TheChek News Flow

Elon Musk’s blindsiding of Ukraine spurs efforts by Europe and Canada to roll out satellites under their own control

LONDON—Elon Musk’s decision to abruptly impose limits on Ukraine’s use of his Starlink communications network—which is critical to the country’s efforts to fight off Russia’s invasion—is prompting U.S. allies to intensify efforts to come up with their own alternatives.

Europeans are expressing concerns about relying on a system with a built-in kill switch that gives Musk the power to deactivate a vital network without consultation.

“The more you play politics with your products, the more you damage your brand,” Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski said to Musk in a post on X after Ukraine reported having problems with Starlink, which is a SpaceX system. Warsaw helps pay for Ukraine’s usage of the system.

Even politicians from President Trump’s party are sounding alarms. Sen. Kevin Cramer, a North Dakota Republican, said Friday that the U.S. shouldn’t be “so dependent on one system, one person, one company.”

The problem for Starlink customers is that there isn’t likely to be a competitive alternative in the near term. The only European company able to operate satellites in low-Earth-orbit where SpaceX dominates is OneWeb, a subsidiary of the French group Eutelsat. OneWeb currently operates roughly 650 satellites and plans to grow its fleet to about 1,300 by 2030, following a 1 billion-euro—equivalent to $1.1 billion—contract signed last month with Airbus.

Starlink already has more than 11,000 satellites in orbit.

OneWeb’s older technology is also less suited to Ukraine’s front line because of bulky, heavy and power-hungry terminals. Switching from Starlink or its military version Starshield to OneWeb would require replacing thousands of terminals because SpaceX uses proprietary technology.

In a sign of urgency, Ukraine and Finland on Thursday announced that as part of a €300 million aid package, Kyiv will join a planned satellite-communications network run by Finnish satellite operator Iceye and networking company Nokia. The first satellites, however, are slated for launch only in 2028.

Canadian satellite-communications company Telesat has also pitched a low-Earth-orbit network, Lightspeed, as offering greater sovereignty. It aims to launch the first of 288 planned satellites in December and become operational by early 2028.

The European Union has contracted with Eutelsat and two other companies to build out a sovereign satellite network of 348 satellites known as IRIS², at a cost of about $17.5 billion. The first satellites are slated to launch in 2029.

In Europe, Starlink mostly serves broadband for homes, businesses and airline passengers, as well as limited but growing military use.

What Ukraine’s military needs most is technology that is difficult to hack or jam and that provides vast amounts of bandwidth, said Tom Withington, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense think tank.

“There won’t be one technology that replaces Starlink,” he said. “They need an amalgamation of different technologies. It will need to be built up over time.” He predicted that “Ukraine’s ability to do that will surprise people.”

European and Canadian funding remains small compared with SpaceX’s roughly $2 trillion market valuation. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has committed some $40 billion to space-related defense by 2030. French President Emmanuel Macron last year raised France’s space defense budget to roughly $11 billion by 2030, a 70% boost.

The German budget includes funding for orbital surveillance, a satellite operations center and a national constellation of more than 100 satellites in orbit. German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has called satellite networks “an Achilles heel of modern societies.”

Germany is also home to the only private company that has sent a rocket into orbit from continental Europe. Aerospace company Isar last month launched a Spectrum rocket carrying five small satellites. SpaceX’s Falcon rocket—on which OneWeb, Telesat and others rely for launches—is more than twice Spectrum’s size.

Isar launched from the only site in continental Europe outside Russia with the proven ability to send satellites into orbit: Andøya Space in Norway. Sweden also hosts an orbital launch site in Esrange, about 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, but the first such launch is planned for 2028.

Given the lack of European launch sites, OneWeb has relied on sites in Russia, Kazakhstan and, after the invasion of Ukraine, Europe’s main launch facility in French Guiana, on the northern coast of South America. It has also used an Indian launch site and SpaceX rockets in Cape Canaveral and California.

“From a European perspective, we need to secure an independent launch capacity,” said Ketil Olsen, chief executive officer and president of Andøya Space. “We have built an invisible infrastructure through critical services in space. The last few days have exposed how vulnerable we are,” he said. “If you don’t have your own capacity, you can’t control the data.”

Andøya Space is 90% government owned, and cannot currently launch satellites of the size required by IRIS², the EU network. Andøya’s single launchpad is reserved for Isar for up to 20 years, and plans to conduct some 30 launches in the next few years, but Olsen said the company plans to build more pads.

Sweden is also among the European nations moving the fastest in space. In 2024, Stockholm contracted with American aerospace company Planet Labs and Finland’s Iceye to send a constellation of roughly 10 military intelligence satellites into orbit, the first of which launched from California in May this year, ahead of schedule.

For now, Sweden relies on the U.S. for launches, which makes it beholden to a busy schedule dominated by commercial actors.

“The demand is higher than the capability. So if you and I wanted to launch something into space, we would have to stand in last in the queue,” said Rear Adm. Anders Sundeman, the chief of space for the Swedish armed forces.

Sweden’s space program is self-funded, independently of the EU’s programs, and relying on multiple partners, even if they are American, helps cushion against the whims of “one single actor,” Sundeman said. “It’s an American actor that makes the satellite, but we own it and control it,” he said.

European efforts are hobbled by bureaucracy, which rarely shows the urgency of commercial actors.

“The main obstacle is leadership,” said Serge Plattard, associate fellow at the Foundation for Strategic Research, a French think tank.

