On August 5, the Tata Group carrier named Tewolde Gebremariam as chief executive and managing director. He replaces Campbell Wilson, the former Singapore Airlines executive who resigned in April and leaves on 30 September.

Then came the cOVID pandemic. Ethiopian took no government bailout, converted passenger aircraft into freighters and let cargo carry the group through the collapse in travel.

The financial picture is worse. Air India and Air India Express posted a combined net loss of Rs 22,238 crore in FY26, more than double the previous year’s Rs 10,859 crore, on combined revenue of Rs 71,870 crore that fell almost 9%.

The third is revenue that does not depend on seats. Cargo, the greenfield maintenance base in Bengaluru and the training academy in Gurugram are already built or building. Ethiopian showed what happens when those units stop being cost centres.

The fourth is network honesty. Routes that cannot pay while the airspace is shut should stay parked, and the retrofitted aircraft should go where premium yields actually are.

The caution is that Ethiopian had a protected home market, state ownership and a low cost base. Air India has none of those, and faces a rival carrying two of every three domestic passengers. Gebremariam cannot reopen Pakistani airspace or speed up Airbus and Boeing. What he can do is decide what this airline is for, and stop it losing money while it works that out.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Air India bets on Tewolde Gebremariam to engineer a turnaround appeared first on International Finance.

That works out to exactly 5.00% of the 390,256,808 shares outstanding, and it was worth somewhere between USD 127 million and USD 154 million depending on which day’s closing price you use, because the market moved so sharply once the news broke.

Lucid’s shares closed roughly 22% higher on the day of the disclosure, their strongest level since April 2026. A representative for the Prince confirmed the obvious, which is that the shares were bought during a slump in the price.

The filing was made on a passive basis, with the prince holding sole voting and sole dispositive power over the entire holding and no intention of steering the company’s management.

For anyone who has followed his career for four decades, the pattern is instantly familiar. Prince Alwaleed does not buy stories at their peak. He buys assets when the narrative around them has soured, then waits.

The template that made a reputation
The template was set in 1991, when a young Saudi investor few people in New York had heard of put close to USD 800 million into Citicorp while the American banking system was in the middle of a property loan crisis. That single position went on to define his standing in global finance and earned him a nickname he has never entirely shaken off, the Arabian Warren Buffett.

The same instinct runs through the portfolio he assembled afterwards. Kingdom Holding Company, which he founded in 1980 and listed on Tadawul in 2007, has taken positions across banking, hospitality, media, technology, aviation and real estate.

Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, Fairmont Raffles Swissotel and full ownership of the Hotel George V in Paris gave him one of the most valuable luxury hospitality footprints in private hands.

Rotana Group and the Lebanese Broadcasting Corporation gave him reach across Arabic-language media. Positions in Apple, News Corporation, JD.com, Uber, Snap and Twitter, the last of which converted into a holding in X, put him early into the digital economy at a time when very few regional investors were looking that way.

More recently the focus has swung towards artificial intelligence (AI), with Kingdom Holding committing significant capital to Elon Musk’s xAI.

Prince Alwaleed retains 78.1% of Kingdom Holding, with the Public Investment Fund holding the 16.9% stake it acquired in 2022, an arrangement that ties his personal balance sheet directly to the state’s own investment programme without merging the two.

Why Lucid, and why now
The Lucid purchase should be read on two levels.

Commercially, it is a classic Alwaleed entry. The company has had a difficult year, and the prince stepped in while sentiment was at its weakest, which is precisely the point in the cycle at which he has historically been most active.

He has done this before with Citicorp, with Fairmont and with hotel assets bought in the aftermath of downturns, and the discipline has rarely varied.

Strategically, the position carries a weight that goes well beyond its dollar value. The Public Investment Fund, through Ayar Third Investment Company, already holds a majority of Lucid, and Saudi Arabia is preparing to move to full-scale vehicle manufacturing in the kingdom.

Lucid is not simply a portfolio line for Riyadh. It is the centrepiece of an attempt to build an advanced automotive industry inside Saudi Arabia, complete with local assembly, engineering jobs and a supply chain that did not exist a decade ago.

When a senior member of the royal family puts his own name, rather than a sovereign vehicle, on a 5% holding, the message to global markets is unambiguous. The Kingdom’s commitment to this project is not a line item that can be quietly withdrawn.

Building upwards in Jeddah
The Lucid filing was triggered by an acquisition dated 23 July. On exactly the same day, Prince Alwaleed was standing on a construction site on the north side of Jeddah, announcing that Jeddah Tower had reached 430 metres.

That coincidence is worth pausing on. The tower, developed by Jeddah Economic Company with Kingdom Holding as its principal backer, is designed to pass one kilometre and become the tallest building in the world.

Construction restarted in 2025 under a contract worth around SAR 7.2 billion, and the project has since moved past the ninetieth floor with facade cladding and mechanical works under way.

Kingdom Holding has pointed to a workforce of roughly 5,200, an average five-day floor cycle and more than eight million hours worked without a lost-time incident. Completion is currently guided towards 2028.

Jeddah Tower anchors Jeddah Economic City, a development of some 57 million square feet intended to position the Kingdom as a destination for international business and premium tourism.

It will house residences, offices, a Four Seasons hotel and one of the highest observation decks anywhere. For Gulf executives watching capital allocation across the region, the tower is the clearest statement of intent that Kingdom Holding has made in years.

The domestic portfolio and the giving
Closer to home, Kingdom Holding holds a stake of about 27.4% in flynas, the low-cost carrier that completed its Tadawul listing in 2025, and 16.2% of Banque Saudi Fransi. The Kingdom Centre tower in Riyadh remains one of the capital’s landmarks and one of his best-known assets.

Then there is the giving, which the prince has repeatedly described as the part of his work he values most. Alwaleed Philanthropies reports more than USD 5 billion deployed over 45 years, reaching upwards of 1.5 billion beneficiaries across 190 countries.

In January this year, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the organisation announced a fresh USD 15 million commitment to the Global Polio Eradication Initiative alongside the Gates Foundation, funding vaccination campaigns, surveillance and outbreak response over three years.

