A wave of optimism has lately swept through China’s chip industry. Share traders in Shanghai joke that Cambricon, a local firm, not only offers a substitute for Nvidia’s processors, but for its stock, too. Although the Chinese semiconductor firm is worth but a fraction of its giant American rival, its share price has rocketed by 350% over the past year, around 15 times as much as Nvidia’s. More
ALEX KARP acts like everyone hates him. As the boss of Palantir strutted the stage at a recent gathering of clients, he got a kick out of sounding perverse, in his tousle-haired, punk-professor way. He used words like “masturbation” and “self-pleasuring”. He berated Silicon Valley, though he was speaking in Palo Alto, its heartland. At the last minute, he cancelled an interview with The Economist, though he used to sit on its parent company’s board; he did not like our review of a book he co-authored. The man we named the best CEO of 2024 can be thin-skinned. More
Let’s play a word-association game. Champions (Liverpool). Cyclists (smug). IT project (failure). Ask people what they know about tech projects, and they will probably say that they take longer than expected, cost more than budgeted and deliver less than they are meant to. Is that perception accurate? And if so, what can be done about it? A forthcoming paper, by Bent Flyvbjerg of Oxford University and his co-authors, sheds light on these questions. More
Being first to market with a drug can be crucial. Eli Lilly is proving that being second but better can also pay. Zepbound, the American firm’s weight-loss jab, was approved in its home country in November 2023, more than two years after Wegovy, made by Novo Nordisk, a Danish rival. Yet in 2024 Zepbound yielded $4.9bn in revenue, more than half of Wegovy’s $8.2bn. On May 7th Novo cut its sales forecast for 2025, citing “lower-than-planned” growth in weight-loss drugs. S&P Global, a financial-data firm, expects sales of Lilly’s obesity drugs to overtake Novo’s by 2027 (see chart 1). More
PEER INTO a Bloomberg screen and the parallels between the past month and the spring of 2020 draw themselves. Then as now the VIX index, which tracks share-price volatility, spiked above 40, a level reached only a handful of periods in American stockmarket history. Uncannily, both in 2020 and 2025 the S&P 500 index of America’s biggest companies peaked on the same day, February 19th, before declining and then collapsing by more than 10% in a matter of days. The oil price plunged. Sentiment among American consumers was and is down the tubes. More
Call it a rare win for Elon Musk. The world’s richest man, whose business empire has lately taken a beating, has long pursued a vendetta against Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI. In recent months Mr Musk, who helped found the artificial-intelligence (AI) lab but left in 2018, has sought to block its proposed conversion into a for-profit company through various methods, including an unsolicited (and unsuccessful) $97bn bid for the assets of the non-profit entity that controls it. More
Last month Jensen Huang, the boss of Nvidia, landed in Beijing with a clear message: the maker of the world’s leading artificial-intelligence (AI) chips planned to “unswervingly serve the Chinese market”. America would rather it didn’t. A few days earlier the Trump administration had introduced new controls that, in effect, banned the company from selling its H20 microprocessor to China. More
Here is your AI recap of the monthly sales-team meeting held at 14:00 on May 1st 2025. There were ten attendees at the meeting, and 45 questions were asked. A total of 18 action items were detected. Main themes: sales results; sales pipelines; Optimate launch; “The Accountant 2”. More