The EU’s satellite navigation system Galileo, created as an alternative to the American GPS and the Russian Glonass systems, was delayed nearly a decade when it entered into service in 2016. Because member states have yet to fully agree on funding and subcontractors, IRIS² is also already poised for delays, Plattard said.

“It is really not safe at all to work the way we’re working today in Europe. We are way too slow, and we are unable to anticipate what’s happening now in space,” he said.

Laurent Jaffart, director of resilience, navigation and connectivity at the European Space Agency, said Europe’s efforts to achieve sovereignty in space are driven by a long-term vision rather than individual incidents like the slowdown in Ukraine.

“Recent events nevertheless underline, if not reconfirm, the importance of ensuring that Europe has resilient and sovereign capabilities for essential services,” he said.

JetBlue Creditors Hire Advisers as Airline’s Shares, Bonds Sink

Senior creditors to the airline are working with financial adviser PJT Partners and law firm Akin

A group of senior creditors to JetBlue Airways is working with financial adviser PJT Partners and law firm Akin as the airline grapples with cash burn and elevated oil prices, according to people familiar with the matter.

JetBlue’s bonds traded down sharply this week following a recent bondholder call. Its $2 billion notes due 2031 fell to 42 cents on Thursday before bouncing back slightly in the mid-40s on Friday, according to market participants and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, or Finra. They traded near 80 cents on the dollar earlier this month, Finra data shows.

Creditors typically engage with financial and legal advisers when they perceive a risk that the company they lent to might not be able to fully repay them on schedule. Debt investors in the airline industry have been on guard since Spirit Airlines, a competitor to JetBlue, shut down operations earlier this year following repeat bankruptcy filings.

A representative for JetBlue said the company is focused on strengthening revenue and building a more profitable business. The company plans to update its progress and financial outlook during its third-quarter earnings call on Tuesday.

JetBlue Airways’ stock has lost about 58% in value since the start of August.

JetBlue had amassed roughly $8.5 billion in debt and finance lease obligations as of June, according to the company. A significant portion of that debt is backed by its aircraft fleet and TrueBlue customer loyalty program.

While the airline has additional assets it could use to raise more capital, some market participants worry that taking on additional leverage could leave the carrier with limited flexibility if it fails to turn around the business. Roughly two-thirds of JetBlue’s property, equipment and intangible assets are pledged as collateral, according to quarterly filings.

JetBlue last disclosed a significant financing in April, when it secured around $500 million in aircraft-backed capital fully drawn as of June 30.

The company also risks pressure from credit-card processors which can require airlines to set aside collateral if financial conditions worsen, the people said. JetBlue said it faced no such collateral requirements at the end of June.

France is looking ungovernable. And it’s going to get worse

As disorder engulfs Paris and Marine Le Pen waits in the wings, the country is running out of money, patience and answers

How dolce is Orient Express’s new Grand Tour?

The luxury travel group has combined its Italian hotels, train and sailing yacht into one Byronic modern adventure

The Orient Express Grand Italian Tour begins as you step off a plane at Marco Polo Airport in Venice and a driver stands holding a sign with the Orient Express logo. There are no consulting detectives or plucky young things with an eye for a mystery in sight; in these cosy crime-saturated times that might be a relief. 

The Orient Express La Dolce Vita train is, despite its storied prefix, a start-up brand. Owned by the French hospitality group Accor, it competes with the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express – now owned by Belmond – which runs the original Agatha Christie trains. La Dolce Vita pledges to take you to something nearer the spirit of its original customers; not so much their quest to murder, more an ambition to travel across Europe in the greatest comfort possible.

So it is a select number of journalists who swoop down the Grand Canal in water taxis, disembarking at Orient Express Venezia, a palazzo of such pedigree it has previously only been owned by aristocracy. An air of hush is very lightly undermined by the influencers, the Byron and Shelley of their era: more costume changes but equally gorgeous and glamorous, and a clue that the target audience here might not be English poets. 

The OE Venezia has been open since spring following an eight-year renovation. Built in 1436, and given to the Duke of Urbino, it was occupied by the Giovanelli family until 20 years ago, and the grandeur of its public spaces endures. Its neo-gothic staircase, beamed ceilings and 19th-century frescoes in the suites will sate even the $20k-a-night appetite; ceiling ancient, plumbing brand-new. 

A day later we are taxied to Santa Lucia station to meet La Dolce Vita, the Orient Express train. The staff line up along the platform to greet you; as we board it becomes clear that we can embrace the infantilisation of great luxury. This new train has been purpose-designed in roaring 1960s Italian style, and a suite is an actual suite: a spacious double bed, a bathroom that is truly a bathroom. You could, in fact, spend several days just on this train, which some guests do. 

We leave Venice toasting our good fortune, wondering how on earth it can take 24 hours to get to Rome when Trenitalia can do it in less than four. Seated with strangers, making a splendid progress through scenic Tuscany, we tell travel stories over a splendid tasting menu. Four wines and five courses take travellers to the Bar Car, where live music continues past midnight (your correspondent, not having the constitution of Lord Byron, does not). 

Even the furnishing-illiterate in our party can sense that we are within the same family as the hotel we have just left. We move as a small, elegant pack to a historic wooden steam train to take us to Siena for a day out. (The reality proves to be an excellent photo opportunity for seven minutes, followed by a slightly uncomfortable hour on a slow, rattling historic train with hard benches for middle-aged people who are immensely relieved to learn we will be returning in people carriers with suspension and air conditioning. So much for verisimilitude.)

