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The new project, which Hegseth dubbed “Project Meridian” in an event in Quantico, Virginia, on Wednesday, will be led by Pentagon official Emil Michael, a former Uber executive. As the Guardian has reported, Michael made millions in profits off non-public Musk company AI stock while in federal office – and while guiding the Department of Defense’s artificial intelligence efforts.

Along with Luckey and Musk, Project Meridian will also include the Trump loyalist and former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Musk was one of the chief financiers of Trump’s 2024 victory, spending over a quarter of a billion dollars in the run-up to the election. Recent campaign records show he is still a major force in the coming midterms. His America Pac spent $3.4m attacking the Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s Senate race, for example. In the hotly contested Texas Senate race, America Pac spent $6.4m to oppose Democrat James Talarico and $1m to support the Trump-endorsed Ken Paxton.

Musk’s SpaceX has been a crucial contractor for US space programs since 2018, and in the second Trump administration his company has emerged as key player in Trump’s pet Golden Dome ballistic missile defense project, a phenomenally expensive effort that could cost as much as $1.2tn.

Musk dwarfs Luckey in resources and fame, but Luckey has achieved immense celebrity in the defense contracting and world. Initially a young celebrity in the tech world for inventing a virtual reality headset, Luckey later founded Anduril, a defense contracting company that has already won significant federal contracts.

Luckey has also become of the most important “bundlers” for Republican candidates on the west coast, as the Guardian reported in August. One of the sources called him the “godfather of Republican fundraising on the west coast”. Invitations to political fundraisers obtained by the Guardian show Luckey hosted and co-hosted events for candidates from Trump himself to Ken Calvert, Rick Scott, Mehmet Oz, Ted Cruz and others. The most recent event was on 22 August, where he and his wife co-hosted a $50,000-a-head effort to “Keep the Senate”, and listing guests John Thune of South Dakota, Mike Rogers of Michigan, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Jon Husted of Ohio.

It is not necessarily a mystery what Musk and Luckey think about warfare’s future.

The 34-year-old Palmer, whose company is backed by Joshua Kushner’s equity fund, has acquired manufacturers of underwater drones, UAVs, and space technology, has been already been voluble about his philosophy on warfare. Earlier this year, for example, he said he thought warfare in the second half of this century would involve “subterranean” conflict, with vehicles that can “move through he crust of the earth the same way that submarines move through the water”.

He has claimed that his company has “working prototypes of subterranean systems”.

“Bringing major industry players into these types of positions at the Pentagon is not something new, but what feels different now is the substantial financial support these two have, and continue to, deliver for the Republican party,” said Brendan Glavin of Open Secrets, a non-partisan group that tracks campaign spending.

The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. %!s()

Diesel prices in the UK also hit record highs this week and are hovering just under 200p per litre, according to motoring organisation the RAC.

The US is a vital supplier of diesel to the world, exporting between 1.2 and 1.5 million barrels per day, with experts warning a ban on shipments abroad could put further pressure on prices in other countries.

"We're thinking about it very seriously," Trump said of an export ban at the weekend.

Energy Minister Martin McCluskey was on a call with European counterparts on Thursday to discuss the potential ban.

A source familiar with the discussions told the BBC it was prudent to prepare a co-ordinated response with other countries, including those across EU, but added that there were still European reserves left from a coordinated release of strategic fuel stocks earlier in the year.

"We have a diverse and resilient supply. We continue to engage with our international partners and the UK fuel industry," a government spokesperson said. The government has stressed that there is no cause for concern about potential diesel shortages, though prices are expected to rise further.

A European Commission spokesperson said today that there were "lots of calls, lots of meetings" taking place on the diesel situation, including with "high level contacts" in the US administration.

A meeting of the governing board of the International Energy Agency (IEA) is taking place tomorrow.

Prices of petrol and diesel globally have skyrocketed since the outbreak of the US-Israel war in Iran in February. The closure of the vital Strait of Hormuz, which typically transports around a fifth of the world's oil and gas, has pushed up the price of products made from oil.

An export ban from Russia, also a major supplier of diesel, has added to the pressure on prices.

Trump has argued that keeping any surplus barrels of diesel in the US would lower pump prices domestically, offering immediate relief to drivers, truckers, and businesses ahead of the midterm elections.

