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In an interview, Tesla Chair Robyn Denholm suggests shareholders wouldn’t like a future without the company’s visionary leader

The thing Tesla TSLA 7.36%increase; green up pointing triangle is selling hardest these days is the idea that Elon Musk needs to be paid more.

And the woman handed that sales job—again—is Robyn Denholm, the chair of the electric carmaker.

She has already begun a campaign ahead of the Nov. 6 shareholder vote on what could be a $1 trillion pay package aimed at motivating Musk to lock in for the next decade. Normally a behind-the-scenes operator, she has been sitting for interviews and preparing to pitch major investors.

This is the second time in about 18 months that she’s essentially making the case Tesla needs to give Musk a giant payday to keep him happy—the implied threat being that he might bolt if investors don’t.

Denholm is trying to sell the new pay package as Tesla’s deliveries of vehicles are down for the year, a remarkable development for a growth-stock company. Its only all-new passenger vehicle in years, the Cybertruck, launched in 2023 and quickly flopped. And the company’s bet on robot cars is still in its infancy, having launched a limited robotaxi service in Austin, Texas, in June after roughly a decade of hype.

In a recent interview, Denholm conceded there’s investor fatigue around the matter of Musk’s controversial 2018 pay plan—the roughly $50 billion deal whose fate is tied up in a Delaware court. But she thinks the latest proposal is what investors want.

“I was getting a lot of questions from shareholders about what does the future look like, for Elon and the company,” she told me.

Denholm said she has tried to imagine a Tesla without Musk and suggests shareholders wouldn’t like it—especially at this crucial moment in pivoting from being a car company to one deploying artificial intelligence through robots.

“Our view is the opportunity ahead is far greater with Elon at the helm than without,” she said.

You wouldn’t expect her to say otherwise. After 11 years on the Tesla board, including nearly seven as chair, Denholm is a veteran of these sorts of proxy fights.

She was the tip of the spear in persuading Tesla investors in 2016 to approve the acquisition of a struggling solar-panel company where Musk was the chairman and largest individual shareholder. It was part of his vision at the time to make Tesla into a renewable energy company, but was seen by critics as a bailout for him.

Then last year, Denholm was again trying to persuade shareholders to reapprove that 2018 compensation plan after a Delaware judge rescinded it. That ruling was critical of Denholm for “lackadaisical” oversight of Musk.

She bristles at such criticisms, once telling a reporter that such claims were “crap,” only to receive a private rebuke from her 95-year-old mother, who I’m told, reads Denholm’s press closely.

“I know that I work for the shareholders,” Denholm said. She sees part of her role as making sure the board and Musk have a good relationship while also balancing her duty to protect shareholders’ interest.

On that metric, she’s delivering. During her tenure as chair, Tesla’s market value has soared to $1 trillion. She credits the 2018 pay package with helping motivate Musk.

Still, it is hard to imagine the board of another publicly traded company giving its CEO the free rein Tesla has given Musk, such as overseeing several other companies—even with his past successes.

“You can’t say ‘I want Elon but I don’t want this bit,’ or ‘Can you dial up this bit?’” Denholm said. “I lean into tough discussions…Sometimes he listens, sometimes he doesn’t, and that’s his prerogative.”

Denholm might technically be Musk’s boss, but like most people at the company, she clearly spends a lot of time trying to make him happy.

Last summer, it seemed like she had. Musk excitedly jumped up and down on stage at the June 2024 shareholder meeting, moments after they reauthorized his roughly $50 billion pay package following the judge’s original ruling.

Except that payday didn’t hold his attention long. Weeks later, he became consumed with President Trump’s re-election. Then he relocated to Washington early this year in a vain attempt to remake the government as some investors pleaded with him to spend more time on Tesla.

His mood about his day job at Tesla wasn’t helped when the Delaware judge in December again struck down the pay package.

In January, a special Tesla board committee, which included Denholm, began work on the compensation issue. They aimed to devise a way to cover the past plan and offer up a new one exciting enough to keep Musk engaged.

During negotiations, according to the company, Musk raised the possibility he “may pursue other interests and leave Tesla if he did not receive” assurances around achieving at least a 25% voting interest in the company and being paid his 2018 compensation plan in full. Musk also made clear, according to the company, that he was unwilling to accept restrictions on his involvement in other companies or his activities.

The special committee had its own wish list, including Musk’s assurance that his involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner. That would happen. Musk’s relationship with the Trump White House later blew up over spending legislation and other perceived slights.