In Siena, the aspirational distinction between an OE excursion and your average day trip becomes clear. Our group includes journalists, film-makers and senior geopoliticians, but our guide is more than up to demystifying the 17 distinct contrade and their traditional rituals of sabotage and corruption. We walk the walled city, pass a delightful informed hour in the cathedral and are then whisked to the palace of the town’s senior noble family to drink franciacorta with the patrician and his uniformed man. They proudly display their view of the Palio, the town’s bareback horse race (run twice a year due to its tourism-boosting popularity). Then a multi-hour lunch. 

The travellers are getting on very well. I’m always suspicious of cruises and tour groups for precisely this reason: what if people want to make friends with me? But somehow this is genuinely convivial. Perhaps it is the dolce rubbing off. 

A band greets us as we pull into Ostiense Station, and are housed in an extremely elegant proprietary lounge. It takes a while, though, to transfer 50 people into their people carriers to Orient Express La Minerva, and even – perhaps especially? – at the highest end of luxury, any pecking order is policed and resented. When we arrive the hotel staff are enormously apologetic at even a moment’s inconvenience in our sweet, sweet life. I am reminded of something an experienced hand said to me earlier in the trip: “The very rich are nicer.”

It is merely a pause in Rome at La Minerva, another immaculate renovation of an original Grand Italian Tour address with a feature rooftop restaurant boasting views of the Pantheon. One stationary sleep and luxury bath later, we are whisked to the port just outside the city, where the OE Corinthian is docked – at the time of writing the world’s largest sailing yacht.

Boarding the Corinthian feels like ascending to a rarefied world of bespoke everything. The OE CEO Amélie Thiriet explains the idea is to capture the spirit and the essence of the Grand Italian Tour – to be somewhere you could reach on a big cruise, but to travel in a style tailored to you. 

It is, at first, almost eerily restrained. Every carpet is deep pile. The motion of the sea is undetectable. So padded and tasteful and spacious is this craft, it is possible to open a door and accidentally find a lap pool open to the sky. Or a tasting-menu restaurant run by a chef with 18 Michelin stars between their restaurants. Or a speakeasy, or a recording studio. There could be more signage, but then you would lose the feeling that it is, in fact, your yacht. It is a perpetual surprise to find anyone else aboard, though with just 54 suites, you are far more likely to see staff than guests.

The yacht is a technological marvel. The sails are made of carbon fibre and magic. Even the captain, Rémi Genevaz, shrugs and declares himself not an engineer when asked to explain why they are so special, but he is very clear it is a real sailing yacht: he can navigate some Caribbean routes for 80-90 per cent of the journey without using fuel thanks to trade winds, and even on the Med saves 20 per cent.

My experience is that they are hypnotically aesthetically pleasing. Best enjoyed after diving from the back of the ship – while it is at anchor, ideally. Indeed, if you take the tender to Capri, our excursion stop, you might conclude Capri itself is optimally viewed from just far enough out to sea to be unable to make out the crocodile line of tourists winding their way up and down its boutique-lined alleys. 

If at least half of the point of owning a yacht is bragging rights – and it must be – you can be perfectly smug about mounting the Corinthian in full view of Capri’s gawpers. Its deep blue livery and extraordinary sails are eye-catchers. The most extravagant suites run half the length of the ship, include multiple bedrooms within and stunning private dining rooms. One contains an exact replica of a carriage from the original Orient Express train, fully restored with gleaming marquetry, bunk beds and open-up vanity sink; a little Easter egg buried deep in a superyacht.

This year’s itineraries start at seven days, but can be daisy-chained together to build a 12-day trip. Shipmates I meet at a disembarkation dinner in Porto Cervo, Sardinia – including this time a senior US political figure, the designer of a tech product you definitely own and some international property investors – are doing just that. Later this year the transatlantic cruise will open up 11 days of straight ocean sailing to enjoy the facilities.

Certainly in two days the volume of activities – gym classes, tasting menus, games, cinema, off-board excursions – might feel overwhelming. Equally as appealing is enjoying the true luxury at the heart of all this munificence: the space and peace of a private terrace for staring at the sea. Waking up and breakfasting on the Med, cosseted in a bathrobe while a butler serves the eggs, is quite the moment. I suspect the Grand Italian Tour itinerary might be sweeter taken at a slower pace. But even at whistle-stop, the shock and awe will endure.

Pegasus spyware founder urges governments to trust his tech and ditch US AI

Former NSO Group boss Shalev Hulio seeks to reinvent himself as a champion of sovereign AI and national security

Countries should host their own AI models rather than entrust sensitive national data to US technology companies, according to the man once responsible for the Pegasus tool used to hack the phones of politicians, reporters and rights activists.

“Every government should have their own model,” Shalev Hulio told the FT. “They should not take the risk that somebody will wake up one day and shut their model because AI is a critical infrastructure,” he continued. “You want to control your own AI.”

The comments represent the latest pitch from the spyware salesman turned cyber security evangelist, whose new venture Dream promises to help governments safeguard their most valuable information and then harness it for the national good.

It is, perhaps, an unlikely proposition from a man who made his name in the 2010s as chief executive and co-founder of NSO Group, the infamous Israeli commercial spyware manufacturer.

Hulio has long faced fierce criticism over Pegasus, including from the then UN special rapporteur on free speech who urged him in an open letter in 2020 to take more robust action to prevent its use in some countries as a tool of surveillance and repression.

The 45-year-old expressed no regret about his previous life, seeing his years selling spyware to governments as an asset to Dream rather than a liability.

“Despite the public opinion, governments managed to prevent terror attacks and managed to save hundreds of thousands of lives along the years using NSO products,” he said. “I actually see [my past] as a huge advantage.”

