brutal to almost anyone else, ran through the entire interview. 

Huang said most of his memories from that period were good, and remembers the time he told his parents his amazement after eating at a restaurant: “Mom and dad, we went to the most amazing restaurant today. This whole place is lit up. It’s like the future. And the food comes in a box and the food is incredible. The hamburger is incredible.”

“It was McDonald’s,” Huang laughed. 

Indeed, these memories were relayed to his parents late; the boys were navigating all of this alone. International phone calls were too expensive, so his parents bought them a cheap tape deck. Once a month, they recorded an audio letter describing their lives in coal country and mailed it back to Bangkok. Their parents taped over the same cassette and mailed it back.

Two years later, Huang’s parents finally made it to America, with just suitcases and only a bit of money. His mother worked as a maid. His father, a trained engineer, looked for work by circling openings in the newspaper classifieds and calling whoever picked up. He eventually found a job at a consulting engineering firm designing factories and refineries.

“They left everything behind,” Huang said. “They started over in their late thirties.”

He still carries one memory from those early years that he said “breaks my heart.” Not long after his parents arrived in the U.S., the family was living in a rented, furnished apartment when he and his brother accidentally broke a flimsy particle-board coffee table. 

“I just still remember the look on my mom’s face,” he said. “They didn’t have any money, and she didn’t know how she was going to pay it back.”

For Huang, moments like that define the stakes his parents accepted when they came to the U.S. “with almost no money”.

“My parents are incredible,” he said. “It’s hard not to love this country. It’s hard not to be romantic about this country.”

Jensen Huang’s humble beginnings inspired Nvidia principles

That way of seeing America—as a place where people will give you a chance if you’re willing to take one—is how Huang explains Nvidia’s early, unlikely bets. 

Huang came up with the idea for Nvidia while sitting in a booth at a Denny’s, where he had worked first as a dishwasher and then a busboy. He wanted to build a chip that could power 3D graphics on a personal computer, and it was at that Denny’s booth that he met two friends to sketch out what would become the company.

Long before the company became synonymous with the AI boom, Huang kept steering it toward ideas that few people understood and even fewer believed in. CUDA was one of them. When Nvidia introduced it in 2006, the cost of the chip roughly doubled, revenue did not move, and the company’s valuation fell from about $12 billion to between $2 and $3 billion.

“When I launched CUDA, the audience was complete silence,” he said. “Nobody wanted it. Nobody asked for it. Nobody understood it.”

CUDA is the software layer that turns the graphics chips into general purpose compute engines, making them capable of large neural networks. Now, of course, nearly every major AI model today runs on hardware that depends on CUDA. 

The same thing happened when he introduced Nvidia’s first AI supercomputer, the DGX1. The launch drew “complete silence,” he said, and there were no purchase orders. The only person who reached out was none other than Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who told him he had “a nonprofit AI lab” that needed a system like this.

Huang assumed that meant the deal was impossible.

“All the blood drained out of my face,” he told Rogan. “A nonprofit is not buying a $300,000 computer.”

But Musk, the world’s richest man, insisted. So Huang boxed up one of the first units, loaded it into his car, and drove it to San Francisco himself.

In 2016, he walked into a small upstairs room filled with researchers— Berkeley robotics pioneer Pieter Abbeel, OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever, and others—working in a cramped little office. That room turned out to be OpenAI, long before it became the most discussed AI organization in the world. Huang left the DGX1 with them and drove home.

Looking back, even as the CEO of a $4.5 trillion company who now draws crowds and autograph-seekers wherever he goes, he doesn’t describe any of this as foresight or heroism. To him, it’s simply the continuation of the risks his parents took when they sent two boys across the world with almost nothing.

“We really believed it, and so if you believe in that future, and you don’t do anything about it you’re going to regret it for your life,” Huang said.

“The people who first made Nintendo’s hits are still working at the company,” Keza MacDonald, the author of Super Nintendo, a forthcoming book about the developer, told me recently. “For the last 50 years, these people have been passing down knowledge and training up a new generation of Nintendo creatives.” 

