WSJ : Amazon Gets Its Biggest Hit Movie Ever With ‘Project Hail Mary’

Amazon Gets Its Biggest Hit Movie Ever With ‘Project Hail Mary’
Sci-fi adventure starring Ryan Gosling opens with $80.5 million in the U.S. and Canada

  • Amazon achieved its first major box-office hit with “Project Hail Mary,” which grossed an estimated $80.5 million in the U.S. and Canada.
  • After acquiring MGM in 2022, Amazon MGM Studios adopted a strategy of releasing around 15 films in theaters each year.
  • Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon MGM, said the studio invests in theatrical films for box-office revenue and Prime Video content.

A decade after it got into the movie business, Amazon has its first major box-office hit.

“Project Hail Mary,” a science-fiction adventure starring Ryan Gosling, opened to an estimated $80.5 million in the U.S. and Canada this weekend.

It’s the biggest-ever debut for a film produced by the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant and the biggest opening for any Hollywood film not part of an existing franchise since “Oppenheimer” in the summer of 2023.

Internationally, “Hail Mary” grossed $60.4 million, opening at No. 1 in nearly every market except China, where it came in behind Disney-Pixar’s animated “Hoppers.”

Amazon has tried multiple film strategies since adding streaming video to its Prime subscription service in the early 2010s. It first focused on prestigious independent movies such as “Manchester by the Sea,” then released big-budget movies directly online during the pandemic including Eddie Murphy’s “Coming 2 America.”

After acquiring the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film and TV studio in 2022, the renamed Amazon MGM Studios settled on an approach similar to traditional competitors like Universal and Warner Bros.: releasing around 15 films in theaters each year, including some with big budgets. It’s had a handful of modest successes and flops since then, but “Hail Mary” represents its most ambitious and expensive release, with a production budget of some $200 million.

Mike Hopkins, head of Amazon MGM, said the studio decided to invest in its own theatrically released films both to benefit from box-office revenue and because he wants them for Prime Video.

“If it was a really good movie, it’s going to do really well when it comes to a streaming service,” he said in an interview.

Buying the rights to theatrical movies from other studios, he added, has gotten difficult because of the proliferation of streaming competitors. “We’ve got a lot more people that want to buy those movies over the last four or five years than studios making them,” Hopkins said.

MGM acquired the rights to make “Project Hail Mary” in 2020 for $3 million, a person familiar with the matter said. That’s a big number for book rights in Hollywood, reflecting how badly studios wanted a new project from Andy Weir, author of the book behind the 2015 box-office hit “The Martian.”

“Project Hail Mary” started shooting in 2024 with Phil Lord and Chris Miller, known for “21 Jump Street,” “The Lego Movie” and “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” directing.

“Hail Mary” performed particularly well on IMAX screens, and exit polls showed its audience leaned male but included people of all ages. Opening-night crowds gave it an average grade of A, according to market research firm CinemaScore, suggesting word-of-mouth should be strong.

Because it’s new to the movie business, Amazon has few established franchises. Its biggest coming releases include June’s “Masters of the Universe,” based on the He-Man toy line popular in the 1980s, and a remake of “The Thomas Crown Affair” starring Michael B. Jordan that comes out next year.

Amazon is also developing the next movie in the James Bond franchise, which it partially acquired from MGM and locked down in a subsequent deal with the movies’ longtime producers. The studio has yet to cast the titular spy or set a release date for the movie, which will be directed by “Dune’s” Denis Villeneuve.

“This is the year where we have some of our biggest, boldest bets coming on and then we have a lot planned for ’27 and ’28 and ’29,” said Hopkins. “I really do think we’re in the first half of the first inning.”

WSJ : Peptides Are Everywhere. RFK Jr. Wants to Make Them Even Easier to Buy

Peptides Are Everywhere. RFK Jr. Wants to Make Them Even Easier to Buy
Injectable peptides are used for everything from weight loss to muscle recovery

  • HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is poised to take action that would allow compounding pharmacies to make certain peptides that are restricted by the FDA.
  • Kennedy has called himself a “big fan” of these alternative therapies and promised to end the “war on peptides.”
  • Some of the substances promise youthful skin and speedy muscle recovery, delivered in injectable form.

