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Some people belong to multiple private clubs that have emerged to fill physical and emotional voids. Others belong only to Sam’s Club.

In a 115-year-old ferry terminal in New York’s financial district, an abundance of excess now exists. Walls lined with Loro Piana cashmere, Brooklyn Bridge views, a wellness center, a jazz bar — all of it can be yours for $3,900 annually (or just $2,500, if you’re under 30). Since it opened in 2021, Casa Cipriani has become one of the city’s buzziest private clubs.

If you can get in, there are many rules on how to behave. No photos are allowed in the “living room” — last year, some members were reportedly ousted after guests snapped pictures of Taylor Swift with Matty Healy. And there’s a dress code — jeans are allowed, so long as they have “no rips.”

Private clubs have long shaped the fabric of New York social life. Many of them formed during the Gilded Age, meticulously designed to be showstoppers before Manhattan’s skyscrapers surrounded them. Some of the original clubs still exist, sitting on prime real estate near Central Park and now officially designated as city landmarks.

But in recent years, a new wave of clubs, including Casa Cipriani, has proliferated, varying in price point, exclusivity and amenities. These clubs have risen by filling two voids left by the pandemic: the loss of “third places,” or locations distinct from work and home that can foster a sense of community, and the abundance of empty office space amid a new work-from-home culture.

Last month, over 98 million square feet of office space was available in Manhattan, nearly double the amount in March 2020, according to the real estate firm Colliers.

Commercial landlords are not in a position to be picky about their tenants, said Ruth Colp-Haber, chief executive of the real estate brokerage Wharton Property Advisors. “There are many New York City landlords that have a lot of empty space, and they need to figure out how they’re going to fill it,” said Ms. Colp-Haber. “They’re very welcome to new tenants, new types of uses.”

In a survey conducted by GGA Partners, a consulting firm for private clubs, over 60 percent of clubs reported an increase in membership for 2022. “The remote work environment fueled by Covid has created these executives who are working from home but still craving that social interaction,” said Zack Bates, the founder of Private Club Marketing.

The historical function of members’ clubs — to stratify the city by gender, race or class — persists today.

Aman New York, which opened in 2022, has offered a membership with an initiation fee of $200,000, plus annual dues. Exclusive access to Casa Cruz, which opened the same year, came at a price of $250,000 to $500,000. ZZ’s Club, from Major Food Group, has comparatively modest fees of $20,000 at initiation and $10,000 per year — the cost of getting into “the world’s first and only private location of Carbone,” the company’s restaurant beloved by celebrities.

On the other end of the spectrum, a membership at Verci — which has more of a D.I.Y., college campus feel — ranges from $200 to $300 a month, with no initiation fee. “We’ve been using this as our third space, our shared living room, a place for about 120 people that are all young and creative and artistic,” said Anant Vasudevan, a co-founder of Verci, which opened its first location in a former office space in Lower Manhattan last year.

The speedy growth has come with some sputtering. Soho House, one of the best-known clubs, announced late last year that it would stop admitting new members at its Los Angeles, New York and London spaces after complaints of overcrowding. The company, which has over 180,000 members and more than 40 locations worldwide, was founded in 1995 and helped pave the way for today’s clubs. In 2021, Soho House made an initial public offering during an aggressive expansion effort, but recently it has considered going private again.

Will the current flurry of hip, trendy clubs stand the test of time?

‘Staying Power’

The affordability of commercial real estate played a role in Verci’s ability to secure a physical space in downtown Manhattan, according to Mr. Vasudevan. “Being able to have a little bit of leverage on that side has been really helpful for us, especially as we start this out,” he said, adding that his company “retrofitted” the space to “feel more like a cozy environment rather than like a corporate environment.”

While many of the older institutions own their clubhouses, the newer ones tend to rent them: Verci, Remedy Place and Maxwell are on leases. “I wish we had the capabilities to buy the buildings,” said Jonathan Leary, the founder of Remedy Place, a “social wellness club.” “Maybe one day.”

Renting might limit the “staying power” of the newer clubs, said Diana Kendall, a professor of sociology at Baylor University and the author of “Members Only: Elite Clubs and the Process of Exclusion.” Dr. Kendall pointed out that some of the new crop “have already come and gone,” including the much-publicized women-only social club the Wing, which shuttered in 2022.

Some new clubs lack “the prestige and resources of the old, established clubs,” Dr. Kendall said, and are thus “more vulnerable to shifts in the economy and fluctuations in the employment sector even at the top levels.”

‘Who You Were and Who You Knew’

The city’s oldest clubs — places for wealthy New Yorkers (mainly white men, at the time of their founding) to socialize among other people of the same status — were created in a sometimes messy fashion, the stuff of gossip.

The Union Club, widely considered New York’s first men’s social club, formed in 1836 out of “an informal meeting of a number of gentlemen of social distinction,” as Francis Gerry Fairfield put it in his 1873 book, “The Clubs of New York.” According to Mr. Fairfield, the initiation fee was $200, and annual dues were $75. But by 1871, after a gentlemen’s disagreement over who was being let in, some members left and formed the Knickerbocker Club — the Knick, for short.

Many other clubs were springing up around this time, including the Century Association, the Brook and the Metropolitan Club, whose first president was J. Pierpont Morgan.

The club culture “was dependent on who you were and who you knew,” Dr. Kendall said. During the Gilded Age, from the late 1800s to the early 1900s, “people were making lots of money — railroads, banking, all of that — in New York,” Dr. Kendall explained. “And so they really wanted places where they could sit around and have cocktails with each other.”

Many early clubs did not allow women or people of color as members. In response, some elite members of those marginalized groups formed their own associations. The socialite and suffragist Florence Jaffray Harriman founded the Colony Club in 1903, which became the city’s premier women’s social club. And the Harmonie Club was founded by Jewish men who were denied entry to other clubs.

University clubs, such as the Yale, Harvard and Cornell clubs, were also popping up during this era to bring together people who shared academic credentials. Other clubs formed around mutual interests — for instance, the Anglers’ Club for those who loved fishing, the Lotos Club for the literary elite and the National Arts Club, which was founded by The New York Times critic Charles de Kay.

But interest in some clubs slumped in the mid- to late 20th century. As suburban development expanded, wealthy white people left New York City in droves and joined golf or country clubs. With membership down, the Union and Knickerbocker clubs even considered a merger.

What You Get for Getting In

With a plenitude of amenities, many of today’s New York City clubs offer more than the opportunity to hobnob.

At Remedy Place, members can take Zoom calls from hyperbaric oxygen chambers. And at Zero Bond, yuppies can, ironically or unironically, sip on a drink called the Trillionaire.

Other clubs pride themselves on offering little to no services. “We don’t have a fully functioning restaurant here, we’re not open until 6 p.m. during the weekdays — you can’t use this as a co-working space,” boasted David Litwak, a co-founder of Maxwell, which opened in Tribeca last year. “Our members have their own liquor locker. They can pour their own drinks.” Membership at Maxwell costs $3,000 annually, with initiation fees that range from $1,000 to $12,000.

Getting into some clubs may require navigating an opaque system. Cipriani’s website says the club “has the sole discretion to approve or deny any application for membership.” Those interviewing to join Maxwell need to pass “a vibe check,” Mr. Litwak said. “There’s no requirement for a degree of accomplishment. We have people who own hedge funds, or people who are in the lowest rung at hedge funds.”

These hoops can be part of the appeal of joining a private club. The clubs can “give you a feeling of prestige that in contemporary life a lot of people don’t necessarily have,” Dr. Kendall said — the feeling that you’re special enough to skip the line.

Searching for Third Places

Third places, such as libraries, coffee shops, bars and community centers, are locations where people can casually spend time outside of home and work — and research shows they have been under threat in recent years. The pandemic accelerated small-business closures, and in New York last year, Mayor Eric Adams — who is known to spend time at the private club Zero Bond — proposed budgets that forced libraries to cut their hours and programming.

