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Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will vote this week in a closely watched election on whether to organize with the United Auto Workers union.
A victory would give the UAW its first major automaker win outside the Big Three in Detroit — General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler parent Stellantis — as well as a launching point for its unprecedented organizing campaign.
A loss would mark the union’s latest organizing failure following decades of unsuccessful drives outside the Big Three and would be a major setback for the organization.

A Volkswagen automobile assembly plant is seen on March 20, 2024 in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Elijah Nouvelage | Getty Images

DETROIT — Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will vote this week on whether to organize with the United Auto Workers in a key test of the union’s sway.
A victory would give the UAW its first major automaker win outside General Motors, Ford Motor, and Chrysler parent Stellantis. It would also offer a launching point for the union’s unprecedented organizing campaign of 13 automakers in the U.S. following major contract wins in 2023 with the Detroit companies.

A loss would mark the Detroit-based union’s latest organizing failure following decades of unsuccessful drives outside the Big Three, including at the Tennessee VW plant in 2014 and 2019. It also would be a major setback for the UAW and President Shawn Fain, who was elected in 2023 as a reform candidate following a yearslong federal corruption scandal involving former union leaders.
More than 4,000 VW workers are eligible to vote, beginning Wednesday and ending at 8 p.m. EDT on Friday. The organizing vote, which is being overseen by the National Labor Relations Board, will need a simple majority to succeed.
Fain and others see this week’s vote as the union’s best shot at organizing the VW plant following the record contracts and strikes at the Detroit automakers, which launched Fain to international prominence as the face of the union last year.

United Auto Workers President Shawn Fain during an online broadcast updating union members on negotiations with the Detroit automakers on Oct. 6, 2023.
Screenshot

The UAW’s record contracts with the three major Detroit automakers is the biggest difference between the current union drive and previous efforts at Volkswagen, said Stephen Silvia, author of “The UAW’s Southern Gamble: Organizing Workers at Foreign-Owned Vehicle Plants.”
“This is by far the best chance for the UAW out of all its drives at Chattanooga,” he said.

Silvia, a professor at American University in Washington, D.C., said the political circumstances, company messaging, and Fain’s leadership all created a more favorable environment for the union than it had during previous organizing drives.
Volkswagen, which has union workers at non-U.S. plants, has said it will let its workers determine whether to organize. The company said it has only acted to clarify information it felt was misleading or incorrect related to issues such as wages and benefits, but it has not publicly opposed union organizing. It also launched a campaign called “Vote for the workplace you want,” encouraging all employees to do so.
“We respect our workers’ right to a democratic process and to determine who should represent their interests,” VW said in a statement. “We fully support an NLRB vote so every team member has a chance to a secret ballot vote on this important decision. Volkswagen is proud of our working environment in Chattanooga that provides some of the best paying jobs in the area.”

An aerial view of the Chattanooga Volkswagen factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 10, 2024. 
Kevin Wurm | The Washington Post | Getty Images

In addition to less political pressure in the right-to-work state, there are also fewer organized efforts against the union than during prior drives. One group called “VW Chatt workers, for VW Chatt workers” in recent weeks started opposing UAW organizing, including a “Still No UAW” website.
A member of the group who asked not to be identified due to repercussions if UAW organizing is successful said he fears the union could cause problems at the plant, including the possibility of layoffs as if workers win more benefits during negotiations.
The assembly employee, who has more than 10 years at the plant, said it’s not guaranteed that the German automaker will agree to the same wages and benefits as GM, Ford and Stellantis.
“The Big Three, they got a decent contract … but we’re not the Big Three,” said the veteran worker. “They’re bigger companies [in the U.S.] and when contracts come into play with negotiations, it’s not going to be the same.”
He said this UAW organizing drive feels different than the past two because there is less outside political pressure, the union has new leadership and organizing tactics and more new workers are supporting the union at the plant.
VW workers filed for the election in March after a supermajority of them signed union cards, according to the UAW. The VW workers reached a majority in early February — two months after launching their public campaign to join the UAW.
Unlike prior organizing efforts, the union is using a grassroots, or bottom-up, drive led by workers at the plant rather than leaders at the international union. The strategy has helped messaging, Silvia said.
In 2019, VW workers at the Chattanooga plant rejected union representation in an 833-776 vote.
“Right now, we just need a voice in the plant. Right now, we’re subject to the whims of the company,” said Isaac Meadows, an assembly worker who has been at the VW plant for 14 months. “There are a lot of issues that we want to have a say in, and by coming together to form our union, it puts us in a position to bargain all that stuff.”
Meadows said he makes $27 an hour and that his top priorities are pay, benefits and additional time off.
VW production workers at the plant earn between $23.40 per hour and $32.40 per hour, with a four-year ramp up to top wages, according to the company.