Bill Gates, Chair of the Gates Foundation, said: “Polio eradication is within sight, but the last mile is the hardest. Alwaleed Philanthropies’ latest commitment is exactly the kind of leadership the world needs to build a future where no family has to live in fear of polio paralyzing their child.”

HRH Princess Lamia Bint Majed Al Saud, Secretary General, Alwaleed Philanthropies, added: “This commitment builds on Alwaleed Philanthropies’ long-standing support for global health and its partnership with the Global Polio Eradication Initiative, reinforcing the critical role of philanthropy in addressing some of the world’s most complex public health challenges.”

In July, its Crafting Change project with UNESCO in Tanzania marked its own milestone in cultural skills training.

The lesson for the region
At 71, Prince Alwaleed remains one of the few Gulf investors whose personal conviction still moves a listed share price on two continents in a single session. The Lucid stake will be judged in time by returns.

What it demonstrates today is the discipline that has defined him since 1980, which is a willingness to commit capital at the point of maximum doubt and to stay committed for far longer than the market’s attention span allows.

For the region’s boardrooms, that is the more useful takeaway. Gulf capital has spent the past decade proving it can write very large cheques. The harder skill, and the one on display this week, is knowing when to write them.

The post Prince Alwaleed bin Talal’s Lucid stake buildup: The art of buying when others are selling appeared first on International Finance.

Few chief executives anywhere have become so bound up with the company they run that markets have coined a phrase for the value they personally add to the stock price.

That phrase is the “Jamie Premium.” And this summer, it is being put to its biggest test yet, as JPMorgan edges towards becoming the first bank in history to touch a USD 1 trillion market valuation.

The bank’s roots go back to 1799. Understanding how it got here means understanding the man who has run it for the last twenty years.

Who Is Jamie Dimon
James “Jamie” Dimon was born in New York City in 1956, the son of a stockbroker at American Express. He has said he picked up the language of markets at the family dinner table long before he ever set foot on a trading floor.

After Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School, he joined Sandy Weill, the dealmaker who spent the 1980s and 90s stitching together what would eventually become Citigroup. Dimon was Weill’s right hand through most of it.

Then it fell apart. Weill fired Dimon in 1998, ending a 15-year working relationship that had, until that point, looked unshakeable. Dimon later said the episode hit his net worth harder than his self-worth, which is a tidy line for a man who spent the next 18 months weighing his options, including a serious conversation with Jeff Bezos about joining Amazon.

He chose banking instead. In March 2000, he took over as CEO of Bank One, a troubled Chicago lender that one analyst at the time said even Hercules couldn’t fix. Dimon put USD 60 million of his own money into the stock on his first day, cut costs, tightened up risk controls, and turned a bank that had posted a USD 511 million loss into one earning USD 3.5 billion within three years.

That turnaround caught JPMorgan’s attention. The two banks merged in 2004, and by the end of 2005, Dimon was CEO of the combined JPMorgan Chase. He took the chairman’s title a year later and has not left either post since, making him the longest-serving chief executive among America’s biggest banks by a considerable distance.

The Moves That Built an Empire
Dimon’s reputation was not built in the good years. It was built in 2008. While most of Wall Street was either drowning or being bailed out, JPMorgan went shopping.

In March that year, as Bear Stearns teetered on collapse, JPMorgan agreed to buy the storied investment bank for close to USD 1.4 billion, a fire-sale price backed by emergency Federal Reserve financing.

Six months later, Washington Mutual failed, still the largest bank collapse in US history, and JPMorgan bought its banking operations for roughly USD 1.9 billion.

Neither deal was clean. Both came loaded with legal exposure and legacy mortgage problems that JPMorgan spent years, and billions of dollars, untangling with regulators afterwards.

Dimon himself later grumbled that the two acquisitions became a convenient scapegoat for legal headaches the bank had inherited rather than caused. Still, the strategic logic held up. Lehman Brothers was gone.

Merrill Lynch had been sold in a rushed weekend deal. Wachovia had failed. JPMorgan, in the space of a single terrible year, had added a top-tier investment bank and a huge consumer deposit base while nearly everyone else on the street was shrinking.

The bank’s next real stress test came in 2012, when a botched derivatives trade out of its London office, the so-called “London Whale,” cost more than USD 6 billion and briefly dented Dimon’s reputation for having risk under control. He didn’t dress it up.

“The London Whale was the stupidest and most embarrassing situation I have ever been a part of,” he wrote in his 2013 shareholder letter, a rare moment of a Wall Street chief executive owning a failure in plain language rather than corporate hedging.

He testified before Congress, rebuilt the risk function, and moved on. It remains the closest JPMorgan has come to a genuine credibility crisis on his watch, which says something, given how long that watch has now run.

What followed was less dramatic but arguably more important. Dimon built what the bank now calls its “fortress balance sheet,” a deliberately conservative capital cushion meant to absorb shocks that would sink less careful rivals. He had been saying as much for years.

“It’s hard to predict when a storm will happen, but one thing is inevitable, it will happen,” he wrote in a shareholder letter back in 2002, long before most of Wall Street took the warning seriously.

That philosophy was tested again in March 2023, when Silicon Valley Bank and First Republic Bank both collapsed within weeks of each other. Dimon personally led efforts to organise a rescue for First Republic.

When that rescue failed, JPMorgan bought the bank’s assets and deposits outright, adding yet another chunk of the US consumer banking market to its own.

He also pushed the bank hard into technology, spending billions annually on digital banking, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence, and built out its investment banking and trading arms so JPMorgan could compete seriously on both Wall Street dealmaking and Main Street lending at once, a combination few of its rivals can match at the same scale.

Record Numbers, Record Milestone
All of that is what has JPMorgan sitting at the edge of a historic number right now. In the second quarter of 2026, the bank posted net income of USD 21.2 billion, the highest quarterly profit any American bank has ever reported.

Total managed revenue climbed 27% year-on-year to USD 58 billion, helped by a surge in trading revenue, a rebound in investment banking fees, and a large one-time gain on the bank’s Visa stake. Strip that gain out and adjusted profit was still USD 16.9 billion, with a return on tangible common equity of 23%.

Loans grew 9% to USD 1.54 trillion. Deposits rose to USD 2.71 trillion. Credit quality, meanwhile, actually improved slightly, with card loss rates ticking down year-on-year, which suggests the growth isn’t coming from looser lending standards.

