TheChek News Flow

Firms are snapping up smaller competitors in a bid to capture a piece of Americans’ growing wealth

Mark Armbruster used to know most of the other owners of wealth-management firms in the Rochester, N.Y., area. Now, a spate of recent dealmaking has resulted in many competitors being bought by out-of-towners—including at least four in the past year alone.

At 53 years old, Armbruster isn’t feeling pressure to take advantage of the paydays his rivals are landing. He hopes his children will one day take over Armbruster Capital Management, which manages $1 billion for what he calls “the millionaire next door.” Yet he still gets a steady stream of emails and calls from would-be buyers.

“It’s pretty constant,” Armbruster said.

A dealmaking boom in the fragmented wealth-management business is playing out across the country. Wealth-management firms, in some cases fueled by private-equity money, are racing to capture their piece of the swelling ranks and pocketbooks of the wealthy and uber-wealthy. So they are snapping up smaller firms, creating growing national competitors along the way.

James Anderson, co-head of Houlihan Lokey’s financial-services group, estimates that deals for these firms—also known as registered investment advisers, or RIAs—are on pace this year to match or exceed the record number of about 250 deals the sector notched in 2024. “ ‘Frenzy’ is not too strong a word” for the dealmaking activity, Anderson said.

There are thousands of RIAs, which focus on financial planning and on managing investment portfolios. They have a fiduciary duty to act in their clients’ best interest and typically charge fees as a percentage of assets managed. Most sit outside the big banks, according to the trade group Investment Adviser Association.

Some of the deal boom is driven by aging owners looking for succession plans. At the same time, private-equity firms are increasingly looking to buy up wealth-management businesses, attracted by the industry’s stable clientele, recurring revenue and relatively low investment costs.

Undergirding it all is a huge tide of wealth creation since the pandemic. More people are looking for help managing their money, supercharging the industry’s growth.

Roughly one-third of the rise in real average household wealth that the top 0.1% wealthiest households in the U.S. have accumulated since 1990 has occurred since 2020, based on an analysis of Federal Reserve data through June 2025 by economist Steven Fazzari at Washington University in St. Louis. The rest of the top 1% wealthiest households also saw their inflation-adjusted wealth grow, though at a lesser rate, with 16% of their comparable wealth created since 2020.

Buyers of independent wealth-management firms say bigger is often better.

Managing more assets can mean the ability to offer clients more rarefied investment products and the sort of one-stop shop they say clients are seeking. That includes everything from tax-and-estate planning to, at the upper tiers of wealth, services such as staffing and property management. While ultrawealthy clients can be demanding, their larger accounts mean firms can focus on managing fewer relationships.

Creative Planning, a wealth-management firm based in Overland Park, Kan., has acquired roughly 20 small firms in the past two years, largely to increase its presence in local markets, said Chief Executive Peter Mallouk. Having a local presence raises awareness among potential clients, he said. “They’ve heard of the Morgans and Merrills and Goldmans. We’d like to raise our profile to be a true alternative to that locally,” he said.

Mallouk expects the firm to manage and advise on more than $650 billion going into 2026, up from roughly $375 billion in December 2023—and said he believes there is significantly more runway.

Creative Planning’s valuation increased more than five times between 2020, when General Atlantic took a minority stake, and 2024, when TPG invested at a roughly $16 billion valuation, said people familiar with the firm. Its clients include more than 150 billionaire and centimillionaire families, Mallouk said, along with tens of thousands of millionaires and multimillionaires.

Another big buyer of RIAs has been Miami-based Corient, which is led by former McKinsey management consultant Kurt MacAlpine. It will soon manage and advise on more than $400 billion, MacAlpine said.

Corient is a subsidiary of CI Financial, an asset manager that recently was taken private by Mubadala Capital, an arm of Mubadala Investment, an Abu Dhabi sovereign-wealth manager. Two deals Corient struck over the past year, for European firm Stanhope Capital Group and Stonehage Fleming, added more than $200 billion in assets.

Corient works with the ultrawealthy. There was a “void in ultrahigh net worth,” MacAlpine said, particularly for families with members scattered across countries. “There was an opportunity for somebody to come in and be a comprehensive provider.”

Part of Corient’s pitch is convenience for the superrich, assigning anywhere from six to 10 advisers to a family to help them with everything from paying bills and developing tax-and-estate plans to making arrangements for private aviation. That can save money for clients, such as musicians who fly private to rehearsals several times a week.

MacAlpine said he plans to do more deals and is in talks with several wealth managers about buying their firms. “My deal pipeline is as robust, if not more robust, than it’s ever been.”

The British renewable-energy startup raised $1 billion in its first stand-alone funding round for Kraken

SYDNEY—British renewable-energy startup Octopus Energy will spin off utility management platform Kraken Technologies at a valuation of $8.65 billion.

Octopus raised $1 billion in its first stand-alone funding round for Kraken, an artificial-intelligence platform used by global energy retailers, with more than 70 million customers between them.

New York’s D1 Capital Partners, Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Fidelity International, and Maryland-based Durable Capital Partners joined existing investors, including Australia’s Origin Energy, on the ownership register.

The separation of Kraken, which Octopus flagged in September and expects to occur by the middle of 2026, is seen by analysts as a precursor to a likely initial public offering. Kraken could be worth as much as $15 billion in such a scenario, those analysts have said.