“I’m not sure that he would say today that his stint in Washington was fabulous,” Denholm said. “I don’t think it was fabulous for the company, either.”

When talking about Musk’s extracurricular activities, Denholm can sound contradictory. On one hand, she says she isn’t concerned about the amount of time Musk spends on Tesla and sidesteps questions about whether she thinks his politics hurt the brand. “I’ve never, never been worried that he hasn’t devoted enough time to Tesla, even while he was in Washington,” she said.

Still, she said the board wants to get him “to devote as much of his time, energy and focus as we could get.” But the new pay plan doesn’t specify how much time the board wants.

Denholm doesn’t see it as a punching-the-time-card situation. “It’s not time that I measure,” she said, “it’s output.”

Shareholders could be forgiven for hoping that output involves selling the future and the products that will shape it, instead of Musk’s pay.

Skydance founder prepares bid just weeks after closing Paramount acquisition

The ink had barely dried on David Ellison’s $8bn deal to acquire Paramount before he set his eyes on another legendary Hollywood studio: Warner Bros.

Ellison, the 42-year-old founder of Skydance, is working on a bid backed by his father Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle and briefly the world’s richest man, to buy Warner Bros Discovery.

This comes just weeks after Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount from Shari Redstone closed on August 7 — a hard-won deal that followed battles with angry shareholders and a probe by the Federal Communications Commission. 

Paramount and Warner Bros, two companies founded in the silent film era that became giants during the cable TV boom, have lacked the scale to compete head-to-head with Netflix in the streaming era.

But Ellison has told colleagues that he can modernise both companies’ linear television, premium cable and film production by integrating them on a single technology stack. That would save money and improve the customer experience.  

A deal to buy Warner would add some of the biggest names in film and TV to Ellison’s budding empire, including the Warner Bros Motion Picture Group, HBO, DC Studios and CNN. It would also catapult Ellison to Hollywood’s highest echelon.

“If you own Paramount and Warner Bros, you’re definitely a mogul,” said Laurent Yoon, an analyst at Bernstein. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He’s putting his foot down and saying: ‘this is my turf’.” 

If Ellison’s plan is realised, it would be a rejection of the strategy pursued by Warner Bros chief David Zaslav and Comcast’s Brian Roberts, who want to spin off their cable TV units after years of secular decline due to cord-cutting. The Comcast cable spin-off, called Versant, is expected by the end of the year. Warner’s is slated for 2026. Warner Bros declined to comment. 

Ellison would pre-empt the Warner spin-off of the cable business and instead use it to feed content — which includes valuable sports rights on TNT and news from CNN — to Paramount’s streaming offerings. The approach would be similar to the strategy employed by Disney chief Bob Iger, who has said the traditional TV assets still generated cash and provided programming to Hulu, one of the company’s streaming services.

“The potential combination of Paramount+ and HBO Max would create an extremely formidable competitor in streaming,” said Jessica Reif Ehrlich, an analyst at Bank of America, in a research note. However, she said “integration and restructuring would likely take years to implement” if a deal were realised.

The Ellisons’ financing power is being augmented by Gerry Cardinale of RedBird Capital, who in addition to providing capital helped engineer Skydance’s purchase of Paramount. Cardinale is also playing a central role in forming a potential bid for Warner.

The move reveals an aggressive side to the younger Ellison, a movie fanatic who founded Skydance 15 years ago and co-produced blockbusters including Top Gun: Maverick and instalments of the Mission Impossible series. He also launched an animation business and hired John Lasseter, the founder of Pixar, to run it. 

It comes as Zaslav, who has overseen painful cost-cutting measures at Warner, has hailed the company’s comeback. Warner has had an exceptional year at the box office, with breakout hits including A Minecraft Movie, Sinners, Weapons, F1: The Movie and Superman.  

“Zaslav knows the company will be more valuable next year. He’s feeling extremely good,” said Yoon. “[Ellison] may want to do the deal preemptively.”

There has been talk in Hollywood about big consolidation in the industry since the streaming bubble burst in 2022, but studios have mostly focused on incremental moves such as cutting costs, creating “bundling” deals and adding advertising to streaming services.  

Now Ellison and Paramount could be close to firing the first shot. A Paramount move on Warner could put the studio in play, attracting other potential suitors such as Apple, Comcast, Amazon or even Netflix.  

Warner Bros has been associated with two of the worst deals of the 21st Century: AOL-Time Warner in 2000 and an acquisition by AT&T in 2018. The attraction in both cases was its world-class assets, which included the film studio that produced the Harry Potter films, along with HBO, DC studios and CNN. 

