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Known for creating the Neapolitan-style jacket, the Naples-based brand credits its 140 highly skilled artisans with producing its luxury tailored clothing.

Far from the bustling restaurant and shop scene on Spaccanapoli and the endless lines of tourists waiting to board ferries to Capri lies a different Naples.

The third-largest city in Italy with a population of around 1 million, Naples has long been known as a luxury menswear Mecca, home to some of the world’s most prestigious tailoring brands including Kiton, Isaia and Mariano Rubinacci.

Lesser known, but no less distinguished, is Cesare Attolini. Its history dates to the 1930s when Vincenzo Attolini, a young tailor in Naples, broke with the Savile Row-inspired suit-making tradition and developed a new silhouette that eliminated the padding and shoulder pads, resulting in a new light and unstructured fit. His creation would eventually come to define Neapolitan style.

His son, Cesare Attolini, began working alongside him in the tailor shop as a young man, learning to cut fabrics and shape and construct his father’s distinct silhouette. He went on to study in Turin at one of the city’s most prestigious tailoring schools and then returned to Naples and the family business.

Today, the business is run by his sons, Massimiliano, president, and Giuseppe, vice president, who have remained true to the heritage of the company while also working to build a more-visible profile. Their game plan is open Cesare Attolini stores worldwide while carefully monitoring its wholesale distribution.

Unlike many brands that are aggressive in their expansion plans, Attolini is much more conservative. And that’s intentional — due to its limited production and high-quality standards. Each suit can take 25 to 30 hours to complete and no more than 35 pieces are produced daily.

The ready-to-wear jackets retail for $6,500 to $7,500 while suits sell for $7,500 to $9,500. Custom garments start at 30 percent more. Each fabric is exclusive to the firm — most are from Scotland — and no more than 15 pieces are made from each one.

Because of the detail and handwork in each garment, Cesare Attolini keeps its production limited to no more than 8,000 garments a year.

“It’s mind boggling,” said Massimiliano. “If an American entrepreneur heard this, they would say: ‘Let me run away from here, because this is not a business I’m interested in.’ That’s why I keep emphasizing to our clients that this is a mission, a passion of a family lineage. There’s no other way that someone in their right state of mind would choose this as a business model. But we inherited this business model, and we’re making it work. It’s a family affair — that’s the best way to describe it.”

Today, half of the production is ready-to-wear and the other half custom or bespoke. The core of the business remains jackets and suits but the firm also produces trousers, shirts and knitwear and outerwear in a knitwear-focused factory they purchased a decade ago in Umbria. There’s also a small factory in Naples that produces ties.

Maintaining the quality it has become known for remains paramount for the Attolini family, and its ace in the hole is the 140 artisans in its main workshop in Naples. These craftsmen and women are highly skilled in the distinct art of creating a Cesare Attolini Napolitan garment, using only needle, thread and scissors. Many specialize in just one part of the production process, such as cutting collars, sleeves or buttonholes, said Giuseppe, while the most skilled are able to work on all parts of the garments.

“Our workers are 100 Neapolitan — local people,” said Massimiliano, who added that many have worked for the family for generations. “To produce high-quality clothing like this, you need to have not only good tailors, but good relationships. We know the name of every employee, their daughters and sons, their husbands or wives. It’s like an extended family. We take care of them because it’s a very important asset. They are specialized for this kind of product. In other factories, there’s not as much handwork.”

But he admitted that it’s getting harder and harder to find tailors with the skill level needed to build an Attolini garment.

“We have a lot of people with white hair,” he said. “Probably in the future, we’ll have to bring in people from outside and teach them how to make Neapolitan style.”

It takes a special kind of person to be willing to spend the time it takes to master the art of tailoring at this level, they said. And while a lot of the workers are older, they have managed to attract some young people. But keeping them is a challenge and only three out of 10 apprentices typically remain.

“It’s too hard,” Massimiliano said. “They have to be patient. Young people come in and work, sometimes for years, next to a tailor so they can learn everything from the beginning. And then, step by step, we move them after one year to a different department of the workshop. The system we have to train young tailors depends a lot on what their sensibility, their passion, their talent and skills are. After five or six years, they are still learning.”

They bemoaned the fact that the government of Italy provides little support for young artisans, making it harder for companies like Attolini to sustain their craft. “Italy is the country of high-quality manufacturing and the politicians do nothing to protect this kind of business,” Massimilliano said. He suggested that the government offer incentives such as tax cuts or assistance in buying a home to young people who follow this path.

Ateliers Horizons creative director Axel de Beaufort talks about the making of the $15,000 headphones, which feature handstitched leather and metallic finishes inspired by the Kelly handbag.

At Hermès, there are personalized products — and then there is Ateliers Horizons.

Nestled behind a steel gate on a nondescript side street in the Paris suburb of Pantin, this discreet workshop houses unexpected treasures. A canoe? A foosball table? A jukebox? Horizons can customize all these, and more, not to mention the handbags that make up the bulk of its special orders.

Don’t even think of trying to bypass the French luxury house’s notoriously long waiting lists by tapping the workshop for a classic Birkin or Kelly. Instead, imagine bags shaped like a birdcage or a pineapple.

With a degree in naval design and architecture from the University of Southampton in England, de Beaufort has the chops to handle the atelier’s large-scale projects like boats, private jet interiors and cars.

He likes to stop by the Horizons showroom to admire the C28 Aérosport, made in 1935 by French manufacturer Avions Voisin, that takes pride of place on the ground floor. Working with a professional restorer, Hermès made the leather interiors of the silver Art Deco-style model, of which only a handful were produced.