The substances, manufactured in China, come in tiny glass bottles with names like “Glow Stack” and “Wolverine Stack.” They promise youthful skin and speedy muscle recovery, delivered in injectable form. Influencers, celebrities and everyday people are raving about peptides, unapproved drugs driving a gray-market craze.

And they now have an ally in Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who wants to make peptides easier—and legal—to buy.

Kennedy is poised soon to take action that would allow compounding pharmacies to make certain peptides that are currently restricted by the Food and Drug Administration, according to people familiar with the matter.

Peptides make up a broad category that includes FDA-approved drugs, supplements and experimental treatments. Technically speaking, peptides are short chains of amino acids that act as messengers in the body.

But today “peptide” has become shorthand for an injectable drug that hasn’t undergone FDA approval. Sold primarily through an online gray market, where they are labeled “for research use only,” the vials can run from tens to hundreds of dollars apiece.

Influencers and podcasters have cast these drugs as a way to look and feel amazing.

“This is my skin before taking GHK,” said a 22-year-old living in Austin, Texas, who goes by the name of Greta Devereux on TikTok. She has shared a before-and-after with her 59,000 followers: Her face, once splotchy with some acne scarring, is now clear, bronzed and glowing. She credited it to GHK-Cu, one of the restricted peptides sold as a stand-alone as well as part of what is known as the “Glow Stack.”

Kennedy has called himself a “big fan” of these alternative therapies and promised to end the “war on peptides.”

In a recent interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Kennedy unveiled plans to lift restrictions on more than a dozen peptides that he claimed were illegally recategorized under the Biden administration. Kennedy appeared to be referring to roughly 17 peptides the FDA reclassified in 2023, citing “potential significant safety risks,” barring compounding pharmacies from making them.

Kennedy, who told Rogan he has used peptides himself “with really good effect” to treat unspecified injuries, didn’t offer further details on what steps he might take. At least two career staffers at the FDA whose work includes compounding drugs said they learned of the health secretary’s plans to take action on peptides only from his appearance on Rogan’s podcast.

People familiar with the plans said the administration’s goal is to let compounders make the banned peptides again and shut down a gray market of products that Kennedy said is a result of existing regulations. Some within the FDA are worried about increasing access to untested treatments.

Before the 2023 restrictions, pharmacies were able to compound peptides that had been prescribed by a physician. Since the FDA moved many of them to its “do not formulate” list, online sellers have cashed in on selling unregulated peptides, most of them from Chinese suppliers, in a gray market at steep discounts.

“Americans are at greater risk from the gray market than they will be if a state-licensed, legitimate compounding pharmacy is preparing these drugs,” said Scott Brunner, chief executive of the Alliance for Pharmacy Compounding, a trade group. “Let a prescriber use her medical judgment to treat a patient.”

Others said the idea that Americans would be safer getting unapproved peptides from compounders doesn’t make sense. “How is that different from saying, ‘If we don’t legalize raiding bank vaults people will just rob banks?’” said Shabbir Imber Safdar, executive director of the Partnership for Safe Medicines, a public-health coalition that focuses on supply-chain safety.

He said the regulatory filter on medicine exists to check for safety, efficacy and trustworthy manufacturing. “It’s not just that the substance itself has been deemed safe and effective,” he said. “It’s also that the source and supply chain are safe and effective.”

Last year two women became critically ill at an antiaging conference in Las Vegas after they received peptide injections at a booth run by a California-based doctor known for promoting alternative therapies. Although an investigation was unable to conclude exactly why the women became ill, regulators in Nevada fined the doctor, who wasn’t licensed in their state, along with two other people in connection with the incident.

Andrew Nixon, a spokesman at HHS, declined to share specifics about Kennedy’s plans but alluded to concern about people accessing peptides through the gray market. In the absence of FDA-approved products, Nixon said, the Trump administration wanted to ensure that alternative therapies “are made by licensed U.S. pharmacies, prescribed by a physician and produced under appropriate quality standards—not products from unregulated or foreign sources.”