UAW signs and water bottles are shown inside the I.B.E.W. building in Chattanooga, Tennessee on April 10, 2024. 
Kevin Wurm | The Washington Post | Getty Images

UAW-negotiated wages this year for the Detroit carmakers range between about $25 an hour and $36 an hour for production workers, including estimated cost-of-living adjustments. By the end of the UAW contracts in 2028, top wages are expected to surpass $42 an hour for production workers.
“The guy building the Ford Explorer, he’s worth about double to Ford as to what we are to Volkswagen,” said Meadows. He added that “everybody was watching” the outcome of the UAW’s talks with the Detroit automakers.
The UAW has used the new wages and other benefits as rallying calls for non-organized auto workers to join the union.
VW is one of 13 non-union automakers in the U.S. that the UAW set its sights on late last year after securing record contracts with the Detroit automakers. The drive covers nearly 150,000 autoworkers across BMW, Honda, Hyundai, Lucid, Mazda, Mercedes-Benz, Nissan, Rivian, Subaru, Tesla, Toyota, Volkswagen and Volvo.
Factory workers at Mercedes Benz’s assembly plant in Alabama earlier this month filed NLRB paperwork for a formal election to join the UAW.
“The first thing you need to do to win is to believe that you can win,” Fain told Mercedes-Benz workers last month. “That this job can be better. That your life can be better. And that those things are worth fighting for. That is why we stand up. That’s why you’re here today. Because deep down, you believe it’s possible.”
Fain previously vowed to move beyond the Big Three and expand to the “Big Five or Big Six” by the time its 4½-year contracts with the Detroit automakers expire. More

A whistleblower last week said that Boeing’s 787 assembly put excessive stress on airplane joints that could reduce some of the planes’ lifespans.
The whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, is scheduled to appear at a Senate hearing on Wednesday.
Boeing has denied the allegations and defended the quality and safety testing on its 787 Dreamliner and 777 aircraft.

An employee works on the tail of a Boeing Co. Dreamliner 787 plane on the production line at the company’s final assembly facility in North Charleston, South Carolina.
Travis Dove | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Boeing on Monday defended the quality and safety testing on its 787 Dreamliner and 777 aircraft, days after one of the company’s engineers went public with allegations that the plane-maker took “shortcuts” to speed up production of the planes.
The whistleblower, Sam Salehpour, last week said that Boeing’s 787 assembly put excessive stress on airplane joints that could reduce some of the planes’ lifespans. Boeing denied the allegations, calling them “inaccurate” and said it stood by the planes’ safety.

Salehpour is scheduled to appear along with another whistleblower who worked at Boeing, a former aviation official and an independent safety expert at a Senate hearing on Wednesday about aircraft safety called “Examining Boeing’s Broken Safety Culture: Firsthand Accounts.”
Salehpour’s claims come as Boeing navigates intense scrutiny after a door plug blew out of a 737 Max plane in January. The narrow-body aircraft is Boeing’s bestseller, and the blowout at 16,000 feet put passengers inches from tragedy. Since the accident the Federal Aviation Administration has blocked Boeing from increasing production of that plane.
In a roughly two-hour presentation with reporters on Monday, two Boeing engineering managers detailed the company’s stress and safety tests for the 787, which include testing the plane for 165,000 cycles, each meant to provide an equivalent of a flight, with varying conditions. In addition, the fuselage skin was struck by a 300-pound pendulum, the engineers said.
Steve Chisholm, chief engineer for Boeing’s mechanical and structural engineering, said Boeing created damage to fuselage panels in intense tests that were repeated more times than what aircraft would experience in service, “and the damage didn’t grow.”
Salehpour’s allegations relate to tiny spaces where pieces of the 787’s carbon composite fuselage meet. He said Boeing used force to join the pieces together and didn’t properly measure the gaps. He and his lawyers sent a letter to the FAA in January detailing his allegations, and the agency is investigating.