For some people, private clubs have been filling that social void.

Last year, Sarah Mary Cunningham, a 41-year-old who works at Columbia Records, joined Remedy Place, which opened its Flatiron location in 2022 and has memberships ranging from $300 to $2,250 a month. Ms. Cunningham said she once made a friend while waiting for an IV drip at the club. “It was a shared connection,” she said. “There might not have been other ways for us to have met.”

Joining Verci “opened up this whole world for me because I didn’t go to college,” said Khalil DaTerra, a 21-year-old artist. “So having this campus feeling of dropping into a community is so valuable.” Mr. DaTerra is a resident member at Verci, part of a program that allows some members who can’t afford the monthly fees to pay what they can or nothing at all.

But in some crucial ways, private clubs cannot be considered third places. In “The Great Good Place,” Ray Oldenburg, the sociologist who coined the term in the 1980s, detailed several characteristics that ideal third places have — including being inclusive and homely and not setting “formal criteria of membership and exclusion.”

The business interests of private clubs can also sometimes conflict with the desires of their members. While people who join private clubs often seek intimacy, personalized treatment and a feeling of exclusivity, the clubs usually seek profitability and increased membership.

Aaisha Bhuiyan, a 27-year-old who works in tech, joined a private social club at the end of last year. She moved from New York City to New Jersey so that she could afford to live on her own, she said, and having access to a club gave her “a place to host my friends without dragging them to another state.” But she said that being at the club has felt “transactional.”

She declined to specify which club, but the cost, she said, is $250 a month.

Threats are mounting in space. GPS signals are vulnerable to attack. Their time-keeping is essential for stock trading, power transmission and more.

Global positioning satellites serve as clocks in the sky, and their signals have become fundamental to the global economy — as essential for telecommunications, 911 services and financial exchanges as they are for drivers and lost pedestrians.

But those services are increasingly vulnerable as space is rapidly militarized and satellite signals are attacked on Earth.

Yet, unlike China, the United States does not have a Plan B for civilians should those signals get knocked out in space or on land.

The risks may seem as remote as science fiction. But just last month, the United States said that Russia may deploy a nuclear weapon into space, refocusing attention on satellites’ vulnerability. And John E. Hyten, an Air Force general who also served as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and who is now retired, once called some satellites “big, fat, juicy targets.”

Tangible threats have been growing for years.

Russia, China, India and the United States have tested antisatellite missiles, and several major world powers have developed technology meant to disrupt signals in space. One Chinese satellite has a robotic arm that could destroy or move other satellites.

Other attacks are occurring on Earth. Russian hackers targeted a satellite system’s ground infrastructure in Ukraine, cutting off internet at the start of the war there. Attacks like jamming, which drowns out satellite signals, and spoofing, which sends misleading data, are increasing, diverting flights and confounding pilots far from battlefields.

Despite recognizing the risks, the United States is years from having a reliable alternative source for time and navigation for civilian use if GPS signals are out or interrupted, documents show and experts say. The Transportation Department, which leads civilian projects for timing and navigation, disputed this, but did not provide answers to follow-up questions.

A 2010 plan by the Obama administration, which experts had hoped would create a backup to satellites, never took off. A decade later, President Donald J. Trump issued an executive order that said that the disruption or manipulation of satellite signals posed a threat to national security. But he did not suggest an alternative or propose funding to protect infrastructure.

The Biden administration is soliciting bids from private companies, hoping they will offer technical solutions. But it could take years for those technologies to be widely adopted.

Where the United States is lagging, China is moving ahead, erecting what it says will be the largest, most advanced and most precise timing system in the world.

It is building hundreds of timing stations on land and laying 12,000 miles of fiber-optic cables underground, according to planning documents, state media and academic papers. That infrastructure can provide time and navigation services without relying on signals from Beidou, China’s alternative to GPS. It also plans to launch more satellites as backup sources of signals.

“We should seize this strategic opportunity, putting all our efforts into building up capabilities covering all domains — underwater, on the ground, in the air, in space and deep space — as soon as possible,” researchers from the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation, a state-owned conglomerate, wrote in a paper last year.

China retained and upgraded a World War II-era system, known as Loran, that uses radio towers to beam time signals across long distances. An enhanced version provides signals to the eastern and central parts of the country, extending offshore to Taiwan and parts of Japan. Construction is underway to expand the system west.

Russia, too, has a long-range Loran system that remains in use. South Korea has upgraded its system to counter radio interference from North Korea.

The United States, though, decommissioned its Loran system in 2010, with President Barack Obama calling it “obsolete technology.” There was no plan to replace it.

In January, the government and private companies tested an enhanced version of Loran on U.S. Coast Guard towers. But companies showed no interest in running the system without government help, so the Coast Guard plans to dispose of all eight transmission sites.

“The Chinese did what we in America said we would do,” said Dana Goward, the president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation in Virginia. “They are resolutely on a path to be independent of space.”

What Is the United States Doing?

Since Mr. Trump’s executive order, about a dozen companies have proposed options, including launching new satellites, setting up fiber optic timing systems or restarting an enhanced version of Loran. But few products have come to market.

A private firm, Satelles, working with the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology in Colorado, has developed an alternative source for time using satellites that were already orbiting about 485 miles above Earth.

N.I.S.T. scientists say the signals are a thousand times stronger than those from GPS satellites, which orbit more than 12,000 miles above Earth. That makes them harder to jam or spoof. And because low-Earth-orbit satellites are smaller and more dispersed, they are less vulnerable than GPS satellites to an attack in space.

The satellites obtain time from stations around the world, including the N.I.S.T. facility in Colorado and an Italian research center outside Milan, according to Satelles’s chief executive, Michael O’Connor.

China has similar plans to upgrade its space-time system by 2035. It will launch satellites to augment the Beidou system, and the country plans to launch nearly 13,000 satellites into low-Earth orbit.

China says its investments are partly motivated by concerns about an American attack in space. Researchers from China’s Academy of Military Sciences have said that the United States is “striving all-out” to build its space cyberwarfare abilities, especially after the war in Ukraine brought “a deeper appreciation of the critical nature of space cybersecurity.”

The United States has increased its spending on space defense, but Space Force, a branch of the military, did not answer specific questions about the country’s antisatellite abilities. It said it was building systems to secure the nation’s interests as “space becomes an increasingly congested and contested domain.”

Separate from civilian use, the military is developing GPS backup options for its own use, including for weapons like precision-guided missiles. Most of the technologies are classified, but one solution is a signal called M-code, which Space Force says will resist jamming and perform better in war than civilian GPS. It has been plagued by repeated delays, however.

The military is also developing a positioning, timing and navigation service to be distributed by low-Earth-orbit satellites.

Other countermeasures look to the past. The U.S. Naval Academy resumed teaching sailors to navigate by the stars.

What Happens if the U.S. Doesn’t Find a Solution?

Satellite systems — America’s GPS, China’s Beidou, Europe’s Galileo and Russia’s Glonass — are the important sources of time, and time is the cornerstone of most methods of navigation.

In the American GPS system, for example, each satellite carries atomic clocks and transmits radio signals with information about its location and the precise time. When a cellphone receiver picks up signals from four satellites, it calculates its own location based on how long it took for those signals to arrive.

Cars, ships and navigation systems on board aircraft all operate the same way.

Other infrastructure relies on satellites, too. Telecom companies use precise time to synchronize their networks. Power companies need time from satellites to monitor the state of the grid and to quickly identify and investigate failures. Financial exchanges use it to keep track of orders. Emergency services use it to locate people in need. Farmers use it to plant crops with precision.

A world without satellite signals is a world that is nearly blind. Ambulances will be delayed on perpetually congested roads. Cellphone calls will drop. Ships may get lost. Power outages may last longer. Food can cost more. Getting around will be much harder.

