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SYDNEY — Australia’s benchmark share index closed lower for a second consecutive session Friday, falling 38 points, or 0.44%, to 8,664.0, as a deepening global bond sell-off and continued strength in oil prices weighed on investor sentiment heading into next week’s Reserve Bank of Australia interest rate decision.

The S&P/ASX 200 opened Friday at 8,757.80 before sliding through the morning session, dropping to 8,663 points by 10:30 a.m. local time. Of the index’s 11 sectors, all but one traded lower, with the materials sector falling more than 1%. The decline followed a global bond market sell-off that pushed U.S. Treasury yields to multi-decade highs overnight, adding to concerns about inflation and the broader path of interest rates worldwide.

Friday’s losses extended a sharper pullback recorded Thursday, when the ASX 200 fell 63.3 points, or 0.72%, to close at 8,702, with the broader All Ordinaries index down 0.66% to 8,897. Thursday’s decline came as oil prices surged above $100 a barrel, compounding steep losses on Wall Street tied to continued selling in technology and artificial intelligence-linked stocks. The Australian dollar finished Thursday’s session little changed at 70.38 U.S. cents. Market breadth was notably weak that day, with declining stocks outnumbering advancers by 695 to 376, and 386 stocks finishing unchanged.

Individual stock moves on Thursday reflected the broader market’s uneven tone. Premier Investments, owner of the Peter Alexander and Smiggle brands and holder of a 25% stake in appliance maker Breville, led gainers with a 7.53% advance, even as the company flagged ongoing concerns about a soft retail sector. Washington H. Soul Pattinson added 6.24% to close at $48.35, while BSP Financial Group rose 5.90% to $7.81. On the losing side, buy-now-pay-later provider Zip Co tumbled 10.27% to $2.01 after the company reported its short sale position following Wednesday’s closing bell, while Liontown Resources fell 7.38% and Nine Entertainment dropped 6.21%, with UBS analysts warning the media company could face near-term revenue challenges following the recent introduction of an ad-supported subscription tier. Mining giants BHP and Rio Tinto bucked the broader downward trend Thursday, rising 1.4% and 0.8%, respectively, as copper prices firmed on reports of Chinese stockpiling ahead of upcoming holidays.

The weaker tone across Australian equities this week has coincided with signs of broader economic strain domestically. National Australia Bank’s latest quarterly business survey found business conditions had fallen to their first negative reading since September 2020, with the bank’s index recording a three-point decline. Sales margins deteriorated to their lowest level since June 2020, a result NAB attributed to declining profitability and what it described as a “particularly challenging cost environment.” Separately, struggling property developer Bathla is expected to cease construction across all of its sites, after 213 staff were stood down in early September and other construction projects were suspended in the wake of a broader corporate deal affecting the company.

Australia’s labour market data, released Thursday, added a further layer of complexity to the outlook. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported the unemployment rate rose to 4.6% in August, up from 4.5% in July, even as total employment increased by 39,500 people. That employment growth came entirely from part-time positions, while full-time employment actually declined by 6,300 over the same period, and the labour force participation rate rose to 67.1%. Economists have suggested the combination of rising unemployment alongside employment growth points to a gradually easing labour market, a dynamic that could give the Reserve Bank additional grounds to hold interest rates steady at its upcoming meeting. Major Australian banks reflected the cautious mood Thursday, with Commonwealth Bank of Australia falling 0.84% to $149.775 and Westpac Banking Corp down 1.32% to $34.30.

The Reserve Bank is scheduled to announce its next interest rate decision on Tuesday, September 29, a meeting that has taken on added significance given the mixed signals emerging from this week’s economic data and the broader volatility across global bond and equity markets. Separately, the central bank has faced internal labor tension of its own in recent weeks. The Finance Sector Union criticized RBA leadership for reoffering the same enterprise bargaining pay proposal that staff had already voted down in July, a 9.5% pay increase spread across three years. FSU secretary Julia Angrisano said the central bank’s approach reflected poorly on its treatment of its own workforce. “The RBA are not respecting the collective voice of their workers by putting forward the same pay offer that was rejected in a ballot just over two months ago,” Angrisano said. “The RBA should be a model employer, but instead they are treating their staff like mugs.”

Beyond domestic developments, global political and economic news continued shaping sentiment Friday. French President Emmanuel Macron, addressing a wide-ranging television interview, said a proposed U.S. ban on diesel exports would be “catastrophic,” both for the global economy and for the U.S. economy specifically, adding another point of international economic uncertainty to a week already dominated by volatility in bond markets, oil prices and equity trading worldwide.

With the ASX 200 now down roughly 5% over the past month and the Reserve Bank’s rate decision just days away, investors are likely to remain focused on how incoming economic data and global bond market conditions evolve heading into next week, as markets continue weighing the competing signals from a softening domestic labour market against the inflationary pressure stemming from elevated oil prices and rising global bond yields.