The whistleblower said on a call with reporters last week that he “literally saw people jumping on the pieces” of the 777 “to get them to align.” Boeing later that day said those claims are inaccurate and that it is “fully confident in the safety and durability of the 777 family.”
Boeing previously suspended deliveries of the 787 for nearly two years until August 2022 because of incorrect spacing on some portions of the fuselage of the planes.
“These claims about the structural integrity of the 787 are inaccurate and do not represent the comprehensive work Boeing has done to ensure the quality and long-term safety of the aircraft,” the plane-maker said in a statement in response to the claims. “The issues raised have been subject to rigorous engineering examination under FAA oversight. This analysis has validated that these issues do not present any safety concerns and the aircraft will maintain its service life over several decades.”
Salehpour’s lawyers also allege that Boeing retaliated against him after he voiced his concerns by excluding him from meetings and moving him off of the 787 program and onto the company’s 777 plan.
Boeing last week declined to comment on those specific allegations, citing the FAA’s ongoing whistleblower investigation, but said, “Retaliation is strictly prohibited at Boeing.”
The company is scheduled to report quarterly results on April 24, when it will face investor questions about aircraft safety, production rates and FAA oversight.

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AMERICAN HEALTH-CARE costs are sky-high; as treatments get pricier and the number of patients swells owing to an ageing population, they are getting higher. Chinese biotechnology is increasingly sophisticated and, as its companies gain scale, getting cheaper. A growing number of American drugmakers, from startups to big pharma, rely on firms like WuXi AppTec and WuXi Biologics, which conduct drug research on behalf of clients and manufacture compounds used in drugmaking. MGI Tech, a maker of gene-sequencing machines, is offering American hospitals kit that is cheaper to buy and half as expensive to run as American-made alternatives. A match made in heaven?Not to America’s Congress. A bill currently before the Senate would forbid the federal government from buying health-care products from companies that do business with companies like the WuXi sister firms and MGI Tech. A bipartisan group of lawmakers in the House of Representatives is pushing for the BIOSECURE Act, which would do much the same. The politicians worry about American health data falling into the hands of the Chinese authorities. They also fret about American intellectual property (IP), for example in the form of drug recipes that big pharma shares with contract manufacturers, flowing to Chinese rivals. And they are concerned about American money going to Chinese firms that collaborate with the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and with the Chinese government’s repression of Uyghurs, an ethnic minority. Should the politicians succeed, America’s patients may be left bearing some of the costs. Chart: The EconomistDespite irreconcilable differences on most other subjects, Democrats and Republicans are united in their dislike of China. Last month the Senate version of the legislation cleared the relevant committee by 11 votes to one. Investors seem to believe it has a good chance of becoming law. The share price of WuXi AppTec, which generates two-thirds of its revenues in America, has fallen by 40% since the BIOSECURE bill was introduced in the House in late January (see chart). WuXi Biologics, half of whose sales come from American customers, has lost more than 50% of its value. MGI Tech has lost more than a third. The three companies, which the House bill name-checks, have shed a combined $22bn in market capitalisation in the past two and a half months.The knock-on effects for the Chinese firms’ American customers are also likely to be profound. Start with the contract manufacturer-researchers. WuXi is to big pharma what Foxconn, the Taiwanese assembler of iPhones, is to Apple—a high-quality supplier entrusted with sensitive IP. It says its clients include the world’s 20 biggest drugmakers. Dozens of American drugmakers have notified investors that, should the BIOSECURE bill pass, they may be unable to meet demand for their products or to complete clinical trials on schedule. WuXi AppTec says that the proposed legislation “relies on misleading allegations and inaccurate assertions”. WuXi Biologics says it “has not, does not and will not pose any national-security risk to the US or any other country”.For the time being Western customers have not severed ties with the WuXi companies, says Lila Hope, a lawyer specialising in biotech partnerships at Cooley. Some drugmakers are reportedly sounding out alternative suppliers from India, another big provider of similar services. But that would require a thumbs-up from American regulators, who have longstanding concerns about Indian companies’ lax quality standards.Jefferies, an investment bank, reckons that replacing Chinese capacity would take big Western drug firms at least five years and almost certainly end up costing more. For biotech startups, which tend to rely on Chinese partners with proven records to save time and money on research and manufacturing, the BIOSECURE bill could be an existential threat. According to a survey conducted in March by BioCentury, a consultancy, biotech bosses and their investors expect a slowdown in drug development in the event of its passage.Cutting commercial ties with the lawmakers’ second target—China’s genomics industry—would have a less immediate impact on American companies. MGI Tech is only just entering the American market for gene-sequencers, having settled a patent dispute with its bigger American rival, Illumina, in 2022. BGI Genomics, which sequences more human genomes than any other company in the world (and is also named in the BIOSECURE bill), makes just 3% of its profits in America. But both Chinese firms bring welcome competition to a highly concentrated industry. Despite being blocked by trustbusters from acquiring a rival in 2019, Illumina has cornered 80% of the global market for high-end gene-sequencers.MGI Tech’s American subsidiary, Complete Genomics, says that it “is not a sequencing-service provider and does not have access to, collect, or maintain genetic data”. Independent investigators brought in by Complete Genomics to inspect its sequencers have confirmed that the company cannot access patient data through the devices. BGI Group says that the allegations made in the BIOSECURE bill that it collects, stores and analyses personal genetic information for the purpose of infringing human rights, that it supports the surveillance of minorities and that it is controlled by the Chinese government or the PLA are all “false”.The law, if passed, would therefore almost certainly face legal challenges from the Chinese firms and, possibly, some of their American clients. It may yet be watered down, especially once big pharma’s lobbyists on Capitol Hill get to work on it in earnest. But the anti-Chinese sentiment guiding its congressional sponsors is not going away—even if that spells trouble for American businesses. ■ More

