TheChek News Flow

Sur un marché qui plafonne, Free, Orange, Bouygues et SFR se battent pour les abonnés à tout prix, multipliant les offres agressives. La bataille pourrait faire des victimes.

« C’est une offre en or », scande le commercial de Bouygues. Démarchée par téléphone, la cliente d’Orange depuis juin 2024 manque de tomber de sa chaise. Un forfait mobile à 9,99 euros pour 100 gigas ? Une bagatelle, à côté des 31,99 euros, pour le même volume Internet, qu’elle débourse chaque mois chez l’opérateur historique. En deux clics sur son ordinateur, elle découvre la foire aux bonnes affaires. Depuis l’été dernier, Bouygues Telecom, Orange, Free et SFR s’étripent pour récupérer des clients.

Exit la trêve instaurée pendant la période inflationniste de 2023, qui leur avait permis d’augmenter les prix. Le marché mobile des télécoms s’est de nouveau mué en arène sans pitié. En un an, le coût du forfait mobile moyen a chuté de 38,4 % selon le baromètre Ariase paru début octobre, passant de 17,50 euros en octobre 2023 à 10,50 euros cette année.

Un « prix plancher historique », selon le comparateur, c’est-à-dire son plus bas depuis la création du baromètre en 2019. Le marché de l’Internet est, lui, plutôt épargné : le coût mensuel moyen d’une box entrée de gamme s’établit à 28,59 euros selon Ariase – soit une baisse de 8 % sur un an.

« Une formule qui marche » chez Free

Dernière offensive en date, celle de Bouygues Telecom, qui a lancé début octobre BIG, une offre destinée aux familles. De quoi faire craindre aux analystes de Morgan Stanley une intensification de la compétition : « L’offensive risque de nourrir l’agitation autour des tarifs et une dilution potentielle des marques. Tous les yeux sont rivés sur les réactions d’Orange et de SFR », ont-ils partagé dans une note. Pour Romain Bonenfant, directeur général de la Fédération française des télécoms, « le marché est oligopolistique, quand l’un baisse les prix, les autres sont obligés de suivre ».

Les hostilités ont véritablement repris au printemps dernier. Difficile de tenir face à Free, qui, avec ses tarifs gelés jusqu’en 2027, est devenu le premier recruteur d’abonnés. Il en a conquis 120 000 au deuxième trimestre 2024 et un peu plus d’1,5 million depuis qu’il a bloqué ses prix en 2022. « Nous en ajoutons toujours plus pour le même prix, se réjouit Nicolas Thomas, directeur général de Free. Une formule qui marche. »

Désormais, quelque 300 000 clients séparent le trublion aux 15,2 millions d’abonnés du numéro trois du marché, Bouygues Telecom. Ce dernier a contre-attaqué via sa marque low cost B & You et sa gamme d’opérateurs virtuels (NRJ Mobile, YouPrice, Cdiscount…), baissant ses tarifs de 12 %, selon le site Zone ADSL. Dans la foulée, le numéro deux, SFR, a surenchéri pour tenter d’endiguer la fuite de ses abonnés – 343 000 entre avril et juin 2024.

SFR « donneur universel »

Même Orange s’y est mis. Le groupe ne pouvait pas se permettre une nouvelle frayeur en Bourse, après que son action a dévissé de 4,4 % en avril 2024 lors de l’annonce des résultats et de la perte de 43 000 abonnés sur le fixe. « Il ne s’agit pas pour nous de nous réaligner avec nos concurrents, mais nous avons été obligés de nous repositionner », admet Jean-François Fallacher, président d’Orange France. Résultat, en octobre, Free a perdu sa place d’opérateur le moins cher avec un prix moyen de 7,04 euros, à égalité avec Sosh, derrière Red by SFR (6,04 euros) et Bouygues Telecom (7,03 euros) selon Ariase.

Vrai responsable du carnage, le manque de croissance du segment mobile. La progression des cartes SIM en service en France a été divisée par quatre en deux ans, à 500 000 unités au premier semestre, selon l’Arcep, le régulateur des télécoms, contre 1,7 million un an avant.

« 500 000 cartes SIM, c’est 125 000 nouveaux clients potentiels pour chacun des acteurs pour générer de la croissance, autant dire rien du tout », alerte Sylvain Chevallier, associé en charge des télécoms au cabinet BearingPoint. Un dirigeant d’opérateur explique : « Le gâteau total diminue, mais chacun veut augmenter sa part et va donc chercher chez les autres. » Et l’hémorragie massive que subit SFR attise l’appétit de ses ennemis. Son demi-million d’abonnés perdus en trois mois, début 2024, lui a même valu le surnom de « donneur universel ».

Bouygues Telecom sème le chaos

Tous s’accordent néanmoins sur un point : « La guerre fait baisser toute la valeur du marché et n’est pas tenable sur la durée », s’alarme un acteur du secteur. Selon Sylvain Chevallier, la France a ceci de particulier que « les infrastructures sont de très bonne qualité alors que les prix sont très bas ». Surtout, le jeu dangereux de la chute des tarifs nuit d’abord à l’image des marques, et les abonnés déjà recrutés exigent de bénéficier des nouveaux prix cassés. « Le risque à terme est de se vider de son parc », glisse un acteur.