Dream was established in 2022 following a chance encounter between Hulio and co-founder Sebastian Kurz, the youthful former Austrian chancellor, whose own political career had collapsed the previous year.

Initially conceived as a cyber security provider to governments, Dream was an early advocate of the need to use AI tools for cyber defence.

“American VCs thought we were cuckoo,” said Hulio of his first talks with potential investors in December 2022.

“I told them five years from now . . . the cyber attack is going to be completely autonomous and the only way to be ready is to build autonomous defenders,” he recalled. “They told me, ‘listen you’ve lost your mind’.”

Dream has since raised more than $400mn and was valued at $3bn in June. Investors include Bain Capital Ventures and Tau Capital, an Abu Dhabi-headquartered investment firm backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed al-Nahyan, the UAE’s powerful national security adviser.

The company’s first product, Sphere, is marketed as a national-scale cyber defence system that uses AI-powered tools to protect governments and critical infrastructure against attacks by hostile states. A second product, Hero, uses AI to autonomously find and patch software vulnerabilities.

In August, Dream’s researchers found evidence of what they described as the first ever “end-to-end autonomous” attack on a government target. “We predicted that it would take five years. It took three and a half,” said Hulio.

Having originally focused on how to protect government data from cyber attacks, Hulio and Kurz decided they could also help countries use their data better.

In June, the pair launched a third product, Atlas, an AI platform designed to allow governments to develop and operate customised AI models hosted on their own infrastructure without relying on external cloud providers.

Unlike the broad capabilities of popular large language models like Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Dream’s bespoke solution is trained on the government’s own data and tailored to specific tasks, like analysing classified intelligence or improving procurement. Hulio’s bet is that this tighter focus is cheaper to run and more closely aligned with what governments need.

“We are saying to entities within the government, you should have a very narrow but very smart model that can run very fast on one or two or three GPUs,” Hulio said, referring to the powerful chips used to run AI systems.

Hulio left NSO Group in 2022 after a decade at the helm. His departure followed a tumultuous few years after the FT revealed in 2019 how NSO had exploited a vulnerability in the WhatsApp messaging service to install Pegasus spyware on iPhone and Android phones.

Once valued at as much as $1.5bn, NSO was blacklisted by the US government in November 2021 and subsequently lost a landmark lawsuit brought by WhatsApp over the hacks.

Despite the controversy, Hulio says his NSO experience has left him with a unique kind of official access. “Governments really appreciate, I think, the relationship that we had before,” he said.

Headquartered in Tel Aviv, with offices in Vienna and Abu Dhabi, Dream has grown to about 350 employees in three years.

“Shalev has a fantastic black book,” said one early Dream investor, adding that Hulio’s “chutzpah” and Kurz’s government experience seemed to be “a good combination”.

Dream does not disclose which governments it works with but says it has sold its cyber security tools to more than a dozen countries, including eight in Europe, five in Asia and two in the Middle East. The sovereign AI product has been deployed in two countries so far, Hulio said.

“When you’re working with government you need a lot of trust and confidence,” Hulio added. “I think this is what we are bringing to the table before the technology . . . trust and confidence.”

Gadi Eisenkot, the Israeli ex-military chief challenging Netanyahu

The grizzled 66-year-old who heads the centrist Yashar party is in a knife-edge race to oust the premier

Five years ago, you would have got long odds on Gadi Eisenkot being a future Israeli prime minister. The former head of the country’s military was not in politics, his family was not keen on him entering, and he was not overburdened with the charisma that gets political consultants salivating.

But as Israelis prepare for an election many regard as the most important in the country’s history, those odds have shortened. Polls suggest a knife-edge race that could yet end in gridlock. And the grizzled 66-year-old is the person with the best chance of ousting Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu.

Sometimes dishevelled and not a natural public speaker, Eisenkot is a stark contrast to image-obsessed Netanyahu — and indeed to other opposition politicians like Yair Lapid and Naftali Bennett. But allies see this as part of his appeal. Eisenkot’s image as Netanyahu’s antithesis, a straight-talking man of substance over spin, is central to his campaign.

“He’s not that tall and doesn’t have good English and people say rude things about the way he looks,” said Hanoch Daube, who served as Eisenkot’s chief of staff when he was deputy head of the military. “But when you have a very tough decision to make, this is the guy you want next to you.”

Netanyahu is also keen to play up the differences. As with so many rivals, he has sought to cast Eisenkot, who heads the centrist Yashar party, as a dangerous leftist: someone who will undermine Israeli security and usher in a Palestinian state. Attack ads from Netanyahu’s Likud paint Eisenkot as a stooge to Israel’s Arab parties, which the prime minister has spent years delegitimising.

But Eisenkot is no dove. He backs Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank and pledges that, if elected, he would end Hamas’s rule in Gaza within 18 months. In the 2000s he formulated Israel’s notorious Dahiya doctrine, which called for using disproportionate military force against enemies, including targeting civilian infrastructure, an approach Israel has since used to devastate Gaza and southern Lebanon.

“He’s not a vegetarian,” says Daube. “He was a very tough officer and he knew how to use force.”

Unlike the man he is trying to replace, Eisenkot grew up far from the traditional centres of power in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. The son of Mizrahi Jews, he spent his childhood in Israel’s southernmost city of Eilat, a background analysts say allows him to connect with parts of the electorate that other opposition politicians struggle to reach.

