Good morning, dear readers,
For Franziska Giffey those fateful days have begun that many top politicians go through after heavy electoral defeats. Everything seems clear on the user interface of the official announcements: the SPD has become the second strongest force in Berlin, the previous red-green-red coalition still has an absolute majority. So formally there is nothing wrong with continuing with Giffey as Governing Mayor. In three months nobody will probably be talking about the fact that the SPD has a lead of only 105 votes over the Greens.
But beneath this interface run the uncharted channels of intra-party power. This fluid can change its direction of flow in a matter of hours, can dry up territories thought to be safe or build up into sudden tidal waves. Whether Giffey can dive through these waves or whether she will be swept away: that was still open on Monday evening.
The deputy state chairman of the Berlin SPD, Kian Niroomand, demanded in the “Spiegel”: “There was a clear mood of change. We can’t ignore that and just carry on like this. The election must be an occasion for a new beginning.”
“New beginning” is the term among party friends that is usually used to encapsulate a demand for resignation. On the other hand: Giffey survived the meeting of his own state board on Monday without an uprising. Perhaps it helped that she used the word “humility” several times throughout the day. A term that is usually used among party friends to mean that after a bad result, you definitely don’t want to just go back to business as usual before going on to business as usual.
SGL Carbon announces a very different farewell to the user interface of power: bmw-Major shareholder Susanne Klatten resigns as head of the carbon fiber specialist’s supervisory board in May. The 60-year-old wants to give up her mandate on the supervisory board after the general meeting on May 9 for personal reasons.
Klatten, who is considered the richest woman in Germany, was actually elected until 2025. “Your commitment as the main shareholder of SGL Carbon remains unaffected by your personal decision to resign from the Supervisory Board,” emphasized the company.
Klatten, and with her BMW, once placed great hopes in the materials from SGL Carbon for the ultra-light construction of electric cars in particular. However, these hopes were never really fulfilled.
According to a representative survey, the battery car in Germany meets with surprisingly large reservations anyway. As an Allensbach survey commissioned by the German Academy of Science and Technology showed, it is a Majority of Germans are convinced that the electric drive will prevail in the next ten years, but only 22 percent think this is desirable.
The circle for which the purchase of an e-car is generally considered is 23 percent. The main reservations are the purchase price, too few charging stations, expensive electricity and doubts about the environmental balance. According to their own assessment, the car is indispensable for 72 percent of those surveyed.
Microsoft has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, the company that invented ChatGPT. The Google parent company Alphabet presented a similar technology at the beginning of February: the artificially intelligent application Bard. When Bard blundered at a presentation and made a false statement, Alphabet lost around $170 billion in market value in two days. This shows impressively how much artificial intelligence (AI) is seen by investors as a key topic for the future. But who will lead the segment? Google or Microsoft?
Most analysts are forecasting price gains for both stocks. However, anyone who chooses one of the two companies today does not primarily invest in AI, but in two completely different business models. At Alphabet, advertising contributes almost 80 percent of revenue, the cloud business almost ten percent. At Microsoft, on the other hand, the cloud accounts for almost 40 percent, with the remainder shared roughly between the commercial and private software businesses.
Our chart shows: In the past few months, more could be earned with Microsoft shares. In the long run, however, Alphabet has made its shareholders vastly wealthier.
It is probably the finest denial ever issued by the White House. In view of the speculation surrounding the downed flying objects over North America, spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre felt the need to clarify: “There is no evidence of aliens or extraterrestrial activities in these recent launches.”
Within a few days, the US military first shot down a suspected Chinese spy balloon and then three other unidentified flying objects. There is hardly any information about these three missiles. The denial became necessary after a reporter asked the commander of the US Northern Command, Glen VanHerck, if he could rule out that extraterrestrials were behind the missiles. The general’s response: “I’ll leave it to the intelligence and counterintelligence services to figure that out. I haven’t ruled anything out at this point.”
Any decent alien invasion would begin with denials from the US government – we’ve learned this from countless Hollywood films. And only a decorated general (played by George Clooney) and a resourceful reporter (Sandra Bullock) wouldn’t go for the cover-up. On their own, they go to the impassable region where one of the missiles is said to have landed. There they make an unexpected discovery…
I wish you a day where you let your imagination run wild.
Best regards
Your Christian Rickens
Editor-in-Chief Handelsblatt
PS: Many corporations are reducing office space as a result of the increase in working from home and are using this as a savings program. This is shown by a Handelsblatt survey of the 40 Dax companies and ten large family businesses. We are interested: Can you report something similar? How has your workplace changed in the years since the beginning of the corona pandemic? Does it make sense for employees to still work from home for a few days or should everyone be in the office? Write us your opinion in five sentences at [email protected]. We will publish selected articles with attribution on Thursday in print and online.