Put it together and JPMorgan’s market capitalisation sat at roughly USD 920 to 935 billion in mid-July 2026, within touching distance of USD 1 trillion. No bank has ever crossed that line. Getting there would put JPMorgan in a club currently occupied almost entirely by technology giants like Tesla, Meta, and Broadcom.

For context, JPMorgan’s current valuation is roughly equal to the combined market value of Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and Citigroup, three of its biggest domestic rivals, added together.

Explaining the “Jamie Premium”
Which brings us back to the Jamie Premium. It isn’t an official financial metric. You won’t find it in a filing. It’s a term analysts and investors use to describe the extra value the market attaches to JPMorgan simply because Dimon is the one running it, over and above what the bank’s underlying numbers alone would justify.

Investors and analysts have pegged that premium at somewhere between 10% and 15% of the stock’s value, a real sum given the size of the company.

The idea makes sense once you break it down. Buying JPMorgan stock isn’t just a bet on the bank’s assets and earnings. It’s also a bet on the judgement of the person deciding where that capital goes and how much risk to take with it, particularly through the next crisis nobody can yet see coming.

Dimon has now steered the bank through the 2008 crash, the European debt scare, a pandemic, the 2023 regional banking wobble, and a string of geopolitical shocks, without a single full-year loss along the way.

That record shows up in how the market prices the stock. When Dimon told an investor conference the shares were “very valuable,” traders piled in within hours, sending JPMorgan’s stock sharply higher.

There’s a catch, though. A premium built around one man is also a risk concentrated in one man. Dimon has spoken openly about succession, and the board has already said it plans to eventually split the chairman and CEO roles once he steps back.

Most analysts expect at least part of the Jamie Premium to fade whenever that handover happens, no matter how capable the next person turns out to be. Two decades of proven judgement isn’t something a successor can simply inherit on day one.

That day hasn’t come yet. For now, JPMorgan is standing at the edge of a milestone no bank has ever reached, carrying both the payoff of twenty years of disciplined, occasionally opportunistic leadership and the pressure of having almost no margin left for a mistake.

The post Business Leader of the Week: Inside Jamie Dimon’s rewiring of JPMorgan into Wall Street giant appeared first on International Finance.

About 1,600 roles ended immediately, with the remaining 1,600 to be phased out over Microsoft’s 2027 financial year. The move is part of a wider reduction of 4,800 jobs across Microsoft as a whole, though Xbox has taken a disproportionate hit, accounting for close to a third of the total.

Sharma did not soften the reasons behind the decision. “Our business today is not healthy,” she told employees, explaining that Xbox’s profit margins are running three to ten times lower than comparable gaming and publishing businesses.

She was equally candid about where money has gone to waste. Since 2018, Xbox has expanded aggressively into new studios, but not every purchase has paid off. Sharma revealed that on average, the company lost 64 cents for every dollar it ploughed into some of its acquired studios each year and conceded that Xbox is “not the best home for every type of studio”.

As a result, four studios are leaving Xbox for good. Compulsion Games, known for South of Midnight and We Happy Few, and Double Fine Productions, the San Francisco studio behind the Psychonauts series, will become independent and keep hold of their games and intellectual property. Two further studios are affected, including Arkane’s French arm, where formal talks with staff representatives are under way.

Despite the scale of the cuts, Sharma insisted that no previously announced first-party game is being cancelled. Instead, Xbox wants a flatter, leaner structure with a tighter slate of flagship franchises and heavier investment behind the titles that matter most.

The backdrop to all this is a punishing stretch for the console business. Despite spending tens of billions of dollars to expand Xbox, including its blockbuster acquisition of Activision Blizzard, Microsoft has struggled to narrow the gap with Sony’s PlayStation and Nintendo. The venture’s hardware revenue recently fell by a third year on year, and rising component costs have made the hardware side of the business harder to sustain. Sharma has pointed to a broader hardware crisis sweeping the games industry, arguing that a stronger Xbox would be far better placed to absorb the shock.

The company has increasingly shifted its strategy towards distributing its games across more platforms, instead of relying on console-exclusive titles to drive Xbox hardware sales.

“South of Midnight producer Compulsion Games and Psychonauts maker Double Fine Productions will become independent studios, while Ninja Theory and Undead Labs will be spun off to grow Senua and State of Decay 3,” Sharma said.

‘The management of Arkane Studios, which developed ‘Dishonoured’ and is currently working on a game based on Marvel Comics character Blade, has started consultations with its workers’ union in France to review options. A healthy Xbox could weather the shock of the hardware crisis,” she added further.

Sharma took over as Xbox chief executive in February 2026, succeeding the long-serving Phil Spencer. She has moved quickly since arriving, cutting the price of Game Pass Ultimate, scrapping the Copilot AI assistant on Xbox consoles, and reviving long-shelved franchises, with a new Gears of War prequel now in development.

Looking further ahead, she wants Xbox to eventually reach more than a billion players a day and has called for a return to what she calls the brand’s “renegade spirit”. Whether the reset works will take years to judge, but Sharma left little doubt about her intent. “We will not be one of them,” she said, referring to companies that assume past success guarantees future survival.

AI to blame?
Xbox’s organisational revamp also comes amid big tech’s historic AI outlays, which are set to top USD 700 billion in 2026. These spendings are also putting pressure on companies to show returns from the technology and offset the rising cost of rolling the technology out across their business verticals. Amazon and Meta Platforms have also laid off thousands of employees this year.

Chief People Officer Amy Coleman, however, told employees in a memo that “the roles eliminated today are not being replaced by AI. At the same time, what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done.”

“That (targeted cuts) makes the announcement read more like portfolio reallocation and operating discipline than a fresh ‌catalyst for ⁠the stock. In the near term, the market is likely to reward Microsoft less for headcount reductions and more for evidence that AI monetisation is scaling faster than AI-related costs,” said Parth Talsania, CEO of Equisights Research, while interacting with Reuters.

Xbox’s parent, Microsoft, itself has gone through a nearly 23% slump in its shares in the first six months of 2026, making it their worst first-half performance since 2022.