John Malone, a Warner shareholder and adviser to the board as chair emeritus, told the Financial Times in an interview last month that he saw consolidation between studios as inevitable.

“There has to be consolidation in the streaming world, particularly as it relates to the old media companies and their efforts [to get] some scale relative to the big tech guys who have decided to get in the business,” he said.

In a different political environment, a Paramount-Warner Bros merger proposal would raise significant antitrust issues. Combining CBS News and CNN under the same corporate roof would have tested the boundaries of media consolidation in previous administrations. 

However, the Trump administration may see greater leeway to a potential combination, said people close to the regulatory agencies. Lawyers said the Trump administration would probably focus less on structural overlap and more on whether Paramount committed itself to keeping CNN politically neutral.

That approach could ease approval risk if the Ellison group was seen as a stabilising owner rather than a partisan actor, said a former competition official.

Ellison recently appointed Kenneth Weinstein — who led a conservative think-tank and has advised President Donald Trump — as ombudsman of CBS News. And he has held talks with Bari Weiss, founder of the “anti-woke” media site The Free Press, about a potential deal that would give her a prominent role in the news operation. 

The prospect of a deal has film and TV executives buzzing, with one saying it has “released the animal spirits” after a downbeat period in the business. A studio boss, who declined to be named, said that a Paramount-Warner merger would pose the first big challenge to Netflix by bringing together a large streaming platform with a vast library of valuable exclusive content.

“They have had a free ride for too long,” he said of Netflix.

French companies’ borrowing costs fall below government’s as debt fears intensify

Lower yields for groups including L’Oréal, Airbus and Axa shake up typical order and signal Paris’s loss of ‘risk-free’ status

Borrowing costs for a number of French companies have fallen below those of their government, as investors’ worries over the country’s political crisis and growing debt pile upset the typical relationship between sovereign and corporate bonds.

Yields on the bonds of groups including L’Oréal, Airbus and Axa have sunk below those on French government debt of similar maturity in recent weeks, according to data compiled by Goldman Sachs, in a sign that investors may see them as a safer bet.

The moves have come as the resignation of François Bayrou this week as France’s prime minister, the second such resignation in less than a year, deepened investor concern over French bonds and pushed yields above those of Greece and close to Italy’s.

On Friday, Fitch Ratings downgraded France’s credit rating, citing the “increased fragmentation and polarisation of domestic politics”.

“Trading at par with French corporates signals that French government bonds are not a risk-free asset anymore,” said Karsten Junius, chief economist at Swiss private bank J Safra Sarasin. “They are trading more like an emerging market,” where corporate yields trading below the sovereign is more common, he added.

Sovereign borrowing costs typically act as a baseline for yields on corporate bonds. This pattern has occasionally inverted in the Eurozone — where German bonds serve as the true risk-free benchmark and other member states’ trade at an additional “spread” — particularly during the bloc’s debt crisis a decade and a half ago.

But the Goldman Sachs data shows that 10 French companies were recently trading at a negative spread to the French sovereign — which as one of the region’s biggest, wealthiest economies has usually enjoyed relatively low yields — the most in data going back to 2006. Across the euro area as a whole, more than 80 companies had bond yields below France’s, according to Goldman.

Fund managers pointed to a 2033 bond issued by luxury group LVMH, which in 2024 and early 2025 traded with a yield of about 0.2-0.6 percentage points above a comparable sovereign bond, but whose yield has been as much as 0.07 percentage points below this week, its widest gap since being issued two years ago.

Mike Riddell, a fund manager at Fidelity International, said the moves were “even more amazing if you consider that these corporate bonds are far, far less liquid than the sovereigns”, which he argued should equate to about 0.1-0.2 percentage points of spread.

The moves were less a reflection of default probabilities than the glut of government bonds hitting the market, Riddell argued, with governments “still issuing bonds like they’re going out of fashion, while corporates generally aren’t, at least not in public markets”.

The topsy-turvy market also reflects a dramatic rally in global credit that has taken US and European corporate spreads to their tightest against sovereign benchmarks in years. The rally in credit, accompanying a series of record highs in stock indices, reflects an exuberance in markets for riskier assets, which is fuelling fears of a bubble.

“You can rationalise tight corporate credit spreads as long as you want, but ultimately if and when we have another crisis or recession, then corporate credit spreads will widen aggressively,” said Riddell.

