When Gianni Infantino, 56, was elected to take over FIFA in 2016 – following his predecessor Sepp Blatter's ousting in a corruption scandal – there were hopes he would wield a new broom. The message from his office, says The Times, is that he has done just that. On his watch, a new FIFA has emerged: “clean, transparent, accountable”.

True, FIFA is more transparent than it was, says the BBC. It now publishes the salaries of all top executives. Infantino might also argue that he has delivered on his pledge to keep the funds that FIFA generates “within football”. Some of the “poorest and smallest footballing nations” have received vital funding for infrastructure and development. Moreover, he has proved an absolute dynamo at fundraising, says The New Yorker. Since taking over, FIFA's “revenues have more than doubled” – during the next cycle, which will run until 2030, the organisation is projected to have $14 billion to spend.

The question tabled by critics is, at what cost? Infantino's “profit-above-all-else approach” has paved the way for many questionable partnerships. The governments he has worked most closely with as FIFA president have been those of Vladimir Putin, the Emir of Qatar, the Trump administration and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Like any other multinational organisation, FIFA must follow the money. Yet his “fascination with autocracy” seems to have grown with his role.

Gianni Infantino and Donald Trump could be this tournament's villains

At every World Cup, there are several prestigious titles at stake besides that of “Champion”, says the Financial Times. There's the “Clown” – a big country that trips up and fails; the “Cinderella” – a small country that experiences a fairy tale; the “Beautiful Loser”; and, above all, the “Villain”. In the latter half of the 20th century, this was often the German team. More recently, individual players have won the laurels. But this year, “the front runners” are Donald Trump and FIFA's president Gianni Infantino.

Notoriously thin-skinned, Gianni Infantino was dismayed at being mocked for a grandiose and right-on speech he made at the 2022 World Cup in Qatar – not least because being the underdog has always been part of his shtick, says ESPN. Growing up in small-town Switzerland, he claims to have suffered prejudice over his red hair and his Italian roots, later arguing that his determination “to drive football as a force for peace and togetherness” was influenced by this experience. After taking a law degree, he became legal counsel and general secretary for the International Centre for Sports Studies, based in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, before joining UEFA – the governing body for European football – where he worked his way up to become general secretary in 2009. While there, he generated “a fierce loyalty” among a small group that followed him to FIFA.

How Gianni Infantino is 'Trumpifying' FIFA

Gianni Infantino's ultimate grand gesture – awarding Donald Trump with “The FIFA Peace Prize” – made headlines for taking his efforts “to flatter and ingratiate himself with Trump to new heights”, says The New York Times. But they overshadowed the bigger story – “the Trumpification of FIFA itself”. As the US president himself observed admiringly: “Everybody knows this man [is] the king of soccer” – and one increasingly insisting on top-down compliance to his every narcissistic whim.

This World Cup's exorbitantly priced tickets and concessions to US commercialism such as the new hydration (advertising) breaks won't have endeared Infantino to many fans. Nor will his increasingly expensive lifestyle: his pay has more than trebled from £1.3 million in 2016. “With nothing to stop him winning a landslide in the presidential election next year”, the FIFA president looks set to “remain in power until at least 2031”, says The Times. Even so, “this might just be the tournament when his crown starts to slip”.

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David Hockney, who died on 11 June, aged 88, was never shy about experimenting with technology. In April 2020, then almost 83, he was interviewed by The Spectator's art critic, Martin Gayford, saying about his iPad that “I was just drawing on this thing I'm talking to you on.”

In his “provocative” book Secret Knowledge, published in 2006, Hockney suggested that old masters, such as Vermeer, had used optical aids in their paintings, says Michael Prodger in The New Statesman. So, Hockney saw no reason why he shouldn't use “fax machines, Polaroids, photocopies [and] high-resolution cameras” to create his works.

It was from a photograph that somebody else had taken that Hockney created what is arguably his most famous painting, A Bigger Splash, in 1967. The pink modernist building that forms the backdrop to the sun-drenched Californian swimming-pool scene came together fairly quickly, but Hockney laboured on the split-second splash in the pool for two weeks to get every drop right – an irony that wasn't lost on him.

In 1972, he painted Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), which in 2018 set a new record for a painting by a living artist sold at auction. It fetched $90.3 million with Christie's in New York. And the comparisons with earlier artists didn't end with the use of technology. In leaving his native Yorkshire and “gloomy” London for California, Hockney has been compared with the painters of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, such as Van Gogh and Gauguin – and later Matisse and Dufy, says The Times.

David Hockney is a national treasure

And while Portrait of an Artist represents the intersection of the two periods with which Hockney is most often associated – the “swimming pool period”, beginning in the 1960s, and the “double portraits” of the 1970s, these represent “a relatively small slice of his overall production”, notes the paper in its obituary. Hockney's more recent landscapes of northern France, including a 90-metre frieze called A Year in Normandie, are a case in point. That series of paintings can be viewed at the Serpentine Galleries in London until 23 August.

“I can't think of an artist so loved by millions today,” writes Andrew Marr in The New Statesman. “The man is gone, but the pictures live on. ‘Spring cannot be cancelled' was one of his more recent slogans. Nor can David Hockney.”

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Jeremy Grantham is an expert in stock market bubbles. In the 1980s he spotted the Japanese bubble. He also, rightly, refused to rush into the tech bubble that popped dramatically during the dotcom crash.

Now, with all eyes on the astronomical valuations AI firms are commanding, does he think a bubble is emerging?

In the latest episode of MoneyWeek Talks, Grantham told MoneyWeek editor Andrew Van Sickle that historians a century from now will be writing about this moment in the same way they write about the South Sea Bubble, one of the first and most significant financial crashes in history.

Grantham points to SpaceX. He said: “The SpaceX prospectus is actually unbelievable. Mining asteroids and colonies on Mars and moving through space and a projection of revenue streams, 90% of which seem to relate to AI.

“And it’s not clear that their version of AI, which is at the moment having its bottom kicked around the block by Anthropic and the rest of the boys is going to be even around. Forget 90% of this colossal income stream of the biggest enterprise in the history of man.

“And of course, they’re running at huge losses at the moment. What an act of faith, I mean, give me a break. Talk about tulips.”

That is not to say that Grantham is opposed to the transformative nature of AI, though. He sees that it is impressive. However, he is cautious about the state of the industry at the moment.

He cited the example of the railroad boom, which he sees as a similar crucial technological advancement that hugely boosted productivity. But the market crashed still.

“People don’t realise that the more obvious and important the idea, the more likely you are to attract too much capital and have a market bust.”

“The railroads transformed our lives. They added enormous productivity. And yet they were so obviously going to do that, that everyone built too many railroads, and everyone lost their money. That will happen in AI.”

He added that looking at the history of the Magnificent Seven and comparing it to their future plans shows two different worlds.

“Looking back, you have seven monopolies. Amazon dominates retail sales, Tesla gets a leap ahead in EVs and so on. They each killed off their junior competitors, bought the exciting up-and-coming competitors, and bestrode the world.”

But the future looks drastically different. Instead of seven monopolies, there is one ultimate goal that they are all aiming for – alongside other firms snapping at their heels. That goal is artificial intelligence.

Grantham says the firms believe that whoever gets there first will have a license to make more money than anyone has ever made at anything in history.

“They’re all saying the main risk is not spending enough. ‘We will spend our vast cashflows’, ‘my 200 billion is bigger than your 107 billion’ – it’s like a kind of gorilla fest in that sense and they all pile into the ring to fight to the death.

“There can only be one. They’re going to fight until someone survives. Now, if you think this is like the seven distinct monopolies, you’re crazy.

“This could be the most vicious fight to the end that we have ever seen, starting now. And there are plenty of signs of it already. In that sort of fight, they do not make lots of money and the stocks get crushed. And then they emerge from the wreckage, like the internet.

“The railroads rose from the ashes, and this will rise from the ashes.”

Listen to MoneyWeek Talks for our full interview with Jeremy Grantham. You can watch the podcast on YouTube, or listen to it wherever you get your podcasts.

About the podcast

MoneyWeek Talks is a podcast that helps you unlock the secrets to financial success. Editors Kalpana Fitzpatrick and Andrew van Sickle are joined by influential guests – from CEOs and entrepreneurs to economists and policymakers – to share their top tips on managing money, investing wisely and building wealth.

Subscribe to the MoneyWeek Talks podcast and get ready to make it, keep it and spend it with confidence.

Tadashi Yanai is living out his dream. Of all the many art books lining his wood-panelled office in Tokyo, the most “sacred text” turns out to be a Next catalogue from 1987, shot by the now famous Vogue and Vanity Fair photographer Koto Bolofo. “This inspired me most, back in the Eighties,” says Yanai, who at 77 is Japan's richest man with a fortune put at around $69bn. “Ordinary people looking cool and casual… I wanted to deliver this kind of clothing for current times. Clothes to make people happy.”

You know when a brand has conquered the zeitgeist when the vocabulary around it goes mainstream. For Uniqlo – the fast-fashion phenomenon with a mission to dress the world in its anonymously chic “wardrobe building blocks” – that moment came when the word “unibare” entered the lexicon, says The Times. It expresses the moment you realise that someone is wearing Uniqlo, “rather than anything more expensive”.

In April, shares in Fast Retailing – Uniqlo's parent company – hit a record high on the back of roaring overseas growth in the US and Europe, says Bloomberg. They've now gained 45% year-to-date. Fast Retailing is the third biggest apparel company in the world after Zara's Inditex and the H&M stable, and its humble brown paper bags have become a fixture from Oxford Street to Fifth Avenue.

In a business culture “famed for grey conformity”, Tadashi Yanai “can't help but swim against the tide”, says Time – happily flaunting his success despite local taboos against ostentatious wealth. He owns two golf courses on the Hawaiian island of Maui alone. Yet when you walk with him through Uniqlo he reveals some “quintessentially Japanese traits”, says Bloomberg Businessweek: “attention to detail, supply-chain prowess, minimalist aesthetics” – and frugality.

Tadashi Yanai was born into the rag trade

Tadashi Yanai grew up in the trade – his parents ran a menswear shop in Ube on the main Japanese island of Honshu. The event that changed his life was the Vietnam war, which interrupted his studies in political economy at Tokyo's Waseda University because of a student walk-out. The break enabled him to travel to the US and UK, where the proliferation of mid-market clothing shops planted a seed. In 1972, after a brief stint selling men's clothes for a supermarket chain, Tadashi Yanai was handed the keys to his father's now expanded business.

In 1984 he opened the first branch of the Unique Clothing Warehouse in Hiroshima to pursue a more casual style. The firm's big breakthrough came in 1998 – as Japan was reeling from its burst economic bubble – when Yanai opened Uniqlo's first Tokyo outlet and sold a lightweight fleece for just £15. “Every fourth Japanese consumer bought one.”

When Tadashi Yanai published his autobiography, One Win and Nine Losses, he had a cathartic time describing his many mistakes down the years – not least overhasty expansion efforts, which necessitated a humiliating retreat. These days, Uniqlo's expansion is more measured, but has a relentless quality, says The Times. Having targeted national capitals, it's going for the regions – in the past year, opening new British stores in Liverpool, Glasgow, Edinburgh and Bristol. A series of designer collaborations – with minimalist Jil Sander and, latterly, Dior maestro Jonathan Anderson – has boosted the brand's appeal.

Tadashi Yanai, who is building sponsorship programmes with art galleries globally, has strong ideas about being “a force for good” and giving back to society. Yet he runs his own fiefdom like “a dictator”, says Time. With two sons now working in the business, questions about the succession abound. But he's giving nothing away. “When I get older my dream is to take a walk every day on the streets of London” – a continuing source of inspiration, he told The Telegraph in 2015. No sign of that happening any time soon.

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Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former senior director at Meta, offers in her 2025 memoir Careless People what The New York Times described as “a darkly funny and genuinely shocking” account of one of the world's most powerful companies.

But, thanks to a gagging order imposed by Meta, owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (which has frequently invoked the importance of freedom of expression to justify some of the more extreme content on its own sites), Sarah Wynn-Williams was forced at this year's Hay Festival to sit mutely on stage during a panel discussion of her whistleblowing book – on pain of financial ruin. Meta, which calls the book's claims “false and defamatory”, last year won an emergency ruling in the US to stop Wynn-Williams promoting the memoir on the grounds that she had “potentially violated her severance contract”.

This prevents her from saying anything negative about Meta, “potentially for ever”, says The Times. The company asserted that her appearance alongside investigative journalist Carol Cadwalladr and former White House technology adviser Tim Wu – two critics of Meta – also breached a legal ruling. “This amounts to targeting people for the ‘crime' of free association and the public discussion of ideas” at a literary festival “taking place in Hay-on-Wye, not Beijing”. What kind of legally sanctioned madness is this? As Wu observed, it smacks of “medieval” despotism.

It's easy to see why Meta is so “rattled” by the book, which, as well as containing unflattering portraits of senior executives Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg (who quit the board in 2024) and global affairs director Joel Kaplan, provides a detailed account of some of its worst alleged practices. An extraordinary array of allegations ranges from “sexual harassment” and the “deliberate manipulation of vulnerable teenagers” to embedding staff in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, working “hand in glove” with China's autocratic regime and complicity, in the writer's view, in the 2017 Rohingya genocide in Myanmar. The book is “petty, malicious and tremendous fun”, says The Spectator. It also paints an often horrifying picture of “a supranational colossus untroubled by local laws or ethical codes”, says the Financial Times. The book takes its title from F. Scott Fitzgerald's description of Tom and Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby – a couple who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness”.

How Sarah Wynn-Williams got involved with Facebook

New Zealand born Sarah Wynn-Williams, now in her mid-40s, had “a front row seat in Meta's growing-up stage”, working in Sandberg's public policy department from 2011-2017, says the FT. After growing up in Christchurch she graduated in law from the University of Canterbury and briefly practised law before joining New Zealand's diplomatic service, which posted her to Washington. She joined Facebook, excited about the potential of the platform. “After years of looking for things that would change the world, I thought I'd found the biggest one going,” she recounts. It didn't take long for disillusionment to set in. In 2017, Wynn-Williams was fired for what Meta/Facebook called “poor performance and toxic behaviour”. She maintains it was after she'd filed a claim of sexual harassment.

“Everyone who cares about free speech” or “the deeds of the powerful and unaccountable” should buy this book, observed The Times after Wynn-Williams' appearance at Hay-on-Wye. It seems readers have taken the message to heart, notes The Bookseller. Sales soared by 305% week-on-week after her very public silencing.

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Zhou Qunfei sparked curiosity as the “mystery woman” placed between two of the US's most powerful technology chieftains, Elon Musk and Tim Cook, during the Chinese state banquet for Donald Trump last month. “Placement” is critical, says Struan Stevenson in his book The Course of History: Ten Meals That Changed the World. And Zhou Qunfei’s placement was a fine example of “dining diplomacy”, which can shape global political and economic outcomes – for better or worse.

Zhou Qunfei is the little-known (in the West) founder of Lens Technology, a leading touchscreen supplier and one of the richest self-made women in the world, says the South China Morning Post. The decision to put her next to two of her most important clients certainly created an opportunity to bend their ears. But from the point of view of Beijing's image shapers, it was also a powerful reminder to American plutocrats that the Chinese Dream is as potent as their own. Within the country, Zhou is held up as an inspirational figure who “rose from humble beginnings” by dint of hard work, resilience and talent, to take her place among China's foremost industrialists. For millions of Chinese migrant workers, she's viewed as the archetypal role model. Forbes puts her current wealth at around $20 billion.

The “touchscreen queen” began life “in utter destitution”. Born in 1970, in a village near the city of Xiangxiang in Hunan province, her mother died when she was five and her father was severely maimed in an industrial accident. Her days were spent planting vegetables, raising pigs and collecting plastic waste to earn money. “I had to constantly think about where my next meal would come from,” she told CNBC. Zhou Qunfei's “hunger years” provided “a foundation of grit”, says Jing Daily. At 15, she set out on the long journey to Shenzhen, initially finding work as a security guard before joining the assembly line of a factory producing glass for watches. She attended night classes in accounting, computing, Cantonese and screen printing and even obtained a licence for driving large vehicles.

Zhou Qunfei's “sharp problem-solving skills” and drive rapidly saw her promoted. But at 23, she took the leap into setting up her own business with relatives, operating out of a three-bedroom flat. They began with silk-screen printing before reverting to manufacturing glass for watches. When mobile phones began proliferating in the early 2000s, Zhou retooled the business, eventually securing orders from Motorola, HTC, Nokia and Samsung. A pivotal moment came in 2007 when Lens Technology became a supplier for Apple's first-generation iPhone touchscreens, says Tatler Asia. The contract catapulted the company “into a dominant position in China's tech manufacturing” sector and made her a billionaire. In 2015, when Lens Technology went public on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange, Zhou rose to national prominence. Lucrative new contracts with carmakers such as BYD, Tesla and BMW followed.

How Zhou Qunfei bounced back from a $6.8 billion loss

Donald Trump nearly proved her undoing, noted Bloomberg in 2018. Zhou Qunfei lost 66% of her fortune, or $6.8 billion, when the US/China trade war erupted, prompting a sell-off of Apple's suppliers. But as the decade turned, Lens bounced back. Last year, Zhou's wealth rose a further 75% when Lens pulled off a dual-listing in Hong Kong. But Zhou Qunfei is still most at home pacing the factory floor, says Tatler. “She'll dip her hands into a tray of water to check if the temperature is just right” and “can explain the intricacies of heating glass in a potassium ion bath”. She has the same intense – often obsessive – interest in operational detail as Elon Musk and, like him, is famous for sleeping on site to troubleshoot. Doubtless, they had much to discuss over their pan-fried pork buns.

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Anthony Bolton remains a legend among fund managers. In the 28 years in which he managed the Fidelity Special Situations Fund, he generated a compound investment return of 19.5% – 6% ahead of the market. His style was primarily contrarian, investing in stocks ignored or disdained by most investors.

When he stepped down in 2007, the fund was split into two: one investing in the UK and one internationally. Thereafter, the funds left the limelight under a succession of managers, but there are strong signs of an upturn.

The UK fund that retains the Fidelity Special Situations name – and the Fidelity Special Values (LSE: FSV) investment trust that follows the same strategy – has steadily outperformed the UK market for the last three years under managers Alexander Wright and Jonathan Winton. More recently, the Fidelity Global Special Situations Fund is also outperforming, with a 19.1% return in sterling in 2025 compared with a 13.9% return for the MSCI ACWI index.

Today, the global fund is “style agnostic”, says Christine Baalham, who took over as co-manager with Tom Record in 2024. Still, it is driven by stock selection rather than broader factors. “I'm not going to pretend I can call the market outlook,” she says. “I could be fabulously optimistic or terribly pessimistic depending on which view of the world I go for. There are reasons to be excited and reasons to be fearful.” Few managers put it so well.

Growth is sought “where the opportunity is much greater than the market believes”, but Anthony Bolton's search for contrarian ideas with hidden value is not neglected. Take Bayer, which is covered by pharmaceutical analysts who hate the agricultural sciences half of the business, says Baalham. Not only does Bayer have “some really good pharmaceutical products”, but “the crops business is nearing a resolution of litigation and includes a high-quality seeds business”. It trades on less than nine times earnings.

Fidelity Global Special Situations Fund: rewards in bottlenecks

The Fidelity Global Special Situations Fund portfolio is diversified: none of the 88 holdings is above 3%. The fund's 2% holding of Nvidia was 2.7 percentage points underweight at the end of the quarter and it didn't hold Apple (which is 4.2% of the index) at all: the stock is trading on nearly 30 times earnings, notes Baalham. This could be a problem for relative performance in the current quarter, given Apple's 30% gain and Nvidia's 14% gain. But Baalham says their AI exposure is covered with other holdings. “The rewards are in the bottlenecks,” she says, “which are memory and power.” The launch of Playstation 6 has been delayed by a shortage of memory chips – hence a holding in chipmaker Samsung. Data centres are creating more demand for energy, so the fund is invested in Siemens Energy as well as NextEra and SSE. However, “we keep an eye on quantum computing”, which has the potential to significantly reduce power requirements.

Another bottleneck is in analogue semi-conductors, which manage the interface between humans and machines. “With no spare capacity, prices will rise when demand in these markets picks up.” A holding in STMicroelectronics is based on this thesis. “We are finding some really interesting ideas caused by technology advances while other investors seem to be focused on geopolitics.” Conversely, the fund is neutral on oil and gas, although it holds US producer Diamondback Energy, services company Baker Hughes, and liquefied natural gas exporter Cheniere Energy.

As in Anthony Bolton's time, the close relationship between managers and analysts is a key strength at Fidelity. Record and Baalham are supported by a global team of 139 equity analysts. They oversee £3.6 billion in Global Special Situations, plus another £6 billion alongside.

It's a pity that the duo don't also run an investment trust, since these tend to outperform sister open-ended funds run by the same manager. Directors of serially underperforming global trusts, take note.

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Elon Musk is an abrasive and frequently infuriating presence and is the focal point of loathing for the establishment. In the UK, members of the Labour cabinet view him as a threat to the administrative order. Yet he is a living example of the Great Man theory of history; “great” meaning a person of consequence, rather than good. The theory is that a single, determined will can move humanity more than the masses. The modern world would rather fiddle and legislate while Elon Musk seeks to act and solve civilisational challenges.

No number of committee meetings could conjure a Starship booster returning from the edge of orbit. This skyscraper-sized rocket fell through the sky only to be plucked to safety by mechanical chopsticks. A decade ago, this would have appeared only in science fiction, but today it is a reality. This is just one example of the way Musk's maniacal focus pushes the boundaries of the possible. Musk has many detractors, particularly in political circles. But politicians curate their personas to seek approval; people like Musk actually drive progress. History will record the man who caught the skyscraper-sized rocket long after his critics are forgotten.

Elon Musk is dedicated to human progress

Musk was already very rich by the age of 27 after netting $22 million from the sale of his first business, Zip2. The sale of PayPal a few years later made him another $180 million. He was barely 30 and possessed enough wealth to purchase a private island and vanish from public view. Instead, he chose to dedicate himself to “the mission” of human progress. He views wealth as fuel for missions rather than a reward for success.

He founded SpaceX and funded Tesla as attempts to solve humanity's challenges. He viewed the stagnation of aerospace and the slow development of electric cars as problems that required a focused, engineering-based response. By committing $100 million to rockets and $70 million to electric vehicles, he bet most of his wealth that he could solve the problems. He couldn't do this alone, but his willingness to bet big acted as a radical sorting mechanism for recruitment. Elite engineers joined because they recognised a founder willing to risk bankruptcy in the pursuit of a better future.

In 2008 the dream almost ended as both firms spiralled toward collapse. SpaceX had endured three launch failures and could afford one more failure before bankruptcy. Tesla was weeks away from exhausting its cash. Musk was borrowing money for rent while sleeping on factory floors to supervise production. Many would sacrifice one company to save the other, but he refused. Only a contract win from US space agency Nasa prevented liquidation. This helped create a culture in his companies that treats adversity as a mere stepping stone towards achieving the objective.

“Idiot Index”: the key to Elon Musk's success

The key to his success is to focus on what is possible, not what has been done before. Musk operates on the principle that “the only rules are the ones dictated by the laws of physics. Everything else is a recommendation”. His method is to strip a problem down to fundamental parts and then reason towards the goal. Most managers make incremental changes to existing models; Musk rejects precedent, believing the way things have always been done is irrelevant to the way they should be. He applies a metric known as the “Idiot Index” to maintain this discipline. This measures the ratio of a finished product's cost to the costs of its raw materials. A high ratio, such as is typical for space rockets, indicates an inefficient process. Musk expects his engineers to identify the best and worst parts of their systems through this lens at all times. This approach allowed Tesla to cut battery costs and manufacturing time by focusing on the component elements, not simply the price of the finished product.

He puts these principles into practice through five steps. First, question every step in the process and seek out flaws. Second, cut out any unnecessary part or process. Third, simplify or optimise, but only after part two is exhausted so as to avoid optimising a process that should not be there. Fourth, accelerate. Fifth and finally, automate. This sequence ensures engineers never waste effort on perfecting an irrelevance.

The Tesla Giga Press is an example. Traditionally, car manufacturers built underbodies by welding 70 or more separate parts together. Most accepted this complexity because they followed tradition. Musk looked at the simplicity of toy car manufacturing and wondered why full-sized vehicles were not cast as single pieces. He commissioned the creation of the largest casting machines in the world to produce a car underbody in one operation. This eliminated hundreds of robots from the production line and drastically improved structural rigidity. By scaling up the logic of a toy, he proved that a better, cheaper and stronger vehicle could be built more quickly and with fewer potential areas for failure.

Twitter layoffs illustrated Price's Law

The acquisition of Twitter (now called X) and the changes brought about there was an experiment in Price's Law. This states that in any productive domain, the square root of the total number of people involved produces 50% of the results. So in a firm of 10,000 people, 100 individuals would account for 50% of the total value. This suggests that most people in a large workforce are redundant. When Musk reduced the headcount at Twitter by 80%, critics predicted a collapse. They assume that productivity is a function of the number of hours worked by the average employee. Price's Law reveals that productivity is concentrated in a tiny elite.