Peloton has quietly removed the unlimited free-membership tier for its app less than a year after it debuted.
The fitness company, known for its Bike and Tread, offered the free-membership tier to bring in new customers but too few of them were converting into paid users.
“That free tier was cannibalizing our funnel and conversion to free trial and then to pay,” finance chief Liz Coddington said at a Morgan Stanley conference in March.

A stationary bicycle inside of a Peloton store is pictured in the Manhattan borough of New York City, U.S., January 25, 2022. 
Carlo Allegri | Reuters

Peloton has quietly removed its unlimited free-membership tier on its fitness app less than a year after it debuted because the initiative was failing to convert users into paid subscribers, the company said. 
Peloton dropped the free option for new users, once a key part of the business’s growth strategy, within the past few weeks. People who signed up for the company’s unlimited free membership before it was removed will continue to have access to it, Peloton said.

New users who are looking to work out with the company’s app now only have access to two tiers that cost $12.99 a month or $24 a month, with the option of a seven-day free trial. 
Last May, Peloton debuted a splashy rebrand that billed the business as a fitness company for all, and put its digital app at the center of its marketing campaign. The rebrand brought a new, tiered app strategy that included the unlimited free-membership option and two other paid levels that all had varying levels of content.
The rebrand came as CEO Barry McCarthy looked to transform Peloton from one focused on its hardware to a business that was equally as invested in its app. As sales steadily declined at the company, he was working to capture new customers who may have been intrigued by the brand but weren’t willing to shell out thousands for its equipment. 
McCarthy, a former Netflix and Spotify executive, had long wanted a free tier on the company’s app. He had bet that free users would fall in love with Peloton’s content and then spring for a paid membership, which comes with a far wider variety of classes, after they tried the app and decided they wanted more. 
The bet appears to have been a bust.

McCarthy told investors in November that the relaunch had been “less successful at engaging and retaining free users and converting them to paying memberships” than the company had expected.
Soon after, the unlimited free tier was no longer available. 
During a Morgan Stanley conference in March, finance chief Liz Coddington said the company “quickly” learned that the free tier was “cannibalizing” efforts to convert free-trial members to paid subscribers, which led the company to shift to a free-trial model. 
“It’s important to know that our app is still a work in progress. We still have a lot of opportunities to improve it,” said Coddington. “What we found is that we need to figure out ways to better engage them during the trial period, that they convert to paid and then also keep them engaged over time, so that they will retain at a higher rate. … When we do that, we believe that our marketing efficiency will improve, both because we’ll have better retention and better conversion rates.” 
While app subscribers declined during Peloton’s fiscal second quarter ended Dec. 31, Coddington said the company still “believe[s]” in its app strategy and it remains “an important part of the business.” 
Shares of Peloton fell more than 6% Monday and were down more than 45% this year, as of Friday’s close. The company’s market cap has shrunk to about $1.2 billion, a fraction of the $47 billion it was worth at the height of Peloton’s success during the Covid-19 pandemic.

