Elon Musk is under attack! Countless Democrats are admitting they plan to investigate or even jail him if they take back power on Congress in the midterms. They can't tell you what he specifically did wrong, but they'll come up with something.
Just as bad, or even worse, however, is that some of his critics want to nationalize his companies, including Starlink, which provides crucial infrastructure to Ukraine. Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich, a far-left populist Democrat, thinks Starlink is too important to be left under Musk's control, and that the federal government would do a better job administering it. I doubt that, but let's hear what he had to say:
NEW: Robert Reich calls for the "defunding" of Elon Musk, calls for Democrats to go after Musk's companies.
"Democrats ought to [start] laying the groundwork for nationalizing Starlink & SpaceX… It should be a public corporation."
From the horse's mouth: Reich thinks Democrats should be laying the groundwork to nationalize Starlink and SpaceX. This idea is crazy and reckless—and even dangerous. Here's why.
Now it's important to go over some of the background here. Starlink is a product that Ukraine uses to provide internet to its people, but only for civilian uses. Musk has maintained that while he is very happy to provide internet to Ukraine in the face of unrelenting invasion, Starlink cannot be used for offensive military purposes, because this would make his satellites a legitimate target of Russia in terms of their war effort. We want to avoid that. Separately, Starshield, a different system, is administered by the Pentagon, and Musk claims he has no control over it.
What happened last week is that a slowdown of the Starshield system resulted in reduced effectiveness of Ukraine's counterstrikes against Russia. And look, that was a problem. I traveled to Ukraine earlier this summer as part of a delegation arranged by a pro-Ukrainian nonprofit. I saw up close how important Starshield is to the defense of a free Ukraine. Moreover, there's entirely too much griping about Ukraine coming from some corners of right-wing media. Some people often seem to forget that Russia is invading Ukraine, not the other way around. It's Russia that won't accept a peace deal. When President Donald Trump called for an immediate ceasefire, Ukraine stopped hitting energy infrastructure in Russia—but Russia kept attacking anyway. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has agreed to immediately stop fighting and freeze the conflict along the current lines, just like Trump wants. It's Russian President Vladimir Putin who won't negotiate.
We don't know for sure who ordered the Starshield slowdown. The U.S. government has denied doing so. Musk has, however, claimed Ukraine violated the terms of service of Starlink, using it for offensive military purposes, and thus that system was slowed down. I understand why that might be frustrating for the Ukrainians, but the fact is that it's Musk's company, so he makes the rules. It belongs to him.
And importantly, it has to stay that way. Nationalizing the company would be an insane step to take in response to a tech owner having a say in how his product is used. Do we really trust the government to operate these companies as efficiently as their founders? Of course not. Moreover, in this specific case, it might bring us closer to a direct confrontation with Russia—and as much as it's a good thing to undermine the Russian conquest of Ukraine, we do not want to start World War III.
And there are the broader philosophical harms. We are experiencing an unprecedented flourishing in the tech space, with AI, driverless cars, robotics, and such. When the government nationalizes a successful tech company, it sends a warning to all the others: If you're too good at what you do, we might take you over. We might punish you. This disincentivizes investment and innovation at a time when they're desperately needed.
Nationalizing Musk's companies is doing Ukraine no favors. But it will hurt America's interests too. We want to encourage Musk, Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Mark Zuckerberg, and all the rest to compete with one another to design products that make life better, earning them profits along the way. It doesn't work if the government butts in. Unfortunately, far-left thinkers like Reich, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), and many of the people who are about to be elected to Congress for the first time actually want to slow down the pace of tech. That's how much they hate Musk.
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Cyprus may still be an unlikely place to build a biotechnology company, but Dr Marianna Prokopi-Demetriades, co-founder and director of Theramir, is increasingly convinced that this is precisely what gives the island something to prove.
At Theramir, that means developing precision-oncology technologies, building the manufacturing and regulatory foundations needed to move experimental therapies closer to patients, and trying to show that globally relevant biotech can emerge from a small ecosystem.
