Bernard Arnault orders $650,000,000 megayacht that's somehow even bigger than Bezos’ Koru
Louis Vuitton (LMVH) CEO Bernard Arnault has reportedly commissioned a $650,000,000 megayacht that will dwarf famous boats like Jeff Bezos’ Koru.
At the pinnacle of the yacht industry sit Amazon owner Bezos and Google CEO Sergey Brin, whose Koru and Dragonfly set the bar for lavish design and pure size.
But more and more billionaires are becoming weary of the noisy life in the mainland, and are looking to escape to the waters.
One of those is Bernard Arnault, who has now reportedly ordered a 470-foot-long $650M megayacht that would dominate the water unlike anything else.
Bernard Arnault wants his megayacht crown back by ordering a new $650M boat
Having reigned as the richest man on the planet on multiple occasions, Bernard Arnault puts his luxury expertise to good use when it comes to boats.
Back in 2015, he ordered Symphony, which was one of the largest vessels of its generation.
Wowed boating enthusiasts of the Monaco coastline have snapped the magnificent six-deck superyacht as the business guru tuned into major sporting events.
But having been overshadowed by a handful of new yachts, he’s reportedly called his old pals at Feadship and commissioned a new boat that is twice as large.
How does this compare to Koru and other gigantic yachts?
All we know about the new Bernard Arnault boat is that it is rumored to be 470 feet long and will likely increase in height, compared to Symphony, with at least another two decks.
It’s set to be between 10,000 and 12,000 gross tonnage (GT), which hints at it being a similar size to the $800M Dilbar.
To put that into perspective, Jeff Bezos’ Koru currently sits at 417 feet in length, meaning Arnault’s will be nearly 15 percent bigger.
As for what will happen to Symphony, there are two options.
Bernard Arnault could go down the Gabe Newell route, whose old yacht will now play as a support vessel for his new $300M nerdy paradise.
Or, as Lawrence Stroll has done, he could look to sell it to make room for the new boat.
Reform UK plans to use £500bn of council pension assets to invest in British businesses
Deputy leader hails ‘huge opportunity’ to create sovereign wealth fund, but experts give sceptical response
A Reform UK government would consolidate local council pension schemes into a near-£500bn “sovereign wealth fund” that it claims would boost economic growth by investing in British businesses.
Reform deputy leader Richard Tice said it would be one of the top eight largest funds in the world and could generate an annual surplus of between £20bn and £30bn a year.
“It will have a strategic British growth mandate,” he said, as he accused the existing local government pension scheme of being “disparate, uncoordinated” and having “no vision”. “This is such a huge opportunity, it’s an absolute game-changer.”
The LGPS in England and Wales has about £402bn in assets, with Scotland and Northern Ireland having another £78bn at the end of March last year.
The scheme is split across 98 administering authorities in the UK, 86 of which are in England and Wales. These 86 are in the process of merging their assets after the Labour government announced last year that all of their assets must be in one of six “pools” by this April. Council funds in England and Wales have 17 per cent of their assets invested in the UK at present.
Tice gave the example of British Steel as a business the fund could invest in, helping to refurbish its blast furnaces.
Tice used his press conference on Tuesday — his first as spokesperson for business, energy and trade — to announce that a Reform government would repeal all net zero targets, zero-emissions vehicle mandates, employment rights and property rental rules introduced by the current Labour government. He also announced that Reform would introduce “heavy tariffs” on Chinese cars.
As part of the pension plans, Reform said that new workers joining the LGPS would be offered a defined contribution pension, with the defined benefit element to be closed to new members. The pensions of existing council fund members would be unaffected.
Tice said this would enable councils to cut existing employer contributions to about 10 per cent, “saving councils millions and millions every year”. The average employer contribution in the LGPS is about 21 per cent of pay.
The announcement echoes a similar proposal made by the Tony Blair Institute in 2023, which advocated consolidating the UK’s “fragmented” pensions landscape into a so-called superfund to drive investment in British infrastructure and industry.
Tice said the scheme was underperforming “hugely” by “£8bn to £10bn per year”. But pensions experts were sceptical that Reform’s proposals would necessarily deliver better returns by focusing more on UK investments, pointing to the scheme’s average annualised returns over the past decade of more than 7 per cent. “This is not a free lunch,” said Sir Steve Webb, a former pensions minister and now a partner at consultancy LCP. “If this turns out to generate lower returns . . . council taxes would have to go up.”
Increasing the fund’s allocation to equities could also make the performance more volatile, leading to bigger changes in the level of contribution rates that are set every three years.
Webb added that the impact of putting new joiners into a defined contribution scheme would be “an incredibly slow burn”.
John Ralfe, an independent pensions consultant, said that LGPS “cannot become a SWF, whatever Reform may think” because it had made promises to pay pensions to its members.
