Economy
SpaceX launches another Starship rocket but it tumbles out of control
After back-to-back explosions, SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship again on Tuesday evening, but fell short of achieving some of its most important testing goals when the spacecraft tumbled out of control and broke apart, adding fresh engineering hurdles to CEO Elon Musk’s increasingly turbulent Mars rocket program.
The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket, the core of Musk’s goal of sending humans to Mars, blasted off on its ninth demo from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas, which residents voted this month to organize as an official city.
Musk’s SpaceX hoped to release a series of mock satellites following liftoff, but that got nixed because the door failed to open all the way.
The spacecraft flew beyond the point of two previous explosive attempts earlier this year that sent debris streaking over Caribbean islands and forced dozens of airliners to divert course, before it began spinning as it skimmed space toward an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced “a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” or burst apart. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test,” the company said in an online statement.
Musk noted in a post on the social media platform X that it was a “big improvement” from the two previous demos, which ended in flaming debris over the Atlantic. Despite the latest setback, he promised a faster launch pace moving forward, with a Starship soaring every three to four weeks for the next three flights.
It was the first time one of Musk’s Starships – intended for moon and Mars travel – flew with a recycled booster. There were no plans to catch the booster with giant chopsticks back at the launch pad, with the company instead pushing it to its limits. Contact with the booster was lost at one point, and it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico in pieces as the spacecraft continued toward the Indian Ocean.
Then the spacecraft went out of control, apparently due to fuel leaks.
“Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” said SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot. The company had been looking to test the spacecraft’s heat shield during a controlled reentry.
Communication ceased before the spacecraft came down, and SpaceX ended its webcast soon afterward.
The previous two Starships never made it past the Caribbean. The demos earlier this year ended just minutes after liftoff, raining wreckage into the ocean. No injuries or serious damage were reported, although airline travel was disrupted.
Risk-tolerant
Besides taking corrective action and making upgrades, SpaceX modified the latest spacecraft’s thermal tiles and installed special catch fittings. This one was meant to sink in the Indian Ocean, but the company wanted to test the add-ons for capturing future versions back at the pad, just like the boosters.
The recent setbacks indicate SpaceX is struggling to overcome a complicated chapter of Starship’s multibillion-dollar development. But the company’s engineering culture, widely considered more risk-tolerant than many of the aerospace industry’s more established players, is built on a flight-testing strategy that pushes spacecraft to the point of failure, then fine-tunes improvements through frequent repetition.
Starship’s planned trajectory for Tuesday included a nearly full orbit around Earth for a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean to test new designs of its heat shield tiles and revised flaps for steering its blazing reentry and descent through Earth’s atmosphere.
But its early demise, appearing as a fireball streaking eastward through the night sky over southern Africa, puts another pause in Musk’s speedy development goals for a rocket bound to play a central role in the U.S. space program.
NASA needs SpaceX to make major strides over the next year with Starship – the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built – in order to land astronauts back on the moon. Next year’s moonshot with four astronauts will fly around the moon, but will not land. That will happen in 2027 at the earliest and require a Starship to get two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back off again.
Mishap probe
Federal regulators had granted SpaceX a license for Starship’s latest flight attempt four days ago, capping a mishap investigation that had grounded Starship for nearly two months.
The last two test flights – in January and March – were cut short moments after liftoff as the vehicles blew to pieces on ascent, raining debris over parts of the Caribbean and disrupting scores of commercial airline flights in the region.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) expanded debris hazard zones around the ascent path for Tuesday’s launch and pushed the liftoff outside peak air travel times.
The previous back-to-back failures occurred in early test-flight phases that SpaceX had easily achieved before, in a striking setback to a program that Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur who founded the rocket company in 2002, had sought to accelerate this year.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest individual and a key supporter of U.S. President Donald Trump, was especially eager for success after vowing in recent days to refocus his attention on his various business ventures, including SpaceX, following a tumultuous foray into national politics and his attempts at cutting government bureaucracy.
Closer to home, Musk also sees Starship as eventually replacing the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as the workhorse in the company’s commercial launch business, which already lofts most of the world’s satellites and other payloads to low-Earth orbit.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng were expected to meet on Sunday to try to prepare ground for potential agreements on artificial intelligence, tariffs and critical minerals for a high-stakes Washington summit this week between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The meetings at JPMorgan Chase’s headquarters in Manhattan, which will also include U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer, were due to start at about 10:30 a.m. (2.30 p.m. GMT) and are expected to run all day.