The work is slow by design. Cancer therapies cannot be rushed through validation, safety testing, manufacturing or regulation, and even strong laboratory results can take years to reach the clinic.
For Prokopi-Demetriades, that reality sits alongside a much bigger ambition. She wants Theramir to help prove that Cyprus can do more than support innovation from elsewhere. It can create it, retain the intellectual property and take it international.
From a small island to global biotech
That ambition received fresh recognition this year when Prokopi-Demetriades was named the 2026 Study UK Alumni Awards global winner for Business and Innovation, selected among 1,800 candidates from 120 countries.
For years, she said, Cyprus “was not a place people immediately associated with biotechnology”, even though its technology and innovation ecosystem has grown enormously over the past decade.
Being recognised internationally therefore felt “both like a very personal milestone and a huge surprise”, but Prokopi-Demetriades also sees it as an opportunity to put Theramir and Cyprus more firmly on the global biotech map.
She is careful, however, not to confuse recognition with progress itself. “Of course, awards do not suddenly bring deals or open doors,” she said, noting that in biotech, progress still depends on years of scientific R&D, validation, manufacturing and regulatory work.
What recognition can do is bring visibility to a field that often feels like “a long and lonely path”.
Her hope is that the award brings more confidence and excitement around biotechnology in Cyprus, inspires the next generation of scientists and helps strong science find “a real path to scale and, ultimately, reach patients”.
What Theramir is trying to do differently
The science behind Theramir starts from a simple but difficult reality. Cancer does not behave in the same way from one patient to another.
Each tumour has its own molecular profile and can evolve under treatment, Prokopi-Demetriades explained, particularly in metastatic and treatment-resistant disease, where cancer can activate several pathways in order to survive.
Theramir’s EVmiR® platform is designed around that complexity.
“We use extracellular vesicles (the body’s natural cellular messengers) to deliver microRNAs, small molecules that can regulate multiple cancer-driving pathways simultaneously,” she said.
The distinction lies in how those molecules act. “Rather than blocking one target, the aim is to interfere with networks controlling tumour growth, resistance and metastatic spread,” she explained.
The company’s lead programme targets triple-negative breast cancer, with expansion into bladder and pancreatic cancer. Because EVmiR® is a platform technology, different microRNAs can be selected for different tumour biology, creating what Prokopi-Demetriades described as “a potentially adaptable precision-oncology approach”.
Could a blood test help tell us what comes next?
Theramir is also developing companion biomarker tools alongside its therapeutics, bringing diagnosis and treatment closer together.
The aim, Prokopi-Demetriades said, is “to connect treatment with the biomarkers that can tell us who is most likely to benefit and how the disease is responding”.
Today, Theramir evaluates LCP-1 expression through tissue biopsy, while liquid biopsy allows the team to study circulating microRNAs and tumour-associated extracellular vesicles in blood.
The value comes from combining those sources of information. “Together, these markers could support patient selection and provide a more dynamic picture of treatment response, with future potential for real-time monitoring and earlier detection of progression, resistance or recurrence,” she explained.
When the laboratory is only the beginning
A new challenge begins when promising science has to leave the laboratory.
“A promising laboratory result is only the beginning,” Prokopi-Demetriades said, because before a therapy can reach patients, the science must be reproduced consistently, safety and efficacy confirmed preclinically and the product transferred into GMP manufacturing with strict quality control and batch-to-batch consistency.
“This is why biotech development takes years rather than months,” she said.
Medochemie’s involvement is therefore significant. As she explained, “Medochemie’s involvement is important because it brings pharmaceutical manufacturing, quality and regulatory expertise directly into this next phase.”
For Theramir, the next major milestone is to translate EVmiR® into a clinical-grade product, establish a robust GMP manufacturing process and generate the data required to support first-in-human clinical development.
The expensive patience of biotech
That timetable also changes the way a biotech company has to think about investment.
Unlike a software startup, which can launch, test and change direction in months, biotech may spend years generating evidence before conventional revenues appear.