Axel de Beaufort Lee Whittaker/Courtesy photo

“Before I met the owner of this car, I didn’t know about Voisin,” admits de Beaufort. “This is what we like at Horizons: to find ourselves in this kind of story.”

He’s just as enthusiastic about more offbeat projects. A fishing rod, boxing gloves and a disco ball are among the commissions the studio has received. “I’m as interested and happy about these little special orders as the seat of a plane,” de Beaufort says.

In the last decade the bespoke studio has also started to create its own capsule collections, available in selected Hermès boutiques. Initially it asked store managers for creative briefs, making items like a picnic hamper, a hammock and a kite. Now the unit generates its own ideas, adding surfboards, skateboards and speakers to the mix.

De Beaufort is part of a team of around 50 people at Horizons, including designers, engineers and artisans. Aside from a handful of bag specialists based at the Hermès headquarters on Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré in Paris, they’re all housed under the same roof.

The sound of hammering reverberates around the airy workshop. Two men are conferring around a brown leather airplane seat. In a corner, a young woman with headphones is handstitching a leather handle cover for a foosball table.

Creatives and makers work hand-in-hand to develop products that meld technical excellence with traditional craftsmanship — a balance de Beaufort perfected back when he worked on big yachting projects.

An Hermès connected speaker. Courtesy of Hermès

“Victor Hugo said: ‘The sea is a place of rigor and freedom.’ I like this because it’s really where we are. When you design a boat, you have to understand every part of the technicity of things and at the same time, it must be a nice object to go wherever you want,” he says.

“We need to be super creative and at the same time, as we are here to explore, we need to understand the engineering of things. It doesn’t mean that we do the engineering, but we need to understand and we need to be able to push boundaries,” he adds.

A case in point: the first Hermès headphones, which will hit stores this summer, 10 years after the luxury house created a sensation by partnering with Apple on its connected watch.

Ateliers Horizons has dabbled in sound before, developing a first jukebox in 2019, as well as a boombox housing a vertical turntable. Its latest collection also includes a cubic connected speaker, a lacquered mahogany DJ table and a new jukebox featuring the Cheval Néon design by Greek illustrator Elias Kafouros.

Creating the $15,000 headset was especially complex as the brand pursued an original “Hermès sound.” Adding leather and a logo to an existing product is never an option for Ateliers Horizons, which works with specialized manufacturers when it doesn’t have the expertise in-house.

“Being able to bring some proper Hermès work on industrial design is very interesting,” de Beaufort says. “The edge between industrial design and craftsmanship is so thin.”

The minimalist design of the headphones, designed for both Bluetooth and wired use, features signature touches like handstitched cowhide leather and metallic finishes inspired by the Kelly bag. Colors include “naturel,” black, chocolate, “rouge H” and Prussian blue.

An Hermès surfboard featuring Gianpaolo Pagni’s “Cheval Vague” design. Courtesy of Hermès

Like any Hermès product, the luxury is whispered.

“People don’t really need to know that what’s happening behind it is as authentic as stitching a Birkin in the workshop. There are people, there are hands, there is time. There are no shortcuts,” de Beaufort says.

“The idea is not to be able to replicate that 10,000 times as a big headset supplier would do. The idea is to have the few that we will do made perfectly, and that has been a very long learning process,” he adds.

It’s just as well the Paris-born designer is a connect-the-dots kind of guy, with a passion for problem-solving. “Finding solutions is always something amazing,” he says.

He has no set routine for tackling a blank page, instead drawing inspiration from conversations, surfing or playing with his kids. “I’m very curious, I like to ask questions wherever I am,” he says. “My brain is always on.”

De Beaufort lauds Pierre-Alexis Dumas, artistic director of Hermès, for giving his teams space to exercise their imagination.

Avions Voisin C28 Aérosport with leather interiors by Ateliers Horizons. Alexis Goure/Courtesy of Hermès

“He’s never telling you what to do. He’s more listening to you and giving you what the DNA of Hermès is,” he says. “It’s really a blessing because it’s pretty rare to be in this kind of situation.”

Bespoke objects are baked into that DNA. After all, Hermès was founded in 1837 as a harness workshop. Its most famous creation, the Birkin, was famously designed for actress Jane Birkin after she met Hermès executive Jean-Louis Dumas on a plane and lamented the lack of large handbags.

“It has never been marketing-driven. It’s always been something appealing to craftsmanship, appealing to stories, with values that we’re attached to, where we can recognize ourselves,” de Beaufort says.

Accordingly, he’s loath to turn down any request, no matter how outlandish. In fact, he frequently pushes clients to think even more outside the box.

“We are here to bring oxygen. We are here to bring the unexpected fun or nice situation in a super high quality. That’s what we try to do,” he says. “People are very happy about that because when they come to Hermès, they come for the entire Hermès [experience].”

An Hermès jukebox featuring the Cheval Néon design by Greek illustrator Elias Kafouros. Courtesy of Hermès

Trump’s tariff threat against European Union hits a bloc that comprises the single-largest U.S. trade partner

President Trump is threatening to ramp up the U.S. trade war with Europe, and costs to move products like cars, pharmaceutical products and airplane parts across the Atlantic are at stake.

Trump on social media Friday called for a new 50% tariff on the European Union starting June 1 while saying trade discussions with the EU “are going nowhere.” He also called the large U.S. trade deficit in goods with the European countries unacceptable.

This marks a major new trade threat against a bloc of 27 countries that add up to the largest U.S. trade partner, ahead of Mexico, Canada and China. In 2024, the U.S. imported about $606 billion in goods from the EU and exported around $370 billion. This kind of imbalance is a major sticking point for Trump as he tries to use tariffs to revamp U.S. manufacturing.

