A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.
The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.
In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.
A businessman with ties to Chinese military contractors was among the overseas investors who acquired stakes in SpaceX while it was still a private company. An entity linked to the Qatari royal family also took a stake.
The new details come from a private investor list obtained by ProPublica that sheds light on a particularly delicate issue for Elon Musk’s rocket company: which people in countries like China bought into the company, and how. SpaceX built its business off sensitive US government work like making spy satellites for the Pentagon. While there is no ban on Chinese investment in US military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated.
In a sign of its sensitivity to the concerns, SpaceX barred investors from China and Hong Kong from buying shares in its initial public offering last week due to “regulatory and compliance risks,” Bloomberg reported. The US government alleges that China has a strategy of using investments in sensitive industries for espionage and to get access to cutting-edge technology.
Le 12 août prochain, une éclipse solaire offrira un spectacle rare aux observateurs du monde entier. Visible depuis la France métropolitaine, elle promet des conditions d’observation particulièrement impressionnantes dans certaines régions. Mais attention : admirer le Soleil, même partiellement...
Around 66 million years ago, an asteroid wiped out 75% of the species on Earth. This event caused the extinction of all dinosaurs except birds, referred to as non-avian dinosaurs. However, an open question in paleontology is whether the dinosaurs were already declining before the asteroid hit. Many scientists think that around 5 to 10 million years before the extinction event, dinosaurs became less biologically diverse across America, making them more prone to extinction.
To investigate this hypothesis, scientists recently revisited fossils in a rock layer from the end of the dinosaur era that previous researchers had incorrectly dated. The bulk of the fossils from this period had previously been collected from a different section of rocks called the Hell Creek Formation in Montana. These researchers studied a rock layer in New Mexico that is exposed to the surface, known as the Naashoibito Member. It’s approximately 30 meters (about 100 feet) thick and formed from ancient river sediments.
To determine when the Naashoibito Member formed, the scientists measured the decay of radioactive elements within its mineral grains over time, a technique called radiometric dating. The scientist reasoned that these mineral grains must have crystallized before being transported and incorporated into the Naashoibito Member, so their youngest ages should provide a maximum depositional age.
They determined the ages of 1,046 crystals of the mineral feldspar from 2 dinosaur-bearing rock layers in the Naashoibito Member. Based on these ages, the researchers found that a sandstone within 5 meters (about 16 feet) of the lowest boundary of the Naashoibito Member must be younger than 66.9 million years old. They found that the other layer, which is around 3.5 meters (11 feet) from the base of the lowest boundary, must be younger than 66.4 million years old. These age ranges indicated that the sandstone contains dinosaur fossils formed 400,000 years before their extinction.
Next, the researchers measured the direction of magnetic minerals inside the rocks, using a practice called magnetostratigraphy. The direction of these minerals indicates where Earth’s magnetic field was pointing at that time. Scientists have shown that the Earth’s magnetic field has flipped multiple times over Earth’s history, so they can use these magnetic signals to create a timescale for when the sediments formed.
The researchers wanted to determine whether the magnetic minerals were lined up in a direction like today, called normal polarity, or the opposite, called reverse polarity. The researchers found one rock layer with normal polarity at the base of the Naashoibito Member, and one with reverse polarity in the upper part of the Naashoibito Member. These magnetic field directions lined up with 2 known polarity intervals over a timeline that matched the feldspar dates. Together, these data demonstrated that the Naashoibito Member formed at the end of the dinosaur era, around the same time as the Hell Creek Formation.
Next, the researchers wanted to test whether non-avian dinosaurs maintained their diversity across different regions of Western North America during this time period. They compared fossil patterns from locations across North America using statistical grouping methods that determine how similar or different their environments were. They found that temperature, rather than geographical location alone, was the best predictor of diversity at the extinction event.
The team concluded that a diverse population of Naashoibito dinosaurs lived at around the same time as the Hell Creek dinosaurs. Earlier scientists surmised that dinosaurs were already on the decline because they studied the colder northern regions, where diversity was lower. However, these results suggest that warmer conditions in the south still supported diverse dinosaur populations. Together, this evidence suggests that dinosaurs were still diverse and thriving 66 million years ago, and that their extinction was indeed a result of the asteroid impact.