The software giant, earlier in 2026, offered voluntary buyouts to about 7% of its US workforce, or about 9,000 employees. While the tech giant is known for trimming jobs near the end of ⁠its fiscal year in June, before setting spending plans for the new financial year, this year’s cuts also coincide with booming AI demand that has powered growth at ⁠Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing business. While the venture has been the exclusive seller of OpenAI’s models, the mounting cost of building data centres to run those services is also squeezing the group’s cash flows.

While the company, in April, had forecast quarterly Azure sales above Wall Street estimates, it also issued a USD 190 billion ⁠spending projection for 2026 that massively surpassed expectations.

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The numbers tell part of the turbulent story. Since she took charge, BT’s share price has climbed by roughly 70% to 80%, a striking turnaround for a stock that had spent years drifting lower. Her own compensation has grown alongside it. In the year to March 2026, Kirkby’s total pay package more than doubled to 5.6 million pounds, made up of salary and benefits, an annual bonus and a large tranche of long-term share awards that reflect BT’s improved market value. It is now the largest pay packet handed to a telecoms boss in Britain in more than a decade, and it has drawn criticism from unions and campaigners who point out that the reward has come alongside tens of thousands of job losses.

Kirkby’s approach has been built on a simple premise. BT’s predecessor, Philip Jansen, spent billions building out full-fibre broadband across the European country, a huge and expensive bet on the United Kingdom’s digital future. Kirkby arrived just as that spending was nearing its peak, which allowed her to start dialling it back and shift the company’s focus toward harvesting returns from the network rather than continuing to build it at the same pace.

She set out to strip three billion pounds of costs from the business by 2029 and has since raised that target to 3.7 billion pounds by 2030, extending the programme by a year. BT has already delivered 1.5 billion pounds of annual savings, and its overall workforce has fallen by around seven per cent in the past year alone, down to roughly 108,000 employees. By the end of the decade, the combined headcount across BT is expected to settle somewhere between 75,000 and 80,000, toward the lower end of a range first floated back in 2023.

That scale of cost-cutting has not been without pain, but it has won over the city. BT’s revenue for the last financial year came in at 19.7 billion pounds, a modest decline from the year before, yet pre-tax profit rose 8% to 1.4 billion pounds. The company has also unveiled a new policy on returning cash to shareholders, and it maintains that it is transforming ahead of schedule, even as it juggles network investment, dividends and further restructuring.

The most significant recent move has been the agreement with Verizon to combine the two companies’ international enterprise businesses into a new joint venture. The deal brings together BT International and Verizon’s international enterprise wireline arm into a single platform designed to serve large multinational clients who need secure, reliable connections that work seamlessly across borders and cloud systems.

The new venture will serve more than 3,000 customers in over 180 countries and will generate close to four billion US dollars in combined annual revenue. Both companies will hold equal stakes and equal voting rights, and Verizon has agreed to pay BT roughly 625 million dollars to balance the value each side is contributing. The venture will be headquartered in the United Kingdom, though technically incorporated in Jersey, and a former telecoms executive, Martijn Blanken, has been named as its incoming chief executive once the deal closes, expected sometime in 2027.

For BT, the logic is straightforward. Running a sprawling international network on its own had become an expensive distraction from its core British business, where the real profits lie. By pooling resources with Verizon, BT gets scale without having to carry the full cost, and it can redirect management attention and capital back toward broadband and mobile services at home. It is, in effect, an admission that going it alone internationally no longer makes sense in a world where multinational clients want a single, AI-ready network that spans continents.

Even so, Kirkby’s challenges are far from over. As BT marks its 180th anniversary this year, the competitive landscape at home has grown noticeably tougher. The merger of Vodafone and Three has created a powerful new mobile rival with the scale to compete aggressively on price and network coverage. At the same time, a wave of smaller “alt-net” broadband providers has been chipping away at BT’s fibre market share in towns and cities across the country, undercutting on price even as BT pours money into laying cable. As the company’s fibre rollout nears completion, Kirkby must answer a harder question, namely what BT actually stands for once the building phase is over and the business shifts into a slower, more competitive growth phase.

There have also been governance tensions closer to home. Sunil Bharti Mittal, the Indian telecoms billionaire who is now BT’s largest shareholder, has taken a board seat and is reportedly pushing Kirkby and chairman Adam Crozier for stronger performance, particularly around market share, which has continued to slip in key segments. A recent rebrand and a significant clear-out of the boardroom have added to a sense of flux rather than settling nerves.

On the international side, the Verizon venture still needs regulatory clearance in multiple jurisdictions before it can close, and integrating two large, previously separate operations is rarely simple. There is also a broader question of how much genuine growth the new venture can generate once cost savings from combining the businesses have been captured, since neither BT nor Verizon is treating this as an aggressive expansion play so much as a tidying up of assets that had become hard to justify running independently.

Kirkby’s supporters argue she inherited good timing along with a difficult job, taking over just as BT’s heaviest spending was behind it. Her critics say the turnaround so far has largely confirmed a strategy already in motion rather than charting a genuinely new course. What is not in dispute is that the easy part, cutting costs and reassuring the market, is largely done. The harder task, proving that a 180-year-old telecoms giant can still grow in a crowded and fast-changing global market, is only just beginning.

Image Credit: BT

The post Business Leader of the Week: Allison Kirkby rewires BT’s comeback journey appeared first on International Finance.

India has emerged as WhatsApp’s largest market, with the platform possessing more than 500 million users while expanding beyond messaging into payments and business services in the South Asian giant. As per Zuckerberg’s announcement, Will Cathcart, the current head of WhatsApp, will move to ⁠a new role within Meta after seven years leading the messaging service.

Announcing Shah’s appointment, Zuckerberg said, “Kunal Shah will join Meta as WhatsApp’s next leader. Kunal built CRED into one of India’s most important technology companies, and he brings the kind of builder mentality and global perspective that will serve him well in running the world’s biggest messaging app. I look forward to working with Kunal to continue to make WhatsApp the best service for billions of people and millions of businesses.”

Meta’s investment into Cred (formed in 2018) is also one of the largest into India’s fintech sector in recent years. While the valuation surpassed the USD 3.5 billion mark, registered by CRED in its last funding round in 2025, it came lower than its 2022 peak of USD 6.4 billion.