Investors seek shelter from AI rout in asset-heavy stocks
Energy and utilities emerge as big winners from fears that artificial intelligence will upend software industry
Utilities, energy and materials stocks have emerged as winners from the AI anxiety gripping Wall Street, as investors fleeing sectors seen as vulnerable to disruption seek businesses with tangible assets.
The S&P 500 software sub-index this week tumbled to its lowest level since the immediate aftermath of President Donald Trump’s “liberation day” tariff announcement last April, losing $1.2tn in combined market capitalisation in less than a month.
The sector has borne the brunt of worries that new AI tools could upend entire industries. Those concerns have also rocked wealth managers and insurers.
But the S&P 500 utilities sub-index is up 9 per cent, while energy stocks have gained 23 per cent, as sectors with substantial physical assets find themselves suddenly back in vogue after years of underperformance relative to asset-light tech business.
“All these capital-light businesses that could scale historically are also the ones that could be easily disrupted,” said Guillaume Jaisson, European strategist at Goldman Sachs.
On the other hand, “capital-heavy businesses are difficult to replicate, it takes time”, Jaisson said.
“They are more insulated from the risk around AI,” he added, labelling the buoyant sectors as “Halo” stocks: heavy asset, low obsolescence.
The tech-heavy Nasdaq index rose 0.8 per cent in early trading on Tuesday as stocks steadied after Monday’s losses.
US software companies Intuit, AppLovin, Gartner and Workday have all dropped at least 40 per cent so far this year. Power company Generac Holdings and glassmaker Corning Inc are among the S&P’s biggest gainers this year so far. Oil groups Exxon and Chevron are up more than 20 per cent in 2026.
In Europe, the biggest stock market winners this year have been defence and energy sector supplier Kongsberg Gruppen and oil tanker shipping company Frontline Plc, both rising about 50 per cent since the start of the year.
Goldman launched a new European basket of “capital intensive” stocks on Tuesday, with its constituents up 12 per cent so far this year, compared with a 6 per cent gain for the broader Stoxx Europe 600. The bank’s “capital light” basket, on the other hand, is down 2 per cent this year so far.
Chipmakers, miners and heavy manufacturers have also led this year’s nearly 13 per cent gain by an MSCI benchmark for emerging markets.
Alex Temple, a credit portfolio manager at Allspring Global Investments, said the flash sell-offs were a symptom of investors crowding into sectors they did not fully understand, and then overreacting to predictions of AI disruption — such as the blog post from Citrini Research that sparked Monday’s software meltdown.
“It’s late-cycle behaviour, a lot of people will be invested in things that they don’t know a lot about,” Temple said, adding that the software selling had been driven by “Fobo”, or the “fear of becoming obsolete” due to AI advances.
Capital-light business models were particularly sought-after in the low interest rate environment that followed the global financial crisis, as investors focused on easily scalable business models at a time of easy borrowing conditions.
But a rise in interest rates since the pandemic has put pressure on these valuations at a time when investment has increased in capital-intensive sectors such as defence and infrastructure.
“The thing that has been working best for the last 15 years is now the most vulnerable,” said Gerry Fowler, head of derivatives strategy at UBS. “The avoidance of things at the moment centres around: is your business based on intangibles and intellectual property?”
Ex-Apple team launches Acme Weather, a new take on weather forecasting
The creators of Dark Sky, who sold their popular weather app to Apple in March 2020, are back with a new take on weather forecasting. The team recently announced the launch of their new app, Acme Weather, which they claim offers a better and more reliable forecast than the one they had at Dark Sky. The app will also offer a range of unique weather notifications, including fun ones like alerts about rainbows and beautiful sunsets.
Unlike typical weather apps, Acme Weather’s forecast is supplemented with a range of alternate predictions for better accuracy.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
Dark Sky co-founder Adam Grossman explains in an introductory blog post that the app’s homegrown forecasts will leverage different numerical weather prediction models, satellite data, ground station observations, and radar data, making its forecast fairly reliable.
However, the app will also feature additional forecast lines that show the other possible outcomes as gray lines on its graphs.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
“Forecasts are often wrong — it’s the weather, right? It’s one of the hardest things to predict,” Grossman told TechCrunch via a telephone interview. “And our biggest pet peeve with a lot of weather apps is you just get their best guess, and you don’t know how certain they are.”
Having an understanding of the alternatives helps people plan for big events, he noted.
“I find it most useful for winter storms, where, maybe the storm starts out in the morning, and you’re going to get snow, but maybe there’s also a possibility it holds out a little bit later — to the afternoon — in which case it’s rain,” Gross explained. “Being able to just see that right there on the timeline just gives you this intuitive sense of whether, do all the models agree, and you’re getting snow? Or do half of them say snow and half of them say rain?” he says.