Autre conséquence, la baisse de revenus. Bouygues Telecom a alerté début octobre sur le net ralentissement de sa croissance à venir sur les deux prochaines années. Son chiffre d’affaires et son résultat opérationnel seront inférieurs à ceux avancés lors du plan stratégique en 2021.

En parallèle, l’opérateur a dévoilé un plan stratégique à l’horizon 2030 comprenant des économies sur la masse salariale. « Bouygues Telecom s’est fait prendre à son propre jeu, à force de semer le chaos sur le marché mobile », tacle un concurrent. A terme, l’ensemble des acteurs risquent de perdre en capacité d’investissement.

Des difficultés qui relancent les spéculations autour d’une concentration. « Bouygues Telecom cherche peut-être à forcer la consolidation du marché, en étouffant SFR et Free », décryptaient les analystes de Kepler début octobre. Mais pour passer les fourches caudines de l’antitrust à Bruxelles, l’opération ne pourra se faire qu’en échange de garanties de concurrence sur le marché.

Nebius, the company formerly known as Yandex that’s now focused on cloud infrastructure for AI uses (aka “AI compute”), is to begin trading on the public markets once again — more than two years after the Nasdaq halted trading due to economic sanctions imposed in the wake of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2022.

The Netherlands-based company is vying to become one of Europe’s leading players in the burgeoning “GPU-as-a-service” space, and sits in a somewhat unique position — it is a startup in many ways as it’s starting out afresh as a new business, but being a public company means that anyone can invest in it as an alternative to the usual U.S. hyperscalers such as Alphabet or Microsoft.

Founded in 1997, most people know Yandex as the “Google of Russia,” building everything from search engines and advertising products to maps and autonomous vehicles. Yandex’s core market was very much its domestic Russia plus a handful of neighboring countries, however its parent was a Dutch holding organization called Yandex N.V. which went public on the Nasdaq in 2011, followed by a secondary listing three years later on the Moscow Exchange.

Yandex N.V. was doing well as a public company, reaching a valuation of $31 billion at the end of 2021 before the Russia-Ukraine conflict kickstarted a series of global sanctions against companies in the region, and also individuals. Yandex co-founder and CEO Arkady Volozh was forced to resign after the European Union placed him on a sanctions list, although he was removed from the list in March 2024, which paved the way for his return as CEO of the next version of Yandex N.V.

That next version is Nebius, and its business is based on one of Yandex N.V.’s few remaining assets outside of Russia: a Finnish data center and AI cloud business called Nebius AI. The new entity formally emerged back in July, outlining its plans to be a “European AI compute leader,” similar to something like CoreWeave — a company that is also in the midst of expanding into Europe, raising a ton of equity and debt en-route.

While the Nasdaq had said in 2022 that it would delist Yandex and several other Russian-affiliated companies, Yandex appealed and the Nasdaq agreed to maintain its listing — but kept a halt on trading as it went about severing its Russian ties. With those ties terminated earlier this year, and $2 billion in the bank from selling its Russian assets, Volozh said at the time that he intended to continue Nebius as a public company, as it was an easier and cheaper way to access capital, in what is a very capital-intensive business.

“Our ambition is to build one of the world’s largest specialist AI infrastructure businesses,” Volozh said in a statement. “This requires access to technological expertise, graphics processing units and capital. These are exactly what we have.”

Nebius said its Class A ordinary shares will resume trading on Monday, October 21, 2024.

How much equity in OpenAI will Microsoft get once the former becomes a for-profit company? That’s the multibillion-dollar question — one the two parties are racing to answer ahead of a two-year deadline.

The Wall Street Journal reports that both Microsoft and OpenAI have hired investment banks to negotiate Microsoft’s equity — which could be substantial. The tech giant is said to have sunk nearly $14 billion into OpenAI. As of October, OpenAI is the second-most valuable startup in the U.S. behind SpaceX.

Among other issues, Microsoft and OpenAI must resolve how much equity will go to CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI employees, as well as which specific governance rights Microsoft will have. Once OpenAI converts to a for-profit, it’ll become a public-benefit corporation, but with a nonprofit component that’ll own equity in the restructured company.

The negotiations come as OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, is reportedly planning to return from an extended leave as soon as November.

VCs are spending gobs of money on AI startups — especially those run by big names in tech — so SandboxAQ is putting its hand out again, even though it raised a whopping $500 million in early 2023.

The spinout from Google parent company Alphabet is reportedly seeking to raise another round that would value it at $5 billion, sources tell Bloomberg. Its last $500 million round, completed in February 2023, had backers like Breyer Capital, T. Rowe Price funds, and Marc Benioff, Reuters reported at the time. PitchBook estimated its valuation after that round to be $4 billion.

SandboxAQ began as Alphabet’s moonshot AI quantum computing unit led by Jack Hidary, also known as a longtime X Prize board member. It was spun out of Alphabet into an independent startup in March 2022, with Hidary as CEO. Billionaire and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt became the startup’s chairman.