But David Fyfe, chief economist at Argus Media, said cutting off American supply would likely cause international prices to skyrocket.

Diesel prices have hit an all-time high in the UK, with the latest RAC figures showing average pump prices at 199.79p per litre, up from 142.38p

Diesel is harder to refine than gasoline and, because it is used by the haulage industry and in agriculture, it is very difficult to reduce demand.

The UK is heavily reliant on imports. Although the four refineries in the UK make more than enough petrol to meet demand, they do not make enough diesel for the country's needs.

There were 15.1 million diesel vehicles on UK roads at the end of June, according to the Department for Transport. That is a drop from 15.7 million a year before.

There were 9.8 million diesel cars, down year on year from 10.4 million. %!s()

Trump thrice avoided making an endorsement in an interview with Time magazine published on Thursday, instead pivoting to his own popularity in Israel and actions in support of Israel’s government.

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The US president was initially asked if the “Israeli people should give Netanyahu another term?”

“Well, I can only say that I’m not involved in politics any more, except that we’re popular,” Trump said, claiming “99 percent” popularity in Israel.

When pressed a second time on whether Netanyahu should have another term, Trump pointed to Washington’s continued security support for Israel and his decision to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem during his first term.

The interviewer responded: “It seems like you’re doing a lot of work for him. Should he have another term?”

Trump replied: “No, my primary thing – I do want to help them defend Israel. My thing that I mention all the time is Iran cannot have a nuclear power because they are crazy and you can’t let crazy people have nuclear weapons.”

Trump has repeatedly hailed his relationship with Netanyahu throughout his second term, even as government officials have leaked accounts of private discord between the two leaders.

Trump has met with Netanyahu at least seven times since January 2025, more than any other leader, and has publicly pushed for a pardon in the Israeli leader’s ongoing corruption trial.

Still, the latest statements come as Trump and his Republican Party have contended with growing discontent with his administration’s policy towards Israel, particularly amid perceptions that the Israeli government influenced Trump to launch the US-Israel war against Iran in February.

The conflict, which has driven up petrol prices in the US, has become a key vulnerability ahead of the US midterm elections in November, which will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the US Senate and House of Representatives for Trump’s final two years in office.

Nevertheless, Trump hosted Netanyahu most recently at the White House in July, flouting concerns over Israeli obstructions to ending the conflict, as well as to achieving a more lasting peace in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza.

Speaking to Time magazine, Trump defended the war with Iran, saying he may still seek to “annihilate” Iran and could resume bombing after the midterm vote.

Trump also came to Netanyahu’s defence, batting away reports that Egypt and the United Arab Emirates had warned Netanyahu of the impending Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel on October 7, 2023.

“I think if he would have known, he would have done something about it,” he said.

He later acknowledged that “people have written off Bibi many, many times, just like they’ve written off me many, many times”, using Netanyahu’s nickname.

“I wouldn’t underestimate Bibi,” he added.

Trump was also asked if US security support would change if Gadi Eisenkot, whose opposition bloc has been leading in  Israeli polls, were to win the October 27 vote.

He replied: “Well, I don’t know. I don’t hear bad things about him.” %!s()

Pundits dubbed this event the "SaaSpocalypse," with some making bold predictions that it would be the end of software. The logic, borrowed from Sequoia Capital's thesis that AI "autopilots" would replace software tools the way autopilots replace pilots, was simple: If an agent can do the work, why would anyone keep paying for the software that once helped a human do it?

Seven months later, the panic looks premature. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (ticker: IGV), a widely watched barometer for the enterprise SaaS industry, tells the story better than any single company's earnings call. After opening 2026 near $106, the fund cratered to a 52-week low below $75 in April, a decline of roughly 30%, pricing something close to a permanent SaaS devaluation. By mid-September, it had clawed almost all the way back, trading around $105, essentially flat for the year.

None of this means the AI-agent disruption story was wrong. It means the story got the target backward. Applications aren't disappearing. Their job is simply changing.

