Elon Musk moves against Keir Starmer

Good morning and welcome again to FirstFT. In right now’s information:

• Elon Musk examines ousting the UK’s prime minister

• Firms borrow document quantities

• Why Donald Trump desires Greenland

• And the race to assert the Moon’s airwaves

Elon Musk has privately mentioned with allies how Sir Keir Starmer could possibly be eliminated as UK prime minister earlier than the following common election, in accordance with individuals briefed on the matter.

Musk, the world’s richest man and key confidant of US president-elect Donald Trump, is probing how he and his rightwing allies can destabilise the UK Labour authorities past the aggressive posts he has issued on his social media platform X, the individuals mentioned.

The chief govt of Tesla and SpaceX has taken a eager curiosity in British politics over the previous six months, and made more and more strident criticism of Starmer’s authorities.

Over the previous week he has demanded a brand new nationwide inquiry into historic grooming instances involving sexual exploitation of women by gangs of primarily British-Pakistani males in a number of UK cities and cities. He has turn out to be “fascinated” by the grooming gangs scandal, mentioned one rightwing commentator, partially as a result of “it’s so horrific”. Here’s more on Musk’s plan to remove Starmer.

And right here’s what we’re protecting tabs on right now:

• Los Angeles wildfires: Authorities have confirmed the primary deaths and ordered greater than 100,000 residents depart their houses as fires continue to rage within the Los Angeles area.

• Ukraine: US Secretary of Protection Lloyd Austin hosts the Ukraine Protection Contact Group assembly for the ultimate time on the Ramstein Air Base in Germany.

• Financial information: Brazil’s statistics company publishes retail gross sales information for November whereas Mexico releases inflation figures for December.

• Federal Reserve: Members of the federal reserve board communicate at a collection of occasions, a day after minutes from the final assembly revealed the US central financial institution will take a “careful approach” to rates of interest this yr.

• Rates of interest: Mexico’s central financial institution releases minutes from their most up-to-date financial coverage assembly and Peru’s central financial institution proclaims its newest price determination.

• Lebanese politics: Lawmakers are as a result of elect a president in a essential gauge of how a weakened Hizbollah will have the ability to wield its influence.

• Jimmy Carter’s state funeral: Joe Biden will ship the eulogy for the thirty ninth US president on the Washington Nationwide Cathedral.

5 extra high tales

1. Firms kicked off 2025 by borrowing a document $83.4bn, the best comparable determine since 1990. The frenzy of latest debt gross sales comes as spreads — the distinction between the yield on company debt versus safer authorities bonds — are close to multi-decade lows. Here’s why companies are rushing to borrow so much money.

• UK borrowing prices: The UK bond market sell-off deepened, hitting the pound and threatening the Labour authorities’s spending plans.

• Bond market ‘police’ are again: Capital markets have entered a new era of antagonism with governments, write FT market reporters.

2. China is to launch its largest sale of offshore payments in a transfer to help the renminbi, as Wall Road boosts its bets against the currency over weak point on the planet’s second-largest financial system and Donald Trump’s menace of tariffs. The Individuals’s Financial institution of China mentioned it could promote Rmb60bn ($8.2bn) of payments in Hong Kong in January, its largest single sale since auctions started within the territory in 2018.

3. Nuclear vitality teams are attempting to shrink reactors to the scale of delivery containers in a bid to compete with batteries as a supply of zero-carbon vitality. Firms consider they’ll substitute diesel and gasoline mills utilized by all the things from information centres to offshore oil and gasoline platforms. Here’s more on the race to develop “microreactors”.

4. Hurricanes, fires and different disasters prompted $320bn of losses in 2024, making final yr the most costly for the insurance coverage trade since 2017, when the hurricane trio of Harvey, Irma and Maria struck the US. Munich Re, the world’s largest reinsurance group, mentioned final yr’s losses had been a few third greater than the yr earlier than and highlight the impact of climate change.

5. Claudia Sheinbaum yesterday hit again at US president-elect Donald Trump’s proposal to rename the Gulf of Mexico, suggesting US territory that was beforehand a part of Mexico, together with California and Texas, ought to be known as “Mexican America” as she stood in entrance of a colonial-era map from 1607. Christine Murray reports from Mexico City.

• The FT View: Europe is confronting a new online threat to democracy, not from autocracies corresponding to Russia, however from the likes of Elon Musk, writes our editorial board.

Information in-depth

The present giant American navy presence in Greenland demonstrates the Arctic island’s very important geostrategic significance to US safety. As local weather change reshapes the area and opens new buying and selling routes near North America, Greenland’s significance is only going to increase.

We’re additionally studying . . . 

• Venezuela: Nicolás Maduro dangers losing the support of his military chiefs and will undergo the identical destiny as Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, opposition chief María Corina Machado informed the Monetary Instances.

• Work traits to observe in 2025: Working It podcast host Isabel Berwick talks to specialists within the fields of administration and management about the year ahead. Join Isabel’s weekly e-newsletter here for extra on the world of labor.

• Apple: Indonesia is sustaining its ban on the sale of Apple’s iPhone 16. Here’s why.

Chart of the day

Non-public firms are staking claims to radio spectrum on the Moon with the goal of exploiting an emerging lunar economy, Monetary Instances analysis has discovered. Final yr, the variety of business filings to a worldwide co-ordinating physique for lunar spectrum outstripped these from house businesses and governments for the primary time.

Take a break from the information

Netflix’s new historic drama American Primeval takes us back to the 1850s and the fringes of the Utah Territory and is the most recent collection in TV’s Western renaissance.