Its mission is a veritable alphabet soup of buzzwords: to work at the intersection of quantum computing and AI. But it is not building a quantum computer, although its software products should one day work with them, Hidary said on a recent episode of the Peter H. Diamandis podcast. Instead, it’s building software based on quantum physics that can model molecules and make predictions of their behavior. Google is still working on the quantum computer part, but Hidary says SandboxAQ already has a number of quantum computing partnerships.

The startup has its hands in a large and somewhat wild assortment of products across life science, materials science, navigation, encryption, and cybersecurity.

It is not working with AI of the generative AI ChatGPT chatbot variety. Instead of predicting language, it is using large modeling AI techniques on equations. Or as Hidary explained, “Instead of the world of large language models, we’ve now entered the world of large quantitative models, LQMs. And LQMs are about starting with equations to generate data. …That’s the most efficient way to generate data, and the most accurate way to generate data.”

To that end, it already has a list of impressive developmental contracts. For instance, it is working on how to extend lithium-ion battery life with battery company Novonix; it has a contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop magnetic navigation systems that don’t rely on GPS; and it’s working with a number of U.S. hospitals on an AI-powered “magnetocardiography system,” a new kind of medical device for imaging the heart, among other projects.

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So, this AI is swinging for bigger fences than writing term papers or creating deepfake videos.

Interestingly, there are some indicators that SandboxAQ could become one of the AI companies that VCs are eager to back. Throughout the year, a number of investors have set up special purpose vehicles (SPVs) for the company’s shares. As we previously reported, such SPVs have become a hot financial tool because so many investors are eager to get a piece of big-name AI startups.

SandboxAQ did not immediately respond to our request for comment.

The 90,000-square-foot contemporary art museum is slated to open in late 2025, with a restaurant and a bookstore.

PARIS — Nearly 40 years to the day after it was inaugurated, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain offered a glimpse at its future home on Place du Palais-Royal, designed by architect Jean Nouvel.

Sitting opposite the Louvre museum, the future home of the contemporary art institution will occupy more than 90,000 square feet on the ground floor and lower levels of a listed building inaugurated in 1855 as part of part of Baron Haussmann’s mandate to overhaul 19th-century Paris.

Over time, the Second Empire-style construction first housed a hotel, then the Grand Magasins du Louvre department store and most recently, the Louvre des Antiquaires, a complex of antique dealers, as well as offices.

“Then Jean went in and as he does, changed the interior a bit,” quipped Alain Dominique Perrin, founding president of the art institution during a press visit of the construction site on Friday.

Perrin later told WWD a cost of 230 million euros had been estimated for the construction works — the building itself belongs to the SDL commercial real estate management group — and that spending was “more or less on track.”

“Despite the inflation, we managed to save on other things,” he said. “The only thing we couldn’t control was the rising cost of steel — and there’s thousands of tons here — so we took a hit, but [one] isn’t too bad. There’s still a year of construction work to go but [the final cost] will be between 225 [and] 245 [million] but not above.”

Conceived with the idea of letting the going-ons of the museum be visible from the outside, Nouvel likened the museum to “a crossing of the future” and “a shelter for the unpredictable,” articulated using ideas and techniques drawn from aircraft carriers as well as large-scale stage mechanisms.

Playing on the indoor-outdoor perception also encouraged the address’ vocation as a crossroads for cultural exchanges. Architecture-wise, his belief is that given the Haussman-style patrimony of Paris, it was important to offset it with a more radical use of space.

“Historical patrimony is here to be a continuum,” he said. “Most major architectures are [composed of] three, four or five periods.”

The 150-meter-long building — on par with the length of the nearby Pompidou Center — will include 70,000 square feet of exhibition space, including 13,500 in the form of five mobile platforms that can be repositioned to create layered vertical spaces reaching up to 11 meters in height.

“There are 11 million combinations,” enthused Perrin. “We can’t do better than give [artists] a tool in movement.”

There are also 13,000 square feet of walkways overlooking the platforms and a garden has been planted on a suspended glass courtyard above the central platform, fitted with shutters that can be adjusted.

A bookstore, restaurant and auditorium will occupy three of the corners of the new museum, while the fourth will be the entrance.

The first exhibition slated to take place here will showcase between 600 and 700 works drawn from the 4,500 commissioned from 500 artists over four decades and “showcasing the vitality of 40 years of contemporary art,” said Perrin.

As is now the foundation’s tradition, that’s where major artists will continue to take pride of place on the central space, while newer signatures will take up other spaces.

While the works are a year from completion, Perrin was keen to mark the 40th anniversary of the cultural institution.

“Today is not the inauguration, that will be done by [managing director] Chris Dercon in a year,” said Perrin. “I am blowing a candle to 40 years, which situates us — not to brag but bragging a little nonetheless — and reminds everyone that we are pioneers and trailblazers.”

The contemporary art institution was inaugurated on Oct. 20, 1984, by then-French minister of culture Jack Lang. Created by the Compagnie Financière Richemont-owned French jewelry firm at the instigation of Perrin, it is a nonprofit organization and museum that helps up-and-coming artists debut, while exhibiting more established signatures as well.

