- Prosus (1TY TH) +4%
- TUI (TUI1 TH) +1.8%
- Wolters Kluwer (WOSB TH) +1.5%
- Puma (PUM TH) +1.4%
- Reckitt (3RB0 TH) +1.4%
- MTU Aero (MTX TH) +1.1%
- Renault (RNL TH) +1%
- Lufthansa (LHA TH) +1%
- Deutsche Post (DHL TH) +1%
- Lotus Bakeries (7LB TH) -1.3%
- BP (BPE5 TH) -1.4%
- Ahold Delhaize (AHOG TH) -1.5%
- Ahold ADRs Drop as Goldman Cuts to Neutral on US Challenges (1)
- Var Energi (J4V TH) -1.6%
- Abivax (2X1 TH) -24%
- Abivax’s Obefazimod Meets Main Goal in Ulcerative Colitis Trial
DAX:
- Siemens Energy (ENR TH) +1.1%
- Siemens Energy to Take Over Camlin Group; No Terms
- Beiersdorf (BEI TH) +1.1%
- Deutsche Post (DHL TH) +1%
MDAX:
- Salzgitter (SZG TH) +3.2%
- Salzgitter Raised, Voestalpine Cut in Steel at Morgan Stanley
- TUI (TUI1 TH) +2.2%
- Puma (PUM TH) +1.3%
- Nordex (NDX1 TH) +1.2%
- Lufthansa (LHA TH) +1.2%
SDAX:
- Grenke (GLJ TH) +2.5%
- Verve Group (VRV TH) +1.7%
After Hours Summary: HPE +36.5% soaring on strong results and guidance; MCHP +10.4% on data center business update; CRDO -10.3% lower on earnings
After Hours Gainers:
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: HPE +36.5%, DHC +2.2% (increases guidance),
Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: MCHP +10.4% (expects revenue of $500 mln in CY26 for its Data Center Solutions Business Unit), PENG +5.4% (CFO to step down; sees FY26 results at high end of guidance), AVGO +3.3% (showcases broadband edge AI portfolio), OBE +2.7% (provides an update to its 2026 capital program and guidance), FLR +2.6% (notice to proceed for proposed Phase 2 expansion of LNG Cnada facility), AD +1.5% (closes license agreement with Verizon; declares $11/sh special dividend), RMD +0.8% completes acquisition of Noctrix Health), HNRG +0.7% (acquires 460 MW of Siemens Turbines for $350 mln), MLI +0.5% (2-for-1 stock split), SAM +0.3% (expects lower interest expense in Q2), LHX +0.1% (awarded $495 mln Army contract modification)
After Hours Losers:
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: CRDO -10.3%
Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: FULC -48.9% (to discontinue its pociredir program for the treatment of SCD; initiates review), ABVX -35% (Phase 3 ABTECT Maintenance Trial results evaluating Obefazimod in moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis), PRAX -10.5% (provides vormatrigine program update), XMTR -8.9% (stock offering), AVEX -8.1% (stock offering; also stock offering by holders), ASYS -7% (stock offering), CSR -5.5% (optimization and deleveraging plan), NU -4.2% (appoints new CFO), GOOG -1.9% (proposed $80 bln equity capital raise to expand AI infrastructure and compute; Includes agreement by Berkshire Hathaway to invest $10 bln in company in private placement), NOG -1.3% (files mixed shelf offering), XNDU -0.9% (stock offering by selling shareholders), AWK -0.7% (completes purchase of Nexus Water Group Systems in eight states), VRRM -0.7% (CEO to step down), TTWO -0.2% (files for 329,949 share common stock offering, relates to stock incentive plan), LPX -0.2% (CFO to retire; names successor)
La Lettre — 01/06/26
Résumé français
FINANCE — Tikehau Capital accélère ses cessions dans l’aéronautique. Quatre candidats (dont Chequers Capital, Fives, Mubea) ont remis des offres de deuxième tour pour racheter Aries Industries, équipementier aéro mis en vente en mars. Offre ferme attendue d’ici mi-juin via Houlihan Lokey. Le PDG Mathieu Pacault privilégie un fonds en vue d’une IPO à trois ans. Aries (CA ~100 M€, 230 salariés) avait frôlé la liquidation en 2020 avant son rachat par Tikehau via Ace Management. En parallèle, Tikehau met aussi en vente Elvia Electronics (circuits imprimés, CA ~70 M€, 438 salariés), acquis en 2022. Ces cessions visent à rattraper le retard du fonds Ace Aéro Partenaires (31 M€ cédés à mi-parcours contre >1 Md€ budgétés en 2025).
