WWD : Michael Rider Is Celine’s New Artistic Director

Michael Rider Is Celine’s New Artistic Director
Previously creative director of Polo Ralph Lauren, the American designer succeeds Hedi Slimane in the plum Paris post.


Celine has named Michael Rider its new artistic director, succeeding Hedi Slimane. He starts in early 2025.

WWD reported on April 24 that Celine was girding for a possible Slimane exit and had lined up a potential successor in Rider, creative director at Polo Ralph Lauren.

It marks a return to the French house for Rider, who logged a decade as Celine’s design director of ready-to-wear from 2008 to 2018, working under then-creative director Phoebe Philo.

A graduate of Brown University in Rhode Island, Rider also worked as a senior designer at Balenciaga from 2004 to 2008, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Celine parent LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton declared Rider’s arrival several hours after announcing that Celine and Slimane were parting ways after a fruitful, seven-year collaboration.

In a release, LVMH said Rider would have “the entire creative responsibility of all Celine collections, from womenswear, menswear, leather goods and accessories to couture.”

“I am delighted to welcome Michael back to Celine, a maison that he knows intimately,” commented Severine Merle, chief executive officer Celine. “Michael’s vision, creative talent, together with his genuine nature and strong connection to Celine’s heritage, make him a natural choice to continue to build a long-lasting success for the maison.”

For his part, Rider said: “Celine is a maison with values very close to my heart and a beautiful heritage to build on. I am honored to come back and shape the future of the maison together with the Celine team.”

It is understood LVMH wishes to build on Celine’s current momentum, and not stray too far from the winning template Slimane had forged, riffing on French bourgeois codes with sly winks to grunge and other alternative music scenes.

According to sources, Celine ranks alongside Loewe as one of the fastest-growing brands at LVMH Fashion Group, with revenues in the ballpark of 2.5 billion euros, making it bigger than Roman house Fendi.

The hire thrusts another prominent studio talent into a plum, high-profile role. In the past, LVMH has tended to favor marquee talents like Slimane and Philo, among the most bankable designers of their generation.

“Under his creative and artistic direction, Celine has experienced exceptional growth and established itself as an iconic French couture house,” LVMH said of Slimane.

“The holistic vision of Hedi Slimane, his exigence and rigor have made it possible to redefine the codes of Celine whilst reaffirming its feminine and Parisian roots,” the French luxury group said in a statement. “He has also remarkably enriched new territories for the maison such as the men’s silhouette, couture and haute parfumerie. The extraordinary journey taken together over the last seven years has made Celine a house with a formidable foundation for the future.”

It is understood Rider has already relocated to Paris, but has kept a low profile. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Slimane’s departure came only three days after he unveiled his spring 2025 women’s collection for Celine via a 10-minute film broadcast on the brand’s website and social channels.

It reaffirmed his reputation as a formidable fashion designer, filmmaker and dream weaver, able to crystalize a style and present idealized imagery that’s compelling and precise.

His women’s collection film brought to vivid life the late French singers and fashion icons Juliette Gréco and Françoise Hardy via bushy bangs, heavy eyeliner, baby-doll dresses and shapely tuxedos.

Meanwhile, his latest cardigan jackets, tweed suits, long necklaces and skirts that cover the knee further fanned a widespread industry conviction that Slimane has the chops, aesthetic and the vision to tackle Chanel, which is currently searching for Virginie Viard’s successor.

Chanel executives told WWD this week it is not yet ready to reveal its next creative leader — and that it’s not necessarily looking for a big-name designer.

A climate of creative uncertainty and upheaval hangs over the industry, currently grappling with a slowdown in luxury consumption and consumer caution.

The employment contracts of John Galliano at Maison Margiela, Jonathan Anderson at Loewe and Lucie and Luke Meier at Jil Sander are coming to term before the end of the year or in early 2025, according to market sources. There are also creative vacancies at Dries Van Noten, Alberta Ferretti, Jean Paul Gaultier and Y/Project, as reported.

Slimane cemented his reputation — and influenced men’s tailoring for more than a decade — as the designer of Dior Homme between 2000 and 2007. He went on to reinvent and ignite the Kering-owned house of Yves Saint Laurent, which he rechristened Saint Laurent, between 2012 and 2016 — all the while maintaining a close rapport with the Arnault family, which controls LVMH and Dior.

His next move could not immediately be learned. To be sure, he has a track record of revving up a brand and then leaving at the height of its success.

In between, he has also taken long sabbaticals to pursue his photography and art.