The deal gives Meta a minority stake in Bengaluru-based CRED without allowing the Silicon Valley tech giant access to CRED customer ‌data. Talking about CRED, the latter operates a members-only platform for consumers with high credit scores, through which it offers products spanning payments, lending, insurance, wealth management, and lifestyle services.

As per the company, it serves 17 million members on a monthly basis, apart from processing more than 40% of India’s ⁠credit card bill payments and managing over 240 billion rupees (USD 2.5 billion) of lending assets for partner financial institutions.

While CRED will be using the freshly raised capital to accelerate its organizational growth, it will also strengthen its leadership and ⁠institutional capabilities, apart from expanding across product categories. Miten Sampat, who has led strategy and finance at CRED since 2020, has been appointed interim CEO.

Shah, who will be transitioning from fintech founder to the CEO of a popular global messaging platform, is known as an entrepreneur, angel investor, and one of the most influential figures in India’s startup ecosystem. He first came into prominence in 2009 by establishing a cashback promotions company, PaisaBack, which he later described as the key business model inspiring the formation of FreeCharge, which Shah, along with Sandeep Tandon, created in 2010.

In April 2015, Snapdeal announced the acquisition of FreeCharge in a cash-and-stock deal widely reported to be about 2,800 crore rupees (roughly USD 400–450 million). By 2022, as per the Mint, Shah was among India’s most active angel investors by number of deals during the year. Another 2021 Moneycontrol profile reported making more than 200 angel investments, including stakes in fintech companies such as Razorpay and BharatPe.

Shah, who also featured in Fortune India’s 40 Under 40 list in 2016, graduated with a degree in philosophy from Wilson College. He later got enrolled in an MBA program at Narsee Monjee Institute of Management Studies. However, he left the course midway to pursue entrepreneurship. Known best for his first-principles method of problem-solving, Shah’s interviews, speeches, and social media posts have earned him a cult status among Indian founders, investors, and business leaders.

Sha will be relocating to California’s Menlo Park, where he will work from Meta’s headquarters while shaping the future of WhatsApp.

The post Meet Kunal Shah: Meta’s surprising yet powerful pick for WhatsApp CEO’s post appeared first on International Finance.

SpaceX raised USD 75 billion in what became the largest IPO in market history, pricing its 555.6 million shares at USD 135 each and reaching a valuation of roughly USD 1.77 trillion. Musk, as ever, got the headlines. Shotwell, as ever, got the job done.

The engineer who almost became a barista
Shotwell was born in 1963 in Evanston, Illinois, the middle daughter of a brain surgeon and an artist. She was a cheerleader, a varsity basketball player, and finished at the top of her high school class. None of that pointed obviously toward aerospace.

The nudge came from her mother, who dragged a teenage Shotwell to a “Society of Women Engineers” panel at the Illinois Institute of Technology. Shotwell recalled being largely bored until she spotted one particular woman on the panel: impeccably dressed, composed, effortlessly credible. “Her shoes were marvellous, her bag matched,” she told Marie Claire in 2017, “and she just made mechanical engineering accessible to me.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering and a master’s in applied mathematics from Northwestern University, then spent over a decade at the Aerospace Corporation before four years at Microcosm, a low-cost rocketry firm. In 2002, a former colleague offered her a tour of a barely-known startup called SpaceX. She spoke to its founder for three or four minutes.

“I wasn’t looking for a job. I didn’t have a resume,” she said. SpaceX called that afternoon, and after a month of deliberation she became employee number 11, joining as Vice-President of Business Development.

She had been clear-eyed about the stakes. If SpaceX failed, she told the Stanford Business School podcast, she was done with the industry entirely. “I’d rather sell real estate or be a barista.”

In September 2008, Shotwell was in a Glasgow hotel bathroom on a conference call to price SpaceX’s bid on a USD 1.6 billion NASA resupply contract while the company’s fourth Falcon 1 launch counted down half a world away.

It was, Musk believed, the last launch the company could afford before going bankrupt. The rocket reached orbit, the NASA contract followed, and Musk promoted Shotwell to President and COO before the year was out. She has held both roles for the 18 years since.

The operator behind the visionary
Colleagues describe a complementary dynamic that is as much about temperament as function. “Elon creates the urgent, sometimes uncomfortable disruption,” Derek Huerta, a former satellite engineer at SpaceX, told CNBC.

Shotwell supplies the operational continuity that converts disruption into delivery. Former NASA programme manager Kathryn Lueders, who worked directly with Shotwell for over 15 years, described her as “the steady interface for customers, stakeholders and the public.” Another former employee called her simply “the glue.”

She combines exacting standards with a rare social fluency. She can deliver tough feedback, said one colleague, and it would “taste like honey.” She earned a reputation for walking onto the factory floor or into mission control and asking forensically specific questions, from manufacturing tolerances to astronaut training simulations. Her compensation reflects her standing.

According to SpaceX’s IPO filing, her total package for 2025 came to USD 85.8 million, against a base salary of USD 1.08 million. By comparison, Boeing CEO Kelly Ortberg received USD 9.4 million in the same year, despite Boeing’s revenue being more than four times larger. Shotwell’s 12.6 million shares were valued at over USD 2 billion at the close of the IPO’s first session.

Selling the impossible, just late
The IPO has brought Shotwell into sharper public focus, and with it a clearer articulation of her philosophy.

“We fail on timeline, but that feels like the right fail to make,” she said. Musk’s formulation, which she repeated to investors, is that SpaceX makes the impossible but makes it late.

She has offered a counter-intuitive defence of failure itself: “If a launch goes perfectly, all you’ve learned is that that launch vehicle on that day worked. When you have failure, you actually get this treasure trove of data.”

SpaceX’s prospectus promises AI data centres in orbit by 2028, a Starship that operates with airline-like turnaround times, and a self-sustaining Mars colony. When pressed on a timeline for the colony, Shotwell ventured 2035, then immediately qualified that she is “so bad at predicting timelines.”

The financial reality is demanding: the company took on USD 29 billion in debt after absorbing xAI, with AI capital expenditure alone reaching USD 12.7 billion in 2025. The company moved, she said, “from those penurious Falcon 9 Dragon days to the more expensive capital-intensive Starship, and then to AI, because it is next-level expensive.”