Reuters reported that the Chinese vice premier arrived in New York with visuals also showing him entering the banking giant’s headquarters.
Key topics will be the status of a U.S.-China trade truce that is set to expire on Nov. 10, flows of Chinese rare-earth magnets and critical minerals that U.S. officials say are insufficient, and potential guardrails for artificial intelligence after reports of key security breaches involving AI models.
The most likely outcome, analysts say, would be for Washington and Beijing to agree on small steps to show they are continuing to avoid escalating tensions in a delicate trade relationship that has major consequences for the global economy.
“I think there will be some show of deliverables because of the fact that it’s a presidential summit coming, but I don’t feel like we’re on the verge of some sort of breakthrough,” said Anna Ashton, a longtime China trade analyst and founder of Ashton Intelligence.
“I think the status quo is probably both sides’ general best expectation.”
Many of the issues that He, Bessent and Greer will have to work through for Trump and Xi are holdovers from the two leaders’ meeting in Beijing in May, including an effort on both sides to cut tariffs on non-strategic goods and Chinese pledges to increase purchases of U.S. agricultural goods by $17 billion a year and to purchase more than 200 Boeing aircraft.
The Bessent-He-Greer meeting follows a pattern set over the past 16 months, in which the three officials met in European and Asian cities to tee up potential agreements for Trump and Xi.
These efforts included the November 2025 truce reached in Busan, South Korea, which capped U.S. tariffs imposed during Trump’s second term in office at about 20% on Chinese goods after tit-for-tat escalation had brought them to triple-digit levels on both sides.
The U.S. Supreme Court later struck down the Trump tariffs that were invoked under a national emergencies law, including duties related to fentanyl trafficking.
Trump’s administration has been rebuilding them under new authorities, including restoring a 12.5% tariff on Chinese goods over forced labor allegations. It is finalizing a separate tariff investigation aimed at curbing excess industrial capacity that it says is rampant in China.
Under that truce, China promised to restore the flow of critical minerals to the U.S. and global users. However, a senior U.S. official told reporters on Friday that China’s performance on that front “has not been up to par” and would be a topic for discussion ahead of the Trump-Xi summit.
New talks on AI
The Bessent-He discussions on AI are significant because the U.S. and China are the two major forces driving the development of advanced AI tools and the global adoption of the technology.
Rare earths play a crucial role in the manufacturing of advanced semiconductor technology powering AI.
Bessent said on Friday he expects the discussions to cover “both open- and closed-weight models.” Open-weight models are AI systems with publicly accessible core elements, where users can download and fine-tune them for specific tasks.
Chinese open-weight models are becoming more popular with U.S. companies because they can be cheaper than closed-weight AI tools such as those developed by Anthropic, OpenAI and other U.S. companies.
“The United States remains the leader in AI. And we are open to discussions on avoiding shared risks and avoiding bifurcation of our two systems,” Bessent said in a statement regarding the China talks.
Bessent has called for the U.S. and China to agree on AI “guardrails,” aimed at keeping powerful models out of the hands of malign non-state actors.
Tariff reductions, investment
The U.S. and China also agreed in May to launch discussions to reduce tariffs for non-strategic goods under a so-called “Board of Trade” mechanism along with a similar forum to deal with specific investment issues.
While the Trump administration has tightened restrictions on U.S. companies investing in some industries in China, Reuters reported on Friday that it is working on rules that would likely allow U.S. pharmaceutical firms to invest in promising Chinese drugs and strike licensing deals for them.
China’s Ministry of Commerce said on Saturday that He would also lead a delegation of Chinese companies to the U.S. that would participate in economic and trade consultations ahead of the summit.
The business delegation, which mirrors a group of U.S. CEOs that Trump brought to Beijing in May, was announced as Trump expressed openness to Chinese automakers building factories in the U.S.
U.S. auto industry groups on Friday urged Trump to maintain an effective ban on Chinese vehicle sales in the U.S. on national security grounds.
Few states may be better positioned to tax billionaires than California. The state is politically left-leaning, faces significant health care funding needs and is home to as many as 250 billionaires whose combined wealth exceeds $2 trillion.
But the Nov. 3 ballot initiative Proposition 40, which asks Californians whether to impose a one-time 5% tax on the state’s billionaires, is far from certain to pass, political analysts say, amid a debate that has raised questions about income inequality and the state’s future business prospects.