When Slimane took over the design reins of Celine, with a mandate to expand the heritage brand into menswear, couture and fragrance, he took a different tack from its previous creative leader, English designer Philo.

“I am enchanted, what a great choice,” Karl Lagerfeld, one of Slimane’s most enthusiastic fans, told WWD at the time of his appointment. “It will be great.”

Slimane immediately brought a blast of cool and youth to Celine, signing up Lalisa Manobal from Blackpink and conscripting her to walk in one of his collection films during the coronavirus pandemic.

When she attended Slimane’s spring 2023 men’s show for Celine along with BTS member Kim Tae-hyung, better known as V, and his bestie, actor Park Bo-gum, pandemonium ensued.

After a few aesthetic tweaks, and after Slimane unearthed the Triomphe logo, Celine took off like a rocket, synonymous with cool, French-girl style with a bourgeois twist.

He meticulously built Celine into a complete universe, adding stationery, headphones, pet accessories, other lifestyle products and Celine Beauté, the first cosmetics line in the house’s history. Lipsticks were added recently and an eyeliner is out next.

The beauty line dovetailed from Slimane’s launch of the Celine haute parfumerie collection, which debuted in 2019.

However, it is understood relations between Slimane and LVMH management have grown increasingly strained.

Still, it seems Slimane worked diligently until the end of his contract, last week releasing a 445-page hardcover book titled “Celine Art Project,” which details the 250 site-specific artworks Slimane curated for the brand’s flagships around the world.

WWD : Understanding Innovation, From Jony Ive at Moncler to the Nike C-suite

Understanding Innovation, From Jony Ive at Moncler to the Nike C-suite
Innovation is more than a new idea — it's a corporate lifestyle.

Innovation is one of things that fashion talks about, but never really explains.

What is it?

Newness in style counts, of course. And a new line of business counts too — Urban Outfitters Inc., for instance, has quietly developed a growth engine with its Nuuly rental operation. There’s also novel in-store presentation or a new feat of warehouse wizardry and so on.

Not innovating, of course, is seen as bad to very bad — by Wall Street, by investors and beyond.

John Donahoe is now Nike Inc.’s outgoing chief executive officer. Most pin his exit on the slowdown in the brand’s famed innovation engine, which led fiscal first-quarter revenues to drop 10 percent to $11.6 billion.

“A comeback at this scale takes time, but we see early wins — from momentum in key sports to accelerating our pace of newness and innovation,” said Matthew Friend, chief financial officer in a statement this week, taking point on Wall Street until Elliott Hill steps in as CEO later this month.

Nike is not alone in trying to get its innovation mojo back.

VF Corp. is still working to recover from Vans’ innovation shortfall, which saw the business gain ground with its classic looks only to lose it again when the fashion trend moved on. Victoria’s Secret is also looking to connect again with a revamped fashion show.

Innovation is easy to talk about, but hard to master.

Ask Jony Ive, who designed the iPhone and a generation of sleek, world-changing technology while at Apple. He just recently stepped into fashion and when he talked to WWD, he talked about innovation.

Ive’s LoveFrom design company partnered with Moncler to make outerwear from high-quality recycled nylon with a new approach. For the project, Moncler had to find a loom to create fabric wide enough to cut a single piece that could then be folded into either a field jacket, a parka or a poncho.

“I honestly think lots of people would say innovation and trying to solve hard problems is virtuous,” Ive said. “Of course, it’s a good thing. But many people don’t have the fortitude and don’t have the commitment to do that, and my intuition turned out to be correct in that [Moncler CEO Remo Ruffini’s] commitment to supporting solving difficult problems was extraordinary.”

The result is a fresh look for Moncler and some buzz to boot.

But innovation takes something more than “fortitude” too.

Innovation doesn’t come from one idea, but from a corporate belief that it’s important to try new things. That and a company culture, thought process and approach to business that brings freshness front and center.

Martha Pease, brand transformation expert and former chief marketing officer at Victoria’s Secret, described innovation as “a higher order awareness that a company has of who their customer is, what their mission is in the world….Innovation is an expression of new ways of thinking about your business and your consumer.”

For Pease, a company’s vision for the future has to prioritize how it’s going to remain relevant to its customers.

“If that’s not the number-one focus of the vision, then how you execute won’t align with being relevant to your consumer,” she said. “If your vision is to expand the franchise of the brand, you will focus internally inside the business to look at where you think you’ve got functional technical things that you can do to expand the business model, but you won’t be expanding your relationship with consumers.