POLITIQUE — Catherine Chabaud quitte la présidence du Yacht club de France. La ministre de la mer abandonne la double casquette qui avait provoqué une fronde des adhérents, son cumul soulevant un conflit d’intérêts sur la fiscalité des yachts. Démission actée par courrier du 19 mai ; Patrick Simon-Letertre devrait lui succéder en septembre.
PARLEMENT — L’ancien médecin du Sénat interdit d’exercer. El Hassan Lmahdi, éclaboussé par l’affaire de la “sextape” au Sénat, a été sanctionné le 19 mai par l’Ordre des médecins d’Île-de-France : un an d’interdiction d’exercer dont six mois ferme, pour violation du secret médical et de ses engagements d’exclusivité.
ENTREPRISES (Énergie) — La saturation du réseau Enedis inquiète les collectivités. Les raccordements de projets renouvelables sont à l’arrêt sur ~10 % du réseau. La FNCCR a réalisé sa propre cartographie, pointant trois zones engorgées (Centre-Val de Loire, Pays-de-la-Loire, Tarn-et-Garonne). Contexte de surcapacité électrique et de repli des objectifs solaires dans la PPE de février 2026, alors qu’Enedis vise désormais la « grande électrification » (plan 2030).
MÉDIAS — OpenAI et Google approchent les patrons de presse. En marge du Congrès mondial des médias à Marseille, des représentants des deux géants (Tom Rubin, OpenAI ; Sulina Connal et Varun Shetty, Google) ont rencontré en “off” des éditeurs internationaux, CMA CGM et WAN-IFRA espérant un “new deal”. Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI) a annulé sa participation, signe que la presse n’est pas sa priorité.
English summary
FINANCE — Tikehau Capital steps up aerospace divestments. Four bidders (including Chequers Capital, Fives, Mubea) submitted second-round offers for Aries Industries, an aero supplier put up for sale in March. Binding offers are due by mid-June via Houlihan Lokey. CEO Mathieu Pacault favors a fund with a three-year IPO horizon. Aries (~€100M revenue, 230 staff) narrowly escaped liquidation in 2020 before Tikehau acquired it through Ace Management. Separately, Tikehau is also selling Elvia Electronics (PCBs, ~€70M revenue, 438 staff), bought in 2022. The disposals aim to make up lost ground at the Ace Aéro Partenaires fund (only €31M divested at mid-point versus a >€1bn 2025 budget).
POLITICS — Catherine Chabaud relinquishes the Yacht Club de France presidency. The maritime minister gave up the dual role that had triggered a members’ revolt, the overlap raising a conflict of interest over yacht taxation. Resignation confirmed by a 19 May letter; Patrick Simon-Letertre is expected to succeed her in September.
PARLIAMENT — Former Senate doctor barred from practice. El Hassan Lmahdi, caught up in the Senate “sextape” affair, was sanctioned on 19 May by the Île-de-France medical board: a one-year practice ban (six months firm) for breaching medical confidentiality and his exclusivity commitments.
COMPANIES (Energy) — Enedis grid saturation worries local authorities. Renewable project connections are stalled across ~10% of the network. The FNCCR mapped the congestion itself, flagging three bottlenecked regions (Centre-Val de Loire, Pays-de-la-Loire, Tarn-et-Garonne). This comes amid electricity overcapacity and scaled-back solar targets in the February 2026 PPE, even as Enedis now targets “mass electrification” (2030 plan).
MEDIA — OpenAI and Google court press bosses. On the sidelines of the World Media Congress in Marseille, representatives of both giants (Tom Rubin, OpenAI; Sulina Connal and Varun Shetty, Google) met international publishers “off” the record, with CMA CGM and WAN-IFRA hoping for a “new deal.” Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI) cancelled his appearance — a sign the press is not his priority.
From: Laurent Chekroun (MAKOR CAPITAL MARKET) At: 06/01/26 06:59:22 UTC+2:00
Subject: >>> Michael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbersMichael Burry just said Elon Musk and Nvidia's deal is built on fake numbers.
Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.
He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.
Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.
Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.
Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.
But here is what Burry is flagging.
Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.
They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.
Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.
Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.
Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.
Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.
Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.
When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.
The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.
Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.
Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.
Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.
The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.
Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.
- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
Burry published a detailed breakdown calling the entire structure "Fugazi", his word for fake.
He is alleging that billions of dollars in Nvidia chips are being hidden off balance sheets, and that American retirees are unknowingly funding the whole thing.
Nvidia, the world's largest AI chip company sold $5.4 billion worth of its most advanced GPUs, the GB200, to a company called Valor.
Valor is not a real operating business. It is a special purpose vehicle, a shell company created specifically to hold these chips and nothing else. Nvidia also invested $1.9 billion of its own money directly into Valor on top of the sale.
Those 100,000+ chips are now physically inside xAI's data center. xAI is Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, the one that builds Grok. xAI is using every single one of those chips right now to run its AI models.
But here is what Burry is flagging.
Neither Nvidia nor xAI owns those chips on paper. Valor, the shell company holds legal title. That means $5.4 billion in GPU assets do not show up on Nvidia's balance sheet as inventory.
They do not show up on xAI's balance sheet as assets. They are legally invisible to both companies.
Nvidia gets to book the $5.4 billion as a completed sale and record it as revenue. xAI gets full use of the chips without owning them. And the risk disappears into a shell company in the middle.
Now here is where American retirees enter the picture.
Valor needed $3.5 billion in debt to fund this structure. Apollo provided it. Apollo is one of the largest asset managers on earth with $1.03 trillion under management and $834 billion specifically in private credit.
Apollo raised the $3.5 billion, packaged it into debt securities, and sold those securities to Athene.
Athene is Apollo's own insurance company. It sells fixed and indexed annuities, retirement savings products, to ordinary Americans.
When a retiree buys an Athene annuity, they believe their money is sitting in safe, stable investments. That money is now inside a structure funding Elon Musk's AI data center.
The numbers inside Athene are most alarming.
Athene holds $74.2 billion in reserves. It has moved $217 billion in assets into a captive insurer based in Bermuda, meaning those assets sit outside normal US insurance regulation and oversight.
Of the entire portfolio, 34.7%, equal to $103 billion, is classified as Level 3 assets.
Level 3 is an accounting classification that means there is no observable market price for these assets. No outside party can independently verify what they are actually worth.
The leverage sitting on top of those unpriced assets is 16 times.
Burry's says:
Every step of this structure is technically legal and publicly disclosed. But the entire thing was deliberately engineered across 8 to 12 steps to move credit risk off balance sheets and away from any market pricing.
- Nvidia books the revenue.
- Apollo collects the fees.
- xAI gets the computing power.
- And retirees sitting at the bottom of a 16x leveraged Bermuda insurance structure, holding $103 billion in assets with no market price carry the risk without knowing it exists.
It’s a tough time for Germany.
A year into Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s tenure, his approval ratings are low and the coalition government he leads is roundly disliked. Capitalizing on widespread discontent, the far-right Alternative for Germany is rising in the polls, inching closer to power. To make matters worse, America, in a Trumpian tantrum, has announced a withdrawal of troops from the country, endangering its bedrock geopolitical relationship. All the features that defined Germany’s recent past — political stability, social cohesion and Atlanticist foreign policy — are under threat.
Yet underlying all these problems is a more profound one. The German economy, once known for its efficiency, orderliness and stability, is in a terrible mess. It’s not just that the numbers are dire, though the country has basically been in a recession for three years. Or that every week or so, another famous old company announces thousands of layoffs (the latest was Commerzbank, founded in 1870). Or that last month, the venerable weekly Die Zeit ran a series called “Where Germany still works” — which means the situation must be pretty bad indeed.
No, the worst of it is that our dynamic economy gave postwar Germany a sense of identity. For all our flaws, we had a country that functioned better than others. Now it doesn’t anymore, and we’re mystified. Yet a better economy is possible. It might not alter the country’s political trajectory, and it certainly won’t placate an aggrieved President Trump. But it can turn the tide on stagnation and restore the fabled resilience of German businesses.
Commentators tend to focus on today’s troubles. The economy’s rise and fall is a much older story, though. At its most prosperous, Germany was a high-tax, high-wage, big-bureaucracy country — something to remember for those whose recipe for renewal is simply to cut the cost of doing business. In the postwar decades of vigorous growth, the economy itself resembled the kind of product that it so excellently manufactured, an expensive and highly complicated machine whose cogs meshed.
