For years, France’s Eutelsat has been trying to build a European alternative to Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite broadband service.

The company merged with British satellite venture OneWeb in 2023, consolidating the region’s satellite communications industry in an effort to catch up to Starlink, which is owned by SpaceX.

Last week, the French state led a 1.35-billion-euro ($1.58 billion) investment in Eutelsat, making it the company’s biggest shareholder with a roughly 30% stake.

Europe largely lags behind the U.S. in the global space race. Starlink’s constellation of over 7,000 satellites dwarfs Eutelsat’s. Meanwhile, Europe’s launch capabilities are more limited than the U.S. The region still relies heavily on America for certain launch services, which is a market dominated by SpaceX.

Eutelsat currently has a market capitalization of 1.6 billion euros, much lower than estimates for Starlink owner SpaceX’s value, which was pegged at $350 billion in a secondary share sale last year. In 2020, analysts at Morgan Stanley said that they see Starlink growing to $80.9 billion in their “base case valuation” for the firm.

Luke Kehoe, industry analyst at network monitoring firm Ookla, said France’s investment in Eutelsat shows the country “is now treating Eutelsat less like a commercial telco and more like a dual-use critical-infrastructure provider” and a “strategic asset” in the European Union’s push for technological sovereignty.

However, building a European competitor to Starlink will be no mean feat.

Relations between the U.S. and Ukraine soured following the election of President Donald Trump and reports surfaced that U.S. negotiators had raised the possibility of cutting Ukraine’s access to Starlink.

Germany set up 1,000 Eutelsat terminals in Ukraine in April with the aim of providing an alternative — rather than a replacement — for Starlink’s 50,000 terminals in the war-torn country.

Since then, U.S.-Ukraine tensions have somewhat cooled, and Starlink remains the primary satellite broadband provider to the Ukrainian military.

Eutelsat’s former CEO Eva Berneke has herself admitted that the company cannot yet match Starlink’s scale.

“If we were to take over the entire connectivity capacity for Ukraine and all the citizens — we wouldn’t be able to do that. Let’s just be very honest,” she said in an April interview with Politico.

Berneke was replaced as CEO in May by Jean-Francois-Fallacher, a former executive of French telecoms giant Orange.

“Eutelsat’s higher altitude satellites are leveraged for specialized use cases, such as polar coverage for companies and research facilities in remote regions like Greenland and Alaska,” said Joe Vaccaro, vice president and general manager at Cisco’s ThousandEyes network intelligence unit.

Looking ahead, Eutelsat said it plans to “build upon its operation improvements” with a “differentiated go-to-market model” and “strong European anchoring.” It also noted that the U.K. government could also increase its investment in Eutelsat “in due course.”

Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the automaker completed its first driverless delivery of a new car to a customer, routing a Model Y SUV from the company’s Austin, Texas, Gigafactory to an apartment building in the area on June 27.

The Tesla account on social network X, which is also owned by Musk, shared a video overnight showing the Model Y traversing public roads in Austin, including highways, with no human in the driver’s seat or front passenger seat of the car.

Tesla did not say which version of its software and hardware had been installed and used in the car shown in the clip — or if and when that technology would be commercially available to its customers.

A Model Y owners’ manual, available on the Tesla website, says that in order to use Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) option — which is the company’s most advanced, partially automated driving system available today — owners must keep their hands on the wheel, and remain ready to take over steering or braking at any time.

The vehicle in Tesla’s video was shown operating without a driver on the highway, passing through residential streets and around parking lots before arriving and stopping for a handoff to a customer. The buyer was waiting by the curb at an apartment building alongside Tesla employees, some sporting logo-emblazoned shirts. (The curb was painted red, indicating it is a no-stop fire lane.)

In 2016, Tesla shared an Autopilot video — known as the “Paint It Black” video — that had been staged in a manner which exaggerated its cars self-driving capabilities, depositions later revealed.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) is investigating Tesla over possible safety defects in their FSD systems, and recently sought more information from the company about its robotaxi debut after its cars were seen violating some traffic rules. 

In posts on X on Friday, Musk wrote: “The first fully autonomous delivery of a Tesla Model Y from factory to a customer home across town, including highways, was just completed a day ahead of schedule!! Congratulations to the @Tesla_AI teams, both software & AI chip design!”

He also wrote, “There were no people in the car at all and no remote operators in control at any point. FULLY autonomous! To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fully autonomous drive with no people in the car or remotely operating the car on a public highway.”

Musk’s claim about the “first fully autonomous drive” on a public highway was not accurate. Alphabet-owned Waymo, which is already operating commercial robotaxi services across multiple U.S. cities, has been offering employees fully autonomous rides on Phoenix freeways since 2024, and has since expanded those rides to Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Head of AI at Tesla, Ashok Elluswamy, said in posts on X that the automaker “literally chose a random customer who ordered a Model Y in the Austin area” to participate. He also said the vehicle delivered is “exactly the same as every Model Y produced in the Tesla factory.”

Elluswamy also noted in a post on X that the Model Y in the driverless delivery traveled at a “max speed of 72 mph.” Most highways in Texas have a maximum speed limit of 70 miles per hour, according to the Texas Department of Transportation website.

