Economy
Musk hits at Trump’s tax bill, calls it ‘disgusting abomination’
Tech billionaire Elon Musk joined the fierce congressional debate over U.S. President Donald Trump’s sweeping tax-cut and spending bill on Tuesday, slamming it and calling it a “disgusting abomination” that will add to the federal deficit.
Several fiscally conservative Republicans in the U.S. Senate supported the views Musk expressed in social media posts, which could complicate the bill’s path to passage in that chamber.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Tesla and SpaceX CEO Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X.
“This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.”
He added: “Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
Musk’s comments hit a nerve. Republican deficit hawks have expressed concerns about the cost of the bill, which would extend the 2017 tax cuts that were Trump’s main legislative accomplishment, while boosting spending on the military and border security.
The House of Representatives passed it by one vote last month, after the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the measure would add $3.8 trillion to the federal government’s $36.2 trillion in debt.
The Senate, also controlled by Trump’s Republicans, aims to pass the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” in the next month, though senators are expected to revise the House version.
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees tax policy, are due to meet with Trump at the White House on Wednesday afternoon to discuss making the bill’s business-related tax breaks permanent, according to Senator Steve Daines, a panel member. Analysts have warned that such a move would greatly increase the measure’s cost.
Republican Senate Majority Leader John Thune said he disagreed with Musk’s assessment about the cost of the bill and stood by the goal of passage by July 4.
“We have a job to do – the American people elected us to do. We have an agenda that everybody campaigned on, most notably the president of the United States, and we’re going to deliver on that agenda,” the South Dakota lawmaker told reporters.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson also dismissed Musk’s complaints, telling reporters, “My friend Elon is terribly wrong.”
Test of influence
Musk’s loud opposition to a bill that Trump has urged Republicans to pass presents a test of his political influence, a week after leaving his formal role in the administration as a special government employee with the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) came to an end. As DOGE chief, he upended several federal agencies but ultimately failed to deliver the massive savings he had sought.
The richest person in the world, Musk, had spent nearly $300 million to back Trump’s presidential campaign and other Republicans in last year’s elections. But he has said he would cut his political spending substantially while returning to his role as Tesla CEO.
The White House dismissed Tuesday’s attack, just as Trump dismissed earlier Musk complaints about the legislation.
“Look, the president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said at a White House briefing. “It doesn’t change the president’s opinion. This is one big, beautiful bill, and he’s sticking to it.”
Republican disagreements
Senate Republicans were divided about the bill even before Musk’s missives. Deficit hawks are pushing for deeper spending cuts than the $1.6 trillion over a decade in the House version, while another coalition of rural-state Republicans are pushing to protect the Medicaid health care program for low-income Americans.
One of the hawks, Senator Mike Lee, called on party members to use the Trump bill and future spending measures to reduce the deficit.
“We must commit now to doing so, as this is what voters justifiably expect – and indeed deserve – from the GOP Congress,” the Utah Republican said on X while reposting Musk’s message.
Republicans have a 53-47 seat majority in the Senate and can afford to lose support from no more than three members, if they expect to pass the legislation with a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance by a July 4 deadline.
Another hardliner, Senator Ron Johnson, predicted that lawmakers would not be able to meet the deadline and secure an adequate number of cuts.
Lee and Johnson are among at least four Senate hardliners demanding that the bill be changed to restrict the growth of the debt and deficit.
The faction of party lawmakers determined to limit spending cuts to project Medicaid beneficiaries and business investments in green energy initiatives is of a similar size.
“I certainly have an interest in making sure people with disabilities are not harmed. But also, there’s the broad issue of how does it affect hospital reimbursements,” Senator Jerry Moran told reporters.
“There’s a set of my colleagues who are pushing to do more. And so it turns on how do you get the votes to pass a bill,” the Kansas Republican said.
Other Senate Republicans said lawmakers may have to look elsewhere to boost savings, including the possibility of leaving Trump’s much-touted tax break proposals for tips, overtime pay and Social Security benefits for later legislation.
“Those are all Democrat priorities. I’m not sure why we shouldn’t be doing that in a potential bipartisan bill to create headspace for this bill,” said Republican Senator Thom Tillis.