This type of weather data could make for a valuable product, not just for consumers, but for other developers, too.
At Dark Sky, the team had offered its weather API to developers for a fee. After being acquired by Apple, the team worked on creating WeatherKit, the developer toolkit that provides access to Apple’s weather data on a subscription basis. Grossman said the team hasn’t yet decided if a developer API will be a part of Acme Weather’s offering.
Instead, Acme Weather is a $25-per-year consumer app, with a two-week free trial. This helps to cover the costs involved with pulling in the different weather models and resources, which can be expensive.
“Most of our time has been spent on building our own forecast — our own data provider, in a way. And this lets us do things like build multiple forecasts … [and] create any map we want, rather than having to rely on a third-party map provider,” Grossman noted.
At launch, the app offers a range of maps, like radar, lightning, rain and snow totals, as well as wind, temperature, humidity, cloud cover, and hurricane tracks.
Another feature, Community Reports, lets users share information about their current conditions to improve the app’s real-time weather reporting.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
While Dark Sky had become a favorite weather app because of its uncanny ability to predict when it would begin raining in your location, Acme Weather aims to improve on this and even have some fun.
The app includes built-in notifications for typical things, like rain, nearby lightning, community reports, government-issued severe weather alerts, and more. It’s also going to experiment with alerts like rainbow predictions or when you might see a beautiful sunset.
These will be available in a special “Acme Labs” section of the app, and Grossman said they’ll be conservative with their predictions, given the difficulty.
Image Credits:Acme Weather
Users will also be able to customize their notifications to focus on weather events they care about, like wind or UV index, or the possibility of rain over the next 24 hours.
Being able to try new ideas is part of what drew the team back to building an indie app, Grossman noted.
“I absolutely love Apple … but as a big company, it’s difficult to try weird, new, experimental ideals. If you have a billion users, mistakes are costly,” he tells TechCrunch. “There’s long software development cycles, there’s a lot of stakeholders, this idea of being able to try a bunch of things, I think, is interesting.”
Acme Weather is currently available on iOS. An Android version is planned.
The team is bootstrapped and includes co-founders Josh Reyes and Dan Abrutyn, also previously of Dark Sky. The small workforce includes both former Dark Sky team members and new hires.
Meta and AMD Agree to AI Chips Deal Worth More Than $100 Billion
The deal could result in Meta owning as much as 10% of AMD’s stock as the chip maker seeks to challenge Nvidia
Meta Platforms agreed to buy 6 gigawatts of AI computing power from Advanced Micro Devices in a deal worth over $100 billion.
The agreement includes warrants for Meta to buy up to 160 million AMD shares, or 10% of the company, for $0.01 apiece.
The deal involves AMD’s custom MI450 series chips, designed for Meta’s specific AI computing tasks, such as inference.
Meta META -2.81%decrease; red down pointing triangle Platforms has agreed to buy 6 gigawatts’ worth of artificial intelligence computing power from Advanced Micro Devices AMD -1.77%decrease; red down pointing triangle in a deal valued at more than $100 billion that could result in Meta owning as much as 10% of AMD’s stock.
The deal, announced by the companies Tuesday, represents a coup for AMD in its effort to challenge Nvidia NVDA 0.91%increase; green up pointing triangle in the market for selling graphics processing units, or GPUs—the microchips powering the AI boom.
Shares in AMD rose 14% in premarket trading.
Under Tuesday’s agreement, Meta will buy enough of AMD’s latest chips, known as the MI450 series, to power data centers using up to 6 gigawatts of computing power over the next five years. Each gigawatt of computing power means several tens of billions of dollars in revenue for AMD, the company said. Meta is expected to deploy the first gigawatt starting later this year.
As part of the arrangement, AMD has agreed to give Meta warrants to buy up to 160 million AMD shares—or roughly 10% of the company—for $0.01 apiece, as long as certain milestones are met.
The full stock award is conditional on a rise in AMD’s share price. Meta would only receive the final tranche of shares once AMD’s stock hits $600. It closed at $196.60 Monday.
With a limited number of large buyers of their chips, both Nvidia and AMD have been using novel financing mechanisms to lock key customers into long-term agreements to use their technology.
In October, AMD struck a deal with OpenAI that had terms almost identical to those of the Meta partnership. Both deals are examples of what critics have dubbed “circular financing,” an arrangement under which one company pays another company, which turns around and buys products or services from the first company.
As the AI boom has intensified and the sums of money going into these deals has skyrocketed, investors have been rewarding chip companies for every large purchase order they announce, even if they involve circular financing.
AMD Chief Executive Lisa Su said in a briefing with reporters ahead of Tuesday’s announcement that the deal is meant to counter competitors like Nvidia. As large customers such as Meta increase spending on AI infrastructure, AMD is seeking to lock them into using its chips for as long as possible.