One route the administration could take is exercising enforcement discretion, under which the FDA would refrain from penalizing the compounding of certain unapproved peptides when demand is high, safety risks are low or no alternatives are available. That idea has gained traction among at least some members of Congress, including Rep. Diana Harshbarger (R., Tenn.), a pharmacist. She wrote a letter to Kennedy in November urging the FDA to use enforcement discretion for certain peptides that she said were “critical to processes” such as metabolism, immune response and tissue repair.

Brunner of the pharmacy-compounding trade group said that would amount to “a temporary fix,” adding that a new administration would simply change the rules within a few years.

Rory Hester, a seller in Idaho, currently lists peptides for “research use only” on the website for his company, Crush Research. He said he doesn’t approve of anyone’s using his product for human use but declined to comment on whether the research being conducted included buyers using it on themselves.

He said some of his peers believe action by Kennedy could ultimately cause a boom in their corner of the industry.

“Middle Americans, all of a sudden, they are going to start learning more about peptides,” he said. “It’s going to legitimize peptides.”

WSJ : AI Is Rewriting the Old Rules of Google Search and SEO

AI Is Rewriting the Old Rules of Google Search and SEO
Winning the search war now depends less on keywords and more on what strangers are saying about you on Reddit

  • AI systems like ChatGPT are changing online search, shifting standards from traditional SEO rankings to a company’s visibility online, in places like review sites and forums.
  • Half of consumers polled in an August 2025 McKinsey survey seek AI-powered search engines, and experts are developing new tactics for AI visibility.
  • AI search standards are inconsistent, with models updating every 17 days on average, making visibility difficult to predict and measure for companies.

The rules of search are changing. And it’s forcing a lot of companies to ask themselves a fundamental question: How do we get noticed now?

For two decades, companies have relied on search-engine optimization, or SEO, to battle for customer attention online—tuning keywords and backlinks to climb Google’s rankings. Now, as AI systems like ChatGPT and Claude increasingly answer questions directly, visibility depends less on ranking first and more on being the source those systems trust.

Half of consumers polled in an August 2025 McKinsey survey specifically seek out AI-powered search engines. And by 2028, McKinsey projects, people will spend $750 billion on goods and services they find through AI-powered searches.

All of this means that companies may have to find new ways to get attention. Unlike Google, AI doesn’t have consistent search standards that companies can follow; in fact, it is very tough to tell what sites AI will use or recommend when answering a question.

The changing landscape also matters for the consumers who use search. For a long time, people’s experience of the internet has been shaped by SEO and the tactics companies use to boost their rankings. Now, the online experience may be affected by very different standards—how companies package their information for AI. And understanding those tactics will help consumers make more-informed decisions.

Experts are already cooking up new ways for companies to boost their AI visibility. Here are some of their recommendations.

Don’t abandon tradition
One caveat right off the bat: Although AI search is growing fast, many people are still using traditional search engines and clicking on links. And even when people do use ChatGPT or other large language models (LLMs), the chatbots are often doing good old-fashioned web searches under the hood—even if they aren’t giving priority to the same stuff that regular search engines do.

The bottom line is that the SEO fundamentals still matter. “This is not the end of SEO,” says Kelly Cutler, associate professor of digital marketing and visual communication at Northwestern University. “This is the next iteration of SEO.” Businesses should still make sure that their sites load quickly, for instance, and that they’re set up for easy indexing.

Talk to customers
At the same time, a lot of rules are changing. For instance, with traditional SEO, getting a single link from a very authoritative site meant more for ranking purposes than hundreds of mentions on other sites.

But experts say AI favors tons of customer reviews and comments, drawing heavily on sites like Reddit, G2 and Quora. For instance, Reddit is ChatGPT’s go-to source for consumer electronics, followed by Tom’s Guide and then Wikipedia, according to marketing-software company Semrush. (An OpenAI spokesperson says, “ChatGPT search is designed to provide people with timely, high-quality answers they find helpful. We surface relevant information from a range of sources, and we’re constantly refining our search indexing, ranking, and model behavior.”)