“Biotech investors are backing scientific progress long before conventional revenues appear, so milestones look very different: reproducible data, preclinical validation, GMP manufacturing, regulatory progress and eventually clinical development,” Prokopi-Demetriades said.
Public funding, she explained, helps de-risk the early science, while private investors “mainly place trust in the founders, the vision and the potential to create something with real patient impact”.
Strategic partners such as Medochemie then add sector expertise alongside capital.
There is, however, a limit to what money can accelerate. “Money can accelerate execution, but it cannot shortcut biology, safety or regulation” is how Prokopi-Demetriades put it, adding that this patience is part of “building biotech for the greater good”.
What could Cyprus become?
The question for Cyprus is whether individual companies such as Theramir can eventually become part of something broader.
Prokopi-Demetriades said the country has “come a long way since Theramir started”, when it was only the second company approved as an innovative company locally.
Her ambitions for the sector are focused. “Competing directly with mature biotech hubs is still unrealistic, but we can build our own niche,” she said.
Instead, she sees a real opportunity in next-generation biomanufacturing, developing specialised GMP capabilities that can take innovation from the laboratory towards the clinic.
Equally important is “creating and retaining Cyprus-made intellectual property”, then scaling it internationally through strategic partnerships and licensing.
That, she believes, would allow Cyprus “not simply to host innovation, but to originate and export it”.
When the science becomes personal
Behind the science, however, there is also a more personal contradiction.
Prokopi-Demetriades has spoken openly about losing people she loves to cancer while spending years working on therapies for the disease.
“There is a painful contradiction in spending years working on cancer therapies while, at the same time, losing people you love to the disease,” she said.
That experience creates an instinct to move faster.
“It makes you want to move faster, but it also reminds you why you cannot take shortcuts,” she said, adding that patients deserve “evidence and safety, not just promising science”.
Through the slower periods, she remains focused on why Theramir began. “The long timelines can be frustrating, but I know why we started,” she explained.
Reaching the first patient with a Theramir therapy would therefore mean far more than another development milestone.
It would be, she said, “a major scientific milestone and, for me, an intensely personal one”.
Just two months after launching i spy, Cypriot founder and CEO Nicole Georgiou is already seeing signs that the way people discover fashion online may be changing faster than the tools they use to shop it.
The London-based fashion-tech platform is built around a familiar problem. An outfit catches your eye on TikTok, Instagram or Pinterest, but finding the pieces behind it can mean screenshots, Google searches, several retailer tabs and saved posts scattered across different platforms.
Georgiou is trying to bring those steps together, allowing users to take inspiration from elsewhere, search for exact or similar items, save products into boards and return to them when they are ready to buy.
Early users show real purchase intent
For Georgiou, the clearest early sign that there is a genuine problem to solve has come from user behaviour, with early users showing that “people aren’t just coming to i spy for inspiration, they’re coming with real purchase intent”.
That interest has translated into activity. In the platform’s first two months, entirely through organic growth, “we’ve seen more than 20,000 searches and 800 user-created boards, alongside thousands of products being saved,” she said.
Those searches are also increasingly tied to genuine buying decisions, with users looking for “things they genuinely want to wear and potentially buy, wedding guest dresses, holiday outfits, bridal looks and pieces they’ve seen elsewhere”.
For Georgiou, however, repeat use matters more than the initial download. “What matters to me isn’t just that someone downloads i spy, but that they come back,” she said, adding that “A download tells you someone was curious. Coming back tells you you’ve created something they actually want to use.”
The same applies to how users save products. Georgiou said “a save means something different on i spy”, explaining that on a traditional inspiration platform it can simply mean “I like this”, while on i spy it can mean “I might actually buy this”.
That difference is reflected in the way users behave, she added, with people beginning to “search, compare, save and organise products they are genuinely considering”.
Fixing a fragmented shopping journey
Asked what problem i spy is actually solving for consumers, Georgiou pointed to the increasingly fragmented nature of online shopping, saying “The way we shop online has completely changed, but the infrastructure hasn’t caught up.”