Octopus will own almost 14% of the separated Kraken, which counts Origin, French energy giant EDF and Japan’s Tokyo Gas among its customers. This year, Kraken also signed a deal with National Grid, in New York and Massachusetts, to act as the AI customer service and billing platform for six million U.S. customers.

“Becoming an independent company gives Kraken the focus and freedom to scale as a neutral, global operating system for utilities,” said Amir Orad, Kraken’s chief executive.

Origin, which since 2020 has paid $1.04 billion to compile a near 23% stake in Octopus and Kraken, said Tuesday it expects separation by the middle of 2026. Its stake in Kraken is worth almost $2 billion following the equity raise.

Origin said it will invest an additional $140 million in Kraken as part of the round. It has secured an additional 1.5% equity interest in Kraken to offset the dilutive impact of the raise, in exchange for its surrender of exclusive Australian rights to use the platform.

It plans to hold on to its near 23% interest in Octopus.

“Origin has always held a deep conviction in the potential of Kraken,” Origin Chief Executive Frank Calabria said.

The raise also brought on a new energy retailer customer, Origin said. It said the retailer had more than 10 million customer accounts but didn’t give its name.

So-called continuation vehicles set to account for a fifth of sales by the sector in 2025

Private equity firms sold companies to themselves at a record rate this year, making use of a controversial tactic to hold on to assets as managers struggled to find buyers or list their investments.

Roughly a fifth of all PE sales this year involved groups raising money from new investors to acquire businesses from their older funds, up from 12-13 per cent the previous year, said Sunaina Sinha Haldea, global head of private capital advisory at Raymond James.

Such transactions sell assets already owned by a PE group to so-called continuation vehicles — newer funds also managed by the firm. The tactic enables PE firms to return cash to investors in older funds, but has prompted concerns about potential conflicts of interest.

“This year is set to break all records,” added Sinha Haldea, predicting that the final figures for 2025 would show $107bn in such sales, up from $70bn last year.

Skip Fahrholz, who oversees such transactions in Europe at investment bank Jefferies, concurred that the global total for the year for sales involving continuation vehicles would be close to $100bn.

The use of the structure has boomed in recent years as buyout firms have struggled to secure the valuations they want from external buyers or public markets, choosing instead to hold on to investments in hope of fetching more in the future.

In a deal valuing the company at €15bn, European private equity house PAI Partners sold part of its stake in Froneri, an ice cream group that includes brands such as Häagen-Dazs in the US, to a continuation vehicle for the second time.

Vista Equity Partners, New Mountain Capital and Inflexion also used multibillion-dollar continuation funds to sell down some of their largest investments.

Sinha Haldea said such transactions had become “a popular and effective win-win-win liquidity solution in a stressed exit environment, where exit values are still recovering from 2024 lows”.

The structure is attractive to buyout firms because such deals generate extra management fees and potentially lucrative future performance fees from companies in ageing funds.

Per Franzén, chief executive of Sweden’s EQT, which has yet to use a continuation vehicle, said recently that he wanted to begin such deals to generate extra fees on some of the firm’s holdings. 

But some backers of PE funds such as pension funds are concerned that in such transactions the same buyout firm is on both the sell and buy sides of a deal.

Some investors fear firms could underplay the value of the assets being transferred, to the detriment of the original fund backers being offered an exit.

PE managers say they offer their original backers the chance to roll their stakes into the new fund and that new investors help set the price at which assets are transferred.

But investors used to backing funds on the strength of their managers rather than analysing assets may lack the skill set or capacity to evaluate individual companies.

Sovereign wealth fund Abu Dhabi Investment Council recently sued US private equity firm Energy & Minerals Group for what it claimed was an attempt to short-change investors on the sale of its stake in a company to a continuation vehicle.

The Abu Dhabi fund alleged EMG had undervalued Ascent Resources when planning to sell the gas driller to itself in a deal that would have increased the buyout firm’s ownership and restarted its ability to earn fees on the group.

EMG ended up halting the deal. Multiple investment groups have since offered to buy Ascent.

Continuation deals used to be seen as an option of last resort for more troubled companies that could not be sold. But the vehicles have also recently been used as a way to keep hold of strongly performing companies.

Investors in private equity funds still favour traditional asset sales.

Consultancy Bain & Co, considered an authority in the industry, recently found that almost two-thirds of investors in private equity funds would prefer companies to exit holdings conventionally through sales or initial public offerings.

Tesla (TSLA) does something unsual ahead of Q4 delivery results



In a surprising move, Tesla (TSLA) has publicly released a delivery consensus for the fourth quarter of 2025 via a press release on its investor relations website. This is a significant departure from the automaker’s standard operating procedure, suggesting it is trying to get ahead of what looks to be a disappointing quarter.

By the end of the week, Tesla is expected to report its Q4 delivery results and confirm that its electric vehicle deliveries are down for a second full year in a row.

It’s not a great look for a company that is all about growth

For years, Tesla has compiled a consensus of sell-side analysts’ estimates, but it typically only shares this data privately through an email from its Investor Relations team to a select list of analysts and major investors.

Today, however, the company decided to publish the data for the world to see:



The consensus, which Tesla says is “company-compiled,” pegs the median expectation for Q4 2025 deliveries at 420,399 vehicles (with a mean of 422,850).