Price's Law is a counter to Marxian economics, which assumes that the worth of a product derives from the labour time required to produce it, seeing progress as a collective process. Musk works on the idea that you should only employ the real talent. Even then, once an employee is no longer driving the mission forward, they are replaced by someone who will. In X, he maintained the output of the platform while shedding the bureaucratic weight that had stifled innovation. The results were a faster and more feature-rich platform.

The modern Western world is choked by layers of managers managing managers who contribute nothing useful. These individuals thrive on the belief that committees lead to better outcomes. In high-stakes engineering and innovation, however, the many are a burden on the few who actually build. This “special forces” model of management prioritises individual brilliance over collective averages. By identifying and motivating this core, Musk forces a level of productivity that bureaucracies can't replicate.

Elon Musk has achieved orbital hegemony

Musk is perhaps best known for his relationship with Donald Trump or his management of Tesla, but his most impressive achievement is SpaceX. SpaceX has achieved a global monopoly through sheer competence. By 2025, SpaceX was responsible for delivering about 90% of the total weight of usable cargo moved into space. Most of the rest was handled by China. Musk achieved this by refusing to accept the “aerospace welfare state” that had defined the industry. Since the 1960s, firms such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin operated under cost-plus contracts, a system that essentially rewarded inefficiency where the government reimburses all costs and adds a guaranteed fee for profit, ensuring that the longer a project overran, the more the contractor was paid.

Musk set SpaceX's engineers to build rockets that were not just functional, but also economically superior. The result was to go back to first principles on every conceivable part of a space rocket, from materials used, to complexity of design and, most notably, reusability. Before SpaceX, throwing away a multi-million-dollar rocket after a single flight was normal. Musk viewed this as an absurdity, akin to discarding a Boeing 747 after a one-way trip across the Atlantic. SpaceX pioneered the landing and reuse of boosters and has reduced the cost of access to space by an order of magnitude. The Pentagon estimates that this shift has already saved the US taxpayer more than $40 billion in procurement costs.

The difference between SpaceX's “special forces” engineering culture and Boeing's bureaucracy is clear when you compare their passenger spacecraft. Despite receiving billions more in funding, Boeing's programme was plagued by years of delays and emergency technical failures, while SpaceX's leaner team delivered a reliable service for 60% less cost per seat. This performance gap continues to widen. The introduction of the SpaceX Starship V3 is intended to enable full reusability. Each engine generates more thrust than a jumbo jet, while the system is designed to be flown, landed and relaunched with high frequency. Soon SpaceX might render traditional expendable rockets obsolete.

Elon Musk's superpower

Ten years ago, Elon Musk was influential but relatively uncontroversial; his alignment with Trump has since made him a more polarising figure. But this political foray too reflects an engineering mindset rather than a thirst for office. Musk views the US state as a legacy system suffering from bloat. He applied his management process to the federal bureaucracy with characteristic ruthlessness. An initial audit uncovered “zombie payments” worth hundreds of billions of dollars. These funds were being sent to individuals who were either deceased, or, according to government records, not born yet. This foray into public service was only ever temporary and he completed a 100-day contract. His reason for doing it was that he believed it was the right thing to do. He didn't care that alignment with Trump would draw fury.

Musk believes that one of his greatest powers is simply not caring what people think of him. This insulation stems from his neuro-atypicality. Musk, who has said he has Asperger syndrome, tends to prioritise data over social cues; ignoring consensus and focusing on physical constraints, often treating social norms as secondary to progress. In the UK, energy secretary Ed Miliband has branded Musk a “dangerous person” and told him to keep out of this country and its politics. The irony is that Miliband, a man who has spent his entire professional life in non-jobs and a zealous proponent of net-zero, is criticising the man who has done more for sustainable energy through Tesla and SolarCity (yet another of Musk's firms) than any person alive. British ministers talk about some better future, but it's people like Musk who are building it. Politicians can only legislate, they can't magic into existence space-based clean energy (another of Musk's missions).

Let history be the judge of Elon Musk

Musk is a difficult man. We should not expect him to be easy or agreeable, as such traits are rarely found in those who actually change the world. If it were not for people like him dreaming about what is over the next hill, humanity would still be a small group of cavemen huddled together in fear. History will judge Musk by the 250-tonne rocket he caught and the progress he forced, not by the social approval he never sought.

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Ryan Cohen, the “rebel CEO” behind GameStop, didn't mince his words when eBay rejected his audacious $56 billion hostile bid earlier this month – slamming the global e-commerce player as a “literally obese” organisation “run by losers”. Indeed, for Ryan Cohen, the rejection is just the preliminary salvo of what might turn out to be a protracted war, says the Financial Times.

Despite multiple unanswered questions about how GameStop, which is valued at roughly $11 billion, could realistically finance the takeover of a company worth about $47 billion, he remains unabashed. “The more [eBay] fight me, the more… I'm not going to take no for an answer.”

It's that kind of fighting talk that has made the 40-year-old Canadian entrepreneur turned activist investor a “cult-like figure” among followers, who dub him the “Meme King”. Cohen's schtick has always been betting on ideas that many institutional investors thought absurd. First, it was online pet supplies (Chewy); then a dying strip mall video-game retailer (GameStop). Cohen has “cultivated this mystique – often communicating cryptically on social media with deliberately vague messages that retail traders try to dissect”.

Indeed, his pursuit of eBay has been a textbook case in how to rally the modern crowd, says Time. As well as issuing and selling new shares to GameStop's enthusiastic investors and putting the proceeds towards his war chest, he has “doubled down on his theatrics, announcing in an X post that he was selling stuff on eBay to pay for eBay”. Fans buying up collectables and GameStop merchandise on the site raised about $169,000, says Business Insider. That's “a drop in the bucket” of what Cohen needs to finance his bid. But the value of the publicity was priceless. It's a measure of his “market-moving power” that traders on betting platforms Kalshi and Polymarket are still willing to place real-money wagers on GameStop's success, says Time.

Ryan Cohen didn't go to college, but as a teenager taught himself coding and cut his business teeth designing websites for his father's business and other family friends, says The New York Times. In 2011, Cohen founded an online pet-goods retailer, Chewy, convinced he could fill a gap in the market because of “the substandard service” provided by big pet retailers, says Fortune. One hundred investors rejected the idea, convinced he could never compete with Amazon and citing the demise of Pets.com in the early 2000s as a cautionary tale. But his determination and outstanding customer service paid off. Chewy became such a thorn in the side of PetSmart that it acquired it for $3.3 billion in 2017.

What Ryan Cohen plans to do next

In 2019, Ryan Cohen founded RC Ventures to take advantage of the burgeoning “meme stock frenzy”. He made about $56 n/m after taking a 10% stake in ailing retailer Bed Bath & Beyond and flipping it the same year, cementing a 56% gain. Then in 2021 he bought a stake in GameStop and became CEO in 2023. Cohen has big plans, says The Wall Street Journal. His chutzpah attracted Michael Burry, the investor made famous by the film The Big Short, who bought into his vision of using GameStop's giant cash holdings to make transformative acquisitions.

Perhaps the biggest blow to Cohen's pursuit of eBay is that Burry has dropped out, nervous about the debt needed to make it happen. Cohen's plan is to drive up eBay's operating margins to 40% and double down on high-value markets such as collectables and luxury goods, leveraging GameStop stores as fulfilment hubs. “Analysts remain unconvinced,” says the FT. But if successful in his “boldest gamble yet”, Cohen will lead “the first major meme-stock-driven deal”. For the moment, he's enjoying the ride. “It's fun. It makes me feel alive.”

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Ted Turner, who has died aged 87, will be remembered primarily as “one of the great innovators of television”. And if Orson Welles' 1941 film Citizen Kane had been made 60 years later, there's a chance that the inspiration for Kane – newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst – would have been updated to Turner, the flamboyant, maverick founder of CNN who had an emotional hinterland every bit as complicated as Hearst's, says The Guardian.

In life, Ted Turner was arguably luckier than Hearst was. He was a master yachtsman who successfully defended the America's Cup in 1977 with an amateur crew and a second-hand boat – and, in later life, he was a pioneering champion of “global understanding” and environmentalism. Not the least of his achievements, says the FT, was helping to save the American bison from extinction.

A man of “restless reach”, who oversaw a vast empire of news, sports and entertainment channels, Ted Turner “cut a brash and vivid figure”, says The New York Times. To his chagrin, he was nicknamed “The Mouth of the South” and, in the early days at least, was often underestimated. When he launched CNN (Cable News Network) in Atlanta in 1980 as the world's first round-the-clock news service, the venture met with predictions it would “crash in flames”, says the FT.

But Ted Turner was convinced there was an opening in the market, partly because he was fed up with returning from work at 7pm and finding he had missed the evening bulletin, notes his CNN obituary. CNN proved a ground-breaker, says Porter Bibb, Turner's biographer. It redefined news and served as the benchmark for all who followed.

Ted Turner was born Robert Edward Turner III, in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1938. His father, Ed, was “a man of violent mood swings and ruinously heavy drinking habits” who shot himself in the family home when Ted was 24. Already by this time a playboy, Ted Turner might have blown his inheritance. Instead, he set about building an empire.

A key move came in 1970, when he took over the heavily loss-making Atlanta TV station WJRJ and slowly built it up with cartoons, old movies and extensive coverage of the Atlanta Braves baseball team.

Ted Turner was “the first media mogul to buy into sports as programme fodder for his network”, notes The Guardian, buying the team in 1976 to protect his TV franchise.

Eventually, the combination of sport and movies drove the ratings of his “super-station” through the roof – paving the way for CNN. From the start, CNN was deliberately international. Its impact soared during the Gulf War of 1990-1991 when it was the only Western TV station allowed to stay in Baghdad, says the FT. The channel set new standards for its coverage of breaking conflicts and crises – and was cited by some as a key factor in the collapse of the Iron Curtain.

Ted Turner the philanthropist

In 1996, Turner sold CNN to Time Warner, remaining an active member of the board. It left him more time to spend with actress Jane Fonda – the love of his life, third wife and fellow campaigner – on their Montana ranch. But within a few years disaster struck after Time Warner was acquired by AOL in 2001 in what came to be regarded as “one of the most value-destroying takeovers of all time”, says The Telegraph. Turner “lost upwards of $8 billion”. The same year, Fonda divorced him.

Still, he had “a billion or two left”, as he put it, and threw himself into ranching and ecology – in 2011, he was estimated to be the largest landowner in America – and in 2015 made good on an earlier pledge to donate $1 billion to the UN. He was diagnosed with dementia in 2018 and withdrew from public life: his five children serve on the board of the Turner Foundation. “Given his childhood,” Fonda told CNN, “he should've become a dictator… The miracle is that he became what he is. A man who will go to heaven.”

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J. Craig Venter was a “risk-taking outsider” who “brought speed, competition and controversy to one of science's biggest races”, says The New York Times – the quest to decode the human genome. A former surfer and Vietnam veteran turned medical researcher, Venter combined a brilliant scientific mind with the single-minded drive of an entrepreneur. Having decided in the 1990s that the US government's $3 billion Human Genome Project (HGP) was moving at a snail's pace, he took the gamble that “he could enter the race late and beat it with a much faster method”, launching a private company, Celera Genomics, as his vehicle. A decade later, he made another significant breakthrough, creating the world's first synthetic bacterial cell.

“The idea of commercialising the genome was extremely unpopular in the scientific community,” says The Telegraph. Nicknamed “Darth Venter”, he was demonised by critics. But Venter relished the controversy – “flashing his Learjet, yacht and Rolex, and his ability to raise $1 billion on the New York stock market in a single day” when he floated Celera in February 2000 at the height of the biotechnology boom. Celera pioneered a technique called “shotgun sequencing”, says Chemistry World: the idea was to randomly cut up the genome into fragments, sequence them, and then use a supercomputer to work out how the pieces related to one another. The method was faster and cheaper than the HGP's approach of slogging systematically through the genome. Indeed, the privately backed company took two years to achieve what the HGP had been trying to do for 14 years, says The Times. “The scramble ended in a photo finish” with the two sides jointly announcing their success at a press conference presided over by Bill Clinton in 2000. Crucially, by publishing the full sequence, the HGP undermined Venter's plans to register patent rights.

J. Craig Venter was a brash entrepreneur

Often described as “the alpha male of US science”, J. Craig Venter was an extremely competitive character, noted the Financial Times in 2007. Born in 1946, into a military family and brought up in Millbrae, California, he was an unruly youth who dropped out of high school to become a surfer before being called up to serve in Vietnam in 1967. Venter returned to the US with a new interest in medical research, earning a degree in biochemistry from the University of California, followed by a doctorate, says The Telegraph. He began working on gene sequencing in the 1980s at the US National Institutes of Health, later co-founding the nonprofit Institute for Genomic Research, with his then-wife, genomicist Claire Fraser.

J. Craig Venter was not an easy man to work with, says Chemistry World. Just over a year after his human genome coup, he was fired by Celera because of internal conflicts, but continued to drive genome sequencing forward via a new non-profit, the J. Craig Venter Institute. Having banked a considerable sum from listing Celera, he continued creating firms – and landing in trouble over them, says The Guardian. He co-founded Synthetic Genomics to advance the technology in vaccines, biofuels and medicines. In 2013 he launched Human Longevity Inc, only later to be sued by the firm, says The Times, “over allegations that he pilfered its trade secrets, poached its staff and sought to lure away its investors”. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2016.

By the time of his death last month aged 79, Venter was worth tens of millions of dollars. But he missed out on the bonanza that synthetic biology now promises in “myriad applications”, says The Telegraph. Maverick to the end, he was regarded by detractors as an “opportunistic maniac” – and by admirers as a plucky “genius” who challenged the research establishment and “should have been given a Nobel Prize”.

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In the Punjabi village of Dutarawali, sits the house of Lawrence Bishnoi. It sits just on the Indian side of the border with Pakistan and is a spacious, whitewashed house, protected by a seven-foot boundary wall, topped with barbed wire and CCTV cameras, says The Guardian. “The symbol of Om is curled on its brown iron door, which has no nameplate.”

At 33, Lawrence Bishnoi is “India's most notorious gangster”. In October 2024, members of the Bishnoi gang carried out one of the most high-profile murders in recent history, gunning down Baba Siddique, a senior Indian politician, in Mumbai. Lawrence Bishnoi has also been linked to a number of killings and attempted assassinations on Canadian soil.

“He has a well-publicised hit list, with dozens of names on it, including Bollywood stars and stand-up comics” – an earlier target was Siddhu Moose Wala, a Punjabi rapper with a global following. But what is remarkable about these killings is that they were all orchestrated from a “high-security prison”, where Bishnoi has been incarcerated for more than ten years awaiting trial on several counts of murder and extortion. In fact, his most serious crimes have taken place while in custody.

“From his cell… Bishnoi allegedly commands an empire” quite capable of “orchestrating a political assassination halfway around the world”, says CNN. He's the kingpin of a gang numbering around 700 members, according to India's National Investigation Agency.

Last autumn, Canada designated the group a terrorist entity after the Trudeau government accused the Modi government of using Bishnoi's gang “to carry out crimes against Sikh dissidents on Canadian soil”. That elevated Bishnoi from being one of India's most famous mob bosses – a household name in his homeland – to global notoriety. It also set up a diplomatic incident with New Delhi, which summarily dismissed Trudeau's allegations, claiming there was no evidence to back them up.

Lawrence Bishnoi shares many of the ruling administration's strong Hindu nationalist convictions, reportedly considering himself “a warrior” for the cause. And in “lawless” India, “where an atmosphere of official impunity is combined with the ever-present threat of violence”, he has become an icon, says The Guardian – “a model” for India's great masses of unemployed youth. “Bishnoi has come to exemplify a nihilistic ideology born of desperation: grab what you can, by any means necessary”, and punish anyone insulting the creed.

Lawrence Bishnoi's image of a Hindu don

Born Balkaran Bishnoi in 1993 to a relatively wealthy landowning family, Bishnoi's father was a former police officer. His mother, who had big dreams for him, renamed him after Henry Lawrence, a 19th-century British administrator who established a string of military-style schools. In 2010, Lawrence Bishnoi nrolled at university to study law, but “drifted towards the underbelly of student politics, falling in with a thuggish crowd”, says the Financial Times. After becoming involved in brawls and shootings, “his descent was swift”. A shoot-out with police in 2014 marked the start of the decade-long jail stretch he is still serving.

During his stint behind bars, Lawrence Bishnoi has perfected managing his image as a revolutionary and has made a virtue of his vegetarian diet and celibacy. No wonder he is celebrated in the mainstream press as a “Hindu don”. A streaming platform, Zee5, has just announced a documentary series on his life, which will further burnish his image. “Separating the man from the myth” is becoming ever more difficult, says the BBC. But the main question surrounding Lawrence Bishnoi hasn't gone away. The control he exerts “would be impossible without powerful allies”. Exactly how far up India's chain of command do they go?

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It's unknown who first nicknamed Mark Mobius, the legendary US stock-picker who has died aged 89, the “Indiana Jones of emerging-market investment”. But he certainly enjoyed playing up to the moniker. “The places I like to be are the places where nobody else wants to be” was a typical pitch, says The Telegraph. “I want to be there when there's blood on the streets,” he said. “Problems, crashes, people jumping out of windows… Fantastic.”

Mark Mobius, who ran the Templeton Emerging Markets Fund for nearly three decades until 2018 – growing it from $100 million to more than $40 billion under his leadership – certainly made many winning bets during crises, says Forbes India. He cleaned up buying quality stocks at rock-bottom prices during the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the Russian panic a year later, continuing the theme through the dotcom bust, the 2008 global financial meltdown and all subsequent dips. “If you see light at the end of the tunnel, it's too late to buy” was a favourite maxim.

At his peak, Mark Mobius was famous for criss-crossing the world in his Gulfstream jet (he travelled for 250-300 days a year), swooping down on bashed-up bargains. But his gung-ho rhetoric concealed more nuanced thinking, and his many books “offered an unusually human view of global finance”, says CNBC. “If you want to understand a market, start with its people,” Mobius wrote. The line distilled his belief that on-the-ground observation mattered more than abstract theory.

Mark Mobius observed in his biography that he had “toured rubber plantations in Thailand and road-tested bikes over the pothole-ridden roads of rural China”, says the Financial Times. He elaborated how he'd “choked on roast camel's meat, sheep's eyeball, guinea pig and dined (surprisingly well) on scorpions on toast”. He was a great storyteller whose calm manner and encyclopaedic knowledge reassured Western investors uneasy about political risk, currency volatility and opaque governance. “People say emerging markets are dangerous places to invest,” he once remarked. “But Bernie Madoff operated in the US for years.”

Mobius is quite rightly acclaimed for opening up a massive new investment class. But the nattily dressed “godfather of emerging markets” was held in equal affection in many of the territories he targeted, says Business Today (India). “He came to India during the economic liberalisation phase of 1991-1992 and fell in love with an expanding economy and its booming stockmarkets,” as well as its people and culture – and remained “a perma Indian bull” all his life. It was a similar story in China and Hong Kong, says the South China Morning Post.

Mark Mobius was a master at finding value

Mark Mobius' family background had nothing to do with finance – but it did open him up to different cultures. His German-born father, Paul, was a ship's cook and baker; his mother Maria was from Puerto Rico. Brought up on Long Island, he studied communications at Boston University, completed a doctorate in economics at MIT in 1964, and worked as a teacher before turning to investment, says The Telegraph. He moved to Hong Kong in 1967 and established his own research and investment business, later working for the British stockbroking firm of Vickers da Costa before the veteran investor John Templeton – himself a past master of spotting hidden value and a pioneer of global investment – invited him to create an emerging-markets fund. The rest is history.

Mobius's lean features and shaved head – a look he adopted in the 1960s after a fire in his apartment damaged his hair – made him a ringer for the Russian-American actor Yul Brynner. But he had his own unique magnetism, says Business Today. There was nothing of the US economic imperialist about him. He was a bridge-builder – and will be sorely missed.

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The true identity of Satoshi Nakamoto – the pseudonymous inventor of Bitcoin – is perhaps "the biggest unsolved mystery of the technology world", says Satyen Bordoloi on Sify.com. For 18 years, Nakamoto has been searched for, speculated about and occasionally wrongly outed. But could he/she/they have been hiding in plain sight all along?

That is the contention of New York Times journalist John Carreyrou, who believes he has finally established the true identity of the inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. He points the finger at Adam Back – a mild-mannered 55-year-old British developer, with the air of “a dishevelled mathematician”, who was active in the cryptocurrency from its inception in 2008 and has since “built a mini empire of Bitcoin-related companies and become one of the community's most influential members”.

Back, who is based in Malta, has been named before and he denies the charge. What triggered Carreyrou's two-year investigation was an appearance he made as an expert witness on a 2024 HBO documentary Money Electric. Carreyrou found the film's contention that Satoshi Nakamoto was the Canadian crypto expert Peter Todd unconvincing. But a scene showing Back “fidgeting” nervously when asked if he was Satoshi Nakamoto was a light-bulb moment. He now claims that forensic linguistic analysis shows “striking similarities” between Back's emails and posts and Satoshi's known output – and also in their shared enthusiasms, bugbears, coding preferences and esoteric knowledge. Back dismisses Carreyrou's evidence.

“Whatever the truth” about Adam Back's contribution, he certainly “helped shape the ideas behind the cryptocurrency”, says The Sunday Times. The melting pot from which bitcoin eventually emerged was a 1990s libertarian movement that called itself Cypherpunk – an international group of mathematicians, cryptographers, coders and anarchists who met online and debated on early internet forums. At the time, Back was a PhD student in computer science at the University of Exeter.

Is Adam Back Satoshi Nakamoto?

It was a fellow student who alerted Adam Back to a free encryption program called PGP (“Pretty Good Privacy”), which people used to avoid surveillance. Money was in the Cypherpunks' sights from the beginning. “To me, crypto anarchy is a means to achieve a more libertarian government,” Back wrote in 1996 – a decentralising message echoed in the white paper Satoshi Nakamoto wrote when he introduced his “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System” more than a decade later. Satoshi Nakamoto also used Hashcash – “a statistical, puzzle-solving system” invented by Adam Back – to mine the first bitcoins. An early clue to Satoshi Nakamoto's nationality – seized upon by some – was his use of a British expletive.

Despite regular appearances at industry events, Adam Back remains guarded about his personal life and privacy, says The Sunday Times. The Carreyrou thesis has cast an unwelcome spotlight. Like The Economist, Back believes that if Satoshi Nakamoto was exposed as a real person, “the world of bitcoin would lose much of its magic”.

Carreyrou remains convinced he's found “the right man”, but we've been here before. Ultimately, the only means of proving Satoshi Nakamoto's identity is “cryptographic”, says Sify. Without evidence of a “private key signature”, or “verified movement of Satoshi's wallets”, even the most forensic investigation is nothing more than a “hypothesis”. The identity of the inventor of Bitcoin remains a mystery.

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Imran Khan, the Pakistan cricket legend turned reforming politician, languishes in solitary confinement in the country's most notorious jail. “They've barred TV channels from saying his name on air and stopped newspapers from publishing his picture”, says Osman Samiuddin on Equator.

“There is no Pakistani – male, female, dead, real, imagined – as famous as Imran Khan,” says Samiuddin. That holds even now, two years into “the state's attempts to erase him from public life”, much to the chagrin of the ruling authorities in Islamabad. The former Pakistani team captain has even been “scrubbed” from footage of his greatest sporting triumphs, including Pakistan's 1992 World Cup victory.

Imran Khan's enduring appeal

An authoritarian government trying “to vanish” a popular political leader is hardly an unfamiliar tale. But Imran Khan is deemed particularly dangerous by Pakistan's dominant military establishment, which has attempted to ban his PTI party, because of his extraordinary powers of rhetoric and ability to draw “a visceral energy from the crowd”.

Imran Khan's premiership – which began in 2018 and ended, as every tenure preceding it has, prematurely in 2022 – “was neither as successful nor as long-lasting as his captaincy”. Yet private political discourse in Pakistan is still imbued with “Imranisms”. Indeed, “one constitutional expert put it to me that Imran's ability to infuse words with new meanings embodied the later philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein”.

Pakistan's “de facto ruler”, field marshal Asim Munir – who was Imran Khan's top spymaster before being removed in 2019 – understands this pulling power all too well, says the Financial Times.

Khan, who is serving concurrent sentences for offences ranging from corruption to leaking state secrets, believes Munir's strategy is to kill him “slowly”. Last November, rumours spread he'd succeeded when Khan, 73, went unseen for so long that many concluded he'd died. Pakistani officials deny wrongdoing and blame his family and supporters for “politicising” his imprisonment “to destabilise the country”.

From cricket to political office

Imran Khan made his international cricket debut as a teenager in 1971 before heading to Keble College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics and economics, says The Observer. After a career spanning two decades, he is still considered one of cricket's all-time greats. After the 1992 World Cup, Imran Khan retired from cricket and raised millions of dollars to fund a cancer hospital in his mother's memory. “That foray into philanthropy spawned his career in politics,” says the BBC. He launched Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) which means “Movement for Justice” in 1996, but it wasn't until 2011 that PTI emerged as a serious political contender.