Trade in goods and services with the EU accounted for around 4.9% of U.S. gross domestic product in 2024, according to Bureau of Economic Analysis data. That means trade with Europe is an even bigger part of the U.S. economy than trade with China, which accounted for 2.2% of U.S. GDP last year.

Pharmaceuticals are the single largest EU-produced product shipped to the U.S., totaling $127 billion in 2024. Europe is home to pharma giants like Bayer and Sanofi, but that’s only part of the story. A number of U.S. pharma companies have factories in Ireland, where taxes are low. In 2024, Ireland exported more goods to the U.S. than Italy and France.

Other top imports from Europe are cars ($45.2 billion) and various types of machinery. The U.S. also bought $5.4 billion worth of wine and $4.4 billion worth of perfume from the EU last year.

Europe is a big buyer of U.S. oil, gas, cars, airplanes—and human blood products like plasma. The U.S. also shipped $32.3 billion worth of airplanes and airplane parts, plus $12.4 billion worth of vehicles to the EU. Many of the cars shipped across the Atlantic are European brands, like BMWs and Mercedes made in American factories.

The U.S. is a big player in the global plasma trade and sent $5.2 billion in blood products to the EU last year.

While the U.S. ran a goods-trade deficit of $235.6 billion with the EU in 2024, including services shrinks that deficit to $161 billion, according to BEA data.

Counting services isn’t as easy as counting goods—work like business consulting and banking doesn’t go through ports and customs. The U.S. says it exported about $277 billion in services to the EU last year and imported $201 billion in 2024. The EU has hinted in the past that it might go after U.S. tech companies—a major source of services exports—in retaliation for tariffs.

In 2018, during his first term, Trump slapped 10% tariffs on aluminum and 25% tariffs on steel. The official justification: national security. The EU hit back with tariffs on more than $3 billion worth of U.S. exports, including jeans, bourbon and Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

In 2021, the Biden administration reached a deal with the EU that effectively ended the spat. The U.S. agreed to let a quota of European steel and aluminum into the country duty-free, and in return the EU suspended its retaliatory tariffs.

The Gut-Wrenching Play in Investing Right Now: Buy and Hold

The biggest weekly decline for stocks since early April is again testing the risk appetite of everyday investors

Key Points

When a chunk of Bill Jensen’s retirement savings got wiped away in early April, he started to second-guess himself.

His wife urged him to consider switching their savings from stocks into safer investments, but Jensen insisted they wait for the market to rebound. The retired 68-year-old tried to reassure both of them by sending emails showing the gains when their portfolio ended in the green.

Seven weeks later, the couple’s investments had recovered most losses, Jensen said. But rather than taking his risk down a notch, he recommitted to the stock market.

This week, stocks fell again.

The S&P 500 retreated 2.6%, its largest weekly decline since early April, the week of President Trump’s globe-spanning tariff announcement. The benchmark index declined 0.7% on Friday after Trump threatened new tariffs on the European Union and on iPhones made overseas, adding fuel to the trade fears.

Such is the gut-wrenching nature of being a buy-and-hold stock investor these days, with volatility poised to continue. The spring’s tariff turmoil has been a sudden shift for investors who were rewarded with steady gains and few prolonged slumps for their portfolios over the prior two years. It has marked a major test of individual investors’ risk tolerances.

“You have to take the good with the bad,” said Jensen, who added that he had “some moments of regret” during the April selloff. On Friday afternoon, he said he was more optimistic.

It is a truism of long-term investing not to sell in the middle of market upheaval. But that can be excruciating right now, investors say.

Jon Ulin, managing principal at Ulin & Co. Wealth Management in Boca Raton, Fla., said he has been spending lots of his time offering clients moral support in addition to investing advice. He encourages them to stick with their original investing plan and reassures them not to switch seats on an airplane that is going through turbulence. Many just want to hear his voice.

“It’s like a self-help line,” he said.

Some big money managers have been advising a more cautious stance toward the market in recent months. Fund manager Vanguard, for example, has suggested investors consider flipping the classic 60/40 split between stocks and bonds for a more conservative, roughly 40/60 approach.

People who are at or nearing retirement, or who have to shell out money soon for big expenses like college tuition, are thinking especially hard about where to stow their money.

Myra Sletson has lived through enough market cycles to know when to walk away from risk, she said. The 69-year-old retired banker in central Pennsylvania said tariffs were the reason she moved 80% of her portfolio into money markets and CDs. Past downturns, like the 2008 financial crisis, felt more manageable, she said. “I was younger then—in my 50s—with more time to recover.”

Sletson had already been growing cautious, but the April selloff confirmed her decision to shift into safer assets. She says the 4% to 5% returns on certificates of deposit felt like a better deal than staying in the stock market. She doesn’t plan to sit on the sidelines forever. “This just isn’t the moment to be brave,” she said.

There are signs more individual investors are starting to take profits. They pulled a net $555 million out of the stock market on May 12, JPMorgan analysts found, marking the first day of net outflows since April 8, when the S&P 500 hit a low in the week following Trump’s tariff announcement.

But others embraced the risks and bought the dip. They were rewarded for it after major indexes rapidly regained April losses. The retail crowd poured roughly $50 billion into equities between April 8 and May 14, according to an analysis from JP Morgan.

As stocks fell in April, Paul Spriggs didn’t touch his portfolio, including two six-figure 529 college savings accounts invested in target-date funds with significant equity exposure.