This number is notably lower than the broader public consensus figures circulating on Wall Street. For instance, Bloomberg’s consensus has been hovering closer to 440,000 units.

By releasing its own, lower consensus publicly, Tesla appears to be attempting to lower expectations ahead of the official delivery and production report, which is expected in the first few days of January. If the “whisper numbers” on the street are 440k and Tesla delivers 425k, the stock would typically take a hit. By anchoring expectations to ~420k now, a 425k result might be spun as a “beat.”

A Second Year of Decline for Tesla’s EVs

The implications of this consensus are stark. If Tesla hits the median target of ~420,000 deliveries for Q4, it would bring the full year 2025 total to approximately 1.64 million vehicles.

This would confirm that 2025 is the second consecutive year of declining deliveries for the electric automaker.

• 2023: 1.81 million (peak)
• 2024: 1.79 million
• 2025 (Est): 1.64 million

A drop to 1.64 million represents a roughly 8% decline year-over-year, a significant acceleration in the wrong direction compared to the slight 1% dip seen in 2024.

The fourth quarter was expected to be difficult following the expiration of the U.S. federal tax credit at the end of Q3, which likely pulled forward a significant amount of demand into the third quarter (where Tesla delivered a record ~497k vehicles). However, a sequential drop of over 75,000 units is steeper than many bulls had hoped.

Electrek’s Take

This is a very defensive move from Tesla.

I’ve been covering Tesla for a long time, and this is unusual for the company, to say the least.

It’s good for them to lower expectations, but no matter what, 420,000 vehicles would be terrible for Tesla and confirm a clear trend of decline in EV sales amid a global surge (EVs are expected to be up about 25% year-over-year globally in 2025).

It’s becoming impossible to ignore the trend here. For a company that was priced for 50% annual growth for years, posting back-to-back years of declining volumes is a massive reality check.

I don’t know where Tesla will land in Q4, but I do know that these estimates make no sense. 35,000 “other vehicles”? I know that SpaceX has been buying a lot of Cybertrucks in Q4, but not 10,000 Cybertrucks.

Or do they expect Model S and Model X sales to double magically? I’m confused.

If Tesla delivers more than 25,000 “other models” in Q4 2025, I’d be shocked, and by shocked, I mean suspicious. And that’s 30% below the average estimate? Again, I’m confused.

A major link in Tesla’s 4680 battery supply chain has just snapped. South Korean battery material supplier L&F Co. announced today that the value of its massive supply deal with Tesla has been slashed by over 99%, signaling a catastrophic drop in demand for the automaker’s in-house battery cells.

This is arguably the strongest evidence yet that Tesla’s 4680 program, and the vehicle that relies on it, the Cybertruck, is in serious trouble.

In early 2023, L&F announced a $2.9 billion contract to supply high-nickel cathode materials directly to Tesla.

At the time, the industry saw this as a major move by Tesla to secure materials for its ramp-up of the 4680 battery cell, which Elon Musk had touted as the key to halving battery costs and enabling cheaper electric vehicles, a plan he later scrapped.

Right now, Tesla’s Cybertruck is the only vehicle using the automaker’s own 4680 cells.

In a regulatory filing today, L&F revealed that the contract’s value has been written down to just $7,386.

No, that is not a typo. $2.9 billion to roughly $7,400.

L&F did not explicitly state the reason for the cut, citing only a “change in supply quantity,” but the dots are easy to connect. The high-nickel cathode was destined for Tesla’s 4680 cells, and the primary consumer of those cells is the Cybertruck.

We have been reporting on the Cybertruck’s demand issues for the better part of this year. In March, we noted that the truck was turning out to be a flop as Tesla began offering discounted financing to move inventory. By June, Tesla became desperate, launching 0% APR incentives as inventory piled up in lots across the US.

Despite a production capacity of 250,000 units per year at Giga Texas, the Cybertruck is currently selling at a run rate of roughly 20,000 to 25,000 units annually. We even saw Tesla discontinue the cheapest Cybertruck in September because, frankly, no one wanted a gutted version of a truck that was already struggling to find buyers.

If Tesla isn’t building Cybertrucks, it doesn’t need 4680 cells. And if it doesn’t need 4680 cells, L&F has no one to sell its cathode material to.

Electrek’s Take

This is not a good look Tesla’s 4680 program.

For years, we’ve been told that the 4680 cell was the “holy grail” that would allow Tesla to produce a $25,000 electric car. But five years after Battery Day, the cells are still reportedly difficult to manufacture at scale due to the dry electrode process, and their only application is a low-volume pickup truck that has become a commercial failure.

The math here is brutal. A 99% reduction in a supply contract basically means the contract was cancelled. It means Tesla is not ramping 4680 production; if anything, they might be winding it down.

The ‘Cybercab’ is also supposed to be using the 4680 cells, but we will have to wait and see how that goes.

It’s also a vehicle program that could go the way of the Cybertruck. CEO Elon Musk is insisting that it will launch in early 2026 without a steering wheel, but Tesla has yet to solve level 4 autonomous driving.

If it does launch without a steering wheel, it will be a program even more limited in volume than the Cybertruck.

The past 12 months were supposed to turn things around for struggling cinemas. But instead of heralding a dramatic return to moviegoing, 2025 is running neck-and-neck with the middling 2024 box office, and will fall far short of the $9 billion in domestic ticket sales that most analysts expected the theatrical movie business to easily eclipse. Prior to the pandemic, North American revenues would regularly hit between $10 billion to $11 billion. The 2025 results are a massive disappointment that no amount of spin can change. (Already there’s talk of how much better 2026 will be.)