Yet, some critical civilian systems were designed with a flawed assumption that satellite signals would always be available, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

That reliance can have dire consequences. A recent report from Britain showed that a weeklong outage of all satellite signals would cost its economy nearly $9.7 billion. An earlier report put the toll on the U.S. economy at $1 billion a day, but that estimate is five years old.

“It’s like oxygen, you don’t know that you have it until it’s gone,” Adm. Thad W. Allen, a former commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard who leads a national advisory board for space-based positioning, navigation and timing, said last year.

For now, mutually assured losses deter major attacks. Satellite signals are transmitted on a narrow radio band, which makes it difficult for one nation to jam another’s satellite signals without shutting off its own services.

Having GPS for free for 50 years has “gotten everybody addicted,” according to Mr. Goward from the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation. The government has not done enough to make alternatives available to the public, he said.

“It’s only admiring the problem,” he said, “not solving the problem.”

China’s Recovery Picks Up as Stimulus Measures Sink In

Signs of improvement in manufacturing sector follow other evidence of ‘green shoots’

BEIJING—China’s sprawling manufacturing sector returned to expansion in March after five months of decline, adding to signs of a stabilizing economy as a recent string of stimulus measures starts to kick in.

An official gauge of China’s factory activity edged up to 50.8 from February’s 49.1, the country’s National Bureau of Statistics said Sunday, beating a forecast of 50 by economists polled by The Wall Street Journal. The 50 level separates expansion from contraction.

Sunday’s upbeat reading comes after a bundle of indicators for the January-February period showing the world’s second-largest economy started off the year on a solid footing, led by the manufacturing sector, with exports topping expectations and industrial profits returning to growth.

While the recent run of positive data will help lift the immediate pressure on China’s leaders, who recently set a growth target of around 5% for the year, many economists say authorities still need to roll out more policy support to hit that relatively lofty goal. A drawn-out property slump has shown no signs of bottoming out, and deflationary pressures are likely to persist.

In the latest sign of distress in the real-estate sector, troubled property giant Country Garden Holdings said Thursday in a surprise announcement that it will miss a deadline for reporting annual results and it needs more time to assess its financial situation.

Meanwhile, another industry leader, Shenzhen-based China Vanke, saw its net profit tumble 46% last year, the biggest drop since its 1991 listing. “During the period of excessive scale expansion, some investment judgments were over-optimistic, and it will take some time for these projects to be digested,” the developer said in a stock exchange filing Thursday.

With monetary policy constrained by tepid borrowing demand and concerns around profits of squeezed banks and a weak currency, fiscal stimulus is widely expected to take the lead role in driving demand this year. Despite recent statements from China’s central bank pointing to further monetary easing, economists say imminent cuts to banks’ required reserves or to interest rates are unlikely, citing uncertainty around the timing of rate cuts by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

Already, China’s leaders have grown concerned that recent moves to loosen monetary policy have led to excessive liquidity that isn’t being funneled into the real economy. Earlier this month, Premier Li Qiang warned that cash shouldn’t be circulating in the financial system for no good reason.

Speculation had grown in recent days that Chinese leaders were contemplating an aggressive boost to liquidity, after the publication of months-old remarks by leader Xi Jinping. In a speech to financial regulators in October, Xi called for the central bank to enrich its monetary policy toolbox and gradually step up trading Treasury bonds in its open-market operations.

Most economists, however, have shrugged off the likelihood of such a policy, given the constraints and limitations of more monetary easing. They say U.S.-style “quantitative easing,” in which a central bank buys government bonds, is unlikely in China.

“In the same speech,” Morgan Stanley economists told clients, “Beijing made hawkish comments that the deleveraging process requires a tighter grip on money and credit supply, which we believe indicates continued preference for austerity.”

The People’s Bank of China is prohibited by law from directly buying Treasury bonds in the primary market, and it has generally refrained from such purchases in the secondary markets over the past two decades.

Xi doesn’t appear to be calling for quantitative easing or aggressive stimulus, but rather expanding the central bank’s options for open-market operations, which should help increase the bank’s flexibility, UBS economist Wang Tao told clients Thursday.

Wang said China’s central bank still has relatively ample room to ease monetary policy with traditional measures, which means unconventional policy tools are unlikely.

In any case, with signs of a nascent rebound in the economy, there may be less need in the short run for any emergency interventions by Beijing.

The Sunday release of the factory-sector data showed the production subindex bouncing back to expansion, finishing at 52.2 in March from 49.8 in February. The gauge for employment, meanwhile, rose to 48.1 from February’s 47.5, suggesting improved appetite from manufacturers to hire more workers.

The subindex for total new orders rose to 53 from February’s 49, while that for new export orders improved to 51.3 from February’s 46.3, surpassing the 50 threshold for the first time in a year and pointing to improved global demand for Chinese goods.

China’s nonmanufacturing PMI, which covers both services and construction activity, rose to 53 in March, compared with 51.4 in February, the statistics bureau said separately on Sunday. The subindex tracking services activity rose to 52.4 from February’s 51.0, while the construction subindex rose to 56.2 from 53.5 in February.

China reported last week that outbound shipments rose 7.1% in the January-February period from a year earlier. Despite the upbeat figures, Chinese officials have repeatedly warned that foreign trade this year still faces extremely severe conditions, pointing to the rising prospect of protectionism against manufactured products, especially Chinese-made electric vehicles, one of the country’s most promising export industries.

As part of efforts to tilt the economy away from heavy infrastructure and property investment, Beijing has been pouring money into China’s vast manufacturing sector as it looks to develop high-tech sectors such as electric vehicles and renewable energy. That has stoked fears that overproduction of such products will prompt Western governments to consider hefty tariffs.

During China’s annual legislative session in early March, Li emphasized manufacturing-sector upgrades and technological innovation, a policy mix that economists say would likely further exacerbate any concerns about overcapacity.

While Beijing has acknowledged the concerns, the solutions that Chinese authorities have adopted “will likely center on retiring obsolete capacity and letting the most uncompetitive companies shut down while continuing to support capacity expansion, innovation, and exports in others,” analysts at New York-based Rhodium Group wrote in a note Tuesday.

Retaining control of Istanbul would bolster the opposition party as it renews efforts to loosen Erdogan’s grip on power

ISTANBUL—Turks are voting in an election on Sunday that will decide whether President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling party will retake control of Istanbul, the country’s largest city and a global center of culture and trade, from the main opposition party.

The mayoral election has far-reaching consequences for Turkey and for Erdogan, who has amassed enormous power over more than 20 years as the country’s top leader. Istanbul’s current mayor, Ekrem Imamoglu, is a leading critic of Erdogan and is seen as a potential presidential candidate.

If Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials AKP, retakes control of the city, it would deal a crushing blow to Turkey’s opposition, which failed to unseat Erdogan in a close-fought presidential election last year. Retaining control of the city, on the other hand, would bolster the opposition as it looks to renew its efforts to loosen Erdogan’s grip on power. Results are expected Sunday night.

The Istanbul mayoral race is the most important of a series of local elections taking place throughout Turkey’s 81 provinces on Sunday. Other major cities held by the opposition, such as Ankara and Izmir, are seen as being more difficult for the AKP to reclaim.

Istanbul is a strategic and symbolic prize for both sides. Sitting astride the Bosporus that separates Europe and Asia, the city with its 16 million people is the cultural and economic heart of Turkey, accounting for 30% of the country’s total GDP. Erdogan himself is a former mayor of the city who grew up in one of its working-class neighborhoods.

“This election is going to shape the future of the opposition in terms of leadership,” said Evren Balta, a political scientist at Istanbul’s Ozyegin University. “There are many economic and symbolic advantages for the opposition to keeping hold of Istanbul.”

The election is an opportunity for Erdogan to roll back one of his opponents’ most important gains of the past two decades. Imamoglu swept to power in an election in 2019 that was seen as a setback for the Turkish leader. Turkish authorities initially canceled the results of that election, triggering a revote that Imamoglu also won.

