TheChek News Flow

The proposed levy would affect companies including Google and Meta

The German government is drawing up plans for a 10 per cent tax on global internet giants like Meta and Google in a controversial move that could further fuel transatlantic trade tensions.

Germany’s federal commissioner for media and culture, Wolfram Weimer, told Stern magazine on Thursday that the new government is drafting a digital levy on global internet platforms, although alternatives like a voluntary commitment by the affected tech companies to pay more tax in Germany are also still under consideration.

German chancellor Friedrich Merz’s centre-left coalition agreed to “evaluate” a tax on internet platforms in its treaty signed in early May, agreeing that the proceeds should be used to strengthen the country’s media landscape.

“We are serious about this,” the former editor of Axel Springer-owned title Die Welt, said in the interview. Weimer added that he had invited “the leadership of Google as well as key industry representatives” to hold discussions over alternatives to a tax, “including possible voluntary commitments.”

A German tax on Google, Meta and other US internet giants could put further strain on transatlantic trade relations at a time when US President Donald Trump is accusing the EU of treating American companies unfairly and wants to impose tariffs as a response.

But Weimer was unfazed by such a prospect, pointing out that the new German government has started the legal groundwork to establish a tax. He said that the duty could focus on the German advertising revenue of digital platforms like Google and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram and may amount to 10 per cent.

“We are preparing a concrete draft law,” said Weimer, adding that it “could” be based on Austria’s model, which he praised as a “simple and effective tax of five per cent on online advertising services for very large platform operators”. Weimer stressed that the actual tax rate could be higher in Germany, pointing out that twice that rate was considered “moderate and legitimate” by the German government.

Several other EU countries, including France, already have taxes on digital companies.

Facebook and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

German media organisations, including the Federal Association of Digital Publishers and Newspaper Publishers, praised Weimer’s initiative, telling German newswire DPA that they welcomed that internet giants would be “held accountable”.

The organisation and another lobby group, the Media Association of the Free Press, urged Merz’s government to redistribute the proceeds from any tax to media organisations with editorial teams, stressing that their own business models have come under dramatic pressure from global tech platforms.

Weimer told Stern that a tax should be applied to all tech platforms that generate “billions of revenue” in Germany and use editorial and cultural content created by others.

Austria’s experience had shown that such a levy on ad revenue did not trigger “significant price changes” but “has resulted in the corporations finally making a small tax contribution to society, meaning their enormous profit margins have slightly decreased”, Weimer added.

French business schools fast-track entry for foreign students blocked from US

Institutions seek to lure elite scholars who fear being caught up by tougher US visa rules

French business schools are fast-tracking or extending application deadlines for foreign students who fear being caught by the Trump administration’s curbs on visas.

Fouziya Bouzerda, head of the Grenoble School of Management, encouraged students unable to study in the US to consider the French Alps.

“If you’re an international student affected by the suspension of visa interviews in the US, we’re here to help you continue your academic journey without interruption,” she wrote on LinkedIn.

“We’ve decided to fast-track applications for students who have already been admitted into US business schools.”

US secretary of state Marco Rubio on Tuesday ordered consulates abroad to pause visa application appointments for students while the government worked on new harsher vetting guidelines.

Léon Laulusa, director of ESCP Business School in Paris, said a group of about 100 French universities and top-tier grandes écoles were discussing co-ordinated steps to help foreign students already in or headed to the US, if the Trump administration confirms it will close its doors to them.

“We’re now looking at pushing back application deadlines that are usually in May to allow people to apply,” he told the Financial Times, adding that ESCP “would be very happy to welcome” those unable to attend US universities.

The group has been in contact with the French government, he said, with potential announcements in the coming days.

About two-thirds of those enrolled at ESCP are foreign students, attracted by MBA and executive MBS programmes offered in Paris and at five other campuses in European capitals.

US President Donald Trump’s broader campaign against US universities has included cutting research funding and putting pressure on scientists working in areas such as climate change and vaccine research.

Since returning to office in January, Trump has focused particular wrath on elite universities such as Harvard and Columbia, accusing them of limiting freedom of speech and academic freedom, as well as generally being too leftwing.

His administration had sought to ban Harvard from admitting international students, who make up about one-quarter of the student body, but the university is challenging the move in court.