Natalie Portman, Charli xcx, Chris Pine and Wu-Tang Clan Projects Set for Sundance Film Festival's Final Edition in Park City

“There’s an unfortunate trend, which that we just can’t get the industry to $9 billion at the domestic box office,” says Mike Sherrill, the chief operating officer of dine-in cinema chain Alamo Drafthouse. “It looks like it’s going to be two years in a row that the industry flatlined.”

More worrisome is the reality that many of the movie business’s biggest franchises are showing signs of oversaturation or fatigue. Marvel continued to struggle with its B Team heroes; February’s “Captain America: Brave New World” and May’s “Thunderbolts” lost tens of millions during their theatrical runs, while July’s “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” will only eke out a modest profit. And even though “Avatar: Fire and Ash” ($760 million and counting), “Wicked: For Good” ($504 million) and “Jurassic World Rebirth” ($869 million) will rank among the year’s top-grossing releases, they will fail to match the revenues of previous films in their respective series. Clearly, the theatrical industry can’t thrive on sequels and spinoffs alone.

It would be easy to declare an end to comic book movies. That said, genres have risen and fallen throughout Hollywood history — just look at musicals or westerns or raunchy comedies, which have faded in popularity after once being surefire draws. What really has theater owners and some studio chiefs concerned as the year closes out is what the future will hold if Netflix is able to secure government approval for its $82.7 billion deal to buy Warner Bros. Already, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos has hinted that he believes that “windows,” industry jargon for the amount of time that movies play exclusively in theaters, are too long. He told Wall Street shortly after the pact was announced that he expects that they will “evolve” in a more “consumer friendly” direction. Everyone knows exactly what he meant by that.

For cinemas, it’s nothing short of an existential threat. During COVID, studios abbreviated the gap between a film’s theatrical release and its home entertainment debut, only to discover that customers got accustomed to waiting to watch movies until they hit streaming or on-demand platforms. If windows keep shrinking, theaters may lose their competitive advantage.

There were also reasons to feel optimistic about the trajectory of an industry that has been knocked down and counted out for half-a-decade. China, which had been hostile to Hollywood fare since the pandemic, embraced a few major studio releases such as “Zootopia 2” and “Avatar: Fire and Ash,” signaling that one of the world’s biggest moviegoing markets is still accessible to certain U.S. productions. Of course, China is doing just fine without Hollywood — thank you, very much. The year’s highest-grossing release isn’t an English-language production but rather the Chinese animated sequel “Ne Zha 2,” which has generated more than $2.1 billion globally, despite the fact that most Americans would draw a blank at the title.

Family films and video game adaptations proved irresistible to audiences, who flocked to theaters to see the likes of “A Minecraft Movie,” “Lilo & Stitch” and “Zootopia 2.” The three films, all of which carry PG ratings, were the three highest-grossing Hollywood productions, with “A Minecraft Movie” tapping out just shy of $1 billion and “Lilo & Stitch” and “Zootopia 2” both crossing that threshold. It’s the second consecutive year that PG films outgrossed their PG-13 counterparts, which is notable because it’s usually the other way around. Meanwhile anime proved to be a massive boon, with “Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle” and “Chainsaw Man” scoring back-to-back wins for Sony-owned Crunchyroll.

“What happened with ‘Demon Slayer’ is great because it opens a new category of film,” says Sherrill of Alamo Drafthouse. “About 49% of the audience was under 24 years old. That’s so important because we need to be thinking about what’s going to be relevant for the next generation of moviegoers.”

Comic book content is no longer king. After being the most popular genre for over a decade, these movies have recently looked a lot less superhuman. The latest “Captain America” suffered from a prolonged post-production and extensive rewrites, with critics piling on when the film debuted in February. Although “Fantastic Four” and “Thunderbolts” movies were much better regarded, they still failed to match the kind of grosses that Marvel movies used to routinely achieve before the pandemic. Marvel Studios will have a chance to recapture its box office prowess with next July’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” as well as December’s “Avengers: Doomsday,” which brings back Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans.

Marvel’s rival, DC Films, fared better with “Superman,” a generally well-received Man of Steel adventure that grossed $616 million. A lot had been riding on the success of the film, which centers on the most recognizable name in DC Comics. James Gunn, who took over DC with Peter Safran in 2022, directed the film and positioned it as a reset for a company in desperate need of a fresh direction. For years, DC films such as “Justice League” and “The Flash” have been slammed as too dark and dense. Gunn and Safran wanted to recapture the humor and hope that defined Richard Donner’s 1978 classic, “Superman.” DC’s real challenge will come next year when the studio fields films like “Supergirl” and “Clayface,” which are based on far lesser known characters.

“We needed to have the DC logo be synonymous with quality again,” Safran says. “For too long, our movies had suffered from real inconsistency. It takes time to develop a positive reputation, but this put us on the right track.”