“Meta has a lot of choices,” Su said. “I want to make sure that we are always a clear seat at the table when they think about what they need next.”
Last week, Meta said it would buy several million of Nvidia’s GPUs as well. That deal, which is expected to cost tens of billions of dollars, is meant to accelerate the Facebook and Instagram owner’s Meta Compute effort, under which the company is planning to increase capital spending on AI computing to develop large language models and further optimize its ad business.
Meta plans to deploy “tens of gigawatts” of data center computing power this decade and “hundreds of gigawatts or more over time,” Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a social-media post in January. The company spent $72 billion last year to build out AI data centers and plans to spend as much as $135 billion this year.
Meta attributed record revenue in the most recent quarter to AI and said it expected sales to rise even more sharply in the current quarter.
Tuesday’s deal is also one of the first examples of AMD selling what it describes as custom AI chips that are designed specifically for the computing tasks the customer wants to perform.
“This is an important step for Meta as we diversify our compute,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. “I expect AMD to be an important partner for many years to come.”
In the past, AMD has usually sold “off the shelf” GPUs, or general-use AI chips that aren’t tailored for any specific workload. Its latest AI chip, known as MI450, is easier to customize because it uses a design architecture that integrates several tiny, interconnected bits of silicon known as chiplets, rather than relying on a single, monolithic silicon die as its main processor.
Meta wants to optimize its AMD chips for inference, or the process by which an AI model responds to user queries. The arrangement with Meta thrusts AMD into more direct competition with Broadcom, the world’s biggest designer of the custom chips.
Novo Nordisk to Cut U.S. List Prices for Ozempic, Wegovy by Up to 50%
The reductions will take effect next January
- Novo Nordisk plans to cut U.S. list prices for Wegovy and Ozempic by up to half, effective Jan. 1, 2027.
- The price reductions aim to lower patient out-of-pocket costs and will escalate a price war with rival Eli Lilly.
- Both Ozempic and Wegovy will list for $675 a month, coinciding with new Medicare prices of $274 for a 30-day supply.
Novo Nordisk NOVO.B -2.92%decrease; red down pointing triangle plans to slash U.S. list prices for its popular weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic by up to half starting next year.
Under the changes, both Ozempic and Wegovy will list for $675 a month, effective Jan. 1, 2027. That is half of the current price tag for anti-obesity therapy Wegovy and a 34% cut for diabetes treatment Ozempic. The price cuts also will apply to pill versions of both injections, including one sold as Rybelsus.
The reductions escalate a price war with archrival Eli Lilly LLY 4.86%increase; green up pointing triangle in one of the fastest-growing, most hotly contested categories in pharmaceuticals.
Millions of patients are taking the so-called GLP-1 drugs, but price tags have deterred other potential customers either because their health plans aren’t covering the medicines or the out-of-pocket costs set by their plans are too high.
Novo Nordisk is cutting its drugs’ list prices for the first time, executives said, especially to reduce high out-of-pocket costs for patients who are enrolled in high-deductible health plans or pay coinsurance that is a percentage of list price.
“Our hope is that reduced prices will lead to better access and affordability,” Jamey Millar, Novo Nordisk’s executive vice president of U.S. operations, said in an interview.
The global market for GLP-1 drugs used for weight loss and diabetes is roughly $72 billion and expected to rise to about $139 billion in 2030, TD Cowen estimated.
The Danish drugmaker took an early lead over Eli Lilly, but Lilly is now the leader. Novo Nordisk, which recently launched the first pill version of a GLP-1 approved for weight loss, has been seeking to regain its advantage.
Both companies have tried to make it easier for potential customers to get the drugs, offering their medicines directly for sale through websites.
They have also sought to compete on price. Novo Nordisk and Lilly have been cutting net prices for popular GLP-1 weight-loss drugs by offering discounts to insurers and consumers, including through recent deals with the Trump administration.
For patients who are paying for prescriptions outside insurance, Novo Nordisk slashed cash prices to a range of $149 to $499 a month depending on the drug and dosage.
Meanwhile, Lilly sells its competing weight-loss drug Zepbound at cash prices ranging from $299 to $449, discounted off a list price of more than $1,000 a month.
Novo Nordisk’s list-price cuts won’t change its discounted prices, which are also available via a new government site, TrumpRx.
The January 2027 effective date of Novo Nordisk’s list-price cuts will coincide with the implementation of new, lower prices for the same drugs in the federal Medicare health-insurance program for the elderly.
The Medicare prices for Ozempic and Wegovy starting in January 2027 will be $274 for a 30-day supply. The Medicare prices resulted from negotiations last year between the Medicare agency and Novo Nordisk.