History is on his side: Research shows that missing just a handful of the stock market’s best days in the past several decades could shrink an investor’s long-term returns by more than 30 percentage points. Those standout days frequently happen in downbeat markets: Two of the S&P 500’s best days on record took place during October 2008.

Spriggs said it was tough to watch the losses earlier this spring, but not enough to nudge him out of the stock market.

“I’ve got enough of a timeline that I think I can recover,” Spriggs said. “I don’t come from money. I’m a middle-class kid. The only way to get ahead is to play the long game.”

Donald Trump issues directive to fast-track nuclear energy development

Executive orders aim to pave the way for construction of 10 large reactors

Donald Trump has directed the government to fast-track construction of nuclear reactors and reform the “risk averse” culture of regulation in a bid to quadruple the US’s atomic energy capacity by 2050.

The president on Friday signed four executive orders that instructed the Department of Energy to facilitate the start of construction for 10 large reactors by 2030 and help finance power upgrades to existing reactors.

In a factsheet accompanying the executive order, the White House said the Nuclear Regulatory Commission had an “overly risk-averse culture”, which requires nuclear facilities to emit as few emissions as possible, including below naturally-occurring levels.

Other measures in the orders include an 18-month deadline for the NRC to approve new reactors and to boost US uranium and nuclear fuel capacity. The orders also called on the energy and defence departments to facilitate development of reactors on federal lands.

“The NRC has failed to license new reactors even as technological advances promise to make nuclear power safer, cheaper, more adaptable and more abundant than ever,” the factsheet said.

White House science and technology policy director Michael Kratsios said that the executive orders would kick-start an “American nuclear renaissance”.

“America’s great innovators and entrepreneurs have run into brick walls when it comes to nuclear technology,” he said.

Nuclear proponents welcomed the administration’s support for a sector which has been plagued in recent decades by long delays to build plants as well as cost overruns. They say nuclear is needed to meet booming artificial intelligence-fuelled energy demand and to lower the US’s carbon dioxide emissions.

“This is an incredible day for nuclear,” said Isaiah Taylor, chief executive of Valar Atomics. He said it was set to open a nuclear reactor in Utah by the end of the year. “The new posture is one of dominance.”

Jacob DeWitte, chief executive of nuclear power start-up Oklo, said that the executive orders provided an opportunity to “bring regulatory regimes back to what their intents were”.

“We need to couple this with permitting reform,” he added.

The proposal to radically reform the NRC will cause concerns among nuclear safety advocates, while other industry experts questioned whether the orders are far-reaching enough. The sector is notoriously cost and capital intensive and also faces tariffs and uncertain government support.

“How can you plan a multibillion-dollar project and finance it when you don’t know [how long Inflation Reduction Act] tax subsidies, tariffs, or what Trump is signing today will be around?” said an industry insider.

“Had it gone through 60 votes in the Senate, as a business person, I’d have put more faith in that,” they added.

Nuclear industry critics warned the Trump administration’s actions risked undermining public trust in the sector by weakening the oversight role of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

“By fatally compromising the independence and integrity of the NRC, and by encouraging pathways for nuclear deployment that bypass the regulator entirely, the Trump administration is virtually guaranteeing that this country will see a serious accident or other radiological release,” said Edwin Lyman, a nuclear expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group.

“Such a disaster will destroy public trust in nuclear power and cause other nations to reject US nuclear technology for decades to come.”

Some industry experts said the administration’s plan to facilitate construction of 10 large nuclear reactors was ambitious given that only two large-scale reactors have been completed in the US over the past two decades. Both reactors at the Vogtle plant in Georgia cost more than $30bn to complete, double their initial estimates.

Shares in Oklo, the small modular reactor developer backed by OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, jumped 23 per cent. NuScale, which also designs SMRs, gained 19.4 per cent.

Nuclear fuel company Centrus Energy’s share price rose 21.6 per cent, while, Cameco, the world’s largest publicly traded uranium company increased 11.1 per cent.

Gains in utility-scale nuclear companies such as Constellation Energy and Dominion Energy were more muted, with share price rises of 2.1 per cent and 1.1 per cent respectively.

The reluctant newsman: How the Telegraph finally found an owner

After two years of false starts, RedBird Capital Partners is buying Britain’s rightwing paper for £500mn

After 717 days, two law changes, one election and a revolving cast of Tory power brokers, Emirati ministers and Downing Street policymakers, the tortuous sale of the UK’s Telegraph newspaper may — finally — be drawing to a close.

On Friday, RedBird Capital Partners agreed to buy the media group for £500mn, in a deal that would make the US private equity group the sole controlling owner. The transaction leaves the door open for Abu Dhabi’s IMI to take a minority stake, after the British government last week changed the law to allow up to 15 per cent of a domestic newspaper to be owned by a foreign state. 

But two years after Lloyds Banking Group seized control of the Telegraph Media Group from the Barclay family, its owners since 2004, the deal remains an outline. 

RedBird boss Gerry Cardinale — a former Goldman Sachs banker with little news pedigree — will take control of the UK’s leading rightwing broadsheet, with the Middle Eastern buyers for whom he originally instigated this deal relegated to minority backers. 

He is still seeking UK investors to back the deal. And the American investor’s plans for the Telegraph are only just becoming clear.  

“I don’t have a tremendous experience in news,” Cardinale, who manages $12bn in assets across RedBird’s portfolio of sports, media and entertainment, told the Financial Times on Friday.

“But I have a tremendous amount of experience growing intellectual property-based businesses and this is very familiar territory to me. All the foundation stones are there for me to do what I do really well, which is create a global media company rooted in world-class journalism.”