Iranian airlines will have trouble functioning globally in two days under the weight of American sanctions, U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent warned Monday, as the Trump administration seeks to keep pressure on Tehran.
On Sept. 23, Wednesday, “all the Iranian airlines will be shut down around the world,” Bessent told CNBC in an interview.
“If they land, you cannot provide them with fuel, you cannot provide them with landing services, you cannot sell them tickets, or you will be knocked out of the dollar system,” he added.
The war in Iran started after the United States and İsrael launched joint strikes in late February.
Tehran countered by blocking the Strait of Hormuz, a vital waterway for energy transit, causing global oil prices to surge as the conflict spread in the Middle East.
Earlier this month, the United States imposed sanctions on “all remaining Iranian airlines” that had yet to face such penalties.
The Treasury Department also took aim at targets for supporting Iran’s aviation sector, including firms based outside Iran.
Bessent previously vowed the United States would declare “economic D-Day” on Iran and pledged to choke off Tehran financially.
Bessent’s comments came a day after he met with Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng for economic talks laying the groundwork for President Donald Trump’s summit this Thursday with Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
China is one of Iran’s top economic partners and diplomatic backers.
Iran’s aviation sector has long grappled with sanctions, which have restricted its ability to acquire aircraft, spare parts and maintenance services.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) briefly climbed past $1 trillion in market capitalization for the first time on Monday, marking a milestone for the chipmaker, which joined a small group of competitors with a similar valuation as investors bet on its expanding role in artificial intelligence computing.
The company’s shares were last up 9% at $610, after surging to an all-time high of $613.92, creating a valuation of just over $1 trillion.
The milestone caps a stellar rally for the Santa Clara, California-based AMD, regarded as the closest rival to AI bellwether Nvidia for graphics processing units (GPUs).
It becomes the fourth U.S. chipmaker to top a $1 trillion valuation, after Nvidia, Broadcom and Micron. Nvidia crossed the mark in 2023 and is now the world’s most valuable company, worth more than $5 trillion.
AMD has accelerated its AI product launches and moved beyond selling individual chips to offering complete systems that combine processors, networking gear and related hardware, helping it compete with Nvidia’s products.
The company is also benefiting from rising demand for central processing units used alongside graphics processors in servers handling inference. That has helped AMD take market share from Intel.
Early last month, AMD forecast quarterly revenue above Wall Street estimates, which fell short of lofty investor expectations, sending its stock down over 7% on the day. Since then, it has leaped over 26%.
Most chip stocks surged on Monday, with Intel jumping around 11%, Qualcomm rising 4.1% and the broader chips index gaining 2.6% to a one-month high.
Türkiye has extended the liquidation period of scores of investment funds at the center of a liquidity crunch that prompted authorities to intervene, while detaining more people and freezing assets linked to executives.
Authorities stepped in last week to shore up market stability after some investment funds defaulted on redemption requests, triggering a sharp selloff in Türkiye’s benchmark stock index. The measures helped the index recover some of its losses.
As part of the intervention, the Capital Markets Board (SPK) mandated Ziraat Bank and Işbank to oversee the liquidation of 131 investment funds managed by seven portfolio management companies, including Tera Pörtfoy, Pusula Pörtfoy and Hedef Pörtfoy, on the TEFAS electronic fund trading platform.
Late Sunday, the SPK said it was extending the liquidation period given to the banks to six months from three months, “considering the portfolio structures of the funds subject to liquidation and market developments.” It did not elaborate. The assets under management of liquidated funds have been said to exceed TL 890 billion ($18.3 billion).
An investigation into suspected share price manipulation has led to the detention of top executives from several firms and drawn scrutiny to concentrated bets in thinly traded stocks.
Treasury and Finance Minister Mehmet Şimşek said Friday the liquidation would not put pressure on Borsa Istanbul Stock Exchange because regulatory changes should prevent any contagion risk. He said authorities would continue to monitor the market closely.
On Saturday, the Justice Ministry said that Pusula Holding Chair Serdar Turhan, Tera Yatırım Holding Chair Emre Tezmen and three fund administrators had been detained as part of the investigation. It said four other suspects had already been arrested and all other suspects identified by the Capital Markets Board had been barred from leaving the country and had their assets frozen.