Those cogs included an education system geared toward supplying businesses with technically proficient workers; managers trained as engineers or scientists rather than as generalists; banks and insurers with major stakes in the largest companies and focused on long-term goals over short-term profits; and stable labor relations that offered workers secure and well-paid jobs as well as a vote in key decisions. Together, these elements contributed to the technological superiority long associated with the Made-in-Germany brand.
Yet when the American economy pulled ahead in the 1990s, fueled by the financial muscle of Wall Street and the fierce entrepreneurialism of Silicon Valley, we ran out of ideas. Eager for something new, the economy opened up to foreign capital: Banks and insurers sold their stakes in German companies and corporate executives targeted international investors. In an attempt to regain competitiveness, the government of Gerhard Schröder reformed the country’s rigid labor market and did away with some of the protections that workers had enjoyed.
On the face of it, Germany thrived in the first two decades of the new century, weathering the financial crisis better than others and hanging on to its industrial core. But in hindsight, the country was on borrowed time. Automakers, for instance, sold millions of cars in East Asia but failed to invest in a much-needed transformation to electric vehicles. The same mix of risk aversion and short-termism characterized other German companies, too. What kept the profits coming was a combination of cheap Russian gas, a booming Chinese market and the multilateral free-trade order led by the United States.
That order is now gone, sundered by American protectionism, Chinese competition and the disruption from artificial intelligence. But the setback needn’t be fatal. The country can overhaul its business model, re-equipping the successful elements of the old system for a newly hostile environment. There are three key areas to focus on.
First, the financing. Many German corporations are now majority-owned by non-German investors, and some of the country’s vital Mittelstand firms — family-owned medium-size enterprises — have been taken over by private equity or other outside money. The influence of detached investors focused primarily on financial results can be beneficial, of course. But it’s gone too far. Established companies need the kind of solid backing that would allow them to plan for the long term, and young companies need patient nurturing.
The government seems to agree. Recognizing that too many of the country’s enormous financial resources are languishing in real estate holdings or fixed-income assets or personal savings accounts, it has established an investment initiative named “Deutschlandfonds.” Designed to support private investors who want to put money into growth industries and other strategically important fields, the fund is a step in the right direction. More can surely be done.
Then there’s education. The country’s famous dual-vocational system, which allows students to complete their schooling in the workplace, long ensured that industry got the kind of skilled labor it needed. But the system now lacks applicants, partly because of demographic decline and partly because too many young people choose to pursue other careers. Germany’s high school students, what’s more, are struggling in the very subjects that the country used to excel in: math and natural sciences.
Overall, Germany is not investing enough in education — and not enough of the money that’s invested goes toward promoting the scientific and technological excellence that the economy so badly needs. Technical universities that have produced legions of Nobel laureates are consistently placed behind better-funded rivals elsewhere. A return to the audacious research projects of the past, typically a collaboration between government, academia and private enterprise, would be a start.
Finally, the labor market. The country’s welfare state has become too expensive, and Germans will need to work longer hours and more years to sustain it. Yet changes should be pursued in the spirit of “Sozialpartnerschaft,” the consensus-based labor relations that played an important role in the postwar economy. Mutual trust has been eroded in recent decades, for which both parties share responsibility. Business leaders squandered good will by awarding themselves lavish salaries while the unions too often refused even minor compromises and readily reverted to class-war language.
The advent of artificial intelligence, intriguingly, might help. Given the scale of the United States’ technological lead, it may sound naïve to suggest that Germany could claim a share of the pie. But artificial intelligence is well suited to complement the country’s traditional strengths in high-quality engineering. And an approach that takes labor interests into account could secure a desirable result: technology that improves the work of humans rather than replaces them en masse.
There is no returning to the past, of course. Yet something precious has been lost: an innate confidence in the country’s strengths. Today, the mood in Germany seems way too bleak. What’s missing is a cleareyed sense of where we should be heading. To adapt, the economy — still the world’s third-largest — needs smart investment, public support and a healthy dose of self-belief. That won’t end the country’s problems, but it could put us back on the path to prosperity.
Konstantin Richter is a journalist and author, most recently, of “Dreihundert Männer,” an account of the rise and fall of corporate Germany.