“AI search is inextricably linked to user-generated content, what people are saying about your brand,” says Andrew Warden, chief marketing officer at Semrush. “AI favors firsthand experience, specificity and continuously refreshed discussions. So the more activity that is happening around your brand, the more likely you are to be propelled into the conversation.”

To gin up that kind of visibility, companies are likely to engage more with customers online, like answering people’s questions, or encouraging them to leave honest reviews.

Structure matters
AIs focus on facts they can easily grab and include in their answers. So companies will try to give their sites a clear structure that makes information easy to identify.

For instance, traditional SEO strategies advise users to put plenty of subheads in their content. But AI chatbots want even more subheads, along with bulleted lists, FAQs and quick “TL;DR” summaries of the article’s main points.

Add details—even really obvious ones
When people search using AI, they get specific and conversational. They won’t tell AI just to look for a “black zip-up fleece”; they will tell it that they’re going hiking next week in the Smoky Mountains and need a slim-fitting fleece to keep them warm. So AI will favor sites that add exactly that kind of contextual information to product listings—even if it seems really obvious.

“It’s about putting yourself in your customers’ shoes and thinking about all the contextual information you could add,” says Rachel Klein, a senior vice president at digital-marketing agency Wpromote.

Different tactics for different AIs
In traditional SEO, techniques that worked for Google would generally also work for Bing, Yahoo and other search engines, and what worked for sites in one industry would usually work in others. AI throws all that out the window.

“All of the platforms have a different weighting of ingredients,” says James Cadwallader, co-founder and chief executive of Profound, a company focused on helping brands gain visibility in AI search. “Gemini pulls from YouTube results far more than ChatGPT does, for example.” Gemini also relies on a wider range of sources than others do, he says.

“We see demand for original perspectives, rich visual formats like video, and information that helps people learn something new,” says a spokesperson for Google, which runs Gemini. “Across Search and Gemini, we don’t aim to show content from any particular site or platform. Rather, we pull together a wide range of the most relevant insights and perspectives from sites across the web.”

Different chatbots also rely on different sites depending on the industry or type of search. “In e-commerce, social channels like Reddit play a huge role, but in fintech, we see [articles on a company’s own website] being successful,” Cadwallader says. So a financial firm could benefit from adding authoritative articles to its own website, while an e-commerce firm might be better off asking customers to leave reviews and start social-media conversations about the products.

Consider sponsored content
Traditional search engines usually give less weight to sponsored content: articles or blog posts that a company pays for but that look like regular editorial content. AI, though, seems to treat that information the same as other articles, Klein says.

“We’re seeing lots of instances where a chatbot is referencing information from sponsored content, but they aren’t disclosing that,” she says. “So there’s an opportunity for brands to influence the types of conversations that they’re in and what they’re associated with.”

Get ready to adapt
The old SEO world got shaken every time Google changed its search algorithm. Strategies that used to work suddenly brought massive drops in traffic. But AI models get updated far more frequently: every 17 days on average, according to Jesse Dwyer, chief communications officer at AI company Perplexity, and that pace will increase as AI models increasingly update themselves. So what works today may not work even a few weeks from now, let alone a few years.

“There were more model updates in 2025 than Google has had algorithm updates since 2018,” says Dwyer. “You can still game these systems at this point, but the rate of acceleration of AI makes it very, very difficult. The models are becoming so sophisticated so fast that this idea of being able to reverse-engineer them and game the results is just untenable and unrealistic.”

Embrace uncertainty
In traditional search, the rules of the game were simple, and success was easy to quantify—where your company showed up in search and how many people clicked on it. AI search, however, is much harder to measure. Many searchers get their answers from AI and never click through to a company’s website. And AI search results vary wildly.

In June and July of last year, Profound ran thousands of prompts through four major AI platforms. The company found that 40% to 60% of the domains cited in AI responses were completely different just a month later, even when they asked identical questions.

Dwyer at Perplexity adds that AI search pulls in much more information about the person asking the question, making search results highly customized for individual users and therefore difficult to predict or measure.