For exhibitions with the Fondation Cartier, artists commit to creating new works, while the foundation ensures production and acquires the final piece.

Perrin recounted the history of the Fondation Cartier, starting with the establishment of the contemporary art institution, which was inspired by conversations with French sculptor César Baldaccini, who expressed the need for better support for artists. “César was always telling me what [artists] want is cash and the speed of a [private] company,” he said.

The Place du Palais-Bourbon address will be the Fondation Cartier’s third home in four decades, after it spent 10 years in its original location in Jouy-en-Josas before moving into its Boulevard Raspail in 1994, also designed by Nouvel.

What will become of its current Boulevard Raspail home, where it occupies the ground floor and lower level of a facility which belongs to the Groupama insurance group, is yet to be determined.

Perrin expressed his willingness to be involved should the 13,000-square-foot premises become the home of the “Maison des mondes africains” (or House of African Worlds), a place dedicated to African reflection and creativity announced by French president Emmanuel Macron in 2021.

He also highlighted that over 40 years, it had staged more than 300 exhibitions in France and abroad, as well as 1,000 “Soirée Nomade” traveling events that highlighted all forms of artists — even a stand-up comedy troupe, he added.

He expressed satisfaction that luxury rivals LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, Kering through the Pinault Foundation and Hermès were among the many companies around the world who had followed in Cartier’s footsteps.

“It was a colossal breath of oxygen for artists,” he added. “We gave extraordinary breathing room to art professions. Given that we make a living from creation so it’s normal that we give back.”

SpaceX was awarded an eight-launch, $733 million contract by the U.S. Space Force on Friday, as part of an ongoing program intended to foster competition among launch providers.

The award includes seven launches for the Space Development Agency and one for the National Reconnaissance Office, all anticipated to use Falcon 9s and occur no earlier than 2026.

The massive new contract is part of a U.S. Space Force Space Systems Command (SSC) program with the catchy name of “National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1.” This third round of contracts was split into two lanes last year: Lane 1, for lower-risk missions and near-Earth orbits; and Lane 2, for heavy-lift missions and the more demanding orbits.

The Space Force selected SpaceX, United Launch Alliance and (somehow, despite not getting to orbit yet) Blue Origin to compete for launches under Lane 1 earlier this summer. At the time, the Space Force acknowledged that the pool of awardees was small, but that it aimed to account for this by allowing companies to bid on Lane 1 on an annual basis. The next opportunity to join Lane 1, which has a total expected value of $5.6 billion over five years, will be later in 2024.

In a press release announcing the contract, Lt. Col. Douglas Downs, SSC’s materiel leader for space launch procurement, said the force expects to see “increasing competition and diversity” with the ability to on-ramp new providers.

The Phase 3 Lane 1 award period is from fiscal year 2025 to fiscal year 2029, with the potential for a five-year extension. The Space Force anticipates awarding at least 30 missions over that period. The SpaceX win may seem like a foregone conclusion this time, but with new launch companies and vehicles coming online in the next few years, the competition may heat up soon.

1. X-energy, $500M, energy: A big raise from the nuclear reactor and fuel space this week. Rockville, Maryland-based X-energy raised a Series C-1 of approximately $500 million, anchored by Amazon. The company is developing advanced small modular nuclear reactors for clean energy generation. Amazon and X-energy are collaborating to bring more than 5 gigawatts of new power projects online across the United States by 2039. Founded in 2009, the company has raised more than $785 million, per Crunchbase.

2. Lightmatter, $400M, data centers: Lightmatter, a startup that uses light to link chips together and to do calculations for the deep learning necessary for AI, locked up a $400 million Series D led by new investor T. Rowe Price at a $4.4 billion valuation. The new round nearly quadruples its previous valuation of $1.2 billion in December after a $155 million raise led by GV — which along with Fidelity Management and Research Co. also participated in the new round. As Big Tech pours hundreds of billions of dollars into new AI data centers, Lightmatter is trying to solve the problems around energy consumption and scalability of those new centers. The company’s tech uses silicon photonics that can speed up processes while also using less power. Although the idea of using light in computing isn’t new, creating the components has historically been challenging. Founded in 2017, Lightmatter has raised $850 million, per the company. Lightmatter’s was not the only large raise by a photonic startup this week. Xscape Photonics — a New York-based startup also using photonics technology to address the energy, performance and scalability challenges of AI data centers — raised a $44 million Series A led by IAG Capital Partners with investment from the likes of Cisco Investments and Nvidia.

3. Splitero, $300M, fintech: Part of the beauty of being a homeowner is having equity in that home. Unfortunately, accessing that equity can sometimes be burdensome. San Diego-based Splitero offers homeowners another option to do just that and this week the startup locked up $300 million through a strategic investment from funds managed by Antarctica Capital to further that mission. Splitero offers homeowners a lump sum of cash in exchange for a share of their home’s future value. Founded in 2021, the company has raised nearly $318 million, per Crunchbase.