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UnitedHealth Group’s first-quarter earnings report could offer a window into the financial impact of the February cyberattack on its Change Healthcare subsidiary.
The outage of the billing and payments processing unit has pushed physician groups to take out loans to meet the costs of managing their practices.
The disruption of real-time data on medical cost trends among seniors will cause greater uncertainty for Medicare Advantage health insurers, as they prepare bids for 2025 plans due in June.

UnitedHealth Group’s first-quarter earnings report Tuesday will mark the health-care giant’s first major public comments since a cyberattack on its Change Healthcare billing and payments subsidiary in February, which has led to the largest disruption in U.S. health care since the Covid pandemic.
“Everybody looks to United as the bellwether of all of health-care services. This will be different,” said Lisa Gill, managing director and health care analyst at JPMorgan.   

The data breach at the Change Healthcare unit forced the firm to take down its massive billing and payment processing service. While the company has restored services for pharmacies, the outage has continued to disrupt operations for health-care providers across the country.
Change Healthcare is a subsidiary of UnitedHealth’s sprawling Optum division, which includes 90,000 doctors under the Optum Care unit and one of the nation’s largest pharmacy benefits managers, OptumRx.
Analysts will be looking for how the company accounts for the costs associated with the cyberattack as well as the impact of the outage on other operations within Optum’s businesses.
“We will be very interested in the charge that they’re going to be incurring … in terms of how they’re estimating either lost revenue or additional expenses,” said Scott Fidel, managing director and health-care analyst at Stephens.
UnitedHealth said it has provided $4.7 billion in no-interest loans to providers, though the American Medical Association said more than half of physician groups surveyed in early April said they’d had to use personal loans to maintain operations.

One such physician, Nashville dermatologist James Allred, said he’s had to take out loans to keep his practice, Wellskin Dermatology & Aesthetics, afloat because he’s been unable to get claims processed and paid by private health insurers. The last six weeks have forced him to give up on plans to expand his practice this year.
“For one single hack to disrupt the entire American health-care industry… brings a lot of questions about how healthy is it, from a system standpoint, to have this massive consolidation?” Allred said.
Larger providers, such as home infusion services firm Option Care Health, have also warned that the outage could impact their quarterly results.

Medicare Advantage uncertainty  

On the health insurance side, the timing of the Change hack has increased uncertainty for UnitedHealthcare and rivals such as Humana, CVS Health’s Aetna and Elevance, which reports its quarterly results Thursday.
All of the Medicare Advantage insurers reported higher-than-expected medical utilization rates among seniors during the fourth quarter.
With the Change outage taking place midway through the first quarter, it has likely made it more difficult for insurers to track medical utilization costs in real time. JPMorgan’s Gill expects most will report adjusted or estimated numbers.
“We’re going to have to wait for the second quarter to really get a better idea as to what’s happening with medical cost trend for United and most likely for the industry,” said Gill.
The delayed outlook on medical costs will also raise the stakes for the health insurers as they prepare 2025 Medicare Plan bids, which are due in early June. It comes after disappointing government payment rate increases for 2025, announced earlier this month, which are expected to pose a profit headwind.  
“We’ve got elevated cost trends. We’ve got still … a pretty competitive market,” said Gill. “So, they have to work through that.” More

Airports in Tokyo and London jumped in the rankings as international travel returned last year.
Domestic U.S. airports had become more popular during the pandemic amid international travel restrictions.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport once again topped the list as the world’s busiest airport.

British Airways Airbus A319 aircraft takes off from Heathrow Airport in London, Britain, May 17, 2021. 
John Sibley | Reuters

International travel roared back last year, pushing airports from London to Tokyo up in a global ranking of passenger traffic.
Dubai International Airport ranked as the second busiest in 2023, up from fifth place in 2022 and fourth place in 2019, according to Airports Council International’s preliminary ranking, which was released on Monday. Passenger traffic to Tokyo Haneda International Airport jumped 55% last year from 2022, and the airport ranked fifth, up from 16th place a year earlier.

