分类： business

SpaceX, the aerospace and artificial intelligence firm led by Elon Musk, has closed the largest initial public offering in global history, raking in a total of $85.7 billion after underwriters fully exercised an overallotment option to add $10 billion in extra share purchases, the company announced in an official statement Friday.

The landmark listing on the Nasdaq stock exchange in New York was initially projected to raise $75 billion from global investors. That figure was already on track to break records, but overwhelming investor demand pushed the underwriting banks—led by industry giants Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JPMorgan—to trigger the so-called “greenshoe” clause, a common financial tool designed to stabilize newly listed stocks and manage excess market demand.

A greenshoe option allows underwriters to issue and sell additional shares beyond the original public offering size when investor appetite outpaces the initial share supply, preventing extreme price volatility during a company’s market debut. In this case, demand for SpaceX shares was so strong that underwriters purchased a full 83.3 million extra shares directly from the company, adding $10 billion to the total proceeds. Even this additional $10 billion alone would rank among the 10 largest IPOs in history, highlighting the unprecedented market enthusiasm for Musk’s company.

The successful blockbuster listing has also pushed Musk’s net worth past the $1 trillion mark, according to calculations from Bloomberg. The vast majority of Musk’s personal wealth is tied directly to SpaceX equity, meaning his new trillionaire status remains dependent on the company’s stock performance: a sharp market downturn could erase the title as quickly as continued gains could grow his fortune further.

Market momentum remained strong in the first full trading day following the listing. On Monday, SpaceX shares jumped more than 14% from its initial offering price of $135, closing at $184 per share. That price gives SpaceX a total market valuation of $1.8 trillion.

While investor enthusiasm remains high, industry analysts have sounded notes of caution. The company’s sky-high valuation leaves little margin for missteps, they say, pointing to ongoing challenges including growing regulatory scrutiny of the commercial space industry, rising competition from rival aerospace firms, and the fact that SpaceX has yet to turn a consistent profit. Questions remain over whether the company can maintain its aggressive growth trajectory to justify its current market valuation.

Media conglomerate Fox has announced a transformative acquisition agreement that will see it take over streaming infrastructure firm Roku in a deal valued at $22 billion, a move that industry analysts say will reshape the competitive landscape of the United States television sector. When the merger is finalized, the combined entity is projected to rank as the third-largest TV provider in the U.S. by total audience viewership share, according to statements from both companies.

Under the terms of the offer, Fox will pay Roku shareholders $160 per share, with compensation structured as a mix of cash and publicly traded Fox stock, the firms confirmed. This deal marks the latest step in Fox’s years-long strategic shift to adapt to shifting consumer behavior, as millions of viewers continue to migrate from traditional cable and broadcast television to internet-based streaming platforms.

Lachlan Murdoch, chief executive officer of Fox, framed the acquisition as a natural progression of the company’s carefully cultivated strategy that has been in motion for nearly 10 years. “Back in 2019, we intentionally reoriented the entire company around live news and live sports content, two categories that remain the most consistent drivers of live viewership in the modern media ecosystem,” Murdoch explained in a statement announcing the deal. “Then in 2020, we completed our acquisition of ad-supported streaming service Tubi, and under our ownership and operational leadership, Tubi has grown to become one of the most successful streaming businesses in the industry. Today, we take the next logical step: bringing together the most valuable portfolio of live content in American video consumption with the leading streaming platform that millions of U.S. households already use to access their favorite content.”

Industry observers have characterized the acquisition as a calculated bet that merging Roku’s popular streaming distribution platform with Fox’s extensive library of high-demand live news and sports content will leave the combined company well-positioned to capture growing market share in the fast-evolving streaming-first TV landscape. The merger comes as traditional media companies across the U.S. continue to consolidate and rework their business models to compete with large, deep-pocketed streaming giants that have come to dominate much of the global streaming market in recent years.

As a wave of baby boomer small business owners approaches retirement across the United States, a quiet but transformative shift is gaining traction: instead of selling their life’s work to outside corporate or private equity buyers, a growing number of owners are transferring full ownership to their employees. This growing trend not only addresses the coming “silver tsunami” of generational business transitions but also delivers tangible benefits for workers, companies and local economies, proponents argue.

One early adopter of this model is Softstar Shoes, an Oregon-based artisan shoemaker with 30 employees. The business completed its employee ownership transition in January 2026, when former sole owner and CEO Tricia Salcido, 56, sold the firm to her workforce to prepare for retirement. Salcido, who will stay on for the next few years as chief financial officer, says the transition has already unlocked a new level of team engagement that was absent under her sole ownership. “I’m getting personal emails from employees saying, ‘well, have you thought about this idea?’” she explained. “These are business insights that weren’t forthcoming before!” For Salcido, the decision was also personal: she wanted to protect local jobs and keep her company’s craft shoemaking operations in the U.S., a outcome she was convinced would not happen under a cost-cutting outside buyer.