“And the value in a brand is in the relationship, not the product,” Pease said. “CEOs often lose sight of that. Leaders lose sight of that. And let’s also say that the emphasis and the priority of marketing and brand building and true relationship innovation is often missing in companies. It’s innovation. It’s a holistic system.”

It’s a system that Hill will soon be now responsible for at Nike.

Hill, 60, spent 32 years at the brand before retiring in 2020 as president of consumer and marketplace, leading all commercial and marketing operations for the Nike and Jordan brands.

He returns just as Nike claims it is making a turn.

As Friend told analysts on a conference call, “We are working to position new products in the path of the consumer, create scale for new ideas and drive more balanced marketplace growth….As we look to the spring season, contribution from newness and innovation will take a significant step forward with growth in footwear units of mid- to high-single digits versus the prior year. And over the coming seasons, we expect to see sequential gains and the percentage of newness and innovation as a mix of our total footwear business.”


Innovation isn’t just a fresh idea, but a process that encourages those new ideas, loves and nurtures them and helps them become a new reality.

And when Nike talking about innovation, in its products today and for tomorrow, it’s signaling that that process is waking back up.

The Bottom Line is a business analysis column written by Evan Clark, deputy managing editor, who has covered the fashion industry since 2000. It appears every other Thursday.

TechCrunch : Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta

Meta confirms it may train its AI on any image you ask Ray-Ban Meta AI to analyze

We recently asked Meta if it trains AI on photos and videos that users take on the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. The company originally didn’t have much to say.

Since then, Meta has offered TechCrunch a bit more color.

In short, any image you share with Meta AI can be used to train its AI.

“[I]n locations where multimodal AI is available (currently US and Canada), images and videos shared with Meta AI may be used to improve it per our Privacy Policy,” said Meta policy communications manager Emil Vazquez in an email to TechCrunch.

In a previous emailed statement, a spokesperson clarified that photos and videos captured on Ray-Ban Meta are not used by Meta for training as long as the user doesn’t submit them to AI. However, once you ask Meta AI to analyze them, those photos fall under a completely different set of policies.

In other words, the company is using its first consumer AI device to create a massive stockpile of data that could be used to create ever-more powerful generations of AI models. The only way to “opt out” is to simply not use Meta’s multimodal AI features in the first place.

The implications are concerning because Ray-Ban Meta users may not understand they’re giving Meta tons of images – perhaps showing the inside of their homes, loved ones, or personal files – to train its new AI models. Meta’s spokespeople tell me this is clear in the Ray-Ban Meta’s user interface, but the company’s executives either initially didn’t know or didn’t want to share these details with TechCrunch. We already knew Meta trains its Llama AI models on everything Americans post publicly on Instagram and Facebook. But now, Meta has expanded this definition of “publicly available data” to anything people look at through its smart glasses and ask its AI chatbot to analyze.

This is particularly relevant now. On Wednesday, Meta started rolling out new AI features that make it easier for Ray-Ban Meta users to invoke Meta AI in more natural way, meaning users will be more likely to send it new data that can also be used for training. In addition, the company announced a new live video analysis feature for Ray-Ban Meta during its 2024 Connect conference last week, which essentially sends a continuous stream of images into Meta’s multimodal AI models. In a promotional video, Meta said you could use the feature to look around your closet, analyze the whole thing with AI, and pick out an outfit.

What the company doesn’t promote is that you are also sending these images to Meta for model training.

Meta spokespeople pointed TechCrunch towards its privacy policy, which plainly states: “your interactions with AI features can be used to train AI models.” This seems to include images shared with Meta AI through the Ray-Bans smart glasses, but Meta still wouldn’t clarify.

Spokespeople also pointed TechCrunch towards Meta AI’s terms of service, which states that by sharing images with Meta AI, “you agree that Meta will analyze those images, including facial features, using AI.”

Meta just paid the state of Texas $1.4 billion to settle a court case related to the company’s use of facial recognition software. That case was over a Facebook feature rolled out in 2011 called “Tag Suggestions.” By 2021, Facebook made the feature explicitly opt-in, and deleted billions of people’s biometric information it had collected. Notably, several of Meta AI’s image features are not being released in Texas.

Elsewhere in Meta’s privacy polices, the company states that it also stores all the transcriptions of your voice conversations with Ray-Ban Meta, by default, to train future AI models. As for the actual voice recordings, there is a way to opt-out. When you first login to the Ray-Ban Meta app, users can choose whether voice recordings can be used to train Meta’s AI models.