The news rookie — who initially had little interest in owning this kind of business, according to people close to the deal — will assemble a board of heavyweight advisers to help oversee the newspaper. Former FT editor Lionel Barber also acted as an informal adviser to Cardinale on the deal, according to several people familiar with the situation.

The new owner’s playbook centres growth on the US. “There is real white space in America in terms of centre right and there’s really no global counterpunch to the New York Times,” Cardinale said. “The Telegraph has got all of the foundations that enable it to aspire to that kind of global breadth and heft.”

The unusual structure of RedBird’s deal to buy the Telegraph reflects its troubled history: the US investor is in part buying the media group from itself. 

RedBird IMI, the joint venture that is three quarters funded by Abu Dhabi royalty, first struck a deal to buy the Telegraph in 2023. After provoking uproar in the newspaper’s newsroom and on the backbenches of the UK parliament, the deal was blocked last year by the former Conservative government over fears around foreign state influence over a national newspaper. 

The final say over the transfer of control between the joint venture partners still rests in Abu Dhabi, given its majority ownership of RedBird IMI — controlled by Sheikh Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, vice-president of the United Arab Emirates and owner of Manchester City football club.

But the terms of the deal — which still requires regulatory approval — have been carefully crafted to ease political angst.

IMI is expected to take the now-maximum permitted 15 per cent interest in the newspaper. It would become a “passive investor”, said one person close to the deal, with no intention of taking a board seat. About £100mn — or about two times the group’s underlying earnings — will be funded through debt. 

RedBird has committed to fund the remainder of the deal’s value, said people close to the transaction, although the group is in talks with other UK-based minority investors. Those include Daily Mail-owner Lord Rothermere’s DMGT, which is likely to take 10 per cent. 

The US group — once dismissed by some as a front for the Abu Dhabi buyers — could find itself on the hook for at least £300mn. That money will not be coming from its Middle Eastern partners, say people close to the company, adding that RedBird does not have any IMI or other UAE money in its funds and will not take any debt funding from the Emirati state.

Those close to the talks said that IMI would have rather the government had set a higher threshold, but that 15 per cent represented a good compromise. “This will soft-land the whole saga so that the relationship between the two countries can get back to normal,” one said.

The Telegraph fiasco contributed to a souring of relations between the UK and UAE in recent years, according to people close to the deal.

Other issues, including investigations into the financial conduct of Sheikh Mansour’s Manchester City — the club denies all charges — also contributed. But Emirati officials were shocked and angered by the hostile comments made by MPs in parliament about the control of UK media. 

“The UAE has been furious about how they were treated,” said one, a situation that also tested relations with Cardinale’s RedBird.

Since being elected last July, Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour government has tried to smooth relations with the Emirati state. The issue of foreign state ownership of UK media was raised by officials on the prime minister’s trip to the UAE in December, according to people familiar with the matter.

Around the same time, Cardinale — who was spending much of his time in Los Angeles overseeing a deal to buy Hollywood group Paramount — decided that he needed to take a more hands-on role to try to resolve the situation. 

Cardinale met the newspaper’s management, editors and UK politicians, before becoming comfortable that there was an opportunity to generate decent returns from the business. 

“As I watched everything play out, I saw that the right thing is for a growth equity investor like me to come in and take this thing to the next level,” Cardinale told the FT.

A deal began to take shape in January for Cardinale, after the end of an exclusive period for talks with a different preferred bidder, Dovid Efune, the owner of the New York Sun.

In March, the RedBird boss visited Downing Street to meet Varun Chandra, the business adviser to Starmer, and Sultan al-Jaber, a top UAE minister politician who has multiple roles in Abu Dhabi including head of its oil company. Representatives from the UK’s Department for Culture, Media and Sport also attended the meeting.

Officials — also being lobbied by other British media groups concerned that a valuable source of overseas funding had been throttled — sought a solution to allow IMI to protect at least some of its investment.

Even now, a deal is far from done. The rival bid by Efune, backed by former cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi and millionaire investor Jeremy Hosking, remains on the table, although was struggling with financing.

But those involved are confident that there will be few of the issues that caused delays to date. None of RedBird’s existing UK investments are in news media, although Rothermere’s potential involvement may attract scrutiny over media plurality. 

If successful, the takeover could be a fresh start for the Telegraph newsroom, reeling after two years in the headlines. RedBird plans to reinvest the cash made by the Telegraph alongside its own funds to increase digital subscriptions and grow its brand in the US. 

Cardinale himself addressed Telegraph senior managers on Friday, striking what one insider called an “apologetic and ebullient” tone — “albeit realistic about how difficult it would be to crack America”.

He emphasised the independence of its editorial team, pledging funds for acquisitions and setting an ambition to boost cash flow to £100mn in what he described as a long term holding.

In a nod to the Telegraph political heartland, he mentioned that he had met Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch this week.

A resolution might also ease one sore point in the UK-UAE relationship, said people familiar with the Emirati state’s position.

“This government inherited a relationship with the UAE that was in a difficult place,” said one UK official.

“The country is a really important regional ally and investor in the UK . . . They need to see they have a relationship that is valued with the British government.”

Victoria’s Secret shows poison pills aren’t always toxic

Rather than a bidder, lingerie retailer may simply need more time

Victoria’s Secret is trying to repel an admirer. The US lingerie company has moved to adopt a so-called poison pill defence after Australian investment group BBRC International boosted its stake in the company to 13 per cent, declared its holding an “active” one and made regulatory filings that would allow it to increase its holding to almost 50 per cent.

