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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Facebook owner Meta has explored a multibillion-euro investment in eyewear group EssilorLuxottica, as the social media platform intensifies its push to develop smart glasses.

The Silicon Valley company has considered taking a small stake in the €87bn Franco-Italian group, according to multiple people with knowledge of its thinking.

The move comes as Meta has been holding talks with EssilorLuxottica to deepen their existing collaboration following the successful launch of a revamped version of their “Ray-Ban Meta” smart glasses last year, some of the people said.

Meta’s chief Mark Zuckerberg has spent billions of dollars in recent years to enter the wearable technology market, such as by creating virtual reality headsets. Meanwhile, Paris-listed EssilorLuxottica has also pushed for deals that can attract a new generation of shoppers.

There is no guarantee that any investment will take place, said the people close to the talks. Meta has been working with Morgan Stanley on the matter, according to one of the people.

EssilorLuxottica’s share price jumped nearly 5 per cent on Thursday following the FT’s report.

Meta, EssilorLuxottica and Morgan Stanley declined to comment.

The first Ray-Ban Meta glasses were launched in 2021, but the newest generation launched in October last year sold more in a few months than the previous ones did in two years, EssilorLuxottica’s chief executive Francesco Milleri said at an event earlier this week.

The latest version of the glasses allows users to livestream what they see directly on to Facebook and Instagram. In the US, the glasses are integrated with Meta’s artificial intelligence assistant, giving owners the ability to ask the glasses for more information about what is in front of them.

This week, EssilorLuxottica agreed to buy US streetwear label Supreme for $1.5bn. People close to the deal said the eyewear group aimed to launch a new version of Supreme smart sunglasses in partnership with Meta, to better target young consumers.

Meta and rival Apple are vying to build unintrusive augmented reality glasses that could one day replace the smartphone as the next-generation computing device, but the technology is nascent and consumers have been reluctant to wear cumbersome devices on their face.

Zuckerberg said on an April earnings call that the company’s outlook for smart glasses had “improved quite a bit” and that it was one of the “bigger areas” that the company was investing into in its AR and virtual reality department, Reality Labs.

Previously, he had said glasses would need “full holographic displays to be a large market”, but that the success of the Meta Ray-Bans had proven otherwise.

“If we want everyone to be able to use wearable AI, I think eyewear is a bit different from phones or watches in that people are going to want very different designs,” he added. “So I think our approach of partnering with leading eyewear brands will help us serve more of the market.”

EssilorLuxottica, which was created seven years ago through a complex €50bn merger of late Italian billionaire Leonardo Del Vecchio’s eyewear group Luxottica and French lens manufacturer Essilor, has steadily grown larger to become the world’s largest eyewear manufacturer.

Over the past few years, acquisitions of technology and engineering companies have been at the core of its strategy. In 2022 the group acquired Israeli hearing technology start-up Nuance Hearing to develop glasses fitted with its acoustic beamforming technology.

This week, EssilorLuxottica also took an 80 per cent stake in Heidelberg Engineering, a German company specialising in eye surgery technologies, as part of its push into medtech.

In order to travel to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee this week, three Arizona delegates needed permission from a judge.

That’s because GOP Arizona state Sens. Jake Hoffman and Anthony Kern, as well as Nancy Cottle, are among the 18 people indicted by an Arizona grand jury for their roles in an alleged scheme to upend the 2020 presidential election by throwing their state’s 11 Electoral College votes to former President Trump.

Hoffman, Kern and Cottle aren’t the only people in this situation who are at the convention in Milwaukee. Three delegates from Georgia, five from Nevada and two from Michigan also face charges for similar “fake elector” schemes in their respective states, according to an NPR review of delegate rosters and news reports.

Election deniers from Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Wisconsin are also present as delegates at the RNC.

A lawsuit was also filed in Wisconsin against those who cast fraudulent electoral college votes for Trump. But the case was partly settled after those fake electors agreed to formally state their actions were “part of an attempt to improperly overturn the 2020 presidential election results.”

The delegates’ roles in Milwaukee are largely ceremonial — on Monday, delegates from each state pledged their support for Trump as the Republican Party’s standard bearer in 2024.

But some former GOP officials say their presence is a stain on the party.

Then-Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Ariz. talks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington in this January 2015 file photo.

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

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“When those kinds of people are the ones that we’re sending from our state, here in Arizona, back to… the top brass of the Republican Party nationally? It reflects badly on us as a state, I believe,” said former congressman Matt Salmon.

In Arizona, it’s not just Hoffman, Kern and Cottle that worries Salmon.

There’s also Shelby Busch, the chair of Arizona’s RNC delegation, who earlier this year threatened to lynch a Republican elected official who’s defended the integrity of elections in Maricopa County.

And Liz Harris, the state’s elected Republican National Committeewoman, was expelled from the Arizona Legislature in 2023 for inviting a witness to present false charges about lawmakers and other state officials — including allegations of an election-related bribery scheme involving the Sinaloa drug cartel.

Sending Harris, Busch and others to the RNC is not what Salmon, who once served as chair of the Arizona GOP, would call putting the state’s “best foot forward.”

“It ebbs our credibility, and our integrity,” he said.

Gina Swoboda, the current chair of the Arizona Republican Party, doesn’t share those concerns. As for the three “fake electors,” Swoboda says such a thing “doesn’t exist.”

“That’s a made up leftist frame,” she said Monday from the convention floor. “We’ve always had alternate electors.”

What Hoffman, Kern and Cottle — the three indicted delegates — did was “in keeping with what we have done historically,” Swoboda added.

“They were proud to represent President Trump in 2020. Arizona stands by everyone who stood by President Trump. We would never do anything less,” she said.

Hoffman, an alternate delegate whose fellow Arizona Republicans elected him the state’s national committeeman, chalks up his indictment as a product of “the Democrats’ weaponization of our justice system” and vows he’ll be vindicated from “this naked political persecution.”

When asked if his presence at the convention was, as Salmon argued, a poor reflection of the Republican brand, Hoffman claimed the charges were part of a plot to divide the country.

“They are doing such a good job at it that an assassin attempted to assassinate President Trump just a few days ago. That is not something that we take lightly,” Hoffman said, adding that he has received death threats that he blamed on “the likes of Rachel Maddow and other insane leftists in the media.”

In Milwaukee, party officials have largely shied away from rehashing a four-year-old election loss. But Trump, too, has historically stood by those who attempted to upend his 2020 loss.

Kern, for instance, boasts of Trump’s 2022 endorsement for Arizona Senate in a recent ad for his 2024 congressional campaign. In it, Kern describes himself as a “hometown hero who actually did stand up for President Trump.”

And the former president has surrounded himself with election deniers, from his choice of vice presidential running mate — Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance has said he thought the 2020 election was “stolen from Trump” — to those seeking employment at the RNC.

Salmon worries that kind of continued acceptance of persistent election denialism will drive essential voters away from the conservative cause.

“I’m talking about the right-of-center voters who are independents, Democrats, and Republicans,” Salmon said “They want us to talk about real problems and making their future better. They don’t want to keep talking about, you know, what happened in the last election.”