“He has a wider net,” says Shira Efron, from the Rand Corporation think-tank. “He can talk to the Tel Avivians, but he can also talk to people from the periphery who are traditionally voters for the [Netanyahu] camp.”

In a country with a history of electing generals, Eisenkot’s military career is another selling point. After joining the elite Golani Brigade, he served as military secretary to Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon before reaching the top of the army when Netanyahu made him chief of staff in 2015.

“He was not perhaps a natural-born soldier, not the kind of killer from Navy Seals,” says Amos Harel, the military analyst for the newspaper Haaretz who has known Eisenkot for more than two decades. “But someone . . . who saw himself rising up the ranks for many years, and then gradually as he became [more senior] understood he could go further.”

After the mandatory cooling-off period for officers, Eisenkot entered politics ahead of Israel’s 2022 election, joining fellow former general Benny Gantz’s centre-right National Unity alliance. They ended up in opposition. But after Hamas’s October 7 attack in 2023, Netanyahu brought the two former generals into his emergency war cabinet.

Two months later, Eisenkot’s fifth child, Gal, was killed fighting in Gaza. Soon afterwards, two of his nephews died in combat. Many would have understood if he had withdrawn from politics. But people who know Eisenkot say Gal’s death only made him more committed. “It made his mission very personal,” says one longstanding friend. “He feels like he is fulfilling Gal’s unwritten will.”

Eisenkot left the war cabinet after falling out with Netanyahu over strategy, and set up Yashar last year. By this summer, the party was vying with Likud to be Israel’s most popular. He has pitched himself to voters as the man to restore Israel to normality and rehabilitate its international standing.

At home, he has pledged to reverse a controversial judicial overhaul pushed by Netanyahu’s allies and end a longstanding military service exemption for ultra-Orthodox Jews. In the West Bank, he wants to rein in spiralling settler violence.

Still, within Israel’s complex coalition system there remain formidable obstacles between Eisenkot and power. Polls suggest neither the Jewish opposition parties nor Netanyahu’s bloc will win a majority on Tuesday. Eisenkot could build a coalition with the support of Israel’s Arab parties. But other opposition leaders, including Bennett and Avigdor Lieberman, have ruled this out.

He will also have to outwit the man who has dominated Israeli politics for two decades. “Even if Netanyahu loses on Tuesday, he’s not going to disappear gently into the night,” says Harel. “He’ll use every trick in the book.”

Still, allies warn against writing Eisenkot off. “He won’t play dirty,” says Daube. “But you don’t become chief of staff in Israel without political skills.”

Davos in the Desert’s ‘old fox’ Richard Attias faces his latest test

Power broker behind kingdom’s flagship investment conference has weathered scandal and setbacks. Now he must contend with war and spending cuts

Richard Attias has spent decades bringing powerful people together at gatherings from the World Economic Forum to Saudi Arabia’s Future Investment Initiative, widely known as “Davos in the Desert”.

Now, even as war and spending cuts threaten the events empire he built from the kingdom, the 66-year-old appears unfazed.

“I am an old fox now, so I went through so many challenges in the past 40 years,” Attias said. “It’s part of the job. It’s sometimes disappointing but it’s not like the end of the world.” 

First the Middle East conflict upended plans for an initial public offering of his events business. Then, this week, the 10th edition of the Future Investment Initiative (FII) was postponed to next year after attacks on Saudi Arabia by Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi rebels.

But Moroccan-born Attias, who arrived in the Middle East almost two decades ago in the wake of a tabloid scandal in France, is plotting another reinvention. He told the FT he had launched a boutique consultancy, North Street Advisory, aimed at helping global leaders diversify their economies, attract foreign investment and boost digital inclusion.

Attias brushed off the idea that investors would be deterred by the latest Houthi attacks on Saudi Arabia, which have killed more than 20 people, hit energy infrastructure and paralysed Riyadh’s international airport.

“You have a long-term leadership, long-term stability, politically, which is the main parameter for investors,” he said. “I’m not concerned . . . We had many big shots who confirmed that they would be landing in Bahrain and coming by road to Riyadh if the airport was not reopened.” 

Attias styles himself as a discreet adviser to world leaders and a bridge-builder helping countries open up to business and investment.

Sunil John, a Dubai-based adviser at global marketing group Stagwell, described Attias as a “one-of-a-kind entrepreneur in the events and marketing communications industry” with a “bulging Rolodex of global leaders in both the political and business sectors that he can bring together”.

Other people who have worked with Attias, however, said he could be “difficult” and sometimes harboured “paranoia” about rivals. 

Attias himself insisted he liked competition — saying he was a fan of late Intel boss Andy Grove, whose motto was “only the paranoid survive”.

He is accustomed to setbacks and unwanted publicity. In 2004 his affair with Cécilia Sarkozy, the wife of Nicolas Sarkozy — then French interior minister — was splashed across gossip magazines. Cécilia later reconciled with her husband and became France’s first lady when Sarkozy became president in 2007, but left him to marry Attias in 2008.   

The scandal overshadowed Attias’s job of corralling the world’s most influential people to the WEF’s annual meeting at the Swiss mountain resort of Davos, according to former colleagues, and he eventually quit Publicis, the French advertising group that has long helped organise the gathering.

Attias had also moved in influential circles in New York. While working for Publicis he helped organise the Clinton Global Initiative conference, through which he came into contact with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein told British politician Peter Mandelson that Attias was “clever” and “full of himself” in an email exchange released by the US Department of Justice. 

After leaving Publicis, he found an opportunity in the Gulf. Just before the financial crisis, as Dubai was fashioning itself into the Middle East’s business and tourism hub, Attias was appointed to lead a new government-owned company, Dubai Event Management Corporation.