While France’s investment-grade corporates are performing well, further down the rating scale French businesses with large debt piles in sectors vulnerable to downturns in consumer spending, such as retail and telecoms, have seen their borrowing spreads widen.

The country’s riskier borrowers — such as retailer Casino as well as Colisee and Cerba, companies owned by private equity firm EQT — are increasingly becoming the targets of hedge funds and looking to scoop up high-yielding debt.

Robyn Denholm defends controversial package and says she has ‘tough conversations’ with billionaire about his political posts

Tesla chair Robyn Denholm has justified her decision to offer Elon Musk $1tn in stock, calling him a “unique” chief executive who must put in superhuman effort and achieve “impossible things” to receive the historic award.

Last week, Tesla’s board proposed a pay package that would grant Musk 12 per cent of the electric-vehicle maker’s shares if over the next decade he can octuple its valuation to $8.5tn, boost earnings 24-fold and sell millions more cars and robots. But achieving even half of the incremental targets could make him the world’s first trillionaire.

“In order to achieve the aspirational goals that we have put in place, he will have to put in time, energy and effort beyond what most humans can do,” Denholm said in an interview with the Financial Times in Palo Alto ahead of a critical shareholder vote on Musk’s pay in November.

“This is definitely not a lay up. It’s a very ambitious plan . . . he earns the right to have an unprecedented award.”

Denholm also defended the board’s hands-off approach to Musk’s divisive politics, emphasising his right to free speech and unique qualities she views as vital to Tesla.

“He’s a generational leader. We think that he actually has what it takes to deliver,” she said. “The board’s opportunity here is to motivate Elon to do impossible things.”

Denholm denied that Musk — the world’s richest man with a $419bn fortune — is motivated by money. She argued the package is structured to offer him incrementally greater control of the company only if he adds trillions in shareholder value, whilst forcing him to wait more than seven years to realise any financial benefit himself.

“He’s been very public about voting rights being important to him. I would say that money is not,” she said. “It’s important to note that he could get nothing . . . zero compensation unless you perform against the milestones.”

Musk has repeatedly threatened to leave if he does not acquire at least a 25 per cent of the stock, arguing he needs a blocking stake to fend off activists as Tesla develops artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and millions of humanoid robots.

Denholm said that she finds his threat credible, and dismissed reports earlier this year that the board sought to replace the CEO as “total rubbish”.

“From my perspective that is a real possibility,” she added. “He has other interests in which he could generate significant advancements in humankind.” Musk also runs $400bn rocket maker SpaceX and $200bn start-up xAI.

The board laid out multiple dire consequences if Musk were to depart: losing his “singular talent” and strategic vision, an exodus of critical staff and a drop in the share price. 

Despite this, Denholm denied that Musk represented an “unsustainable” key man risk, giving the board little leverage in contract talks to negotiate the best deal for shareholders.

Without Musk “there are activities in the company that would continue, but our view is the best way to optimise the future of Tesla is with Elon at the helm”.

Despite having one of the most high profile and lucrative roles in technology, Denholm had shunned publicity for most of her six-plus years chairing Tesla from her native Australia. But last year, the 62-year-old former accountant was forced to defend her integrity when a Delaware judge struck down Musk’s 2018 Tesla pay deal.

That too was thought to be unachievable, but paid out in full after Tesla’s value grew from $59bn to exceed $650bn, netting Musk $56bn in stock options.

Denholm has faced fierce personal criticism and found herself at the centre of a debate about the vast wealth and power being accumulated by Silicon Valley’s elite. She herself has made more than $530mn from exercising share options in her 11 years on the board.

In her ruling, the Delaware judge criticised Denholm’s “lackadaisical approach” to governance and characterised the board — which includes Musk’s brother Kimbal, venture capitalist Ira Ehrenpreis, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia and Rupert Murdoch’s son James — as “supine servants of an overweening master”.

Denholm rejected the allegations as “absolute BS” and “crap” in an FT interview last year. 

The company is appealing against the decision after the package was re-ratified by a shareholder vote in June last year.

With the case still pending, Tesla last month awarded Musk 96mn shares worth about $30bn in what it described as a “good faith” interim payment. Shareholders will vote on the new 423mn share package on November 6.

Denholm has also been cast in the uncomfortable role of overseeing Musk’s increasingly strident social media posts and navigating the fallout of his relationship, then rift, with President Donald Trump.