After taking office in 2018, Imran Khan struggled to maintain his promise to be a “change” candidate. “Inflation soared, the rupee plummeted and Pakistan became crippled by debt, stoking anger and criticism that he had mishandled the economy.” He had to arrange a $6 billion rescue bailout from the IMF over a balance-of-payments crisis in 2019, before losing a vote of no confidence in 2022. There followed a cat-and-mouse game with the authorities before he was seized, in dramatic circumstances, at an Islamabad High Court hearing in May 2023, says The New York Times. His arrest sparked riots across the country.

“Let there be anarchy, let there be chaos,” one supporter told the BBC. “If there is no Imran, there's nothing left in Pakistan.” Yet, short of revolution, the chances of his release are slight. Khan faces “an elaborate buffet” of charges “so numerous that even his own legal team has lost track of exactly how many there are”, says The New York Times. Still, pressure is mounting. Last month, his son, Kasim Khan, addressed the UN, detailing his father's “deliberate persecution” in a moving speech. There was “a familiar determination” in his eyes.

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A few years back, Aliko Dangote, Africa's richest man and an ardent Arsenal FC fan, reluctantly abandoned his dream of buying the London club – saying he had no “excess liquidity” because he was channelling everything he had into his biggest project yet: the continent's largest oil refinery.

That act of self-discipline is now richly rewarding Dangote, says The Economist. Since the start of the war with Iran, his phone hasn't stopped ringing with offers for his gasoline, diesel and aviation fuel.

“People are ready to pay anything now,” he says. Aliko Dangote's $20 billion refinery complex, which spans “an area nearly half the size of Manhattan” outside Lagos in Nigeria, can process 650,000 barrels a day. It is by far the largest scheme owned by the Dangote Group, the cement-to-sugar conglomerate behind his estimated $28.5 billion fortune. But Dangote, 68, suggests it symbolises something more: seeing the plant as a clarion call for the continent to become more self-reliant. “If we Africans don't lead in the industrialisation of Africa, Africa will never industrialise.”

“No one should confuse the tycoon with an altruist” – Dangote's many critics argue he milks state-backed monopolies in several essential sectors, now including oil. Still, the refinery is “a macroeconomic feat as well as an industrial one”. Last year the International Monetary Fund estimated that, if run at full capacity, it would boost Nigeria's non-oil GDP by 1.5% between 2025 and 2026, and boost official dollar reserves by $5.5 billion annually. Double that, says Business Day Nigeria: Dangote has just announced plans to expand capacity to 1.4 million barrels per day and is also scaling up the group's fertiliser and polypropylene plants. The refinery has blown apart a bad trade for Nigeria, says Business Insider. For decades, it was forced to export its crude – and then spend billions importing refined fuel.

How Aliko Dangote built his billions

Trading runs in the family. Aliko Dangote's great-grandfather, as he told Time in 2014, was “a kola nut trader, and the richest man in West Africa at the time of his death”. His own father was a businessman and politician, though he was raised by his grandfather. “It's traditional in my culture for the grandparents to take the first grandchild and raise it. I had a lot of love, and it gave me a lot of confidence.” After studying business at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, he started trading himself in the 1970s – eventually gaining “exclusive import rights” for cement, sugar and salt, says The Economist. Generations of influence helped. At the turn of the century he started making cement, and Dangote Cement “became the concrete foundation of his fortune”. The move into oil refining promises to be just as transformative.

Aliko Dangote is still the only African among the world's 100 richest people, according to Forbes. He has appointed his three daughters – Fatima, Mariya and Halima – to head key operations across his group, while honing his contacts at events such as Davos – Cherie Blair is an independent director of the group's board. Mild-mannered and courteous in person, Aliko Dangote has a tendency to lecture other wealthy Nigerians on their responsibilities, says Business Insider, especially those seduced by luxury consumption.

“If you have money for a Rolls-Royce, you should go and put up an industry in your locality… or wherever you feel there is a need.” No wonder he puts backs up.

But Aliko Dangote has done Nigerians a real service, says Feyi Fawehinmi in the FT. Since coming online in 2024, his refinery has saved the country “dollars and dignity”. Fuel shortages have long been an “obsession” in Nigeria. But “when supply is reliable “both the economy and the national mood shift”. Dangote's great contribution has been “the quiet revolution of availability”.

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Is Market Financial Solutions (MFS) a canary or a cockroach? Possibly both. The niche Mayfair-based mortgage company founded by Paresh Raja and specialising in bridging loans, which was put into administration in February, has become the leitmotif of increasing unease in the private-credit market, which some claim is a $2 trillion time-bomb.

Creditors – including Barclays, Jefferies, Wells Fargo and Apollo's structured credit arm, Atlas SP Partners – are facing an “alleged shortfall” of £1.3 billion and are “scrambling to figure out what their collateral is actually worth amid allegations of double-pledging”, says the Financial Times. The fear is that MFS might be the harbinger of more blow-ups to come.

Paresh Raja, who is now in Dubai, denies any wrongdoing. “Mistakes have been made but there has been no intention to defraud whatsoever and Mr Raja has not been the beneficiary of any shortfall (if any) there may be,” his lawyers told The Telegraph. However, he has been hit with a worldwide freezing order while accusations of fraud are investigated, says the Financial Times; he has been “barred from spending more than £5,000 a week without administrators' consent” and must provide details of all his assets worth more than £10,000.

“Once again, some of Wall Street's most sophisticated players” – already scarred by the collapse of First Brands and Tricolor in the US last year – “missed the warning signs”, says The Wall Street Journal. Even a preliminary delve into MFS's business might have raised concerns.

The firm backed dozens of property deals linked to Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, a former land minister in Bangladesh who, along with family members, built a sprawling $295 million property portfolio from 1992 until August 2024, when the government of Sheikh Hasina collapsed amid student protests. In June 2025, the UK's National Crime Agency froze 342 properties linked to Chowdhury, worth about £185 million, as part of “an ongoing civil investigation”.

Creditor allegations against Paresh Raja – who created a complicated web of entities, many registered under the names of Greek and Roman gods, to house the loans he had secured using MFS's loan book as collateral – paint “a damning picture” of his self-described “re-financing merry-go-round”, says the FT. There are allegations that eight companies that were supposedly “genuine borrowers” from MFS were actually “closely connected” to the owner. It has emerged that some listed directors and shareholders of corporate borrowers also held positions at MFS's accountants.

Who is Paresh Raja?

The details of Paresh Raja's biography are thin. He worked in consultancy before launching MFS in 2006 to fill a gap in the market by offering “bespoke loans” and financing – covering everything from buy-to-let mortgages, to refurbishments and conversions. Two years in, the global credit crunch hit, but that proved a catalyst for growth. “It suddenly became very difficult to get finance from mainstream lenders” and property investors “appreciated the utility of the specialist market”, recalled Raja. He embraced clients rejected by high-street banks. “We look for reasons to issue a loan, rather than finding excuses not to.”

For all Paresh Raja's efforts to raise its profile, the firm remained “barely known outside its corner of finance”, says Bloomberg. In December, employees descended on the five-star Peninsula Hotel for a lavish black-tie Christmas event. It turned out to be a last hurrah. Alarmed by events in the US, MFS's creditors instigated extra checks on their loan books. In January, Barclays froze MFS's accounts, triggering the unravelling that prompted the firm's collapse. In 2025, Paresh Raja was named “Disruptor of the Year” by one media group. That now sounds distinctly ironic.

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When British police seized 61,000 bitcoin from Qian Zhimin – a Chinese conwoman on the run – they hailed it as the largest seizure of cryptocurrency ever. Now a legal battle is intensifying over the haul which, at current prices, is worth around £3.2 billion. After the self-described “Goddess of Wealth” was jailed for 11 years for money laundering in the autumn, the chancellor reportedly “earmarked” most of the stash “to shore up the government's finances”, says The Times.

Many of Qian Zhimin's 128,000 Chinese victims are crying foul, however. They insist the compensation scheme proposed by the UK is inadequate because it fails to capture the massive rise in the value of bitcoin, which has more than quintupled since the fraud unravelled – and are fighting to stop the British state from benefiting, says the Financial Times. Prosecutors say litigation firms representing the victims are merely trying “to cash in”.

It is a fittingly messy climax to a long-running saga that has drawn a good deal of attention in China, where Qian Zhimin is viewed as a “super-villain”, says the South China Morning Post. By the time Chinese police busted her massive pyramid scheme, which ran from 2014 to 2017, she is reckoned to have conned investors, many elderly, out of more than 40 billion yuan (around £4.4 billion). Qian Zhimin dangled returns of up to 300% for investing in Tianjin Blue Sky Grid Electronic Technology, which claimed to offer everything from bitcoin mining to air purifiers, says The Economist. “In fact, the firm's funds mainly came from depositors who, in typical Ponzi fashion, were offered rewards to recruit others.” Qian Zhimin appears to have had a mesmerising effect on victims, who were lured to conferences at luxury hotels across China. She tapped into her audience's patriotism and skilfully manipulated their generational gripes.

Little is known about Qian Zhimin's early life, beyond the fact that she was born in 1978. But her extraordinary trajectory and grandiose schemes hint at an unscrupulous personality with fantasist tendencies. You can't fault her derring-do. When the balloon went up in 2017, Qian Zhimin fled China on a moped to Myanmar, having smuggled out her bitcoin stash, says The Guardian. She fetched up in Britain under the alias “Yadi Zhang”. It was the start of an extravagant seven years on the run. Qian Zhimin rented a mansion on the edge of Hampstead Heath, posing as a wealthy antiques and diamond heiress, and hiring a “personal assistant” to help launder the crypto into cash and property. Qian Zhimin herself “spent most of her days lying in bed, gaming and online shopping”, while drawing up bold schemes to secure her freedom. She planned to found an international bank, buy a Swedish castle and ingratiate herself to a British duke. But the grandest scheme was to make herself queen of Liberland – an unrecognised microstate on the Croatian-Serbian border – which she would run as a bitcoin fiefdom, believing it would entitle her to immunity from prosecution, says the BBC. A budget of £5 million was set aside for a set of crown jewels.

Crypto worth £67 million found in Qian Zhimin's London property

The dragnet started closing in when police were alerted to her assistant's attempt to buy a £24 million London property. A raid revealed hard drives and laptops loaded with tens of thousands of bitcoin. Qian Zhimin vanished the day before she was due to be interviewed in September 2020. It would be four years before she was finally caught after police noticed that a bitcoin wallet they were monitoring had been accessed by a Malaysian-born businessman whom Qian Zhimin had recruited as her “butler”, says The Times. They followed him to a house in York. When Qian Zhimin was arrested, a memory stick “in a secret pocket of her jogging bottoms” was found to contain the codes for £67 million of bitcoin. Given half a chance, she was ready to make a run for it.

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Matthew Partridge: James Caan – you founded Alexander Mann and co-founded Humana International, two successful recruitment companies. Would you say that today there's a risk that many university graduates heading into entry-level roles today are being replaced by AI?

James Caan: While I feel much depends on what type of degree the student gains and what they want to do, I do think we're heading for a car crash. I talk to a lot of the big corporate employers, such as Goldman Sachs or KPMG, and if you look at the graduate intake this year, it's going to be less than 50% of the previous year's level.

Up until now, the basic entry-level graduate would have done a research-oriented job. But research is now available at the click of a button, removing the need for someone sitting there for hours trawling through documents and information. Even law firms have significantly reduced their intake, with many of these jobs set to be phased out altogether.

Matthew Partridge: Won't eliminating these entry-level jobs make it harder to find tomorrow's managers and executives?

James Caan: It might, but I think the whole concept of management will change. After all, so much of it is about managing businesses through information, and now access to information, whether financial or operational, is going to be on steroids, both in terms of increased quantity but also accessibility. This, in turn, will drastically reduce the need for managers. What's more, the managers who remain will be much more analytical and data-orientated than today's people-orientated managers.

If you take the three largest recruitment companies in the world, Adecco, Randstad and Manpower, you can see that their share prices have crashed over the last two years. This suggests that the market doesn't believe that the number of jobs they will fill, as well as the fees that they generate, will be anywhere near where they used to be, so my outlook for the job market is very bearish.

Matthew Partridge: So what sort of degrees should students looking to get a job after university do?

James Caan: Unless they want to follow a specific path, such as medicine, I don't think it is possible to generalise. However, I would say that degrees involving learning to work with data, whether through physics, maths or science, are going to be much more valuable. It is also important to realise that education is about more than just getting a degree; it's about capability, confidence and critical thinking. I left school at 16 because I wanted to get on with building something. Later, I went to Harvard because I wanted to sharpen what I had learned through experience. Both experiences were “education”. At the very least, the career departments of universities and schools need to reflect the careers of today with the advice they give students.

Matthew Partridge: You've been vocal about the need for change in the education system through your work with the Foundation for Education Development (FED). What sort of reforms would you like to see?

James Caan: Education is a very sensitive subject for me because I feel passionately that the UK's education system has not kept up with the times, with students that are coming out of schools ill-equipped for the jobs that exist today. The key problem is that the education system dates back to the 1950s idea of GCSEs and A-levels leading on to university, even though the economy has changed dramatically over that period. The problem is made even worse by the fact that many teachers working today were trained 25 years ago, which means key aspects of their skill sets can't meet the needs of today's students.

When I talked to various people about incorporating technologies such as AI or animation into classrooms, they all say “It's a great idea, James, but we don't have the resources within the education system to deliver those courses because the teachers are just not equipped”. What is particularly worrying is that the [Persian] Gulf and China are way ahead of us in terms of using AI and technology to provide advanced education at schools and universities, and their offerings are starting to overtake what's available in our institutions. Even Oxford, Cambridge and the LSE are falling behind, which means that they, and the country, could lose their income from overseas students.

Matthew Partridge: Is the solution to bring more money into education, or change the way in which education is delivered?

James Caan: The discussion has shifted towards skills, apprenticeships and employability, not just academic routes. The decision to refocus public funding away from master's-level apprenticeships is a clear signal of intent: prioritise earlier-stage, broader access to training. We also need to deliver lessons better. Thanks to AI, even when the teacher isn't qualified to deliver a topic, you can now design bespoke courses, using content culled from world-class institutions, which can then be delivered by virtual avatars.

So, for instance, I've always been a big fan of teaching students the basics of personal finance, such as owning a credit card and opening a bank account, right through to the mechanics of setting up a company and issues such as limited liability. Yet when I've raised the issue, the big objection has always been that many of those teaching in schools today don't know that much about those topics either.

The good news, though, is that thanks to the explosion in information, there's so much content available that it should be relatively easy to design a course and program an avatar to deliver a lesson for 30 minutes, with the teacher dealing with any further questions that the pupils might have. While this might seem futuristic, I'm already seeing schools in the Gulf and China using such technology in this way.

Matthew Partridge: You were a presenter on Dragons' Den, a TV programme credited with promoting entrepreneurship. Do you think that we're becoming more entrepreneurial as a society?

James Caan: Dragons' Den did something very powerful. It normalised entrepreneurship. It showed people from all backgrounds that starting a business was not reserved for a particular class, education or network. It made business conversations part of mainstream culture. That visibility matters enormously because you cannot aspire to what you cannot see.

Historically, we have had a cautious culture. We are more comfortable with security than risk. To fail in business still carries a stigma here that it does not in the US or the Middle East. But this is changing. Younger generations are far more comfortable with enterprise, side businesses, and alternative career paths. The cultural shift is happening, but the system has not yet caught up with the ambition.

Matthew Partridge: A big criticism of British entrepreneurship is that those who do set up companies still focus more on selling themselves to larger groups than growing into global champions. Is this true, and if so, what are the reasons for it?

James Caan: There is a lot of truth in that. Access to sufficient capital to achieve scale in the UK is still more limited than in the US. Founders receive acquisition offers earlier than they should, and without the right support, selling can feel like the rational decision. But I also think Britain can change this if it gets serious about confidence and long-term growth. When sentiment improves, companies invest more, and founders hold their nerve. The January business readings show we are not there yet, but the direction matters.

We need patient capital, better advisory systems, and a culture that celebrates building enduring companies, not just quick exits. A great example of the sort of thinking required is Amazon. At present many listed firms think in quarterly cycles because they have to report every three months and therefore the time horizon for investment is very short. However, Amazon held fast to its view that they needed to invest in order to build a world-class platform that would make them and their investors' a lot of money. While this meant that Amazon received a ton of negative press until the platform was built, it quickly became one of the most successful firms in the world, showing the benefits of thinking a bit more longer term.

Matthew Partridge: The government has recently talked about trying to reduce the amount of red tape around business. Do you think that will work?

James Caan: Yes, we definitely need to reduce red tape. I mean, try opening a bank account tomorrow or getting a VAT or PAYE number. One of the companies I set up recently took five months to get a VAT number. It's just ridiculous. And the awful thing is that, with all today's technology, we should be able to do this online. How is it that I go to Barclays and it can take me four months to open an account, but I can open one with a fintech such as Revolut in ten minutes?

Some of the decisions that the government has taken haven't helped. The decision to hike national insurance was particularly ill-thought through; it looks as though the Treasury may end up losing money because of the reduced number of hires. Similarly, the tax hikes on some of the wealthy have resulted in people leaving the country. I don't think that the government understands how to implement policies to boost business and entrepreneurship.

Of course, I'm not against all tax rises, especially if they are used to fund retraining for workers displaced by AI. It might make sense to target the huge technology companies that are causing all the problems. However, by hiking employers' national insurance contributions to 15%, the only thing that you are going to do is to kill all the small companies.

James Caan CBE is the founder and CEO of private-equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw as well as chairman of both Recruitment Entrepreneur and Ingenia Global Partners. Between 2007 and 2012, he was on the panel of Dragons' Den. He has written four books on business.

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Reza Pahlavi was an 18-year-old studying in Texas when his father was deposed as the Shah of Iran in 1979. A year later, on the Shah's death, he declared himself the country's rightful ruler. “Few took his political aspirations seriously,” says the Financial Times. Pahlavi “appeared destined for a life of quiet prosperity in Washington's suburbs, occasionally appearing at think-tank events, book launches and gala dinners”. But as mass protests rocked Iran, he began hoping that would change and launched a campaign to position himself as the country's leader-in-waiting – “a unifying leader capable of rallying all democratic forces in the nation should its theocratic regime be toppled”.

Of late, events haven't been going quite to plan, says The Times. If Pahlavi was heartened by the death of supreme leader Ali Khameini and other hardliners, the assumption of power by the latter's son, Mojtaba Khameini, is a setback. So, too, is the somewhat dismissive attitude of the US commander-in-chief. Despite the crown prince's efforts to project himself as a power broker in Washington, Donald Trump appears to have pooh-poohed the notion.

He “looks like a very nice person”, observed Trump last week, but “it would seem to me that somebody from within, maybe, would be more appropriate”. Somebody “currently popular”. Attempts by Pahlavi's Paris-based team to urge the president “to abandon his view of Venezuela as a model for Iran” are falling on deaf ears.

Compared with the White House's Hobbesian plan (or absence of one) for the future government of Iran, Pahlavi's looks like a model of democracy – involving a referendum on the new system of government, followed by the election of a constituent assembly and ratification of a constitution over two to three years. And he might point to a precedent – the return of King Juan Carlos, following the death in 1969 of the Spanish dictator Franco, helped build a lasting democratic system.

But although some Iranians perceive Pahlavi as “an opposition leader”, others consider him merely “opportunistic”, says The Conversation. It's hard to forget that his father “ruled Iran with an iron fist” from 1941 to 1979, deploying a secret police arguably every bit as vicious against dissidents as the ayatollahs' later enforcers.

All the while, Pahlavi and his siblings combined a gilded life in the imperial palace with plenty of glamorous foreign travel.

Reza Pahlavi is playing the long game

Pahlavi's adult life has been dominated by political activism against the Islamic Republic – aided by his wife Yasmine Etemad-Amini, a fellow refugee from the revolution and a former attorney active in human-rights advocacy, particularly on issues affecting Iranian women.

There's always been speculation – both within Iran and outside – about the extent of the family's fortune. A 1979 Washington Post investigation described the Shah's wealth as “staggering”. But there's no public record of how much of it was smuggled out. The family has several lovely houses in America, but taken together they suggest “assets in the low-to-mid single-digit millions”.

On a personal level, Pahlavi is much admired, says Politico. But some supporters have been unnerved by the “slash-and-burn tactics” adopted by his team as it seeks “to dominate the Iranian opposition”. Others note that Pahlavi's political agenda has shifted to the right, threatening his appeal across a broad swathe of Iranian society. Still, plenty of Iranians might be “willing to settle” for him. Whether they get the chance to is another matter. Last week, traders on prediction market Polymarket assigned a roughly 13% chance that Pahlavi will “lead Iran” in 2026, down from 17% in February. His odds are falling, but he's in for the long game.

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The killing of Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, aka El Mencho – Mexico's most wanted man – in a joint operation by Mexican security forces and US intelligence, was a sensational sting. “The 59-year-old former policeman and cartel godfather was tracked down to a modest holiday cabin in a pine forest in his home state of Jalisco” and fatally wounded after a gun battle, says The Times, .

El Mencho was head of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) – “The Company” – one of the most powerful criminal organisations in the world. It is a drug-trafficking and extortion empire, with an estimated $50 billion in assets and a private army at its disposal. Now, says The Times, it has “no clear leader”.

El Mencho's demise, while heralded as an important victory in the battle against organised crime, raises the substantial risk of more carnage if it sparks a war for control of the CJNG and its “barbaric riches”. Confrontations inside Mexican cartels, following the removal of kingpins, have “caused the most extreme spikes in violence over the past 20 years”. The violence that followed El Mencho's death was almost immediate, says The Economist. Attacks were carried out in at least 15 states, with buses and banks set alight and roads blocked. Some 60 people were killed.

Unlike his erstwhile rival El Chapo – the imprisoned head of the Sinaloa cartel – El Mencho has never courted publicity, says The Guardian. Few photographs of him exist. Born poor, one of six sons, to an avocado farmer from Aguililla in the western state of Michoacán, Oseguera was involved in drug-trafficking from an early age. After dropping out of primary school to work in the fields, he started guarding marijuana plantations, noted a 2017 Rolling Stone profile, before migrating illegally to the US at some point in the 1980s. There, he assumed aliases and ran multiple rackets until his luck ran out when he was convicted of heroin distribution in the US in 1994 and jailed for nearly three years.

Oseguera made the most of his deportation back to Mexico, says France 24. He married the formidable Rosalinda Gonzalez Valencia (aka “The Boss”) – the daughter of a drug lord, who later became CJNG's chief financial operator – and joined the Milenio criminal cartel, as well as the local police force. When infighting forced him out of Michoacán, he took refuge in neighbouring Jalisco, teaming up with the Sinaloa cartel to form the “Matazetas”, or “Zeta Killers”. Their mission was to take revenge on the Zeta cartel who had stolen his territory and seize its lucrative business. The brutality was remarkable even by Mexican gang standards. One of Oseguera's tactics, says The Times, was “to strap and detonate sticks of dynamite” on live victims.

El Mencho’s far-reaching grip

Of late, CJNG's business success has been unmatched – as a global drugs trafficker (of cocaine and meth and more recently fentanyl), with lucrative sidelines in “avocado production, fuel and gold smuggling”, and “timeshare property scams” fleecing Americans. El Mencho “formed alliances with like-minded drug gangs from Africa to Australia”, maintaining an active social-media presence that portrayed CJNG as “both charitable and menacing” – there are plenty of shots showing off formidable weaponry.

Drug cartels gained a big foothold in Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s, but El Mencho and his peers came to exert a substantial and far-reaching grip on the national economy. On one estimate, criminal activity in the country cost 18% of GDP in 2024. The very fact that his succession is now a national talking point shows how deeply the cartel is embedded in Mexican life. With his son “El Menchito” now imprisoned for life in the US, speculation has swirled that maybe his divorced wife will win the power struggle.

With Donald Trump breathing down her neck, Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum had little option but to take down El Mencho, says Al Jazeera – even though she must fear the consequences of killing the kingpin. A long history of removing gang chieftains in Mexico and Colombia has done little to stem the production and flow of drugs towards the US. Maybe so, says The Economist. But it's unlikely many Mexicans will mourn his demise.

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A few years ago, Dario Amodei “was just another techie in San Francisco”, toiling in relative anonymity and playing video games on Sunday nights with his sister Daniela.

Fast forward to 2026, says The Sunday Times, and the Anthropic co-founder is worth billions.

He runs ones of the fastest-growing and most potentially disruptive companies in the history of capitalism, flits around the world and writes lengthy papers highlighting the dangers of untrammelled AI.

Unfortunately, he also finds himself in the crosshairs of the Pentagon under Donald Trump.

In a showdown this week, Amodei was summoned to meet secretary of war Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth gave Amodei an ultimatum. If Anthropic refuses to give the Pentagon free rein on the use of its Claude AI software “for all lawful purposes”, his firm faces penalties far beyond the cancellation of its $200 million contract.

It will be deemed “a supply-chain risk” – a move usually reserved for foreign companies from dubious regimes – forcing any other firm with military contacts to ditch its software.

It might also be compelled to do national-security work under the Defence Production Act.

Trump has been branding Anthropic dangerously “woke” and “ideological” for months.

It’s fair to say that “Amodei’s outspokenness and sharp elbows have earned him both respect and derision”, says Alex Kantrowitz on Medium.