Trump and his allies have seized upon pro-Palestinian protests on campuses in recent years to argue that universities do not sufficiently protect Jewish students.

Laulusa said there was incomprehension in the French academic community about Washington’s approach. “Look at all the Nobel Prize winners from abroad that the US has attracted . . . Scientific innovation should be the goal, and that has no borders,” he said.

European countries are seeking to benefit from a brain drain of top academic researchers affected by Trump’s federal funding cuts in medicine, energy and social sciences, among other fields.

European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen has proposed a €500mn financial package to be spent in 2025-27 “to make Europe a magnet for researchers”. French President Emmanuel Macron has promised to offer €100mn in such incentives, and the UK has floated a similar scheme.

Macron has for years made attracting foreign companies to France a priority under the slogan “Choose France”, which he quickly retooled to “Choose Europe for Science”. “We refuse a diktat consisting of any government being able to say you cannot research this or that,” he said in a press conference with von der Leyen earlier this month.

At Sciences Po in Paris, applications from foreign students have already begun to rise: the university said they had increased by 26 per cent from a year earlier for master’s programmes, and 8 per cent for bachelor’s degree classes that began studies last November. The school offers courses in political science and policy, law and journalism.

“When you apply for your studies, you’re committing for four to five years, so, of course, you look for the safest places,” Luis Vassy, director of Sciences Po, told France Culture radio on Wednesday. “We are among the institutions that are both excellent and, undoubtedly, reassuring.”

Musk warned that Trump wouldn’t bless OpenAI data-center project unless his xAI company was added

OpenAI led a group of American technology giants that won a deal last week to build one of the world’s largest artificial-intelligence data centers in Abu Dhabi. Behind the scenes, Elon Musk worked hard to try to derail the deal if it didn’t include his own AI startup, according to people familiar with the matter.

On a call with officials at G42, an AI firm controlled by the brother of the United Arab Emirates’ president, Musk had a warning for those assembled: Their plan had no chance of President Trump signing off on it unless his company xAI was included in the deal, according to some of the people.

Musk had learned just before Trump’s mid-May tour of three Gulf countries that OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman was going to be on the trip and that a deal in the U.A.E. was in the works, and grew angry about it, according to White House officials. He then said he would also join the trip, and appeared alongside the president in Saudi Arabia.

After Musk’s complaints, Trump and U.S. officials reviewed the deal terms and decided to move forward. The White House officials said Musk didn’t want a deal that seemed to benefit Altman. Aides discussed how to best calm Musk down, one of the officials said, because Trump and David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto adviser, wanted to announce the deal before the end of the president’s trip to the Middle East.

Musk didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “This was another great deal for the American people, thanks to President Trump and his exceptional team.”

A senior White House official said Musk raised concerns about the deal and “relayed his concerns about fairness for all AI companies.”

Over the past year, Musk has emerged as one of the most powerful donors in Republican politics. The entrepreneur spent some $300 million to re-elect Trump to the White House and became a close adviser. Musk recently stepped down from his role at the Department of Government Efficiency task force to spend more time working on the five companies he runs, including Tesla.

Altman and Musk co-founded OpenAI in 2015, but Musk left the company in 2018 after a power struggle. He has since publicly turned on his former co-founder, suing him for allegedly betraying OpenAI’s nonprofit mission, accusing him of being “not trustworthy,” and giving him the monikers “Swindly Sam” and “Scam Altman.” Musk responded to the launch of OpenAI’s hit product ChatGPT by launching his own rival startup, xAI. But xAI hasn’t had nearly the traction or commercial success that OpenAI’s chatbot has received.

In the months leading up to Trump’s May visit to the Gulf, Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al Nahyan, the U.A.E. national-security adviser and brother of the president, and other officials from the U.A.E. launched a lobbying effort for a national priority: They wanted AI chips—lots of them—and they were willing to spend heavily to get them.

The tiny petrostate sees AI as a crucial way to diversify its economy. So after the Biden administration had restricted the U.A.E. and most other countries from freely buying the latest products from Nvidia and other chip makers, the U.A.E. leaned on the Trump administration. The U.A.E. pledged giant investments in the U.S., lobbied influential CEOs and bolstered a Trump-family business—to win a change to the chip export rules.