He advises companies to direct their optimization efforts at improving their products and the quality of the information they share, not on technical tweaks aimed at moving an elusive needle. “Marketers have the option to follow fake numbers or to focus on building great things,” he says. “Time will tell which of those strategies is better.”

FT : Donald Trump pushes Iran war to new phase of escalation

Donald Trump pushes Iran war to new phase of escalation
US president’s 48-hour ultimatum to open Strait of Hormuz follows series of tit-for-tat strikes by Tehran

The US and Israel’s war against Iran appeared to enter a new escalatory phase after Donald Trump threatened to strike Iran’s power plants if the Islamic republic did not open the Strait of Hormuz within 48 hours.

The US president said American forces would “hit and obliterate” Iran’s power plants, “starting with the biggest one” if Tehran did not allow vessels to transit through the blocked strategic waterway through which about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas normally passes.

Iran, which has already severely disrupted oil and gas supplies by attacking the US’s Gulf allies, warned it would respond to any such strikes by targeting vital infrastructure across the region, including energy facilities and water desalination plants.

Trump’s threat in a post on Truth Social late on Saturday came after an Iranian missile penetrated Israeli air defences to hit the city of Dimona, near Israel’s nuclear research centre and heavy-water reactor. A few hours later, a second salvo struck the nearby town of Arad, heavily damaging several multistorey residential buildings.

The strikes wounded more than 150 people, eight seriously, in one of the worst attacks in the nation since the US and Israel launched the war more than three weeks ago. Authorities in Israel said the second strike used a heavier warhead.

Israel’s military chief Eyal Zamir has said the war, which is entering its fourth week, is at its “halfway point” and will continue during the Jewish festival of Passover, which begins at the start of next month. The country’s defence minister, Israel Katz, said on Saturday that the US and Israel would “intensify” and “significantly increase” their strikes on Iran in the coming week.

Ali Vaez of the Crisis Group think-tank said the conflict had reached “the next stage of escalation”. “Neither side has shown they are ready to climb off the escalation ladder and it could get far worse,” he said. “Going after infrastructure is going to result in scorched earth throughout the region with disastrous consequences.”

Iran launched the attack on Dimona after it accused the US and Israel of attacking its Natanz nuclear facility, evidence that the Islamic regime is following up on its vow to retaliate with strikes against similar targets that are hit in the republic. Israel is the only nuclear-armed Middle East state, although it does not acknowledge its programme.

After Trump’s threat to bomb Iran’s power stations, Iranian military and political officials warned that the regime would strike energy infrastructure across the region, as well as water desalination plants that many Gulf states rely on.

“Immediately after our country’s electricity and infrastructure are struck, we will consider vital infrastructure, as well as energy and oil facilities throughout the region, to be legitimate targets and will destroy them in an irreversible manner,” Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, one of Iran’s top wartime leaders, said in a post on X.

Despite the US and Israel launching thousands of strikes on Iran, the regime has demonstrated that it retains the capacity to launch destructive missile and drone attacks against its neighbours.

After Israel attacked energy facilities in the republic’s South Pars vital gas complex last week, Iran swiftly launched a missile attack that caused extensive damage to Qatar’s main liquefied natural gas plants that will take up to five years to repair.

The attacks on QatarEnergy’s Ras Laffan complex involved sophisticated missiles that were manoeuvrable and able to evade US-made Patriot air-defence systems, according to an official briefed on the attack.

Iran also hit a water desalination plant in Bahrain this month, after it accused Israel of bombing a similar facility in the republic.

The UK said on Saturday that Iran fired two missiles at the US-British base in Diego Garcia, the Indian Ocean island about 4,000km from the Islamic republic, indicating that Iran can strike at a far longer range than expected.

The missiles failed to reach the base, with one failing in flight and the other shot down by a US warship, UK officials said.

Iran’s ability to slow the rate of traffic through the Strait of Hormuz and attacks on energy facilities throughout the oil-rich Gulf has already pushed crude prices to multiyear highs and triggered warnings of the worst global energy crisis in decades.

Alaeddin Boroujerdi, a senior member of Iran’s parliament, told state television on Sunday that any vessel passing through the strategic waterway was paying a $2mn fee. “A new regime is being implemented in the waterway,” he said.

