If there’s anything buzzy in the tech world, chances are Xavier Niel has caught wind of it. The hacker-turned-entrepreneur owns a sprawling telecom empire, sits on TikTok parent ByteDance’s five-member board, and is a major startup champion, counting French darling Mistral AI among his investments.
The billionaire has had a keen eye on tech developments throughout his career. But he has also witnessed Europe slip behind the U.S. and China in innovation.
Europe has produced some promising startups amid the generative AI frenzy, such as Mistral AI and Aleph Alpha. However, the region will have to do a lot more to keep up with the global AI race.
Niel warns that Europe has a real shot at showing its promise and creativity on the AI front. But if it misses the boat, it could cease to be relevant.
“If Europe doesn’t do this right, it will become a very small continent abandoned for a few generations,” he told the Financial Times in an interview published in November.
What differentiates European AI startups are their “values,” such as privacy and transparency, Niel said. It’s also generating engineering and mathematics-focused talent at its universities, which could give the region an edge—if it moves fast and breaks things, as the saying goes.
“Sure, the world moves faster now; the resources are greater. But there will always be two clever kids somewhere in the world, working out of a garage, with a technological vision or a new idea,” Niel said.
The French mogul, who is estimated to be worth $8.7 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, is at the center of AI developments. His optimism in Europe’s AI prowess has led him to develop the world’s biggest startup incubator in Paris, Station F. He has also coinvested $300 million in a nonprofit AI research lab alongside Eric Schmidt and Rodolphe Saadé.
Still, he worries that if Europe fails to ride the AI wave, it will be reduced to “the nicest place in the world for museums,” Niel told Wired in September. He likened the current AI moment to when search engines became mainstream. Today, they are largely run by American players, such as Google and Microsoft Bing.
“If you want to create a search engine now from scratch, you cannot win because you were not there 25 years ago,” he said.
Other experts have also been concerned about Europe trailing behind and how that might impact the region’s security and defense prospects compared to the rest of the world.
What Niel touts as one of Europe’s strengths has also led to the perception that it regulates AI too harshly, pushing competitors out of its market. The European Union passed a first-of-its-kind draft of AI rules, which some see as groundbreaking while others think it’s restrictive.
In an in-depth report into Europe’s competitiveness, former ECB President Mario Draghi highlighted that AI could open up new opportunities if deployed correctly.
Meanwhile, German tech company SAP’s CEO Christian Klein said overregulation risks holding Europe’s startups back. The likes of Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg and Spotify’s Daniel Ek issued an open letter in September echoing similar concerns, urging Europe to fix its “fragmented and inconsistent” regulations on AI.
Companies on the Fortune 500 Europe list, which ranks the region’s biggest companies by revenue, are slowly but surely integrating AI into advanced applications. Ultimately, Europe’s strategy for addressing challenges could determine whether it’s a winner or a loser.
“Put simply, developing, launching, or just using technology is harder in Europe than it is anywhere else in the world. To stay in the global race, the EU needs a new approach: mitigating the risks of new technology while enabling innovation,” Google’s EMEA president Matt Brittin told Fortune in October.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on November 18, 2024.
Pop star Chappell Roan is no stranger to controversy: She’s gotten pushback for complaining about “abuse and harassment” by strangers in public, canceling a performance at the last minute to prioritize her health, and refusing to endorse a presidential candidate in the last election.
And now, with comments she made last week as a guest on the Call Her Daddy podcast, Roan has really stepped into a hornet’s nest: She’s angered moms.
When asked by host Alex Cooper if she’s still close with friends back home in Missouri, she said that she is, but that their lives are very different, with many of them parents to little children.
“All of my friends who have kids are in hell,” the 27-year-old said. “I actually don’t know anyone who’s, like, happy and has children at this age. I literally have not met anyone who’s happy, anyone who has light in their eyes, anyone who has slept.”
As the oldest of four kids herself, Roan added that her mom had her at 23, asking, “Why did my parents do that?”
The interview quickly moved on—to high school reminiscing, early idols, fame. But many moms have remained stuck on the parenting comments, taking to social media to call Roan out.
“What she said was deeply misogynistic,” noted one critic on Instagram. “Pushing the narrative against mothers. It’s so miserable, it’s so awful blah blah blah.”
Parenting, said another on Instagram, is “hard af don’t get me wrong but to openly sh*t on your friends? After they vented to her in confidence and probably already feel like crap. She’s not doing them any favors, I wouldn’t want to be friends with someone who needs to air out other people’s dirty laundry for the sake of fame. “
Some agreed with that criticism over on X, with one noting that the comments are “a prime example of why you cannot just vent to anyone because I guarantee she has this perspective because a few of her mom friends are going through it,” adding, “May the friendships of narcissistic childless women with no sense of loyalty [never] find me lol.”