It was a disappointing year for many adult-oriented dramas, with the likes of “The Smashing Machine,” “Bugonia” and “Springsteen: Deliver Me From Nowhere” failing to make much of a dent at the box office. However, some studios took artistic gambles that paid off handsomely, none more so than Warner Bros., which bet on idiosyncratic horror films like Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners” and Zach Cregger’s “Weapons,” both of which attracted huge crowds after they debuted to rave reviews. And awards buzz helped another of the studio’s auteur-driven films, Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another,” gross more than $200 million. The only problem: With a budget of $140 million and tens of millions spent on marketing, the film stands to lose $100 million theatrically since studios and exhibitors essentially split ticket sales.

“The good news is that when a movie catches the eye of a filmgoing audience, they are ready and excited to go. We saw all kinds of movies work this year,” says Adam Fogelson, chair of the Lionsgate Motion Picture Group. “The challenge is if you have something that, for whatever reason, doesn’t spark people’s interest, the floor is non-existent, regardless of the level of star power. You can have a movie that the audience likes and no one goes to see.”

Tom Cruise’s star power may be dimming, as evidenced by the diminished returns of the mega-budgeted “Mission: Impossible – The Final Reckoning.” It ranks among the year’s biggest bombs and may put Ethan Hunt on hiatus, at least until Cruise’s adventure films get less costly. But other talent is ascending to the A-list. Timothée Chalamet, for example, proved that he’s one of the hottest names in movies. The 30-year-old actor has helped make A24’s “Marty Supreme,” a period movie about ping pong, into an unlikely holiday season hit. Credit goes to the star who helped mastermind a promotional push that saw him deploy everything from bright orange blimps to viral videos in service of the indie drama — the marketing blitz drew TikTok fans, as well as arthouse aficionados.

Movie theaters have also relied heavily on premium large formats like Imax and Dolby. The popularity of those screens, which are more expensive than the average movie ticket, has helped to offset the decline in attendance. For visual spectacles like “Avatar: Fire and Ash” or “F1: The Movie,” those PLFs have accounted for 50% to 60% of overall sales. Although industry sales were essentially flat, Imax delivered its best-ever year at the box office with $1.2 billion globally.

“We branched out in genres,” says Imax’s CEO Richard Gelfond. “We were known more in 2022 and 2023 for superhero movies and sequels. This year, we did a lot more in horror and family films. Three of the four biggest animated films in our history were this year, which I don’t think is a coincident. The public’s attitude is expanding to the kind of films they like to see in Imax.”

He suggests that “more diversified content would help insulate theaters from some Hollywood changes.”

Exhibitors have, in fact, been turning to alternative content to populate their screens during the slower months. “Kill Bill” or “Back to the Future” re-releases or “Jaws” anniversary screenings have helped Alamo, for one, pace 5% ahead of the industry’s year-over-year returns. But cinema operators are keenly aware that oldies aren’t going to keep the lights on by themselves. They need Hollywood to supply the kind of new releases that turn multiplexes back into the epicenter of culture.

“I would like to think that studios and distributors are looking at the trends and seeing that original, fresh stories are working,” says Sherrill. “So don’t just give me 20 more movies. Give me 20 more of the stuff that’s meaningful for people.”

Will those type of films fill marquees in 2026? This year, they certainly didn’t.

A flurry of activity accompanied the official establishment of the island’s tariff and tax exemptions - but will the frenzy last?

A customs scheme covering the entirety of Hainan, China’s southern island province, appears to have triggered a surge in consumption since its inception last week, with the province’s tourism hub Sanya recording more than 500 million yuan (US$71.25 million) in duty-free sales over five days.

Analysts cautioned, however, that the greater significance of the policy lies less in short-term spending boosts than in whether Hainan can diversify its economy beyond its previous reliance on real estate and establish higher-value growth drivers to rival established consumption hubs Singapore and Hong Kong.

From December 18 to 22, Sanya logged a combined 535 million yuan in duty-free sales, with daily turnover exceeding 100 million yuan for five consecutive days. This was a year-on-year increase of more than 50 per cent, pushing the city’s cumulative duty-free sales for the year past 20 billion yuan, according to the Sanya Municipal Bureau of Commerce.

“Hainan has the potential to grow into a globally influential leisure destination, supported by strong policy incentives such as visa-free access and duty-free shopping, as well as solid physical infrastructure,” said Li Yingtao, a partner at the Shanghai-based consulting firm MCR.

“In the near term, Hainan is well positioned to capture some high-end consumption that would otherwise flow to Hong Kong or Singapore.”

The city’s duty exemptions now cover most categories associated with international retail travel, including cosmetics, fashion, electronics, jewellery, food and other lifestyle products. To further stimulate demand, local authorities have also rolled out consumption vouchers spanning duty-free shopping, retail outlets and dining.

Smartphones and gold items have emerged as top sellers.

Social media posts showed long queues outside Apple stores in Sanya after the adoption of the new customs regime. In Hainan, the most expensive variant of the iPhone 17 costs 2,140 yuan less than the phone’s official retail price on the mainland, a nearly 12 per cent discount.

The Mate X6 from domestic telecommunications giant Huawei Technologies has also proved popular, with combined discounts of about 1,700 yuan, but state media have reported many of the company’s models have already sold out on the island.

Gold jewellery has likewise seen a surge in demand. On Chinese social media, many engaged couples have shared accounts of flying to Hainan specifically to buy wedding bands and other pieces, combining vouchers and promotions to save tens of thousands of yuan in some cases.