Imamoglu has since emerged as one of Erdogan’s most effective critics. Like Erdogan, he is a charismatic politician from a family from Turkey’s Black Sea region. A self-described social democrat, his campaign has centered on expanded social services like kindergartens and benefits for new mothers.

An Istanbul court in 2022 convicted Imamoglu on charges of insulting public officials after he referred in an interview to government officials who nullified the initial result of the 2019 election as “fools.” The mayor has rejected the charge as an attempt to silence opposition to the government.

Running against him is Murat Kurum, a former environment minister in Erdogan’s cabinet and a recently elected member of parliament. His campaign has promised to expand transportation in the city and overhaul the urban environment to prepare for earthquakes—a pledge also made by Imamoglu.

The 53-year-old mayor, campaigning in a little-known working class neighborhood called Yavuztürk on Istanbul’s Asian side earlier this past week, climbed on top of his campaign bus to speak to a crowd of supporters at an intersection between a supermarket and blocks of apartment buildings. On a nearby hillside, the dome and six minarets of Turkey’s largest mosque, built under Erdogan’s rule and inaugurated in 2019, could be seen.

“They want to take back Istanbul, from who? From the people!” he said, eliciting cheers from the crowd. Without naming Erdogan, he spoke of the president and other government officials who campaigned for his opponent, and said, “Send them back to Ankara!”

Like many in Turkey, Imamoglu’s supporters see the race in terms of its implications for Turkey’s national politics. Chief among their concerns is the Turkish economy, which has plunged into crisis in recent years.

“I think the economy is going really badly, and I think he can fix it because he can go from being mayor to being president,” said Onur Yuksel, a 46-year-old communications consultant who stood in the cold waiting for Imamoglu to speak. “I believe in him,” he said.

Erdogan held his own rally in support of his chosen candidate on March 24, assembling tens of thousands of people at a disused airport and urging supporters to vote in a speech that also pointed to the vote’s national significance.

“This city is now condemned to the oppression of the CHP,” he said, referring to the opposition party. “On March 31st, we have to save it.”

Also weighing on voters’ minds is the risk of earthquakes after Turkey suffered a catastrophic double earthquake last year that killed more than 50,000 people and leveled parts of southern Turkey and northwestern Syria. Residents fear that it is only a matter of time before a similar earthquake shakes Istanbul, which sits near a fault line. Both candidates have promised to prepare the city, which also suffered an earthquake in 1999 that killed more than 17,000 people.

“Istanbul’s biggest problem is earthquakes. The person who will be the architect of the renewal of all these buildings is Murat Kurum,” said Hamdi Buyukbahceci, 78 years old, referring to the AKP candidate’s background as an official in the state housing authority.

Carlos Tavares is betting big on the company’s flexible vehicle platforms as it rolls out new electric models in its Jeep and Ram brands

Stellantis decrease; red down pointing triangle Chief Executive Carlos Tavares in February made an intriguing announcement: The Chrysler-parent company would remain all-in on electric vehicles, even as competitors scale back and sales growth slows.

“We’re going flat out,” he told analysts on the company’s earnings call.

The 65-year-old’s view on battery-powered vehicles is a drastic change from just a year ago, when he sounded the alarm on the high cost of EVs. Now, Tavares is more bullish, driven by the company’s flexible vehicle platforms and that Stellantis’s EVs are already profitable.

Tavares says the company is staying the course with an ambitious goal it staked out two years ago: to make 50% of Stellantis’s U.S. sales volume all-electric by 2030, buoyed by its popular Jeep SUV and Ram pickup brands.

A part-time race car driver, Tavares has always stood out among his peers as an executive who moves to the beat of his own drum.

While Stellantis has sold electric models in Europe the past few years, the U.S. was put on the back burner for some time. Company executives have said the delay gave them time to better understand what U.S. customers want—an advantage when competitors have spent billions of dollars to quickly introduce their first electric models to catch up to market leader Tesla, even as some drivers remain skeptical of the technology.

Stellantis, born in 2021 through the merger of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles and PSA Group, has 14 brands worldwide, including well-known American names such as Jeep and Ram as well as European makes Opel and Peugeot.

The company is executing an aggressive plan to capture a chunk of the electric-vehicle market: Sell 48 EV models globally by the end of 2024, including eight in the U.S.

Among those are the Fiat 500e subcompact vehicle, which is currently available, and the muscle car Dodge Charger Daytona and Ram 1500 REV pickup, expected to hit dealerships later this year.

New advantages

Tavares is betting big on his company’s new flexible vehicle platforms. They will give Stellantis an edge, allowing the company to switch between building gas-powered vehicles and EVs based on consumer demand.

These platforms are in essence common structural foundations on which different types of vehicles can be built.

“We are launching at the right time with the right technology and the right products covering several segments of the market,” a company spokesperson said.

But Tavares said he has more than one reason to be more optimistic—raw material costs are falling and the electric-only models Stellantis sells around the world are already profitable. At a time when many automakers are losing money on EVs, launching profit-generating electric vehicles as soon as they come to market is a core tenant at the company, he said.

“People do things if they believe it is going to be profitable,” Tavares said in an interview. “If not, they just drop it.”

Not your typical CEO

Tavares, who ran Peugeot after several years at Nissan Motor, has developed a reputation for maintaining sharp metrics to track progress and being hyper-focused on costs. He sometimes flies budget airlines over the private jets favored by other auto executives.

That focus on restraining costs has continued into his tenure at Stellantis, which has maintained double-digit profit margins since its inception in 2021, among the highest in the industry.

The company achieved those marks under Tavares’ watch by reducing its U.S. salaried head count through buyouts and layoffs, and by making moves to sell off some of Stellantis’s biggest real estate holdings, such as its North American headquarters.

Tim Kuniskis, chief executive of Dodge and Ram, recently said Tavares instructed the company’s American brands to not buy any regulatory credits allowed under U.S. law to meet tailpipe emission standards. Fiat Chrysler had relied upon the credit-buying system for years to meet the requirements.

“My guys may think, ‘Carlos is crazy’,” Tavares said, “and that is OK.” But he said buying credits from other automakers only helps competitors and puts Stellantis in a position of weakness.

So far, some automakers have struggled to make money on their EVs. Ford last year lost nearly $5 billion on its electric-car business and projects even bigger losses this year. General Motors has delayed a $4 billion overhaul of a Detroit factory to build electric pickups as well as a self-imposed goal of producing 400,000 EVs over a two-year period through mid-2024.

Tavares, meanwhile, told analysts in the February call that Stellantis’s EVs in Europe are profitable, including a new hatchback offered by the company’s Citroën brand, the e-C3, which is being sold in Europe at 23,300 euros, equivalent to about $25,000.

Sell at a profit

For years, Tavares said consumers wouldn’t make a switch to electric models without substantial government subsidies and lower costs, and he routinely chastised regulators for requiring companies to sell more battery-powered cars.

Now, the CEO says the company’s core U.S. brands—Dodge, Jeep and Ram—are expected to make money on their first retail EVs that go on sale later this year.

Stellantis’s new global vehicle platforms have been touted by executives as a business advantage in recent months. Up to two million vehicles alone can be built on one of Stellantis’s new platforms, called STLA Medium, equal to one-third of the automaker’s total sales in 2023.

These platforms, which contain the basic mechanical components that underpin a car, can be used to not only make battery-only models but also hybrids and those with internal combustion engines.

Kuniskis said at a recent conference that one of the company’s four new vehicle platforms will support a midsize SUV for Jeep, a two-door muscle coupe for Dodge and a new vehicle for Chrysler—including those powered by gas engines and battery motors.

“That one platform underpins in the short term, eight different, completely, radically different cars for radically different customer profiles,” Kuniskis said. “And in the longer term, it will do even more.”

Tavares said the setup is particularly advantageous as the U.S. and Europe face political elections this year that could upend the regulatory environment for electric vehicles.

If regulators after those elections want fewer EVs, Stellantis can slow down until consumer demand increases, he said. If they want more, it can speed production up.

