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The attacks were conducted in coordination with the U.S. and Israel and went on for weeks

The United Arab Emirates carried out dozens of airstrikes against Iran beginning in the early days of the war and continuing through the day after the April cease-fire was announced, people familiar with the matter said, a deeper involvement than was previously known in the air campaign led by the U.S. and Israel.

The extent of the strikes is further evidence of the country’s growing willingness to protect what it sees as its strategic interests, setting it apart from some of its neighbors in the Gulf region, which have taken a far more cautious approach to the threat from Iran.

The attacks were conducted in coordination with the U.S. and Israel, both of which provided intelligence, the people said. They included targets on Qeshm and Abu Musa islands in the Strait of Hormuz; Bandar Abbas; the oil refinery on Lavan island in the Persian Gulf; and the Asaluyeh petrochemical complex, some of the people said.

Some of those strikes targeted Iranian energy facilities in response to Tehran’s attacks on U.A.E. oil and gas infrastructure, some of the people said. The Asaluyeh strike, carried out with Israel, garnered significant international backlash and led the U.S. to ask Israel to stop striking energy facilities.

Gulf countries said ahead of the war they wouldn’t let their airspace or bases be used for attacks. But some shifted course after the war began and Iran responded by launching missile and drone attacks against Gulf population centers, energy infrastructure and airports in an effort to raise the economic and political costs of the conflict.

The U.A.E. suffered the brunt of those attacks, as Iran targeted it with more than 2,800 missiles and drones, far more than it fired at any other country including Israel.

The scale of the U.A.E.’s hawkish response exacerbated divisions within the Gulf. In early April, Saudi Arabia complained to the U.S. that U.A.E. attacks were raising the risk that regional energy facilities could come under fire from Iran, something that could spike oil prices and rock global markets, some of the people said. The Saudis wanted the U.S. to pressure the U.A.E. to stop the retaliatory attacks and join diplomatic efforts by regional countries, they said.

“The U.A.E. holds Iran fully responsible for these terrorist attacks and their repercussions,” the Gulf state’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. Saudi Arabia and the Israeli prime minister’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment. The White House declined to comment.

Saudi Arabia, which has faced fewer and less damaging strikes from Iran, has publicly condemned the attacks on the Gulf, but has taken a less confrontational approach and has worked to resolve the conflict through diplomacy.

U.A.E. President Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed grew frustrated with Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman earlier in the war after he refused to participate in coordinated military actions against Iran, Gulf officials have said.

Those frustrations worsened a growing divide between the two Gulf powers, which were already vying for influence over the Red Sea on opposite sides of conflicts in Sudan and Yemen. The U.A.E. pulled out of OPEC in April, leaving the Saudi-led group and pledging to double down on security ties with the U.S. and Israel.

In addition to the strikes, the U.A.E. backed drafts of a resolution at the United Nations that authorized the use of force if necessary to break Iran’s chokehold on the strategic Strait of Hormuz waterway.

The U.A.E. also acted against Iran’s financial interests, closing schools and clubs in Dubai that were linked to Tehran and denying visas and transit rights to Iranian citizens. The moves crimped the economic lifeline the Emirates have long provided to Iran amid heavy sanctions by the West.

Iran has responded by repeatedly accusing the U.A.E. of joining the U.S. and Israeli campaign.

The Emirates has long had a high appetite for foreign policy risk and a willingness to use military power to advance its interests in the region. In recent years it has sent weapons to militias in Sudan and Libya and mercenaries to Yemen in a series of operations designed to outflank regional rivals.

It isn’t clear yet whether the country has the capacity to deter a much bigger, closer enemy like Iran. Its attacks were largely symbolic compared with the more than 20,000 strikes carried out by the U.S. and Israel.