The company’s defence mechanism works like this: once an investor acquires more than 15 per cent of Victoria’s Secret, all other shareholders will be entitled to purchase one new share for every share they currently own at a 50 per cent discount. The plan, aimed at making it prohibitively expensive for any investor to acquire a controlling stake, will remain in effect for one year.

These kinds of takeover shields, whose use jumped during the Covid-19 pandemic, are cropping up once again. Companies whose share prices have been walloped by the recent market turmoil are rushing to shore themselves up against bids from opportunistic rivals. They can also be useful to repel activist campaigns — a rising phenomenon — by putting a lid on the stakes such investors can buy.

Already, 13 public companies in the US have adopted poison pills for the year to date, according to Deal Point Data. More are in the works, Lex hears from advisers busily helping clients put together plans they can keep in reserve, as well as update existing ones.

Poison pills rarely get triggered. The simple fact of their existence can leave a bitter taste. By protecting entrenched management and boards from takeovers, they dull some of the pressure to perform. They also remove an element of choice from shareholders who may want to maximise their returns by selling their stakes in an acquisition.

But they do serve a function, especially in the US where it is possible for investors to buy up near-controlling stakes without negotiating with management, paying a premium, or worrying about thresholds at which they would have to bid for the whole company.

Victoria’s Secret, which was spun out of L Brands only four years ago, has good reason to fight for its independence. Once the linchpin of the $12bn-a-year US lingerie market, the company has struggled in recent years as its push-up bras fell out of favour. Its stock is still languishing about 70 per cent below its peak in 2021.

Under new CEO Hillary Super, the company is showing signs of a turnaround. It reported its first rise in annual revenue and net profit in three years. Rather than a bidder, Victoria’s Secret may simply need more time. Sometimes these pills can be more prophylaxis than poison.

Madrid’s stance threatens alliance unity amid preparations to meet Trump’s military spending demand in June

Spain is the last major holdout on a Nato plan to announce early next month that the entire alliance will spend 5 per cent of GDP on defence by 2032, a target demanded by US President Donald Trump.

Madrid is under pressure to commit to the target and enable Nato to announce that all its members will meet the pledge at a meeting of its defence ministers in Brussels on June 5, four officials briefed on the preparations said.

Trump has demanded Nato countries hit 5 per cent or risk losing US protection, in a drive to “equalise” the cost of defending the alliance.

Diplomats are straining to secure unanimous Nato backing ahead of the alliance’s leaders’ summit in The Hague on June 24, where many hope Trump will accept the promises of increased spending and reaffirm US security guarantees to Europe.

But Spain was still yet to confirm that it will support the 5 per cent pledge, the officials said, potentially blocking a unanimous statement, undermining alliance unity and complicating the preparations for The Hague.

US secretary of state Marco Rubio said he had “urged Spain to join allies in committing 5 per cent of GDP to defence”, after meeting Spain’s foreign minister in Washington this week.

But the Socialist-led Spanish government is refusing to address the demand head-on in public.

Spanish foreign minister José Manuel Albares said: “There was an exchange [with Rubio] and both of us expressed our views very clearly. I insisted that it was a huge effort to reach two per cent, and that the debate right now needs to focus on capabilities.”

Spain has long been a laggard on defence spending. Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez only said this month that Spain would meet Nato’s current 2 per cent spending target this year, as he unveiled a €10bn defence investment plan. He had previously said Madrid would hit 2 per cent before 2029.

Under a scheme drawn up by secretary-general Mark Rutte, the allies will commit to spend 3.5 per cent on core defence expenditure by 2032 and an additional 1.5 per cent on related spending such as cyber security and defence-adjacent infrastructure.

Margarita Robles, Spain’s defence minister, said this week she had told a meeting of Nato counterparts that “we understand that the important thing is not so much talking about specific percentages, but rather developing capabilities and fulfilling missions”.

Madrid has consistently argued that it makes big contributions to Nato, EU and UN missions that are not quantified in the figures.

No Nato ally currently spends 5 per cent on defence according to the alliance’s strict existing criteria. But two officials said that the 3.5 per cent figure was more critical, given that almost all allies already spend 1.5 per cent of GDP on the areas set to be covered by the second portion of the target.

US ambassador to Nato Matthew Whitaker said: “5 per cent is our number,” earlier this month. “We’re asking our allies to invest in their defence like they mean it.”

If Spain agrees to the pledge, Nato plans for the defence ministers in June to use the meeting to discuss technical details of the scale-up, including potential milestones between now and 2032, according to Nato diplomats.

Bernardo Navazo, founder of Geopolitical Insights, a Madrid-based consultancy, said Spain’s government recognised the need to spend more than 2 per cent, but had to buy time to “work on an accompanying public discourse, because as a country we come from a tradition that is more pacifist and anti-militarist”.

But Navazo saw the US target as unrealistic. “For countries like Spain and Italy, it will be very difficult to get their populations to back 5 per cent in a context where people perceive no imminent threat, even if the leaders say we are part of the EU and the EU faces a security threat from Russia.”

For every dollar in gambling tax revenue, U.S. states spend under a penny on problem gambling. The gaming industry spends even less. Millions of gamblers are at their mercy.

Playing the ponies is one of many Kentucky Derby traditions and rituals, alongside pastel pinks and feather fascinators. The gates open at 9 a.m. on the first Saturday of every May. By 10 o’clock two commentators appear on enormous screens to run through the odds and their picks for the day’s 14 races. In between events, an announcer’s baritone booms over the PA system: “If you don’t bet, you can’t win!”