On Sunday, the ministry said it had identified a transfer of $15 million from Turhan’s account to an account in Switzerland, and another transfer of $25 million from an account belonging to Muhammed Yarız, another executive at Pusula Pörtfoy Yönetim, which is linked with Pusula Holding.
The ministry added that Nihat Kırmızı, the chairman of the Doğa Sigorta firm, was also detained as part of the probe.
15 detained over Katılımevim shares
On Monday, Justice Minister Akin Gürlek said authorities detained 15 people in a probe into transactions involving shares of Katılımevim, a listed Turkish savings financing company that was founded by Pusula Holding’s Turhan, while freezing assets linked to executives at several investment firms.
Prosecutors launched legal proceedings against 25 suspects in the Katılımevim investigation, Gürlek said in a statement. Ten suspects remained at large.
The SPK last week filed criminal complaints against 38 people over alleged manipulation of shares in Katılımevim and two other listed companies, and imposed two-year trading bans on them.
Authorities froze financial and asset transactions involving executives and officials linked to Pusula Finans Holding, Pusula Yatırım Menkul Değerler, Tera Yatırım Menkul Değerler, Tera Portföy Yönetimi, Hedef Holding, Hedef Portföy Yönetimi, Bulls Yatırım Menkul Değerler, Bulls Portföy Yönetimi and Ufuk Yatırım Yönetim ve Gayrimenkul, Gürlek said Monday.
The government has instructed banks, notaries, land registry authorities and financial crimes watchdog MASAK to prevent assets under investigation from being transferred or reduced, Gürlek said.
Authorities also ordered strict monitoring of transactions by board members, authorized signatories, their spouses and close relatives that could reduce their assets, requiring such transactions to be cleared by prosecutors.
The investigation was continuing, Gürlek said.
Tera says working to repay investors
Tera Pörtfoy said Sunday it had repaid some investors and was working to repay others, but that restrictions imposed by authorities were delaying the process.
“Redemption requests submitted during the period when inflows into our funds were being converted into investments surged within a short timeframe, evolving into a collective outflow demand totaling approximately 300 billion Turkish Lira” ($6.15 billion), Tera Pörtfoy said in a statement.
“It should be appreciated that meeting a demand of this magnitude within such a short period would not be easy for any financial institution,” it said, adding that investors had been paid between September 16 and 18 but that further repayments were not possible “due to transaction restrictions and blocks.”
It also said the firm was ready to cooperate with authorities to conclude the process as quickly as possible.
Alphabet’s Google search engine has been slapped with a 403 million euros ($463 million) fine by the European Union after an inquiry into its processing of location data, a watchdog acting on behalf of the bloc said Monday.
Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DCP) found that Google infringed European Union privacy rules known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through three of its specific features – “Web & App Activity,” “Location History” and “Location Accuracy” – from 2018 to 2020.
“As a result of Google’s failures, individuals could have been unaware that their location was being used to, for example, influence them with ads or to infer their interests, and could lose control over their personal data,” DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said in a statement.
“The retention of users’ location data for longer than necessary aggravated this loss of control.”
It was the fourth-largest fine of the more than 4 billion euros in total levied by the DPC since it became the lead EU regulator for most big U.S. tech firms under the strict 2018 GDPR due to the location of companies’ EU operations in Ireland.
Google was also ordered by the DPC to bring its processing into compliance within six months.
In response, the company said the “case centers around historical policies that have since been updated.”
“From 2019 onward, we’ve significantly evolved our practices and launched robust tools that make managing location data simple,” it added in a statement.
The DPC opened the inquiry in 2020 following complaints from several European consumer rights organizations, including the pan-European consumers’ organisation BEUC, regarding Google’s processing of location data.
The infringements included the lawfulness and fairness of Google’s processing of location data in “Web & App Activity,” an account setting that processes information related to users’ activity on Google services, and “Location History,” which keeps track of users’ location through mobile devices.
Google is subject to three other ongoing statutory inquiries, all of which are at an advanced stage, the DPC added.
A fourth-quarter jet fuel deficit looms for Europe, despite its efforts to secure supplies from faraway countries like South Korea, which is preparing to send its highest volume to Europe in four years this September, according to expert analysis and shipping figures.