The U.A.E.’s aggressive stance risks making it a bigger target in what could be an extended period of contentious relations with Iran. Earlier in May, Iran attacked an important U.A.E. oil port in the emirate of Fujairah after the U.S. Navy launched an operation to break Iran’s grip on the Strait of Hormuz. More recently, a drone fired from Iraq, home to powerful pro-Iran militias that have been active in the war, hit near U.A.E.’s nuclear power plant.

The U.A.E. has recently adopted a more accommodating posture, pushing for diplomatic solutions to a conflict that has put its vast energy facilities at risk, some of the people said. The Emirati president was among regional leaders who encouraged President Trump to make a peace deal with Iran on a call earlier in May.

The war has deepened the alliance between the U.A.E. and Israel. Israeli officials were encouraged by the U.A.E.’s behavior during the war and see the relationship between the two countries as a long-term strategic partnership.

Israel sent Iron Dome batteries and Israeli troops to defend the U.A.E. during the war, with many dozens of troops still stationed in a military complex in the Gulf nation, one of the people familiar with the matter said. A stream of top Israeli officials—including Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the head of the Mossad spy agency, the head of the Shin Bet, and the Israeli chief of staff—secretly visited the U.A.E. during the war to coordinate on Iran.

The IPO of Elon Musk’s company is a big risk for the millions of investors who have put savings into passive investing

“Enshittification” is a term coined by tech critic Cory Doctorow in 2023. It describes the process whereby many tech offerings start as fun and life-enhancing, then become useful and then unavoidable, often indispensable. But over time, the offerings degrade in quality as the extractive ambitions of billionaires trump the interests of the ordinary people they were supposedly designed to serve, leading to miserable outcomes.

If we are not careful, this process will take root in finance too, and just like one area of consumer-facing tech, it all involves Elon Musk.

The mercurial Musk is, of course, the man who seemingly bought Twitter pretty much by accident and changed its name to X. Since then, the once fun and life-enhancing social media network has become an enshittified open sewer on the internet, infested with trolls, bigots, tinfoil-hatted conspiracists and AI slopaganda. 

But the mercurial Musk is also the man behind carmaker Tesla and AI/rockets/satellites mishmash SpaceX, the latter of which has filed documents with regulators sketching out its intention to list on public stock markets and “extend the light of consciousness to the stars”. Its total addressable market, it says, is $28.5tn — an amount equivalent to more than a fifth of global GDP. 

The filing, peppered with pictures of rockets and artist visualisations of human life on Mars, correctly explains that up to now, humans have been extremely reliant on Earth. We must look beyond this “single celestial body”, the document states, as “we do not want humans to have the same fate as dinosaurs”.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Maybe there really is a highly lucrative business in a fusion of seemingly sensible communications networks, iffy AI, and human colonies on Mars, and maybe that represents a wealth-enhancing opportunity for investors around the galaxy. Some serious professional investors tell me they buy that line and intend to buy the stock when it lists — a punt on this moonshot working out, just as Tesla shares have gained about 2,800 per cent over the past decade or so.

Musk himself believes SpaceX is worth a gravity-defying $1.75tn. That would make this the seventh-biggest company in the US despite revenues that would rank it at about 200th in the States, roughly on a par, as our Lex column pointed out, with General Mills, maker of the Lucky Charms breakfast cereal.

But whether you believe in Musk’s business and valuation or not is irrelevant, because if you have a pension or savings or investments anywhere, you are very likely to start owning a tiny slice of it very soon.

That is because SpaceX stocks look set to be on a fast track to inclusion in big indices — the basis for passive investment, a phenomenon that started life 50-odd years ago as life-enhancing, then became useful, then indispensable, then unavoidable.

Picking individual stocks to buy is famously hard to do well, and advisers have spent decades telling investors that by far the better way to play the markets is to buy a low-cost, diversified index tracker and sleep easily. This transformational force prised open financial markets to the masses and provided a deep stream of investor money for companies lucky enough to be included.