While Attias hailed the business’s contribution “to the diversification and repositioning of the city”, three people familiar with his time in Dubai said the venture had struggled, and that it had been quietly folded up after the financial crisis struck in 2008.  

Dubai nevertheless served as “a training ground for him before he went to Saudi Arabia”, according to one media executive in the region.

Saudi Arabia proved more rewarding. Having built up his own company, Richard Attias & Associates (RAA), he secured a powerful patron in Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, for whom he launched FII in 2017 as part of a drive to transform the oil-dependent kingdom into an investment and tourism hub.

The conference quickly became a magnet for Wall Street bankers, sovereign wealth fund executives, tech entrepreneurs and political leaders, cementing Attias’s role in the kingdom’s efforts to attract international investment.

But in 2018 Attias faced another crisis after the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi inside the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul sparked global outrage. Many executives and officials withdrew from the conference and Riyadh’s standing was damaged.

The following year, advertising group WPP, which was a 49 per cent shareholder in RAA, sold its holding back to Attias — although he insists he drove the transaction after Sir Martin Sorrell’s departure from WPP and that the timing was unrelated to fallout from Khashoggi’s killing. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund has since built up a 75 per cent stake.

Attias’s willingness to work with authoritarian leaders has stoked controversy. A conference he arranged in 2012 for Gabon’s then president Ali Bongo was criticised by activists and opposition groups for costing too much and burnishing the reputation of a dictator, while his work for Saudi Arabia has drawn similar fire.

“Richard loves that world . . . rich dictators,” said one former colleague.

“I think it’s comments coming from people who are extremely — and, sorry to not be humble — jealous,” Attias retorted.

“It’s so easy to say that you are working for dictators while these people are visionary leaders, and they are bringing their countries to success,” he argued. “I am here always to support countries’ growth, countries’ development, always to support inclusive growth.”

Until recently, Saudi Arabia’s calendar of international events — including the 2034 men’s football World Cup and Expo 2030 Riyadh — offered lucrative opportunities for event organisers. But spending cuts and stalled mega-projects are undermining such prospects. In one sign of the kingdom’s pullback, it has been replaced by Kazakhstan as the host of the 2029 Asian Winter Games. 

RAA’s close relationship with the Saudi state raises questions about whether it is over-reliant on a single client, but Attias denies he is dependent on the kingdom.

“We were always global,” he insisted. “We have offices in New York, in Paris, in Dubai, in Riyadh, in Africa. We’re just opening now in Asia ,” he said, adding that the company was temporarily reallocating some of its resources elsewhere while diversifying more broadly, particularly towards Asian markets. 

Despite the turmoil, Attias said he was still preparing RAA for a stock market listing. 

“It’s an important milestone,” he said. “It’s being listed and in a very good condition. It’s a statement. It’s a legacy.”

For now, the postponement of the 10th FII conference remains a disappointment.

“We had, in total humility, a fantastic programme ready,” Attias said. But “at the end of the day, you don’t celebrate an anniversary without your friends and family”.

The B-word is on everyone’s lips: Are we in a bubble? As there have been in recent months, there were all kinds of signs this past week that investors are becoming less enthusiastic about the generational investments into artificial-intelligence data centers. And while the AI bubble doesn’t look ready to pop yet, 2027 is shaping up as a make-or-break year for the sector.

CoreWeave, which invented the “neocloud” business model—speed running to becoming a hyperscaler—has become an AI battleground stock, especially this past week. The company is built on a cycle of debt, capex, and very rapid sales growth, with a foundation of a nearly $130 billion backlog. It’s a tightrope walk across a canyon. If it keeps moving forward, there’s a pot of gold on the other side, but if it stops for a second, it could all come crashing down.

Since the market close on Oct. 6, the PHLX Semiconductor index has been down seven days in a row, falling 12% all told. CoreWeave has seen its stock decline by 24% in that period. Its publicly held debt has sold off, trading at roughly 82 cents on the dollar for its 2032 senior notes. The yield to maturity is 14.4%, up from 9.6% at offering in June.

In another blow to sentiment, last week there was a kerfuffle over AI-model leader OpenAI’s revenue, which was either at a $70 billion annual run rate in September or $50 billion, depending on whether gross or net sales were used for the calculation. Then, this week, Anthropic released quarterly numbers at a private investor day that failed to quell the market’s concerns.

OpenAI had already decided to postpone its initial public offering while it works out the security issues that its new models are causing. It isn’t alone: Australian AI cloud provider Firmus decided to delay its IPO after investors balked at the proposed $30 billion valuation, up from $11 billion in August. Anthropic, however, despite facing security issues of its own, is charging ahead with a fall offering.

But it’s OpenAI’s long-term commitments of over a trillion dollars—including large cloud contracts with Oracle, Microsoft, CoreWeave, and Cerebras —that remain central to everyone’s worries. Many wonder if it can earn enough revenue to pay those bills, which only grow over the next five years. The bigger risk for OpenAI isn’t the AI investment boom rolling over, but rather cheaper competition eating into its gross profit.

And rising long-term interest rates are a developing issue for the cloud business, which is very dependent on debt.

Investor sentiment took a downturn in September. But back on the ground, it’s still full steam ahead. My No. 1 indicator is graphics processing unit rental prices, and according to data from Silicon Data and Ornn, they have been rising all year. CoreWeave has even rented out its Nvidia A100 GPUs, first released in 2020, through 2029. Even as the so-called hyperscalers add hundreds of billions of dollars worth of new capacity, demand growth continues to outpace supply.

