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U. Russia plans its own Starlink as Putin courts Musk
Speaking at a Moscow summit with African leaders on 28 October, Putin praised Elon Musk’s “genius” and said he was in touch with Starlink’s controlling shareholder.
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Transcript
JOHN: Welcome to The Gist. It is Thursday, October 29th, 2026. I’m John.
MARY: And I’m Mary. We are your smart friends on the go. We skip the jargon and look at who really benefits from today’s headlines.
JOHN: Let’s start with a shouting match at the UN. US Ambassador Mike Waltz clashed with Cuba’s foreign minister. Now, Washington is kicking out a Cuban diplomat.
MARY: It is the latest move in a US embargo that started back in 1962. But let’s look at the incentives here. Washington already holds back almost everything from Cuba. So this penalty? It costs the US absolutely nothing.
JOHN: Right. But for Havana, it hurts. Cuba’s best weapon is the annual UN General Assembly vote against the embargo. It is non-binding. It doesn’t force legal action. But it is their one big diplomatic win. Back in 2024, the vote was 187 to 2 against the US.
MARY: The UN mission in New York is where Cuba gathers those votes. Losing a diplomat disrupts that networking. Expect Cuba to call this harassment. But remember the rules of the game. The Helms-Burton Act of 1996 locked the embargo into US law. Only Congress can end it. Until then, diplomacy is just noise.
JOHN: Moving to global security. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is watching the Middle East very closely. According to Politico Europe, he fears a bigger US-Iran conflict will derail Ukraine’s truce talks.
MARY: It comes down to resource flows. Ukraine desperately needs American air-defense systems for the winter. But every flare-up in the Middle East pulls US weapons and attention toward Iran.
JOHN: Oil markets are feeling that same tension. Crude oil fell in early Asian trade today after rising overnight, according to the Wall Street Journal. Traders are guessing. They do not know if the oil supply will actually be cut.
MARY: Let’s pivot to tech. Big spending on Artificial Intelligence is finally showing a payoff. Microsoft reported massive quarterly profits. Their cloud computing growth is accelerating.
JOHN: This calms investors. For months, they asked a simple question: “Will these expensive data centers ever make money?” Microsoft is proving they do. Customers are paying for the capacity.
MARY: Over in China, Tencent’s cloud chief, Dowson Tong, agrees. Bloomberg reports he is defending heavy spending on AI. Tencent is moving away from consumer chatbots. They are focusing on enterprise clients—big businesses—and keeping computing power for their own models.
JOHN: But not all tech news is sunny. Chinese tech hardware stocks took a hit. Some chipmakers reported sales jumping by 1,800 percent. But investors were not fooled.
MARY: Why? Because jumping 1,800 percent from near zero is still a tiny number. It tells us nothing about real profit.
JOHN: Exactly. And South Korea’s Samsung saw its shares drop too. Analyst Sanjeev Rana told Bloomberg it is because Samsung did not announce stock buybacks. A buyback is when a company buys its own shares to boost their value. Investors wanted cash in hand today, not just promises of better chips tomorrow.
MARY: Turning to Europe. Russia wants its own Starlink.
JOHN: At a summit in Moscow, Vladimir Putin praised Elon Musk as a “genius.” The Guardian reports Putin says he is in touch with the Starlink billionaire. But Russia is also building its own satellite network called Rassvet.
MARY: Rassvet is meant for military use in Ukraine. Think of it like a private cell tower. If you own the network, you control battlefield communication. It cuts Moscow’s reliance on commercial systems. Plus, it gives Putin something valuable to offer African leaders at that summit.
JOHN: Meanwhile, European leaders are picking up the phone. Finland’s President Alexander Stubb and Norway’s Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre just called Putin.
MARY: That is huge. Direct calls to Putin have been extremely rare over the last four and a half years of war.
JOHN: At the exact same time, Finland’s Foreign Minister is meeting US Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Germany’s ZDF network reports they are discussing Ukraine.
MARY: The strategy is clear. Northern European countries are opening their own direct lines to Moscow and Washington. They are not waiting around for the European Union to agree on one unified message.
JOHN: Speaking of waiting, German consumers will not wait long for higher bills. The ifo institute just released its price-expectations index. It measures how many businesses plan to raise prices. That index jumped in September.
MARY: The culprit is energy. The blockade in the Red Sea’s Bab al-Mandab strait pushed crude oil higher. Now, ifo predicts German inflation will top 3 percent soon. Winter utilities are going up.
JOHN: Down in Italy, the cabinet approved a massive 26 billion euro budget. The goal? Cut income taxes for people making under 55,000 euros.
MARY: But who pays for the tax cut? The banks. Il Sole 24 Ore reports the financial sector will foot about 6 billion euros of the bill. It is a direct resource transfer from banks to middle-income households. But the catch is, the later years of these cuts are not funded yet.
JOHN: Finally, a quick look at who owns European businesses. The Center for Economic Policy Research, or CEPR, looked at the 2020 pandemic crash.
MARY: They found a fascinating trend. Companies mostly owned by local, domestic investors cut their investments drastically. But companies with diverse, international owners held strong.
JOHN: It is like having a diversified stock portfolio. If your owners are spread across the globe, a local crisis does not hit you as hard. It is a strong economic case for the EU’s Capital Markets Union—a plan to merge Europe’s fragmented financial markets into one.
MARY: And that is the temperature today. Geopolitics is straining global resources, dragging oil markets and defense supplies in multiple directions. Meanwhile, the AI bet is starting to cash out for big tech, but investors have zero patience for empty promises. Europe is bracing for higher winter bills, and northern nations are taking diplomacy into their own hands.
JOHN: Thanks for listening. If you like staying a step ahead with us, you will love our daily newsletter. It is completely free, and it lands right in your inbox. Just tap the subscribe link in the show notes to get The Gist every morning. See you tomorrow.
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