“I will be in a better position to face that market than if I start to slow down now,” he said.

Growing confidence

Other executives have taken a different view, saying a flexible arrangement such as Stellantis’s isn’t the right approach. Developing an EV system from scratch allows for a larger battery—thus providing a longer driving range—and a roomier interior relative to an electric vehicle that was retrofitted from a gas-engine layout, supporters such as General Motors and Volkswagen have said.

Still, Tavares is confident his strategy will be fruitful.

The CEO said the company has enough battery supply secured to support its U.S. ambitions. And the carmaker is benefiting from its long-game approach because of the slowdown in consumer interest, as the continuing narrative has resulted in decreasing total costs to make an EV, Tavares said.

“That has an impact on the raw material price, which means the raw material price is going down,” he said. As a result, affordability for customers should continue to increase, he said.

Pain points persist, Tavares said, and the industry won’t have success selling EVs unless companies continue to drive down costs, increase affordability and build out a robust charging network for drivers.

But even if there are some bumps in the road, he said he believes the electric transition is inevitable. In the coming years, though, Tavares believes the competition will be intense and only a handful of global automakers might survive.

“There will be only five,” he said. “Among those, there will be Stellantis.”

Nvidia stock edged higher early on Thursday, but was on course for a weekly loss after 11 consecutive weeks of gains.

Nvidia shares were up 0.7% at $908.94 in early trading. The stock closed down 2.5% at $902.50 on Wednesday.

“Technical indicators are suggesting trend exhaustion and Nvidia could also be in the process of forming a double top pattern,” wrote Kim Cramer Larsson, a technical analyst at Saxo Bank.

A ‘double top’ is characterized by two consecutive peaks that technical analysts believe can signal a coming reversal of a stock’s momentum. Technical analysts don’t address the fundamentals of a company’s business but analyze stock-price charts for clues about how shares are likely to behave.

Larsson said that if Nvidia closes below $822.79, that would confirm the move and could lead to heavy selling. Meanwhile, a close above $974 would indicate a bullish move and likely open the path for the stock to rise beyond $1,055, according to Larsson.

For those who prefer analysis on fundamentals to charts, Nvidia now trades at a trailing price-to-earnings multiple of 75.6 times and a price-to-sales multiple of 36.9 times, according to FactSet. Both of those are expected to decline quickly: Nvidia is expected to nearly double its earnings per share to $25.08 in its fiscal 2025 year and increase its revenue by around 80% to $109.4 billion.

Growth is expected to slow thereafter.

“If we look at price-to-earnings…then the stock is clearly not expensive…but the problem is the multiple of sales even four years out looks very high to us on Jan 2028 [fiscal year] multiple of 15.5 times,” wrote UBS analyst Andrew Garthwaite in a research note on Thursday.

Among other chip makers, Advanced Micro Devices AMD was up 1.0% in early trading. Intel INTC had gained 1.1%.

Nvidia shares had risen 82% so far this year through to Wednesday’s close. That compares with a 10% rise in the S&P 500 index and a 9.3% gain in the Nasdaq Composite Index

OMP over the same period.

A string of gambling situations involving athletes leaves leagues in a tough spot.

Major League Baseball held its season openers this week under the shadow of a gambling scandal. Reports surfaced that the National Basketball Association is investigating a player over irregular bets. And college basketball fans await results from a review into unusual betting on a men’s basketball game.

The incidents have highlighted a trade-off that professional sports leagues made when they embraced gambling.

Leagues have signed lucrative marketing deals with betting apps like FanDuel and DraftKings and use gambling to amp up fan engagement. But this new source of revenue has also opened the doors to a fundamental danger: that an explosion of sports betting could threaten the assumption of fairness at the core of athletic competitions.

“The risk is that the game becomes like professional wrestling — which is rigged. And nobody bets on professional wrestling,” said Fay Vincent, the M.L.B. commissioner from 1989 to 1992. “And if baseball becomes professional entertainment the way wrestling is, it’s dead.”

Leagues are unlikely to abandon gambling completely. But is there a way for them to protect their image as they profit from betting?

Clubs can no longer blame gambling itself for scandals. When Pete Rose was barred from baseball in 1989 for betting on games, in one of the most famous gambling scandals in sports history, Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti, Vincent’s predecessor, denounced gambling as corrosive. But after a 2018 Supreme Court decision paved the way for states to legalize betting, leagues are now working directly with sports books. The N.B.A. signed an estimated $25 million contract with MGM Resorts in 2018, and M.L.B. has an exclusive multiyear deal with FanDuel.

“There is no putting the toothpaste back in the tube,” said Patrick Rishe, a professor in the business of sports at Washington University in St. Louis. “The money flows too thick.”

Leagues may support limits on prop bets, which allow gamblers to bet beyond the results of games on components like the first player to score. Since the outcome of these bets can often be decided by only one player, they leave individual athletes vulnerable to more pressure from bookies and others. The president of the N.C.A.A., Charlie Baker, encouraged states this week to ban prop bets, sending shares of DraftKings and FanDuel’s parent company, Flutter, tumbling. (Some analysts said a ban would only minimally affect the sports books’ bottom lines.)

Better self-monitoring could help. The largest U.S. sports books announced this week that they were forming the Responsible Online Gaming Association, an organization that will allow them to share information about customers who have been excluded because of problematic gambling.

“This is real money, real participation,” said Chris Grove, an analyst at Eilers & Krejcik Gaming. “But, with that said, it shouldn’t also just be a free pat on the back. There are a lot of questions, especially around what kind of information are you going to be sharing about individual players and then what kinds of actions are you going to be taking based on that information sharing.”

Leagues could also extend bans against in-sport betting to individuals with ties to players, like personal assistants. Anyone who works at the teams “should probably be subjected to the same rules as they’re subjecting the athletes to,” said Jeffrey Kessler, a sports law lawyer at Winston & Strawn.

More taxes may be on the table. “State governments are also major beneficiaries of regulated gambling,” Grove said. “They have an obligation to step up and to help to mitigate whatever problems are emerging.”

States could raise taxes on sports betting, which range from 6.75 percent in Iowa to 51 percent in New York, Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and use the proceeds to fund oversight initiatives such as real-time data monitoring or state-supported teletherapy for gambling addicts.

A flat tax increase might be welcomed by FanDuel and DraftKings, the largest betting sites, which are better equipped than smaller rivals to afford the impact — “though they would never say that out loud,” Grove said.

But many are doubtful this will happen any time soon, given the pushback that higher taxes would most likely elicit from others. Professional sports teams and casinos both “have a very strong track record in terms of lobbying state legislatures,” said Marc Edelman, a professor of law at Baruch College who studies gambling history.

Will the latest incidents damage leagues? Given the lengthy nature of TV contracts and relative steadfastness of fans, any immediate impact may be subtle. Attendance at Cincinnati Reds games dipped only slightly after Rose, who managed the team, was ousted for betting, said Keith O’Brien, author of “Charlie Hustle: The Rise and Fall of Pete Rose.” A year later, it jumped about 25 percent.

“Does that mean that fans wanted to come because they were washing away the scandal? I don’t know,” O’Brien said. “I can tell you, having lived in Cincinnati in 1989, that it ruined baseball. It ruined it. And it was a lost season.”

As they peered through the smoke from lit flares, fans of the Italian soccer team AC Milan dancing beneath the towering Italian gothic cathedral in the city’s Piazza Duomo may have noticed a tanned 56-year-old American who didn’t quite look like he belonged.

Gerry Cardinale’s dark blue polo stood out amid the red and black striped jerseys the fans of the “rossoneri” wore—if they were wearing shirts at all—to celebrate the team’s title-clinching 3-0 victory against Sassuolo.