Lloyd’s List Intelligence reported last week that a tanker operator had paid a $2mn fee in exchange for safe passage through the strait.

Admiral Bradley Cooper, the head of the US military’s Central Command, said on Saturday that Iran’s navy was “not sailing” and that “Iran’s combat capability is on a steady decline as our offensive strikes ramp up”. US and Israeli officials have repeatedly said Iran’s missile capacity has been severely degraded.

But Neil Roberts, head of marine and aviation at the Lloyd’s Market Association, said the majority of ship masters and owners still felt the risk to crew and vessel safety was too high to transit the strait.

Vaez, Iran expert at the Crisis Group, said that even if the US decided to seize Iranian islands in a bid to open up the strait or destroyed civilian infrastructure, the regime would “retain the capacity to retaliate in a way that externalises the conflict to the global economy”.

“This goes back to the Iran-Iraq war [in the 1980s], there’s thousands of people standing in line to fight, and they are rooted in contingency plans refined over decades,” he said. “When it comes to the Strait, these are less ad hoc reactions than longstanding playbooks Tehran has kept on the shelf for roughly 40 years.”

Majid Mousavi, head of aerospace for Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, said over the weekend that the country’s “new tactics and launch systems” would greatly shock the US and Israel.

Esfandyar Batmanghelidj, chief executive of the Bourse & Bazaar Foundation think-tank, said if the US and Israel did hit Iran’s power plants, of which there are hundreds, and cause serious damage, it “would constrain Iranian economic output for years to come”.

“But I don’t see how it impinges on Iran’s missile and drone attacks in the short term,” Batmanghelidj said. “In the medium term, there might be an impact on defence production, but Iran still has time to work through its stocks.”

FT : Spain’s angry young men turn to the radical right

Spain’s angry young men turn to the radical right
Young women still lean to the left but male youth is more rightwing than it has been for decades

Bullfighting was once the ultimate culture war issue for Spain’s radical rightwing Vox party and some of its older voters — a chance to defend the sanctity of tradition, spar with “woke” animal rights activists and cheer as the nation’s top matador dedicated his final bull to Vox leader Santiago Abascal.

But now that the populist, anti-immigration party is surging in the polls thanks to the support of young Spanish men, Vox leaders have found that old-school conservative preoccupations such as bullfighting have lost much of their importance.

Instead, Vox has learnt to exploit men’s deep-seated economic and social grievances, which have become the defining feature of a new strain of Spanish populism.

“I never liked politics, but I started to vote when I saw the state of the country,” said Vox supporter Adrián Domingo, 30, a metals salesman drinking beer with friends in Teruel, Aragón, near the town’s landmark bull statuette. “It’s a shambles.”

Young women still lean to the left, but there has been a striking shift among males: they identify as being more rightwing than any other cohort of young men in the past 40 years.

Many see themselves as victims of Socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and his policies on the economy and immigration.

While Sánchez celebrates Spain growing faster than any other major advanced economy in the past two years, young men complain that their personal hopes have been frustrated. Stoking their discontent are a band of populist rap artists and far-right podcasters and influencers.

Hermann Tertsch, a Vox member of the European parliament, told the FT: “Young people nowadays see the abyss that exists between reality and the official narrative. It’s an absolute insult.”


Domingo and his two drinking buddies have resentments aplenty: the soaring cost of housing; illegal immigration that they blame for rising crime; degraded public services; “feminist” laws that they say put women’s rights above men’s; and corruption, including allegations against Sánchez’s wife and two former right-hand men in his Socialist party PSOE (who all deny wrongdoing).

If a national election were held today, Vox — which voices exactly these concerns — would win more votes than any other party among men aged 18 to 34, according to CIS, Spain’s public pollster.

As for bullfighting, Domingo said he is a fan but cares more about it as a livelihood issue than a matter of culture. “A big part of Spain lives off livestock farming,” he said. “If you cut that off what happens? You make even more people poorer. I can understand that some people don’t like the bull getting killed. But the bull puts food on the table.”