A key prong in the strategy was to bring American AI companies to Abu Dhabi. Officials readied a site that could ultimately hold a five-gigawatt cluster of AI data centers—a project far larger than any single site in the U.S.—that would house servers of various U.S. companies.

After a March visit to the White House by Tahnoon, the Trump administration gave the green light to strike a deal with the U.A.E. that would allow the country to buy far more chips, and include a new data center for a U.S. AI company, people familiar with the negotiations said.

While Tahnoon had invested in several major U.S. AI startups—including Musk’s—his G42 zeroed in on OpenAI for the inaugural data center, and worked with the ChatGPT maker and other companies—Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank—to hash out an agreement.

To win over the U.S. officials and companies, G42 would pay the cost of the buildings’ construction, and then would have to fund a similar-size project in the U.S., people familiar with the arrangement said. The deal was ultimately announced on May 22—a week later than initially hoped—though some details have yet to be completed. It was called Stargate U.A.E., after a similar deal Trump struck in the U.S. soon after he returned to the White House.

Musk’s blowup resembled his reaction in January to Trump’s U.S. Stargate deal with OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank. Musk was in the White House complex and blindsided when Altman and Trump touted the $500 billion investment, The Wall Street Journal reported. Musk complained to aides about the project, claiming Stargate’s backers didn’t have the money they needed. He even took to his social-media platform, X, to criticize the January deal.

The U.A.E. has built ties with Musk, particularly since he tethered himself to Trump. Tahnoon’s MGX fund was a large investor in a $6 billion fundraise by xAI announced in December, and in February, Dubai struck a deal with Musk’s Boring Company to build an 11-mile network of tunnels, announced at a conference where Musk spoke by video with the U.A.E.’s AI minister.

Musk’s xAI has also been seen as a likely candidate for future sites at the giant data-center cluster. Under the framework agreement between the U.S. and U.A.E., xAI is on a shortlist of U.S. companies that are conditionally approved to buy most of the 500,000 chips permitted annually, the people familiar with the deal said.

Novo Nordisk underestimated demand for its weight-loss drug, and shortages let rivals in the door

Key Points

In 2023, Novo Nordisk NVO -2.61%decrease; red down pointing triangle was the most valuable company in Europe, surpassing LVMH on the back of soaring demand for Ozempic and Wegovy.

Today, the Danish company has lost its grip on the anti-obesity market it carved out.

The company has lost market share amid production missteps and a bungled rollout of Wegovy that led to shortages. Its U.S. rival Eli Lilly LLY -0.80%decrease; red down pointing triangle—initially in the rearview mirror—has been proven to have the more effective weight-loss drug and a more promising pipeline of next-generation treatments. Novo Nordisk’s research-and-development machine has disappointed, and a key marketing strategy was slow to get off the ground.

Novo Nordisk’s ability to stay atop a market that analysts see growing to $150 billion in annual sales is now in doubt. Its controlling shareholder this month forced a surprise ouster of the company’s chief executive, Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen. And while it is still generating multibillion-dollar sales for Ozempic and Wegovy, shares have tumbled more than 50% over the past year.

If Novo Nordisk doesn’t turn things around, it could join a long list of companies that blew a first-mover advantage, from Sunshine Biscuits—whose Hydrox cookies were overtaken by now-iconic Oreos—to the MySpace social network.

“Everyone wants to be the first footprints on the empty beach,” said Americus Reed, marketing professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “But it depends on how you land on that first move. The second mover is watching them make mistakes. You’re able to identify those and not make those mistakes.”

A Novo Nordisk spokeswoman said the company remains the global-volume market leader in GLP-1 drugs, serving nearly two-thirds of patients taking them for diabetes and obesity.

Some investors and industry watchers say Novo Nordisk’s troubles stem from a cautious, reactive approach starting when the market first burst onto the scene, in contrast with a faster, more aggressive tack in production and marketing by Lilly.

“Novo is always a step behind,” said Yuri Khodjamirian, chief investment officer at Tema ETFs, which owns Novo Nordisk shares.

Novo Nordisk thought Wegovy might run into the same market constraints as Saxenda, so the company planned modest production levels, using a combination of in-house and contract manufacturing capacity.