Many have blamed his divisive politics for alienating core liberal customers and causing a plunge in car sales in the US and Europe. Second-quarter profit fell by more than a fifth and Tesla now faces the loss of billions in emissions credit trading profit after Republicans neutered US schemes and ended EV tax incentives.

Denholm said that it was “tough to tell” if Musk was the root cause of the sales decline, and that temporarily shuttering four factories to reconfigure them to produce a new version of its bestselling Model Y was also to blame.

“There’s definitely obvious sentiment out there, particularly over the period of time when he was part of the administration . . . But who knows?”

When Musk took a role as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency early this year, his cuts to the federal workforce provoked a backlash, with Teslas being vandalised, drivers harassed and dealerships picketed.

“Protests in a democracy are expected, but violent protests, particularly when they’re directed at employees and customers, to me, that’s not cool,” she said. 

Investors also criticised the amount of time he spent in Washington away from Tesla’s headquarters in Austin. Denholm said that the company asked him not to travel back and forth for security reasons and that he never disengaged.

“I don’t have to measure the number of hours that he’s working to see what he’s doing at the company,” she said. “Quite frankly, he works extraordinary hours.”

Still, Tesla’s proxy statement ahead of the pay vote said that the board had received “assurances that Musk’s involvement with the political sphere would wind down in a timely manner”.

Denholm declined to comment on whether this meant Musk could no longer start his planned new “America Party” to challenge Trump, donate to candidates in the US or abroad, or continue posting about political issues if he wants to get his shares.

“It’s exactly what it means . . . We spent a long time writing the proxy. The words were very carefully chosen and vetted and gone through 47 advisers. So they are the words that we chose.”

Has she ever asked him to rein in his politics or post less incendiary messages for the benefit of staff and the company’s brand?

“The board is very comfortable having tough conversations,” she said. “I have conversations with Elon regularly. I can text him any time of the day . . . And he will answer me pretty quickly.”

“I don’t call him up about every single tweet that he makes. Free speech is one of his and the US’s important principles . . . At the end of the day he’s an individual. He has opinions. He’s free to share those opinions.”

When asked her view about a post Musk made on September 10 after the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk which stated: “The Left is the party of murder”, she replied: “I don’t think I’m going to comment on that. If there are things that I don’t subscribe to, I will tell him, but not every single tweet.”

Aena chair says airline is using it as a scapegoat to dodge customers’ wrath over cancellations

Spain’s airport operator has accused Ryanair chief executive Michael O’Leary of using it as a scapegoat to avoid incurring passengers’ wrath for the airline’s flight cancellations.

Airport operator Aena and Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, are locked in an escalating public row over what the carrier calls “excessive” fees, which it says have forced it to cut 2mn seats on flights to Spain and threaten another 1mn summer seat cuts next year.

In an interview with the Financial Times Maurici Lucena, chair and chief executive of Aena, hit out at O’Leary, accusing him of “lying continuously” and obscuring the true reason for the cuts.

“What really bothers me is that they’re not telling the truth,” Lucena said. “It has nothing to do with Aena’s fees. The reason they lie is that they don’t want to face the political and reputational cost of abandoning some regional airports, and in some cases even causing job losses when they shut down a base. That’s the real underlying issue.”

The Aena boss said Ryanair’s goal was to shift planes to routes outside Spain where it could make more money, including by charging higher ticket prices and securing taxpayer-funded support from governments.

“For [Ryanair], the business case includes everything: airport fees, the strength of demand, and public subsidies. Then, from that algorithm, they decide where to assign the planes,” said Lucena.

Lucena downplayed the significance of Aena’s proposed 6.5 per cent fee increase, which has sparked O’Leary’s outrage. The airport operator says it averages out at €0.68 per passenger, though it will vary by airport as some charge more than others in absolute terms.

Ryanair is the biggest airline in Spain by passenger numbers and the country is its second biggest market after Italy by revenue.

This week, O’Leary told the FT that regional costs were “too high”, and the airline was “better off flying at the same cost to places such as Palma [on the island of Mallorca] than flying to Jerez”.

Lucena suggested Ryanair was under pressure to move aircraft to maximise profitability because it is grappling with delays to the delivery of new Boeing planes, which have disrupted its ambitious expansion plans.

Ryanair was hit by the delays earlier this year, but now says it expects to receive most of the new planes this autumn and the remainder early in the new year — well ahead of bookings for next summer.

Ryanair says it will run no winter flights to some Spanish airports including Santiago de Compostela, where the airline accounted for 42 per cent of all passengers in the eight months to the end of August, according to Aena. At other airports where it plans to cut flights, including Vigo, Jerez and Tenerife, Ryanair has a smaller presence.