4. Terray Therapeutics, $120M, biotech: Los Angeles-based Terray Therapeutics, a biotech startup developing small molecule drug therapeutics, raised a $120 million Series B led by new investor Bedford Ridge Capital and existing investor NVentures. Founded in 2018, the company has raised $200 million, per Crunchbase.

5. Path Robotics, $100M, robotics: Path Robotics, a startup using AI in robotic welding systems in the manufacturing industry, announced it has closed $100 million in new investments in the past year led by Drive Capital and Matter Venture Partners. The Columbus, Ohio-based company currently has two robotic welding products in the market, both leveraging vision systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning to autonomously weld steel parts. Founded in 2018, Path has raised $170 million, per the company.

6. Skimmer, $74M, service industry: Austin, Texas-based Skimmer, a software provider for pool service businesses, raised $74 million in growth capital from Mainsail Partners. Founded in 2014, the company has raised $79 million, per Crunchbase.

7. Decagon, $65M, artificial intelligence: San Francisco-based company Decagon, a developer of AI customer support agents, raised a $65 million Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures. Founded in 2023, Decagon has raised $100 million, per the company.

8. Oshi Health, $60M, health care: New York-based Oshi Health, a virtual gastrointestinal care startup, raised a $60 million Series C funding led by Oak HC/FT. Founded in 2019, the company has raised nearly $120 million, per Crunchbase.

9. Koloma, $50M, energy: Denver-based Koloma, which identifies and commercializes geologic hydrogen resources, reportedly raised a $50 million Series B extension led by Osaka Gas and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. Founded in 2021, the company has raised more than $386 million, per Crunchbase.

10. Galileo, $45M, artificial intelligence: Galileo, which provides generative AI evaluation and observability for enterprises, raised a $45 million Series B led by Scale Venture Partners. Founded in 2021, the San Francisco-based company has raised more than $68 million, per Crunchbase.

With Pfizer’s stock down sharply, an activist investor is pushing for CEO Albert Bourla to improve performance

When a novel coronavirus struck in early 2020, Pfizer’s PFE -0.17%decrease; red down pointing triangle chief executive, Dr. Albert Bourla, saw an opportunity to help save the world. He pushed the drugmaker to deliver a Covid-19 vaccine at lightning speed.

The Greek-born CEO’s bold bet paid off. The shot turned Pfizer into a household name, while ringing up tens of billions of dollars in sales. Bourla’s cellphone hummed with calls from leaders around the world. The experience, he said in a commencement speech afterward, showed the virtue of “setting ambitious goals that are seemingly impossible.”

But now Bourla is under attack because Pfizer’s stock price is way down, in part because it miscalculated demand for its Covid-19 vaccine, and some of the ambitious goals Bourla has set in the years since the pandemic have yet to pan out.

An activist investor is leading the charge. Starboard Value, a hedge fund that has waged fights in recent months against Autodesk, Salesforce and Tinder parent Match Group MTCH 1.05%increase; green up pointing triangle, recently took a roughly $1 billion stake in Pfizer. The sides held their first meeting on Wednesday, after Starboard accused the company of pressuring two former executives who had been working with Starboard to express support for Bourla.

It’s a moment of reckoning for Bourla, 62, a veterinarian by training who joined Pfizer in his early 30s from academia and moved all over the globe for the company as he climbed the corporate ladder.

Bourla enjoys strong support from Pfizer’s board of directors, according to people familiar with the board’s thinking. Members recognize Bourla’s success spearheading the Covid-19 vaccine, and steps he has taken to right the ship over the last year, including multibillion-dollar cost-cutting programs. The CEO has also reorganized the company, creating a separate cancer-drug research unit in a bet that breakthroughs there will bring in billions in new sales.

But Pfizer so far has been unable to escape its postpandemic slump. After the Covid-19 emergency receded, sales of the company’s vaccine and antiviral tanked, much more than executives forecast. New drug launches under-delivered. Pfizer’s first stab at the booming anti-obesity market flamed out.

Wall Street noticed, sending Pfizer stock down. Today Wall Street values Pfizer at roughly $166 billion, roughly half its peak during the pandemic.

Starboard’s campaign turned bitter fast. The investor was working with two now-retired Pfizer executives, former CEO Ian Read and former Chief Financial Officer Frank D’Amelio. Read had handpicked Bourla to be his successor. D’Amelio had worked alongside Bourla in the company’s C-suite.

Last week, Read and D’Amelio issued a statement expressing support for Bourla. Starboard publicly accused Pfizer of threatening lawsuits and other measures unless the pair made public statements of support. Pfizer has declined to comment. Read and D’Amelio did not respond to requests for comment.

Their involvement—even if fleeting—has made the activist fight personal for Bourla, who feels betrayed, according to people familiar with the matter. Bourla declined an interview request.

‘Everything is possible’

Bourla grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece, the nation’s second-largest city. The son of Holocaust survivors, Bourla has said his mother’s optimism was a big influence. She taught him to “never say ‘this is impossible.’ Everything is possible. Just have faith, believe and try,” he once said on a Bloomberg podcast. “That is something that put a stamp on me at a very young age”

His middle- and high-school education in Greece was heavy on the study of ancient philosophers. But he also had a love of both medicine and animals, he told the Leadership Matters podcast in 2022, and decided to study veterinary medicine.