Elon Musk’s various companies are pursuing an unusually dense slate of new technology projects in 2026, spanning space exploration, brain-computer interfaces, humanoid robotics and semiconductor manufacturing. Here are five of the most significant technologies currently in development across his business empire.

The first is Neuralink’s push to scale brain-implant production and restore vision for blind patients. Musk has said Neuralink plans to move toward high-volume production of its brain-computer interface device in 2026, alongside a transition to a nearly fully automated surgical implantation procedure, following the company’s earlier regulatory clearance. As of September 2025, twelve patients worldwide had received Neuralink implants, and the company has continued expanding its clinical trial participant registry, including accepting applications from Canada, with expansion into the United Kingdom under evaluation. Separately, Neuralink’s Blindsight implant, designed to restore a form of vision for people who are completely blind by using ultra-fine threads to stimulate the visual cortex and generate perceptions of light and shapes, is set for its first patient trial in 2026, a milestone the company has described as a significant step toward using brain-computer interfaces to address sensory disability.

The second major project is SpaceX’s development of its next-generation Starship V3 spacecraft. The upgraded vehicle, featuring SpaceX’s new Raptor V3 engine, is expected to conduct propellant transfer tests in orbit during 2026, a capability that could eventually support long-distance missions to the moon or Mars by allowing spacecraft to refuel while already in space. SpaceX is also continuing to deploy its next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, designed to offer improved performance and faster internet connectivity compared with earlier generations of the satellite internet constellation.

The third significant development is Tesla’s expanding robotics and autonomous vehicle production. The company began mass production of its Optimus Gen 3 humanoid robot and its Cybercab autonomous vehicle in 2026, alongside continued production of the Tesla Semi. Tesla has also worked to expand its Full Self-Driving software into a fully unsupervised operating mode, with the company’s Robotaxi service already operating in Dallas and Houston. On the energy storage side, Tesla has continued expanding its Megapack 3 and Megablock systems, aimed at supporting large-scale electrical grid storage projects.

The fourth major initiative is Terafab, a joint semiconductor manufacturing project between Tesla and SpaceX aimed at giving Musk’s companies greater control over their own chip supply chains. Musk announced in March that the project would begin with what he called an “advanced technology fab” in Austin, Texas, designed with the equipment necessary to manufacture and test a wide range of chip types. Musk has said the broader semiconductor industry is moving too slowly to keep pace with the volume of chips his companies expect to need in the coming years. “That rate is much less than we’d like,” Musk said, addressing the industry’s current production pace. Beyond the Austin facility, reporting has also pointed to a related manufacturing arrangement in which computer chip maker Intel would produce chips at a separate facility, called Terafab, with Tesla, SpaceX and xAI serving as anchor customers, designed to bring logic, memory, packaging and testing operations together in a single location, producing chips intended for use in Tesla’s Optimus robots and Cybercabs as well as space-based data centers SpaceX is developing. Investment firm ARK Invest has estimated the broader Terafab initiative could eventually require as much as $1 trillion in total investment, a figure that would exceed the inflation-adjusted cost of building the entire U.S. Interstate Highway System.

The fifth major technology push involves the consolidation of Musk’s artificial intelligence efforts under a single corporate structure. SpaceX completed its acquisition of xAI in February, valuing the AI company at $250 billion in an all-share transaction that created a combined entity valued at approximately $1.25 trillion, a deal reported to be among the largest corporate mergers on record. Following that consolidation, xAI has continued expanding its Colossus supercomputer cluster located in Memphis, Tennessee, acquiring a third building as part of a plan to increase the cluster’s total training capacity toward nearly two gigawatts of computing power. The AI arm’s Grok product line, now formally part of SpaceX’s broader AI division following the merger, has continued to be distributed through Musk’s social media platform X as its primary AI offering, even as X itself remains a separate operating entity within Musk’s broader portfolio of companies.

Beyond these five headline projects, Musk’s companies have continued advancing other initiatives simultaneously, including The Boring Company’s underground transit tunnel systems and ongoing efforts to expand creator payouts on X in an effort to compete more directly with larger platforms like YouTube for original content creators. Industry analysts covering Musk’s broader technology portfolio have noted that his various companies increasingly overlap across artificial intelligence, robotics, vehicles, communications and infrastructure, reflecting a deliberate strategy of building an interconnected ecosystem of technologies rather than operating each company as an entirely independent business line.

Given Musk’s own history of ambitious timelines that have not always been met on schedule, technology analysts have cautioned against viewing any of these projects, Neuralink’s scale-up, Starship V3’s orbital refueling tests, Tesla’s robotics production targets, the Terafab chip manufacturing effort, or the continued build-out of xAI’s computing infrastructure, as guaranteed to arrive precisely as announced. Even so, each project represents a substantial ongoing investment of capital and engineering resources across Musk’s companies, positioning 2026 as what industry observers have described as a pivotal year for testing how many of these ambitious technology bets can move from announcement to functioning reality.