A top-level research director at OpenAI who broke ranks to form Anthropic with his sister in 2021, he has long split opinion in the Valley.

Admirers see a “technological visionary” and “a safety-minded leader”. Critics charge that he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing – a “control-oriented ‘doomer’ who wants to slow AI progress” – the better to “shape it to his liking and shut out the competition”.

Born in San Francisco in 1983, Amodei became an activist early on. As an undergraduate at Caltech he protested against the Iraq war, railing against fellow students for their “passivity”.

The death of his father in 2006 after a long rare illness had a big impact and he shifted his graduate studies at Princeton from theoretical physics to biology in the hopes of decoding human illness.

A later move into research, studying proteins in and around tumours, prompted his first experimentations with “machine learning”, as it was then known. “The complexity of the underlying problems felt like it was beyond human scale,” he later said. He realised tech could bridge the gap.

Dario Amodei's move into business

Amodei left academia to pursue AI advancement in the corporate world, where there was cash to support it – joining the Chinese search engine Baidu and then, briefly, Google Brain. He was “among the earliest employees of OpenAI”, says the Financial Times, and instrumental in developing the large language models behind ChatGPT.

He left five years later after disagreements with Sam Altman over OpenAI’s direction and “with concerns about AI’s potential for harm if appropriate guardrails were not put in place”.

From the get-go, the company’s mission was simple, says Kantrowitz – build LLMs and “implement safe practices to pressure others to follow”. When the Claude chatbot was released in 2023, it won high acclaim for its “high-EQ personality”.

Meanwhile, Amodei grappled with ethics – and found himself increasingly landing on the side of pragmatism. “Unfortunately,” he wrote, “I think ‘No bad person should ever benefit from our success’ is a pretty difficult principle to run a business on.”

With a float scheduled this year likely to value Anthropic well north of $300 billion, Amodei already has a lot on his plate. The Pentagon stand-off will add to the stress. “They say your values aren’t truly your values until they cost you something,” says Bloomberg. Dario Amodei is about to be tested.

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Peter Mandelson has had more experience at compiling resignation statements than most politicians. Even so, his latest – announcing his departure from the Labour Party after a lifetime’s immersion – was a corker.

Allegations that he had received $75,000 from Jeffrey Epstein 20 years ago, he said, “need investigating by me”. It was vintage Mandelson: grandiose, controlling and supremely confident in his powers as an escapologist.

Still, the net is tightening, says The Guardian. In Britain, Mandelson faces criminal investigation for misconduct in public office over suggestions that he passed on market-sensitive government information to Epstein at the height of the financial crisis – which could potentially mean “jail time”.

In the US, he has been summoned to testify before Congress. Mandelson has also been forced to divest his 21% stake in Global Counsel, the lobbying firm he co-founded in 2010, following revelations that he sought advice from Epstein, says City AM. The firm has completely expunged him, in hopes of stemming an exodus of blue-chip clients that so far includes KKR, Barclays, GSK, the Premier League and Palantir.

Meanwhile, Peter Mandelson’s earlier business contacts are under scrutiny: not least the friendship forged with Russian metals oligarch Oleg Deripaska – a close associate of Vladimir Putin – during his stint as an EU trade commissioner from 2004-2008, which involved “ghost flights” in the Russian’s private jet and steam sessions in the “banya” of his Siberian dacha, says the Daily Mail. “To the delight of Deripaska”, soon afterwards the EU lifted tariffs on aluminium.

A decade later, Mandelson’s client list at Global Counsel included a shady firm with ties to the Chinese military.

After all that, Mandelson’s two previous resignations – for not declaring an interest-free home loan from Geoffrey Robinson in 1998, and the Hinduja “cash for passports” affair in 2001 – look almost quaint.

What drives Peter Mandelson?

Although clearly appreciative of life’s comforts, Peter Mandelson is not driven by money.

As a perceptive Prospect profile in 2009 observed, he’d take “politics-power” over “business-money” any day.

His much-peddled remark that new Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich” wasn’t a personal manifesto, “but a clever sound bite” aimed, successfully, at puncturing the party’s reputation for the politics of envy.

Mandelson, who was born in 1953 and grew up in Hampstead Garden Suburb, was famously born into Labour aristocracy. His maternal grandfather was Herbert Morrison – a leading light in the Atlee government, and the Wilsons “lived down the road”.

In later life, currying favour with “authority figures” was “almost a compulsion” for him, a former aide once observed. Indeed, Mandelson’s “default setting” was “to identify the most powerful person in prospect and then work exclusively, almost slavishly, for them – often at the expense of all other relationships”, says Prospect.

Witty, waspish, generous and a godfather many times over, Mandelson had a talent for friendship, across business and the arts as well as politics. Yet, often “blind to the effect of his own behaviour”, he was equally adept at making enemies.

“Peter who?”

In 2009, Mandelson briefly became the most powerful man in Britain after Gordon Brown made him his de facto deputy.

He holidayed at the Rothschild estate in Corfu, notes The Times, and, during a trip to New York, mixed business with pleasure, turning down the chance to attend an Armani party with “the young daughter of a close friend”.

This was the year of Mandelson’s most wretched betrayal. What goes around comes around.

When asked by Sky News last September if he had any sympathy for the former UK ambassador, Donald Trump replied: “I don’t know him actually”.

We’ve long known that the rich are different, and not just because they have more money. But the Jeffrey Epstein files, a huge cache of correspondence between the disgraced financier and the rich and famous, give us a “rare glimpse” into what the personal finances of billionaires actually look like, says Rachel Louise Ensign in The Wall Street Journal.

The complex finances of Leon Black, former CEO of Apollo Global Management, for example, are laid out in several documents, “down to the exact balances in each of his 69 bank accounts”.

What is revealed are the strategies used by the ultra-rich to build wealth and minimise their tax bills.

Even though they are worth billions on paper, they still borrow, for example, and funnel their wealth into trusts, limited liability companies and private investments not accessible to the typical person.

They spend millions on art collections and rare books and Chinese bronzes. In the first two months of 2015, Black spent $27,196 on dining out and $67,333 on alcohol.

What such folk were getting from their association with Epstein is clear enough – tax and estate-planning advice, if nothing more sinister. (There is no evidence Black was involved in any wrongdoing and he has said he regrets his involvement with Epstein.)

But what were the likes of Peter Mandelson getting?

One thing we should take from the Epstein scandal is a “better understanding of the elites”, says Janan Ganesh in the Financial Times. The self-made super-rich – the “private elite” – often discover too late that most people do not find money or the making of it interesting, and that there is less social status than they expected to be gained from all their hard work.

So they seek to bask in the reflected glory of artists, intellectuals and politicians – the “public elite” – by hobnobbing with them.

For their part, the high-status “public elite” struggle to make the kind of incomes they feel themselves entitled to from work that is actually enjoyable.

There are obvious ways for both parties to mutually benefit. The “classic solution” is marriage, where one partner provides the wealth and the other the social clout. A few end up doing “improper things for the rich in order to get some of their crumbs”.

Mandelson was beguiling to the rich because he came from the world of ideas and events. “Their appeal to him scarcely needs spelling out.”

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In January 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi fled Iran with “his wife, some jewels and a clod of earth”, says author Christopher de Bellaigue in the Financial Times. A measure of how the country’s Islamic revolution has devoured itself is that today’s revolutionaries “have been shouting for the son of the man their parents once deposed”. Iranians haven’t become monarchists – they are simply seeking anyone who can replace a despotic regime at war with its own people.

“The author” of last month’s carnage – the worst in the bloody regime’s 47-year history – is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei: an uncharismatic and consistently underestimated cleric who succeeded his revolutionary mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini, on the latter’s death in 1989. Khamenei is the regime’s “great survivor”, says The Economist. Yet, at 86, he is ailing. Even before the recent uprising threw Iran’s future in doubt, speculation was whirring about the succession – with many insiders tipping Khamenei’s second son Mojtaba, also a cleric, as the likely candidate. But if Khamenei ever harboured dreams of a dynasty, recent events could scupper his plans. All the more so if they reveal to ordinary Iranians the extent of his family’s domestic and international business empire.

Born in 1939, one of eight children of a poor religious scholar from the north-east of Iran, Khamenei followed in his father’s footsteps and went to study in the city of Qom, the pre-eminent place of Shia scholarship. Alongside reading the Koran, he listened to music, recited poetry and read novels such as Les Misérables and The Grapes of Wrath, depicting secular struggles against oppression. He also took an interest in thinkers who “sought to meld Marxism and Islamism to create a new ideology”, translating some of the works of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian political theorist and revolutionary, into Persian. Imprisoned repeatedly by the Shah’s security services, Khamenei swiftly rose up the hierarchy of the radical regime that seized power, surviving an assassination attempt that deprived him of the use of an arm. A canny consolidator of power, a key power base was the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Khamenei, who lives in a compound with his family on Tehran’s Palestine Street, has “always stressed his humble lifestyle”, says The Guardian. “His reputation for modesty, which contrasts with the ostentatious wealth of many other officials, has deflected some popular anger.” But sceptics doubt “whether his asceticism is quite as authentic as presented”. Within Iran, Iran’s supreme leader heads one of the country’s wealthiest organisations, created through the seizure of thousands of properties and assets after the revolution, says Bloomberg. Known as Setad, it manages billions of dollars-worth of commercial holdings, in sectors ranging from insurance to energy and telecoms.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's empire is under threat

The overseas empire headed by his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is more modest. But it’s nonetheless a substantial affair, “embracing everything from Persian Gulf shipping to Swiss bank accounts and British luxury property worth in excess of £100million”. None of the assets is listed in Khamenei’s name – his interests are concealed by “layers of shell companies”. But many purchases appear in the name of a crucial middleman, Ali Ansari – a prominent tycoon with connections to the family, who has just been sanctioned by the UK. Ansari is best known for presiding over the Ayandeh Bank, a private lender that collapsed last year, “engulfed in allegations around insider lending”.

The Khamenei family might have banked on their overseas assets as “some kind of rainy day fund” in case they had to leave Iran in a hurry, says Bloomberg. The UK decision to sanction Ansari – and freeze some of those assets – has rather complicated the plan.

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Back in October, Dolly Parton addressed concerns about her poor health with a video: “I ain’t dead yet!” That sound you heard, says The Contrarian, was “300 million people collectively breathing a sigh of relief”. At a time “when it often feels like we’re on the brink of a second civil war, Parton’s physical well-being feels like nothing less than a matter of vital national security. Equally beloved by drag queens and MAGA diehards, she might be the only person in the country who would be greeted with a standing ovation if she graced the stage at either party’s convention.”

The relief in Memphis, where Tennessee state planners were preparing to mark Parton’s 80th birthday on 19 January by declaring it “Dolly Parton Day” in perpetuity, was palpable. And when the milestone day dawned, Parton didn’t disappoint, reports Billboard. “The iconic singer-songwriter shared a new version of her 1977 song, Light of a Clear Blue Morning, and some laughs” – declaring she hoped to live another 80 years. But “Oh Lord, I’ve outlived so many plastic surgeons…”

That Dolly is back, after a horrible 2025, is a streak of light in wintery America thanks to her unofficial status as “the great unifier”. Her singular ability to bridge divides was the subject of an acclaimed 2019 podcast, Dolly Parton’s America, but her own life was shaken to the roots last March when her “devoted husband” of nearly 60 years, Carl Dean, died, says The Guardian. A businessman, who had owned an asphalt-paving business in Nashville, he assiduously avoided the spotlight. “A lot of people say there’s no Carl Dean, that he’s just somebody I made up to keep other people off me,” Parton observed in 1984. She later revealed he was the inspiration for her 1973 classic, Jolene – a song about a flirty bank teller, who had “got this terrible crush on my husband… It was kind of like a running joke between us.”

Dean has in fact always been fully entwined in the Parton rags-to-riches legend. The couple met outside the Wishy Washy laundromat on the day she moved to Nashville at 18. Born dirt poor, one of 12 children on a small Tennessee tobacco farm in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains in 1946, Dolly sang and made up songs “as soon as she could talk”, notes the Financial Times, getting radio gigs as a child thanks to an uncle who was also a performer.

At 13, she secured a slot at a country music mecca, the Grand Ole Opry, and was introduced on stage by Johnny Cash. “Decades of hit songs and movies followed.” Parton has always had a talent for staying relevant, matching it with a shrewd business brain. Almost from the get-go, she took control of her publishing rights – a first in the patriarchal society of Nashville. Parton’s “pretty lil’ Miss Dolly” schtick encouraged many people to underestimate her. The Parton empire, worth more than $500million, includes a theme park, Dollywood, which is estimated to make a direct economic impact of $1.8billion a year in Tennessee.

Dolly Parton 'ain’t nobody’s fool'

A new book, Ain’t Nobody’s Fool: The Life and Times of Dolly Parton, reports on some darker moments in the singer’s life, says the Los Angeles Times. A nervous breakdown in 1982, fuelled by health issues and a career slump, resulted in bouts of alcoholism and depression. But Parton’s commitment to “God’s plan” has always pushed her out of crisis “to greater heights – and greater giving”. In 2020, she contributed $1million towards the development of a Covid vaccine. But the cornerstone of her philanthropy is her Imagination Library, which in 2024 reached the milestone of having mailed 264 million free books to children.

Parton’s “larger-than-life persona makes her a great entertainer. Her intelligence and authenticity make her an icon”, says Salon. Famously, she has never declared a political allegiance, carefully picking her way through the culture wars with winning self-deprecation. Yet she has always used her music to call out injustice and tell stories about the downtrodden. “Parton’s core message has never wavered,” says The Contrarian. “She believes in allowing people to be who they are, and treating them with respect. Long live Dolly – and Dollyism.”

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Michael Moritz, arguably “the richest Welshman to have walked the Earth”, made his fortune via investments in tiny companies that later grew into Google, PayPal and LinkedIn, says The Times. Although no longer running Sequoia – he quit as a partner of the venture-capital firm in 2023 after 38 years – he retains a benign view of Silicon Valley and its tycoons, with most of whom he’s on first-name terms. “If you think of who’s done more to increase prosperity in the United States – Silicon Valley or the US government – it’s clearly Silicon Valley… Imagine what would happen if the lights were turned off at Alphabet and Amazon and Meta.”

No fan of Donald Trump, whom he dismisses as “an absurd buffoon”, Moritz says he “made the case as politely as possible” to friends in the venture-capital industry that “character comes first when you pick a leader”. But it “fell on deaf ears”. He is nonetheless sceptical about suggestions that the tech industry cheered on the US president’s second election. There were a few people “who had loud megaphones on social media”, he says, but most tech moguls are simply trying “to weather” Trump. “He’s running a protection racket and they’ve got to pay for protection.”

Moritz, 71, who was born in Cardiff to Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, has just published “a powerful family memoir” titled Ausländer, says the Financial Times. “Anyone hoping for an inside account” of his prescient investments at Sequoia will be disappointed. “Moritz’s California self” – as represented by the colossal paintings by abstract artists on his walls – is only “dimly glimpsed” as a counterpoint to the darkness of his family’s past. The book is both a Holocaust story and an examination of the present. “Occasionally I receive reminders that, because of my ethnicity, others are eager to hasten my demise,” he writes of the anti-semitic hate mail that occasionally reaches his San Francisco home.

Moritz’s account starts with his parents, who were sent to the UK from Germany in the 1930s and eventually settled in South Wales, where his father became a professor at Cardiff University, says Wales Online. Their childhood experiences left them with a constant “fear of having the rug ripped out from underneath you”, Moritz told The Times. Like his father, he was very able academically – studying history at Christ Church, Oxford, and later winning a scholarship to the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. But he claims his parents “always felt that either I was crooked or extremely lucky”. Had he ever been investigated as an investor, “my mother would have been calling to offer witnesses to the SEC about her son’s appalling character”. As a young man, Moritz shrugged it off – beginning his career as a journalist on Time magazine. A subsequent book about the creation of Apple, based on interviews with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, caught the attention of Sequoia. He joined the firm and swiftly emerged as one of the most successful venture capitalists in the Valley.

What is Michael Moritz doing now?

Now worth more than £4billion, Moritz and his novelist/sculptor wife Harriet recently pledged $9million to the city of San Francisco to fund food benefits shut down by Trump. He also finances The San Francisco Standard, a newspaper he co-founded. In Britain, the couple supports the Booker literature prize and funds bursaries for low-income students at Oxford. They recently chipped in £150million to fund a new wing of the National Gallery. Still, Moritz is assailed by a growing sense of unease, seeing the UK as an increasingly “hostile place” for Jews. Although he holds both British and US passports, he has also applied for German citizenship, citing an “emotional connection”. It’s also a bleak nod to the past. “I think the lesson I’ve learnt is that you can never have enough passports.”

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Oh, to have been a fly on the wall at this week’s Golden Globes awards. While British and Irish luvvies were celebrating a big night for Hamnet, a coded power game was quietly in play. “We’ll start the bidding for Warner Bros at $5 – do I hear $5?” joked the ceremony host, Nikki Glaser, in her opening monologue to an audience that included Warner Bros boss David Zaslav and the Hollywood studio’s spurned suitor, David Ellison of Paramount. Seated next to Zaslav was an enigmatic-looking figure, reports the Daily Beast: none other than the reclusive billionaire Aviv “Vivi” Nevo – a big Warner stakeholder, described as having “a good deal of influence over Wall Street, Silicon Valley and Hollywood”. Nevo’s “very public placement” was a pointed reminder to Ellison, and supporters of his hostile $108billion bid, that Zaslav “has big dogs in his corner”.

Ellison’s retaliation was immediate. In an attempt to force Warner Bros back to the negotiating table, he has threatened a “proxy fight” for seats on Warner’s board – backing that up with a lawsuit demanding more disclosure on the details of Netflix’s winning $83billion bid, says The Wall Street Journal. Anyone assuming this is a done deal is misguided – there will be plenty more plot twists to come. The battle for the once-mighty Warner Bros has turned Tinsel Town upside down, says the BBC. As well as raising troubling questions about the concentration of media power and freedom of expression in Trump’s America, the impending sale – whether to Paramount as a whole, or to Netflix cut up in parts – is likely to mean more upheaval and job losses. Still, whichever side they’re rooting for, “the one thing people in Hollywood seem to agree on is this story’s villain”.

Step forward Zaslav, who took control of Warner Bros in 2022 when he merged his cable company Discovery with AT&T’s WarnerMedia, and now stands accused of running the historic film studio into the ground, while lining his own pockets. Zaslav, “whose teeth gleam a startling white and whose wardrobe skews toward Wall Street leisurewear”, makes a great Hollywood “anti-hero”, says The New Yorker. A trained lawyer with a reputation as a shrewd dealmaker, he rose to prominence in the industry as the head of Discovery – “a middle-market cable company” that makes low-cost, low-brow reality shows. For a long time, his “greatest claim to fame” was the size of his pay cheque. In 2014, when it hit $156million, he was the country’s best-paid executive. But he always wanted to be a player in Hollywood. When he pulled off his big deal in 2022, the minnow swallowed the whale.

Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Zaslav came of age in Rockland County in New York, where his upwardly-mobile lawyer father had moved the family, says Vanity Fair. After graduating from Boston University School of Law in 1985, he started his career as an attorney in New York before joining TV network NBC in 1989, where he helped launch CNBC and MSNBC. In 2006, he became CEO of Discovery. He was once described by former Goldman Sachs boss Lloyd Blankfein as having a “golly gee aspect” to him. “He’s so enthusiastic that sometimes I get tired just talking to him.”

What will be David Zaslav's legacy?

Some give Zaslav credit for turning his company around, says the Financial Times. Others note that the shares “remained under water” until last September, when Ellison began his pursuit. The bidding war puts Zaslav in line for “a bumper pay day”, which has already sparked anger. He took “ungodly amounts of money from a company in decline”, says Stephen Galloway, a former Hollywood producer. “He will go down in Hollywood history as a major blot on the legacy of an extraordinary studio.” The sale might, at least, “give him some kind of redemption”.

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Almost exactly a year ago, Nicolás Maduro and his wife Cilia Flores arrived in triumph at Venezuela’s National Assembly in Caracas for his third presidential swearing-in ceremony. After being plucked from their beds by US commandos, and deposited in one of New York’s toughest jails, they will have plenty of time to ponder the difference 12 months can make. Yet Maduro “put on a remarkable display of insouciance” right until the last, says The Times. As US military forces assembled off the coast, he donned a sombrero and was seen dancing on stage with supporters and attending Christmas tree lightings.

For all his apparent buffoonery, Maduro, 63, is “known to be a cunning and ruthless operator” who relished “playing the role of David to the US Goliath”, says the Financial Times. Until now, he’s always been a survivor. In 2018 he dodged a drone attack at a military parade; in 2020 he withstood a botched mercenary incursion. Maduro had an unlikely rise to power, assuming “the revolutionary mantle” of his mentor, the leftist strongman Hugo Chavez, following his death from cancer in 2013.

But against predictions, he hung on to power – even as Venezuela’s economy collapsed under his regime’s mismanagement – by viciously crushing dissent, subordinating courts and freely dispensing patronage to consolidate his power. Elections were held, notes The Times, “but outcomes were rarely in doubt”. Under Maduro’s rule, Venezuela – which has the world’s biggest proven oil reserves – suffered one of the stiffest contractions ever suffered by an economy, anywhere. Since 2013, GDP has shrunk by almost 80% and corruption, trafficking and violent crime has flourished amid a growing scarcity of basic commodities. The result has been an “unprecedented” exodus. As many as eight million Venezuelans, or a third of the population, have fled the country, according to UN figures.

Who is Nicolás Maduro?

Born in 1962, and raised in El Valle, a blue-collar suburb of Caracas, Maduro was “steeped in left-wing activism from an early age”, says The Telegraph. He began his political career as president of his high school’s student union – though records show he never graduated. A keen baseball player, Maduro travelled to Cuba in 1986 “to receive a year of ideologic instruction”, notes Fortune, eventually returning to Caracas to work as a bus driver and union activist. He became a Chavez supporter after “El Comandante” was jailed for a failed coup in 1992, and rose rapidly through the ranks of the ruling party when Chavez took office in 1999. Nonetheless, the latter’s deathbed anointment of Maduro as his successor “stunned supporters and detractors alike”.

Soon after Chavez’s death, Maduro went on TV to claim the spirit of the late revolutionary had “reappeared to him as a tiny songbird” while he was praying in a chapel, says The Telegraph. This was in marked contrast to the reality of the “heavily armed militias of motorcycle-riding Chavista supporters” he deployed “to terrorise opponents”. The US alleges that Maduro and his wife Cilia – whom he called the “first combatant” instead of first lady – were involved in a drug-trafficking network run by Venezuelan military officials called the “Cartel de los Soles” (Cartel of the Suns), responsible for transporting thousands of tons of cocaine into the US.

Most Venezuelans are rejoicing at the dictator’s removal even as they fear what might happen next. For Maduro, the future looks bleak – he will “soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil”, said attorney-general Pam Bondi, though Maduro is a man who is always thinking of how to get what he wants out of any situation, says one former associate. Right now, that looks quite a challenge.

What does this mean for Venezuelan opposition figure María Corina Machado?

With Nicolás Maduro deposed, this “should be María Corina Machado’s moment”, says the Financial Times. But Venezuela’s main opposition leader, who has been living in hiding for many years, faced difficult choices. Having left the country to accept the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo in December, should she return to her homeland? Or call her supporters onto the streets to push for regime change?

Machado, 58, has been on a “roller coaster”. An industrial engineer from Caracas, her political career peaked with a resounding victory in the opposition’s primary election in 2023. A subsequent ban on holding public office forced a retreat into hiding. She then won the Nobel Peace Prize, only to hit a new low with the “humiliation” of a snub from Donald Trump. Despite her warm comments about the US president and his actions in her country, Trump decided she lacked sufficient “support or respect” in Venezuela to be the leader. Trump is instead working with Maduro’s deputy, Delcy Rodríguez, who is now Venezuela’s acting president.

The reason for the snub, according to The Wall Street Journal, is that Trump was warned by CIA analysts that Machado, and her presidential candidate, Edmundo González Urrutia, would struggle to gain legitimacy and face resistance from pro-regime security services, drug trafficking networks and political opponents.

The Washington Post thinks the decision may be more personal – Trump is simply irritated she accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. “If she had turned it down and said ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s’, she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” a source told the newspaper.

Trump has talked of a democratic transition after the oil industry has been rebuilt, something he says could take 18 months, but which could take longer, giving the regime opportunities to thwart the opposition or “simply outlast Trump”, says The Economist. The best hope for Machado is to “try to speed things up”.

Machado appeared on Fox News on 5 January and thanked Trump for his “courageous actions”, promising she could turn Venezuela into an energy hub, “suggesting sweet talk is still her method”. “Machado has proved remarkably resilient and canny. But her biggest challenges lie ahead.”