The steady hand and the key-man question
The IPO has surfaced questions about SpaceX’s “key-man risk,” the dependency on Musk’s vision and public profile. Shotwell is the principal hedge against that risk. During Musk’s feud with the Donald Trump administration in June 2025, when he threatened to decommission the Dragon capsule, she quietly assured NASA officials the tensions would pass.

She has also defended him on personal grounds, sending a company-wide letter after harassment allegations in 2022 against her communications team’s advice.

“I don’t believe he could have done what he was accused of. But he is imperfect. I’m imperfect.” She has called him “probably the best CEO in history” and endorsed the supermajority voting control he holds.

Pressed on her own ambitions, Shotwell remains characteristically understated. She is preparing a 1,000-acre Texas ranch to become a vineyard. Given a Starship and a free itinerary, she says she would go to the moon, not Mars. Six months is a long journey.

It is a telling deflection. The woman who kept a failing rocket company solvent through sheer commercial tenacity, who priced a billion-dollar government contract from a Glasgow hotel bathroom, and who rang the opening bell on the largest public offering in stock market history has earned the right to a modest aspiration. The moon is, after all, reachable.

The post Gwynne Shotwell: The woman who built the SpaceX appeared first on International Finance.

To put that in perspective, a trillion dollars is a million millions. If you spent USD 1 million every single day, it would take you nearly 2,740 years to spend it all.

SpaceX raised a record USD 75 billion in the offering, valuing the company at roughly USD 1.8 trillion, making it the largest stock market debut in history. By the end of that first trading day, with SpaceX opening on Nasdaq at USD 150 a share, Musk’s combined SpaceX and Tesla stakes alone were worth roughly USD 1.05 trillion.

From USD 24 Billion to a Trillion
As recently as March 2020, Musk’s net worth was estimated at USD 24.6 billion. Then, in January 2021, he became the richest person on the planet, surpassing USD 200 billion and USD 300 billion in the same year. The driver was Tesla. The electric car company’s stock rose roughly tenfold in about 18 months, as investors began valuing it less like a car company and more like a tech giant. By late 2021, Tesla’s total market value topped USD 1.23 trillion, temporarily pushing Musk’s net worth to USD 340 billion.

Then came the crash. In October 2022, Musk bought Twitter for USD 44 billion. The deal was expensive, chaotic, and immediately controversial. Tesla shareholders panicked. Between November 2021 and December 2022, Musk’s net worth fell by over USD 200 billion, one of the largest wealth destructions in history. That sum was greater than the entire fortune of the world’s second-richest person at the time. He briefly lost his top ranking to French luxury goods billionaire Bernard Arnault.

He came back. Tesla recovered. SpaceX kept growing in the background, quietly and dramatically. Then the milestones started piling up faster than anyone had predicted. Musk became the first person ever with a net worth of USD 500 billion in October 2025.

Two months later, the Delaware Supreme Court reinstated his previously cancelled Tesla stock option package, valued at USD 139 billion, pushing his fortune to USD 749 billion and making him the first person to cross USD 700 billion.

Then in February 2026, Forbes declared Musk the first person in history to surpass USD 800 billion, following the SpaceX-xAI merger that valued the combined company at USD 1.25 trillion. The SpaceX IPO in June 2026 was the final push over the line.

In the six years since he first crossed USD 100 billion, Musk’s net worth grew roughly tenfold, at a pace that no billionaire in history has matched, including Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Bernard Arnault during their own runs at the top.

The Twitter Gamble That Became the X Ecosystem
When Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, most observers saw a billionaire overpaying for a struggling social network. What Musk saw was the foundation for something far larger.

Twitter was folded into a new company called X Corp. in April 2023. In July 2023, it was rebranded as X, with an entirely new strategy. The platform moved to the x.com domain in May 2024 and began integrating payments, video, and AI features through the Grok assistant.

The idea Musk kept referencing was WeChat, China’s super app where people chat, pay bills, shop, book taxis, and manage their bank accounts all in one place. He wanted to build the Western world’s version of that.

The payments piece came first. X Money launched as a digital wallet allowing users to store money, send and receive funds, earn interest on cash balances, and spend via a dedicated Visa debit card, all without leaving the X platform.

The AI piece came next. Musk founded xAI in July 2023, building the Grok chatbot directly into X. In February 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI in an all-stock deal, bringing together SpaceX’s rockets and Starlink satellite network, xAI’s Grok AI platform and Colossus supercomputer, and the X social media platform under one corporate roof. The stated goal was to build what Musk calls “orbital data centres,” essentially AI computing infrastructure in space.

X’s revenue tells a complicated story. In 2021, Twitter generated USD 5.1 billion in revenue in its last full year as an independent public company. By 2026, X generates approximately USD 2.9 billion, still 35% below the pre-Musk peak, with advertising accounting for 68% of income despite a significant exodus of big advertisers.

But the real value was never in ad revenue. The strategic objective was to acquire the world’s largest real-time human conversation dataset at precisely the moment that data became the most valuable raw material in the global economy. That data now feeds Grok, which sits inside a company worth USD 1.8 trillion.

Where the Trillion Actually Sits
Musk’s wealth is concentrated in a small number of companies he founded or controls. His fortune breaks down roughly as follows: SpaceX accounts for approximately USD 800 billion, Tesla approximately USD 290 billion, xAI approximately USD 40 billion, and X approximately USD 12 billion. His other ventures, including Neuralink and The Boring Company, barely register at this scale.

Musk owns 4.8 billion shares of SpaceX, or about 42% of the company, plus 350 million stock options exercisable at just USD 8.39 per share. At the IPO price of USD 135 a share, his stake alone is worth USD 648 billion, with the options adding another USD 44.3 billion.

Musk himself has pushed back on characterisations of his wealth as purely personal gain. Writing on X earlier this year, he said: “My ‘net worth’ is almost entirely due to my ownership stakes in Tesla and SpaceX. I have less than 0.1% that is cash,” adding that he has already created wealth for others “thousands of times over” and that Tesla is “more than 80% owned by retail investors and index/pension funds.”

Nearly 95% of Musk’s total fortune consists of unrealised equity gains, meaning he cannot simply spend it. Despite holding wealth that exceeds the GDP of several mid-size economies, he remains largely illiquid.