It was May 2022 and the public announcement had not yet gone out, but Cardinale, founder of the investment firm RedBird Capital, had just agreed to a $1.2 billion deal to buy the legendary football club. Cardinale, a Goldman Sachs veteran famous in American sports, entertainment, and media, had descended from the boardroom to experience firsthand what kind of party one of Italian soccer’s most beloved teams would put on the day of its first championship in 11 years. It was perhaps the last time Cardinale would walk the streets of Milan unrecognized.

Since then Cardinale has become a figure of fascination and controversy in the city and in Italian soccer. His plans for a shiny new stadium to replace AC Milan’s venerable San Siro stadium have worried some—but many pundits and fans, despite their usual wariness of foreign owners, can’t help but concede that Cardinale’s plans are the team’s best hope for a return to its much-longed-for-glory days.

That’s certainly how Cardinale sees it. His investment firm, RedBird Capital, has lately become the go-to financer for the entrepreneurial adventures of Hollywood celebrities such as The Rock, Ryan Reynolds, and Ben Affleck, as well as sports superstars such as LeBron James. Prior to RedBird, Cardinale was best known for his big deals in sports, including forging a lucrative relationship with the New York Yankees and then-owner George Steinbrenner in the early 2000s at Goldman. Cardinale was key to coming up with the innovative idea to create the Yankees’ YES cable network and helped the team assemble the financing used to build the new Yankee Stadium.

So it stands to reason, perhaps, that at the center of Cardinale’s vision for Milan is a state-of-the-art 70,000-capacity stadium, complete with an entertainment district, team museum, hotels, theme park, and locker rooms featuring cryogenic pools, according to documents viewed by Fortune. The project, still in its early stages, would see Milan leave the beloved but rickety San Siro stadium for a new arena, with an estimated cost of $1 billion, in a suburb of the city—essentially, a Yankee Stadium in Milan.

‘Sports is no longer a hobby for rich guys’

Amid a gold rush in European soccer, Cardinale pitches himself as a tenacious, entrepreneurial operator, pointing out he doesn’t have the funds of an oligarch or an oil sheik and he isn’t an aristocrat dilettante. For him AC Milan is neither a vanity project nor a sportswashing endeavor. He’s at heart an investor and a wheeler-dealer who brings a proven track record and a responsibility to his partners—who, one can assume, are expecting returns.

“Sports now is no longer a hobby for rich guys,” Cardinale tells Fortune in an interview. “Sports is a multibillion-dollar live event entertainment business, and you have to bring relationships and multidisciplinary skill sets across a range of activities to be able to get these things done.”

Cardinale says he reveres the history of the 98-year-old San Siro, but argues it shouldn’t impede progress. “It’s time for Italy, and for Milan, to do what the Yankees did back in 2008,” Cardinale says. “Old Yankee Stadium had been around forever. Babe Ruth was there, Joe DiMaggio was there, Mickey Mantle was there, Roger Maris was there. It was iconic. But they realized that it’s time now for a new version of that.”

Just as in New York City, change-averse Milan fans (egged on by parts of the Italian media) have been slow to embrace the idea of leaving the San Siro—a modernist monument to Milan’s past glory. In 1989 and 1990, Milan was considered the best soccer team in the world, winning back-to-back European Cups while playing some of the most entertaining soccer fans had ever seen. Throughout its history, Milan cultivated a reputation for attracting the game’s biggest players—Marco Van Basten, Ricardo Kaka, Ronaldinho, David Beckham—giving it a patina of stardust that few other teams could rival.

If AC Milan wants to build on its 2022 comeback to reclaim its perch atop European soccer, Cardinale argues, it needs an experienced pro with a track record of supercharging sporting giants by turning them into fabulously lucrative brands. But will his American playbook work in Italy?

Italy is beautiful and fickle, mesmerizing and exasperating, glorious and antiquated. Fans can pack a soccer stadium 70,000 strong with choreographed color displays, or, if they disapprove, can manifest their frustration through a torrential downpour of boos. Local governments can attract a billion dollars in foreign investments and then slow-walk approvals for those very projects. And the world of European soccer financing can be perilous—as Cardinale’s firm is discovering now, with the announcement of an Italian financial police probe into RedBird’s purchase of the team.

Building a Yankee Stadium in Milan, it turns out, might be even harder than getting it done in the Bronx.

The Harvard-educated number-cruncher in Milan

The son of Italian-Americans from Philadelphia’s affluent and picturesque Main Line suburbs, Cardinale has acknowledged that he wasn’t a “baseball man” before he got into the business side of the game. He rowed as an undergrad at Harvard, then was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, before spending 20 years at Goldman Sachs, making a name for himself as the go-to dealmaker for sports and entertainment.

Goldman was where he helped develop the idea of a sports team as a media company, when he worked with Steinbrenner to create the Yankee Entertainment and Sports Network (which was eventually sold at a $3 billion valuation). He later helped secure funding for a $2.3 billion new stadium to replace the Yankees’ legendary home.

He hung his own shingle in 2014 with RedBird (a play on his last name), and at his own firm he has put together a slew of celebrity-laden deals, a Cardinale speciality. His focus on sports and entertainment has put him on first-name basis with figures ranging from the actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, whose movie production company he bankrolled, to the basketball player LeBron James, whose sports media company is owned by RedBird. The Rock tapped Cardinale to revive the Xtreme Football League, a defunct football league once owned by Vince McMahon. And last June, RedBird broke into the other European sport sweeping the U.S. when it bought a 24% stake in the Formula 1 team Alpine Racing alongside the movie stars Ryan Reynolds and Michael B. Jordan. He has brought the same penchant for working with celebrities to Milan, hiring the club’s tough-talking former star Zlatan Ibrahimovich as an advisor.

Cardinale’s profile is also rising in the worlds of entertainment and media. Last year he hired Jeff Zucker, the former president of CNN, to lead a $1 billion joint venture with the Abu Dhabi-based International Media Investments that currently controls the U.K. paper The Telegraph. There are also rumors that David Ellison’s Skydance Media, in which RedBird is the second-largest investor, is interested in buying Shari Redstone’s shares of Paramount.

Another name in Cardinale’s Rolodex is Billy Beane, the former baseball executive credited with inventing the data-driven approach that was famously profiled by the journalist Michael Lewis for Moneyball, which became a Brad Pitt movie of the same name. Beane has been business partners with Cardinale for several years, launching a $575 million SPAC in 2020 dedicated to investing in sports. And Beane is also a soccer nut who has encouraged Cardinale and other American friends to consider European soccer.

Cardinale sees what he does in the boardroom as analogous to what Beane did on the field: use sophisticated data analytics to find an edge against a better-funded opponent. “It’s not a question of outspending the other guy,” Cardinale says. “It’s a question of spending an incremental dollar of capital better than anyone else.”

An unlikely underdog

And indeed, despite its deep pockets in almost any other context—with about $10 billion in assets under management—RedBird can’t compete with the virtually endless supplies of money that have flowed into the European game over the past 20 years, upsetting many traditional hierarchies, including Milan’s place at the very top of the sport.

Russian oligarchs and Middle Eastern oil money have elevated formerly humbler clubs such as Manchester City (Abu Dhabi) and Paris Saint-Germain (Qatar) to top-dog status with exorbitant salaries for the world’s best players and investments in world-class infrastructure like stadiums and training centers. Man City now has more than double the revenues of Milan; PSG turns over exactly twice as much. Man City and PSG have spent as much, if not more, on players’ salaries than Cardinale did to acquire Milan. “You’re never going to outspend that,” Cardinale tells Fortune.

In this super-rich company, Cardinale and RedBird are arguably the underdogs of European soccer—a strange label to affix to a plugged-in financier and a large American private equity firm. But the ace up Cardinale’s sleeve, he argues, is what separates him from other owners: Cardinale doesn’t have a few hundred million dollars burning a hole in his pocket. Nor is he the bored failson of a titan of industry sent to run the family sports team. And he’s nothing like the sovereign wealth funds of the oil-funded Arab kingdoms, for whom a sports team is a relatively cheap cultural asset that can offer some soft power or image-laundering.

