Elon Musk strikes towards Keir Starmer

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

• Elon Musk examines ousting the UK’s prime minister

• Firms borrow document quantities

• Why Donald Trump needs 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, based on 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 stated.

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 circumstances involving sexual exploitation of ladies 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, stated one rightwing commentator, partially as a result of “it’s so horrific”. Right here’s extra on Musk’s plan to take away Starmer.

And right here’s what we’re maintaining tabs on right this moment:

• Los Angeles wildfires: Authorities have confirmed the primary deaths and ordered greater than 100,000 residents go away their properties as fires proceed 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 converse at a sequence 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 12 months.

• 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 pronounces its newest fee resolution.

• Lebanese politics: Lawmakers are on account of elect a president in a vital gauge of how a weakened Hizbollah will have the ability to wield its affect.

• 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 very 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. Right here’s why firms are speeding to borrow a lot cash.

• 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 brand new period 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 Avenue boosts its bets towards the foreign money over weak point on the earth’s second-largest economic system and Donald Trump’s menace of tariffs. The Folks’s Financial institution of China stated it might 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 power teams are attempting to shrink reactors to the scale of transport containers in a bid to compete with batteries as a supply of zero-carbon power. Firms consider they’ll exchange diesel and gasoline mills utilized by every thing from information centres to offshore oil and gasoline platforms. Right here’s extra on the race to develop “microreactors”.

4. Hurricanes, fires and different disasters triggered $320bn of losses in 2024, making final 12 months 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, stated final 12 months’s losses had been a few third greater than the 12 months earlier than and spotlight the influence of local weather 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 reviews from Mexico Metropolis.

• The FT View: Europe is confronting a new on-line menace to democracy, not from autocracies resembling Russia, however from the likes of Elon Musk, writes our editorial board.

Information in-depth

The prevailing massive American army 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 simply going to extend.

We’re additionally studying . . . 

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

• Work developments to look at in 2025: Working It podcast host Isabel Berwick talks to specialists within the fields of administration and management concerning the 12 months forward. Join Isabel’s weekly e-newsletter right here for extra on the world of labor.

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

Chart of the day

Personal firms are staking claims to radio spectrum on the Moon with the intention of exploiting an rising lunar economic system, Monetary Instances analysis has discovered. Final 12 months, the variety of business filings to a worldwide co-ordinating physique for lunar spectrum outstripped these from area companies and governments for the primary time.

Take a break from the information

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