“When you cancel a route from an airport, especially if it’s a small airport, it doesn’t look good in the eyes of the public because people are used to being able to take that Ryanair flight,” Lucena said.

Due in part to rising traffic at bigger airports such as Málaga and Palma de Mallorca, Ryanair’s passenger numbers in Spain have grown this year, rising 5.1 per cent from a year ago to 47.2mn in the eight months to the end of August, Aena said.

Lucena, a former politician in Spain’s ruling Socialist party, said there was no chance of Aena closing any smaller airports, not least because it is required by law to keep them operating.

He added that other airlines were taking the slots abandoned by Ryanair, led by Vueling, Binter, EasyJet and Volotea. “The airlines will fill these gaps over the coming months, but it takes time.”

At the eleven airports affected by Ryanair’s cuts, planned seat numbers for the winter season across all airlines were down just 2.3 per cent from a year ago, Lucena said.

Ryanair has repeatedly clashed with European airport operators over fees — most recently in France, where it cancelled some flights — and the Aena boss lamented its “bullying” tactics. “I don’t understand why they treat us as vassals,” he said, noting that Aena’s €37bn market capitalisation was bigger than Ryanair’s €25bn.

“In Europe there is now a growing awareness that it is not necessarily a positive thing when Ryanair has a dominant share of an airport’s traffic and it starts exerting that political pressure.”

The Spanish airport most dependent on Ryanair is Vitoria in the Basque region, where the airline accounts for roughly 90 per cent of passengers and is planning small cuts.

Spain is “going to remain a key market for Ryanair”, Lucena predicted. “Who needs who more? I don’t know. But they need us a lot, absolutely. And they’ll keep on needing us if they want to serve their shareholders well in the coming years.”

A Ryanair spokesperson said: “If we are lying as Lucena claims, then why doesn’t he call our bluff and cut Aena’s high fees at Spain’s empty regional airports?”

They added: “Ryanair always goes where costs are lower and will happily go back to regional Spain when they stop charging Madrid/Barcelona prices. Until then it’s adiós Aena!”

AI-controlled drone swarms set to transform combat on battlefield

The latest iteration of flying robot warfare, unmanned weapons co-ordinate to overwhelm enemy defences

AI-powered drone swarms are set to transform the battlefield, with companies launching cutting edge software set to make unmanned weapon attacks which overwhelm enemy defences more deadly.

In this next iteration of drone warfare, groups of unmanned weapons use artificial intelligence to co-ordinate with each other to attack enemy positions.

The advent of swarming was a “very big moment”, said Lorenz Meier, chief executive of Auterion, a US-German start-up which recently unveiled a “drone swarm strike engine”.

The technology, dubbed Nemyx, transforms individual drones into a single, co-ordinated force. Powered by Auterion’s operating system and delivered as an app, the system allows any compatible drone to join the swarm through a simple software upgrade.

The new software has yet to be used on the battlefield, but Auterion is shipping 33,000 of its artificial intelligence drone “strike kits” to Ukraine by the end of this year as part of a contract with the Pentagon. It said these systems could be upgraded with Nemyx to be deployable in co-ordinated swarms.

“[Militaries] know that it will saturate their defences,” said Meier, adding that they were “all talking about swarming, they are all wary of swarming”.

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The swarms allow a single soldier to control multiple drones, allowing attack strategies that automatically seek to outfox and overwhelm enemy defences. 

“The whole idea of swarms is that you are force multiplying. You’re leveraging the single human” said Gundbert Scherf, co-founder of Helsing, which announced its AI driven swarm technology last week in partnership with German software firm Systematic, using the latter firm’s software.

The first large scale experiments with drone swarms started in 2016 with the US Navy F-18 hornets dropping microdrones. China has also showcased large-scale swarms since 2017.

Since the Russian invasion in 2022, a number of Ukrainian companies have experimented with drone swarms, notably Swarmer, a Kyiv based company which says its technology has been used in 82,000 combat operations.

Serhii Kupriienko, the CEO and co-founder of Swarmer likens an intelligent swarm to a living organism in which drones communicate with each other, decides autonomously how to fly and execute operations.

In one experimental combat operation last year, the Ukrainian military used Swarmer’s software with a swarm of drones which approached Russian positions and independently determined the moment to launch an attack. 

“Autonomy and automation are the rule,” said Kupriienko. Swarming technology “responds in real time to new human commands and priorities, changing circumstances and newly discovered information”, he said.