Analysts said the transformation of Hainan into a free-trade hub exempt from nearly all tariffs, combined with the tropical island’s appeal as a travel destination over the coming winter and its extended holiday season, is set to further boost demand for trips, reinforcing the province’s standing as a tourism destination while helping to fulfil its broader ambitions.

Flight bookings to Hainan have already surged. Reservations for trips around the New Year holiday rose by 19 per cent year on year for the provincial capital Haikou and 51 per cent for Sanya, according to online travel agency Qunar, while bookings around the Lunar New Year holiday next February jumped 130 per cent for Haikou and 80 per cent for Sanya.

Inbound travel has also picked up, with international flight bookings to Haikou rising by more than 40 per cent year on year during the period from Christmas to New Year’s Day, and more than doubling during the next Lunar New Year.

However, analysts and tourists said Hainan still has gaps in service depth and professionalism compared with established tourism hubs such as Singapore, the US island state of Hawaii and Bali, Indonesia.

Air connectivity also remains relatively thin, though direct international routes to Europe, the US and Southeast Asia are likely to expand as the island establishes itself as a destination of note.

While it has absorbed some high-end consumer spending in the short term, Li of MCR said Hainan is unlikely to usurp Hong Kong or Singapore as a global trade centre any time soon, as both its rivals continue to hold clear edges in finance and professional services, advantages underpinned by deeper legal frameworks, more mature institutions and stronger talent pools.

“Over a much longer horizon, Hainan could begin to exert competitive pressure if it succeeds in attracting talent and executing a broader economic transition,” Li added.

“That means moving away from property dependence, upgrading tourism and consumption and building higher-value manufacturing, trade processing and re-exporting capabilities, supported by institutional incentives such as the 15 per cent cap on individual income tax.”

Analysts said the Hainan Free Trade Port framework – which, among other policy incentives, allows goods containing imported materials to enter the rest of the mainland tariff-free under certain conditions – could also enable the island to serve as a processing and transit hub for higher-end industries, potentially reshaping parts of the regional supply chain.

Just like past tech booms, the latest frenzy has produced a group of billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups.

The artificial intelligence boom has turned high-profile billionaires like Jensen Huang, the chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, and Sam Altman, the chief executive of the ChatGPT maker OpenAI, into even richer billionaires.

It has also produced a crop of new billionaires — at least on paper — from smaller start-ups. These individuals may become future Silicon Valley power brokers like the wealthy executives created by past tech booms, including the late-1990s dot-com frenzy, who then invested in or helped steer later waves of technology.

The new A.I. billionaires include Alexandr Wang and Lucy Guo, who founded Scale AI, a data-labeling start-up that received a $14.3 billion investment from Meta in June. The founders of the A.I. coding start-up Cursor — Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger and Arvid Lunnemark — entered the billionaire ranks when their company was valued at $27 billion in a funding round last month.

The entrepreneurs behind Perplexity (an A.I. search engine), Mercor (an A.I. data start-up), Figure AI (a maker of humanoid robots), Safe Superintelligence (an A.I. lab), Harvey (an A.I. legal software start-up) and Thinking Machines Lab (an A.I. lab) are in the nine-figure club as well, according to the companies or people close to the start-ups, as well as data from the start-up tracker PitchBook and news reports. Most reached that point after the valuations of their privately held companies soared this year, turning their company stock into gold mines.

Jai Das, a partner at Sapphire Ventures, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, likened the new billionaires to the railroad barons of the 1890s Gilded Age who leaned into that era’s technology boom. But he cautioned that their wealth could be fleeting if the start-ups did not live up to their promise.

“The question is which of these companies is going to survive,” Mr. Das said. “And which of these founders can actually end up really being true billionaires and not just paper billionaires.”

Here’s what to know about them.

Elon Musk’s journey to billionaire took years. After becoming a millionaire when one of his early ventures was sold to eBay in 2002, the tech entrepreneur did not turn into a billionaire until he was leading the electric carmaker Tesla and had started the rocket company SpaceX.

In contrast, most of the new A.I. billionaires founded their companies less than three years ago after OpenAI released ChatGPT, and then saw investors rapidly bid up the values of their firms.

Mira Murati, 37, a former top executive at OpenAI, announced her A.I. start-up, Thinking Machines Lab, only in February. By June, the start-up had hit a $10 billion valuation without releasing a single product. (The start-up, which declined to comment, has since released one.)

Ilya Sutskever, 39, another former top OpenAI executive, launched Safe Superintelligence in June 2024. The company has not unveiled a product but is valued at $32 billion after raising $2 billion this year, according to PitchBook. Safe Superintelligence declined to comment.

Brett Adcock, 39, the chief executive of Figure AI, founded the company in 2022. His net worth stands at $19.5 billion, Figure AI said. Aravind Srinivas, 31, the chief executive of Perplexity, also created his company in 2022; it is valued at about $20 billion, according to PitchBook.

Perplexity said Mr. Srinivas was not focused on his wealth and “prefers to live modestly,” adding that the company is searching for wisdom, which “is far more important than the search for wealth.”

(The New York Times has sued OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The companies have denied the claims.)

The wealth accumulation has been especially rapid this year. Harvey, which is based in San Francisco, raised money in February, June and this month. Each time, the company’s valuation soared, reaching $8 billion from $3 billion in February. That catapulted the wealth of Harvey’s founders, Winston Weinberg and Gabe Pereyra.

