Category: 3. Business

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Elon Musk has appointed former Morgan Stanley banker Anthony Armstrong as the new chief financial officer of his artificial intelligence group xAI, marking the latest shake-up to his executive ranks. 

The financier, who advised on the Twitter takeover, has emerged as a key lieutenant to Musk in recent years, including during the billionaire’s time in Washington at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge).

He will head up the finance function for both xAI and social media platform X, according to several people familiar with the matter. Musk merged X and xAI in March, valuing the combined group at $113bn.

The change of CFO at xAI comes as Musk contends with a spate of senior departures across his businesses. Linda Yaccarino, chief executive of X, resigned in July. xAI’s general counsel Robert Keele and its previous CFO Mike Liberatore also left over the summer.

Armstrong has been working with xAI for several weeks and was formally appointed chief financial officer of the company in recent days, one of the people said.

His X account now carries an xAI logo by his name signifying that he is an employee of the company.

Armstrong and xAI did not respond to requests for comment.

Musk has doubled down on his bet on AI, racing to build sophisticated models to compete with the likes of OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, while pouring investment into costly infrastructure to support those ambitions.

xAI has recently been discussing a new funding round that would value the company at around $200bn, according to investors in the group, who added that the round had not yet closed.

Armstrong will also be tasked with returning the social media business to financial health following an exodus of advertisers, after Musk relaxed its content moderation standards and told marketers who disagreed with his approach to “go fuck” themselves.

As head of global technology mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, Armstrong was part of the team hired by Musk to facilitate the $44bn acquisition of X, then Twitter. Armstrong and Musk grew close as the deal, for which Morgan Stanley provided financing, was hashed out, the people said.

More recently, Armstrong worked for the Trump administration as a senior adviser to the Office to Personnel Management as Musk enacted his Doge cost-cutting efforts before falling out with President Donald Trump. Armstrong left the administration over the summer.

Armstrong will replace Liberatore as CFO, who defected to OpenAI after three months in the role. Liberatore left after clashing with some of Musk’s inner circle over corporate structure and tough financial targets, people with knowledge of the matter said.

Armstrong will also take up the duties of X’s chief financial officer Mahmoud Reza Banki, who is leaving after less than a year into the role, according to three people familiar with the matter. Banki did not respond to a request for comment.

Additional reporting by George Hammond in San Francisco

7 October 2025

The letter of indemnity would be a familiar instrument to those involved in the shipping and commodities trade. These are typically used to procure the discharge and delivery of cargo from a vessel when the bills of lading are unavailable for presentation at the discharge port. Through the letter of indemnity, the risks of a claim for misdelivery are transferred from the carrier to the party issuing the letter of indemnity (typically the shipper/charterer), provided the letter of indemnity is properly worded and valid. Such letters of indemnity are often referred to as discharge letters of indemnity.

A less familiar use of the letter of indemnity would be in commodity finance where the letter of indemnity is issued by a beneficiary of a letter of credit (“LOC”) and tendered in lieu of original bills of lading in order to draw on the LOC. Such letters of indemnity, known as payment letters of indemnity (“Payment LOIs”), are not a recent innovation. They are commonplace in the oil trade and were mentioned in the UK Law Commission Report on Rights of Suit in Respect of Carriage of Goods by Sea issued in 1991.

However, it is only in recent years that Payment LOIs have received attention from the Singapore courts. This has come about in cases brought by trade financiers to recover their loans following the insolvencies of major oil traders. The judgment by the Singapore Court of Appeal in The Maersk Katalin [2025] SGCA 42 is the most recent of these cases.

This article discusses the High Court and Court of Appeal decisions in The Maersk Katalin – decisions which go a long way towards restoring faith in the bill of lading and the presentation rule in Singapore.

Allen & Gledhill Partners Corina Song and Daniel Liang represented the successful bank in The Maersk Katalin.

To read the article, please click here.

Chinese car making giant BYD says the UK has become its biggest market outside China, after its sales there surged by 880% in September compared to a year earlier.

The company says it sold 11,271 cars in the UK last month, with the plug-in hybrid version of its Seal U sports utility vehicle (SUV) accounting for the majority of those sales.

It comes after figures from the car industry body the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) showed that sales of electric vehicles (EVs) jumped to a record high in September.

The UK is particularly attractive to firms like BYD as the country has not imposed tariffs on Chinese EVs, unlike other major markets such as the European Union and the US.

BYD, which offers cheaper models than many of its Western rivals, said its share of the UK market jumped to 3.6% in September.

The company will launch more new hybrid and electric cars in the months ahead, said the BYD’s UK manager Bono Ge. He added that the brand’s future in Britain looks “hugely exciting”, having just opened its 100th retail outlet.

UK EV sales hit a record high last month, with sales of pure battery electric vehicles rising to almost 73,000, according to the SMMT.

Sales of plug-in hybrid cars grew even faster, it said.

The Kia Sportage, Ford Puma and Nissan Qashqai were the best-selling cars in September. Chinese models – the Jaecoo 7 and BYD Seal U – were also in the top 10.

But despite the surge in overall EV sales in the UK, petrol and diesel vehicles still made up more than half of new car sales last month, according to the SMMT.