He earned a doctorate in the biotechnology of reproduction from the Veterinary School of Aristotle University in Thessaloniki. He was doing animal-health research at Aristotle University in 1993 when a recruiter convinced him to take a sabbatical and try working at Pfizer in Athens. “I wish I could say it was a vision that drove me to Pfizer,” he joked during a talk at the University of Oxford’s business school last year. “It was a salary that I couldn’t resist.”

Bourla, who relocated his family eight times and lived in five different countries while working for Pfizer, arrived in New York—where the company is based—in 2001. He played key roles in the successful launches of breast-cancer drug Ibrance and bloodthinner Eliquis, medicines now among the company’s bestsellers. Bourla, who keeps photos of Pfizer patients in his office, rose to oversee the company’s cancer, heart and other innovative drugs before taking its helm in 2019.

“On the day I was named CEO,” Bourla wrote in his 2022 book, ‘Moonshot,’ “the Pfizer board of directors called me into a conference room…. I thanked them, smiled, and said aloud, ‘Only in America!’ Only in America could a Greek immigrant with a thick accent become CEO of one of the world’s biggest corporations.”

Soon after becoming CEO, Bourla took company leadership on a Silicon Valley tour, visiting tech giants including Google, Apple and Salesforce to understand their recipes for success. “Companies that stay true to their purpose perform much better,” Bourla said in an interview afterward.

The visit helped shape Bourla’s decision to double down on Pfizer’s bet on innovative medicines.

After roughly eight months at the helm, Bourla struck a deal to hive off Pfizer’s off-patent drugs business and merge it with generic pharmaceutical company Mylan. He also guided Pfizer’s plan to spin out its division selling medicine-chest staples, such as Advil and vitamins, to combine it with GSK’s own consumer-health business. It’s now a separate public company called Haleon.

The moves left Pfizer a leaner company that could grow sales faster if its innovative drugs in development panned out, but cost Pfizer steady cash flow.

“He’s willing to take calculated, smart risks,” said Dr. Scott Gottlieb, a former U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner who is now a Pfizer board member. “Covid is obviously the best example of this.”

After Covid-19 emerged, Pfizer partnered with Germany’s BioNTech to use its then-unproven gene-based vaccine technology, called mRNA, to develop a vaccine. Bourla urged his company’s researchers to work fast. When he assembled his executive team via videoconference in March 2020, he told them he wanted a vaccine ready by the fall—an ambitious request given the typical shot takes more than a decade to develop.

Inside Pfizer, the vaccine program was dubbed “Project Lightspeed.”

Before it was clear whether the vaccine would work, Bourla also pressured Pfizer manufacturing staff to ramp up capacity to make the shots. It was a huge, risky commitment. Bourla sought the company’s board of directors’ approval to spend more than $1 billion on the buildup.

Among those inside the company who opposed such a large outlay was D’Amelio, then the CFO, according to people familiar with the matter.

Then Bourla doubled down on the manufacturing bet. During one of Pfizer’s twice-weekly meetings on the project, in summer 2020, he told the team he wanted them to increase commercial production at least 10-fold. “Why can’t we make more and why can’t we make it sooner?” Bourla demanded.

“What we’re doing already is a miracle,” Mike McDermott, Pfizer’s manufacturing boss, said he responded.

‘Always aim high’

Bourla’s pandemic parlay resulted in Pfizer quickly shipping billions of vaccine doses around the world. The company’s stock soared as it reaped more than $100 billion in sales in 2022.

“Setting ambitious goals that are seemingly impossible based on conventional wisdom does not restrain human ingenuity. It liberates it. That’s why you should always aim high,” Bourla told graduates during a 2022 commencement speech at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

But the company’s pandemic success obscured long-term issues at Pfizer. Some of its top-selling drugs, such as arthritis treatment Xeljanz, are getting older and nearing the loss of patent protection, when lower-priced generics can compete. Pfizer must find new sources of sales to fill the holes.

Bourla knew this and used the company’s pandemic cash windfall to go on an acquisition spree, hunting for Pfizer’s next big hit. He bought Arena Pharmaceuticals for $6.7 billion, in a bet on the bowel-disease drugs it had in development. He landed sickle-cell disease drug developer Global Blood Therapeutics for $5.4 billion. He acquired the rest of Biohaven Pharmaceutical Holding that Pfizer didn’t already own for about $11.6 billion, which provided a new migraine drug. And, in his boldest bet of all, he paid $43 billion down for cancer-drug biotech Seagen last year, doubling the size of Pfizer’s oncology pipeline.

Some analysts and investors have said Bourla overspent on those acquisitions, some of which have yet to bear fruit. Pfizer recently pulled a sickle-cell disease drug, Oxbryta, from the market. The launch of the migraine drug, Nurtec, started slowly.

A closely watched pill in development for treatment of obesity disappointed during testing, setting back Pfizer’s efforts to join one of the pharmaceutical industry’s hottest markets. Pfizer is now advancing another version of the anti-obesity drug.