The word Rolex has five letters, two syllables, and works in every language a marketer might want to sell into. It is short enough to sit on a watch dial without crowding the hands, blunt enough to pronounce in German, French, Japanese, and Hindi without distortion, and abstract enough to mean nothing at all. A young Bavarian named Hans Wilsdorf registered it as a trademark in 1908 in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, years before he had a factory of his own. The name came first. The watches followed.
That sequence — invent the word, secure the word, then build the company around it — is one of the earliest known examples of what marketers would later call a coined brand. Wilsdorf did it in 1908 for a product he did not yet manufacture.
Wilsdorf had ended up in London after a stint at a watch exporter in La Chaux-de-Fonds. By his mid-twenties he was importing Swiss movements and casing them in England under the unglamorous name Wilsdorf & Davis. He wanted something better. He wanted a name that was short, memorable, pronounceable in any European tongue, and small enough to be legible above the 12 o’clock marker of a wristwatch barely 30 millimetres across.
The constraints were real.
Try the test yourself. Write your favourite watch brand on a dial 30 millimetres wide, leaving room for hour markers, a logo, and the hands. Patek Philippe is thirteen letters and a space. Vacheron Constantin is eighteen. Jaeger-LeCoultre is fifteen and a hyphen. Rolex is five. On a wrist seen from across a room, five wins.
The phonetics of a global product
The cleverness sits in what the word avoids. There is no diphthong that collapses in Mandarin. No silent letter that an English speaker would mispronounce in French. No umlaut. No accent. No consonant cluster that trips an Italian tongue. The two syllables — ro and lex — are phonemes that exist in nearly every major language. A Tokyo retailer and a Geneva concierge say the word almost identically.
This was not accidental. By his own account, Wilsdorf wanted a name that was short, easy to say and remember in any language, and that looked good on a dial — a goal he later described as the reason he ran through hundreds of letter combinations before settling on Rolex, as Rolex itself recounts in its company history. He had also learned, selling watches across the British Empire and into continental Europe, that brand names with national flavour travelled badly.
He got one. Rolex is the closest thing the watch industry has ever produced to a piece of linguistic infrastructure — a sequence of sounds engineered to survive translation.
Trademark first, factory later
Wilsdorf registered the name in Switzerland in 1908 — the surviving registry entry is dated 2 July 1908 and lists the La Chaux-de-Fonds office of Wilsdorf & Davis, as the original trademark record reproduced in horological archives shows. He was still operating out of London and still casing movements supplied by Hermann Aegler’s workshop in Bienne. He did not own a Swiss manufacturing operation. He owned a word, an import-export business, and a hunch that wristwatches — at that point still dismissed as women’s jewellery, a prejudice Space Daily has explored in detail — would become the dominant form of timekeeping for men within a generation.
He was right on both counts. The First World War, with its trench officers needing both hands free, did for the wristwatch what no advertising campaign could. By 1919 Wilsdorf had relocated to Geneva, partly because British post-war duties made exporting from London punishing, and partly because anti-German sentiment in Britain had already pushed him to rename the firm The Rolex Watch Co. Ltd. in 1915, a change Britannica attributes to wartime prejudice against the German-sounding Wilsdorf name. The company that became synonymous with Swissness was Swiss almost by accident of geopolitics.
What a name buys you
Coining a word does something specific that descriptive names cannot. A descriptive name — Universal Geneve, International Watch Company — tells you what the thing is and where it comes from, and that’s the ceiling of its meaning. A coined word is an empty vessel. Whatever you pour into it over decades of advertising, sponsorship, and product, the word holds.
Wilsdorf began pouring almost immediately. The company developed the Oyster case, among the first commercially viable waterproof wristwatches. In 1927 a young London typist named Mercedes Gleitze, the first British woman to swim the English Channel, wore an Oyster during a high-profile Channel swim, and Wilsdorf took out prominent newspaper advertising to promote it. The word Rolex had its first myth.
The dress watch market is still organised around names of this kind. A 2025 Esquire review of a dress watch describes the category in language Wilsdorf would have recognised: thinness, legibility, restraint. The dials of the watches sitting next to it in auction catalogues all carry short, abstract words. Omega. Cartier. Tudor. Seiko. The naming convention Wilsdorf arrived at in 1908 became the default the rest of the industry now follows.
The decision that made Rolex unbuyable
Naming was the first of two structural decisions that made Rolex what it is. The second came after the death of Wilsdorf’s wife, Florence. Childless and grieving, he created the Hans Wilsdorf Foundation and, in his will, left every share of Rolex to it. When he died in 1960, the foundation became the sole owner. That arrangement — which Space Daily has covered separately — means no shareholder can demand a dividend, no rival can buy the company, and no quarterly report has to be filed. Rolex’s finances remain opaque because there is no legal obligation to publish them.