Separately, Tesla began a robotaxi pilot program in Austin last weekend involving 10 to 20 of its Model Y SUVs equipped with technology, about which Tesla has revealed little to the public.

The Tesla robotaxi service is available only to select, invited riders who have mostly been influencers and analysts, many of whom generate income by posting Tesla-fan content on platforms like X and YouTube. The Tesla robotaxi vehicles run with a human safety supervisor on board in the front passenger seat, and are remotely supervised by employees in an operations center.

Since 2016, Musk has been promising that Tesla would soon be able to turn all of its existing EVs into fully autonomous vehicles with a simple, over-the-air software update. In his Master Plan, Part Deux, he outlined a future where every Tesla owner would be able to add their car to a “Tesla shared fleet just by tapping a button on the Tesla phone app,” enabling their car to generate income for them while they sleep.

In 2019, Musk said Tesla would have 1 million robotaxis on the road by 2020 — a claim that helped him raise $2 billion at the time from institutional investors.

While Tesla has not fulfilled those promises thus far, the driverless delivery in Texas this week has elicited excitement among believers in Musk and his vision.

Meanwhile, Tesla is battling a brand backlash in response to the CEO’s often incendiary political rhetoric, his endorsements of Germany’s far-right extremist party AfD, and his work for the Trump administration.

Tesla sales have declined year-over-year in key markets, especially throughout Europe, in the first five months of 2025 partly as a result of that backlash. The company is also facing increased competition from EV makers, particularly Chinese brands such as BYD, Nio and Xiaomi, offering more affordable and newer models.

Tesla is expected to disclose its second-quarter vehicle production and delivery numbers on July 2.

A $44 billion IPO. A Senate bill with bipartisan momentum. And now, a wave of Fortune 500 firms launching crypto tokens of their own.

Stablecoins — once a niche corner of the cryptocurrency world — are entering the corporate and policy mainstream, potentially reshaping how money moves in the United States and around the world.

“Many of the users out there today are not aware of stablecoins, or not interested in stablecoins, and they should not be,” said Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal’s SVP of blockchain, crypto and digital currencies. “It should just be a way in which you move value, and in many cases, is going to be an infrastructure layer.”

For corporations, stablecoins are an opportunity to slash millions in transaction fees and turbocharge payment infrastructure with instantaneous settlement.

USDC issuer Circle’s long-awaited public debut exposed a wave of pent-up demand for digital dollars as investors sent the stock soaring as much as 750% in June. Partnerships, and competition, quickly followed.

Coinbase announced a deal with e-commerce platform Shopify to bring USDC payments to merchants. Payments firm Fiserv announced a stablecoin to pair with the 90 billion transactions it processes every year.

“We’re entering the utility phase right now, where the technology has matured. It’s gotten fast, it’s gotten cheap,” said Jesse Pollak, head of base and wallet at Coinbase. “It’s gotten easy to use, and that’s leading to real-world adoption across businesses and consumers.”

Base is Coinbase’s Ethereum layer-2 network, designed to make blockchain applications faster, cheaper, and more accessible to developers and users.

Merchants are a particular focus for stablecoins, as payment processing fees for these businesses totaled a record $187.2 billion in 2024, according to the Nilson Report. Payment companies are looking to fend off potential disruption by stablecoin issuers.

Mastercard this week announced support for four stablecoins on its Multi-Token Network. The private blockchain is targeted toward institutions and promises 24-hour settlement.

Visa’s CEO told CNBC the payment processor is modernizing its infrastructure with the help of stablecoins.

“Visa and MasterCard are leaning into the disruption,” said Nic Carter, founding partner at Castle Island Ventures. “They’re trying to disrupt themselves, so they seem to be ahead of the curve.”

JPMorgan took a slightly different approach to the crypto token boom on Wall Street. The financial giant launched a token backed by commercial bank deposits rather than U.S. dollars.

JPMorgan’s Naveen Mallela, global co-head of Kinexys, the bank’s blockchain unit, told CNBC the JPMD token would allow for round-the-clock settlement for institutional clients looking for faster, cheaper transactions while staying connected to the traditional banking system.

The Senate passed its framework of rules for stablecoins, called the GENIUS Act. The bill includes guidelines for consumer protections, reserve requirements for issuers, and anti-money laundering guidance.

Stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies have faced criticism for their use in illicit activity, and some Democrats argue the bill doesn’t do enough to address those concerns. Those lawmakers also argue the bill doesn’t curtail conflicts of interest, including the recent launch of a stablecoin tied to President Donald Trump through World Liberty Financial.

The crypto-focused firm run by his family is behind the dollar-pegged token USD1.

When asked about Trump’s ties to crypto projects in his name, the White House told CNBC there are no conflicts of interest and the president’s assets are in a trust managed by his children.

“I think it was a mistake for Trump to have a Trump-affiliated DeFi project issue a stablecoin. I think that really set back his stablecoin legislative agenda,” Carter said. “I think we could do it a lot more in terms of tackling these conflicts of interest. And I completely understand the Democrats when they try and weed this out.”

Watch the video above to learn why corporate giants are racing to launch their own crypto tokens