Donald Trump is a crypto bro who’s going to cut taxes and regulations, loves big banks and corporate mergers, doesn’t care about deficits, loves oil and hates wind and solar, and might actually let RFK Jr. do some kooky health stuff. That, roughly speaking, is the picture of Trump that you get when you look at how markets reacted this week to his reelection as president of the United States. In other words, the markets are saying that he’s pretty much who many of us thought he was.

The immediately obvious conclusion to draw from the fact that the stock market spiked on news of Trump’s win—with all three major indexes hitting record highs—is that traders think he’s going to be very good for business. But traders were not simply buying stocks across the board; they were pouring money into assets they think will benefit from the next Trump presidency, while punishing those they think will be hurt by it.

The sheer number of sectors—and individual stocks—that traders seem to believe will be affected by Trump winning is striking. It reflects Trump’s stated intention and willingness to use executive power in an unfettered way. So what we’re seeing is the traders scrambling to try to read Trump’s mind—because they need to figure out how his whims might shape the fate of multibillion-dollar companies.

[Read: The strategist who predicted Trump’s multiracial coalition]

Some version of this market response happens after every election: Government policy has a big impact on business outcomes, and traders’ job is to anticipate that impact on their holdings. It’s also worth remembering that the stock market rose sharply in 2020 after Joe Biden’s victory looked assured, so some of this week’s rise is probably the result of traders’ relief that we’re not headed for months of legal challenges and conflict over who won. But going by what he has said over the course of the campaign, Trump has very ambitious plans.

Most starkly, he has promised to impose across-the-board tariffs on almost all imported goods, and 60 percent tariffs on Chinese imported goods in particular, and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants. Much of this Trump can direct on his own account, without seeking congressional approval.

The stock market is therefore working overtime to parse his various campaign promises: which it should take seriously and which it can ignore. For instance, one promise that traders seem to be comfortable ignoring is Trump’s vow to let Elon Musk slash trillions of dollars in federal spending. (Musk has claimed, improbably, that he can cut “at least $2 trillion,” mainly by getting rid of government waste.) If traders actually believed that was going to happen, the market would have sold off steeply, because government budget cuts of such magnitude would send the economy into a deep recession.

Instead, the market believes Trump is going to do the opposite: Far from embracing austerity, Trump is likely to cut taxes and increase spending, pouring more money into the economy. That would increase the risk of inflation—ironically, given the fact that Trump won in large part because voters were angry with Biden and Kamala Harris over high prices—which is why, on the first day of trading after Trump’s election, interest rates on 30-year Treasury bonds rose by their biggest margin in more than two years. This is because, when the risk of inflation rises, bond investors demand higher interest rates to protect their position.

The real market action, though, was among individual assets, and the most obvious winners were companies in sectors that Trump plans to deregulate. Share prices in oil drillers and allied service companies, for instance, soared on the expectation that Trump will be a “Drill, baby, drill” president. The value of cryptocurrency assets and stocks likewise shot up, because Trump is expected to replace the current Securities Exchange Commission chair, Gary Gensler, with someone far more tolerant of crypto than Gensler has been, and because Trump’s general attitude toward financial regulation is, at best, lax. Given that Trump shilled for a memecoin himself during the election campaign, concluding that the crypto industry’s legal worries are mostly behind it seems like a good wager.

Oddly, though, Trump-themed memecoins themselves did quite badly, with the most popular Trump memecoin, which is literally called MAGA, falling by more than 50 percent this week, after initially spiking following Trump’s win. And his social-media company, the Trump Media & Technology Group, is also on pace to finish the week down, despite much anticipation that a Trump win would be good for the stock. Both of these sell-offs appear a classic example of traders buying the rumor and selling the news.

Financial stocks rose strongly, with companies such as Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley registering double-digit gains on Wednesday, presumably on the expectation that they, too, will be operating in a friendlier regulatory environment. Another intriguing sign was that shares of Discover, which is in the process of being acquired by Capital One, saw a 17 percent increase. That merger has yet to be approved by federal regulators, and it’s come under considerable scrutiny—including from Democratic members of Congress—for its arguably anticompetitive effects. The big spike in Discover’s stock price suggests that traders believe, almost certainly correctly, that for all of Vice President–elect J. D. Vance’s criticism of corporate consolidation, a Trump administration will be much friendlier to mergers and acquisitions than the Biden administration has been.