He can borrow against his shares, but even a hint of selling large stakes could crash the very stock prices that underpin the number. Financial analysts have also flagged questions about how long the valuation holds up.

As Jason Schloetzer of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business told ABC News: “It remains to be seen whether the valuation of SpaceX can maintain or whether we’ll see it come down once it’s under the scrutiny of public markets. Clearly, fundamentals matter in the long run. But it seems like Musk has been able to defy fundamentals in the past and he may be able to do that again.”

A Gap No Other Billionaire Comes Close to Bridging
Before the SpaceX IPO, Alphabet co-founder Larry Page held the position of the world’s second-richest person, with a net worth of around USD 304 billion, itself a staggering sum. The listing made even that figure look modest.

Forbes deputy editor Matt Durot described the gap plainly to Reuters: “The second-richest person has been hovering around USD 300 billion, so about less than one-third of what Musk is worth. And only one other person, Oracle founder Larry Ellison, has ever been worth USD 400 billion.”

Post-IPO, the scoreboard looks like this. Musk, at USD 1.1 trillion, sits USD 704 billion ahead of second-placed Larry Page, who is worth USD 296 billion. Oracle’s Larry Ellison is fourth on the Forbes list at USD 228 billion, putting him USD 872 billion behind Musk. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, at USD 196 billion, trails Musk by USD 904 billion.

The top 10 billionaires in the world combined were worth USD 2.55 trillion at the end of 2025. Musk alone is now approaching half that combined figure.

The scale also dwarfs entire national economies. Musk’s personal net worth is now larger than the annual GDP of Taiwan, Ireland, or Sweden. His fortune equals roughly one-quarter of India’s entire GDP, which the IMF estimates at around USD 4.15 trillion.

The milestone has drawn sharp reactions across the political and economic spectrum. Senator Bernie Sanders was direct on the platform Musk himself owns: “Today, Elon Musk, a trillionaire, pays the same amount into Social Security as someone making USD 184,500. If we end that absurdity and lift the cap on taxable income, we can make Social Security solvent for 75 years and expand benefits by USD 2,400.”

From the economics world, Michael Morris, professor of leadership at Columbia Business School, offered a more structural view, by stating, “For him, it probably won’t be a very meaningful change. He already has an enormous amount of wealth, and this will be some more zeros. But our institutions are under our control, and our institutions are allowing greater levels of inequality, and we just know empirically that that puts democracy at risk.”

Musk’s wealth did not build steadily. It moved in violent jumps, each tied to a specific event. A Tesla stock split in 2020. A SpaceX tender offer in late 2025. A court ruling reinstating his Tesla pay package. A merger announcement in February 2026. An IPO in June 2026. Each event added between USD 50 billion and USD 200 billion in a matter of days.

The result is a fortune so large it has effectively created its own category, one that no other person in history has entered, and that the second-richest person on earth, Larry Page at USD 296 billion, would need to nearly quadruple his wealth just to reach.

The post Business leader of the Week: How Elon Musk became world’s first trillionaire appeared first on International Finance.

Blanc, also a CEO of British insurer Aviva, oversaw Manifold’s appointment at BP in October 2025. However, multiple figures ⁠from London’s financial centre, including large investors in the oil giant, told the Financial Times that this time around, Blanc would lack the support from shareholders to make a second appointment to the post.

Manifold’s inglorious exit has added another chapter in BP’s leadership instability. In 2023, former CEO Bernard Looney was fired ⁠after lying to the board about his personal relationships with colleagues. His successor, Murray Auchincloss, left abruptly in December 2025.

While former Woodside CEO Meg O’Neill joined the British energy major immediately, she also became the venture’s fifth CEO since 2020. Although her role has been to accelerate the company’s shift away from renewable energy to refocus on oil and gas, right now what BP needs is stability at the top, along with clear policy direction.

BP’s gas and low-carbon business chief William Lin will leave the organisation as well. However, as per the reports, this has to do with O’Neill’s reorganisation efforts that will turn the business into two main units of downstream and upstream, bundling oil and gas production, with the goal of making BP simpler and more valuable.

BP vs Manifold
The immediate reason behind Manifold’s removal was his alleged act of aggression with different colleagues across the BP. The board had reportedly received enough information following a whistleblower report to ascertain that there was a pattern of “unacceptable behaviour” from the chair.

Manifold, while interacting with Reuters, disputed the accusations and commented, “I was removed without warning and without explanation. I dispute entirely the characterisation of my conduct, and I will not allow a false narrative to go unchallenged.”

It is also worth remembering that Manifold had the backing of activist hedge fund Elliott, which has built up a stake of around 5% in BP. The chair’s role at BP was Manifold’s first-ever leadership job in the energy industry. Before joining the British giant, he was the chief at building materials producer CRH, where he helped the company to reshape its operational portfolio. He also helped the business to move its primary listing from Ireland to the United States, a move that helped CRH’s share prices to go up.

However, Manifold’s journey as BP’s chair was anything but smooth. Under his watch, BP’s board shrank. Shell finance chief Simon Henry, who only joined the company in September 2025, was among those quitting at short notice. The April 2026 annual general meeting (AGM) saw the board failing to get two of its resolutions accepted by shareholders, and Manifold’s appointment as chair got less support than typical.

Despite the board putting up a united show back then, proxy adviser Glass Lewis held Manifold accountable for BP’s decision to exclude a resolution filed by climate activist group Follow This and thus recommended a vote against him. His appointment, however, was confirmed by around 82% of votes, well below the typical near 100% tally for directors.

Another infamous chapter was Manifold’s alleged clash with Henry. As per the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the issue was the fellow director’s handling of sensitive talks related to a potential deal. Manifold privately accused Henry of overstepping his authority and excluding other directors from communications, while Henry denied any mishandling of talks, arguing that Manifold ‌was ⁠mischaracterising conversations.

Hitting back to the WSJ, Manifold’s spokesperson said, “Assertions that he accused Mr Henry of overstepping his authority or excluding fellow board members ⁠from communications are false.”

Manifold, post his removal as the BP chair, said not everyone at the oil major shared his priorities to cut costs and boost efficiency, while acknowledging being too pushy for the change. However, he again denied committing any misconduct.