The continent has been importing more jet fuel from nations including Nigeria, the United States and Canada since the outbreak of the Iran war over half a year ago, which hit Middle East supplies and cut off around half of Europe’s jet imports.
Europe remains highly exposed to the risk of further supply disruption as Middle Eastern tensions rise.
Consultancy Energy Aspects forecasts that Europe will see a fourth-quarter jet fuel deficit of 510,000 barrels per day, against surpluses of 18,000 bpd in the United States and 419,000 bpd in Asia-Pacific. The third-quarter trend is largely the same.
South Korea in September has become the latest large source of jet fuel shipments to Europe, according to flows data. European imports of the fuel from the Asian nation so far in September stand at 129,000 barrels per day, according to commodities intelligence firm Kpler, the highest since October 2022. LSEG data shows similar volumes.
With the continent expected to remain short of jet fuel, Europe’s imports are set to continue, said James Noel-Beswick, head of commodities at market intelligence firm Sparta Commodities.
Jet fuel is one of the so-called middle distillates, which include diesel and gas oil. European diesel hit a record high this week, firmer than Asia’s diesel markets.
The widening spread between the Asian and European benchmarks is making it more profitable to export barrels into Europe, Noel-Beswick added.
Europe’s jet fuel stocks drop
Imports from South Korea also coincide with low inventories, with stocks held independently in the Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp (ARA) oil refining and storage hub hitting their lowest in seven years in the week to Sept. 10.
Asia is a swing supplier of jet fuel to Europe and traders typically turn there when they judge the arbitrage – the relative prices between the two regions – profitable. Average monthly exports last year were 1.5 million barrels, Kpler data showed.
South Korea’s jet fuel output for July hit a seven-year high of almost 13.89 million barrels, while exports reached a 3-1/2-year high, government data showed.
An increase in refinery crude processing rates has contributed to this rise in output, and traders expect crude runs for August to be firmer than July. Provisional government data showed July refining runs at 2.7 million barrels per day, up by 16% from June.
Flights in and out of Scotland, Northern Ireland and the north of England were disrupted Monday due to an air traffic control failure, the latest embarrassment to afflict the U.K. national air traffic controller.
Although NATS, formerly known as National Air Traffic Services, said the issue at its Prestwick center in Scotland has been fixed, the repercussions would likely continue through the day at the very least, with flights canceled or delayed.
“We are working with airports and airlines to safely lift air traffic regulations as quickly as we can to minimize any further disruption,” it said in a statement. “We apologize for the disruption.”
NATS said airports south of Manchester, including those in and out of London, are “broadly unaffected.”
Manchester, Belfast International, Edinburgh and George Best Belfast City airports have seen the most disruption, according to aviation analytics company Cirium.
NATS said the disruption is unconnected with the software glitch that led to the cancellation of over 2,000 flights in and out of the United Kingdom two weeks ago. The chaos prompted mounting calls for its chief executive Martin Rolfe to stand down.
In a report on the outage published Friday, NATS said a software defect in the National Airspace System, which allocates codes so air traffic controllers can identify flights on radar, was behind the decision to ax the flights.
A previous outage in August 2023 cost airlines 100 million pounds ($134 million) and caused travel chaos.
Airlines and airports were aghast at the latest problem to afflict air traffic control over the U.K.
Ryanair, Europe’s biggest airline, said 25,000 of its passengers were facing delays as a result of Monday’s issue and repeated its calls for Rolfe to resign.
“Martin Rolfe has presided over repeated system failures, repeated passenger disruption and repeated failures to deliver an effective back-up system,” its chief operations officer Neal McMahon said. “Enough is enough. Martin Rolfe should resign today.”
Rival airline easyJet had to cancel some flights, saying the latest disruption “once again calls into question the resilience of NATS’ systems and demonstrates the need for firm actions to prevent these repeated failures.”
And British Airways said it is “disappointing” that some customers may experience disruption after “yet another technical fault” involving NATS.
The U.K. government owns 49% of NATS, making it the largest shareholder and giving it a veto over key decisions. Airlines, airports, investors and employees own the remaining shares in the public-private partnership.
“I know this will be deeply frustrating for passengers after the previous issue,” Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander said.
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