His friend Francisco Royo, 31, who works for a moving company in Teruel, a remote town, said he paid little attention to politics previously. “But they’re just so bad in the Socialist party that, little by little, I’m getting more interested in screwing them over.”

Voting for Vox is the way to do that — and to surf a populist wave that is headed by US President Donald Trump and washing all over Europe. “We are part of a global cultural and political movement,” Tertsch said.

One of the movement’s leitmotifs is a hardline stance on immigration, which chimes with the views of Jorge Montero, 23, a Vox-voting student from an affluent neighbourhood of Barcelona.

He is troubled by a rise in immigrants “who don’t like our culture or are not able to get used to that culture”. He decries criminals in police custody whose “names are not Spanish” and endorses Vox’s call for tougher border controls and deportations. “It’s not a matter of being racist. It’s that you’re not complying with my laws,” Montero said.

Vox was founded in 2013 by defectors from the People’s party (PP), Spain’s mainstream conservative force, and its original supporters were well-off, Barbour-wearing urbanites and “young guys baling hay in the countryside”, as a party official put it. However, in the past year it has started winning over working-class men who would once have been on the left.

Since last December, Vox has won its largest vote shares on record in three regional elections, capturing 17 per cent across all age groups in Extremadura, 18 per cent in Aragón and, last Sunday, 19 per cent in Castilla y León.

The figures are short of those of its ideological cousins elsewhere: Reform UK is topping the polls on 26 per cent, the Rassemblement National in France is leading on 34 per cent, and Germany’s Alternative for Germany is on 24 per cent, according to Politico’s Poll of Polls. But the discontent of young men is giving Vox momentum.

Rubén Díez, a sociology professor at the Complutense university in Madrid, said: “There is a sense of malaise that is not only economic. It’s also emotional. That pushes people towards more radical views. They think that institutions and democracy are not working for them.”

Vox is in third place in the polls and unlikely to win the next general election due by August 2027. But if Sánchez loses, as today’s polls suggest, Vox will probably be the kingmaker that decides whether to help the PP reach a governing majority by forming a rightwing bloc.


Sánchez portrays Vox as a hateful threat to democratic values. When he led western opposition to the US-Israeli war against Iran last week, Abascal accused him of siding with “tyrannical ayatollahs” and jeopardising economic ties with the US. Sánchez replied that Vox was supporting “those who are setting the world ablaze then complaining about the smoke”.

A decade ago Spain’s politics were the other way around: the PP was running a corruption-riddled centre-right government, unemployment was more than 20 per cent and the political insurgents were radical leftists.

Pablo Iglesias led those leftists as the founder of Podemos, a party that is now on the margins. Vox today, he said, is part of the broader “fascist-isation of the right”. But the right is winning, he acknowledged, because it has adapted to the new rules of the game.

“In societies as media-saturated as ours, politics is an ideological struggle,” Iglesias said. “It’s to do with what is said and repeated on television and on social media. In this the far right has been absolutely masterful. It understands that what matters is the art of dominating emotions.”

The stars of rightwing populism online include Angie Corine, a rapper whose videos conflate opposition to Sánchez with flag-carrying patriotism, and ‘El Jincho’, a tattooed rap artist whose “Sánchez the dog” tune this month bore the premier’s insulting nickname and pilloried him over corruption.

There are podcasters such as Víctor Domínguez, known as Wall Street Wolverine, whose shows mix dismay over Muslim immigration with investment tips, and Daniel Esteve, a social media personality and entrepreneur who has evicted thousands of squatters and rails against Sánchez for cosseting them. Vito Quiles, a journalist who orchestrates impromptu confrontations with politicians and their supporters, is especially popular with young men.

Social media has also hosted bouts of nostalgia for the dictator Francisco Franco, although the sentiment is purely vicarious for those born long after he died 50 years ago. Memes suggest the economy was stronger and the streets were safer under the autocrat — doubtful assertions that also ignored his trampling of political freedoms and human rights.

Vox politicians bristle at the mention of the dictator. “It’s like saying that Reform voters are fans of Oswald Mosley,” said one, referring to the 1930s leader of Britain’s fascist party.

