Reports say space exploration company has begun talks to raise more than $25bn for IPO
Elon Musk’s space exploration company SpaceX is preparing to list on the stock market next year in a move that could raise more than $25bn (£19bn) and value the business at more than $1tn, according to reports.
SpaceX, which designs, builds and launches rockets, is said to have started discussions with banks about an initial public offering (IPO). It could join the stock market in about June or July, according Reuters, which cited an unnamed source familiar with the matter.
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© Photograph: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
© Photograph: Manuel Mazzanti/NurPhoto/Shutterstock
Opposition leader María Corina Machado’s daughter to receive award on her behalf in Oslo, says Nobel Institute
The Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado will not attend the Nobel peace prize ceremony and the award will be accepted by her daughter, organisers have said.
Machado has been seen only once in public since going into hiding in August last year amid a tense showdown with the president, Nicolás Maduro. Venezuela’s attorney general has said Machado, 58, would be considered a “fugitive” if she left the country to accept the award.
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© Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
© Photograph: Odd Andersen/AFP/Getty Images
Glitzy draws, OJ-era chaos, grass laid over AstroTurf and a host nation that barely cared – the 1994 World Cup arrived amid suspicion and slapstick. Yet it became a watershed that would alter US sport and global football politics alike
“The United States was chosen,” the columnist George Vecsey wrote in the New York Times in 1994, “because of all the money to be made here, not because of any soccer prowess. Our country has been rented as a giant stadium and hotel and television studio.” Nobody could seriously doubt that. The USA had played in only two World Cups since the second world war and hadn’t had a national professional league for a decade. And that meant there was a great deal of skepticism from outsiders, even after Fifa made it clear there would be no wacky law changes to try to appeal to the domestic audience: Would anybody actually turn up to watch?
But there was also hostility in the United States. A piece in USA Today on the day of the draw told Americans they were right not to care about the World Cup, what it sneeringly described as the biggest sport in “Cameroon, Uruguay and Madagascar”. “Hating soccer,” wrote the columnist Tom Weir, “is more American than mom’s apple pie, driving a pickup or spending Saturday afternoon channel surfing with the remote control.”
Excerpted from The Power And The Glory by Jonathan Wilson, copyright © 2025 by Jonathan Wilson. Used with permission of Bold Type Books, an imprint of Basic Books Group, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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© Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
© Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
© Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images
Olya Kuryshchuk’s publication is a rare – and increasingly powerful – voice advocating for the people behind the scenes in an industry that loves a star. Its new awards celebrate the ‘teams who never get to walk a red carpet’
At the Fashion awards – a lavish event at the Royal Albert Hall this month – Jonathan Anderson was named designer of the year for a third time for his work at his own namesake brand and Dior, Anok Yai was named model of the year and Delphine Arnault, the CEO of Dior and scion of fashion’s wealthiest family, gained a special recognition award for her work supporting new talent through the LVMH prize. Think of it as fashion paying tribute to its biggest stars.
Since the night, there has been praise for the British Fashion Council’s new CEO Laura Weir but also criticism. The anonymous Instagram account boringnotcom, which often shares strong opinions on the industry, wrote: “As predicted, the same names got rotated and won the fashion awards … how utterly boring.”
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© Photograph: WWD/Getty Images
© Photograph: WWD/Getty Images
© Photograph: WWD/Getty Images
Plus: players popping up randomly on TV, triple-doubles in names and which match featured the most Ballon d’Or winners?
Mail us with your questions and answers
“While scanning the Champions League fixtures, I noticed that Pafos FC of Cyprus have a person’s face on their badge (Cypriot freedom fighter Evagoras Pallikarides),” writes Paul Savage. “Other than faces of legendary characters (Ajax), do any other badges have people on them?”
This was one of the more popular Knowledge questions of 2025. We received dozens of answers – thanks one and all – that referenced clubs all around the world. In no particular order, here they are.
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© Composite: Guardian
© Composite: Guardian
© Composite: Guardian
Initial Kansas plan for US training base thrown into doubt
FA exploring alternative options on the east coast
The Football Association has sent operational staff to the US this week to scout for World Cup training camps amid concerns that England may lose their preferred site to the Netherlands.
Thomas Tuchel had cleared an FA plan for England to be based in Kansas after a pre-tournament training camp in Fort Lauderdale, but after last week’s draw there are concerns that the Netherlands will be allocated their chosen facility at Sporting Kansas City, a high-performance centre used by US Soccer.
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© Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
© Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
© Photograph: David Rogers/Getty Images
© Adriana Loureiro Fernandez for The New York Times
Data from World Inequality Report also showed top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90%
Fewer than 60,000 people – 0.001% of the world’s population – control three times as much wealth as the entire bottom half of humanity, according to a report that argues global inequality has reached such extremes that urgent action has become essential.