It’s clear that Meta, Snap, and other tech companies are pushing for smart glasses as a new computing form factor. All of these devices feature cameras that people wear on their face, and they’re mostly powered by AI. This rehashes a ton of privacy concerns we first heard about in the Google Glass era. 404 Media reported that some college students have already hacked the Ray-Ban Meta glasses to reveal the name, address, and phone number of anyone they look at.

WSJ : China’s Patriotic Rhetoric Takes a Violent Turn

China’s Patriotic Rhetoric Takes a Violent Turn
‘Hate education’ becomes new buzzword in China after stabbings of foreigners, while online pleas for compassion are stifled

China’s Communist Party has for years stoked patriotism in the state media and the country’s classrooms, driving nationalist fervor that at times spun out of control.

Now, three stabbing attacks in four months that targeted Japanese and Americans have exposed a dark side of that campaign, what many in China describe as “hate education.”

In one of the past year’s viral videos, a desk-pounding schoolteacher lectures to her students about China’s “blood feud” with Japan, admonishing them to never forget the atrocities conducted by the Japanese army in World War II. State media praised her, and other teachers reposted her video.

In another video, a Chinese mother expresses pride as her grade-school daughter rebukes her baffled preschool brother over his love of Ultraman, the Japanese science-fiction character.

Recent rancor aimed at foreign rivals has been tolerated and in some cases promoted by Chinese authorities in schools and social media—where censors can suppress unwelcome views and allow others to flourish. That approach runs counter to Beijing’s mission to restore global connections that helped power economic growth in the past.

“Hate is inside China’s education” in schools, media and patriotic movies, said Wang Ke, a retired Kobe University professor who has studied nationalism in China and modern Japan. “The Communist Party has been licking historical wounds, consciously not letting it heal.”

Public pleas for compassion have been routinely stifled. After the stabbing death of a 10-year-old Japanese boy on his way to school in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen on the Sept. 18 anniversary of Japan’s 1931 invasion of Manchuria, two Beijing law professors posted a warning against the spread of hatred.

“Do not indulge in violence in the name of patriotism,” Chen Bi and Zhao Hong wrote on their personal blog on WeChat, China’s ubiquitous social-media platform. “If history is remembered through hate, what follows will be more killings and harm.”

Their commentary was removed from online platforms after many readers reposted it. The Cyberspace Administration of China didn’t respond to a request for comment.

“China does not teach its people to hate Japan,” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lin Jian said several days after the 10-year-old’s death. “We believe that to learn from history is not for perpetuating hatred but for avoiding the tragedy of war from repeating itself.”

Textbooks in China have long highlighted Japanese wartime atrocities and portrayed the U.S. as its ideological rival.

As pronounced by leader Xi Jinping, vigilance against the West is a necessity. China’s adversaries “have put more effort into winning the hearts of our youngsters than in anything else,” he said in a newly released speech to a national education conference six years ago.

In recent years, China has revised textbooks used in schools across the country to support Xi’s leadership and his emphasis on national security, alongside sustained themes such as placing support for the Communist Party at the heart of the country’s patriotism.

Lessons in Chinese schools reinforce official positions on topics such as border conflicts with India and Beijing’s proclaimed sovereignty in the South China Sea.

Revised textbooks also retain long-established themes about China’s war with the U.S. on the Korean Peninsula and heroic tales of fighting the Japanese.

The recent outburst of anti-Japan sentiment intensified last year after Beijing vilified Tokyo for releasing water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific Ocean, though the releases had been approved by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Shortly after, at a middle-school play in the northern Chinese city of Zaozhuang, students drew applause when they re-enacted the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and unfurled a banner criticizing the Fukushima water releases, according to state media.

Local education authorities later said the performance wasn’t “entirely appropriate,” but that the students should be tolerated for their mistakes because of their age.

Public debate on China’s internet wavered between those who said that the students were righteous in expressing anti-Japanese attitudes and those who expressed concern that an act of political violence was being taken too lightly.

In the months that followed, Japanese schools in China emerged as a target on social media, a message that turned deadly this year. The stabbing in September was preceded by an attack in June by a Chinese man with a knife on a Japanese woman and her child at a school-bus stop in Suzhou, a city in eastern China with a large Japanese population. The two were injured; the bus attendant, a Chinese woman, fought the man and was killed.

A few weeks earlier, four instructors affiliated with an American college were stabbed by a Chinese man while walking in a park in Jilin, a northern Chinese city. China’s Foreign Ministry said the incident wouldn’t affect “the normal development of people-to-people and cultural exchanges between China and the U.S.”

Chinese authorities have revealed little about the attackers in the three stabbing attacks, which they described as isolated incidents.