However, the popularity of Franco memes reflects something deeper, said Paco Camas, head of public opinion in Spain for polling firm Ipsos. “Surveys show a rise in the number of young people who believe that an authoritarian system can sometimes be better than a democratic one.”

Economic grievances remain crucial to Vox’s success. Although Spain’s jobless rate is below 10 per cent for the first time in 18 years, young people are angry that wages are stagnating while housing costs leap.

Adrián García, 20, a business student at a university campus in Teruel, said: “I can see that I’ll be working in two years and I still won’t be able to buy a house. I won’t be able to have children because I won’t be able to support them. For me, those things are fundamental.”

He is backing Vox, hoping that its pledges to slash “abusive” taxes and public sector waste will avert that bleak future. Its love of bullfighting, which he considers “unethical”, is incidental.

Last year, when the bullfighter Morante de la Puebla dedicated his last kill to Vox leader Abascal, he told him: “Thank you for everything you do for us.”

Under the gaze of the bull statue in Teruel, Domingo is not grateful just yet. “We’ll have to see how Vox gets on. But we’ve got to give them a chance,” he said. His friend Royo added: “They couldn’t do any worse than what we have now.”

FT : Global carmakers retreat en masse from electric vehicle plans

Global carmakers retreat en masse from electric vehicle plans
Rolls-Royce is latest of more than a dozen groups to change course as demand for petrol engines persists

At least 12 global carmakers are scaling back their electric vehicle plans amid stubborn demand for combustion engines and a rollback of supportive policies in both the US and Europe. 

Last week, Honda abandoned its plan to stop making combustion engine cars by 2040 and forecast $16bn in losses over the next two years from its EV strategy overhaul. Mercedes-Benz, Ford, Stellantis and Volvo Cars have also cut their all-electric targets.

Among luxury brands, BMW-owned Rolls-Royce is the latest to change course, announcing this week that it would continue making petrol engine vehicles beyond 2030.

Bentley, Lotus, Audi and Porsche have already scaled back plans to go fully or 80 per cent electric over the next decade, with many choosing to extend the availability of plug-in hybrid cars in their line-ups.

Volkswagen-owned Lamborghini also recently abandoned its plan to launch its first fully electric car, the Lanzador, by 2030. The model will be a plug-in hybrid instead. 

“The rejection rate of the full electric cars is increasing,” said chief executive Stephan Winkelmann. “The emotional part [of a Lamborghini] is the vibration of the car, how you steer, how you brake, and one of the biggest [factors in] the rejection of fully electric cars was the missing sound of the engine.”

Ferrari last year halved its 2030 EV production target but is pressing ahead with its first electric model, saying it aims to provide the same “driving thrill” whether the car is petrol, hybrid or battery-powered.

Chief executive Benedetto Vigna has repeatedly said Ferrari would not force fans to give up the familiar roar of its petrol engines.

Bentley, which is also owned by Volkswagen, said last year that it would continue selling plug-in hybrids beyond 2035, ditching its EV-only target.

The transition to EVs had been slower for luxury cars.

In 2023, Rolls-Royce became one of the first luxury brands to launch an all-electric vehicle, the Spectre. Ferrari will begin taking orders for its all-electric Luce in May, while Bentley will launch its first electric model next year — two years behind its initial target. 

“During the time since Rolls-Royce Spectre launched, the world has changed,” said Chris Brownridge, chief executive of Rolls-Royce Motor Cars.

Since Donald Trump came to power, the US president’s administration has ended federal tax credits for people buying EVs, cut spending on charging infrastructure and watered down vehicle emission targets. The EU has also weakened its emission targets.

Brownridge stressed that the company would push ahead with EV launches while continuing to sell cars with the traditional Rolls-Royce V12 petrol engine.

FT calculations suggest that changes to EV strategies, including cancelled car launches and investment plans, have cost the global car industry at least $75bn in the past year.

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Cover:
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Interview:
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Tech Trader:
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The Trader:
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Features:
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Europe:
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Emerging Markets:
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Commodities:
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Streetwise:
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