Update (1100ET): Upon seeing this exclamation from the dismally-polling Green leader. Elon Musk took to X (the platform she demands be shutdown for too much free-speechifying) to make some demands of his own...
I demand that she be shut down for treason against France!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026As Remix News detailed earlier, French Green leader Marine Tondelier has reiterated her calls for social media platform X to be temporarily shut down, claiming its owner Elon Musk is using it to interfere in French politics and promote Marine Le Pen ahead of the 2027 presidential election.
Tondelier, general secretary of the Ecologists and a declared presidential candidate, suggested that suspending X for one month would improve political debate in France.
“If X were to stop for a month, it would do a world of good for the French public debate,” she said, as cited by Libération.
She claimed the platform could not be treated merely as a question of freedom of expression or freedom of enterprise because it was controlled from the United States by an owner seeking to influence European politics.
“This tool is owned by someone based in the United States, with a supremacist ideology, who clearly wants to push Europe into total submission to the United States,” Tondelier said.
She also accused Musk of wanting Le Pen elected and argued that his intervention exposed what she described as the “hypocrisy” of the National Rally’s patriotism.
“The algorithm of this social network is rigged,” she claimed.
“The ‘ratings’ meant to indicate the veracity of posts are now a source of further fake news.”
Tondelier also complained that environmental claims she posts on the platform are routinely challenged and said female politicians face persistent cyberbullying.
In January last year, she said, “This network must be banned in Europe. Whether I leave it or not, it will still have an impact on the real world. It will contribute to destabilizing the next elections,” adding that X was a “source of suffering, as a politician and as a woman.”
Her comments followed Musk’s public endorsement of Le Pen last month.
Responding to an American account discussing her polling strength and the possibility of mass deportations under a National Rally government, Musk wrote, “She is France’s last hope.”
Despite the outburst, Tondelier remains a marginal contender in the presidential race.
Recent IFOP polling places her support at about 4 percent, with other surveys putting her between 3 and 5 percent.
Le Pen, by contrast, is polling at approximately 35 percent and is strongly positioned to reach the second round of the election.
Tyler Durden Thu, 08/06/2026 - 10:30After tightening sharply following last week's (pre-Situational Awareness) rout which sent hyperscaler CDS to the widest on record, AI bond spreads are blowing out again this morning - with SpaceX bonds - which have quickly emerged as the fulcrum bond security of the AI world - plunging this morning on news that for the third time in a year, Alphabet which has emerged as the credit (both on and off balance sheet) nexus of the AI supercyle, is looking to raise another $25 billion from its latest US investment-grade bond offering, a deal that will again test investor appetite for AI-related debt following a July selloff when bond AI-linked bond spreads exploded to all time wides.
The offering, which will very likely be upsizied (just as the illl-fated SpaceX bond offering) will be Alphabet's third since November.
In February, the Google parent issued more than $30 billion in new debt, including multiple non-US tranches. The offering followed a similar bond issuance from November 2025, when Alphabet sold $25 billion in debt, quadrupling its long-term debt to $46 billion. Since then Google's debt has surpassed over $100 billion and is rising at an astronomic pace; one can only hope the rating agencies don't notice.
According to Bloomberg, Alphabet is offering notes in as many as 10 parts, with maturities ranging from two to 40 years. Initial price talk for the longest-tenored tranche is a premium of about 1.55 percentage points above Treasuries. No final decision has been made on the size, according to people familiar with the matter, however it is likely that - as always - there will be excess demand leading to significant oversubscription, with the bond then sliding after it starts trading.
Virtually every bank is an underwriter on the offering which will need all the help it can get: Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and Wells Fargo are managing the sale, Bloomberg said.
Alphabet’s offering comes one month after Amazon issued an identical amount of debt, and just two weeks after the company again raised its 2026 spending outlook, which triggered fresh worries about whether massive artificial-intelligence investments will pay off. Investor appetite for bonds to help fund capex cooled in July as Alphabet increased its forecast to as much as $205 billion, more than double 2025’s outlays.
Meanwhile, as the market finally started paying attention to good, old on-balance sheet debt, the flood of off-balance sheet continued with BlackRock last week selling $12.5 billion of bonds tied to a Meta data center SPV in Texas. Initial demand was very poor, following soft interest for an offering by Amazon.com.
Immediately afterward, bond spreads across the Hyperscaler sector blew out to record wides in the secondary market, as we reported on multiuple occasions.
However, following the historic short squeeze in the past week (sparked by.... nobody really knows) sentiment improved again as August began, helped by gains in US Treasuries.
“We’ve had a few days now of positive reactions from investors across corporates and especially technology,” said Brett Kozlowski, portfolio manager at GW&K Investment Management. “But another large debt deal will still test the depth of that and be worth watching.”
Sure enough, after sliding by almost 20bps in the past week, hyperscaler spreads have already cut their gains in half after blowing out by almost 10bps since Tuesday, a move that is set to accelerate as even more debt comes to market.
Alphabet, which sold more than $50 billion of debt in the first half of 2026, and Amazon have led the AI-infrastructure borrowing spree. Alphabet last tapped the US high-grade debt market in February, before selling bonds in Swiss francs, British pounds, euros, Canadian dollars and Japanese yen. It also issued nearly $85 billion of shares two months ago.
The explosive growth in CapEx is why Alphabet posted its first quarter of negative cash flow since its 2004 initial public offering.
The hope is that at some point, all this massive investment will lead to a surge in EBITDA. The only problem is what happens if nearly-free Chinese open-weight models end up dominating the market while US hyperscalers duke it out in the biggest spending spree since the Nuclear arms race. And, as we reported overnight, that's precisely what is happening.
Tyler Durden Thu, 08/06/2026 - 10:14