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Whingeing about the appalling state of things has become the national pastime. And for good reason. A lot has gone wrong in living memory. Nothing works well – if it works at all. You pull a lever and it falls off in your hands – or refers you to an app, which doesn’t work. We seem to be living in a culture in decline. It’s little surprise, then, that reviewers of Clarkson’s Farm – a highlight in the TV schedules from the past year, now streaming on Amazon – have seen in the show confirmation of whatever it is they have to complain about. Clarkson’s Farm is a reality TV show where, as host Jeremy Clarkson knowingly puts it, “everything goes wrong against the clock”. But there is a deeper and somewhat more optimistic message that emerges from Clarkson’s buffoonish attempts to become an amateur farmer, which is that it is a miracle that anything works at all, ever. That they work at all, as well as they do, is something to celebrate and be grateful for as we head into the New Year – something to be mindful of, lest we smash them up too in our modern rage for perfection.

Clarkson’s Farm is now in its fourth season (the fifth is expected in the spring), and is a chronicle, in documentary-style format, of the trials of the former motoring journalist and Top Gear presenter as he tries to run a farm and get it to make money. He acquired the land – largely for tax reasons, as he cheerfully admits – in 2008, and faced a quandary in 2019 when the farmer looking after the estate retired. What to do? Well, why not, he thought, run it himself? A brilliant idea! (For a TV show.) How hard can it be?! (Very and amusingly so, we hope!) That running a farm of course turns out to be a great deal harder than Clarkson’s (performative) ignorance is capable of grasping without taking prolonged instruction in the school of hard knocks is the basis of the joke that runs through the show.

The joke works, is charming, and keeps on giving throughout the four seasons. But there’s far more on offer than the blokeish laughs that lovers of Clarkson’s previous output will be expecting. Along the way Clarkson is seen to learn humility and compassion, the transcendent value of work and community, our absolute dependence on ecosystems that we are all too casually destroying, and is brought face to face with the fact that reality is somewhat broader and more complicated than can be captured in his famously no-nonsense opinions. One of the episodes is even, as its title warns, emotionally harrowing. The show has justly won approval and applause, even from those who may not previously have been exactly enamoured of Clarkson’s on-screen and on-page political persona.

Clarkson’s Farm is a political parable

The show is also a surprisingly insightful parable that illustrates vividly the truths of political economy. It is, for example, widely believed on the left, and hence in the culture generally given the dominance of left-wing notions among our elites, that nothing could be easier than to make a shed load of money if you just have the good sense to be born into the right family, or through luck or guile or having the right connections have somehow managed to acquire the land and the capital to set up in business. All you would then need to do is hire some hands, exploit them ruthlessly, then sit back and wait for the loot to roll in until you’re as rich as… well, as Jeremy Clarkson.

Foolish left-wing notions are generally mirrored in some form on the right, and sure enough Clarkson is seen to hold a similar view (at least for the purposes of his admittedly contrived show), just without the moralising inflection. The farm he has acquired needs to make money to survive. He has the land and the money on hand to acquire the necessary capital and to hire the hands. So, how hard can it be? Bring it all together, do a bit of “tractoring”, then sit back as the profits roll in. At the end of the first year, after more hard work and stress and disasters than he had bargained for, or that would seem reasonable or fair to anyone who is not also a farmer, Clarkson finds that he has made just £144 – a tiny drop in the ocean of the investment needed for the next year’s cycle.

So there’s one miracle. Despite the weather, the ridiculous regulations, the meddling bureaucrats, the screw-ups, the cost inflation, the price deflation, the fearsomely complicated and pricey yet indispensable technology and machinery, the rocky markets, the risky and highly uncertain investment and production decisions, the appalling pay and non-existent returns, the blizzard of green levies and rules and taxes, the need to deal with the bureaucracy and demonstrate you are complying with the rules, however daft, not to mention a global pandemic and war playing havoc with global supply chains and prices – despite all this, somehow, farmers keep going and put food on our tables.

This is the work of the entrepreneur – to take big risks for highly uncertain future returns, and work day and night to see it through. The rewards if you get it all right and with a bit of luck can be considerable – and well deserved. Consumers benefit just as surely as they do. Those who get them right are those we hear about – and criticise mercilessly. We do not see the many more who – when the rain descended and the floods came and the winds blew – fell by the wayside.

Signs and wonders

“Except ye see signs and wonders ye will not believe,” so let’s consider another miracle, as chronicled in the fourth season. We have all, no doubt, had disappointing experiences with country pubs. We tear ourselves away from the comfort of our couches in the hope of a warm welcome, a crackling fire, good food and drink, and convivial company. What we get instead is an eerily silent and dilapidated old building smelling vaguely of mould, an indifferent welcome, warm beer, and food you’d hesitate to give to the dog. At least there’s the favourite national pastime to fall back on, on the drive back home. But the next time you are unaccountably optimistic enough to give the experience another try, do it with the benefit of a viewing of Clarkson’s Farm and you might, instead of grumbling, consider the miracle that anything is there at all.

Clarkson’s grand idea for bringing in more money is to open a pub that serves food produced on the farm, and on other local farms in the area, and sell other farms’ produce in a shop on the same site. How hard can it be? First, find one of those dilapidated old country pubs and buy it. The news here at least seems good, to start with: there are plenty of them on the market, and more coming up for sale all the time. (Let’s pass over any consideration of why that might be so.) It should be possible to find yourself a nice old building, perhaps a historic inn, in need of some updating and some care, for a bargain price.

True, the bargain might not be quite all it seems when you get a quote from the construction workers and plumbers and decorators needed to get the place shipshape – costs in the industry have soared and remained sky-high since Covid. And this is assuming you can secure the necessary permissions from the planning bureaucrats, which might be tricky, especially if you’re doing something unusual (running a shop and a pub from the same premises), or if the planners hate you for making rude TV programmes about them, or just prefer things to stay as they are than to see anything that smacks of economic development. Then there’s all the equipment needed to run a kitchen, a bar, a restaurant, a shop. The connections to be made to markets, supply chains, the authorities, customers. The advertising, the managers, the chefs, the staff, the accountants. On and on.

There’s also the inevitable moment when your ideas run up against reality. Clarkson wanted to run a local pub that sold only local produce produced on local farms. But what about if your customers want a gin and tonic, or a Coke? What if they want to put some black pepper on their steak (which is available relatively locally, but only if you’re prepared to pay ten times the going rate)? You might have the nice idea of shunning food wholesalers as unnecessary middlemen, but what if your customers want roast beef when the cows are not yet ready for slaughter? What happens when the local slaughterhouse closes down, as they are doing up and down the country because they can’t compete with those run on an industrial scale? What to do when all your staff are fed up with all the crises and are threatening to walk out? How, when you think about it, does anything ever work, ever? Yet, as Clarkson says, the result is so often, as in this case, that “incredible” people “pull off a miracle”. Think on these things the next time you order a pint. Behind the scenes there is chaos. Bless those bringing some order into your life!

"I’ve done a thing!"

The insights you take from Clarkson’s trials are something like those you find in the economics classic I, Pencil by Leonard Read. Just as there’s not a single person in the world who knows how to make a pencil – who knows how to cultivate a forest, harvest the timber, prepare it for manufacture, produce the graphite, the food for the workers, the fuel for the machinery and to mine the raw materials, the craft and processes involved in the making of the finished product, and so on and on – there’s not a single person who knows how to open and run a pub; a mediocre one, let alone one that you’d want to go back to. At every stage of the process, there are processes to coordinate, costs to consider, hard-to-acquire and costly skills, technical and social and commercial, that are necessary, all to be brought together in a timely and organised way that will produce something affordable and pleasing to people skilled in the national pastime. The miracle is not that this is ever done well. The miracle is that it is done at all.

One of Clarkson’s catchphrases is “I’ve done a thing!”, proudly shouted when he achieves some trifling success in a trivial-seeming task that only seems trivial to those who haven’t tried it or spent a lifetime acquiring the kind of tacit knowledge we don’t even know we have when we have it. “I can’t tell you how to do it, you just have to know,” says Kaleb Cooper, Clarkson’s hired hand and later farm manager, helpfully, as he shows Clarkson the ropes in his own world. “Unfortunately, I don’t know,” replies Clarkson, quite reasonably. But what he does know is how to make an entertaining and popular and amusing television show. In his latest, Clarkson has “done a thing” worth celebrating indeed.

One final lesson to be taken from the show is that governments have to find a balance between facilitating and encouraging – or preferably just getting out of the way of – all those involved in doing a thing, and the laws and regulations tied around all of that so that one person’s thing does not too much interfere with or destroy everyone else’s thing. It seems pretty clear, made all the clearer by Clarkson’s ventures, that we are now getting that balance dangerously wrong. Clarkson’s farm is a noble venture that is, like Gulliver, tied down by a million tiny threads. As the show makes clear, each tiny thread in and of itself might seem pretty sensible and necessary. The danger is that as those threads multiply, the activity that produces all of our everyday miracles might yet find itself totally circumscribed. And that would be a true national disaster. Why not have a moan about it over a drink? Keir Starmer remains banned from Clarkson’s pub. Everyone else can book a table at thefarmersdogpub.com.

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Zohran Mamdani: A socialist takes New York

“We cannot have a socialist” running “the greatest capitalist city in the world”, observed one Wall Street financier just before November’s mayoral election. Get used to it, said The New Yorker. On New Year’s Day, Zohran Mamdani will become the first avowedly socialist mayor of New York, and its first Muslim leader to boot, following a meteoric rise. A year ago, most had never heard of the youthful Assembly member from Queens. But Mamdani’s rising star – on a platform of soaking the rich to fund rent freezes, free bus travel and universal child care – has proved unstoppable.

Donald Trump, who once called Mamdani a “100% Communist lunatic” and threatened to deport him, changed his tune when he met him, staging a surreally chummy press conference with his charismatic fellow populist. “As well as coming from nowhere” to win New York, Mamdani has “succeeded in setting” America’s domestic economic agenda in 2025, making the issue of “affordability” the watchword of his slick TikTok campaign. Born in Uganda, Mamdani, 34, arrived in New York aged seven. His unremarkable CV since might suggest he’ll struggle to run a city with “the economy of a medium-sized nation”, says The Economist. And his hands are tied: the state legislature seems unlikely to pass his full $9 billion package of tax hikes. But the city’s fate ultimately depends on whether Mamdani shows “a pragmatic streak”, says The Wall Street Journal – or views “his mission” as “creating a socialist lab experiment”.

Javier Milei: El Loco stands at a crossroads

Argentina’s chainsaw-waving “libertarian firebrand” Javier Milei narrowly escaped financial meltdown this year – helped by a $20 billion lifeline from the Trump administration to avert a currency crisis and “Make Argentina Great Again” – before pulling off a surprising landslide in the country’s midterm elections, says Bloomberg.

Nicknamed “El Loco” (The Madman) as a teenage goalkeeper, Milei has often seemed determined “to perpetuate this reputation with his egotistical boasts and brutal attacks on critics”, notes The Washington Post – not to mention “his crazy hair, cloned dogs and claims of expertise at tantric sex”. Yet since coming to power in 2023, the results of his far-reaching free-market reforms have been impressive, says The Economist. Inflation is down from 211% to around 30%, the poverty rate has fallen and “the budget has been wrestled under control”. Milei is now moving towards a floating peso and removing most capital controls. The process has been painful, but voters have kept faith with his vow “to jolt” Argentina “out of more than a century of statism and stagnation”. Markets, in turn, have celebrated, judging the prospect of Milei’s re-election next year now more likely. “Rev up the chainsaw!”

Much could yet go wrong. Milei is now at a crossroads, Carlos Malamud, a Latin America specialist at Madrid’s Real Instituto Elcano, told the Financial Times. “He has everything he needs, if he gets it right… to lead a deep transformation of Argentina.” But if “arrogance gets the better of him again”, all bets are off.

Sanae Takaichi: Japan’s Iron Lady

The new Japanese premier, who made history in October when she became the country’s first female PM, has proved a gift for headline writers. Known for her love of hard rock and motorbikes – and citing Margaret Thatcher as an inspiration – Sanae Takaichi has gone “from Iron Maiden to the Iron Lady”, says Sky News. But she has taken a battering at the hands of bond markets. Since taking power, and shocking investors with a “low quality” fiscal expansion of $135 billion – “including such gems as rice vouchers and subsidies for fossil fuels” – yields on Japanese debt have “spiked wildly across the maturity curve”, says The Telegraph. The risk that this could escalate into a major crisis in Japan’s historically sedate $12 trillion bond market “has sent tremors” through the markets.

When it comes to dealing with Donald Trump, she appears to have learned from her mentor, the late Shinzo Abe, that “flattery, deference” and golf-related “gold-plated gifts” were the way to go. “Takaichi’s smorgasbord of giveaways” may make a “mockery of Thatcherism”, but she does share some traits with her heroine. “Like the late Iron Lady, she has little patience for other career women,” says The Telegraph. She belongs to Nippon Kaigi, “a nationalist nostalgia movement that fights feminism and harks back to the Samurai ideal of women as the anchor of home and family”. Still, unless she is careful with bond-market vigilantes, Takaichi runs the risk of comparison with another UK Conservative prime minister – Liz Truss.

Liang Wenfeng: The hedgie who shook the world

The entrepreneur behind DeepSeek began 2025 with a shot that rang around the world, says Fortune. Billions of dollars were wiped off the value of Silicon Valley’s AI titans in January when the unknown Chinese start-up revealed its prowess at developing cutting-edge AI at a fraction of the cost – raising doubts, that have lingered all year, about the gargantuan sums being spent in the West. “Whether by chance or design”, the launch of DeepSeek’s R1 coincided with Donald Trump’s inauguration, says Time, creating “a powerful narrative” that China had “matched America’s best with just a fraction of the computing power”. It was hardly the best start in Washington to a year of tight trade negotiations.

Liang Wenfeng, 40, who hails from a village in southern China, isn’t a computer whizz so much as a financier. After graduating from Zhejiang University, he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2016 – originally using AI as a trading strategy to predict market trends and help make investment decisions. In 2021, says the Financial Times, Liang began buying thousands of Nvidia chips as “an AI side project”. At the time, local business partners viewed this as “a quirky hobby”. But when he started DeepSeek in 2023 – and began challenging local rivals ByteDance and Alibaba – they sat up. DeepSeek has spent its short corporate life having to work around successive US bans on the export of vital chips to China. The upshot, says the South China Morning Post, is that Liang has become one of the most forceful drivers of China’s push for technological self-sufficiency.

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The boom in prediction markets this year has made it, alongside AI, one of the few industries where “young founders can become paper billionaires practically overnight”, says Bloomberg. Leading the pack are the 29-year-old duo behind Kalshi – Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara – who met as undergraduates at MIT. Both have interesting backgrounds. While Mansour grew up in Lebanon and had early dreams of becoming a competitive skier, Lopes Lara trained at the Bolshoi and became a ballerina in her native Brazil before moving to the US. This year, she became one of the youngest female self-made billionaires.

Kalshi has certainly performed un grand jeté. For six years the start-up – which offers wagers on everything from elections to pop-culture happenings – grew slowly, raising about $100 million in small funding rounds. Yet since June, its valuation has exploded by around 450% as outside investors have piled in and now stands at $11 billion.

The attraction isn’t hard to gauge. Once of primary interest to “quantitative political scientists”, prediction markets have evolved rapidly from their “quirky origins” to become “marketplaces for almost anything”, says the Financial Times: helped by some timely approvals from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and close connections with the new administration. In January, Donald Trump Jr joined Kalshi’s board as a strategic adviser. In August, he also joined the board (and invested in) its arch-rival Polymarket. Together, these companies dominate this hottest of sectors.

The event that put Kalshi on the map was the 2024 presidential election race when – having fought a lawsuit to become the first company to offer legal election contracts – it trounced traditional pollsters by correctly giving Donald Trump higher odds of victory.

But what has really greased its wheels this year has been a major move into sports betting: a gigantic, but still evolving US market where Kalshi is proving just as disruptive to established players. Investors are betting it will become “a sports-gambling behemoth”. But almost any event has profit potential, according to Matt Zhang of Hivemind Capital. “What these prediction markets have realised is that the news is a huge, liquid asset class.”

“There are few better trainings for being told ‘no’ and pushing through anyway than being a professional ballerina,” Alex Immerman, a partner at VC giant Andreessen Horowitz, told Forbes. Lopes Lara “learned persistence with grace early on… and she’s carried that same calm confidence into building Kalshi”. After graduating from the Bolshoi, she did a nine-month stint as a professional ballerina in Austria “before hanging up her pointe shoes” and heading for MIT to study computer science.

Lopes Lara spent her summers interning at Ray Dalio’s Bridgewater Associates and Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities. But it was a blossoming friendship with classmate Tarek Mansour that launched her entrepreneurial career. The pair became close and one evening “the idea of a prediction market business just clicked”, says Forbes.

The duo spent the pandemic years “building the company, fighting for federal regulation approval and getting early backing from significant players, such as Charles Schwab and Sequoia Capital”, says The New York Post. The gamble has paid off. Having each retained a 12% stake in Kalshi, she and Mansour are now worth $1.3 billion apiece.

Great battles lie ahead for Luana Lopes Lara's Kalshi

The biggest battles may lie ahead. As well as contending with growing competition from Polymarket and other contenders, Kalshi faces a big pushback against its sports-betting ambitions, says the FT. The year ended in a “significant” legal setback. But the battle will go on state by state and could end up in the Supreme Court. Lopes Lara will need every bit of her famous stamina.

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In 2008, a light aircraft crash-landed into a garden in Highclere, Hampshire. Both the pilot, Christopher Harborne, and the householders counted themselves lucky to have survived. Two years later, in a strange twist of fate, a plane carrying Nigel Farage plummeted to the ground after getting wrapped in a banner it was flying, says the Financial Times. “Both men suffered injuries, both recovered. And both are now trying to overturn Britain’s political order.”

Reform UK’s new mega-donor – a Thai-based aviation entrepreneur turned crypto tycoon – is rarely seen with Farage in public. He keeps a low profile. But long before he coughed up a record £9 million in a donation revealed this week, he had maintained a discreet presence as a key backer of Farage. Ahead of the 2019 European elections, he installed himself in the then Brexit Party’s campaign HQ – ordering in a coffee machine, a supply of gin, tonic and limes, and some “decent tumblers”, says The New Statesman.

UK public support for a hard Brexit that year saw the party, somewhat ironically, become the largest single national party in the European Parliament. Now Harborne is fully behind Farage’s quest to repeat the trick at Westminster. Farage’s big challenge at the moment is fighting claims in the press that as a schoolboy he was a racist bully. But the “slightly geeky” Cambridge engineering graduate sees political problems more as “a mathematical equation that is producing the wrong answer”, says one associate.

Christopher Harborne's early bet on crypto made him a fortune

Harborne, who is in his early 60s, was born in Britain but for more than two decades has lived and worked in Thailand where he has joint nationality and goes by the Thai name Chakrit Sakunkrit. “There’s a romantic side to him,” says one senior Reform member, who describes him as “a merchant adventurer with a great belief in this country”.

But others have questioned the transparency of an international business empire – which now includes a major shareholding in Tether, the biggest stablecoin, and its sister crypto exchange Bitfinex, as well as a sizeable chunk of the UK defence group QinetiQ. Harborne holds some assets in his English name, and others in that of his Thai alter ego.

Last year, he and his aviation fuel company AML Global won a defamation case against The Wall Street Journal for making “false accusations of fraud, money laundering and financing terrorism” in a 2023 article examining companies connected to Tether, says CoinDesk. The judgment noted that “when he became a naturalised Thai citizen, he was required to adopt a Thai name” for legal purposes.

Harborne worked as a consultant with McKinsey in the late 1980s before taking management positions at firms including Walkers and PepsiCo, notes The New Statesman. In 2003, Harborne registered AML Global in Thailand, later forming the Sherriff Global Group, which, among other things, trades private planes. AML would go on to win substantial contracts with the US government. But it was Harborne’s “early bet on cryptocurrencies” that really sealed his fortune, says the FT. He was in at the start of ethereum when it launched in 2014 at about $0.30 per token; that price has now mushroomed to roughly $3,300.

Harborne has his detractors in the Reform movement. Ben Habib – the breakaway founder of the hard-right Advance UK party – was incensed when Harborne gave the Conservative party £1.5 million in 2022 and donated £1 million to Boris Johnson’s private office after he stood down as Tory leader. “I think it’s rotten, Harborne is on every side of the trade.” Still, thanks to his longtime “silent donor”, Farage now has cash in the bag with which to fight the local elections next April, says The Times. “It’s his teenage self he has to beat.”

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In September, reports began circulating in Kyiv that a high-profile and controversial American was sniffing around for business. “Military hawks and defence privateers” described how Erik Prince – founder of the now defunct mercenary company Blackwater – had been “aggressively pitching his services” and was on a “hunt to acquire drone-makers with a footprint in Ukraine”, noted The Guardian. The rumours tallied with reports that the Trump administration may be lining up US private military contractors to operate in post-war Ukraine.

Prince has also been preparing the ground in Venezuela, where Trump has just imposed a no-fly zone and issued an ultimatum for the president, Nicolas Maduro, to relinquish power. He was in the country last year, spearheading a local fundraising campaign to oust the leftist strongman. By his standards, that action was quite mild, observes The Times of India. Prince’s more “controversial” recent operations include “advising on a drone assassination programme” in Haiti.

Suddenly it seems “America’s most notorious mercenary is everywhere”, says The Economist – at the heart of a resurgence of private military companies, his services “more in demand than ever”. Prince’s “worldview” has certainly never chimed better with those holding power in America. Unlike most mercenaries, he does not shy away from publicity. “Cocksure and combative,” he brims with “machismo” and is lauded by his friend, US secretary of war Pete Hegseth, for his “warrior ethos”.

A former US Navy Seal, Prince, 56, was born into a family of Michigan industrialists, renowned for their god-fearing ways and political activism – and had “an intensely conservative upbringing”. After leaving school, Prince joined the US Naval Academy, reportedly quitting after three semesters because “he found the place too liberal”, says The Economist.

He interned in George H.W. Bush’s White House before joining the Seals, serving in the Balkans, Haiti and the Middle East. The death of his father in 1995 brought him home. Prince sold the family business for $1.35 billion, using some of the proceeds to set up Blackwater. Quickly expanding its services, the company became internationally infamous for its activities during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and was “blacklisted” in 2007 following a “massacre” in Baghdad. Four security guards were later convicted of murdering 14 Iraqi contractors. In 2020, Trump pardoned them.

In 2009, Prince sold the remnants of Blackwater and moved to the UAE, establishing a string of new companies. The most prominent, says the Financial Times, was Frontier Services Group – a Hong Kong-listed firm, backed by China’s state-owned investment house Citic, which ran logistics for mining and energy companies in Africa. This pivot, from “Bush-era military adventures” to Chinese “Silk Road” fixer, raised eyebrows in Washington. Indeed, Prince’s attempts to re-establish himself during Trump’s first term ultimately failed, says CNN, even though his sister, Betsy DeVos was serving in the administration. “Banned from inside the Pentagon and CIA” by officials concerned his outfit “brought unwanted scrutiny and pushed the boundaries of legality”, he went on to be investigated by the UN for alleged arms trafficking to Libya.

What will Erik Prince do next?

With a more untrammelled Trump back in office and in need of on-the-ground operators, “the former pariah… has newly reestablished himself”, says CNN, doing what he does best – spotting opportunity in chaos. Prince’s return is a sign of the times, says The Economist: a world in which “private firms with private firepower” – specialising in “bringing order” – are deemed the only alternative to “total anarchy” in some countries.

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Plenty of influential investors have been trimming or offloading stakes in Nvidia as the AI boom draws a growing number of sceptics. But none has attracted attention quite as much as Michael Burry, says Bloomberg. The hedge funder, famous for correctly betting against the US housing bubble ahead of the 2008 financial crisis – as chronicled in Michael Lewis’ The Big Short – has become a fixation. “We’re obsessed with contrarian investors” who make “concentrated ‘hero bets’ on macro outcomes”.

Burry’s allure is especially strong among online retail investors, who have helped drive the values of firms such as data-intelligence specialist Palantir into the stratosphere, says the Financial Times. Hence the recent fury of the group’s “voluble” boss, Alex Karp, when Burry informed his 1.4 million followers on X that he had taken a sizeable $900 million short position on Palantir’s stock. Karp described Burry as “bat-crazy”. Yet arguably, he has had the last laugh. Within a fortnight, Burry announced that he is winding down his hedge fund Scion Asset Management – a measure of what a “brutal era” this has been for many bearish investors as the stock market has marched relentlessly higher.

Who is Michael Burry?

At 54, Burry stands out even among the colourful characters who are attracted to short selling. A self-described loner (who has nevertheless married twice) he told Michael Lewis that “my nature is not to have friends… I’m happy in my own head”. Born in 1971, and raised in San Jose, California, he lost his left eye to a rare form of cancer called retinoblastoma at the age of two and has worn a prosthetic eye ever since, says Investopedia. He later discovered he also has Asperger’s syndrome. After studying English, economics and medicine at the University of California, Burry was initially bent on pursuing a medical career. “However, his new hobby – picking stocks – engaged him more than the messy world of medicine,” says the FT. When his residency ended in 2000, he quit the profession and set up an investment firm, naming it Scion Capital, after The Scions of Shannara, a 1990 fantasy book by Terry Brooks.

Burry started out as a value investor, buying into unloved companies he felt were extremely undervalued. A lover of heavy metal, he developed a reputation as a head-banging, fiercely contrarian money manager. “If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are,” he told Lewis. “The late ’90s almost forced me to identify myself as a value investor… I thought what everybody else was doing was insane.”