In October last year, the EU announced it would hit imports of Chinese EVs with levies of up to 45%.

The measure is aimed to protect European car makers from being undermined by what the EU believes are unfair Chinese-state subsidies.

Chinese car makers like BYD have been effectively shut out of the US by high tariffs, which were backed by both President Donald Trump and his predecessor Joe Biden.

WATCH TIME: 3 minutes | Captions are auto-generated and may contain errors.

“We know dopamine works really well, but beyond that, we don’t really fully understand how Parkinson works. There are many, what I call ‘pathway abnormalities’—things that are different in cells of somebody with Parkinson from somebody who doesn’t have Parkinson. Those pathway abnormalities may be things that you can target [with disease-modifying therapies].”

At the 2025 International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders (MDS), held October 5-9, in Honolulu, Hawaii, interim data were presented by Jonas Hannestad, MD, PhD, which detail the open-label, phase 1b findings to-date of a small trial of 21 participants with Parkinson disease (PD) in Australia. The study’s primary goal is to determine the therapy’s safety and tolerability, but secondarily, it is seeking to assess results from mechanistic biomarker readings to confirm target engagement and efficacy signals.

The therapy, GT-02287, is an investigational small-molecule designed to attempt to act as a disease-modifier for PD. All told, it is showing promising early safety and tolerability results in the ongoing phase 1b trial. Although Hannestad, who is the the chief medical officer at Gain, expressed that the results must be taken with “a grain of salt” as they are early phase and the trial is not powered for efficacy, the positive signals on the MDS Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale Parts I and II do offer some momentum for the treatment’s future development.

While on-site at the congress, NeurologyLive spoke with Hannestad further to discuss the results, but also to glean his perspective on the state of therapuetic availability for patients with PD. He offered his thoughts on the current model of therapy, often beginning with dopeminergic targeting treatments—such as the gold standard in PD, levodopa—which offers great symptomatic relief to patients, particularly early on. However, long-term, these approaches have some limitations, with patients experiencing wearing off effects and lessened efficacy. Additionally, he noted, these treatments do not offer disease-modifying effects—simply put, they do not slow disease progression. Many therapies in the pipeline are being evaluated for their ability to potentially do this, and Hannestad provided some context on the targets that GT-02287 acts on in its attempt to modify disease progression in PD.

Click here to read more from MDS 2025.

REFERENCES
1. Pozzi R, Ignoni T, Bosetti M, et al. GT-02287 in Parkinson’s Disease: Interim Data from a Phase 1b Study. Presented at: International Congress of Parkinson’s Disease and Movement Disorders; October 5-9, 2025; Honolulu, HI.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 6 (Reuters) – OpenAI touted new partnerships to incorporate its AI products across diverse industries at its developer conference on Monday, aiming to drive the strong momentum it has enjoyed among consumers to its enterprise business.

“You should expect a huge focus from us on really leaning into enterprise,” CEO Sam Altman told journalists at a press conference following his keynote at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.

Sign up here.

That included a way for other apps to plug into ChatGPT and allow a user to ask questions or perform tasks in the app. One engineer gave a live demo showing how someone could use ChatGPT to generate a readymade playlist in Spotify, or ask Zillow to narrow down a list of properties to just show those with three bedrooms and three bathrooms.

Executives said this was the start of a broader vision of transforming ChatGPT into a central portal where users can access a broader range of services.

“What you’re going to see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that is really, really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system,” ChatGPT head Nick Turley said.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, underscored that OpenAI was “committed to building the best enterprise platform.”

Spotify said in a press release about its partnership that it would not share user data with OpenAI to train models. Asked if the same policy applied to the other deals, Turley said it would abide by the preferences users selected in their data settings.

OpenAI had always planned to target the enterprise market, but its AI models were not previously ready for the higher demands of business-use cases, Altman said.

“We needed to let the models get better. The models are there now,” he said, adding that the company had selected “a few active early partnerships.”

The ChatGPT-maker outlined ambitious new plans in the last month to build $1 trillion or more of computing capacity and launched a viral AI-video-generating app called Sora, which has shot to the top of Apple’s app rankings.

All this has made OpenAI a massive money-losing operation to date. Altman said it was “not in my top 10 concerns, but we obviously someday have to be very profitable.”

Monday’s moves are the latest in a stream of announcements for OpenAI, which sparked the modern AI boom with the launch of ChatGPT about three years ago.

Many of Altman’s ambitions are bold and expensive even by Silicon Valley standards, sparking some concerns among tech investors about whether or not AI investments are a bubble.

Altman said during the question-answer session that many areas of the AI industry are “kind of bubbly,” but that “real value will get created.”

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

Oil steadied after a two-day advance after OPEC+ agreed on a modest supply quota increase, with traders also parsing signals from lower-than-expected Saudi prices.

Brent crude traded above $65 a barrel after a 1.5% gain on Monday, with West Texas Intermediate near $62. OPEC and allies including Russia decided at the weekend on a 137,000-barrel-a-day increment, while de-facto leader Saudi Arabia kept the price of its main grade to Asia unchanged in a sign of caution, surprising traders who had expected an increase.