The stocks whose booms were the most ominous sign of what a Trump presidency has in store were those of Geo Group and CoreCivic, private-prison companies that already do a lot of business running migrant-detention facilities. Geo Group also administers a GPS-monitoring programs for asylum seekers who have been paroled into the country while waiting for their cases to be heard. If Trump expands facilities to detain people who cross the border and implements his plan for mass deportations, the demand for these companies’ services will rise sharply. Geo Group’s stock was up 42 percent on Wednesday, and CoreCivic’s rose 29 percent.

[Read: Don’t give up on America]

There were losers too. Electric-vehicle manufacturers, with the exception of Musk’s Tesla, saw their stocks fall, presumably because Trump is likely to eliminate subsidies for electric vehicles. The same was true for renewable-energy companies such as First Solar that will now be operating in an environment where the federal government has little interest in, if not outright hostility toward, their business. Tesla’s stock bucked this trend, rising 13 percent on a day when most competitors saw their stocks fall. Traders know that a company is set for success when its CEO played a major role in the president’s election.

Stocks in home-improvement retailers such as Home Depot and Lowe’s also slipped on Wednesday, though they recovered most of their losses by the end of the week. Some of that movement may have involved concern about the effect of Trump’s tariffs, which will force retailers to raise prices or else see their profit margins shrink. But the bigger reason was that higher interest rates provoked by Trump tax cuts would crimp new-home buying and renovation—and more expensive mortgages are bad for the Home Depots of the world even with more money in the economy. Real-estate firms similarly saw their shares fall.

The most intriguing category of losers were companies in sectors that could be a target of government action if Trump follows through on his promise to make Robert F. Kennedy Jr. some kind of health czar. (As yet, what specific job that might be is unclear, but RFK Jr. himself has been claiming some such role in interviews.) Pharmaceutical companies that make vaccines, particularly COVID-19 vaccines, saw their stocks fall. Trump has said he wants to defund any school that still has vaccine mandates (whether he means a COVID-19-vaccine mandate or one applying to any other type of vaccination is not known). But clearly, any exercise of power by RFK Jr. over their industry would be very bad news for vaccine makers.

Less glaring but likely related, the stocks of consumer-staples companies such as Pepsi and Mondelez fell. They didn’t take a terrible tumble: The sector as a whole was down only 1.6 percent. But if RFK Jr. does have an administration post, then processed food is a probable target of his “Make America Healthy Again” project—he already released a video going after a colored dye found in many kids’ foods. So it makes a certain sense that investors in those companies would be skittish about how his elevation might affect their business. This points to a certain tension in the relationship between Trump and RFK Jr.: The president-elect’s broad approach is all about deregulation, whereas Kennedy’s instinct is all about tightening regulation. Traders appeared to be betting that Trump’s tolerance for MAHA intervention will be limited.

All told, the markets remain fluid and dynamic, already showing signs that some investors have begun to reconsider their bets and unwind certain trades. (Interest rates, for instance, had come back down by Friday, in part because the Federal Reserve cut rates on Thursday.) Traders are, after all, trying to judge not only what a volatile, often distracted president is going to decide to do, but also how much his administration will actually be able to implement. The old line about Frank Sinatra comes to mind: It’s Trump’s world; traders just live in it.

When the 1997 comedy Austin Powers needed a song to send up the swinging ’60s in its joyfully absurd opening sequence, the movie could have opted for obvious touchstones, such as British-invasion rock or sitar-drenched psychedelia. Instead, it used an offbeat bit of samba-jazz by Quincy Jones. This was an inspired choice. Jones’s 1962 song “Soul Bossa Nova” was certainly an artifact of its decade, reflecting a then-emerging international craze for Brazilian rhythms. But the track was more than just a time capsule; its hooting percussion and saucy flutes exploded from the speakers in a way that still sounds original, even alien, decades later.

Jones, the legendary polymath who died at age 91 on Sunday, spent a lifetime making music like this—music that defined its era by transcending it. He’s best associated with the gleaming, lush sound of jazz and pop in the ’70s and ’80s, as most famously heard on Michael Jackson’s albums Off the Wall, Thriller, and Bad. But his impact was bigger than any one sound or epoch, as Jones used his talent and expertise to design a future we’re still catching up to.