The opacity is the point. Because the company discloses nothing, every revenue figure is an outside estimate: analysts at Morgan Stanley and LuxeConsult put Rolex’s annual wholesale revenue above CHF 11 billion in their most recent reading, while cautioning that the brand publishes no official figures of its own. The foundation, a registered Swiss charitable trust, directs funds to charitable causes, including children’s charities — a nod to Wilsdorf’s own childhood as an orphan.
In 2023, Rolex agreed to buy Bucherer, its largest retailer, consolidating a distribution partner it had worked with for a century. A privately held watchmaker had moved to absorb its own biggest distributor, the kind of step no public company answerable to shareholders would have executed so quietly.
The freedom to make moves like that traces back to two decisions taken decades apart by the same man. First, in 1908, to coin a word with no national origin and trademark it before he had a factory. Second, decades later, to put the company beyond ownership. The first decision gave Rolex a name that could be sold anywhere. The second made sure no one could ever sell Rolex.
What five letters still do on a dial
Pick up a Submariner. The word sits above the centre pinion in a sans-serif crown-logo lockup that has barely changed in eighty years. Five letters. About four millimetres wide on a 40 mm dial. The eye reads it before it registers the hour. On a black bezel diving watch under a cocktail-bar lamp, the word is legible at three metres. On a gold Day-Date across a boardroom table, it’s legible at five.
That legibility is a function of letter count. Six letters would have required a smaller font. Eight would have required either a smaller font or a curved arc that distorts the reading angle. Five fits the optical sweet spot of a wristwatch dial almost perfectly — the horological equivalent of a logo built for a smartphone home screen, except Wilsdorf made the choice in 1908, when the dominant timepiece was still a pocket watch on a chain.
There is a reason the watch industry has not produced another Rolex-style word in the 118 years since. Most of the obvious five-letter, language-neutral combinations were registered long ago. The rest sound like pharmaceuticals. Coining a word that means nothing and survives a century of meaning being poured into it is harder than it looks, and the field is crowded with failures whose names you have already forgotten.
The trademark filing in La Chaux-de-Fonds in 1908 predated the existence of Rolex SA as an independent Swiss manufacturer by years. It predated the Oyster case by nearly two decades. It predated the foundation that owns the company today by several decades. It predated the watch on the wrist of an English Channel swimmer by nearly twenty years. For most of its first decade, the word Rolex sat on watches whose movements were made by other people, in cases assembled by other people, sold under a name that belonged to a young Bavarian importer in a rented London office. The word did the work. The factory caught up later.
Look at a Rolex dial today and you are reading a piece of linguistic engineering that is older than the Russian Revolution, older than the Model T, older than the first transatlantic flight. The hands have moved roughly a billion times around it. The word has not.
The Guardrails Alliance, which has raised $5 million, is positioning itself as a populist effort that will take on the pro-A.I. interests trying to influence this year’s elections.
Generator’s shares rise as regulator finds no evidence of misleading statements about fuel’s sustainability
The City watchdog has closed an investigation into the owner of the Drax power plant after an almost 10-month review into whether the company’s sustainability claims mislead shareholders.
The Financial Conduct Authority said it had “reviewed thousands of pages” of “complex material” relating to the company’s sourcing of wood pellets for the Drax power plant in Selby, North Yorkshire, but “did not find evidence that justified any further action”.
En mars 2026, le cyclone Jolina ravageait l'Afrique du Nord. Quelques années plus tôt, la tempête Daniel tuait des milliers de personnes à Derna, en Libye. Ces catastrophes ont un nom peu connu du grand public : les médicanes. Le réchauffement climatique leur donne de l'ampleur.
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Harlan Coben's I Will Find You is now streaming on Netflix — here's everything you need to know about Matthew's disappearance and David's false imprisonment.
We're about six weeks out from the debut of Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home. It's been five years since Spidey graced the big screen, so naturally, Sony Pictures has released a new trailer to build audience anticipation.
(Spoilers for No Way Home below.)
No Way Homeended on a pretty bleak note, with Peter Parker (Tom Holland) asking Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to erase him from everyone’s memory to protect the multiverse, including MJ (Zendaya).
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