Philippa Kaur

AMERICA’s BODY corporate looks, as a whole, to be in rude health. One large company after another is presenting record quarterly results. Bosses are raising profit forecasts left and right. Poke and prod big business, though, and you find pockets of sickliness. On November 4th Pfizer, maker of drugs from covid-19 vaccines to Viagra, reported year-on-year declines in sales and earnings. To add insult to this financial injury, it has found itself in a bidding war against Novo Nordisk, a Danish rival, over Metsera, a developer of anti-obesity drugs for which Pfizer has raised its offer from $7bn in September to $10bn this week. More

Despite what Alex Karp, the boss of Palantir, says, investors are hardly “batshit crazy” to bet against his company. The seller of whizzy analytics tools has a market value of nearly $450bn, equivalent to 137 times its sales over the past 12 months and 624 times its net profit. Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world and a fellow beneficiary of the artificial-intelligence (AI) boom, is worth a comparatively meagre 28 times its sales and 54 times its net profit. More

Before the craze for Labubus, few had heard of Pop Mart, the Chinese toymaker behind the mischievously grinning dolls. With customers across the world now lining up to get their hands on one, the company, which saw its sales rocket by 245% year on year in the quarter from July to September, has investors rapt. More

“It’s very difficult to find love,” Aleksandr Zhadan, a 20-something software developer from Moscow, lamented on social media last year. To speed things up, Mr Zhadan programmed an artificial-intelligence (AI) bot to trawl through endless profiles on Tinder, a dating app, and interact with more than 5,000 lucky girls on his behalf. After some 100 real-life dates, Mr Zhadan proudly announced to the world that he had proposed to his algorithmically ordained other half. More

You COULD easily miss the brass plate on the door of Arsenalsgatan 8C in central Stockholm. It reads “Investor AB”—the name of the holding company that is controlled, through various foundations, by Sweden’s Wallenberg family. The discreet sign fits the family motto: Esse, non videri (to be, not to be seen). When you control 35% of the value of the national stock exchange, as the Wallenbergs do, invisibility is hard to achieve. More

Bryan Follicle, Thought Leader, Serial Founder, Dad, Husband, Son: Don’t let anyone tell you that your dreams are unattainable. By the time I was 14 I was a millionaire several times over. By the time I was 21, I was bankrupt. By the time I was 28, I was a billionaire. I’m now 34, and slightly nervous. Life is a journey. Travel well. More

Porsche is synonymous with high performance. And for many years the financial performance of the German maker of sports cars was as pleasantly exhilarating as a ride in one of its vehicles. That makes its declining roadworthiness all the more shocking. It has issued three profit warnings so far this year, and on October 24th unveiled an operating loss in the third quarter of almost €1bn ($1.1bn), a week after announcing the sudden departure of its boss of ten years. More

THE ERA of artificial intelligence featured an unlikely early leader. Until ChatGPT came along in November 2022, Microsoft was better known for business software that was ubiquitous, worthy and dull. Suddenly, owing to an exclusive cloud partnership with the chatbot’s creator, OpenAI, the 47-year-old technology titan became the hottest thing in big tech. Since then it has created over $2trn in shareholder value. That is ho-hum by the standards of Nvidia—which has furnished the AI revolution with chips and been furnished in turn with a market capitalisation of $5trn—but astonishing by any other measure. More