Militaries have already been using swarm tactics to great effect. Russia, for example, has learned to group attacks with its cheap, long range Shahed drones against Ukrainian cities, overwhelming Ukrainian defences and increasing overall hit rates.

The latest software, however, can make swarming tactics even more deadly, allowing attack drones to learn. There was no real intelligence involved in the “comms relays” where multiple drones are controlled by a larger drone which relays radio signals to extend the attack range, said Helsing’s Scherf.

With their massive archive of drone footage which is useful for training artificial intelligence models, Ukrainian defence tech groups believe they have a crucial edge over their foreign rivals. Only Ukrainian companies have access to a classified database of combat drone data known as the Universal Military Dataset.  

“Drone swarming has long been treated as an ambitious goal” said Eveline Buchatskiy, managing partner of D3, a venture capital company in Kyiv which invests in military technologies.

Ukraine’s “unprecedented volume of combat data available to train autonomy models” were “the essential building blocks for swarming”, she said.

Michael Holm of Systematic said the trend for drone makers is run on open software systems which makes them easier to co-ordinate. “We’re talking weeks, days and weeks, to integrate and make the swarm operational, not years and months.”

Critics of the AI powered systems warn that the algorithms that run swarms could push the boundaries of human control over weapons, leading to a greater portion of combat decision making handed over to artificial intelligence.

Fully autonomous weapons in which there is no human input, are restricted under international law.  

“We’ve of course built autonomy in, but we’ve always made sure that the human is in the loop,” said Scherf. “This is very much where companies [are] built around European values, and European doctrine.”

With swarms requiring individual drones to be in constant contact with each other, a leading challenge for the technology is electronic warfare, where navigation and communications frequencies used between drones are jammed, warned experts.

Beyond the battlefield, swarming algorithms could be used in logistics, agriculture and emergency response. Multiple drones working together could inspect pipelines, plant crops, or search disaster zones far more efficiently than single units.

Start-ups in Silicon Valley, Shenzhen and Tel Aviv are already experimenting with swarms for warehouse automation, firefighting and crowd monitoring. Analysts note, however, that the commercial potential depends on regulators developing standards for safety and data use.

Dubai developer Emaar turns to ‘big countries’ for M&A opportunities

Company looks to US, India and China after domestic property price boom leaves it with cash to spend and little debt

Dubai’s leading developer Emaar is considering buying companies in countries such as the US, India and China for the first time as it looks to expand internationally using proceeds from a boom in local property values.

Skyrocketing property prices propelled Emaar, whose biggest shareholder is the Investment Corporation of Dubai, to a 25 per cent increase in net profit before tax to Dh18.9bn ($5.1bn) last year. The company posted a 34 per cent gain in the first six months of 2025, spurring it to expand outside its local market.

Emaar’s financial strength meant that “a really serious global strategy is something that the board is really debating now,” said Mohamed Alabbar, its founder and managing director.

“The aim is really to expand drastically,” Alabbar told the Financial Times. “It’s almost like you grow by acquisition.”

Revenues at the owner of the Burj Khalifa skyscraper, the world’s tallest tower, have surged on the back of a third property bull run since Dubai opened up to foreign investors in the early 2000s. Average prices per sq ft in the city have soared 67 per cent between July 2019 and July this year, according to data analytics firm Reidin. 

“Emaar is strong in the [United Arab Emirates], but I think maybe UAE is becoming too small for us, or Dubai is becoming too small for us, to continue this growth story,” said Alabbar, who is one of the most influential businessmen in the region.

Alabbar said while Emaar has established and operated foreign subsidiaries in the past, including in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, it was now considering a strategy based on acquisitions, partly because its low level of debt meant it could borrow easily to fund acquisitions.

“How can we smartly and reasonably take equity and leverage and really do something?” he said, adding that “the model of investing in a big local player, I think it’s a better way” than starting its own companies abroad.

Alabbar said that the acquisition plan still needed board approval, but it was his “strong recommendation”.

He said he wanted Emaar to look at “big countries” such as the US, India, China and parts of Europe and was flexible about the exact nature of the relationships once it had identified targets.

“Maybe you go and buy a majority stake in a developer and then change the way they do business . . . [Or] maybe they already do good business [and] we learn from them.” 

Emaar already has a sizeable presence overseas, owning more than 175mn sq ft of land outside the UAE at the end of 2024, excluding a 1.1bn sq ft “economic city” project in Saudi Arabia.

