Universal Music, home to Taylor Swift and Drake, receives €55bn takeover offer

Billionaire Bill Ackman’s hedge fund has offered to buy Universal Music Group (UMG) in a deal that values the world’s biggest music company at about €55bn (£48bn).Pershing Square, the New-York based hedge fund, has made a bid for the business, which is home to artists including Taylor Swift and Elton John, with a cash and stock deal that would move its stock market listing from Amsterdam to New York.Ackman said in a statement that while the company, which is led by the British-born Sir Lucian Grainge, had done “an excellent job nurturing and continuing to build a world-class artist roster and generating strong business performance”, its share price had lagged owing to issues “unrelated to the performance of its music business”.Shares in UMG, which have been listed in Amsterdam since 2021, had lost more than a quarter of their value in the past year alone. Pershing’s offer triggered a sharp rise, with the price up by 13% on the previous trading day when the Amsterdam Euronext exchange closed on Tuesday

Oil back above $110 in volatile markets as Trump deadline looms for Iran to reopen strait – as it happened

Brent crude has risen above $110 a barrel again, after Donald Trump warned Iran “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran does not make an agreement.Brent, the global oil benchmark, has see-sawed in volatile markets today, and is now up 0.8% at $110.67 a barrel.Writing on Truth Social, the US president said:double quotation markA whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again

An AI company with an arsenal of spacecraft: what exactly is SpaceX?

Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, US tech editor at the Guardian, writing to you as I listen to George Handel’s Messiah for Easter.SpaceX filed confidentially for an initial public offering on the US stock market last week at a reportedly astronomical valuation. My colleague Nick Robins-Early reports:Elon Musk’s company, which has become a dominant power in both space travel and satellite communications, could seek a valuation upwards of $1.75tn

Porn, dog poo and social media snaps: the ‘taskers’ scraping the internet for Meta-owned AI firm

Tens of thousands of people have been paid by a company part-owned by Meta to train AI by combing Instagram accounts, harvesting copyrighted work and transcribing pornographic soundtracks, the Guardian can reveal.Scale AI, 49%-controlled by Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, has recruited experts across fields such as medicine, physics and economics – putatively to refine top-level artificial intelligence systems through a platform called Outlier. “Become the expert that AI learns from,” it says on its site, advertising flexible work for people with strong credentials.However, workers for the platform said they have become involved in scraping an array of other people’s personal data – in what they described as a morally uncomfortable exercise that diverged significantly from refining high-level systems.Outlier is managed by Scale AI, which has contracts with the Pentagon and US defense companies

Jon Rahm adamant he will play for Europe at next year’s Ryder Cup

Jon Rahm has declared he will play for Europe in next year’s Ryder Cup, with the Spaniard confident of ending his standoff with the DP World Tour by this September. Rahm’s sentiment from Augusta National will raise Luke Donald’s confidence that he will be able to call on one of his key team members for Europe’s Ryder Cup defence.Rahm has been subject to fines reaching seven figures for participating on the LIV Tour without consent from the DP World Tour, of which he is still a member. Rahm dropped his appeal over the sanctions recently, which leaves him in default to the DP World Tour and unavailable for Ryder Cup selection. He also turned down a deal which would have seen the situation resolved in return for playing six designated DP World Tour events

‘We’ll start a creche’: how the World Surf League is becoming family friendly for parents on tour | Kieran Pender

The tour brings in maternity wildcard and parental leave, with surfers saying it is a ‘huge step in the right direction’ and ‘so sick’ for the sportThis year’s Rip Curl Pro at Bells Beach has felt different for Connor O’Leary. After almost a decade on tour, this is the Australian Japanese surfer’s first World Surf League campaign with a baby in tow. Romii-Sakura O’Leary, who will celebrate her first birthday this month, is one of a growing number of children hanging out in the competitor’s area.“I was watching her crawling around the competition site yesterday,” O’Leary says midway through the Pro, the opening event of the 2026 WSL calendar. “Seeing her crawling around, playing with Kelly [Slater], Steph [Gilmore] was grabbing her, it makes you appreciate the life that we live