This year, for the second time, Toby Coggins and his sister made the pilgrimage to the Churchill Downs raceway from College Station, Texas. Leaning against a wall near a complimentary cocktail booth, Coggins scrolls through the in-house betting app advertised on billboards around the track. He doesn’t usually gamble. “I’m just not a big risk taker,” he says. “But here it’s all part of the fun.”

About a quarter of Kentuckians placed bets on horses in 2021, according to an Ipsos survey. Today, those gamblers have far more options. In September 2023, Kentucky became the 38th U.S. state with legal sports betting.

Sports wagers, mostly placed through smartphones, have already trampled the state’s horse bets.

In the 12 months after Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear placed the state’s first legal sports bet—a $20 parlay on Kentucky college football—Kentuckians wagered $2.4 billion on sports. Bets on horse racing fell 8% to $196 million.

The betting trend has played out much the same way across the U.S. Americans now wager roughly $150 billion a year on sports, and 48% of American men under 50 have an account on a digital sportsbook at sites like DraftKings, FanDuel, ESPNBet, and BetMGM, according to a Siena College survey.

The wagers have generated a surge of new interest in professional sports leagues. State coffers are being filled with new tax receipts, and struggling media companies are stuffing commercial breaks with ads for betting apps. It’s all part of a national gambling honeymoon in the wake of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that cleared the way for nationwide sports betting.

But addiction experts say a public-health time bomb is ticking. Gambling on smartphone apps carries higher addiction risks than traditional wagers like those at casinos and horse tracks, according to the Journal of Behavioral Addictions. Internet search queries related to gambling addiction “have consistently increased year over year since 2021,” a recent study in the Journal of the American Medical Association found.

It takes around seven years for someone with a gambling problem to first present for treatment, experts say, meaning a wave of problem gamblers have yet to identify themselves. When they do, the healthcare system is sure to be overwhelmed. Kentucky has five counselors certified to treat an estimated 60,000 problem gamblers, according to the state’s problem gambling council. Nationwide, there’s no accurate count of gambling counselors and no universal standard for certification.

U.S. states raked in $14.4 billion worth of gambling tax revenue in 2023, according to the National Association of Administrators for Disordered Gambling Services, and allocated $134 million of that revenue to gambling addiction services. For every dollar states made from gambling, less than a penny went to addressing its harms.

Gambling addiction affects millions of Americans, and research shows it’s associated with higher rates of suicidal thoughts, domestic violence, child neglect, social isolation, economic insecurity, substance abuse, unemployment, homelessness, and crime.

Since 1996, the Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling has used privately raised funds to produce public service announcements and train local operators at the 1-800-GAMBLER hotline, which directs callers to treatment resources like Gamblers Anonymous. For years, though, the council struck out on its main goal to get state funding for problem gambling services—what Executive Director Mike Stone called “a 23-year quest of advocacy.”

It took an expansion of state-sanctioned gambling for that funding to materialize.

After four years of back and forth, Kentucky in 2023 passed a bill to legalize sports betting beyond thoroughbred racing. To win over a group of holdouts in the state Senate, lawmakers added a problem gambling assistance account to the legislation. It earmarked 2.5% of the state’s new gambling tax revenue to fund workforce training, treatment, and research. The remainder goes to the state’s pension fund for public employees.

DraftKings, FanDuel, and BetMGM were among the gambling firms that advocated for the bill. In total, the industry spent $443,000 lobbying the Kentucky legislature in 2023, state records show.

DraftKings was enthusiastic about the bill’s passage. In August 2023, the company boosted its revenue outlook for the year, calling out $20 million in new revenue expected from Kentucky in the final three months of the year. Soon after, DraftKings told investors it had signed up more than 5% of Kentucky’s adult population within five weeks of going live in the state.

The grants from the problem gambling fund moved slower.

After the Kentucky bill passed, Stone says he “immediately got phone calls and folks saying, ‘Well, what are you going to do with all this money?’” he says with a laugh. “My response was, ‘What money?’”

The fund currently has $1.8 million, but disbursement has been slowed by red tape. Every dollar distributed from Kentucky’s gambling fund requires a grant request, extensive paperwork, and a public comment period lasting up to 120 days, an arduous task for any administrator.

The 2023 law includes a clause that caps administrative spending at $50,000, so Kentucky’s system hinges on one part-time worker—despite an expected explosion of problem gamblers in the coming years. “They just flat don’t have the money to fund a full-time person,” Stone says. It took the fund 13 months to fill its first grant.

In the Kentucky town of Owensboro, 83 miles west of Churchill Downs, RonSonlyn Clark has been treating people with gambling disorders for more than two decades. After 10 years as a substance abuse counselor, Clark took a problem gambling training course in 1998. She was surprised by how often gambling came up at the battered women’s shelter where she worked. Studies show that around a third of problem gamblers have been victims or perpetrators of intimate partner violence.

Today, she trains gambling counselors in Owensboro and at the University of Indiana, sits on the board of an international organization that licenses gambling counselors, and works alongside Stone as president of the Kentucky Council on Problem Gambling.

She says her career has been a battle against the public’s dismissal of gambling issues. Pathological gambling was first classified as a mental disorder in 1980 by the American Psychiatric Association. The public view still hasn’t caught up with the science, though, Clark says.

“There’s a whole lot of people who think it’s a moral issue. Why should we care?” she says. “They don’t understand it’s brain chemistry.”

In Kentucky, gamblers’ shame is at odds with state pride around the country’s most iconic betting event.

“When you think of the Derby, you think of beautiful hats, stately horses, mint juleps, pageantry, pomp and circumstance, and the fun that’s involved,” Clark says. “You don’t think of somebody out back getting ready to shoot themselves because they bet $10,000 on a horse and they’re not going to be able to make their house payment.”