By 2005, he had trained his focus on what a collapse of the US housing market would do to mortgage bonds – later crediting his insights to his neurodiversity, says The Guardian. As he observed: “Only someone who has Asperger’s would read a sub-prime mortgage-bond prospectus.” Burry’s decision to bet against the mortgage market prompted anger from investors, who felt he was abandoning a profitable strategy. However, between November 2000 and June 2008, the fund returned 489%. Those investors who stuck with him made $700 million, while Burry made personal profits of $100 million.

Yet for many professionals, Burry’s performance since then has been “distinctly ho-hum”, says the FT. Burry, who has launched a new subscription newsletter called Cassandra Unchained, has seemingly retired from investing before – closing Scion Capital after his bets against subprime mortgage bonds paid off in 2008 before reopening as Scion Asset Management a few years later. As he wrote on X shortly before filing for the wind-down of his fund: “Sometimes we see bubbles. Sometimes, there is something to do about it. Sometimes, the only winning move is to not play.”

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They’d make a great band name. But Chen Zhi and the Prince Group are in fact a global scourge – combining two of the worst malaises of the age: people trafficking and cybercrime. Now Western authorities are getting tough, says The Guardian. In a grand swoop last month – dubbed “the largest action ever in Southeast Asia” – the US and UK sanctioned Chen and 146 other businesses connected to his Prince Group, accusing the company of detaining trafficked workers in “scam compounds” across Cambodia – and compelling them to “engage in a range of fraudulent schemes” that have sucked billions of dollars from victims globally.

The Chinese-born kingpin, Chen Zhi, 38 – also known as “Vincent” – has also been charged with wire-fraud conspiracy and money laundering, but “remains at large”. It could prove hard to pin him down. Chen is thought to have bought citizenship in Cyprus and the South-Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, as well as holding Cambodian nationality. Within Cambodia his power has grown. His rapid ascent to wealth has won him political influence, including reported roles advising the authoritarian former prime minister Hun Sen and his successor and son Hun Manet.

“Chen Zhi isn’t a mob boss as we traditionally conceive of them – he is (or rather was) the polished face of a state-protected criminal economy,” Jacob Sims, of Harvard University’s Asia Centre, told CNN. The “baby-faced tycoon” has risen to “the highest echelons of power in his adopted home” where “he bestows scholarships and runs philanthropy programmes, while overseeing one of the country’s largest and best-connected conglomerates”. At the height of his power, Chen and associates were making $30 million every day from their sprawling transnational criminal organisation, according to US prosecutors.

Who is Chen Zhi?

Born in 1987 in Fujian, a province in southeastern China, the now-removed website of Chen’s Singapore family office described him as a “young business prodigy” who cut his teeth setting up internet cafes and gaming centres in the provincial capital of Fuzhou, says Bloomberg. Chen subsequently renounced his Chinese citizenship, turned up in Cambodia and “began splashing enormous amounts of cash”, says CNN. His first investments from 2011 onwards were in real estate – Cambodia’s cities are dotted with Prince’s skyscrapers. But over the next decade, the group’s interests grew to span entertainment, finance and even an airline.

Assets across the region – including a Singaporean car-loan firm, and two listed companies in Hong Kong – are now on the sanctions list, says Bloomberg. Yet it seems Chen, who is married with three children and reportedly living in Singapore, didn’t see the threat coming. “As recently as the day the US charges went public,” his family office was advertising for a personal assistant for inflated pay of as much as $5,000 a month. The contrast with conditions in a cybercrime empire stretching to at least “10 forced labour camps” couldn’t be greater, says CNN. The US indictment describes “vast dormitories, surrounded by high walls and barbed wire” where incidences of violence and coercion were “frequent”.

These operations have hitherto gone largely unchallenged in Cambodia due to the “complete dismantling” of the country’s civil society and independent media. The question now is whether the US and UK can use their leverage to dismantle the lucrative industry. “This is the first time Washington and London have hit the architecture – the elite ownership, the laundering conduits, and the money itself – at the very top,” says Sims. Time will tell whether they can succeed – and catch Chen Zhi.

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In 2024, Jared Isaacman became the first non-professional astronaut to walk in space. Within months, the daring payments billionaire – a close ally of Elon Musk – leapt closer to another personal goal by becoming Donald Trump’s top pick to head US space agency NASA. He was briefly out of favour when Trump and Musk fell out, but the stars have realigned for Isaacman. Trump has renominated Isaacman, saying he’s the ideal candidate to drive the agency’s “mission of discovery and inspiration”.

Within NASA, there are hopes that the appointment will draw a line under “weeks of drama” over who will lead the agency, says Bloomberg. Isaacman, 42 – who founded his company Shift4 at just 16 – is a political neophyte. But Trump highlighted his business achievements; and there’s no doubting his passion for extraterrestrial travel and derring-do, says Time. A former stunt pilot, he bankrolled last year’s three-day Polaris Dawn space mission, reportedly paying $200 million to Musk for all four seats aboard the SpaceX craft. Isaacman has tied himself closely to SpaceX since 2021, says Bloomberg, spending undisclosed sums on multiple missions and helping fund research and development. “A staunch supporter of the commercial space industry,” he’s expected to increase NASA’s use of private companies if confirmed for the top job. Conflict of interest is a worry.

“Dropping out of high school isn’t usually a good idea, but it sure paid off for one New Jersey kid,” noted a 2011 profile in Business Jet Traveler charting Isaacman’s meteoric rise. His parents, who earned a precarious living, worried when the self-described “horrible student” quit school, but Isaacman already had a business plan. During school holidays, he’d done IT work for Merchant Services Inc – “early e-commerce stuff” – and got a feel for the credit-card industry where he saw “a lot of opportunity for improvement”. In 1999, he founded United Bank Card from his parents’ basement: “Assets were limited to $10,000 in stock certificates that he’d received from his grandfather.”

The young firm flourished. Isaacman’s father, Don, who joined as a salesman, later said “he was within a year of losing his house” when the company (rebranded Shift4 in 2017) started, crediting his offspring with “saving the family”. There was no silver bullet, says Isaacman: no “one technology or patent”. He simply focused on streamlining the then labyrinthine business of processing credit cards, moving quickly into new technologies and often offering customers (typically restaurants and shops) free kit in order to win their accounts. Within a few years, the firm made Inc magazine’s annual list of America’s fastest-growing small businesses and Isaacman was runner-up to Mark Zuckerberg in the list of “30 top entrepreneurs under 30”. By 2011, he was running one of the US’s largest payment processors.

Can Jared Isaacman lead NASA?

Success gave Isaacman free rein to indulge his passion for flying. An avid collector of vintage planes, he became an aerobatics whizz, performing at air-shows. In 2009, says Fortune, he “set a world record for circumnavigating the globe”. Isaacman parlayed his love of aviation into a business, founding Draken International, a defence firm specialising in military aircraft and training pilots. In 2019, he sold a majority stake to Blackstone, launching himself into billionaire status. Isaacman is “a thrill seeker”, says Forbes. But that’s partly “to unwind from the non-stop… 80-plus-hour weeks” he works. NASA's staff can expect an intense regime of slashed meetings, cost-cutting and liberation from “inefficiencies”. Isaacman has said he wants to “foster a culture of urgent execution” in his quest to kick-start America’s new space age. “NASA’s Game of Thrones is finally over,” observed Politico. There’s quite a firebrand in the hotseat.

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Simon Wolfson is widely regarded as the most able CEO of any FTSE-100 company. He joined Next, of which his father was then chairman, in 1991, was appointed to the board in 1997 at the age of 30 and took the top job in 2001. Next had been founded as a mid-market fashion retailer in 1981, but over-expanded and nearly went bust in 1988. Under Wolfson, it has expanded internationally, acquired other brands and gained a market value of £18 billion. He is well worth listening to.

When asked which business book he’d recommend, he replies, “Just one. Bill Slim’s Defeat into Victory”. This is the book, first published in 1956, by Field-Marshal William Slim about how he led the British 14th Army in the retreat through Burma in 1942; in the defence of India against a determined attack in 1944; and in the subsequent rout of the Japanese forces in Burma by June 1945. This was despite extraordinarily difficult terrain; being outnumbered, under-equipped and undersupplied; and the ferocity of Japanese defence. What lessons does this book hold for business managers 80 years later, and how did Wolfson apply them to Next?

Slim’s senior commanders were all people who he had got to know and trust years before, to whom he could delegate tasks with confidence. Similarly, Wolfson promotes internally, rather than recruiting from outside; 28 of his top 30 managers were promoted and have been at Next for a combined 500 years.

Slim displays a determination to get on with, even like, notoriously difficult people on the same side. These included “Vinegar Joe” Stilwell, the American in command of Allied forces who served as Chiang Kai-Shek’s chief of staff; Orde Wingate, commander of the Chindits commandos, who did not regard Slim as his commanding officer; and Aung San, the Burmese nationalist leader. He also cultivated strong relations with the Americans, with the RAF and with Louis Mountbatten, the Allied commander in the Far East. The lesson for Wolfson? Learn not just to get on with, but also to respect and like the people you need in order to be successful.

Simon Wolfson's leadership style

Morale was critical to Slim’s success. “I made a point of speaking myself to every combatant unit, or at least to its officers... whether British, Indian, Gurkha or African. My platform was usually the bonnet of my jeep with the men collected around it and I often did three or four of these stump speeches in a day.” Wolfson too makes a point of visiting outlets, distribution warehouses, design centres and offices as often as possible.

Slim had an overarching strategy, but was prepared to be flexible if circumstances and dispositions changed. In fact, he regarded Japanese inflexibility as a key weakness, meaning that they would be thrown into confusion if the 14th Army did not respond as expected. Likewise, Wolfson emphasises his scepticism about an inflexible long-term strategy and the importance of being able to respond to changing circumstances. Hence, the acquisition of other brands such as Joules and Cath Kidston and expansion overseas when technology made it economic to do so.

Slim was very willing to acknowledge failure and recognise mistakes. He regarded it as important to learn lessons and move on; “the lessons from defeat are more than from victory. A defeated general will turn in upon himself and question the very foundations of his leadership, but if he is to command again, he must shake off these regrets as they claw at his will and self-confidence”. Wolfson is never publicly flustered and always willing to admit to setbacks.

He admires Slim for his willingness to retreat, as he did before the Japanese offensive in 1944, rather than stubbornly defend a poor position. The result was a mixture of caution and boldness: “when in doubt about two courses of action, a general should choose the bolder”, he writes. A CEO should too.

Wolfson probably hasn’t had to improvise to overcome shortages in the way Slim did: he had river craft built, roads constructed and even parachutes made out of jute to overcome the lack of silk and special cloth. Supply problems were a challenge to be overcome, not an excuse for inaction. Wolfson can probably supply comparable anecdotes. Like Slim, he sets great store by intelligence; in Burma, it was a question of the location and condition of Japanese troops; for Wolfson it is gauging how the market is developing and changing.

But the most important aspect both leaders share is their regard for the importance of logistics. For Slim, this was the supply of food, fuel and ammunition, maintenance of vehicles and treatment and evacuation of the wounded. Much of the logistics in 1944-1945 was airborne, which meant control of the skies, building forward airfields and the accumulation and distribution of stores. The inadequacy of their logistics was why Japanese casualties were so much higher.

For Wolfson, logistics means managing supply chains, the distributions to stores, handling of returns and integration of service all along the chain. You might think that wars are won on the battlefield and retail success at the point of sale, but without good logistics, generals and retail CEOs fail. Slim focused on the whole army, not just the frontline troops. “Everyone in the army had to be made to see where his task fitted into the whole”. The same applies in any business.

Slim combines intense regard, liking and loyalty towards those on his side with disdainful ruthlessness towards the Japanese. Perhaps Wolfson has a similar attitude to those who cross him in business, but any potential enemies would be well advised not to find out.

After the war, Slim went on to become chief of the Imperial General Staff and governor-general of Australia. He was a highly regarded lecturer on leadership and died in 1970. If Wolfson ever writes a management book, it too will be well worth reading.

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The publication of Alan Greenspan’s memoir, The Age of Turbulence – a detailed apologia of his 19-year tenure at the US Federal Reserve (1987-2006) – coincided with the first gusts of the looming credit storm. In Britain, a historic bank run on Northern Rock was underway. “Inevitably, we now see his tenure through the prism of the current financial situation. Crisis may be too strong a word, but turbulence is certainly accurate,” noted a Guardian review in October 2007. To which the contemporary reader might add, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Nearly two decades on, as Greenspan, 99, approaches his own centenary, the question posed by economist Howard Davies in 2007 hasn’t changed. “How far should the Fed be held responsible for sowing the seeds of the whirlwind by running an excessively lax monetary policy and… turning a blind eye to the explosion in subprime mortgages and the rapid growth of complex credit derivatives?” The only difference now is scale. If Greenspan’s Fed fuelled the global cataclysm of the Great Financial Crisis, it must also bear partial responsibility for everything that has happened since – from the distortions wrought by quantitative easing (QE) and the vast debt piles now crippling Western economies, to the growing chasm between the asset-rich and poor and the abandonment of notions of “moral hazard” in markets. If the great art of central banking – as outlined by Greenspan’s predecessor Paul Volcker – is knowing when to remove the “punchbowl” from the party, we are still nursing the hangover from the Maestro’s lengthy 1990s “Great Moderation” gig, which, as Britannica Money points out, remains “the longest official economic expansion in US history” and cemented Greenspan’s reputation as a “rock star” central banker.

After the 2008 crash, Greenspan’s public image “imploded as quickly as America’s overheated housing market”, noted Prospect in 2016. How did the man who invented the phrase “irrational exuberance” – to define the speculative excess of the turn-of-the-century dotcom era – became so blind to his own role as an enabler? The question of what Greenspan foresaw, but played down or ignored, has followed him down the years. The title of Sebastian Mallaby’s biography, The Man Who Knew, was “not necessarily a flattering sobriquet”. One thing that Greenspan certainly knew about was data. He was “recognised as unbeatable both on his raw knowledge of detailed economics and his instinctive grasp of the bigger picture”. While studying for a doctorate at Columbia in 1952 he met the polemical novelist Ayn Rand and became a member of her inner circle. Greenspan went on to form his own economic consulting firm, Townsend-Greenspan & Co., before cutting his political teeth – at Rand’s urging – as an adviser for Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign, later serving as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers during Gerald Ford’s presidency.

“The Greenspan put”

In 1987, Ronald Reagan nominated Greenspan to replace Volcker, says the Financial Times. A practised operator in the corridors of power, “he relished Washington’s social bubble and could play the status game with the best of them”, says Prospect. But it was his ability to deal with crises – from the October 1987 market crash through to the millennial dotbomb – that reassured his political masters over five successive terms. He became renowned for “the Greenspan put”: aggressively lowering rates to fight the popping of asset bubbles – a pragmatic approach at odds with his “hot-gospelling libertarian beliefs”, which fomented years of excessive risk, says the FT. Greenspan’s urgent desire to be at the heart of policymaking overcame his instincts – until eventually the mother of all bursting bubbles (to date…) overcame him.

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Isaac Newton, who must be one of the cleverest individuals ever to have lived, made groundbreaking contributions to physics, mathematics, mechanics, philosophy and astronomy. The laws of motion, the theory of gravitation and the reflecting telescope were among his many contributions. He was also a brilliant alchemist, obsessed with theology and biblical prophecy. As if that isn’t enough, he is credited with the design of the gold standard, the primary monetary system of the world for over two hundred years.

Counterfeit coins

In 1695, counterfeit coins accounted for more than a tenth of all English money in circulation. The English used the counterfeit coins in particular to pay their taxes. The Exchequer that year reported no more than ten good shillings for every hundred pounds of revenue. Coin clipping was also a major problem, especially of old coins, and silver coins were disappearing from circulation altogether.

Silver was worth more on the continent as bullion than it was in the UK as tender, so arbitrageurs shipped coins abroad, melted them down, and sold them for gold. Everyone from the Jews to the French was blamed, but by 1695, it was almost impossible to find legal silver in circulation. It had all been melted down and sold.

This all led to a shortage of currency, which inhibited trade. King William III begged the House of Commons to respond to the crisis and, seeking help, secretary of the Treasury William Lowndes wrote letters to England’s wisest men, asking their advice. Among them were philosopher John Locke, banker Josiah Child, and scientist Isaac Newton.

Newton was in his mid-40s and probably not far off the peak of his powers. He had published his most famous work, the Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, just eight years earlier in 1687, and it had established him as the cleverest man in the country. He would now apply his great mind to money.

With the formation of the Bank of England in 1694, Newton had become aware of the possibilities of paper money. “If interest be not yet low enough for the advantage of trade and the design of setting the poor on trade,” he wrote, “the only proper way to lower it is more paper credit till by trading and business we can get more money”.

He could see that token value and intrinsic value were not necessarily one and the same. It was also obvious to Newton that the currency criminals were rational actors. They would continue to clip, counterfeit and sell abroad while there was profit in it. Bullion smuggling carried the death sentence, yet still it went on. Coercion alone would not be enough to stop it from happening. The market itself needed to be changed.

Newton came up with two measures. Firstly, to deal with the clipping, all coins minted prior to 1662 should be called in, melted down, and, using machines, re-made into coins that had a single consistent edge. With no more hand-hammered coins in circulation, clipping coins would become that much more difficult. Re-minting the entire country’s coin, however, at a time of such primitive machinery, was no small undertaking. Secondly, to deal with the silver issue, the amount of silver in coins should be lowered so that the silver content and the face value of the coin were the same. The thought of such a devaluation went against the psyche. The idea that token value and intrinsic value might be different was alien and Newton’s second proposal was not widely welcomed. There were 20 shillings to a pound, so a shilling should contain a concomitant amount of silver.

Newton may have thought that the token was more important than the silver content, but landowners and the government, which was largely made up of them, would lose 20% of their wealth by Newton’s proposal. In 1696 Parliament approved the recoinage, but stipulated the new coins maintain the old weights. Newton warned that the silver outflow would continue.

Isaac Newton's new career

The following year, nudged by John Locke, Charles Montagu, the chancellor of the Exchequer, sent Newton a letter notifying him that the King intended to make him warden of the Mint. So began his new career. Perhaps the role was only intended as a sinecure, but Newton took it very seriously.

Putting his chemical and mathematical knowledge to good use, Newton got the Mint’s machines working and the coins minted at a speed that defied the predictions of even the boldest optimist. Newton would also have to learn the skills of a policeman – both investigator and interrogator – and he proved masterful. This ruthless enforcer of the law oversaw numerous investigations, exposing frauds and then prosecuting perpetrators. Poor counterfeiters had no idea what they were up against, and many were sent to the gallows for their crimes.

So good at the job of warden was Newton that, in 1699, he was promoted and made master of the Royal Mint. After the political union between England and Scotland in 1707, Newton directed a Scottish recoinage that would lead to a new currency for the new Kingdom of Great Britain. He had solved the clipping problem, the counterfeiting issue was vastly improved, but silver was still making its way across the Channel, just as Newton had said it would. As long as the silver content exceeded the face value of the coins, the trade would continue. By 1715, almost all of the coins that Newton had struck between 1696 and 1699 had left the country.

Newton’s studies had moved on from tides, planetary motions and pendulums to the gold markets. He drew up an extensive table of assays of foreign coins and in doing so realised that gold was cheaper in the new markets opening up in Asia than in Europe, and thus that silver was not just being sucked out of England, but out of Europe itself to India and China where it was traded for gold.

The 18th-century gold rush

Portuguese deserters had found alluvial gold two hundred miles inland from Rio de Janeiro in Minas Gerais in Brazil. Soon everyone was flocking there. By 1724, within just three decades of the discovery, world output had doubled. By 1750, 65% of global production was emanating from Brazil. The gold made its way to Lisbon, along with sugar, tobacco and other Brazilian products, and with it the Portuguese minted their moidores coins. The Portuguese used their gold to buy English cereal crops, beef and fish, woollen goods, manufactured articles, and luxuries. Portugal imported five times as much from England as it exported to it, and it used its gold to settle the difference.

The moidores, which weighed slightly more than an English guinea, worth 28 shillings, actually became currency. In London, the Bank of England began buying vast amounts of gold “to be coined as it comes in” and the Mint began minting guineas from the moidores. By 1715, the Bank had 800 kilogrammes, or 25,700 troy ounces (t.oz), a nascent central bank reserve, and this figure would rise to 15.5 tonnes, 500,000 t.oz, by 1730. So much gold coin had never been minted before, and London soon overtook Amsterdam as the foremost precious-metals market. Gold was coming and staying. Silver was leaving for Asia. In 1717, Newton was called on to investigate.

He came up with a new system in 1717. Less than three months later there was a Royal proclamation that forbade the exchange of gold guineas for more than 21 silver shillings – even if they were clipped or underweight. Thus was a guinea just over a pound, which was 20 shillings, or 113 grains of gold. The ratio of gold to silver was effectively set at roughly 1:15.5.

But silver-coin clipping continued, and full-weight silver coins continued to be exported to the continent, where 21 shillings of silver could still get you more than a guinea’s worth of gold (just over 7.6 grams/1/4 t.oz). Exports also headed to Asia, especially India and China, often via the East India Company, where silver was even more valuable. The result was that silver was used for imports, and thus left the country, while exports were traded for gold, which thus came into the country. All in all, some two-thirds of that Brazilian gold is thought to have ended up in England.

Britain had always been on a silver standard. A pound was a pound of sterling silver. Although the Royal proclamation suggested a bimetallic standard, in practice, with so much silver going abroad, it moved Britain from silver to its first gold standard.

Gold was more dependable than clipped silver. The future would look back on Newton as the father of the gold standard. His system proved the bedrock of Britain’s domestic and international trade throughout the 18th century, helping it to become such a formidable commercial power. But it was an accidental gold standard. Nobody – not the institutions nor the persons involved – had had the slightest intention of creating a new monetary system based on gold. Most people wanted to sustain silver as the prime coinage of the land. Newton had tried to create a functioning bimetallic standard.

But market forces had other ideas

The second half of the 19th century proved the age of the gold rush. Aside from taxation, it is difficult to think of anything more overlooked that has had a more profound influence on the course of human history than the gold rush. Nations, indeed civilisations, have been formed on the back of them. The 24th of January 1848 stands as a watershed moment, the dawn of a new golden age.

On that day a carpenter from New Jersey by the name of James Marshall saw something shiny at the bottom of a ditch while carrying out a routine inspection of a lumber mill he was helping build on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada in California. Within a few years, the scale of the gold business changed out of all proportion.

Until that point there had been roughly one-third of an ounce of gold for every person on the planet. Fifty years later, even with a higher population, there was two-thirds of an ounce. The gold price should surely fall with all the new supply, feared bankers and economists. “The price must fall,” said The Economist, wrong about everything even then. But the gold price did not fall. It remained constant. What everyone had failed to appreciate was that most of the gold would be used as money, and that trade, exchange and economic expansion would be the result.

Surprisingly perhaps, the biggest casualty of the gold rush was silver. Silver had been used as money for thousands of years. Not for much longer. Its price halved. In 1850, only Britain, Portugal, Brazil, and a handful of other nations were on the gold standard. Everyone else was on bimetallic standards. By the end of the century, every major nation bar China was on a gold standard, the classical gold standard Newton is credited with having designed, but which, really, was accidental.

Dominic Frisby’s latest book is The Secret History of Gold: Myth, Money, Politics & Power, published by Penguin Business and available from all good bookshops. He writes investment newsletter The Flying Frisby.

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Before we launched MoneyWeek, I worked in finance, mostly as a junior broker selling Japanese equities to international clients out of Tokyo. I liked it. It was intellectually challenging; involved hanging around with lots of clever and interesting people; and, crucially, it was fairly well paid. I stopped in my late 20s, however, when I was fed up with mergers (there was a wave of consolidation underway in investment banking) and with living in Tokyo.

And it was only then that I began to pay any attention to what the business I worked in actually did. That sounds ridiculous. But here’s what I mean. In no training courses or continuing professional development (CPD) events at any of the places I worked did anyone ever mention whose money we were happily moving around the place. The clients we talked about were the big fund-management companies, not individual savers.

If I had stopped to think about it I would have known that at the end of the chain – perhaps with shares in the investment trust run by that nice man from Gartmore, or with units in the open-ended fund run from Sydney – there were real people saving to improve real lives, and paying the real fees that were covering my (quite high) expenses. But these people, the ultimate beneficial owners, or UBOs, simply weren’t mentioned. An industry that should have reminded itself every morning before the market opened that every action it took affected a UBO in one way or another, did not do so. Not ideal.

When Jon Connell approached me in London about launching a sister magazine to The Week, MoneyWeek, I thought it was a fabulous chance to start redressing that balance: to give the UBO, the ordinary investor, the information and hence the power to both judge and challenge fund managers, wealth managers and independent financial advisers (IFAs). These were the days when if you bought units in a fund via a financial adviser, you paid him a percentage of the value of the assets invested in that fund every year for as long as you held it – even if you never spoke to him again.

