Forbes list honors self-made women

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order doubling U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum to 50%, effective Wednesday, with one exception: Imports from the U.K. will remain at the original 25% rate. The administration is aiming to protect national security and boost domestic production, according to the order. Meanwhile, the White House was eyeing a Wednesday deadline for other trading partners to present their best offers in negotiations around "reciprocal" tariffs, Reuters reported, citing a draft letter to those nations.

Nvidia has reclaimed the crown of the world’s most valuable company amid renewed investor optimism over the AI chipmaker’s growth prospects. The shares rose 2.8% to close at $141.22 on Tuesday, giving it a market cap of $3.45 trillion. That surpassed LinkedIn-parent Microsoft, whose market valuation stands at $3.44 trillion. Nvidia’s stock has soared over 45% from its April low, adding $1 trillion in market value. Last week’s quarterly results, in which revenue surged 69% to $44 billion, signaled that Big Tech spending on AI shows no sign of slowing.

Forbes rolled out its list of the world's richest self-made women this week, with ABC Supply co-founder Diane Hendricks topping the ranking with a net worth of $22.3 billion. According to the outlet, the number of self-made women billionaires on the list has more than doubled over the last decade to 38. Rounding out the list's top five are Epic Systems founder and CEO Judy Faulkner, Little Caesars matriarch Marian Ilitch, Wonderful Company co-owner Lynda Resnick, and SHI International CEO Thai Lee.

Creativity is not about stepping outside a box—it is about realizing that the box was never there to begin with. The greatest breakthroughs in human history did not come from those who merely pushed the limits; they came from those who refused to acknowledge those limits at all. Innovation does not arise from working around restrictions but from dismantling them entirely. The moment we accept that creativity has no fixed shape, no rigid structure, and no predefined path, we open ourselves to a world of infinite possibilities. Every remarkable invention, every revolutionary idea, has been born from an unshackled mind that dared to challenge convention.

Boundaries are often illusions—constructed by society, reinforced by tradition, and accepted as reality. But imagination does not conform to these artificial constraints. It soars beyond them, reshaping the world in ways that once seemed impossible. From the first flight of the Wright brothers to the digital revolution, history is a testament to the power of those who refused to be confined by what others deemed possible. True creativity is not about thinking differently within an existing framework—it is about redefining the framework itself, or better yet, realizing that no framework is needed at all.

When we free ourselves from the notion that creativity must follow rules, we unlock the potential to dream, to invent, and to transform. The most profound discoveries and artistic masterpieces come from those who refuse to accept limitations, who see opportunities where others see obstacles, and who believe that imagination is boundless. The future belongs not to those who work within constraints but to those who dissolve them, proving that true hashtag#Innovation begins where limitations end, and where the fearless mind dares to explore the unknown.

 Alarm over China's stranglehold on critical minerals grew on Tuesday as global automakers joined their U.S. counterparts to complain that restrictions by China on exports of rare earth alloys, mixtures, and magnets could cause production delays and outages without a quick solution.

German automakers became the latest to warn that China's export restrictions threaten to shut down production and rattle their local economies, following a similar complaint from an Indian EV maker last week.

China's decision in April to suspend exports of a wide range of critical minerals and magnets has upended the supply chains central to automakers, aerospace manufacturers, semiconductor companies, and military contractors around the world.

The move underscores China's dominance of the critical mineral industry and is seen as leverage by China in its ongoing trade war with U.S. President Donald Trump.

Trump has sought to redefine the trading relationship with the U.S.'s top economic rival, China, by imposing steep tariffs on billions of dollars of imported goods in hopes of narrowing a wide trade deficit and bringing back lost manufacturing.

Trump imposed tariffs as high as 145% against China only to scale them back after stock, bond, and currency markets revolted over the sweeping nature of the levies. China has responded with its own tariffs and is leveraging its dominance in key supply chains to persuade Trump to back down.

Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to talk this week, White House spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt told reporters on Tuesday, and the export ban is expected to be high on the agenda.

"I can assure you that the administration is actively monitoring China's compliance with the Geneva trade agreement," she said. "Our administration officials continue to be engaged in correspondence with their Chinese counterparts."

Trump has previously signaled that China's slow pace of easing the critical mineral export ban represents a violation of the Geneva agreement.

Shipments of the magnets, essential for assembling everything from cars and drones to robots and missiles, have been halted at many Chinese ports while license applications make their way through the Chinese regulatory system.