This is being driven by several concurrent factors. In the first place, AI models took a big leap in capabilities this year, and they are finally ready for real business work, beginning with writing software code. The focus is around agents—software that can use AI models to accomplish a complex series of tasks from simple conversational commands. Agents use AI models at a pace that no human could possibly match, and it has led to a demand explosion.

In the U.S. Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, carried out in September and October, only 28% of companies polled said that they would be using AI in the next six months. But that is up from 21% at the end of last year, and leaves a lot more room for growth.

Cheap Chinese models are putting pressure on OpenAI and Anthropic, and both companies have instituted price cuts in the past two months. Lower prices typically lead to more demand. Meta Platforms’ new Wonder models put the company in the same category, and now there are three frontier AI labs instead of two, adding more pressure.

One reason the models are getting so much better this year is because the GPU clusters they are being built on are getting massive. Meta Wonder was trained at Meta’s sprawling Prometheus data center. OpenAI’s best model, Astra, was trained on 100,000 Nvidia GPUs at Oracle’s Abilene, Texas, data center. These clusters will have to get larger with each generation.

The biggest near-term danger to the AI boom isn’t demand; it’s capital and politics. Nvidia, Broadcom, Microsoft, Cisco, and others have worked with lenders like BlackRock and Apollo Global Management to create investment vehicles totaling hundreds of billions of dollars to fund AI infrastructure. But as the price of CoreWeave debt shows, some lenders are getting more selective, while others are looking for the exit.

There is also growing local political opposition to data centers, one of the few issues that can cross party lines in the U.S. Data centers have already been canceled, delayed, or downsized, and state and local regulation may follow.

The classic sign of a bubble is concentrated investment in a single asset class, in this case AI data centers. In the past year, domestic investment into data center buildings, computers, networking equipment, software, and research accounted for nearly all the growth in U.S. fixed investment. Just five companies are spending up to $750 billion on capital expenditures this year, with likely more coming in 2028.

For the investment boom to continue, that has to change next year. Meanwhile, investors should remember that the late stages of stock market bubbles can be the most profitable. In 1999, before the implosion of the dot-com bubble the following year, the Nasdaq Composite index was up 86%, after nearly tripling over the previous four years.

Until it’s your enemy, the bubble is your ally.

October has been a busy month for disruption drama. Walt Disney is trying to unseat IMAX with help from a cast of Old Hollywood avengers, including Universal and Paramount. And Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellite empire agreed to pay $8 billion for cellular spectrum licenses, sending telecom shares sliding.

Let’s assess prospects and progress for these and other, longer-running corporate insurgencies by issuing a disruption score card, using a scale from one to five Schumps. Those are named for Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian-born economist and Harvard dandy known for his knee-high riding boots and capes, theatrical lectures, and belief that creative destruction is a core engine of capitalism rather than a flaw. Grading will be arbitrary and opaque, but also Schumpterian, which is to say, performed while wearing my highest-rising footwear, 8-inch L.L. Bean duck boots.

Disney vs. IMAX

4 Schumps

I’m deducting a Schump only because no one has done much of anything yet, but on paper, this plan is gold. IMAX theaters fetch premium prices and can boost box office revenue, but there aren’t enough to go around. Lately, IMAX has used the shortage to favor films that were shot using its cameras, effectively double-dipping on fees. Disney is hot over its Avengers: Doomsday, a sure moneymaker, getting blocked from IMAX screens come Christmastime by Dune: Part 3. Dune was shot on IMAX, while Avengers was not.

Earlier this year, Disney introduced a new big-screen format called Infinity Vision, and this month, it announced that a host of big studios are on board. Big theater chains will like the pitch: Take their existing non-IMAX premium screens with names no one recognizes, like AMC Prime and Cinemark XD, and rebrand them as Infinity Vision, with better marketing. Hollywood pushes big films on this new standard, and both it and theaters keep higher cuts. As a test, Disney rereleased the last Avengers movie from 2019 on Infinity Vision, and it did a big enough number to nudge it ahead of Avatar as the top seller ever. Disney’s plan is cheap for theaters and studios, and just the threat of it could help keep IMAX in check on fees. IMAX stock is down 8% from its late-September peak.

Musk vs. Telecom

2.5 Schumps

We’re still waiting for the humanoid robot and robo-taxi takeovers, but one area where Elon Musk has outperformed expectations is in driving down satellite launch costs using reusable rockets. That has made SpaceX’s Starlink unit a world-beater in space-based communications. Lately, SpaceX has been snapping up wireless spectrum licenses, which looks to some investors like a telecom takeover—unlikely. Satellites are great for filling in telecom dead zones, but they’re no match for dense networks of cell towers and fiberoptic cables in urban and suburban markets.

By partnering with a telco, or operating as a limited one itself, Starlink can provide satellite voice and data service through regular phones, without the use of bulky antennas, while reducing connectivity problems in buildings or under heavy foliage. But rolling out a true Verizon or AT&T killer would cost perhaps $250 billion in spectrum, cell towers, fiberoptics, and other infrastructure, which is more than the stock market value of either company. A takeover, meanwhile, would be a regulatory long shot. And big telcos are unlikely to grant Starlink permission to piggyback off their networks for mobile service that might rival or beat their own. That leaves Starlink keeping costs down and competing for flights, shipping, and the 15% to 20% of earth’s land which lacks cell towers, while licensing dead-spot coverage to telcos. It’s an excellent plan, but not a telco killer, and not trying to be.