It was also a time when personal-finance and investing journalism was a bit rubbish. There were some brilliant business journalists, but the money market (while jammed with press releases) was short on quality information and analysis. That was a particular problem in 2000, when ordinary investors needed help even more than usual. The dotcom bubble had burst earlier in the year, and even the rather more staid UK market had already fallen for three quarters in a row for the first time since 1974. It was nasty out there… and maybe not the best time to launch a magazine.

We did it anyway. We mostly planned it in the same Italian restaurant in Westbourne Grove – over so many lunches that when I once went in the evening with someone else, the manager asked if my boyfriend knew. That was perhaps a sign that it was time to stop talking and start doing! Jon raised the money and got the infrastructure going. I hired the team, and we launched into a decade of bickering, new rounds of money-raising and magazine redesigns. We received sometimes challenging, but mostly charming backing from first Angus MacDonald and then Bill Bonner (both of whom I remain friends with – huge thanks to you both). As a result, we became the best-selling financial magazine in the UK by (I think) 2008.

I’m extremely proud of what MoneyWeek has achieved since then and extremely grateful to the many readers who stuck with us for so long. The first few issues were awful. But we gradually found our feet and our voice, and along the way we built an excellent group of writers, editors, and production people who have long been both brilliant and loyal.

Look to the back of the magazine and you will see names such as the current editor Andrew Van Sickle, politics editor Emily Hohler, picture editor Natasha Langan and writer Jane Lewis. All these people have been with MoneyWeek since issue one. John Stepek, the editor after me, was with the magazine for 17 years.

MoneyWeek successes and struggles

The standard of personal-finance and investing journalism has soared since 2000. The business itself has become far more democratic with the rise of investing platforms, social media and the advent of the auto-enrolment pension. I loved playing our part when I edited MoneyWeek, and have also been pleased to see that our campaigning on everything from fund fees to shareholder democracy has seen significant successes.

But here’s the bit that worries me. In my first editor’s letter, I wrote about taxation. There was a Budget coming up. The public finances weren’t in a bad state: there was even a budget surplus (imagine that!). But I was still horrified by Gordon Brown’s plan to raise public spending by significantly more than the UK’s rate of GDP growth at the time – and by the idea (clearly close to Brown’s heart) that spending by the state was somehow an inherent good.

Soon, I said, confidently “we will look back and be amazed” that it could ever have been accepted that government could control such a vast percentage of the country’s GDP. What can I say? I was young. At the time, debt to GDP was around 30% and public spending was 37% of GDP. Today, those numbers are near 100% and 44%. We’ve had many successes with the financial industry over the years (witness fund fees today). But I think it is safe to say that MoneyWeek has had less traction with politicians. The battle continues.

Merryn Somerset Webb now hosts the Merryn Talks Money podcast and newsletter for Bloomberg. You can find her on X @merrynsw

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The difference between successful people and very successful people, Warren Buffett once said, is that very successful people say no to almost everything. I suspect he’s right. But I’ve never been good at saying no, and when the idea for MoneyWeek popped into my head, I couldn’t resist it. It came to me in the summer of 1999. I’d founded The Week four years earlier, and it was beginning to take off. Why not apply the same formula to the financial world? Most money magazines were so dry. Why couldn’t there be one along the lines of The Week, less share-obsessed than Investors’ Chronicle, taking a wider view: how to make money, how to keep it, how to spend it.

I’d dreamt up The Week on a long walk in Scotland in January 1994. But having resigned as deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph, I struggled to raise the money: the venture capitalists I approached seemed neither adventurous nor anxious to part with capital, and I ended up funding the launch myself – with help from family and friends.

Then along came the quixotic publisher Felix Dennis, who wrote to me out of the blue suggesting we “share a beer”. Anyone heard of Felix Dennis, I asked, waving the letter around. No one had, but while our readership was growing our bank account was not. So a week or two later I found myself on a sunny afternoon sitting under an oak tree in Felix’s garden near Stratford-upon-Avon and doing an impetuous, back-of-the-envelope deal which certainly wasn’t prudent but which gave us the money we needed.

They were heady days, those early days at The Week, and perhaps it all went a little to my head. Full of boundless confidence, I sketched out a plan for MoneyWeek and recruited Merryn Somerset Webb, who’d done a stint on our City pages before, sensibly, telling me I was paying her too little and returning to the City. I knew she’d be brilliant. So off we went, in November 2000, with a new office in New Cavendish Street from which I could oversee both The Week and MoneyWeek. This time, raising the money was easier, but once again I underestimated how much we’d need.

The new magazine was aimed primarily at investors, not City professionals, and targeted a similar demographic to The Week: AB readers with disposable income; non-experts (like me) wary of stockbrokers and financial advisers but anxious for guidance on where to put our money and, indeed, how to hang on to it. Some of The Week’s key features, of course, could be replicated: Best Properties on the Market; Good Week, Bad Week; the Briefing; a map for global financial news. My friend Andrew Robson was prevailed on to write a bridge column.

MoneyWeek's early ups and downs

I now had to divide my time between two magazines, and Felix wanted me to sell shares in The Week as the price for doing so. Unwisely, I agreed. You don’t have to do much right in the world so long as you don’t make too many mistakes, says Warren Buffett.

He’s right. I’ve made my fair share of mistakes, too many, and this was one – especially as there were moments when I wondered whether we’d ever make a success of the new venture. I’m a bit “ready, fire, aim”, to use a phrase coined by a clever American friend. I remembered a conversation from the early days of The Week. “I’d give it ten,” said a newspaper circulation manager to a friend of mine. “What – ten out of ten?” replied my friend, rather chuffed. “No, ten issues.”

The worst time was a year or so after launch when our money all but ran out. In the end we were rescued first by a City-based Scottish entrepreneur, Angus Macdonald, and then, a year or so later, by the man who helped propel us to success: Bill Bonner, the quietly spoken founder of Agora, the hugely successful US newsletter company. I was introduced to him by my brother-in-law; we had lunch in Notting Hill, hit it off and did the deal there and then. It was the quickest, most painless transaction I’ve ever been involved in.

After that, things got easier. Bill is a shrewd contrarian who likes a good argument, a perfect match for Merryn. Between them, they gave the magazine a strong personality, aided by John Stepek and a small, clever team including the current editor, Andrew Van Sickle, and Stuart Watkins, who steered production with admirable calmness and good humour. Successful magazines need to have a heart; their readers need to come to know and trust them like a friend. Slowly and steadily, we built the circulation, as I’d done on The Week.

Then, in fairly quick succession, Felix Dennis died; a decision was made by his trust to sell The Week; The Week bought MoneyWeek to bring them both into the same stable; and eventually my two brainchilds were bought by private equity and then, not long afterwards, by the current proprietors, Future Publishing. I left before the second sale – to do two things. One was – indeed is – a weekly email to help CEOs plan for the future called Sunday Briefing; the other a daily newsletter called The Knowledge, a five-minute catch-up on the world which goes out at lunchtime each day.

But I loved every minute of my time at MoneyWeek and am immensely proud of it and the team now running it. It is easily the best and most fun financial magazine in Britain. Nor do I think niche magazines are on their way out. Newspapers may struggle in the longer term, but not specialist publications, which can never quite be replicated online. Long may MoneyWeek survive, as I’m quite sure it will.

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In the late 1990s, a young Stella Li landed in Rotterdam from China with $30,000, a container load of lithium-ion batteries and an order from head office: “sell them to survive”. She clinched a deal with Nokia, then the number one mobile-phone maker. Never one for false modesty, she told the Financial Times: “I opened the door and moved BYD to another level.”

Nearly 30 years on, the company has moved far past its roots as a battery maker to become one of the world’s most powerful manufacturers of electric vehicles. Globe-trotting Li remains so firmly at the heart of its international expansion that colleagues have dubbed it “The Stella Show”. Yet the stakes, while much higher, are just as existential. BYD sales grew by 40% last year, but it is having to grapple with both rising Western protectionism and a darkening domestic outlook in China in the teeth of cut-throat competition. It’s going to be “very difficult for BYD to continue to grow the way it’s been growing”, says analyst Tu Le of Sino Auto Insights.

“A diminutive woman with almost frenetic energy,” Li, 55, “zips across the globe furiously, rarely making it back to her current home in Los Angeles”, says Fortune. In a typical day, BYD’s “crucial ambassador and strategist” might wake up in Istanbul, fly to a meeting in Vienna and then spend the night in Germany. The carmaker now exports to roughly 95 markets, but Europe is particularly crucial to its global push. In markets such as Britain – which this year became BYD’s biggest outside China – the company has become “Elon Musk’s worst nightmare”.

At its heart, BYD – which was founded in Shenzhen in 1995 by Wang Chuanfu – has always been a partnership. While Li led marketing and expansion, Wang, 59, was the engineer behind the group’s rapid technological advancements and manufacturing prowess. He never wavered from his dream of building electric cars, even when it looked like a long shot. The pair met soon after Li had graduated from Shanghai’s prestigious Fudan University and the relationship developed romantically as well as commercially.

BYD stands for “Build Your Dreams”, but back in the early days when Li was pestering mobile-phone executives in Atlanta suburbs with her box of battery samples, she used to joke that it stood for “Bring Your Dollars”, says Bloomberg Businessweek. Her great strength then was persistence. It took her two years to win a contract from Motorola. But by 2002, when BYD went public in Hong Kong and Shenzhen, the company was on a roll. Many investors were furious when Wang bought a majority stake in a failing state-owned carmaker a year later – appalled that BYD “was wading into a market it knew nothing about”. At the time, Wang didn’t even know how to drive, but was convinced that electric cars were “a natural extension” of the battery business.

The first clunky models did nothing to dissuade the critics, but Wang continued to pour cash into product development.

Stella Li's deal with Warren Buffett

The deal that put BYD on the map was Berkshire Hathaway’s landmark $232 million investment in 2008, says the FT. Li was introduced to Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger by her friend Li Lu, a billionaire hedge-fund manager. In the nearly two decades that Berkshire stuck with BYD until completing its exit this year, it reportedly netted a return of about $7 billion. In that time, BYD has achieved what Tesla, Ford and the rest of the car industry haven’t, says Businessweek: “build an affordable electric car for the masses and make money doing it”. Jean-Francois Baril, chair of Nokia’s owner HMD Global, who has known Li for more than two decades, credits her with “bridging the East and the West”, says the FT. She’ll need all that skill to keep BYD on the road in the years ahead.

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It’s been a tough two decades for UK-listed firms. BP, Shell and HSBC have dropped out of the ranks of the world’s largest listed companies. Britain’s current largest firm, AstraZeneca, doesn’t even make the global top 40. At the same time, the reputation of British universities has gone in the opposite direction. “We now have more universities in the global top 10 than we had 20 years ago,” as Robin Bagchi, chairman of the London Technology Club, points out. UK universities “continue to punch well above their weight in terms of producing world-leading research”, which is an important economic asset, says James Witter, head of Sarasin Bread Street. More than 2,000 active start-ups have been spun out of UK universities. Little wonder that a sovereign-wealth investor has said that British academia is “our equivalent of Gulf oil”.

The cutting edge of the 'golden triangle' UK universities

Such economic excellence is built on a foundation of “incredible institutions that are focused on applying science and technology to solve fundamental problems”, says Ed Bussey, CEO of Oxford Science Enterprises. He puts Oxford University at the top of the list of such institutions, pointing to the fact that every year Oxford comes up as one of the leading research universities, with a history of more than 70 Nobel prizes in a wide range of disciplines. “When I go out to lunch, I’ll be standing in a queue and the person behind me will be a world leader in this, and then I’ll be walking back to the office and another will walk past me and they’re the Nobel winner in another area.”

Such a concentration of elite academics can help create an environment that ends up being worth more than the sum of the individual academics involved. Having a “cosmopolitan and multinational” atmosphere “attracts other great minds” – and a lot of investors willing to put money into early stage enterprises stemming from Oxford research. This in turn creates a “virtuous circle” where the quality of research attracts capital, which in turns encourages more talented academics to move to Oxford.

Andrew Williamson, managing partner of Cambridge Innovation Capital, emphasises Cambridge’s reputation and heritage as a major competitive advantage in attracting the best scientific talent. “We’ve existed for nearly 800 years, which means that we’ve been doing this for longer than almost anyone else in the entire world,” he says. It has leveraged its infrastructure and culture of “cutting-edge science” to create links between “the academic world, the start-up world and the biggest global technology companies”.

Oxford and Cambridge are not the only points of excellence in British academia. Commentators increasingly talk about the “golden triangle” of Oxford, Cambridge, and Imperial and UCL, rather than just “Oxbridge”. Indeed, as Bagchi notes, when it comes to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects, “some recent rankings put Imperial College London near the very top of the global table, ahead of Oxford, Cambridge and Harvard”. University College London has also had a lot of success when it comes to creating interesting spin-outs – DeepMind is one example.

UK universities beyond the golden triangle

The golden triangle may be the most visible sign of British scientific excellence, but there is “some really great science coming out of the other UK universities” too, says Doug Quinn, partner at DSW Ventures. As Quinn’s colleague, Mira Androniciuc, notes, there are key specialised laboratories in other UK universities that outperform the general laboratories in the golden triangle institutions. “There are clearly opportunities out there.” But sadly, these are not yet producing a strong pipeline of new firms. There were around 600 early-stage investments in the golden triangle in 2024, but only 250 in other universities. The regions get around a fifth of the total investment that the golden triangle gets, says Quinn. But the gap is mainly due to inexperience and should narrow as the teams outside Oxbridge and London do more deals. Already, there have been more than 100 spin-outs from Manchester University, which now has a well-established technology transfer office.

Indeed, a “Northern arc” is starting to emerge as a serious challenge, led by the four universities of Liverpool, Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, says Duncan Johnson, CEO of Northern Gritstone. Johnson notes that these four institutions alone employ around 16,500 researchers and have the UK’s largest research budget at around £770 million, which is bigger than those of Oxford, Cambridge and London. Northern Gritstone, which has first refusal on the commercial opportunities from research produced by the Northern arc, has been able to raise £362 million from individuals and institutions.

Henry Lane Fox, CEO of Founders Factory and chairman of the Creator Fund, singles out the University of Southampton as particularly strong when it comes to quantum and high-performance computing; the University of Glasgow as a leader in chemistry; and Edinburgh when it comes to robotics. Overall, around half of the deals that Lane Fox and his team evaluate, and around a third of those that they end up investing in, come from outside the golden triangle, "and both numbers are growing”.

Lane Fox is so enthusiastic about the quality of academic research in the UK as a whole that, in an attempt to grab the most interesting idea at an earlier stage than his competitors, his Creator Fund is now targeting doctoral students at universities across the UK. Similarly, Chris Wiles, Director of Private Equity and Venture Capital at Foresight Group, has set up a network of regional offices, including in Edinburgh, Leeds, Manchester, Cardiff and Exeter. Another source of world-leading research comes from the various research institutes that are funded by the UK government, but not affiliated with any specific university – the nuclear research facility at Culham Campus, for example, run by the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA), as well as the Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire.

Rethinking commercialisation in UK universities

As well as producing some of the best research in the world, British universities are generally much better at turning their research into companies and products than they were even a few decades ago. “Every university around the world is on a journey when it comes to commercialisation,” says Williamson. Over the last 20 years, the UK government has made a particular effort to encourage universities to make commercialisation and “knowledge transfer” key to their mission. This began with universities setting up knowledge-transfer offices, principally focused on the licensing of technology. Over the past 10 to 20 years, that model has evolved and is now creating spin-out companies based on the technologies that the academics have created. Academics and students have become more entrepreneurial and “want to set up their own firms to commercialise their tech, rather than stay as academics and simply license it to third parties”.

Arnab Basu, founder and CEO of Kromek, which specialises in radiation-detection technology, agrees that things have changed for the better. When he set up Kromek two decades ago from research he pioneered at Durham University, “spin-outs were not the flavour of the day, and we had to do everything ourselves, from agreeing a licensing agreement with the university, to finding investors and then raising additional funds”. Today, the support system for entrepreneurs, in terms of both money and advice, is much more developed. Many smaller universities have also realised that forming partnerships with similar institutions is a good way to gain experience quickly.

There has been a change in attitude within academia over the past 15 years, says David Grimm, a partner at AlbionVC. Launching start-ups was previously seen as “a bit grubby and commercial”, but now founding a start-up has almost become a precondition for becoming a professor. The latest report into spin-outs, produced in conjunction with analytics firm Beauhurst, reveals that investment in UK spin-outs reached the record level of £3.35 billion in 2024. This compares with £1.16 billion in 2019, as Moray Wright of Parkwalk Advisors points out.

Lowering the “university tax”

But just because UK universities have upped their game doesn’t mean that there isn’t plenty of room for further improvement. MoneyWeek spoke to several venture capitalists, and nearly all of them pointed to universities’ desire to cling on to as much of the company spun out as possible as a big problem. It is, of course, reasonable for institutions to try to get the best return for what is, after all, their intellectual property, says James Paton-Philip, partner in the corporate team at law firm Hill Dickinson, but too often this “university tax” can make investing unattractive for investors and for those founding the company in the first place, especially given that the founders’ stake will end up being diluted further as they raise more cash.

Universities do have a tendency to be too aggressive in negotiations, agrees Grimm, and to take too long to reach an agreement, which can be a major problem in the fast-moving world of technology, where multiple firms are trying to bring similar products to market first. “I’ve known of several major cases where ideas for start-ups have failed on the launch pad because the negotiations got so involved that by the time they were settled the opportunity had passed.”

The good news is that this is becoming much less of an issue thanks to pressure from the government to reduce the share institutions demand and to standardise terms. The 2023 Independent Review of University Spin-outs has helped speed up the process, says Grimm. AlbionVC has, for example, an agreement with UCL where the university agreed to take just a flat 5% stake in any software start-up spun out of it. The first company AlbionVC spun out under the new conditions took much less time to set up. UCL isn’t the only university to do this, says Bagchi. Imperial now takes a flat 10% share from its spin-outs, and Oxford has reduced its share by more than half from 50% to 20%.

The British Microsoft is coming

The UK may be “world class at research, and very good at creating early stage companies, but there is still room for improvement when it comes to scaling up”, says Greg Smith, CEO of IP Group. Northern Gritstone’s Johnson agrees that our tech sector still “struggles” when it comes to raising large sums for expansion. From his own experience, he’s found that raising amounts in the region of £200 million is still a big ask for British tech firms, whereas those in Silicon Valley can raise such sums with a single phone call.

The lack of domestic capital willing to back tech firms means that too often UK start-ups are either forced to rely on overseas investors, or sell themselves to larger US tech companies, says Wright. He emphasises that such investment represents a vote of confidence in the capabilities of the UK research base, but such external investors and larger tech companies also “have their own agendas, which don’t necessarily align with the interests of the UK”. He points to DeepMind, the AI company spun out from UCL that was acquired by Google in 2014 for £400 million, and which “would now be worth more than £10 billion – maybe even more than £100 billion – if it had remained private”.

Google’s purchase of DeepMind may have deprived Britain of its very own OpenAI. Yet the fact that it, and others, such as OrganOx and Oxford Ionics, have fetched “significant sums” will “undoubtedly draw more interest into this area, and encourage more university researchers to launch commercial enterprises”, says Sarasin’s James Witter.

Such successes are also helping to build the necessary environment in the UK “of investors, lawyers and financial services intermediaries”. So, provided pension funds and institutions are willing to invest more, “there’s no reason” why we can’t build a British tech company on the scale of Microsoft, says Paton-Philip. Smith believes “unequivocally” that several large British tech firms will emerge within the next decade. We look at some of the most promising places to put your money below.

Spin-outs from UK universities: where to invest

Companies such as Oxford Capital, Parkwalk Advisors, Foresight Group and AlbionVC all offer investors with deep pockets access to venture-capital trusts. Those of more modest means might like to consider IP Group (LSE: IPO), a listed FTSE 250 company that has been investing in spin-outs from UK universities for the last 25 years. Over this time, it has supported around 500 companies, creating an estimated 10,000 jobs. At the moment, the group has 62 firms in its portfolio, spanning “deep technology”, life sciences and clean-energy technology (cleantech). The stock trades at only seven times estimated 2026 earnings and at a sharp discount to the book value of its assets.

One of IP Group’s most successful clean-technology investments was in fuel-cell and hydrogen-power technology company Ceres Power (LSE: CWR). Originally spun out of Imperial College London, IP Group stepped in to rescue the company after a failed trial, taking an active role in its management before eventually selling its stake for a large profit in 2020. Ceres Power is not currently making any money, but it continues to grow, with sales tripling between 2019 and 2024, and it is expected to be a big winner from the spike in demand for clean energy created by the data-centre boom.

One of Cambridge Innovation Capital’s many success stories is Bicycle Therapeutics (Nasdaq: BCYC). It was founded in 2009 by Cambridge Enterprises (Cambridge’s commercialisation body) and uses technology developed by Greg Winter, winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2018, to develop drugs that can target and treat solid tumours that cannot be reached by conventional drugs. It is not making any money yet, but has several promising drugs in development. The most advanced of these is zelenectide, which is in advanced trials as a treatment for metastatic urothelial cancer (the hope is that it will also prove effective in treating other cancers).

Autolus (Nasdaq: AUTL) was founded by Martin Pule, who leads the “CAR-T” research programme at UCL’s Cancer Institute, with the help of UCLB (UCL’s commercialisation arm). Its products modify white blood cells to help the body’s immune system fight cancer. The company is not making any money, but its therapy Aucatzyl has recently been approved for use in the UK, US and EU for treating acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, with the hope that this can pave the way for similar treatments being approved for a wider range of cancers in the near future.

As noted in the main story above, Kromek Group (Aim: KMK) was originally spun out of Durham University by Arnab Basu. The company specialises in making radiation detectors that use cadmium zinc telluride (CZT) semiconductors for use in medicine and security. The company has already secured contracts with GE, Siemens, Philips and Canon, and with the help of funding from the US and UK governments, it is developing devices to detect biological pathogens. The stock trades at 18 times expected 2026 earnings. With revenue more than doubling between 2020 and 2025, that looks like good value.

Investors with an extremely high tolerance for risk might want to consider micro-cap Quantum Base Holdings (Aim: QUBE). It was founded by Robert Young of Lancaster University and uses quantum technology to produce product codes that are virtually impossible to counterfeit. With counterfeiting being a significant problem for global brands, the commercial potential seems huge, although the company is currently losing money.

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What’s happened?

Earlier this month, the Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to three academics noted for exploring the two most urgent practical questions in their discipline: why do economies grow, and how can we help them do so? Half the $1.2 million (11 million Swedish kronor) prize was given to Joel Mokyr, an American-Israeli economic historian of the industrial revolution in Britain and its scientific and cultural underpinnings. The other half of the prize was shared between Philippe Aghion (of the London School of Economics) and Peter Howitt (of Brown University in the US). The pair are growth theorists best known for their Schumpeterian model of economic growth, focused on innovation and “creative destruction”. The choice of these laureates is a reminder that significant and steady economic growth is a relatively recent phenomenon, merely a few centuries old, and that we take it for granted at our peril.

What drives economic growth?

A growing population, rising productivity and labour-market flexibility are what drive long-run economic growth, and of these, productivity is the biggest factor. As for what drives that, the first building block is having a well-functioning market economy, alongside a stable regulatory regime that allows enterprises to flourish. A second is having access to global markets and high levels of investment in both physical capital and human resources, in the form of skills and education. But all that would mean little without technological innovation. The UK economy is delivering more than 15 times as much output per head of population as it was 200 years ago, mainly thanks to technological advances, particularly in key sectors such as manufacturing, transport and communications. By contrast, there was almost no improvement in living standards whatsoever in the four centuries between 1300 and 1700. This year, the Nobel committee chose to honour academics focused on the economic growth that has lifted billions of people out of poverty over the past two centuries. In the grand sweep of history, it’s been a highly unusual period – and there are no guarantees that it will continue.

What do the Nobel Prize winners say?

Mokyr’s work as an economic historian focuses on why growth took off in the first place. In A Culture of Growth, published in 2016, he argues that from the 17th century, European cultural norms changed in a manner that was conducive to scientific experimentation and discovery, and to the commercialisation of those ideas – especially in Britain. Compared with large and more monolithic states and empires in Asia, Europe’s political geography helped foster that change. Academics and innovators who fell out of favour could seek a safer harbour elsewhere. Governments were also more prepared to allow “creative destruction”, where old firms and products and sectors die, and new ones grow.

Aghion and Howitt were recognised for their theory of sustained endogenous growth through creative destruction. The term “creative destruction” was coined in the 1940s by Joseph Schumpeter to encapsulate the idea that economic progress carries with it significant disruption, churn and displacement of older technologies and firms. The distinctive contribution of Aghion and Howitt, says Peter Kienow in a paper for the Centre for Economic Policy Research, is to have “transformed creative destruction from an evocative metaphor into a rigorous analytical framework” and mathematical model. The Aghion and Howitt framework, dating from 1992, allowed growth theory to integrate real-world micro-data on firm and product dynamics, and built a platform for decades of subsequent work on innovation and growth both by themselves and others – leading to “new insights about the social versus private returns to innovation, the distributional implications of innovation and potential political barriers” to it.

What can this year's Nobel Prize teach us?