The challenge ahead, Cardinale says, isn’t to have more money than his competitors—that’s impossible—it’s to have better ideas, and better execution. But it remains to be seen whether Cardinale can pull it off. Italian soccer is big business, but Europe is not the U.S., where money talks and everyone listens.

The best path to success, as Cardinale sees it, is a fancy new stadium. But few things in soccer are as difficult to execute than building a stadium in Italy. Being the first American to do so would be like striking soccer oil.

Each sports club a ‘Mini Disney’

A common Cardinale refrain is that sports teams “have to monetize the live event.” That means creating a game-day experience that’s such a good time and so additive to fans’ enjoyment that they can’t help but spend money. In an era where audiences have virtually limitless entertainment options at their fingertips, a stadium can no longer just be a venue to sit in a seat and watch a match.

“In the old days you could just throw a party and people would show up,” Cardinale says. “Today, there’s a tremendous amount of competition for an individual’s discretionary time. So if you’re going to charge premium pricing in a live event, you’re going to have to deliver a value proposition to that customer, in this case, the fan.”

In other words, even the most loyal fan has to be wooed—and these days it’s going to take more than a hot dog or, in Milan, a panino con la salamella. Fans are “very smart,” Cardinale says, and teams can’t just hike up prices for tickets and concessions and expect to get away with it.

Central to this thesis are the plush hospitality offerings that allow owners to cater to a team’s wealthiest fans and also attract corporate clients who reserve boxes for client schmoozing or to offer as executive perks. Premium seating is what makes the difference between clubs that make “a huge amount and those who make quite a small amount from their matchday income,” says Phil Carling, senior vice president of football at the sports marketing agency Octagon, who has worked in European soccer for 30 years.

By that measure, San Siro is drastically underperforming. (One fan review site, after describing the candy bars, peanuts, and sandwiches available at the stadium’s limited stalls, remarked “I can’t see how these small counters can serve 80,000 people when the stadium is sold out.”)

For comparison: Paris Saint-Germain’s stadium, with far more extensive concessions, brought in $165 million in 2022/2023 season, despite seating only 48,000 people. Meanwhile, last season Milan had an average attendance of almost 72,000 fans, and those gangbusters attendance numbers yielded just $79 million in stadium revenue. But the real blueprint is in the U.S.: In 2023, Yankee Stadium revenues were projected to be $341 million, according to Fitch Ratings.

The customer base for this kind of premium seating and suites will pay virtually anything for them, Carling says. The more creative a football club can get, the more money it can entice high rollers to spend. Manchester City sells access to the Tunnel Club, where fans can watch players’ prematch rituals via a one-way mirror. London-based Arsenal, which is owned by the Colorado sports magnate Stan Kroenke, has the exclusive “Diamond Club,” which includes meet and greets with the team’s coach and a five-course meal prepared by Michelin star chef Raymond Blanc. A new stadium can, and according to Cardinale should, also be an attractive concert venue—a lucrative business in itself, as blockbuster tours by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé showed last summer.

Not all teams own their own stadiums, Carling points out, but those that do “completely control the commercial model”—setting ticket prices, selling the naming rights to a sponsor, and building out luxurious VIP hospitality packages, among other revenue streams. San Siro is owned by the city of Milan, for which the club pays rent—while the new stadium would be entirely owned by the club, dramatically increasing its revenue potential.

Seen through this lens, Italian soccer’s dearth of team-owned soccer stadiums isn’t a shortcoming, but an opportunity. While Milan’s $79 million in stadium revenues is nothing to sniff at, the problem is that its fans are spending it at the wrong place, an arena it doesn’t own and manage, meaning it’s leaving precious money on the table.

“One big macro thing in sports, in general, is you’ve had this massive escalation in these valuations in sports and none of the people and none of the infrastructure really has kept pace,” Cardinale says. “I mean, these are all now mini Disney’s—live event entertainment companies.”

Change isn’t easy

San Siro might be a fixer-upper, but it still holds tremendous sentimental value for soccer fans in its own city and around the world. When Milan and crosstown rival FC Internazionale (Inter) met for a rare matchup in Europe’s Champions League last May, soccer commentators marveled at the atmosphere fans created in the stadium. A viral clip from CBS’s U.S. broadcast of the game showed one of its pundits, an Englishman, pausing his prematch analysis to survey the stadium-wide color displays the fans had put together, holding up colored boards to form massive images or spell out words. “Just look around,” he said. “I’m genuinely mind blown by the stadium.”

Many Milan fans have made peace with the fact the team will have to move to a new stadium to remain competitive with Europe’s top clubs. And even the club’s most conventional fans struggle to justify the practicalities of maintaining a century-old facility. A relatively old stadium even in a league already plagued by aging infrastructure, the 75,800-seat San Siro stadium is creaky, has few corporate boxes, and has been at various points labeled decrepit and obsolete by Milan chair Paolo Scaroni.

Still, when it comes to building anything new in Italy, “you’ve really got your work cut out for you,” says Carling, who has worked in Milan before, helping Inter with its finances. “Good luck with all of that: achieving the permissions, getting the local politicians on your side. It’s a very bureaucratic country and that sets up its own challenges.”

Indeed, Italian bureaucracy is notoriously slow and sprawling, manned by aging and underpaid government workers, according to the Aspen Institute Italia. Business leaders and politicians alike have often claimed it stifles business, blaming it for everything from killing thermodynamic solar panels, to making it harder to hire doctors, to delaying the expenditure of €200 billion euros in EU pandemic relief funding. “The bureaucracy is killing Italy,” the Italian-American owner of the Florence-based ACF Fiorentina, Rocco Commisso, told Forbes in 2020, referring to his own efforts to build a soccer stadium.

After a couple of false starts, RedBird and AC Milan are now trying to build the stadium outside central Milan, in the town of San Donato, about seven miles and 25 minutes by car from downtown. In September, the club presented the city council of San Donato the architectural plans for the new stadium, which passed review in January. There has been some pushback in San Donato, too. A community group filed a petition with 2,000 signatures to the city council opposing the stadium on environmental and public safety grounds. “The stadium would hold 70,000 people in a town that has less than half as many citizens,” said Iris Balestri, a spokesperson for the community group. “The municipality isn’t ready to handle the presence of so many people in terms of cleanliness and urban sanitation.”

Historic Italian cities such as Milan, Rome, and Florence are particularly challenging for development because they’re subject to regulations meant to preserve their cultural heritage. (San Donato may not be in central Milan, but there’s an 889-year-old abbey about a mile away from the stadium’s proposed location.) The beauty and prominence of those cities is also what makes them so alluring to investors, says Simone Tosi, a sociology professor at the Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, who studies the culture of soccer stadiums. Milan has fashion week, the Duomo, Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper—which Tosi jokes is less of a tourist attraction than a Milan game—all of which make for an appeal that’s difficult to replicate. “The name of some very well-known Italian cities is able to give these sorts of investments another gear because of their glamor,” Tosi says.

Cardinale himself has remained upbeat about his stadium project in Milan, even as he acknowledges he’s “heard from others’ past experiences that it’s very tricky.” Still, he says, “I like our chances.”

With San Donato’s recently completed review of Milan’s initial proposal, there is reason for optimism. But the plan must still go through many stages and approvals, likely to take between a year and a half and two years, before a final version can be presented to the town council for a vote.

In the meantime, to give itself a head start in advancing through the bureaucratic process, AC Milan bought a plot of land in San Donato that had already received preliminary zoning approvals for a much smaller sports complex called SportsLifeCity. “I wanted to know I had a viable, zonable option for the stadium,” Cardinale explains.

If the stadium doesn’t get built, it would be an uphill climb for Milan to compete in Europe, Cardinale admits. But he says he’s committed to AC Milan either way. “If the stadium doesn’t happen,” he says, “we stay at San Siro.”