The suspension has triggered anxiety in corporate boardrooms and nations' capitals - from Tokyo to Washington - as officials scrambled to identify limited alternative options amid fears that production of new automobiles and other items could grind to a halt by summer's end.

"If the situation is not changed quickly, production delays and even production outages can no longer be ruled out," Hildegard Mueller, head of Germany's auto lobby, told Reuters on Tuesday.

Frank Fannon, a minerals industry consultant and former U.S. assistant secretary of state for energy resources during Trump’s first term, said the global disruptions are not shocking to those paying attention.

“I don’t think anyone should be surprised how this is playing out. We have a production challenge (in the U.S.), and we need to leverage our whole-of-government approach to secure resources and ramp up domestic capability as soon as possible. The time horizon to do this was yesterday,” Fannon.

Diplomats, automakers, and other executives from India, Japan and Europe were urgently seeking meetings with Beijing officials to push for faster approval of rare earth magnet exports, sources told Reuters, as shortages threatened to halt global supply chains.

A business delegation from Japan will visit Beijing in early June to meet the Ministry of Commerce over the curbs and European diplomats from countries with big auto industries have also sought "emergency" meetings with Chinese officials in recent weeks, Reuters reported.

India, where Bajaj Auto (BAJA.NS), opens new tab, warned that any further delays in securing the supply of rare earth magnets from China could "seriously impact" electric vehicle production is organizing a trip for auto executives in the next two to three weeks.

In May, the head of the trade group representing General Motors (GM.N), opens new tab, Toyota (7203.T), opens new tab, Volkswagen (VOWG.DE), opens new tab, Hyundai (005380.KS), opens new tab and other major automakers raised similar concerns in a letter to the Trump administration.

"Without reliable access to these elements and magnets, automotive suppliers will be unable to produce critical automotive components, including automatic transmissions, throttle bodies, alternators, various motors, sensors, seat belts, speakers, lights, motors, power steering, and cameras," the Alliance for Automotive Innovation wrote in the letter.

 (AP) — Elon Musk blasted President Donald Trump’s“big, beautiful bill” of tax breaks and spending cuts as a “disgusting abomination” on Tuesday, testing the limits of his political influence as he targeted the centerpiece of Republicans’ legislative agenda.

The broadside, which Musk issued on his social media platform X, came just days after the president gave him a celebratory Oval Office farewell that marked the end of his work for the administration, where he spearheaded the Department of Government Efficiency.

“I’m sorry, but I just can’t stand it anymore,” Musk posted on X. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination. Shame on those who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”

The legislation, which has passed the House and is currently under debate in the Senate, would curtail subsidies that benefit Tesla, Musk’s electric automaker.

The tech billionaire followed his criticism with a threat aimed at Republicans.

Related Stories

Trump pushes a July 4th deadline for tax bill as Republican senators dig in

Elon Musk is leaving the Trump administration

Can Trump fix the US debt? Even Elon Musk has doubts

“In November next year, we fire all politicians who betrayed the American people,” he wrote in another X post.

It’s a sharp shift for Musk, the world’s richest person, who spent at least $250 million supporting Trump’s campaign last year. He previously pledged to help defeat Republican lawmakers deemed insufficiently loyal to Trump, but now he’s suggesting voting them out if they advance the president’s legislative priority.

However, it’s unclear how Musk will follow through on his criticism. He recently said he would spend “a lot less” on political campaigns, though he left the door open to political involvement “if I see a reason.”

The tech titan’s missives could cause headaches for Republicans on Capitol Hill, who face conflicting demands from Trump and their party’s wealthiest benefactor.

Alex Conant, a Republican strategist, said “it’s not helpful” to have Musk criticizing the legislation, but he doesn’t expect lawmakers to side with Musk over Trump.

“Senate Republicans are not going to let the tax cuts expire,” Conant said. “It just makes leadership’s job that much harder to wrangle the holdouts.”

Trump can change the outcome in Republican primaries with his endorsements, but Musk doesn’t wield that level of influence, Conant said.

“No matter what Elon Musk or anybody else says — and I don’t want to diminish him because I don’t think that’s fair — it’s still going to be second fiddle to President Trump,” said Republican West Virginia Sen. Shelley Moore Capito.