Jones was born into wretched conditions in Depression-era Chicago: His mother was sent to a mental hospital when he was 7, leaving him to be temporarily raised by a grandmother who was so poor that she cooked rats to eat. When Jones was 11, after his family moved to Washington State, he and his brother broke into a building looking for food and came across a piano; playing around with the instrument lit a fire in the young Jones. He’d spend his teenage years hanging out with Ray Charles and playing trumpet with the Count Basie Orchestra; at age 20, he started touring the world as a member of Lionel Hampton’s big band. After producing Dinah Washington’s 1955 album, For Those in Love, he went to Paris to study under the famed classical-music teacher Nadia Boulanger, who’d also tutored Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

These early brushes with genius—and global travels that exposed him to far-flung musical traditions—gave him the skills he’d draw on for the rest of his life. Boulanger, Jones would often later say, drilled into him an appreciation for the endless possibilities contained within the confines of music theory. Mastery, she told him, lay in understanding how previous greats had creatively used the same 12 notes available to everyone else. Jones took this idea to heart. His work was marked by a blend of compositional rigor and freedom; knowing what had come before allowed him to arrange familiar sounds in ways that were, in one way or another, fresh.

Take, for example, Lesley Gore’s 1963 hit “It’s My Party,” which Jones produced. The song is a key text of mid-century girl-group pop—Phil Spector tried to take the song for the Crystals—but what made it soar were the Jonesian touches: harmonic decisions that feel ever so off, Latin syncopation pulsing throughout. You can hear similarly eclectic, colorful elements in another American standard that Jones arranged: Frank Sinatra and Count Basie’s 1964 version of “Fly Me to the Moon” (which Buzz Aldrin listened to before stepping onto the lunar surface in 1969).  

Though schooled by classical academics and jazz insiders, Jones seemed to have a pop soul: He used precise technique not to impress aficionados but to convey emotion in an accessible, bold way. “The Streetbeater,” the theme song for Sanford & Sons, used prickly, interlaced percussion to conjure sizzling excitement; a tempo change in “Killer Joe,” from Jones’s 1969 album, Walking in Space, opened up an oasis of cooling flute. The 1985 African-famine-relief anthem “We Are the World” was a particularly gracious use of talent. Not just any producer could have brought 46 vocalists—including such distinctive voices as Bob Dylan, Cyndi Lauper, and Tina Turner—into one coherent, catchy whole.

Jones’s signature collaborator was Michael Jackson. It was a kinship that made sense: The two men shared a knack for rhythm, a sense of history, and perfectionism. “He had a perspective on details that was unmatched,” Jones said of Jackson in a 2018 GQ interview. “His idols are Fred Astaire, Gene Kelly, James Brown, all of that. And he paid attention, and that’s what you’re supposed to do.” For all of Jackson’s scandals and eccentricities, the music he made with Jones has never been overshadowed. The songs are just too intricately lovely, delighting hips and hearts and heads all at once, to be denied.

[Read: AI can’t make music]

As Jones settled into living-icon status, he tried to pass his wisdom to new generations. In 1992, he founded the hip-hop magazine Vibe; in 2017, he launched Qwest TV, a streaming service for videos of jazz performances. He kept working with young talents, such as Amy Winehouse in 2010 and the avant-pop composer Jacob Collier much more recently. Even so, later in life, Jones liked to gripe about the state of pop music. In his view, modern artists weren’t educated or broad-minded enough to break new ground. “Musicians today can’t go all the way with the music because they haven’t done their homework with the left brain,” he told New York magazine in 2018. “Music is emotion and science.” He added, “Do these musicians know tango? Macumba? Yoruba music? Samba? Bossa nova? Salsa? Cha-cha?”

Yet clearly, he still has disciples today—though perhaps some of them are misunderstanding his lessons, trying nostalgically to imitate his work rather than studying his techniques to create something different. I feel, for example, conflicted about the Weeknd, a pastiche-y pop star who’s obsessed with recapturing the magic of Jones and Jackson’s hot streak. Jones himself appeared on an interlude on the Weeknd’s 2022 release, Dawn FM. He relayed a story about childhood trauma rippling throughout his adult life, and concluded by saying, “Looking back is a bitch, isn’t it?” The point, he seemed to say, was to use the past to keep moving forward.

He was in a gang as a child but became Michael Jackson and Frank Sinatra's favourite collaborator.