Capital One vs. Visa and Mastercard

3.5 Schumps

When Capital One bought Discover last year, it picked up more than additional customer accounts. Discover, like American Express, has its own payment network, so it bypasses the near-duopoly of Visa and Mastercard and saves on fees. That means Capital One can now handle a rising volume of payments in-house. “On debit, it was the big bang—everything transferred,” says Truist analyst Brian Foran. “On credit, it’s like every year a little bit more moves to the Discover network, and a little bit moves away from Mastercard.” Capital One won’t move its premier travel cards to Discover’s network soon, because those benefit from the overseas reach of the big two. And it won’t try to lure the likes of Bank of America and Citigroup to its payment network. But it has already saved $1 billion a year in fees, estimates Foran. He calls the stock a top pick and predicts 50% upside.

Big Retail vs. Primary Healthcare

1.5 Schumps

Healthcare remains a disrupter graveyard. Remember Haven, the healthcare start-up of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JPMorgan Chase, or Amazon Care, a telehealth venture? They were flops. Amazon resorted to buying a primary-care outfit called One Medical, and offering discounted memberships as a perk for Prime members. Walmart once had more than 50 stand-alone Walmart Health centers, with cash pricing on sick visits, tooth extractions, therapy, X-rays, and more. All closed due to staffing shortages and low margins. Walmart has retreated to doing eyeglasses and drugs in stores.

Amazon vs. FedEx and UPS

4 Schumps

Amazon has become the top U.S. parcel carrier, surpassing FedEx, UPS, and the post office. It did that by stocking its goods in distribution centers near its customers; selling fulfillment and delivery even to merchants that don’t list goods on Amazon; and leasing its vans to local entrepreneurs who handle the driving. FedEx, historically an express carrier, divorced from Amazon early, in 2019, to focus on higher-value business-to-business shipments, while UPS loaded up on cheap e-commerce, which helps explain why UPS has suffered the bigger Schumping: FedEx stock has outperformed it by 110 percentage points over the past five years.

Qnity Electronics stock could gain 40% as investors improve their understanding of its products and their role in the supply chain.

There are many ways to play the artificial-intelligence boom. From copper wires carrying electricity to servers, to data centers housing the servers, to the GPU, CPU, and memory chips inside the servers, to frontier AI model companies using the servers to build AI applications that, hopefully, transform the world for the better—all have been explored, some at length, in investing publications like this one.

These aren’t the only ways to play the trend, however. There are other ways for investors to profit, such as DuPont spinoff Qnity Electronics —and it’s a promising one. It benefits from the increasing complexity of semiconductors. Shares could rise 40% as investors better understand its growth potential.

The Wilmington, Del.-based Qnity supplies chip makers with things they need to make chips, including silicon polishing pads, photolithography materials, bonding materials, and heat-management solutions, among many others.

It was spun out of DuPont in October 2025, so the company is just about a year old. Corporations can spin off assets for several reasons, including improved capital allocation. Oftentimes, spinoffs are driven by valuation. Valuation is indeed a factor for Qnity. It competes with the likes of Entegris, which trades at about 33 times earnings expected over the coming 12 months. DuPont, at the time of the Qnity spin, traded at about 16 times. (Now it trades at 17 times.)

Qnity, for its part, trades at about 24 times earnings, despite similar growth expectations as Entegris. That’s better than DuPont, but a fairer multiple would be closer to 30 times, which implies a stock price of $160, up more than 30% from Wednesday’s close of $121.62.

Fairer in the stock market isn’t really a thing, though. Valuation boils down to earnings growth and investors’ confidence in it. That confidence may be lacking for now simply because Qnity is still new. “It’s among the most underfollowed names in the S&P 500,” says Fermium Research analyst Frank Mitsch. The stock has only 10 analysts covering it. The average for an S&P 500 stock is 25 analysts.

Being undercovered is very much part of the spinout process. Wall Street, after all, is a key source of new ideas for investment managers. “Qnity is in a great position to take advantage of the boom in AI and the advanced technologies…and yet, because it’s under the radar as of now, we believe that it’s suffering from a valuation discount,” Mitsch adds.

As investors start to tune in, they should like what they see. Qnity has reported only three quarters as a stand-alone company, but those reports have all topped Wall Street’s sales and earnings projections, with each posting at least 33% year-over-year earnings-per-share growth.

Mitsch’s target for the stock is $175, corresponding to a gain of more than 40% from recent levels. RBC Capital Markets analyst Arun Viswanathan has a higher price target of $189, up 55% from recent levels. Qnity has more exposure to “advanced node” chips, he says, which will result in above-average sales and earnings growth.

Chips are getting more complicated, with tiny, nanometer-scale transistors etched using extreme ultraviolet light and stacked on top of one another using some of the most complicated machines ever built by humanity. That complexity means more business per chip for Qnity, a big reason to expect stable, above-average sales growth for years to come.

M&A is another source of potential growth, according to Qnity CEO Jon Kemp. Qnity’s balance sheet can handle some deals. It carries about $3 billion in net debt, which is less than two times expected 2026 earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda. That isn’t an alarming ratio. The average net-debt-to-Ebitda ratio for S&P 500 industrial stocks is about 1.6 times.

Ebitda is expected to grow about 8% a year for the coming three years. Things can turn out better than that, though. Entegris’ Ebitda is expected to grow closer to 10%. Qnity’s estimates are also rising. Wall Street projects about $2 billion in 2027 Ebitda. That number was closer to $1.6 billion at the time of the spin.