Following the boy’s killing in Shenzhen, Japanese officials requested that China remove extreme anti-Japan content from the internet. Most Chinese platforms had already started to do that after the stabbing in Suzhou in June, but anti-Japan content never slowed, and many of the most prominent social-media voices promoting extreme nationalism remain untouched.

One commentator, an official “propaganda ambassador” of Guangdong province, compared the Shenzhen attack to a 1937 incident that triggered the second Sino-Japanese war—suggesting that Japan was using the attack as an excuse to inflame conflict with China.

The commentator, Gu Yan Mu Chan, later echoed the official media argument, saying that the killing was a result of anti-China attitudes in Japan, which she said had never come clean of its historic sin.

The growth of hateful content online in China has accelerated, experts said, in part because of platforms’ technological limitations, but also because moderators can be reluctant to remove content that draws audience traffic.

“The platforms aren’t innocent,” said a former content manager of a Chinese video-sharing site.

In the days after the death of the Japanese 10-year-old, a letter that appeared to be from the boy’s father began to circulate online. He and his wife, who is Chinese, refused to hold grudges, it said.

Their son, it said, loved to draw, was passionate about insects and had “a heart more tender than anyone else’s.” The letter was spread quickly across many of China’s social-media platforms, shared by readers who described it as an antidote to toxic nationalism.

Within days, the letter had all but disappeared from the Chinese internet, a result only possible with an order from the country’s internet regulator.

A week after the stabbing, a group of Chinese activists launched a memorial campaign for the Japanese boy, calling on people worldwide to take a stand. Posters, circulating in Chinese, Japanese and English on Instagram and other overseas platforms, said, “Say No to Hate Crime.”

The organizers also asked people to do something the boy enjoyed: Draw an insect.

WSJ : OpenAI Nearly Doubles Valuation to $157 Billion in Funding Round

OpenAI Nearly Doubles Valuation to $157 Billion in Funding Round
Startup behind ChatGPT raises $6.6 billion from backers including Microsoft, SoftBank and Thrive Capital

OpenAI has raised $6.6 billion in new funding, capping a complex fundraising process that involved negotiations with multiple tech giants and large private investors at the same time it has been experiencing disruptive internal turmoil.

Investors are valuing the startup behind ChatGPT at $157 billion, a total that puts it on par with the market capitalizations of publicly traded household names such as Goldman Sachs Group, Uber Technologies UBER -1.85%decrease; red down pointing triangle and AT&T.

OpenAI was last valued at $86 billion early this year, when employees sold existing shares.

The funding round is one of the largest ever for a private company, save for the $10 billion OpenAI itself raised from Microsoft MSFT -0.85%decrease; red down pointing triangle in January 2023. Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s AI startup xAI raised $6 billion.

Investors in the new round will have the right to withdraw their money if OpenAI doesn’t complete its planned conversion to a for-profit company within two years. Currently it is a charitable nonprofit with a for-profit division through which investors can buy a share of its future profit.

The round was led by venture-capital firm Thrive Capital, which is putting $1.25 billion into the company, according to people familiar with the matter. Microsoft is investing a little less than $1 billion.

New investors include Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank, which is putting in around $500 million, and AI chip maker Nvidia, which is investing about $100 million, one of the people familiar with the matter said.

Investment firm Tiger Global Management is putting in $350 million. Cathie Wood’s Ark Investment Management and Altimeter Capital are each putting in about $250 million, which is the minimum amount required to review OpenAI’s financial documents.

Other investors include Khosla Ventures, Fidelity Management and Research Company and MGX, a United Arab Emirates state-backed company created this year to invest in AI.

Apple was in talks to invest in OpenAI, but those discussions fell apart, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. It would have been a rare strategic investment for the iPhone maker, which is already joining with OpenAI on its new Apple Intelligence product.

OpenAI told investors in the new round that it doesn’t want them to put money into its biggest private competitors. Those include Anthropic, which was founded by several ex-OpenAI employees; Safe Superintelligence, which was co-founded by OpenAI’s former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever; and xAI. Before starting xAI, Musk was an OpenAI cofounder and its first major source of funding.

In addition to those startups, OpenAI is also up against tech giants such as Google and Meta Platforms that are making huge investments in AI.

OpenAI remains the best known company in the burgeoning AI market, thanks to the breakout success of ChatGPT, which has 250 million weekly active users and 11 million paying subscribers, according to a knowledgeable person. Around one million business customers pay to use its technology.