Both Nintendo’s business and creative leaders have long tenures at the company. Current president Shuntaro Furakawa joined the company in 1994 as an accountant. Shigeru Miyamoto, the brains behind franchises like “Super Mario” and “The Legend of Zelda,” joined as a staff artist in 1977. 

There is a risk that companies that rely too much on institutional knowledge get stuck in their ways. Yet Nintendo, according to MacDonald, has combined institutional knowledge with fresh ideas to continuously replenish its pipeline of fun games: “It’s not like the oldest guy gets to decide what’s a good idea and what isn’t. Everyone puts ideas in.”

Nintendo has its share of flops, failed experiments, and puzzling business decisions–as does every firm. Yet the company maintains its share of the highly competitive video game industry against bigger, deeper-pocketed rivals like Sony and Microsoft. 

The few designers who’ve left Nintendo still have fond feelings about their time there. As Lee Schuneman, a former Nintendo game designer and now Efekta Education Group’s chief product officer, told our Brainstorm Design audience this week, “I got to work with some of the most talented game designers in the world, including people like [Shigeru Miyamoto] at Nintendo, and [learn] a whole range of lessons about how to make playful experiences.”

That goodwill may be the result of Nintendo avoiding the industry’s boom-bust churn and valuing the expertise its workforce accumulates.

Nintendo “is still, to this day, making games differently from everyone else,” MacDonald says. You can check out the rest of our mainstage sessions from Brainstorm Design here.—Nicholas Gordon

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top news

Netflix to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery studios 

The online streamer and the maker of the  Superman and Harry Potter franchises are expected to announce a sale of Warner’s studios and HBO Max business to Netflix, the WSJ reports. Paramount Skydance chief David Ellison lobbied the White House against the deal even though Netflix offered a richer valuation, according to the New York Post.

“China’s Nvidia” stages IPO

Moore Threads, a maker of GPUs based in Beijing went public today at a valuation of $1.1 billion and its stock rose by 400% on day one.

$10 billion a week on U.S. national debt

The calendar year may have a few weeks left to tick off, but as far as the government’s budget is concerned, we’re in fiscal 2026. The Treasury has already paid out a 12-figure sum to service the nation’s debt. Unlike the tax and calendar year, the government’s financial calendar runs to the end of September. According to Treasury data, in the nine weeks since, it has spent $104 billion in interest on its $38 trillion borrowing burden. That’s more than $11 billion a week, and already represents 15% of federal spending in the current fiscal year.

Poor labor data may have locked in Fed cut

Analysts may not have necessarily digested this week’s lackluster labor data with glee—but it sure didn’t dampen their spirits either. Wall Street is hoping for a Christmas miracle with a final interest rate cut from the Fed, bringing the base rate down to 3.5% to 3.75%, and recent jobs reports may just have sealed the deal.

U.S. lobbied against E.U. seizing Russian money

American officials urged Europe not to use frozen Russian assets as the basis of loans that would fund Ukraine’s defense against Moscow’s invasion of its Eastern flank. The funds could be used as an incentive to end the war, Washington argued.

January 6 pipe bomb suspect arrested

Brian Cole Jr., 30 of Woodbridge, Virginia, was the subject of a five-year-long investigation by federal officials. 

Wall Street forecasts S&P will hit 7,500

Analysts are publishing their notoriously unreliable annual stock market forecasts and this year nine investment banks are guessing that the market will rise about 10% in 2026.

The markets

S&P 500 futures were up 0.17%  this morning. The last session closed up 0.11%. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.18% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.19% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 1.05%. China’s CSI 300 was up 0.84%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 1.78%. India’s NIFTY 50 is up 0.55%. Bitcoin fell to $91.4K.

Around the watercooler

How a Texas gas producer plans to exploit the ‘mega trend’ of power plants for AI hyperscalers by Jordan Blum.

Battle for sports betting market heats up as Polymarket announces return to the U.S. by Carlos Garcia.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang admits he works 7 days a week, including holidays, in a constant ‘state of anxiety’ out of fear of going bankrupt by Jessica Coacci.

Kim Kardashian shaped Skims into a $5 billion brand—now she wants to help other entrepreneurs mold their skills for success by Emma Hinchliffe.

CEO Daily was compiled and edited by Jim Edwards and Lee Clifford.