Some of Pfizer’s R&D programs “haven’t worked out. It’s the nature of the business. A lot have,” Gottlieb said. “In this business you have to be willing to lean forward.”

Indeed, the company secured nine new drug approvals last year, including respiratory vaccine Abrysvo and multiple-myeloma treatment Elrexfio.

Still, David Risinger, a Leerink Partners analyst, forecasts that Pfizer’s revenue will decline between 2025 and 2030. He said it’s possible the company’s pipeline is developing drugs Wall Street is undervaluing, but it will take time for that to play out.

Predictions like that have opened the door for the activist push by Starboard. Starboard is expected to lay out its issues with the company’s recent direction at a conference called the 13D Monitor Active-Passive Investor Summit on Tuesday. The activist-investing firm declined to comment.

Bourla’s defenders say the CEO is operationally astute, in addition to being bold, and his acquisitions, cost-cutting and reorganization have positioned the company for a turnaround. They point to the company’s last two quarters of performance as evidence of improvement, and say third quarter results, if they prove strong, could bolster Pfizer and Bourla further.

Long a fascination of engineers, electrostatic motors are in testing and have massive potential

A technology pioneered by Benjamin Franklin is being revived to build more efficient electric motors, an effort in its nascent stage that has the potential to be massive.

A handful of scientists and engineers—armed with materials and techniques unimaginable in the 1700s—are creating modern versions of Franklin’s “electrostatic motor,” that are on the cusp of commercialization. It’s reminiscent of the early 1990s, when Sony began to produce and sell the first rechargeable lithium-ion batteries, a breakthrough that’s now ubiquitous.

Franklin’s “electrostatic motor” uses alternating positive and negative charges—the same kind that make your socks stick together after they come out of the dryer—to spin an axle, and doesn’t rely on a flow of current like conventional electric motors. Every few years, an eager Ph.D. student or engineer rediscovers this historical curiosity. But other than applications in tiny pumps and actuators etched on microchips, where this technology has been in use for decades, their work hasn’t made it out of the lab.

Electrostatic motors have several potentially huge advantages over regular motors. They are up to 80% more efficient than conventional motors after all the dependencies of regular electric motors are added in. They could also allow new kinds of control and precision in robots, where they could function more like our muscles.

And they don’t use rare-earth elements because they don’t have permanent magnets, and require as little as 5% as much copper as a conventional motor. Both materials have become increasingly scarce and expensive over the past decade, and supply chains for them are dominated by China.

These motors could lead to more efficient air-conditioning systems, factories, logistics hubs and data centers, and—since they can double as generators—better ways of generating renewable energy. They might even show up in tiny surveillance drones.

Out of the lab in Wisconsin

Leading the effort to resuscitate Franklin’s concept for motors big enough to use in industrial applications is C-Motive Technologies in Middleton, Wis. It is a 16-person startup founded by a pair of University of Wisconsin engineers named Justin Reed and Daniel Ludois who spent years tinkering with electrostatic motors to see if they could be improved.

They’re reaching out to companies, hoping to get their motors out into the real world. So far, FedEx and Rockwell Automation, the century-old supplier of automation to factories, are among those testing their motors.

“In motor technology, this is unique,” says Kyle Crum, director of advanced technology Rockwell, which has made a small strategic investment in C-Motive, and is testing the company’s motors in one of its laboratories.

“Other motor technologies are kind of iterations on a theme, but they all work on the same physics,” he adds. “This is turning everything on its head. I don’t use the term ‘disruptive technology’ lightly, but this could be that. It could change the game.”

FedEx Supply Chain is testing the motors in conveyors at a distribution center near Fort Worth, Texas, says Mark Crowley, the automation technician at the site.

Electric motors 101

Conventional electric motors come in many types, but they all work by transforming a flow of electricity into motion. Picture the high school science experiment of wrapping copper wire around a nail. Current running through that coil can make the axle of a motor spin—or the process can run in reverse, yielding a generator. In a conventional electric motor, the movement of electrons induces a force that makes it go.

Electrostatic motors, for which the basic principle hasn’t changed since Franklin built the first practical example, are different. The force in these motors comes not from the movement of electrons but from the attraction and repulsion between negative and positive charges in components—the same type of static charge that gives you a shock when you touch a doorknob after shuffling across the carpet in winter.

Franklin’s original model—which he first demonstrated to the public in 1749 as a rotisserie to cook a turkey—is an illustrative example.

Rather than being pushed by a continuous electromagnetic field, the axle of Franklin’s motor included brass sewing thimbles that had their charge reversed as they passed one of four glass jars that store electric charge, one at each corner of the device. This meant every thimble had either a positive or negative charge, and was therefore attracted to the next glass jar and repelled by the one it just passed.

This is an ingenious way to turn electricity into motion, but it has a major flaw: It relies on air as the insulator keeping the positive and negative charges separated. Air is only so-so at this, which means that a Franklin-style electrostatic motor big enough to do useful work in industry would be weak and inefficient.