From front door to back office

For two decades, enterprise software competed on the interface: the dashboard, the workflow builder, the mobile app that got a worker to log in one more time a day. That was the product. Increasingly, it isn't. Knowledge workers are doing more of their day-to-day work by typing into an LLM chat window and letting an agent fetch what it needs, whether that's a customer record in Salesforce, a head count plan in Workday, or a ticket queue in ServiceNow. Gartner expects 40% of enterprise applications to ship with task-specific AI agents by the end of this year, up from under 5% a year ago. Analysts at A16z have described the shift more bluntly: The traditional system of record "slips into the background as a commodity persistence tier," while a dynamic agent layer becomes the thing people actually see and touch.

The vendors that got hit hardest in February seem to agree, and most were already repositioning as agentic-first before the sell-off forced the issue. Put together, this is not evidence that legacy SaaS is going away. It's evidence that they are becoming less visible. The systems of record that used to be the enterprise's front door are turning into plumbing: still essential, still holding the data of record, but increasingly encountered by employees only indirectly, through whatever chat or agent interface that now sits on top of the stack.

Why the real risk was never the app layer

Here is the more useful debate enterprises should be having instead of "which app dies next": If the interface is moving to chat and the work is moving to agents, what happens when the data underneath isn't ready for either?

The evidence says most companies aren't ready, and that this — not model quality — is the actual bottleneck holding agentic AI back. A pulse survey by Harvard Business Review Analytic Services, sponsored by my company, Reltio, found that 94% of organizations are exploring or implementing AI, but only 15% consider their data foundation "very ready" for agentic AI, and just 39% call themselves highly proficient at ensuring data is trustworthy, even though 94% of leaders rank that trust as their single most critical capability. Gartner predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, citing unclear value and inadequate governance over the mounting cost of scaling on shaky foundations. A 2025 MIT NANDA study, still one of the most-cited data points on enterprise AI's return on investment, found that 95% of enterprise generative AI pilots had so far produced no measurable financial return. Informatica's 2026 CDO survey puts a finer point on it: Among companies that have already adopted agentic AI, half say data quality and retrieval are the single biggest barriers to getting anything into production.

An AI agent that acts on — not just answers — bad, stale, or siloed data doesn't just produce a wrong answer. It takes a wrong, and sometimes irreversible, action.

Stop rebuilding the app. Fix what feeds it.

This is the strategic mistake enterprises risk making in reaction to the SaaSpocalypse headlines: pouring budget into recreating Salesforce- or Workday-like functionality in-house, on the theory that owning the software means owning the future. It's the wrong fight. The value was never really the login screen. It was the customer, product, supplier, and employee data that those systems accumulated over many years, and whether an AI agent can trust that data enough to act on it safely. Data is every organization's competitive moat; tools are commodities.

That argues for enterprises spending less energy re-platforming applications knowledge workers barely open anymore, and more on building the data foundation that lets whichever interface wins, chat, agent, or otherwise, actually work: unifying records across the silos that 46% of leaders still cite as their top barrier, closing the governance gap that leaves most companies "highly proficient" in name only, and giving agents a real-time, connected, semantic understanding of the business, not just access to more raw data.

The SaaSpocalypse made for a dramatic six weeks in the market. But the more consequential shift is quieter: The systems of record enterprises built over the last twenty years aren't dying, they're retreating into the background, and the winners in the agentic era will be whoever makes sure what's back there is something an AI can actually trust.

Explore how Reltio connects trusted data for the agentic AI era.

This sponsored post was supplied by Reltio, an SAP company.

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New York, New York--(Newsfile Corp. - September 11, 2026) - Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP, a leading national securities law firm, is investigating potential claims against AEVEX Corp. (""AEVEX" or the "Company") (NYSE: AVEX) and reminds investors of the October 20, 2026 deadline to seek the role of lead plaintiff in a federal securities class action that has been filed against the Company.

Faruqi & Faruqi is a leading national securities law firm with offices in New York, Pennsylvania, California and Georgia. The firm has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for investors since its founding in 1995. See www.faruqilaw.com.

As detailed below, the complaint alleges that the Company and its executives violated federal securities laws by making false and/or misleading statements and/or failing to disclose that: Specifically, the statements conveyed a commitment to follow a 180-day "lock-up" and therefore prevent Madison from selling its Class A common stock or converting or exchanging its Class B or LLC Units into Class A common stock for public sale until at least October 13, 2026, while simultaneously concealing a pre-arranged plan between Madison and the Underwriter Defendants to prematurely abrogate that commitment and allow for an SPO shortly after the IPO. Through that SPO, Madison would earn over $200 million and the Underwriter Defendants would share in a further $8-plus million in fees.