Whether and how to tax the ultrawealthy are questions that extend well beyond the Hollywood Hills and Silicon Valley.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a Democrat and democratic socialist, filmed a video in front of billionaire investor Ken Griffin’s penthouse as part of an ultimately successful campaign to tax high-end second homes in the city. Even a majority of Republicans see billionaires as creating unfairness and contributing to economic woes, one 2025 poll showed.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll in August found 64% of independent registered voters in the six-day nationwide poll said they support increasing taxes on corporations and billionaires, compared to 15% who oppose the idea.
“Billionaires are no longer very popular,” said University of California, Berkeley economics professor Emmanuel Saez, a researcher of wealth inequality who helped write Proposition 40. They have “enormous wealth, enormous power.”
Saez describes the proposal as very simply “a tax on billionaires to fund health care.”
California has more billionaires than any other state, according to a Forbes estimate last year, and is home to some of the country’s most valuable companies, including tech giants Google, Apple, Meta and Nvidia .
Polls show it ahead – for now
A UC Berkeley IGS Poll in August found 48% of likely voters supported Proposition 40, with 41% opposed, while a September Public Policy Institute of California poll showed it leading 52% to 46%.
California ballot measures typically need robust early support to survive Election Day. Undecided voters are more apt to vote “no” when the time comes, political analysts say, and opponents have yet to crank up their advertising campaign.
“California ballot measures tend to lose support over time, and if it’s polling below 50% in August, that’s not a good sign for its prospects,” said John Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College.
Backers say California’s measure would generate $100 billion for health care, food assistance and education. But skeptics peg the revenue estimate at closer to $40 billion and say it could also drive some billionaires out of state, depriving California of future tax revenue and investment.
Opposition has been bolstered by billionaires such as Sergey Brin, the Google co-founder who has spent more than $100 million to defeat Proposition 40 and support countermeasures on the same ballot that would effectively void it.
“I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place,” Brin, 53, whose family left the Soviet Union when he was a child, told the New York Times.
Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat widely believed to be running for president in 2028, also opposes Proposition 40, instead advocating for a nationwide federal wealth tax.
Colorful initiative history
California ballot initiatives draw unusual attention because the state combines a powerful direct-democracy system with the nation’s largest state economy and population. The process allows citizens to propose laws, though most initiatives are drafted by interest groups or lawyers.
Proposition 13 in 1978, which capped and rolled back property taxes, became a national symbol of a tax revolt that shaped U.S. politics.
But California voters have only approved one in three citizen initiatives historically.
In 2022, another California ballot measure aimed at increasing taxes on top earners, Proposition 30, lost 58% to 42%, even though Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly two to one.
“Sixty percent of Californians now reliably vote Democratic for statewide races, but that doesn’t mean that they’re really liberal on taxing, spending, or even many social issues,” said Thad Kousser, a professor of political science at UC San Diego.
European countries including France, Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Germany repealed wealth taxes between 1997 and 2018 amid concerns about capital flight, avoidance and economic competitiveness. The California proposition is retroactive to Jan. 1, limiting billionaires’ ability to escape the tax by moving.
Saez said the tax was unlikely to prompt many billionaires or the tech startups that are making people wealthy to move, because of the quality of California’s universities, research, infrastructure and talent.
“It’s just absurd to think that Silicon Valley is going to come to a standstill because of a billionaire wealth tax,” he said.
The U.S. emerged as the second-top destination for Turkish exports in the first eight months of the year, with shipments surging close to 13% compared to the same period a year earlier, according to a report on Sunday.
Türkiye’s exports to the U.S. increased by 12.9% year-over-year in the January-August period, reaching approximately $9.64 billion (TL 470.11 billion), the report by Anadolu Agency (AA) indicated. The U.S. thus became the second-largest destination for Turkish exports.
The country’s total exports increased by 4% on a yearly basis in the January-August period, rising from $177.9 billion to $185 billion, according to data compiled from Türkiye Exporters Assembly (TIM).
During the same period, Germany ranked first among Türkiye’s top export destinations, with exports totaling $13.58 billion.
When looking at trade with the U.S., exports surged from some $8.54 billion during the same period last year to $9.64 billion this January-August, approaching the $10 billion mark.
In Türkiye’s exports to the United States during the first eight months of the year, the chemicals and chemical products and electrical and electronics sectors stood out, while exports by the steel sector in August increased by a staggering 404.6% versus the same month last year.
According to sectoral export data for the U.S., exports of chemicals and chemical products increased by 33.7% during the January-August period compared with the same period last year, climbing from $780.3 million to slightly over $1 billion.
Automotive exports reached $841.2 million
Exports from the electrical and electronics sector to the U.S. also increased by 41.8% during this period, rising from $702.8 million to $996.4 million.