Salcido is far from alone. Data from a 2025 industry study shows as many as 600 U.S. firms are now sold to their workforces each year, and available financing for these deals jumped 78% from $500 million in 2024 to $865 million in 2025 — a clear signal that the transition to employee ownership is accelerating. The scale of demand for this model is easy to understand: a 2026 report from global business consulting firm McKinsey estimates that roughly 6 million small and medium-sized U.S. companies, owned by baby boomers, will change hands between now and 2035 as this generation exits the workforce. Harvard Business School associate professor Ethan Rouen notes that demand for exit strategies is already pervasive, and most founders cannot pass their businesses to family: “I don’t think a week goes by where I don’t talk to an owner who is looking to sell their business. Their grown-up children often aren’t interested in taking on the family venture.”

Multiple case studies and research papers confirm that employee-owned firms outperform traditional ownership structures on key metrics. When employees share both the risks and rewards of business ownership, they become far more motivated, leading to higher overall productivity. Employee-owned firms also are less likely to conduct mass layoffs during economic downturns and consistently pay higher average wages than externally owned competitors.

Another business owner who chose employee ownership to protect his company’s legacy is William Stockwell, whose family has owned Philadelphia-based industrial component manufacturer Stockwell Elastomerics since it was founded by his great-grandfather in 1919. After observing the disruption that followed outside buyouts of similar firms, Stockwell decided to sell to his employees. “The new [outside] ownership might move the business, they might shut it down, or drastically change it in other ways, and the people remaining are stuck,” he said. Today, Stockwell works part-time at the firm he sold to staff.

Three main employee ownership models are currently used in the U.S. The most popular structure is the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which held $2 trillion in combined assets across 6,609 U.S. firms employing 10.9 million Americans as of 2023, the most recent year for full data. Under an ESOP, the company is held in a trust for employees, who earn shares that they can cash out only when they leave the company. The second model, which Softstar Shoes used, is the Employee Ownership Trust (EOT). Under an EOT, a trust holds ownership on behalf of staff, eliminating the need for employees to purchase shares out of their own pockets. The trust pays the former owner in installments drawn from future annual profits, meaning the former owner carries risk and must wait for full payment, but employees receive a share of profits each year. The third model is the worker cooperative, where employees buy individual shares of the business directly.

The trend extends beyond legacy family firms. Proponents note that employee ownership also appeals to younger workers disillusioned by the inequality and rigid hierarchy of traditional corporate structures. “The only way to truly create wealth in this country is through ownership of capital. And this is a way to democratise that,” Rouen explained.

Despite the benefits, the model still faces significant barriers. Setting up EOT and ESOP structures is far more administratively complex than a straightforward sale to an outside buyer. Many owners are also discouraged by the requirement to wait years for full payment and accept financial risk tied to the company’s future performance. Most importantly, widespread lack of awareness about employee ownership schemes slows adoption: “No one’s heard of them,” Salcido says.

Still, the outlook for growth is positive, insiders say. 71-year-old Paul Silvis, who is currently in the process of selling his central Pennsylvania manufacturing firm SilkoTek Corporation to his employees, says he has full confidence in the decision. “I’m getting ready to ride off into the sunset at some point,” he says. Stockwell, who has already completed his transition, advises owners considering the move to plan years in advance, saying “It’s not something you want to begin the year you want to retire.”

In recent years, the U.S. federal government has moved to support employee ownership, with bipartisan backing in Congress and a new Employee Ownership Initiative launched by the Department of Labor to promote the model and provide guidance for interested owners. As policy support grows and the wave of generational business transitions accelerates, Rouen predicts more businesses will make the switch: “my hunch is that we will see more successful employee ownership conversions in the next few years.”

A striking contrast between two German automotive facilities on opposite sides of the Atlantic has laid bare the core factors behind a key economic puzzle that has divided experts in recent years: how has the United States maintained stronger growth and stability than most other advanced economies, even when facing the same global headwinds that have derailed growth elsewhere?

Late last year, Volkswagen’s iconic “Transparent Factory” in Dresden, eastern Germany — originally built to demonstrate the cutting-edge peak of European industrial ambition — rolled its final vehicle off the assembly line. Meanwhile, 4,000 miles away in Spartanburg, South Carolina, fellow German manufacturing giant BMW operates its largest global production facility, running at full capacity amid rising U.S. demand. This juxtaposition frames a broader trend of divergent economic performance across the developed world following a cascade of global disruptions.