Alabbar said Emaar’s current total land bank — an industry term referring to land owned by developers and reserved for future use — was at 1.87bn sq ft, including the UAE.

India, where Emaar owned 122mn sq ft of land at the end of 2024, could provide a testing ground for Emaar’s overseas strategy and its subsidiary there was discussing a potential joint venture with local developers, including the Adani Group, Alabbar said.

Alabbar dismissed reports that Emaar had been discussing the sale of its business in India to Adani. “We’re not selling,” he said. “We actually were looking for local partners to do a local [joint venture].”

Adani did not respond to a request for comment.

By holding up a gas deal and accusing Egypt of violations in Sinai, Netanyahu is endangering a vital peace treaty

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s threat this month to block a $35bn gas deal with Egypt is a dangerous miscalculation that threatens to undermine Israel’s most vital Arab partnership. Netanyahu justified halting the agreement by citing supposed Egyptian violations of the peace treaty through military deployments in Sinai — a claim that Egypt denies and which reflects a troubling pattern of manufactured crises designed to pressure Cairo into accepting policies no Egyptian government could ever embrace.

After 46 years of cold peace and generally constructive co-operation, an increasingly hostile wind is blowing from Jerusalem towards Cairo. This represents a profound strategic error at a moment when Egypt already faces intense domestic and international pressure over Gaza.

The allegations against Egypt follow a familiar script. Netanyahu, or unnamed “government sources”, make serious claims about possible violations, the media quickly echoes them, then Likud supporters vehemently defend this position on TV and social media.

Early this year, Israel’s ambassador to the US, Yechiel Leiter, warned Jewish American organisations about alleged offensive weapons that he claimed amounted to “a clear violation” in Sinai, and promised Israel would “very soon and very emphatically” address the supposed Egyptian military build-up. These claims were later debunked by Israeli security officials, who clarified that social media reports about increased Egyptian forces in Sinai were “not correct” and had been “disseminated by rightwing figures for political reasons”.

Egypt’s troop presence in Sinai is monitored continuously — not only by the Israel Defense Forces, but also by the Middle East’s most robust monitoring force. Israeli authorities have arrested two of Netanyahu’s advisers for allegedly unlawful ties to Qatar — and the revelation that Israeli government employees on Qatar’s payroll helped spread anti-Egyptian messaging compounded the crisis, shocking Egyptian diplomats.

The stalled gas deal would provide enormous mutual benefits: increased Israeli gas production, expanded export infrastructure and Egypt’s $400mn investment in pipeline connections. Egypt desperately needs gas for its domestic market, while Israeli companies stand to profit handsomely.

The reason Israeli officials are holding it up lies in Gaza policy — or rather, the absence of a coherent one. They refuse to discuss realistic “day after” plans, instead reciting the empty mantra: “Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority.” This policy vacuum has created space for extremist fantasies, including expecting Egypt to accept Palestinian “voluntary relocation” from Gaza. Leiter previewed this strategy in February and President Donald Trump has suggested Egypt, Jordan, and others should absorb Gaza’s population.

The timing of the gas deal suspension, coinciding with potential Israeli reoccupation of Gaza City, suggests a co-ordinated pressure campaign tied to the so-called “Gaza Riviera” vision. This approach fundamentally misunderstands Egyptian red lines. No Egyptian government will participate in forced Palestinian relocation. Both the security implications and the political costs would be devastating.

Egypt has paid a steep price for maintaining peace with Israel during the Gaza war. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have attacked Egyptian diplomatic missions worldwide, while Cairo faces criticism for co-operating with Israeli policies. The current trajectory threatens to undermine all co-operation between the two countries. With no ambassadors currently serving in Cairo or Tel Aviv, diplomatic channels are narrowing precisely when expanded dialogue is essential.

The 1979 Israel-Egypt peace treaty remains one of the Middle East’s most successful diplomatic achievements, providing the foundation for broader regional stability. Just this March, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi referred to the accords as “a model to be followed”. But peace agreements require nurturing, not exploitation.

By treating Egypt as a potential dumping ground for unwanted populations rather than a valued partner in regional security, Israel risks alienating the Arab world’s most important country. After the Doha attacks, Egypt could even reassume the chief negotiator role between Israel and Hamas.

Israel’s long-term interests demand abandoning fantasies of Palestinian transfer and recognising Egypt’s legitimate concerns. The gas deal should proceed because it is mutually beneficial — not be used to coerce Cairo into adopting politically unsustainable policies.