An 11-year study ending in 2016 found that one in five people with a gambling disorder had attempted suicide. The National Council on Problem Gambling estimates 1% of American adults, or 2.5 million people, meet the criteria for disordered gambling.

The federal government, which collected roughly $370 million in federal excise tax on sports gambling last year, has no programs in place for that group. The U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, by contrast, has an annual budget of $7 billion.

The disparity has caught the attention of a few U.S. lawmakers. “I think that the federal government has a right to say, let’s use this to make people healthier,” Rep. Andrea Salinas (D., Ore.) says of the taxes collected on gambling. Last year, she co-sponsored a bill called the Gambling Addiction Recovery, Investment and Treatment, or GRIT, Act, which would shift 50% of those funds to problem gambling treatment and research.

It stalled in Congress. The gambling industry spent $39.2 million on federal lobbying efforts in 2024, according to OpenSecrets.org. “They have come out hard against this bill,” Salinas says.

The American Gaming Association says its opposition to the bill stems from the underlying excise tax that would fund the problem gambling initiatives.

“The AGA opposes the GRIT Act and supports bipartisan legislation, the Discriminatory Gaming Tax Repeal Act of 2025, that would repeal the excise tax on legal sports betting operators to ensure we can effectively migrate Americans into the protections of the regulated market,” Chris Cylke, senior vice president of government relations at the American Gaming Association, said in a statement.

The AGA points to $472 million in responsible gaming expenditures like customer service, education, and research that its members make annually. That total is 0.7% of the industry’s revenue last year, which came to $71.9 billion. States, by comparison, spent 0.9% of their gambling tax revenue on problem gambling initiatives.

As the debate unfolds in Washington, sports betting is on the rise. This year, Wall Street expects DraftKings to generate $6.3 billion in revenue, up from $432 million in 2019. It operates sports books in 25 states, plus the District of Columbia.

Rival FanDuel, owned by U.K.-based Flutter Entertainment , is forecast to have sales of $16.9 billion this year, up from 2019’s $2.8 billion. It’s in 22 U.S. states and D.C.

The stocks have been smart bets. DraftKings shares are up 156% over the past three years, while Flutter has risen 108%. The S&P 500 index has gained 48% over the same period.

FanDuel says it hasn’t conducted lobbying activities around the GRIT Act. “FanDuel is an industry leader in responsible gaming,” a company spokesperson says. “We are also highly supportive of gaming tax funds being used for responsible gaming research and consumer protection in many of the states in which we operate.”

DraftKings didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Without federal oversight of gambling, states have been left to fend for themselves, particularly when it comes to public health. “There’s no playbook,” says Jeff Marotta, a clinical psychologist who has spent three decades consulting with states to develop problem gambling services.

While states are gradually increasing their problem gambling budgets, the work has been slow. As of 2024, the median state funding level for problem gambling was $1.9 million, according to a survey Marotta conducted for the National Association of Administrators for Disordered Gambling Services. Massachusetts is a standout with a $30 million problem gambling budget, while eight states provide no funding at all.

The challenge for policymakers trying to regulate gambling is its almost magical benefits to state coffers.

Gambling is “a very effective way to get more state budget without having to raise taxes,” says Heather Wardle, a professor of gambling research and policy at the University of Glasgow. Once gambling revenue is supporting pension funds, infrastructure, and other state priorities, Wardle says, “it’s very hard to then roll back from that.”

In Kentucky, Stone’s problem gambling council dealt with that challenge for years. “We would be taking money away from some other program,” Stone says state legislators regularly told him.

The dynamic was a topic in last year’s Commission on Gambling, organized by the Lancet, the international medical journal. “While governments readily appreciate revenues from the gambling industry and might even use gambling products for their own fund-raising purposes, they generally underestimate the prevalence and seriousness of social harm done and the associated public costs,” the commission reported.

To Kentucky lawmakers, though, their citizens were already facing gambling’s harm. As of 2023, sports betting was legal in most of its neighboring states, meaning Ohio, Illinois, and Virginia were generating gambling revenue off Kentuckians. “So why forgo that revenue when the ills already come with it?” says state Rep. Michael Meredith, who sponsored the bill to legalize sports betting in Kentucky.

It was a winning argument—but maybe not for the state’s public health.

“That can’t be a healthy system, particularly when we know that the way the industry generates its profits is disproportionately relying on those who are harmed,” says Wardle, who co-chaired the Lancet’s project.

A study in the Journal of Gambling Business and Economics found that 5.7% of U.S. sports bettors generate 80% of sports betting revenue. That ratio roughly holds across sales in the alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana industries. Researchers say this “addiction surplus” has motivated industry players to prevent public-health initiatives tied to reducing consumption.

Across the country, the programs that do exist have often been met with little interest, Marotta says, because of a dated approach.

“The place where states really struggle is they equate the needs to address gambling issues among their population like they do with other addiction issues or mental health issues,” he says. Problem gambling treatment is “a different business model.”

Promoting the treatment is as important as the treatment itself, Marotta argues. “These folks that have gambling issues don’t tend to just show up for treatment,” he says. “So there needs to be an effort to be more proactive and go out there and do outreach and market your services.”

Until then, the programs are stuck in a continual effort to get off the ground with disappointing impact. In the end, Marotta says, policymakers “don’t see the numbers they expect, they reduce the funding or they gut the program.”

In 2019, Washington, D.C., allocated $200,000 to problem gambling initiatives when it approved sports betting in the District. Four years later, gambling tax revenue reached $5.4 million and D.C. cut its problem gambling budget to zero.