Another person on X admitted that, though she loves the pop star, her comment “reinforces the stigma that if you complain about motherhood you must hate your life and your kids. :/ motherhood is hard, not miserable and we don’t hate our kids.”
On the Mom Wars Substack, author Kara Kennedy went so far as to suggest Roan is mom-bashing to further her career, as “hating kids right now is in vogue.”
Still others defended Roan, criticizing those who took offense.
“If you’re a mom and she offended you by sharing her personal opinion from her life (not yours), ask yourself why,” noted an Instagram commenter. “You’re projecting your unhappiness on her. You heard what you wanted to hear, not what she said.”
Added another, “Kids aren’t for everyone. I respect her answer and found it to be honest; not negative.”
Why were Chappel Roan’s comments so triggering?
Laura Markham, a Brooklyn-based clinical psychologist, mother, and parenting coach, understands why the pop star’s comments were a “profound emotional trigger.”
“Parents are doing one of the most difficult jobs imaginable, with very little societal support,” she tells Fortune. “They are often exhausted and sleep-deprived. They feel constant pressure to be ‘perfect’ from social media. Deep down, they desperately need affirmation that their sacrifice matters.”
Moms feeling defensive about what Roan said, Markham explains, is “not insecurity so much as a fear that if they acknowledge the profound challenges too openly, the difficult feelings might overwhelm them.” Our culture, she points out, “offers parents almost no structural support while simultaneously romanticizing parenthood. This creates a perfect storm where parents must convince themselves and others that the struggles are ‘worth it’ because the alternative—admitting how much they need help—feels too vulnerable in a society that judges parental struggle as personal failure.”
TikToker and mom Stella Joy, in a video now seen over 1.2 million times, touched on some similar ideas, and says she believes people got so defensive because “they don’t like having a mirror held up to the fact that they fell for the greatest lie ever told,” which is, from the moment they hold their first baby doll as a kid, that “being a mother is our ultimate goal.”
Markham, meawhile, points to evidence that confirms what Roan observed about unhappiness and parenting: One study, for example, found a decline in well-being once parenting begins. Another found that couples without children were happier in their relationships.
But the big response to Roan’s comments is also evidence of an American political clash, Markham says.
“There is also a significant political backlash right now that glorifies motherhood as women’s ultimate fulfillment, precisely as reproductive rights are being curtailed nationwide,” she says. “For this ideology to succeed, motherhood must be portrayed as universally blissful despite mounting evidence of parental struggle in a society without adequate support systems … When young women like Roan speak openly about the struggles their parent-friends face, it directly challenges a narrative that aims to channel women back toward traditional roles without acknowledging the profound difficulties involved.”
Instead of responding with compassion and acknowledging these systemic issues, she says, “we’re shaming women who speak truthfully about their experiences,” which only further deepens parents’ isolation and “manipulates parents’ genuine love for their children into a weapon against honest conversation.”
Some are really trying to be honest, though—especially on TikTok, where many of the responses to Roan addressed these complexities.
“I struggle with happiness on a daily basis,” said Mallory Brooks, a 26-year-old single mom who defended Roan’s honesty in a video (above) viewed over 900,000 times. “I love my child more than anything in the world,” she said. But on top of the day-to-day difficulties, she added, “a lot of moms are promised happiness as the result of motherhood.” Now she realizes, “I was promised a village that I don’t have.”
The FAA has changed rules that allow the tracking of private jets. The agency also says it’s considering making ownership information private by default at some point in the future. Elon Musk and Taylor Swift have called trackers that use the formerly publicly available data a threat.
The days of being able to monitor where private planes owned by celebrities are coming to an end.
A new rule change at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) will make it easier for owners of those jets to hide their registration information, making it more challenging for tracking sites like the ones created by a college student who caught the wrath of Elon Musk and Taylor Swift.
Private aircraft owners can now submit an electronic request that the FAA withhold their aircraft registration information from public view, meaning it will not be publicly accessible through FAA services. The agency also said it’s evaluating whether to make that information private by default.
This almost certainly puts the final nail in the coffin of popular flight-tracking services like those created by Jack Sweeney. A little more than two years ago, Musk threatened legal action against the founder of the jet-tracking app and permanently suspended the @ElonJet account on Twitter (now X), which tracked the flights of Musk’s private jet, as well as Sweeney’s personal account.
Months later, Taylor Swift’s lawyers filed a cease-and-desist letter to Sweeney, attempting to ban another tracker he created that followed the movements of the pop star, saying, “While this may be a game to you, or an avenue that you hope will earn you wealth or fame, it is a life-or-death matter for our client.”
The rule changes followed the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2024. That Biden-era legislation gave the FAA two years to develop rules that would let private-jet owners keep their personal information hidden.
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