Musk’s business interests stand to take a hit if lawmakers approve Trump’s bill, which would slash funding for electric vehicles and related technologies. Musk is the chief executive of Tesla, the nation’s largest electric vehicle manufacturer, and SpaceX, which has massive defense contracts.

Last month, Musk said he was “disappointed” by the spending bill, a much milder criticism than the broadside he leveled Tuesday.

The budget package seeks to extend tax cuts approved in 2017, during Trump’s first term at the White House, and add new ones he campaigned on. It also includes a massive buildup of $350 billion for border security, deportations and national security.

To defray some of the lost tax revenue to the government and limit piling onto the nation’s $36 trillion debt load, Republicans want to reduce federal spending by imposing work requirements for some Americans who rely on government safety net services.

Musk’s post threw another hurdle in front of Senate Majority Leader John Thune’s already complex task to pass a bill in time for Trump to achieve his goal of signing it by July 4. The South Dakota Republican has few votes to spare in the GOP’s slim 53-seat majority.

Two of the Senate’s most fiscally hawkish Republicans quickly backed Musk.

“We can and must do better,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul wrote on X. Utah Sen. Mike Lee said “federal spending has become excessive,” adding that it causes inflation and “weaponizes government.”

Still, Trump enjoys fierce loyalty among the GOP base, and in the end, his opinion may be the only one that matters.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt played down Musk’s criticism.

“The president already knows where Elon Musk stood on this bill,” Leavitt said, and Musk’s post “doesn’t change the president’s opinion.”

The tension in the GOP delighted Democrats, who found themselves in the unlikely position of siding with Musk. Democrats are waging an all-out political assault on GOP proposals to cut Medicaid, food stamps and green energy investments to help pay for more than $4.5 trillion in tax cuts — with many lawmakers being hammered at boisterous town halls back home.

“We’re in complete agreement,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said of Musk. The New York Democratic lawmaker stood alongside a poster-sized printout of Musk’s post during a Capitol news conference.

The last time Musk weighed in significantly on legislation, the scenario was far different. His power was ascendant after the election, with Trump joining him for a rocket test in Texas and appointing him to spearhead DOGE.

During the transition period, Musk started whipping up opposition to legislation that would prevent a government shutdown, posting about it repeatedly on X. Trump soon weighed in, encouraging Republicans to back out of a bipartisan deal. Lawmakers eventually patched together a new agreement.

Self-driving cars have seemed the ultimate unfulfilled promise. Everyone from Tesla (TSLA.O), opens new tab boss Elon Musk to ousted Nissan (7201.T), opens new tab Chair Carlos Ghosn has hailed, opens new tab the impending mass arrival of vehicles that can dispense with human drivers, only for much-hyped timelines to pass by. Recently, though, the tone has shifted. Costs are falling; adoption in early markets is rising; artificial intelligence heralds new capabilities. Challenges still loom, but robotic taxis are looking more inevitable.

Musk perhaps best embodies the sense of missed expectations. Over the past decade, he has promised that truly autonomous vehicles were coming first in 2018, then 2019, and so on, to the point that he dubbed himself the “boy who cried” full-self driving. Even when limited tests were delivering rides with no people behind the steering wheel, incidents like General Motors-owned (GM.N), opens new tab Cruise’s tragic pedestrian collision in 2023 seemed critical setbacks.

Now, though, things are moving faster. Tesla is internally committed to launching a robotaxi service later this month in Austin, Texas, Bloomberg reported. But they’re already playing catch-up.

Alphabet-controlled (GOOGL.O), opens new tab Waymo operates commercial services in multiple cities; in San Francisco, its market share has exceeded traditional ride-hailing app Lyft (LYFT.O), opens new tab, according to analysts at venture capital firm Bond, opens new tab. The technology is moving out of early hotspots in the U.S. and China, too: this year, WeRide (WRD.O), opens new tab, started to serve passengers in Abu Dhabi. Waymo is conducting tests in Japan.

Behind the optimism is one major factor: cost. First, take the cars themselves. Morgan Stanley analysts, totting up the wealth of sensors they sport to map the world and computing grunt to traverse it, estimated in October that Waymo’s current-generation vehicles cost over $120,000. Its upcoming car, by their reckoning, could fall to $85,000. By July, Goldman Sachs estimated that specialized vehicles could ring in at $50,000 by 2030.