Mr. Weinberg, 30, who lives with Mr. Pereyra, 34, and a third roommate, said he did not think much about riches. “Yeah, sure it’s in the billions, but it’s on paper,” he said.

The exception to the speed is Scale AI, which grew relatively quietly until Meta’s investment.

Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, tapped Scale AI’s Mr. Wang, 28, to be his chief A.I. officer. Ms. Guo, 31, left the start-up in 2018 and has started a venture capital firm and Passes, a platform for influencers to make money from their content.

Scale AI and Meta declined to comment, and Ms. Guo did not respond to a request for comment.

Youth is a hallmark of tech booms. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were in their 20s when they founded Google in 1998. Mr. Zuckerberg was 19 when he founded Facebook in 2004.

The latest A.I. billionaires are also youthful. “Like the original Gilded Age and like the dot-com boom, this A.I. moment is making some very young people very, very, very rich, very quickly,” said Margaret O’Mara, a history professor at the University of Washington who focuses on the tech economy.

Among them are the 22-year-old founders of Mercor. Brendan Foody, the chief executive, dropped out of Georgetown University in 2023 after founding the company with two high school friends, Adarsh Hiremath, the chief technology officer, and Surya Midha, the chairman. Mercor, which declined to comment, was valued at $10 billion in an October funding round.

Other young billionaires include Mr. Truell, the 25-year-old chief executive of Cursor, and his co-founders, Mr. Asif, Mr. Sanger and Mr. Lunnemark, who are also in their 20s. They met at M.I.T. and graduated in 2022. A $2.3 billion funding round last month brought the valuation of their start-up — also known by its parent company’s name, Anysphere — to $27 billion, according to PitchBook.

Cursor did not respond to requests for comment.

The A.I. boom has elevated mostly male founders to billionaire status, a pattern in tech cycles. Only a few women — such as Ms. Guo and Ms. Murati — have reached that wealth level.

The A.I. craze has amplified the “homogeneity” of those who are part of this boom, Dr. O’Mara said.

To celebrate the 130th anniversary of its patterned canvas in 2026, the luxury giant will unfurl three special collections — plus windows, campaigns and pop-ups.

This is not the Monogram’s first rodeo.

Louis Vuitton celebrated the centenary of its brown and gold patterned canvas back in 1996, famously conscripting designers including Helmut Lang, Romeo Gigli, Vivienne Westwood, Azzedine Alaïa and Sybilla to design bags or travel pieces.

It did an encore in 2014 when the French luxury goods giant gave carte blanche to several iconoclasts — among them Karl Lagerfeld, Frank Gehry and Cindy Sherman — to try their hand at bags and luggage in the supple, yet highly resistant material.

Now as the Monogram marks its 130th anniversary, Vuitton is plotting a full-court press throughout 2026 around the motif’s origins, when the founder’s son Georges deposited a sample square at The Paris Archives in 1896.

“It was really that act in 1896 that created the brand that it is today,” marveled Pietro Beccari, Vuitton’s chairman and chief executive officer. “Yet there’s always more to discover, and more to do around this canvas. It’s like a holy grail of Louis Vuitton.”

From Jan. 1, all Vuitton windows globally will display reproductions of the original Monogram patent, complete with its sealing wax, and reproductions of the historic wooden Monogram stamp. Inside, Vuitton boutiques will showcase special-edition anniversary collections, backed by dedicated campaigns, pop-ups and other animations and surprises.

“I think people are seeking meaning, and reasons to adhere to a brand,” Beccari told WWD. “They want to know more about the product, what’s behind, what is the savoir-faire.”

The anniversary “gives us the chance to explain one of the symbols of Louis Vuitton to new generations, and give a reason for buying this product,” he said in an interview. “They should know they can pass it to the next generation, and that it will always represent one of the most luxurious brands in the world.”

To be sure, the Monogram is synonymous with many of Vuitton’s most iconic and perennially popular bags, including the Speedy and Keepall styles, both created in 1930; the Noé, designed in 1932 to carry five bottles of Champagne; the Alma in 1992, considered a tribute to Parisian architecture, and the roomy Neverfull tote in 2007, which has developed its own cult following and is engineered to carry up to 200 pounds of stuff.

“I think these names are mythical and they were all born dressed in the canvas that we are speaking about,” Beccari said.

Vuitton has readied three anniversary ranges, all of which arrive in stores early in 2026:

• The Monogram Origine line of handbags and trunks interprets the original 1896 pattern in a linen and cotton blend jacquard weave. This new coated canvas comes in the historic dark brown color and four pastel shades. According to Vuitton, the collection also draws inspiration from the cover of a 1908 client register.
• The VVN collection takes the pale-colored, natural cowhide that always trims Monogram bags and makes it the main material, which develops a unique patina over time and use. The Monogram appears on detachable name tags and a jacquard inner lining of the bags. (VVN is the acronym for the French term vache végétal naturel.)
• The Time Trunk collection employs trompe-l’œil printing to reproduce the textures and metallic details of historic Vuitton trunks on its Speedy 30 Soft, Noé and Alma GM bags. The bags were first unveiled at the fall 2018 show of Nicolas Ghesquière, artistic director of Vuitton’s women’s collections, and reprised for fall 2024 when the French designer celebrated a decade at the house.

Beccari called that pioneering 2001 collaboration “like an act of genius because it opened up a world of possibilities.”