In the past, it would have been tricky for a company such as SpaceX to get a coveted spot in an index, and drink from this stream, quickly. No company generally gets on to an index at speed — they are typically left to season on public markets for a while first. In addition, SpaceX is elaborately lossmaking. It has a corporate governance structure that would make most investment committees wince. (This is the Musk Show, essentially.) Only a tiny portion of it is going to float — up to $75bn, or some 4 per cent.

Some or all of this is off-putting to index providers, as a rule. But tech-friendly Nasdaq has already cleared a path for companies like this to join its index ranks, fast, and with representation in the benchmarks equivalent to three times the tiny floated portion. FTSE Russell this week also announced a fast track for new listings with small floats for some of its offerings. Neither has altered the rules specifically for SpaceX, but it does stand to benefit enormously, and timing is everything. Other index providers are likely to follow suit.

Companies come and go out of indices all the time and investors generally do not and should not care. And if Musk’s company really is worth $1.75tn then, sure, indices would be weirdly distorted if they had a SpaceX-sized black hole in them. But if SpaceX stumbles after it lifts off and hooks straight into the veins of passive flows, there are consequences for all investors.

Crypto has not succeeded in poisoning the core of investment (yet) as it still largely sits on its periphery. You can choose to participate or not. This fast-track access to the most mom-and-pop-and-apple-pie method of savings, by contrast, is potentially more of a direct strike. It sets a template that warrants careful attention if we are to cling on to any notion that markets reflect anything vaguely resembling real life.

Three Swiss lawyers placed under formal investigation over disappearance of Nicolas Puech’s shares in the luxury group

French prosecutors have placed three more suspects under formal investigation as part of their widening probe into the disappearance of billions of euros worth of Hermès shares suspected of being linked to LVMH boss Bernard Arnault’s failed takeover of the company.

The case, which originated from complaints filed by Hermès more than a decade ago and one of the longest-running mysteries in French corporate lore, concerns the whereabouts of Hermès heir Nicolas Puech’s shares in the luxury group, and whether advisers around him helped to divert the stock to the benefit of LVMH as Arnault was covertly building a stake in the company.

The Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed on Friday that French prosecutors had in recent months placed three Swiss lawyers under formal investigation on suspicion that they participated in defrauding Puech of his shares “to the benefit of LVMH”. 

A fourth person, a wealth adviser to Puech suspected of orchestrating the diversion of about 6mn Hermes shares now worth about €14bn, died last year. 

LVMH said on Friday that it was “completely uninvolved in the aforementioned actions and still does not know what became of Nicolas Puech’s shares”. 

Arnault’s stake in Hermès, which was revealed in 2010 and peaked at about 23 per cent, has since been sold following a prolonged battle between two French families that dominate the luxury industry. LVMH’s takeover attempt was rebuffed by Hermès, and the company was fined by the market regulator in 2013 for failing to properly disclose its stake-building process. 

Now French prosecutors are pursuing probes into Swiss lawyers Alexandre Montavon, François Besse and Vanja Megevand on preliminary charges of allegedly perpetrating an organised fraud against Puech. Montavon and Besse are also being investigated for allegations of aggravated breach of trust and receiving stolen goods.

Montavon and Besse are also being investigated for aggravated breach of trust and receiving stolen goods.

A formal investigation in the French system does not imply guilt and no indictments have yet been issued.

All the suspects deny the allegations against them, the prosecutor’s office said, and the investigation is ongoing. Besse declined to comment. Montavon and Megevand did not reply to a request to comment. 

The fourth person, Puech adviser Eric Freymond, was placed under judicial supervision on bail in 2025 on suspicion of breach of trust for abusing the mandates Puech had granted him over the heir’s financial affairs, and forgery of documents. Freymond died a few weeks later after being hit by a train in an incident that has been widely reported as suicide. 

He had previously been arrested in 2018 as he attempted to board a plane to Japan before being brought to testify to magistrates investigating the case. 