Over the past half-decade, nearly all advanced economies have been buffeted by overlapping crises: sweeping trade policy shifts that upended long-standing global supply chains, seismic shifts in labor markets from changed immigration policies, and geopolitical conflict in the Middle East that sent global energy prices swinging wildly. Many leading economists predicted these combined pressures would trigger prolonged stagnation and persistent stagflation in the U.S., but those forecasts have not come to pass. Instead, the American economy has expanded at a steady clip, and while inflation has at times proven stubborn, the toxic combination of zero growth and sustained price hikes that many feared has failed to materialize.

Joe Brusuelas, chief economist at global accounting and consulting firm RSM, argues that the U.S.-China trade war initiated by the Trump administration inadvertently became the most compelling demonstration of the American economy’s inherent resilience. “The own goals that the Trump administration imposed on the U.S. with respect to trade and immigration are probably the single best example of the underlying dynamism of the American economy,” Brusuelas explained. When faced with sudden new tariffs on imported components, major U.S. corporations did not simply accept compressed profit margins — they doubled down on capital investment to reshore and reconfigure their supply chains.

Current data bears this out: capital expenditure now makes up 13.9% of U.S. gross domestic product, a figure that most economists would expect to decline sharply amid overlapping supply and demand shocks. Instead, investment has held steady, and the resulting gains in productivity have offset much of the pressure from global disruptions, allowing the overall economy to expand at a consistent annualized rate of roughly 2%.

A second major factor supporting U.S. resilience comes from the transformed American energy sector. Historically, spikes in global oil prices triggered by Middle Eastern conflict have been a major drag on U.S. economic growth. But the shale revolution of the past two decades has fundamentally reshaped America’s exposure to energy shocks. The U.S. is now one of the world’s top oil and natural gas producers, and domestic businesses have systematically cut their reliance on petroleum over the past generation. “The development since the early 2000s of fracking in the United States, alongside the evolution of alternative fuels, has created the conditions where oil’s contribution to GDP per unit has fallen by half over the past 50 years,” Brusuelas noted.

This stance contrasts sharply with the approach taken by European economies. While the U.S. has prioritized market flexibility, embraced domestic fossil fuel production, and allowed energy prices to adjust to market conditions, Europe has long relied on long-term fixed-price supply contracts and interconnected cross-border networks to ensure energy security. This model left most European countries extremely vulnerable when Russian natural gas supplies were cut following the invasion of Ukraine, and that vulnerability persists amid new Middle East tensions that are pushing global energy prices higher.

Rebecca Christie, a senior fellow at Brussels-based economic think tank Bruegel, argues the divergence in economic performance stems not just from policy choices, but from deep cultural differences in attitudes toward risk. “Americans are very solutions-oriented and much more comfortable with taking a short-term risk in service of a long-term advantage. Europe as a culture is risk-averse,” Christie explained. She recalled attending a policy event where the European Union’s own financial services commissioner acknowledged that European leaders too rarely discuss the risk of failing to take risks at all.

This cultural divide is reflected in the structural differences between the U.S. and European economies. In most of Europe, businesses rely heavily on bank loans for financing, and worker retirement pensions are typically tied to guaranteed insurance contracts that cap both potential losses and gains. “If you finance your business with a bank loan, you don’t have the same flexibility that you do if you sell shares or attract venture capital,” Christie said. By contrast, U.S. companies can easily access capital from public stock markets and private venture investors, a flexibility that gives American firms a competitive edge over the more bank-dependent, state-backed European corporate model.

Despite the U.S. economy’s strong macroeconomic performance, Christie cautions that aggregate resilience hides significant pain and inequality at the micro level. “The U.S. is a land of very high inequality,” she said. “If you’re struggling, you are really going to have a hard time because the labour market is not adding piles of new jobs, things are getting more expensive, many cities have housing crises.” Her core concern is that rising inequality could eventually reach a tipping point, where even a strong dollar and stable banking system would not offset a sustained real-world jobs and livelihood crisis.

So far, broader labor market data has not supported that worst-case scenario. In May, American employers added 172,000 new jobs, a figure that far outpaced expert projections. However, newly released inflation data has signaled that the limits of U.S. resilience may be approaching. Consumer prices rose at their fastest pace in three years in May, pushing annual inflation up to 4.2% from 3.8% in April.

While the U.S. economy continues to outperform most other advanced economies, it is not immune to global pressures. Persistently high inflation, rising energy prices, and widening inequality all pose long-term threats that could erode the country’s current competitive advantage. Even so, the U.S. remains far more robust than most of its global peers. Its unique combination of flexible markets, sustained business investment, abundant domestic energy production, and cultural tolerance for calculated risk has allowed it to weather crises that have pushed many other developed economies to the brink of stagnation. As Brusuelas summarizes the current state of global economics: “It’s the cleanest shirt in a very filthy laundry.”