But the company is far from profitable, which made the new investment round critical. It is expected to lose around $5 billion this year on revenue of $3.7 billion, a person with knowledge of its financial data confirmed. It is projecting revenue will grow to $11.6 billion in 2025.

Developing new AI models is hugely expensive, as is operating them. In addition, competition for the most talented AI researchers has driven their annual salaries into the millions.

The New York Times reported earlier on OpenAI’s financial data.

OpenAI has been putting out new products for consumers and businesses at a rapid pace this year. It has also been adding people with business experience to an employee base that used to be made up primarily of researchers. The company recently hired its first chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, who helped lead the fundraising process.

This shift—along with personal disputes among OpenAI executives—has sparked tensions within the company. Numerous top executives and researchers have left this year, including multiple co-founders and, just last week, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.

At an AI conference in Seattle Wednesday, Altimeter chief executive Brad Gerstner said he was impressed ChatGPT has become “the verb” associated with using AI and he wasn’t put off by the drama that has taken place at OpenAI recently.

“Look in the middle of all this chaos of the last nine months at OpenAI,” he said. “And what’s happened? The numbers have accelerated. They’re launching new products… That’s not a sign of fragility.”

FT : OpenAI poses new investors an intelligence test

OpenAI poses new investors an intelligence test
The start-up has another $6.6bn of cash, but providers will have had to grapple with at least four flavours of complexity

Grappling with the science of artificial intelligence isn’t for the weak of heart. The same is true of investing in OpenAI, the purveyor of productivity-enhancing chatbots.

A $6.6bn injection of investor funds, which OpenAI announced on Wednesday, gives Sam Altman’s nine-year-old company a post-money valuation of $157bn. It adds Japan’s SoftBank to a list of investors that already included Microsoft, Jared Kushner’s Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures. For a company whose founder envisages “shared prosperity to a degree that seems unimaginable”, the price might seem cheap. To say the reality is more complex would be an enormous understatement.

Altman’s investors will have had to get comfortable with at least four levels of intricacy. There are the products themselves, of course, so advanced they can answer PhD-level questions on physics. More head-scratching is OpenAI’s governance. Altman was ousted last year, then swiftly returned. Multiple executives have since donned their virtual parachutes. Supreme power theoretically vests in a board meant to ensure OpenAI benefits humanity; Altman’s hokey-cokey showed its toothlessness.

Would-be backers also need to navigate finnicky financial engineering. OpenAI is essentially a non-profit company in charge of a for-profit. Investors own a share of future earnings, with returns capped at a certain level. Undoing both of those features is not a simple process, practically or politically. There is ample potential in whatever emerges for misaligned incentives between various vintages of investors and executives like Altman.


No less murky is the business model. OpenAI hopes to turn out $100bn of revenue five years from now, the New York Times has reported. But how? If it can double the price of its paid version of ChatGPT to $44 a month per user, as it reportedly hopes to, that might suggest nearly 200mn paying customers, about half as many as pay to use Microsoft’s Office 365. But predicting demand for products that don’t yet exist is a fool’s errand. Likewise, ascertaining the cost of feeding ever-godlier models with chips and energy.

At a valuation of $157bn, OpenAI investors are paying about 13 times the company’s estimated $12bn in 2025 revenue. That might seem modest: fellow AI icon Nvidia trades at 18 times, according to LSEG data. Then again, Nvidia is lavishly profitable, while OpenAI is burning $5bn a year. True, losses are common in tech. Back in 2017, Tesla had $12bn of revenue and $2bn of losses. The carmaker’s market capitalisation, though, was a more modest $50bn.

For now, OpenAI is less of a company, and more of an idea. Granted, it’s an exciting one. If Altman’s models scale Olympian heights, so might his company’s value, as Tesla’s did. But investors making that call today must surely be powered more by instinct than intelligence.

FT : TotalEnergies warns it will curb UK investment over windfall tax

TotalEnergies warns it will curb UK investment over windfall tax
Patrick Pouyanné says he has been ‘arguing’ with the Labour government over plans to increase the levy

The chief executive of TotalEnergies has said the French oil and gas major will curb its investments in the UK and restructure its operations in the North Sea if the government increases a windfall tax as planned.

Patrick Pouyanné said the Labour government’s plans to raise the tax and remove investment allowances that enable companies to reduce their tax bills was even more problematic than the spectre of higher taxes in France.

“I’m taking this very seriously because clearly we’ll be very selective on any capex we spend in the UK and [are] clearly looking seriously at ways to restructure operations,” Pouyanné told an investor day in New York, referring to capital expenditure by the group.