“Is it possible that in my determination to drive change on costs, performance, the balance sheet and shareholder communications, I pushed hard and challenged people directly? Yes, it is. What I do not accept is that lies can be told about me, nor that anyone should be allowed to hide behind anonymity when ⁠commenting on my time at BP,” he remarked.

Quoting BP’s internal sources, a Reuters report claimed that Manifold met with activist shareholder Elliott Management during his tenure without telling fellow board members directly. While these ⁠interactions were not technically a breach of any specific rule, they created an impression of him acting unilaterally, reportedly displeasing the board.

While Elliott wanted BP to cut costs, shift focus and spending from renewable projects to oil and gas and simplify its organisational structure, Manifold, on the other hand, ⁠wanted to accelerate the revamp. Most of the organisational changes got implemented in recent months.

Does BP have the most volatile boardroom?
As per Lindsey Stewart, director of institutional investor content at Morningstar, “At this point it’s fair to say BP has the most volatile boardroom of the oil supermajors. With a resurgent share price so far this year, BP should be taking credit for the rewards of its strategic reset. Instead, the company is on its third CEO and now its third chairman in under three years. It’s clear that getting a grip on corporate governance and strategy at the company must be a priority of the interim chair and his eventual successor.”

Legendary investment manager Neil Woodford, on the other hand, minced no words for BP. As per him, Manifold is the third chairman the company has been through in three years, and this sort of makes BP look “ungovernable”.

“Shareholders should look away from the churn at the top and instead at who is doing the churning,” Woodford remarked in a LinkedIn post, as he continued, “people should focus on the decisions made by non-executive directors rather than the chairman himself.”

“Most of the non-executive directors who pushed Manifold out have sat on that board throughout the entire period. The same people who have hired and fired chairmen and chief executives in quick succession remain comfortably in place. And the man they have just removed was the architect of BP’s turnaround strategy and the person who recruited the new chief executive in the first place. The board kept itself and discarded the one figure actually trying to change the business,” he concluded.

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However, it’s not the above news that has grabbed the limelight but the statement from CEO Bill Winters, in which he termed the job cuts as “artificial intelligence replacing lower-value human workers.” Not only did he have to apologize to the upset staff, but the whole fiasco has put the bank in the regulators’ crosshairs.

In a LinkedIn post, while explaining the rationale behind StanChart cutting its back-office support ‌jobs, Winters used these exact words: “It’s ⁠not cost-cutting. It’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”

While the global bank bosses, in recent weeks, have been more straightforward about the job cuts the industry will face due to the possibility of AI making routine tasks more efficient, one can argue whether Winters’ comment was in good taste.

Winters quickly got into the damage control mode by including a transcript of his full remarks on his LinkedIn post, which he said showed that ⁠he valued his colleagues “most highly.”

He also included preceding context that the global lender was “giving every opportunity” to at-risk employees who ⁠want to learn new skills. However, the “lower value human workers” remark has now resulted in Hong Kong and Singapore regulators seeking clarification from the bank.

The monetary authorities from both countries have reportedly pressed the lender on the ⁠impact of job cuts in their domestic markets, with Hong Kong stepping up the heat further by asking whether StanChart was using AI as a pretext to cut staff.

Talking about Standard Chartered’s AI-centric restructuring, Winters commented, “Some roles ‌will ⁠reduce in number, some will change, and new opportunities will emerge. We will continue to prioritize investment in reskilling and redeployment wherever we can. Where changes do happen, we will handle them with thought and care.”

Talking about the banking sector waking up to the AI reality, Japanese lender Mizuho in March 2026 unveiled up to 5,000 job cuts that will be done over the next decade.

HSBC boss Georges Elhedery, on the other hand, has said AI would destroy and create certain jobs in the financial industry, and the ⁠bank was retraining its workforce to meet the challenge. Jamie Dimon-led JP Morgan too will be hiring more “AI experts” in the coming years.

As per Winters, StanChart would continue to invest in technology, platforms, and automation to improve operations and client services and position itself for long-term ⁠growth.

“I want to be absolutely clear that the future of Standard Chartered depends on the talent, judgement, relationships, and commitment of you, our colleagues. Our progress and ambition are only possible because of what we achieve together,” he said.

What StanChart’s roadmap says

The bank, which as of May 2026 has a total global staff of nearly 82,000, will be adopting a two-pronged strategy: reducing the headcount and simultaneous adoption of automation and AI, with the remaining staff getting the opportunities to reskill, reposition, and carry on their roles within the organization.

According to Winters, the bank’s back-office centers, including ‌those in ⁠India, Malaysia, and Poland, will be affected most due to the layoffs.

“Of course we’re using AI along the way, and AI will be a huge facilitator and enabler of that,” he added, referring to the organization’s ongoing revamp to automate a good chunk of its core banking system.

Talking about the broader picture, StanChart will be looking to deliver over 15% return on tangible equity (ROTE) in 2028, more than three percentage points higher than in 2025. By 2030, it will attempt to take that ratio to about 18%.

To ensure the completion of these targets, the bank will be focusing on higher-margin businesses, including affluent retail clients and financial institutions within its corporate and investment banking division.

“Notably the lender ⁠pulled forward a goal of attracting USD 200 billion of net new money to 2028 from the previously set 2029. In the first quarter, the bank reported both its highest wealth revenue and new client money,” reported Reuters.

StanChart, known for its strong operations in the Asia-Pacific and Africa regions, will likely face the challenge of raising more loan-loss provisions if the Iran ⁠war drags on, as higher energy costs and weaker growth strain borrowers.

Knowing this, the venture has set aside USD 190 million in precautionary provisions linked to the Middle East conflict in Q1 2026.

Winters to carry on

Despite his loose statement putting StanChart on a sticky wicket, Winters’ stint as the bank’s CEO, a role which he has helmed for the past 11 years, looks secure as of now.

While he will be reportedly continuing for the next few years to help the StanChart transition through the AI-first strategy, former group CFO Diego De Giorgi and former corporate and investment banking head Simon Cooper, once seen as potential successors of Winters, have left the company.

StanChart has appointed investor relations head and equity research veteran ⁠Manus Costello as the group’s permanent CFO.

Image Credit: Standard Chartered

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