Meanwhile, the automotive industry was also among the sectors that exported the most to the United States. Its exports increased by 3.5% during the first eight months of the year, reaching $841.2 million.
During the same period, exports of cereals, pulses, oilseeds and related products increased by 4.7% to $596.9 million, while exports of ready-to-wear clothing and apparel rose by 6.5% to $594.8 million.
Similarly, sales of machinery and equipment also posted a yearly increase of about 27.2% to $530.8 million, while carpet exports rose by 5.2% to $486.7 million.
Istanbul’s exports to U.S. up by 9.1%
Looking at exports by province, Istanbul recorded the highest level of exports to the United States during the January-August period, totaling $3.42 billion. Istanbul’s exports to the U.S. increased by 9.1% compared with the same period last year.
Istanbul was followed by the capital, Ankara, with $976.5 million, the western province of Izmir with $819.7 million, Gaziantep in the south with $816.4 million, and the northwestern province of Kocaeli with exports totalling some $700.3 million.
Ankara’s exports to the United States increased by 53.5%, Gaziantep’s by 16.8%, Kocaeli’s by 13.6% and Izmir’s by 11.3%, respectively.
Exports from Bursa also increased by 25.7% during the same period, reaching $566.8 million, while exports from Eskişehir rose by 25.5% to $436.4 million.
Türkiye has revoked the license of Bank Mellat, one of Iran’s largest private banks, according to the decision published in the country’s Official Gazette early on Saturday.
The move follows a decision by Türkiye’s banking regulator over the Tehran-based bank, which provides financial support to Iran’s government and is subject to U.S., EU and U.K. sanctions, according to OpenSanctions, an open-source database of information on sanctions-hit entities.
The Iranian government is also the largest shareholder of the bank, it said.
In revoking Bank Mellat’s license, the Turkish regulator cited article 71b of the banking law, which says the entity’s “continued operation poses a threat to the rights of depositors and participation fund holders and to the security and stability of the financial system.”
The move comes two weeks after Washington imposed sanctions on a smaller Türkiye-based bank over alleged ties to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
A recent data breach at Australian graphic design platform Canva has affected information linked to 424 organizations or institutions in Türkiye, according to the country’s data protection authority.
According to Canva’s notification, the breach occurred after unauthorized access to a third-party tool used by the company as a data controller.
The threat actor is believed to have extracted certain personal data through a connection with the data processor.
The number of individuals impacted by the breach in Türkiye has not yet been determined, the private broadcaster CNBC-e said, citing a notice from the Personal Data Protection Authority (KVKK).
The affected data included various details belonging to employees of Canva’s customers.
According to the KVKK notice, the exposed information included first and last names, work email addresses, workplace locations and business telephone numbers.
The breach was not limited to employees’ contact information, the authority said.
Customer order forms, contracts, invoices, data protection agreements and master service agreements shared with Canva were also among the affected data, to the extent that they had been provided to the platform.
Other routine business correspondence conducted by companies through Canva may also have been affected, according to the notice.
A security research company has managed to break into OpenAI’s internal systems using the latest software from Anthropic, the firm said Friday, exposing how quickly the technology can carry out sophisticated cyberattacks.
The researchers from security firm Hacktron said they found a security flaw in OpenAI’s public help forum, run by the Discourse platform, that allowed them to take control of the site.
“We immediately reported the initial vulnerability to OpenAI and Discourse and worked with them to coordinate the patch,” Hacktron said in a blog post.
“We appreciate their attention to detail and fast resolution of this issue,” the post added.
OpenAI confirmed the flaw was fixed within about 14 hours of being notified and paid the researchers a $6,500 reward.
“We thank the researchers for contacting us and sharing their findings. We narrowed the permissions on Community sign-in tokens and revoked affected tokens and sessions,” said Drew Pusateri, an OpenAI spokesperson.
The Hacktron researchers said they initially used Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 to identify and exploit the software flaw, but struggled to make it work consistently.
After Anthropic released Claude Opus 5, the researchers said the newer model produced a working hack within about three hours.
The hackers did not use Claude Mythos, a more capable Anthropic model that is restricted to a small group of vetted cyber-defense organizations.
Anthropic has described Mythos as having the strongest cybersecurity capabilities of any model it has built.
Hacktron said the underlying software flaw is not unique to OpenAI and is used across many companies’ products, including those made by Slack and Meta.
The firm said it is continuing similar tests at other companies.
The case adds to growing concern among security experts that AI tools are making it faster and cheaper to carry out sophisticated cyberattacks that once required specialized teams and months of work.
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