Global airports served 8.5 billion passengers last year, up 27% from 2022 but still about 6% below pre-pandemic counts, ACI said, citing preliminary figures.
The resurgence of international travel has been a bright spot for airlines with big international networks, while ultra-low-cost, domestic-focused U.S. airlines have struggled in recent months. Domestic U.S. airports continued to post big gains in passenger counts, but some slipped in the rankings compared with the middle of the pandemic, when international travel restrictions limited long-haul trips abroad.
Nearly 78 million people used Denver International Airport last year, up 12% from 2022, but the airport, a major hub of United Airlines, fell in ACI’s ranking to sixth place from third.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Delta Air Lines’ biggest hub, once again topped the list of the busiest airports, serving 104.7 million passengers, ACI said.
Here are the 2023 rankings (with 2022 rankings in parentheses):

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (1)
Dubai International Airport (5)
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport (2)
London Heathrow (8)
Tokyo Haneda International Airport (16)
Denver International Airport (3)
Istanbul Airport (7)
Los Angeles International Airport (6)
Chicago O’Hare International Airport (4)
New Delhi’s Indira Gandhi International Airport (9)

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In New York, the tax department reported 771,000 audits in 2022, up 56% from the previous year, according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance.
At the same time, the number of auditors in New York declined by 5% to under 200 due to tight budgets.
The state is sending out hundreds of thousands of AI-generated letters looking for revenue, many of them focused on remote work or a change in tax residency.

Photo Of Robot Examining Invoice With Magnifying Glass.
Andreypopov | Istock | Getty Images

Even as the IRS makes headlines for cracking down on the wealthy, state tax collectors have become even more aggressive with audits of high earners, according to tax attorneys and accountants.
In New York, the tax department reported 771,000 audits in 2022 (the latest year available), up 56% from the previous year, according to the state Department of Taxation and Finance. At the same time, the number of auditors in New York declined by 5% to under 200 due to tight budgets.

So how is New York auditing more people with fewer auditors? Artificial Intelligence.
“States are getting very sophisticated using AI to determine the best audit candidates,” said Mark Klein, partner and chairman emeritus at Hodgson Russ LLP. “And guess what? When you’re looking for revenue, it’s not going to be the person making $10,000 a year. It’s going to be the person making $10 million.”
Klein said the state is sending out hundreds of thousands of AI-generated letters looking for revenue.
“It’s like a fishing expedition,” he said.
Most of the letters and calls focused on two main areas: a change in tax residency and remote work. During Covid many of the wealthy moved from high-tax states like California, New York, New Jersey and Connecticut to low-tax states like Florida or Texas.

High earners who moved, and took their tax dollars with them, are now being challenged by states who claim the moves weren’t permanent or legitimate.    
Klein said state tax auditors and AI programs are examining cellphone records to see where the taxpayers spent most of their time and lived most of their lives.
“New York is being very aggressive,” he said.
On remote work, states like New York that have so-called “convenience rules” argue that if you are employed by a New York company, from their New York office, you owe New York taxes — even if you live and work in Colorado.
Many of the wealthy in New York City who moved kept their apartments with most of their belongings. State tax authorities are claiming that since they didn’t move with all of their household items, for tax purposes they didn’t actually move.
“The state says, ‘Well, you didn’t really move since all your TV and all your stuff is still in New York,'” Klein said. “They don’t understand, the wealthy can buy more stuff for the Florida home. They can buy another TV.”

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THE FOOTBALLERS look realistic at first sight but, on closer inspection, something is wrong. Their faces are contorted, their limbs are bending in alarming directions, the ball is slightly egg-shaped. Strangest of all, running across one footballer’s left leg is the ghostly trace of a watermark: Getty Images.Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has caused a creative explosion of new writing, music, images and video. The internet is alive with AI-made content, while markets fizz with AI-inspired investment. OpenAI, which makes perhaps the most advanced generative-AI models, is valued at nearly $90bn; Microsoft, its partner, has become the world’s most valuable company, with a market capitalisation of $3.1trn. More