Indeed, all subsequent designers at Vuitton have given their own twist to the Monogram. Ghesquière, for example, introduced a “Dune” version inspired by the colors of sand, and Kim Jones a vivid red take as part of a 2017 collaboration with Supreme.

Virgil Abloh experimented with kaleidoscopic treatments plus transparent and eco-felt versions, while Pharrell Williams introduced a leather Speedy in primary colors that retails for around 9,250 euros — and has spawned a waiting list of more than 5,000 names.

“Everybody falls in love with this symbol of Vuitton and the catwalk is always a volcano of inspiration that makes it come alive, and stay young and modern,” Beccari enthused.

In 2017, the brand introduced Monogram Eclipse canvas, described as a “masculine interpretation” in deep graphite and black tones.

Vuitton’s high-profile collaborations with artists including Takashi Murakami, Yayoi Kusama and Richard Prince have all touched on the Monogram, but the 2026 celebration gives the floor to heritage elements, durability and functionality.

At Vuitton’s large-scale “Visionary Journeys” exhibition in Osaka over the summer during the World Expo, Beccari said the Monogram room — displaying the original square alongside historic trunks and modern iterations — was one of the most popular. “It gave us the idea to reinforce this link,” he said.

The origins of the Monogram and its flower-like symbols remain “mysterious,” according to Beccari. “Is it Gothic? Is it from Venice? Is it from Japan? Is it from the kitchen tiles in Asnières (the former Vuitton family home)?”

To be sure, Georges Vuitton dreamed up the Monogram canvas for trunks as “something that nobody can copy,” since the previous stripes and Damier checks had been widely imitated, Beccari related.

“In any case, it was done just to differentiate himself from the others, and it ended up being one of the most copied things in the world,” he said, chuckling at the paradox.

(That said, Vuitton takes counterfeiting seriously and about 50 people work to combat fakes, whose production is frequently associated with money laundering and child labor, Beccari noted.)

The back-to-the-roots approach of the anniversary year spills over into one of Vuitton’s forthcoming campaigns, which will spotlight vintage Monogram bags, exalting the character and patina they acquire after frequent use. It breaks on Jan. 1.

“Bags that lived, that have a story to tell,” Beccari said. “That’s a peculiarity of Louis Vuitton: Vuitton is not a bag that you put in your cupboard, or add to your collection, or something you wear once in a while. It’s a bag that you wear every day and that you have the pleasure to preserve and hand down to the next generation.”

The pre-loved bags in the new ads were retrieved from Vuitton’s archives, and care and repair centers, which are popular. “We are talking about hundreds of thousands of pieces that we repair every year,” Beccari said.

A second campaign, due out in February, is to focus on celebrities who are devotees of Monogram bags, but their names are still under wraps.

Vuitton expects its special-edition Monogram products to be collectible, and each bag comes with a name tag that doubles as a cardholder, and an inside label demarcating it as part of an anniversary collection.

The brand has also applied its Monogram Origine pattern to three of its fragrances, along with two travel cases in pink and blue colors.

Three pop-ups dedicated to Monogram are to debut Jan. 8 in Shanghai’s Xuhui district, at Vuitton’s SoHo store in New York City, and at its Dosan location in Seoul. More pop-ups are to be unveiled from March, along with other “surprises,” Beccari teased.

The retailer has raised money through sale-leaseback deals in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, but sources wonder if they’ll be enough to save the company.

Saks Global’s make-or-break moment has come.

The struggling luxury department store company has a more than $100 million interest payment due on Tuesday, which is necessary to keep it current on the $2.2 billion in debt it took on to buy Neiman Marcus Group last year.

The company might have that cash on hand after recent sale-leaseback deals for the Neiman Marcus stores in Beverly Hills and San Francisco, but sources closely watching the situation wonder if that money will ever get to bondholders.

Instead, financial experts said Saks Global might use those funds to help see it through a bankruptcy filing — although the situation seems to be fluid and the company could also come up with an 11th-hour Hail Mary, like the sale of a stake in Bergdorf Goodman or some more real estate deals.

Sources who have kept in regular touch with Saks Global executives say they have gone into relative radio silence in recent days.

The sale-leasebacks show that there is still value wrapped up in the business, however.

A Saks Global spokesperson said: “We made the strategic decision to sell the land beneath the Neiman Marcus Beverly Hills store and enter into a long-term lease with the new owner. This opportunistic real estate transaction does not impact our day-to-day operations. We remain committed to serving our loyal Beverly Hills customers.”

The spokesperson gave the same statement relating to the Neiman Marcus store in San Francisco.

Saks Global is said to have signed 99-year leases with the new owners.

But 99 years is a long time and the industry — from brands owed money to factors who are not approving new orders to competitors looking for any new advantage — is watching for what happens in the near term.

Typically when companies miss interest payments on their bonds there’s a five-day grace period to make the payment, with a few more weeks after that to find some some solution with bondholders.

In the meantime, Saks and Neiman Marcus stores are open for business, but struggling. The big brands that retain ownership of the inventory through concession shops are said to be doing solid business with the retailer because the shops are fully stocked. But smaller and niche-y vendors have been reluctant to ship the company this year given the retailer’s slowness in paying, leaving it without enough on its floors to regain sales. Saks Global is said to owe vendors anywhere from $500 million to $800 million.