The American investors who have met their match in Italian soccer

If trying to build a new stadium turns out to be a massively expensive mistake for Cardinale and RedBird, he won’t be the first investor to be frustrated by Italian soccer. Several Italian-American owners already had the idea of returning to the motherland, as all-conquering, billionaire heroes from the New World. (In Italian a rich uncle is referred to as a zio d’America—the uncle from America.)

Building a team-owned soccer stadium in Italy has been the white whale for a slew of American owners—who see Italian soccer as a good business opportunity that could become even better with some added professionalism and corporatization, Cardinale says. “Those concepts are more familiar to American investors and I think that’s what attracted them to Serie A,” Cardinale says, referring to the Italian soccer league. “They realize what the legacy is and the history here in some of these under-managed brands. They realized the potential to have a great investment on your hands, simply by professionalizing the ownership.”

AC Milan’s previous owners, American hedge fund Elliott Management, started that work. Elliott took Milan as collateral after Chinese businessman Yonghong Li (who had bought the club in 2016 for $788 million from the perma-tanned media impresario-turned-politician Silvio Berlusconi) failed to pay back a $32 million loan. After several years of bleeding red ink, Elliott, a specialist in fixing distressed businesses, managed to get Milan back on track, culminating in the 2022 championship. Stability achieved, Elliott sold the team to RedBird, who last year managed to turn a $6.6 million profit, its first since 2006.

But the deal is now under investigation by Italy’s financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, over allegations that Elliott, not RedBird, still controls the club. A spokesperson for RedBird denied that was the case. “The notion that RedBird doesn’t own and control AC Milan is just false and contradicts all the evidence and facts,” they told Fortune.

A spokesperson for Elliott echoed those sentiments. “The Elliott funds have had no equity interest in, or control over AC Milan,” they said.

Prosecutors called attention to a €560 million vendor loan that Elliott gave RedBird at an 8% interest to fund its acquisition of the club, according to documents viewed by Fortune. Cardinale told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera he wanted the loan in order to keep working with Elliott. “Elliott did a great job,” he said. “No one put a gun to my temple.” Tangential to the whole affair is BlueSkye, a disgruntled minority owner with an indirect stake in the club that RedBird alleges “instigated” the investigation as part of its legal disputes with Elliott. BlueSkye declined to comment.

Elliott and RedBird are not alone in their struggles in Italy. James Pallotta, founder of the hedge fund Raptor Capital and owner of Rome’s AS Roma from 2011 to 2020, tried to build a stadium in the Eternal City for years, but progress faltered when real estate developers and city officials were caught up in a bribery scandal that led to multiple rounds of arrests. (The club wasn’t involved in any of the criminal activity.) Pallotta later sold the club for $700 million to another batch of American owners, the billionaire father-son duo Dan and Ryan Friedkin. The Friedkins since picked the project back up again in a different neighborhood in Rome. (Raptor Capital did not respond to a request for comment). In Florence, Rocco Commisso, the Italian-American billionaire who griped about Italy’s bureaucracy, had originally planned to tear down and rebuild Fiorentina’s aging architectural marvel of a stadium. After several rounds of high profile outrage from architectural guilds, academics, and others, Commisso settled for a stadium refurbishment and a brand new training facility. (ACF Fiorentina and AS Roma did not respond to a request for comment.)

Cardinale is cheering the Friedkins on, he says. “I hope Dan Friedkin is able to get a stadium done,” Cardinale said. “I’ll certainly do everything I can to support him because Italy needs more live event entertainment infrastructure.” Cardinale sees these efforts less as competition than as a tide that can lift all ships: “If I had my druthers, I would help every single other owner in Serie A build a stadium, because it’s good for the ecosystem,” he says.

Next to fail or the first to succeed?

Cardinale says he’ll remain committed to the team whether or not the stadium is built—but without a new stadium and the money it would bring in, the future of AC Milan looks uncertain. The club risks languishing, lagging just behind Europe’s greatest teams, with only the memories of the halcyon days when it was the envy of the soccer world.

For RedBird, the consequences of failing to build a stadium are less clear-cut. It could certainly puncture the aura of invincibility that surrounds one of the most visionary investors in sports and entertainment. Or maybe Cardinale’s peers would hardly notice, with RedBird just the latest in a litany of foreign investors to get fed up with Italian soccer and cash out. Or it could be seen as just the latest private equity or venture capital-funded moonshot to fall flat.

If Cardinale succeeds in Milan, on the other hand, it would be quite a victory. An American investor called to the siren song of Italy who didn’t end up shipwrecked in the stormy waters of its bureaucracy. It would also be a vindication of Cardinale’s brand of number-crunching corporatism: finding untapped potential where others only saw mediocrity, taking advantage of opportunities everyone else considered inadequacies, and doing it all with superior smarts, intuition, and a healthy dose of self-belief.

As his friend Billy Beane might remind him, that’s moneyball.

The chat platform, which has long avoided advertising, is latest tech company to lean into paid promotions

Social-media startup Discord plans to start showing advertisements on its free platform in the coming week after long dismissing them, becoming the latest tech company to turn to ads to try to boost revenue.

The paid promotions are from videogame makers and will offer users gifts for completing in-game tasks while their friends watch on Discord.

Discord is looking to hire more than a dozen people for ad-sales positions, according to people familiar with its plans.

The introduction of ads on Discord represents a pivot for the closely held company, whose chief executive, Jason Citron, has repeatedly said it would not depend on ads the way Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and others do.

Ads can intrude on the user experience and raise privacy concerns. Still, Uber Technologies, Lyft, Instacart, DoorDash, Netflix, Reddit have all embraced ads in recent years as have streaming services by Disney and Amazon.com.

Discord’s decision to join the crowd could alienate users, said Meghana Dhar, a former Snap and Instagram executive who is now a tech adviser and investor.

Discord “has famously promoted itself as committed to being ad-free, so this step-change could impact user trust and potentially have them looking for alternative platforms,” she said.

Discord said users will be able to turn off the ads in their settings.

Discord’s move speaks to a common challenge for consumer-tech companies. They must work to balance the interests of users with the need to generate revenue and, eventually, a profit.

Launched in 2015, Discord was designed to make it easy for videogame enthusiasts to chat while playing games online together. It expanded its appeal amid the 2020 pandemic lockdowns to a broader range of users including retail stock investors, students seeking help with homework and friends who want to watch movies together. In March, Discord said it had more than 200 million monthly active users.

The company has been trying to turn its popularity into a big payday for years. In 2021, Discord was in talks to sell itself to Microsoft for at least $10 billion. Later that year, it raised $500 million at a $15 billion valuation.

Since then, many on Wall Street have been expecting an initial public offering from the San Francisco startup. Citron told Bloomberg recently that the company would probably go public at some point.

The company has long relied on its Nitro subscription service, which offers the ability to upload large files and other perks, to boost revenue since its introduction in 2016. Prices range from $2.99 to $9.99 a month.

Discord’s revenue has reached $600 million on an annualized basis, quadruple from what it made in 2020, according to a person familiar with the matter. In January, the company laid off 17% of its workforce.

Discord in March announced plans to launch the new ads, which it calls Sponsored Quests, and they will become part of the platform beginning in the coming week. The ads will be targeted to users based on their gameplay, age and geographic location data, and they will appear in the bottom left corner of users’ screens, said Peter Sellis, Discord’s senior vice president of product, in an interview.

To earn rewards, users must stream themselves, completing an in-game task from the advertiser while at least one friend is watching. Users who watch their friends can then set off on quests of their own.

“We’ll get you in front of players,” reads a slide in a presentation Discord is using to show Sponsored Quests to game developers. “And those players will get you into their friend groups.”

Some users who were given descriptions of the ads said they seem minimally intrusive and the need for them is understandable given the platform is mostly free. Others worried the ads would make people pressure their friends to watch them.

“I don’t want my friendships to be monetized or productized in any way,” said Zack Mohsen, 32, a longtime Discord user and computer hardware engineer in the Seattle area. “I think this risks pushing people away from it, myself included.”