Puech, an 83-year-old recluse living in Switzerland, claimed in a rare interview with French magazine L’Express last year that he had lost his fortune due to the manipulations of Freymond and his associates. Puech separately filed a civil suit against Arnault and LVMH in 2025 seeking compensation for the missing shares. 

LVMH condemned what it said at the time were “unfounded allegations seeking to reinterpret the conditions of LVMH’s entry into Hermès International’s capital”, adding it “reserves the right to take any action necessary to assert its rights”.

Puech is a fifth-generation heir to the Hermès family fortune that built a 19th-century Parisian saddlemaker into one of the world’s most valuable luxury companies.

Shoppers spend months or years on waiting lists for the opportunity to buy one of Hermès’s coveted Birkin and Kelly bags, which retail for €10,000 and above. The company, which the family still controls and runs, has a market value of €172bn.

Microsoft next week will unveil a suite of new homegrown AI models at its annual Build conference for app developers in San Francisco. The question is whether it can win over these people.

The company plans to unveil a coding model to boost the competitiveness of Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot, a coding assistant whose early lead in the AI coding market was eroded by Cursor and Claude Code, according to someone with direct knowledge of the plans.

Microsoft also is planning to announce new models that come in various sizes and specialize in tasks like transcription, thinking (i.e. reasoning), speech and images, the person said. The family of models will build on the earlier homegrown models that Microsoft previewed earlier this year. (Speech and transcription are becoming a big deal among developers, as Stephanie described in vivid detail in Wednesday’s edition.)

A Microsoft spokesperson declined to comment. Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman, in his excitement, previewed one of the forthcoming image models focused on image generation on Tuesday.

It’s an important test for Microsoft’s in-house AI capabilities. Models launched by the team under Suleyman haven’t topped AI leaderboards since he joined the company two years ago; Suleyman has said he was restricted in training cutting-edge models by Microsoft’s deal with OpenAI, which prevented Microsoft from pursuing human-level AI before April, when the companies renegotiated the matter.

So far, Microsoft has primarily relied on models from OpenAI (which it gets for free through 2032) and Anthropic (which it pays for) to power its GitHub Copilot as well as its 365 Copilot software, which automates tasks within Office apps.

When Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technology in six years or so, it wants to have legit AI of its own so it isn’t beholden to pricey suppliers.

Microsoft will market its new models as cheaper than the slightly more capable ones from OpenAI and Anthropic, the person said. That mirrors how Microsoft has positioned some of its earlier homegrown models, and is similar to Google’s strategy. Of course, we won’t be able to take Microsoft’s word about the new AI capabilities until developers confirm them.

Microsoft has said it is using some homegrown models to power AI features in Copilot software for Office apps, driving down the cost of running the features. The new models are expected to also help in that regard, said the person with knowledge of the launch.

The company also wants developers to buy the new models through its Azure cloud the same way they buy access to OpenAI and Anthropic models.

Relying on models from Anthropic has prompted Microsoft to raise the prices of some products, such as GitHub Copilot, and cap how much developers can use Anthropic models through that product. If Microsoft’s in-house coding model can serve as a cheaper alternative to Claude, it could help Microsoft win back market share among cost-conscious developer customers.

Latest $65 billion fundraising round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital

AI startup Anthropic closed a funding round at a $965 billion valuation, rocketing past ChatGPT-maker OpenAI as the companies race ahead on expected public listings this year.

The company has emerged as the front-runner in the AI race and is on track next month to hit $50 billion in “annualized revenue”—a metric startups use that employs short-term sales to forecast a yearly figure. That figure grew 80-fold in the first quarter.

Anthropic, founded in 2021 by Dario Amodei and others who decamped from OpenAI, raised $65 billion from investors including Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Sequoia Capital and others, about half OpenAI’s tally that closed earlier this year.

The $965 billion valuation more than doubles Anthropic’s previous value.

Known for its Claude models, which went viral late last year when paired with tools such as Claude Code, Anthropic has seen outsize revenue growth as businesses began enabling employees to use its systems.