A typical journey, she said, might involve seeing an outfit on TikTok, saving something on Instagram, finding inspiration on Pinterest, using Google to search for the product, opening multiple retailer tabs and taking screenshots on a phone.
The result is that “The inspiration, search, saving and purchasing parts of the journey are completely disconnected,” she said.
That is the gap i spy is trying to close. Georgiou put it simply when she said “i spy connects that journey”, allowing users to “take inspiration from anywhere, find the exact or similar products, save them, organise them and come back when you’re ready to buy”.
Building between inspiration and purchase
While visual search itself is not new, Georgiou sees i spy as occupying a different place from larger platforms.
She described Google Lens as “a strong image search tool” and Pinterest as “incredible for inspiration”, but said i spy is “specifically built around fashion and around what happens between seeing something you like and deciding to buy it”.
That space between discovery and purchase is central to the company’s proposition, with Georgiou describing it as “the consideration layer between inspiration and purchase”.
Taking on the bigger platforms
Asked what makes i spy defensible when Google, Pinterest and other large platforms could potentially build parts of it, Georgiou said there is “a structural reason why this space is still relatively unowned”.
In her view, large platforms face conflicting incentives. “Pinterest ultimately wants to keep you on Pinterest, while Google operates within its own ecosystem,” she said, while i spy is “deliberately cross-platform and consumer-first, if you discover something anywhere, you can bring it into i spy”.
Georgiou acknowledged that large platforms could technically build elements of the same experience, but said “creating a system that connects users across different platforms and retailers doesn’t naturally align with their existing business models”.
Focus is another part of the argument. “We’re also incredibly focused,” she said, contrasting i spy with platforms “building for hundreds of millions of people across many behaviours”.
By comparison, she said, “we’re building one thing for one specific behaviour: what happens between seeing something you want and deciding to buy it”.
That focus also feeds into the technology itself. Georgiou said “Our proprietary fashion technology and the behaviour we’re learning from searches, saves and interactions become increasingly valuable as the platform grows.”
Using AI to understand taste
When asked what AI can understand about a shopper that traditional search cannot, Georgiou said its value lies in reducing rather than expanding choice.
“I think AI is most useful when it reduces choice rather than simply giving you more of it,” she said.
The company is using technology to learn “someone’s real, underlying taste”, looking not just at what a person has searched for once, but at “the patterns across what they repeatedly search for, save, put into boards and eventually keep in their closet”.
Over time, Georgiou said, that allows i spy to understand “the person behind the search” and give users “better results, recommendations and discovery”.
She is also keen to distinguish that approach from the growing number of AI shopping agents. “We’re not trying to build another AI shopping agent that simply gives you a list of products,” she said, adding that “I want technology to understand someone’s taste while keeping the human and social side of fashion intact.”
Changing where shopping begins
Georgiou’s ambitions stretch beyond building another fashion app.
Asked what she means when she describes i spy as becoming “the default system for online shopping”, she linked that ambition to a change in where the shopping journey actually begins.
“When i spy becomes the default system for online shopping, it will be because we’ve changed where people think shopping starts,” she said.
That behaviour is already shifting, in her view, because “Shopping used to start with a search bar. Increasingly, it starts with a TikTok, an Instagram post, a creator, a Pinterest board or something you see in real life.”
For Georgiou, that is the space i spy wants to occupy, with the aim to “own the moment between seeing something you want and deciding to buy it”.
Fashion is where the company is starting because “it’s one of the most visual and fragmented categories”, although she believes “the underlying behaviour is much broader”.
Georgiou is also building the company from London as a Cypriot founder, saying the city has given her “access to fashion, technology talent, investors and brands”, while she still sees “a huge opportunity for Cyprus to support globally ambitious consumer technology companies”.
The company is now moving into fundraising after what she described as “strong interest from early investors”, with plans “to scale the technology, team and user growth”.
Ultimately, however, Georgiou’s measure of success is much simpler. She wants someone to see something they love and instinctively think “I’ll i spy that.”
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