One of Novo Nordisk’s early stumbles was underestimating the demand for Wegovy—the weight-loss version of semaglutide, the same compound as diabetes drug Ozempic—ahead of its 2021 launch. The company’s planning was informed by its experience generating modest sales for an earlier weight-loss drug, Saxenda. Doctors were skeptical of it, and many health-insurance plans in the U.S. didn’t cover weight-loss drugs.

It wasn’t enough. It took only five weeks for the prescription rate of Wegovy to exceed the level that Saxenda had taken five years to reach. Jørgensen recalled later, in an interview in 2024, that he initially thought: “ ‘That’s patients who’ve been lined up, there’s pent-up demand, it will normalize.’ It didn’t. It just kept growing.”

The company responded by limiting demand—the last thing a drugmaker wants to do with a new product. Sales representatives asked doctors not to start new patients. The company resorted to rationing by withholding the lower, starter doses for new patients, to conserve supplies for existing patients taking the higher doses.

The shortages opened the door for competition. They made it legal for special pharmacies in the U.S. to make compounded, copycat versions of semaglutide that sold for much less than list prices for Ozempic and Wegovy. Telehealth firms capitalized on the new, lower-cost supply by hawking the compounded versions, taking away market share from Novo Nordisk.

The shortages gave rival Eli Lilly time to catch up. Lilly introduced Mounjaro for diabetes in 2022, followed by Zepbound, a weight-loss version of the same drug, in 2023. Zepbound has been shown in studies to induce greater weight loss than Wegovy, more than 20% of body weight.

Although Lilly also encountered shortages due to high demand, it was able to resolve them more quickly than Novo Nordisk. Now, weekly U.S. prescriptions for Lilly’s Zepbound have surpassed Wegovy’s. Mounjaro still trails Ozempic but is closing the gap.

Novo Nordisk has spent billions of dollars trying to expand manufacturing capacity, including an unusual deal last year for its controlling foundation to acquire the contract manufacturer Catalent for $16 billion.

The R&D race for future weight-loss drugs also has tilted in Eli Lilly’s direction. Lilly has reported favorable clinical-trial data for two closely watched experimental drugs, including a pill version that analysts think could be appealing to people who don’t want injections.

Novo Nordisk, meanwhile, has had some R&D disappointments, including studies of an experimental combination weight-loss drug dubbed CagriSema. The less-than-expected results of one study sent Novo Nordisk shares plunging more than 20% in one day in December, wiping out nearly $100 billion in stock-market capitalization for the company. Some analysts have cut their sales forecasts for the drug.

Lilly has gained an edge on the marketing front as well. The company beat Novo Nordisk to the punch in launching a direct-to-consumer, online service selling weight-loss drugs at discounted cash prices, aimed at people who don’t have insurance coverage. And it was first to strike a deal with a big telehealth firm, Ro, to sell a discounted weight-loss drug. Novo Nordisk eventually made similar moves, but months after Lilly.

“They seem to be missing a lot of these kinds of strategic endeavors to help sell into a market that is different from a lot of pharma markets,” said BMO Capital Markets analyst Evan David Seigerman.

The Novo Nordisk spokeswoman said the company resolved its shortages before announcing its direct-to-patient service and striking telehealth deals.

Novo Nordisk isn’t out of the race. The company can still turn things around by leaning into CagriSema, which generated solid weight-loss data even if it missed expectations, and by developing other new drugs that target various segments of the growing market, Seigerman said.

More recently, Novo Nordisk has shown signs of being more aggressive. It signed a deal with CVS to make Wegovy the preferred weight-loss drug for members of its drug-benefit plans.

Author Hanne Sindbæk, who has written two books about Novo Nordisk, says there has been an eternal tug of war inside the company between those who are guided by values—the idea that the company works for the common good rather than simply to make a profit—and those who run the business. If Novo Nordisk wants to stay in the game, it may have to lean toward the latter in choosing its next CEO.

Jørgensen, the outgoing CEO, is still in his role while the company searches for a new chief. His predecessor as CEO, Lars Rebien Sørensen, who is chairman of the foundation that has voting control of the drugmaker’s shares, will join the Novo Nordisk board of directors.

“Now they need somebody more business-driven,” Sindbæk said.