In the interim, though, Baidu (9888.HK) opens a new tab. CEO Robin Li told analysts that the company could bring costs to under $30,000. Elon Musk has suggested that Tesla could do that, too. Higher production volume is key. For Tesla, so too is eschewing expensive sensors like lidar. Those still hewing to the gizmos may get a boost, too: Chinese manufacturer Hesai Technology says its latest lidar is half the price of the previous generation.

Actually delivering on these boasts is another matter. Getting any of the way there, though, would be hugely significant, since depreciation accounts for the majority of per-ride costs, according to TD Cowen. Yet operating expenses must come in line, too.

Initial stabs at self-driving were a tangle of neural networks and hard-coded rules, requiring vast quantities of real-world data to finesse. Key to the process was not just using regular maps, but minutely surveying areas of operation, which requires constant updates.

The appeal of Tesla’s approach is that it avoids this step, using camera feedback to make on-the-fly decisions. The likes of UK-based Wayve and China’s Pony AI (PONY.O), open a new tab, meanwhile, are using generative AI to create virtual training scenarios to prepare their models for the statistically unlikely but potentially ride-ending “corner cases” that human drivers can readily handle. This could make expansion less laborious: Wayve, for instance, claims that its software was able, opens new tab to navigate unfamiliar U.S. and German roads with only a few weeks of additional training.

Of course, technology sometimes fails, and a human must be on hand to observe and potentially take over. Today, robotaxi operator Pony AI lets one person monitor as many as a dozen cars, a person familiar with the matter told Breakingviews. What may limit that ratio in the end is public debates over safety. Analysts’ and industry insiders’ estimates for how many supervisors will be required range anywhere from one for every five vehicles to one for every fifty. Ultimately, though, this is squeezing a small part of the total expenses. Morgan Stanley pegs mobile operators at under 5% of Waymo’s vehicle-level per-mile costs.

Given the momentum, profitability seems plausible. Analysts at Huatai foresee Guangzhou-headquartered Pony AI’s vehicles costing 200,000 yuan, around $28,000, by 2028. If that happens, vehicle depreciation, remote monitoring, maintenance, and other expenses like insurance could be roughly 100,000 yuan annually, all-in. Charging as little as 3 yuan per kilometer, if it can cover some 300 kilometers for 340 days per year – in the ballpark of what a human taxi driver manages, opens new tab in super-dense cities – would yield double that in revenue, even accounting for the fact some of those miles will be without passengers.

There remain corporate expenses like research, financing, and more. Still, analysts polled by LSEG see everything coming into balance, forecasting a net profit for Pony AI by 2029. Compatriot WeRide, which also operates other, simpler kinds of autonomous services like street-sweeping, may get there by 2027, per the estimates.

Caveats apply. A working robotaxi is one thing; finding customers is another. Operators like Waymo and WeRide have thus far tended towards partnering with ride-hailing apps like Uber (UBER.N), opens new tab. These dominant platforms will take their cut, possibly as much as 30% of gross bookings, analysts at TD Cowen reckon.

Political tensions may stymie international expansion. The U.S. has effectively banned Chinese-connected car technology within its borders. The constant threat of stricter controls on chips and chip-making gear from Uncle Sam could be a hurdle for manufacturers in the People’s Republic.

There are other wildcards, too. Local regulators’ decisions on things like the required number of monitors or where fleets can operate are just the beginning, nudging the scales of cost and revenue. A single tragic accident, like the fatal crash that sunk Cruise, could trigger tighter controls and spook customers. Powerful lobbies could keep robotaxis out of certain markets entirely.

It's therefore easy to understand why some CEOs are wary. Yu Kai, boss of Volkswagen partner Horizon Robotics, told Breakingviews that the current generation of autonomous cars is akin to a horse – “smart enough” to get from A to B most of the time, yet not so smart that riders can simply take a nap. Musk himself once preached that getting to 90% of miles driven autonomously is the easy part, with the final 10% being a much tougher challenge. Robotaxis are now all about profitably claiming those final miles.

Ford Motor Company's U.S. sales jumped more than 16% year-over-year in May, the automaker said Tuesday. An employee pricing program meant to offset the Trump auto tariffs helped boost that figure, as did double-digit increases in the sales of gas and hybrid vehicles (17.2% and 29%, respectively). One weaker area: all-electric vehicles, which saw a 25% sales drop from last May. Ford has also recently instituted price hikes on some cars, partly in response to the tariffs.