C-Motive’s founders discovered that a number of technologies had matured enough that, when combined, could yield electrostatic motors competitive with conventional ones. These enabling technologies include super fast-switching power electronics—like those in modern electric vehicles—that can toggle elements of the motor between states of positive and negative charge very quickly.

But the secret sauce of C-Motive’s motors is, in a sense, an actual secret sauce. Dogged exploration of combinations of various readily available industrial organic fluids led to a proprietary mix that can both multiply the strength of the electric field and insulate the motor’s spinning parts from each other—all without adding too much friction—says C-Motive Chief Executive Matt Maroon.

The biggest challenge to this new technology is the same that faces many other radical new ones—there’s already a huge infrastructure devoted to the existing technology, making companies reluctant to switch to something new, and relatively untested and costly, says James Edmondson, research director at emerging-technology analysis firm IDTechEX.

Electrostatic motors also require much higher voltages than traditional motors, which means they require a different kind of power electronics to feed current to the motor, potentially adding to the cost of the total system, he adds.

Micro drones

Electrostatic motors are inherently efficient because they don’t lose energy to the process of moving current around like a conventional motor, says Mingjing Qi, a professor of electrical engineering at Beihang University in Beijing. But until recently engineers didn’t have a very good understanding of how to optimize their efficiency, he adds.

A team of scientists led by Dr. Qi worked for six years to design an electrostatic motor light and powerful enough for a small, solar-powered drone. Their eventual goal is drones the size of insects, that can fly as long as sunlight shines on them, while carrying a payload that includes a tiny camera.

Electrostatic tech isn’t suitable for fast-spinning motors like those in the powertrains of electric vehicles and conventional drones, says C-Motive’s Maroon. But if they prove compelling in industrial applications, it’s possible that some systems that are currently designed for conventional motors could be redesigned to use electrostatic ones, such as home heating and cooling systems.

“With any startup and any new technology, there’s a bunch of ifs,” says Crum, of Rockwell Automation. “But we’re talking about fans, pumps, servos for robots, conveyors—just drive down the road, and every industrial facility you see has these. Just the electrical efficiency you could gain from these alone is gigawatt after gigawatt, if widely adopted.”

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When they’re not inventing sentient chatbots, tech giants have a new obsession: nuclear power. This week, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon.com both announced investments in new kinds of reactors.

It’s the latest sign that nuclear energy is making a comeback, some 50 years since the technology was last considered a growth industry. The trend had already lifted the stocks of companies that own reactors, including Vistra and Constellation Energy.

But the Google and Amazon deals signal a new phase where companies could actually build new nuclear reactors. As a result, a separate group of stocks has begun to rise—companies that are designing, building, and fueling novel kinds of nuclear generators—and they could keep gaining. That includes Nuscale Power, Oklo, BWX Technologies, GE Vernova, Lightbridge, and Centrus Energy, all of which rose this week.

On Wednesday, Amazon said it would finance the construction of several small nuclear reactors in Washington state and invest in Maryland start-up X-energy, which will build the reactors. The news came after Alphabet’s Google announced on Monday that it had made a deal with privately held Kairos Power, a California-based developer of small nuclear reactors, to support the development and construction of several reactors. Financial terms weren’t released, but Kairos expects to get the first reactor up and running by 2030 and potentially build several more by 2035.

The tech giants are looking for ways to secure power for their data centers, which are consuming more electricity as artificial-intelligence usage grows. The firms say they want to reduce their carbon footprints to slow global warming, and executives think nuclear fits the bill. Nuclear plants don’t emit carbon and operate continuously, unlike solar and wind.

The biggest obstacles for nuclear adoption are that reactors take a long time to build and can be very expensive. A big one with 1,000 megawatts of capacity is likely to cost more than $10 billion, and the last set of reactors went an estimated $20 billion over budget.

The new kind of nuclear plants built by Kairos and X-energy are known as small modular reactors, or SMRs, and they’re supposed to be cheaper and easier to construct. They produce about one-tenth as much power as the behemoths that exist today, and are called “modular” because they’re designed to be built by factories in pieces.

Only three SMRs exist in the world today, and none are in the U.S. But there could be dozens by the 2030s. Congress passed a law this year meant to speed up approval of new SMRs, and the Biden administration said it would invest $900 million into helping companies build small reactors. The Inflation Reduction Act contains vital support for nuclear, too.

It’s not easy to invest directly in the trend. Kairos and X-energy are privately held, but two other SMR developers are publicly traded. Oklo, whose chairman is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, completed a SPAC merger earlier this year. Another player is Nuscale, which is the only SMR developer to have received approval for its design from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Other nuclear companies, including Westinghouse, which is owned by Brookfield Asset Management and uranium miner Cameco, and nuclear equipment provider BWX Technologies have designed SMRs. GE Vernova, GE’s publicly traded energy spinoff, is working on deploying SMRs in Canada. Investors can also buy uranium enrichment company Centrus Energy and nuclear fuel company Lightbridge, which works with Nuscale.

Until these new plants get off the ground, the trade should be considered speculative. Other U.S. nuclear “renaissances” have petered out because of costs or safety concerns. But with Big Tech and government joining forces, this one is looking more likely by the day.