On June 2, 2026, in reaction to the after-market filing of the June 1, 2026 registration statement announcing the Company's intention to conduct an SPO and revealing the premature waiver of the 180-day lock-up restrictions, Aevex's Class A common stock fell approximately 16% against the prior day's closing price, wiping out over $700 million in market capitalization.

On June 5, 2026, in response to the pre-market filing of the final prospectus, Aevex's common stock fell a further 7% that day, erasing about $200 million more in market capitalization.

The court-appointed lead plaintiff is the investor with the largest financial interest in the relief sought by the class who is adequate and typical of class members who directs and oversees the litigation on behalf of the putative class. Any member of the putative class may move the Court to serve as lead plaintiff through counsel of their choice, or may choose to do nothing and remain an absent class member. Your ability to share in any recovery is not affected by the decision to serve as a lead plaintiff or not.

Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP also encourages anyone with information regarding AEVEX's conduct to contact the firm, including whistleblowers, former employees, shareholders and others.

To learn more about the AEVEX class action, go to www.faruqilaw.com/AVEX or call Faruqi & Faruqi partner Josh Wilson directly at 877-247-4292 or 212-983-9330 (Ext. 1310).

Follow us for updates on LinkedIn, on X, or on Facebook.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) for Investors Regarding the AEVEX Securities Class Action Lawsuit:

What is the AEVEX securities fraud lawsuit about?

This lawsuit alleges that AEVEX Corp. and certain defendants made materially false and misleading statements in connection with the company's initial public offering. Specifically, the complaint alleges that defendants conveyed a commitment to honor a 180-day lock-up agreement that would have prevented Madison from selling its Class A common stock or converting its Class B shares or LLC Units into Class A common stock for public sale until at least October 13, 2026. At the same time, defendants allegedly concealed a pre-arranged plan to prematurely waive those lock-up restrictions and allow for a secondary public offering shortly after the IPO, through which Madison allegedly stood to earn over $200 million while the underwriter defendants would share in more than $8 million in additional fees. When the alleged scheme came to light, AEVEX's stock price fell sharply, erasing over $900 million in market capitalization across two separate trading days.

Who may be eligible to participate in the lawsuit?

Investors who purchased or otherwise acquired AEVEX Corp. (NYSE: AVEX) Class A common stock during the Class Period - between April 17, 2026 and June 4, 2026, inclusive - may be eligible to participate in this lawsuit. Eligibility to participate in any potential recovery is not limited to those who apply to serve as lead plaintiff; any class member who purchased shares during the defined Class Period may share in any recovery ultimately obtained. Investors are encouraged to review their trading records to determine whether their purchases fall within the applicable Class Period dates.

What is a lead plaintiff, and how can I seek appointment?

A lead plaintiff is a court-appointed representative who acts on behalf of all class members in directing the litigation, including working with counsel on litigation strategy and settlement decisions. Any investor who purchased AEVEX Corp. (NYSE: AVEX) Class A common stock during the Class Period may move the court for appointment as lead plaintiff, but the deadline to file such a motion is October 19, 2026. Courts generally consider the investor with the largest financial interest in the relief sought, who also satisfies the requirements of Rule 23 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, for appointment as lead plaintiff. Importantly, investors need not seek appointment as lead plaintiff to participate in the lawsuit or to share in any recovery that may result from it.

Why should investors contact Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP?

Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP has represented investors in securities litigation for decades and has recovered hundreds of millions of dollars for shareholders. Investors who purchased AEVEX securities during the Class Period may contact the firm to discuss their legal rights, potential claims, and the lead plaintiff process at no cost or obligation.

Attorney Advertising. The law firm responsible for this advertisement is Faruqi & Faruqi, LLP (www.faruqilaw.com). Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome with respect to any future matter. We welcome the opportunity to discuss your particular case. All communications will be treated in a confidential manner.

To view the source version of this press release, please visit https://www.newsfilecorp.com/release/313841

Markets Insider and Business Insider Editorial Teams were not involved in the creation of this post. %!s()