The Nobel committee awarded the prize in the hope that the trio’s work would help ensure that growth was maintained and “steered in the direction of supporting humankind”. In accepting their prizes, the three laureates warned against policies that could hamper growth, including by restricting immigration and erecting trade barriers. But for the UK specifically, there are vital lessons above and beyond the need to be an open, trading nation, says Daniel Susskind in the Financial Times. Currently, the country’s growth strategy is focused on building its way out of stagnation. Yet the lesson from Mokyr, Aghion and Howitt is that “serious growth comes from a very different place: discovering new ideas, unleashing innovation and whipping up technological progress. In short, growth comes from the intangible world, not the tangible one”. If the UK had grown at the same rate as the US since the financial crisis, for example, Britons would each now be £8,000 richer (in terms of annual per capita GDP). That’s a massive gap in a short space of time, and it’s been driven by the UK and Europe more widely, falling behind in productivity-boosting technologies.

What should Britain do?

It should “focus on reforming intellectual property rights with the same intensity as planning reform”, says Susskind – which means “confronting the powerful creative industries trying to throttle reform on the use and re-use of new ideas in society”. It should also take research and development more seriously; our spending is below the average for the OECD club of rich nations. It should do far more to attract talented foreigners. It should tackle the pervasive sense within some of our most innovative industries – from finance to life sciences – that the UK is becoming a hostile place to operate. Above all, our education system should embrace new technology, not resist it. “Too many political leaders are drawing on old-fashioned ideas about what causes growth – to little effect.

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The good times are rolling again in Tokyo, where the Japanese stock exchange has extended its record rally, fuelled by what UBS calls the “Takaichi trade”, says MarketWatch. But if new PM Sanae Takaichi – the country’s first female prime minister – is one symbol of the boom, another is the return to prominence of one of Japan’s most notorious traders.

Activist investor Yoshiaki Murakami was a central player in the Livedoor scandal that shook Japan to its roots in 2006 when the internet company, founded by the flamboyant Takafumi Horie, collapsed spectacularly after the exposure of a shares and accounting scam. Eventually sentenced to two years for insider trading of shares in Nippon Broadcasting System (which Horie had waged a hostile bid to acquire), Murakami’s downfall was viewed as a “victory for Japan’s traditional business community”, who regarded his “brash brand of capitalism with barely concealed contempt”, noted The Guardian at the time.

Like Horie, Murakami had risen to prominence as an enfant terrible, determined to crush established hierarchies “in the search for quick profits”. Famous for “aggressive tactics and fiery language”, the impact of his disgrace – and the wider collapse following the 2008 global financial crisis – was to bring “activist investing in Japan to a halt”, says Bloomberg. In 2009, he left the country for Singapore to concentrate on real estate investments.

Now 66, Murakami is back with a new firm, City Index Eleventh, and his tactics haven’t changed – he spots weakness in a target and tightens the screws until he gets what he wants. The latest is another prominent broadcaster, Fuji Media Holdings, which in January became engulfed in a sex scandal. “Longtime executives quit in disgrace. Advertisers fled. Earnings cratered” – and Murakami piled in, amassing a 16% stake and demanding the spin-off of subsidiaries to boost the share price. Since his investments started picking up in 2021, his companies have made ¥170 billion (£841 million) in profit, according to Citic Securities. Indeed, Murakami, his family and affiliates now control at least £2.4 billion in Japanese stocks – two daughters, Aya and Rei, are in the business.

More significantly, the originator of Japanese activism has helped spawn a new movement. A record 146 activist campaigns were waged in the country last year, disrupting “once-clubby” executive suites and helping to revive Japan’s stock market.

After graduating from the University of Tokyo in 1983, Murakami joined the Ministry of International Trade and Industry – gaining a reputation for his financial acumen and straight talk. Murakami got into the habit of checking financial results before meetings and was astonished by how many executives were ignorant of the company’s balance sheet. They simply assumed the customary practice of their predecessors – sitting on hoards of cash rather than investing. “Frustrated by the lack of urgency”, he left the civil service, “figuring he could be more effective as an investor”.

Yoshiaki Murakami's Marmite personality

Something of a Marmite personality, Murakami is castigated by opponents for “using fear as an investment strategy”, says the Financial Times. Others view him as a brave standard-bearer. “He’s Japanese – with a thoroughly Anglo-Saxon understanding of capitalism,” one broker told Bloomberg. “He was an insider who realised Japan needed to change and became an outsider to make that happen.” Murakami’s “approach was direct, data-driven and fundamentally correct in diagnosing bloated balance sheets [and] weak governance”, adds Star Magnolia Capital. “Management teams saw him as an intruder”, and the media “portrayed him as a raider”. Yet he wrote “the first chapter of modern Japanese activism”. No doubt he plans to write a few more.

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Albert Einstein is, of course, most famous for formulating his General Theory of Relativity. He also made important contributions towards quantum theory, even if he was at times as puzzled by his findings as the rest of us. That the Nobel Prize in Physics was last week awarded to a trio of scientists for their work, conducted 40 years ago, into quantum mechanics, just goes to show how far we’ve come and how much we have yet to understand in this scientific field. What is less well remembered is that Einstein had other pursuits besides working out how the universe is put together, and one of these was playing the violin.

Einstein is thought to have owned around ten violins during his lifetime. But what is believed to be his first full-size instrument was bought for him by his family in 1894, shortly before the young Einstein left for Switzerland to continue his schooling. Into the wood Einstein etched “Lina”, the name by which he called all of his violins, and it would remain his principal violin during the years he worked on his famous theories until around 1920.

In 1932, he gave the violin to his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue before leaving Germany for the US to escape the Nazis’ rise to power. Two decades later, Laue gifted it to an acquaintance, Margarete Hommrich of Braunschweig, whose great-great-daughter consigned the instrument to Cirencester-based Dominic Winter Auctioneers to be sold last week. They did – for a hammer price of £860,000. With the buyer’s premium of 26.4% taking the total amount paid to over £1 million, Einstein’s violin becomes the most expensive such instrument that wasn’t owned by a concert violinist or made by Stradivarius, says BBC News.

But before selling it, Dominic Winter Auctioneers tapped Paul Wingfield, director of studies in music at Trinity College, Cambridge – who had just so happened to have recently composed a musical drama called Einstein’s Violin – to research and confirm the instrument’s provenance. “I think [Einstein] used [the violin] as a way of mulling things over,” Wingfield tells Rhys Blakely in The Times. “It just really helped him order his thoughts.”

So important were the violins to Einstein that he mentioned them alongside his scientific manuscripts and books in his will of 1927. He updated that will in 1934, shortly after arriving in the US, and that document – torn into pieces, but retrieved from the bin by an employee of the Princeton Bank & Trust Company, which held his assets – was valued at up to $30,000 when it appeared for sale with Christie’s in New York yesterday, alongside personal letters and photographs of Einstein. Other notes and letters of his have fetched upwards of £1 million in recent years.

In 1950, Einstein filed a final will in which he left his violin to his grandson, Bernhard Einstein. Einstein had remarked that if he hadn’t become a scientist, he would have liked to have been a musician. Music’s loss was science’s gain.

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Rob Granieri is “the last founder standing” at Jane Street – “the black-box money machine” currently “minting Wall Street records”, says Bloomberg. But he’s almost impossible to pin down – guarding his “low-key stature” so tightly that he often goes unrecognised, even in his own company, where he officially has no title. His profile in the employee directory stands out for its missing headshot.

If you want a sighting of the “schlubby” billionaire recluse, you’re better off looking beyond Wall Street. The “soft-spoken libertarian” is most at home at alternative gatherings: notably that “mecca of counterculture”, the Burning Man festival. Another favoured haunt is the Scarlet Pearl casino in Mississippi’s Biloxi Bay – a family affair he helped build and finance.

Still, “invisibility has grown harder to maintain” as Jane Street’s profits have exploded, says the New York Post. The firm, which some have dubbed the world’s most lucrative trading house, has enjoyed such breakneck growth over the past five years – at the vanguard of the exchange-traded fund boom – that it accounted “for nearly a quarter of all US-listed ETF trading volume last year”. “The amount of money they make is almost obscene,” one former analyst told the Financial Times, which describes the “quirky and opaque” outfit, renowned for spotting arbitrage opportunities, as one of the “new titans of Wall Street” – frequently trouncing establishment rivals. Jane Street’s $21.9 billion trading revenues in 2023 were “equivalent to roughly one-seventh of the combined equity, bond, currency and commodity trading revenues of all the dozen major global investment banks”. The arrival of bitcoin ETFs the following year put another rocket under revenues. As of June this year, it had already pulled in $17 billion.

Granieri, now 53, always “harboured ambitions to make a lot of money”, says Bloomberg. After graduation in 1992, he printed a stack of CVs and dropped them off on each floor of Philadelphia’s tallest buildings. The strategy worked. He scored a job at Jeff Yass’s Susquehanna International Group, “the quant-trading firm that was quietly becoming a market behemoth,” and was soon pulling in $700,000 a year. But, itching for change, he teamed up with two other traders to form the firm that became Jane Street in 1999.

Rob Granieri: into the limelight

Being dragged into the limelight by success is one thing. Sadly for Granieri, Jane Street is increasingly under scrutiny for other reasons, too. Most serious, says Bloomberg, is an accusation by the Indian regulator of “rigging the world’s largest options market”, which the firm has vowed to fight. The collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange, and subsequent high-profile fraud trial, also shone unwelcome light on the firm’s culture – “SBF” spent his early career there, personally recruited by Granieri. “Having Jane Street on the CV was a crucial bit of Bankman-Fried’s sales pitch,” notes the FT. Yet the lax office vibe at FTX was a partial mirror of Jane Street’s, where Granieri “has inculcated a culture that mirrors his quirks”, says the New York Post.

The wider worry, says the FT, is that Jane Street’s “tight-knit” corporate culture no longer fits its size and global clout. The firm is run by roughly 40 equity partners with no traditional management structure: a recipe for a lack of accountability, say critics. Much depends on the outcome of the Indian investigation. The worse-case scenario for the firm is that “the temporary block on activities” imposed there could spread to other jurisdictions as regulators dig deeper. One of Granieri’s few personal indulgences is fine dining. Why cook, he jokes, when you can “eat at Le Bernardin every night”? Given his woes, he could be forgiven a spot of comfort eating.

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Paramount’s new boss is adamant he intends to keep “politics at arm’s length”. Good luck with that, says Vanity Fair. After this summer’s $8 billion takeover by Skydance, David Ellison, 42, is in “the hot seat” of an impassioned national debate about the future of the media juggernaut and whether it has been captured by Donald Trump.

As CEO of the newly formed Paramount Skydance Corporation, Ellison’s first big appointment has fanned the flames. In a controversial acqui-hire, he is paying $150 million to buy Bari Weiss’s news site, The Free Press, and installing the journalist entrepreneur as editor-in-chief of CBS News. Her pro-Israel and anti-woke views have fuelled speculation that she’ll act as an “ideological commissar” at CBS, helping to “enforce compliance” with the White House line.

This is certainly an “almost existential” moment for the near 100-year-old network, whose new owners have been accused of “kowtowing” to the president after settling a vexatious $16 million lawsuit to get the deal over the line, and cancelling comedian Stephen Colbert when he described it as a “big, fat bribe”.

Ellison is hardly the patsy “nepo baby” of a Maga-leaning patriarch he’s sometimes portrayed as. Described as modest, well-mannered and popular, he’s the opposite in temperament to his volatile, irascible father, Larry – who bankrolled Skydance’s takeover, and last month briefly became the world’s richest man thanks to the soaring share price of his company, Oracle. But he has inherited the latter’s drive – credited in Hollywood for building Skydance, which he founded in 2010, into one of the industry’s strongest independents. “I don’t know his plan, but I would bet on that kid any day of the week,” former Paramount Pictures president Adam Goodman told The Los Angeles Times. He has “an institutional knowledge and appreciation for the studio’s history, and a real love of movies”.

Born in 1983, to Larry Ellison and his third wife Barbara Boothe, David grew up on a horse farm in the San Francisco Bay area and was an intern at Oracle during high school. He eventually enrolled at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, dropping out to act in a $60 million movie about World War I pilots, Flyboys, part-financed by his father, which spectacularly flopped.

There’s no question Ellison “was gifted a head start”, says Bloomberg. Not many young Hollywood wannabes get to raise $350 million from JPMorgan for a production company. But it’s what he did with the cash that counts. He got a taste of success right at the start with the release of the Coen brothers’ True Grit, which grossed more than $252 million globally, following that up with several other blockbusters.

Still, the huge Paramount deal takes things to a new level. To secure it, Ellison had to wrestle with the Redstone family and their shareholders – while trying to prevent Trump from derailing the deal. “The reward for his patience is a company in decade-long decline,” stuffed with ancient networks and a “withered” film studio.

David Ellison is gunning for Warner Bros

Less than two months after swallowing one ailing media giant, Ellison is now looking to take down a much bigger one. Nothing captures his ambition better than his interest in Warner Bros. If he wins the $50 billion giant, the combined behemoth would boast the largest share of the national TV advertising market, the biggest movie studio output and a pair of streaming services (Paramount+ and HBO Max) that together sell more US subscriptions than even Netflix, says The Economist. Add CNN to CBS – and throw in Larry Ellison’s interest in the US operations of TikTok – and the family will become a mighty force in both old and new media. The question is what they do with that power.

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Matthew Partridge: What is your book, The Money Trap, about?

Alok Sama: It’s a memoir of my six-year journey as the president and chief financial officer of SoftBank Group International, working for SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son. Son is an absolutely fascinating character in the world of technology and finance, and the best way to understand Masa is to take his self-description of himself, as “the crazy guy who lives in the future”, at face value. Although he’s been characterised as a compulsive gambler, if you live in the future and you’re making big bets on something that you’ve already seen in your mind, there’s not a lot of uncertainty associated with that.

Matthew Partridge: You quote Son as saying “in the fight between the crazy man and the smart man, the crazy man will always win”. What does he mean by that?

Alok Sama: Son is a big fan of investing in companies led by true visionaries, and many of them are seen as crazy. In the case of Alibaba, one of his greatest successes, he put in money after meeting Alibaba co-founder Jack Ma, who at the time only had a very rudimentary idea of what he wanted to do, and in fact ended up doing something completely different. Son bet on the man, rather than the idea, which is what he means by the crazy guy always wins.

Matthew Partridge: Son has had some major successes, but also some major flops, most notably WeWork.

Alok Sama: Son has had some flops, but he is humble enough to admit it when he goes wrong. When it came to WeWork, he was honest enough to say that he blamed himself more than WeWork’s CEO and co-founder, Adam Neumann. And when it comes to investing in technology, he got the big calls spectacularly right: chipmaker ARM has made more than $100 billion in profit for SoftBank; Alibaba, $72 billion.

Matthew Partridge: Do you think there’s anything that the average entrepreneur or investor can learn from Son’s career?

Alok Sama: Son really is one of a kind, and is the sort of person who is easy to admire but impossible to emulate. But people can copy his resilience – the way he has bounced back, first from the collapse of his net worth when the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 and also from his more recent stumbles. But Son also demonstrates the danger of hubris. If you’ve had a great run in the market, then it’s easy to think that you’re invincible. That’s when you really need to be cautious, as your moment of maximum comfort is your moment of maximum vulnerability.

Matthew Partridge: AI boosters like Son think that AI is going to save humanity, while “doomers”, such as Elon Musk, think AI threatens our existence (and therefore needs to be tamed). At the end of the book, you declare that there are still some things computers won’t be able to do. Are you still sceptical about AI?

Alok Sama: My views on this are evolving daily because I play with ChatGPT and other large language models (LLM), and it’s scary how quickly these machines are evolving. For example, I’ve been periodically testing their ability to deal with humour and irony, and over time, the answers have become much more nuanced and much more human-like. AI is great at learning to do things, or even refining them, if they have been done before – and in many cases can do so better than humans. I have never felt safer in a car than I have in a self-driving Waymo.

That said, all these machines work by predicting what pixel or what word or what letter comes next based on analysing what came next before, which is a process that precludes originality. So, I still do not believe a machine is capable of doing something that is completely new.

Matthew Partridge: Do you think that we are close to artificial general intelligence (AGI, or computer self-reasoning), or is that still some way off?

Alok Sama: I’m not even sure that AGI can be properly defined. I think that we’ve already passed the loose definition of the Turing test, which is whether a machine can impersonate a human effectively. But it doesn’t really matter either way, as AI is a massive productivity tool moving at warp speed and changing everything we do, with the exception of manual tasks, like being a plumber.

Matthew Partridge: Are there going to be any losers from AI?

Alok Sama: It certainly will be disruptive and disorientating, and it’s not just call-centre workers that are vulnerable. As recently as five years ago, we used to think computer coding was an essential skill, but LLMs are getting pretty good at coding. But generally, it will make people more efficient. In the early days of the internet, everyone was worrying about whether it would make people redundant, but we adapted, with new jobs and business models. Similarly, I would never bet against human ingenuity, and we will keep reinventing ourselves. We always do.

So, while there will still be doctors and lawyers, lawyers will rely a lot less on paralegals and doctors will rely a lot less on old-fashioned machines. After all, machines can read X-rays better than humans can now. So, everyone will be a whole lot more efficient.

Matthew Partridge: Do you think that the AI companies are overvalued? Is there a bubble?

Alok Sama: It’s important to distinguish between public markets and private markets. The fact that people can raise billions, or tens of billions, from venture capitalists without even a proper business plan, or tangible product, is evidence of excess. However, if you look at Microsoft, Google and Meta, the valuations aren’t silly.

During the internet bubble in 2000, Cisco, which provided the infrastructure and plumbing for the internet, was valued at over 200 times earnings at its peak. By contrast, Nvidia, which had a stronger competitive position than Cisco ever had, is growing faster and is valued much more reasonably. Nvidia’s revenue and profit growth have outpaced its share-price growth.

Matthew Partridge: In the book you note that a lot of Indian entrepreneurs now are actually setting up their own companies in India. Has Silicon Valley lost its competitive advantage?

Alok Sama: When I left India in the 1980s, it was still characterised by socialism and bureaucracy (the “license Raj”), which made it impossible to start a firm. But things have changed dramatically. India also benefits from the fact that you don’t have a lot of pre-existing infrastructure, which can, paradoxically, slow down change. So, rather than being loath to give up malls, people can move directly to e-commerce. Likewise, there isn’t any credit-card penetration. As a result, the move towards using digital payment is quite seamless.

When it comes to cutting-edge technology, whether it’s AI or quantum computing, the action is still in the Valley, to a lesser extent. There’s a lot going on in the UK, with some interesting firms coming out of the Cambridge and London university ecosystems, with DeepMind (which emerged from the latter) eventually being bought out by Google.

Matthew Partridge: While the UK has produced a lot of interesting start-ups, it’s had a problem turning them into much bigger companies. Do you think this matters for the UK, and if so, what should the UK government do to address this problem?

Alok Sama: I think as long as we continue to invest in the educational ecosystem and let nature take its course, you’ll have bright minds coming up with interesting companies, and the capital will come. It doesn’t have to come from the UK – it can come from the US, China or even the Middle East.

Matthew Partridge: The re-election of Donald Trump marks a resurgence in economic nationalism. Do you think that is here to stay?

Alok Sama: America is critical to the global economy and thus impossible to ignore. However, the European and British approach of being pragmatic, realising that they need the US as a big trading partner and as a source of technology and defence, and adjusting accordingly, is the most sensible course. Countries shouldn’t moralise; they must deal with it.

Matthew Partridge: How should investors deal with everything going on, including tariffs and AI?

Alok Sama: There are no shortcuts to investment success. So I think that using index funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) is the best way to go, for two reasons. If you’re buying the market, whether it’s the S&P 500 or a global index, it is heavily skewed towards technology anyway, so you’re getting plenty of exposure to that. And every company will benefit from AI. It’s a productivity tool and it means margin expansion across the board. So you will benefit from that even if you’re not directly invested in a tech company. Stick with ETFs and be in it for the long haul.

Alok Sama is the former president and CFO of SoftBank Group International. He is the author of The Money Trap: Grand Fortunes and Lost Illusions Inside the Tech Bubble, now out in paperback. He is available for speaking engagements via Champions Speakers.

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Margaret Thatcher was no ordinary leader. She lost popularity as fast as she had gained it, which eventually led her to resign in 1990, after holding the top spot for 11 years.

Her challenging tax policies, taming unions and in her coldest moment, removing free milk for school kids, left her infamously labelled as ‘Thatcher the milk snatcher’ and the ‘Iron Lady’.

Her Victorian family values also added to the controversy – she wasted no time introducing section 28, a law that passed in 1988, which prevented schools from promoting homosexuality or LGBTQ+ related education.

Thatcher also refused to relax divorce laws and wanted to reinstate capital punishment.

Yet, she was the longest serving prime minister in the 20th century.

She served as prime minister between 1979 and 1990 and was the leader of the Conservative party between 1975 and 1990. Thatcher was also the first woman to become the UK prime minister.

Born 13 October 1925, the late Thatcher would have been 100 this month.

While her social policies may have divided the country, it was her economic policies that made the biggest impact. Thatcher changed the City forever and her policies continue to shape finances today. But what did she achieve and does ‘Thatcherism’ still live on today?

Thatcher’s ‘Credit Crunch’

Purse strings were tight for households as high inflation and unemployment gripped the UK in the 1980s, but Thatcher wanted them to spend. To encourage this, she relaxed rules around borrowing, making it easier for households to get credit using credit cards, hire purchase arrangements and even mortgages.

There was an overall reduction in government regulation of financial services and ultimately, people borrowed more than they could afford.

Did Thatcher’s credit boom lead to the financial crisis that followed almost 30 years later? One of the main reasons behind the 2008 financial crisis was the high risks banks took, which included dishing out risky loans and taking high risk investment opportunities.

‘The Big Bang’

‘The Big Bang’ in financial markets refers to the sudden deregulation of financial markets in the UK, when the London Stock Exchange became a private limited company.

The deregulation in 1986 removed restrictions that would then enable the UK to compete globally. Face-to-face trading was replaced with electronic trading instead, fixed commissions on trades were removed, and foreign firms were allowed to own UK companies. Thatcher changed the City forever.

But in doing so, she raised concerns that the ‘Big Bang’ would lead to ‘boom and bust’. Leaked memos almost 30 years later revealed that Thatcher’s move possibly contributed to the 2008 financial crisis. The memos, now moved to the National Archives, were reported in the Financial Times.

Pensions mis-selling

Personal pensions were launched in 1988 under Thatcher, giving people another way to save for retirement if they did not have access to workplace pensions, or just didn't want to be part of one. The idea was to reduce the burden on the state and tax liabilities.

Under the 1986 Financial Services Act, employers were unable to force employees into workplace pension schemes. Adverts were released encouraging people to ‘break the chain’ of compulsory membership.

But, her plan backfired and it led to a major pensions mis-selling scandal in the 1980s, as people opted to leave their ‘safe’ workplace pension move into arrangements with lower contributions and higher risks.

Savers had no experience of managing a personal pension, yet commission-driven advisers pushed them into these plans, where they would also not benefit from employer contributions and face higher risks.

Around two million people were advised to switch out of occupational schemes. Compensation from misselling claims are estimated to have cost the industry over £11 billion.

Right to Buy

If there was one policy that gained Thatcher popularity, it was the Right to Buy policy, allowing tenants to buy the properties they lived in.

It was part of the Housing Act 1980 which enabled people to buy the house at a discount from the market value, depending on the length of their tenancy.

The policy is still in place today in England, but discounts are smaller, slashed by Labour to between £16,000 and £38,000, down from between £102,400 and £136,400.

Over two million people have used the scheme to date, but experts believe the scheme is adding to the social housing emergency and driving shortages.

Labour has said it plans to add restrictions to the scheme by excluding newly-built social housing.

Tenants will also be required to live longer in their property to qualify to buy at a discount.

Taxes

Thatcher believed tax cuts were vital to build a healthy economy and as such, in the 1979 Budget, the then chancellor Geoffrey Howe slashed the basic rate of income tax from 33% to 30% and the top rate from 83% to 60%.

The basic rate eventually fell to 25% in 1988.

But indirect taxes went up, up from between 8% and 12% to a single rate of 15%, meaning consumers had to pay more for goods and services.

But this drove inflation to as high as 21%, which then saw the government set interest rates at 14%. It was the government that determined the base rate back then.

The poll tax was perhaps the most awful tax ever to be applied in British history, requiring everyone to pay a fixed domestic tax. Rates were set by local authorities. It started riots and a protest in London in March 1990 attracted over 100,000 people.

It’s now been replaced with council tax.

Privatisation of state-owned companies

It was under Thatcher when many people became shareholders for the first time, when she decided to privatise a number of state-run companies in the UK.

In the 1980s, Thatcher privatised a number of state-owned companies which include British Telecom, British Airways, British Aerospace and Rolls-Royce.

The idea was to make them more efficient, reduce government debt, but also enable people to hold a stake in these companies by becoming shareholders.

Many may remember the ‘Tell Sid’ campaign when British Gas shares went public.

While supporters of privatisation saw this as a positive move that would lead to reduced costs and stronger profits, it also drove prices higher for consumers, and services were driven purely by markets.

Margaret Thatcher eventually resigned in 1990 after her leadership was challenged and her support ebbed away. She was succeeded by John Major.

Thatcher passed away at the Ritz in London in April 2013.