The authoritative World Inequality Report 2026, based on data compiled by 200 researchers, also found that the top 10% of income-earners earn more than the other 90% combined, while the poorest half captures less than 10% of total global earnings.
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© Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images
© Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images
© Photograph: Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing/Getty Images
Veteran set decorator Lauri Gaffin has spent a career dressing up films from indie classics to blockbusters. Her new photographic memoir takes us behind the scenes of this ever-changing job – and on the hunt for wolves’ penis bones
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© Photograph: Lauri Gaffin
© Photograph: Lauri Gaffin
© Photograph: Lauri Gaffin
Women work longer and per hour earn a third of what men are paid, in figures that have changed little in 35 years, UN report shows
“Gender inequality is one of the most entrenched and significant problems of our time,” says Jocelyn Chu, a programme director at UN Women, responding to the stark figures contained in this year’s World Inequality report, which labels gender inequality a “defining and persistent feature of the global economy”.
Women work longer and earn just a third – 32% – of what men get per hour, when paid and unpaid labour, such as domestic work, are taken into account. Even when unpaid domestic labour is not included, women only earn 61% of what men make, according to the report.
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© Photograph: Murtaja Lateef/EPA
© Photograph: Murtaja Lateef/EPA
© Photograph: Murtaja Lateef/EPA
The author of The Power looks to the past for lessons in surviving an era of seismic technological change
Naomi Alderman argues that one of the most useful things to know is the name of the era you’re living in, and she proposes one for ours: the Information Crisis. In fact, the advent of digital media marks the third information crisis humans have lived through: the first came after the invention of writing; the second followed the printing press.
These were periods of great social conflict and upheaval, and they profoundly altered our social and political relationships as well as our understanding of the world around us. Writing ushered in the Axial Age, the period between the eighth and third centuries BC, when many of the world’s most influential religious figures and thinkers lived: Laozi, Buddha, Zoroaster, the Abrahamic prophets and the Greek philosophers. Gutenberg’s printing press helped bring about the Reformation. While it is too early to know where the internet era will take us, in her new book, which she describes as a “speculative historical project”, Alderman suggests that those earlier crises offer clues.
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© Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Guardian
© Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Guardian
© Photograph: Phil Fisk/The Guardian
I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, but the sound of a child brought me out of my trance, and showed me how important it is to look outwards in a crisis
The moment I knew I was about to die came a couple of years into my 20s, when life was really just starting out. My best friend, Helen, and I were on our way to Blackburn to catch up with an old university friend who had recently moved there for work. Thrilled to see each other, and basking in the prospect of the party weekend ahead, we chatted nonstop as we made our way by train from York.
We stashed our bags – full of essentials such as bottles of wine and my new pair of black clogs – above our heads and settled down in a cosy two-seater. About 50 minutes into our journey, I was dimly aware of a bang. Then came another, this time impossible to ignore. A woman screamed as our carriage was thrown up into the air in what felt like slow motion. Suddenly, Helen and I were somehow on our feet in the middle of the aisle, hugging each other. Head down, eyes screwed shut, I waited for the carriage to roll over and burst into flames, as I’d seen in films. I remember thinking about our families and friends getting the news. Then I heard the little girl crying.
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© Photograph: Anna Woodford
© Photograph: Anna Woodford
© Photograph: Anna Woodford
The host nation’s newspapers could barely contain their delight after Ben Stokes and his team were spotted relaxing before the crucial third Test
A mid-tour jaunt by the England cricket team to a Queensland beach town was covered gleefully by Australia’s tabloid newspapers, which splashed a shirtless Ben Stokes across their pages amid taunting headlines.
“On back foot, England bails to the beach”, one read. “Life’s a beach, even for the sinking Poms,” added another. “Sun’s out, runs out”, offered a third, alongside a photo of Stokes’s tattooed biceps.
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© Composite: The West Australian / Herald Sun / Courier Mail
© Composite: The West Australian / Herald Sun / Courier Mail
© Composite: The West Australian / Herald Sun / Courier Mail
‘We couldn’t have asked for more,’ says manager
Slot skirts around the Mohamed Salah issue
Arne Slot said Liverpool’s players gave everything he could have asked after they put Mohamed Salah’s absence aside to inflict a first European home defeat on Inter in more than three years.
The Liverpool head coach conceded that Dominik Szoboszlai’s decisive 88th-minute penalty – awarded for a shirt pull by Alessandro Bastoni on Florian Wirtz – would probably not have been given in the Premier League. But following the difficulties caused by Salah’s incendiary interview at Leeds on Saturday, Slot was thrilled with the response of his team at San Siro.
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© Photograph: Fabrizio Carabelli/PA
© Photograph: Fabrizio Carabelli/PA
© Photograph: Fabrizio Carabelli/PA
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