Pouyanné is the latest executive in the sector to warn Labour’s plans will cut investment in the UK North Sea. Consultancy Wood Mackenzie last month said oil and gas production could halve by 2030, and critics of the government have said its plans will threaten the country’s energy security.

“I’m arguing with them, but they should copy [and] paste the Norwegian system which is maybe high fiscally but also has incentives to invest,” Pouyanné said. Norway’s system has incentives allowing companies to deduct capital costs and claim partial refunds when they fall into a loss.

The UK’s temporary energy profits levy was introduced by then chancellor Rishi Sunak in 2022 after Russia invaded Ukraine, and Labour has decided to extend it until 2030 even though oil prices have since eased.

The government is planning to raise the levy by 3 percentage points from November, which will take the overall tax rate on the sector to 78 per cent if the increase is confirmed in this month’s budget.

Labour wants to use proceeds from the tax to help fund investment in renewable energy including wind power, and has set up a new state-owned company, Great British Energy. Total, which has also invested in offshore wind farms off Scotland, is focused on gas production in the North Sea.

Pouyanné also confirmed Total was still exploring a secondary listing in New York, a move it said will allow it to tap US investors more nimbly although it will remain anchored in Paris.

He took a swipe at French plans that could hit companies with higher taxes, calling the proposals “unfortunate”. The newly-appointed government, led by Prime Minister Michel Barnier, this week said big groups would have to contribute to efforts to fix public finances.

But Pouyanné said the proposed measures to temporarily hit it and other companies with higher taxation would likely have little impact on Total because the group’s production stems from overseas.

Total on Wednesday also boosted its dividend for 2025 by 5 per cent and maintained share buybacks of $2bn a quarter, despite a looming supply glut in liquefied natural gas that could depress prices, especially from 2026.

FT : Is nuclear energy the zero-carbon answer to powering AI?

Is nuclear energy the zero-carbon answer to powering AI?
After decades of stagnation, the world’s biggest tech groups and banks are considering an alternative energy option

The rise of AI and its insatiable demand for energy could not have come at a better time for the nuclear industry. 

After decades of stagnation in the west, this year has seen a rush of demand for nuclear plants from the so-called hyperscale tech companies, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, which need vast amounts of low-carbon 24-hour electricity to run their data centres and win what one of the companies internally calls “the AI war”. 

Some of the world’s biggest banks also threw their weight behind the industry at a climate event in New York last week in a public show of support for a sector that is selling itself as a key part of the transition to clean energy.

“AI data centres will be built next to energy production sites that can produce gigawatt-scale, low-cost, low-emission electricity continuously. Basically, next to nuclear power plants,” said Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, on X.

“There is real appetite. There’s a limit to what we can say, you can read between the lines at every hyperscaler, there’s appetite,” said Chris Rees, energy strategy manager at Meta. 

The excitement in the nuclear industry is palpable. While China and South Korea have been busy building nuclear reactors in recent decades, there has been marked decline in the US and Europe.

After a wave of nuclear power stations were built in the 1970s and 1980s, the US has only built three new reactors since the mid 1990s, with the industry suffering from heavy cost overruns.

Accidents at Three Mile Island in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986 and the earthquake and tsunami that hit the Fukushima plant in 2011 have also triggered public antipathy to the technology.


Last month, Microsoft announced it would revive the mothballed nuclear plant at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, while Amazon paid $650mn in March to put a data centre next to the Susquehanna Steam Electric nuclear plant, also in Pennsylvania. 

The premium prices that tech companies are willing to pay may also trigger a wave of investment in new nuclear plants, investors said.

“We’re seeing price points in the market that will validate new construction,” said Arthur Hyde of Segra Capital, a hedge fund that has invested in the supply chain of uranium, the metal used in most nuclear power plants.

“You have government commitments to invest in new nuclear, you have financial commitments to support it, and we know the demand picture is there. Those are the commitments you need to green light new nuclear capacity in the US and Europe. For the first time, we’re seeing all those components together.

“I’m quite bullish that we will see new nuclear capacity announcements in the United States over the next 12 months,” he added.

But behind the hype, there remain structural challenges, including the key question of who will be willing to bear the high risk of nuclear projects, which can go years over deadline and billions over budget.

“Tech companies will not want to have anything to do with owning a nuclear asset. If they do, they’ve lost their minds. That’s not what they’re in business to do,” a data centre and nuclear insider at a top-three tech company said.

At a nuclear industry dinner ahead of New York Climate Week, Caroline Golin, the head of energy markets development at Google, warned that tech companies cannot be expected to take all the project risk, according to two people who were present.

Todd Noe, the director for nuclear at Microsoft, said at the World Nuclear Symposium in London last month the most that tech companies are willing to do to support new nuclear plants is to offer long-term contracts at good prices for the power. 

That may not be enough. “They are talking to us, they are talking to nuclear technology providers, they are talking to utilities, but they do not want to build, own and operate their own nuclear reactors, they want to be the end users,” said Ahmet Tokpinar, the general manager of the nuclear power business at the US engineering giant Bechtel.

“They are willing to offer long-term power purchase agreements (PPAs), even at a premium. That is great, but it is not helping with the front end development. Whose capital is going to help underwrite the risk?” he said.

PPAs are long-term agreements to buy energy at a pre-determined price, but they do not cover any cost overruns or delays that a project might incur.

Tokpinar added that while he was aware there had been some discussions about tech companies putting equity into projects, he said none of these had progressed.

“For [new power plants] to happen, they need to step in, in a big way. I cannot see anyone else. They have the means to do it, they have the capital to do it. Whether it is something they can justify to their shareholders is beyond me.”

Microsoft, Amazon and Google all declined to comment on their nuclear strategy.

The technology companies and the nuclear power groups are trying to find a formula that will work for them, with the banks advising both.

“I would not be terrifically surprised if the landscape for these radically complex projects requires some changes to the way the PPA works,” said Peter Freed, former director of energy strategy at Meta.

He suggested the ultimate price that tech companies pay for their energy could be set at a later date from the initial deal, to capture any overruns from construction. “You demonstrate that there’s demand available and then the price does not fix until you get further along,” he said. 

“The debate is, this needs a new market structure that does not currently exist,” said one financier at the climate event in New York, adding: “The low-hanging fruit for all these hyperscalers is to look at existing reactors.”

But he warned that if tech companies start pulling large quantities of low carbon nuclear power away from the grid, they face a political backlash.

“Pennsylvania’s clean energy is 88 per cent nuclear. You start taking the nuclear plants away and their ability to hit net zero targets becomes really compromised,” he noted. 

Tony Grayson, general manager at Compass Quantum and a former US Navy nuclear submarine captain who went on to help build Oracle’s data centre business, said tech companies could provide subsidies for new projects, stepping into the role that governments have traditionally played. They could also offer low-priced power to local communities to overcome objections to new nuclear projects. 

But he warned the nuclear industry against excessive hype, noting that projects tend to be measured in decades and that technology can change rapidly and radically.

“In datacentres you make your money on speed to market. Nuclear is not speed to market,” he said. “I am a huge believer in nuclear power, but we just need to take a deep breath and realise this stuff is not going to happen anytime soon.”

>>> US After Hours Summary: LEVI -9.8% lower on earnings and review of Dockers b

After Hours Summary: LEVI -9.8% lower on earnings and review of Dockers brand; BIGC +0.6% names new CEO

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: BIGC +0.6% (reaffirms guidance, also names new CEO and exec chair)

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: FNF +2.2% (acquires commercial ops of First Nationwide Title), LUV +2% (director acquires shares), CDXS +1.9% (increases cash reserves; appoints new execs, including a new CFO), CLW +1.9% (temporarily suspends ops at 2 faciltites due to Hurricane Helene), APO +1.7% (to provide €1 bln to acquire minority stake in Vonovia affiliate), PSN +1.3% (awarded position on $4 bln defense contract), PBF +1.3% (Control Empresarial bought 55000 shares), TPL +1% (acquires Permian oil & gas interests for $286 mln), RYAN +0.6% (completes acquisition of certain assets of Geo Underwriting Europe), LMT +0.6% (increases dividend, also announces $3 bln share repurchase authorization), UAL +0.3% (FAA concludes review of UAL after finding no major safety issues, according to Bloomberg), RLGT +0.2% (acquires operations of Focus Logistics), AMZN +0.1% (NLRB issues formal complaint), NFE +0.1% (announces ~$3 bln of debt and equity transactions), ERO +0.1% (provides update on Furnas Copper-Gold Project)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: LEVI -9.8% (also announces strategic review of its Dockers brand), NG -2.5%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: RCUS -1.2% (announces collaboration with Volrustomig), KTB -1% (in sympathy with weak LEVI earnings), TM -0.3% (pushes back production of EVs in North America to 1H26 amid slowing sales, according to Nikkei), LASE -0.2% (to restate certain financials), ABG -0.1% (wins preliminary injunction against CDK Global)