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Apple is in talks to acquire the US rights to screen Formula 1 as the tech giant chases the success of its hit movie based on the race car series and delves further into showing live sport.

The iPhone maker is challenging Disney’s ESPN — Formula 1’s current American broadcaster — when the broadcast contract becomes available next year, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The interest comes as F1 starring Brad Pitt becomes the company’s first big box office success since moving into the business of making original content for its Apple TV+ streaming service.

Formula 1’s US owners, Liberty Media, are hoping the film, along with Netflix’s Drive to Survive documentary series, will have increased the value of the rights for its races by attracting younger, female and American audiences to the sport.

F1 has generated roughly $300mn at the box office making it Apple’s highest-grossing film, while representing a pivot into producing mainstream blockbusters after commercial disappointments with Killers of the Flower Moon and Napoleon.

Apple has previously made moves into the live sports streaming, striking a deal with Major League Baseball in 2022 to broadcast games on Friday nights, as well as a broader deal with North America’s Major League Soccer.

The race car series makes in the region of $85mn a year from its existing broadcast partner ESPN. F1 also streams live races on its own streaming service in the US, charging fans directly.

Analysts at Citi have previously estimated that F1’s next US broadcast deal could be worth $121mn a year, although that was before the release of the F1 film. Its total global media rights revenue grew almost 8 per cent to about $1.1bn in 2024.

F1 is yet to make a decision on its future broadcasting arrangements and ESPN may yet retain the rights, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter.

ESPN had an exclusive period of time to negotiate a deal without competition from other bidders. However, that window ended without a deal last year, opening the process to rivals. Other bidders are also expected to seek the rights.

The US is a priority market for Liberty Media, which has added Miami and Las Vegas to its race calendar in recent years, complementing its grand prix in Austin, Texas. Cadillac, the US brand backed by billionaire financier Mark Walter’s TWG Motorsports and General Motors, will join the grid as the 11th team in 2026.

F1’s audiences on ESPN have doubled from 554,000 viewers a race in 2018, the year after Liberty Media took over Formula 1, to roughly 1.1mn in 2024. In the first 10 events this year, F1 averaged 1.3mn viewers, with record viewership for Australia, China, Monaco, Spain, Canada and Austria.

Apple does not break down revenue for Apple TV+ and its production company Apple Studios, instead including them in its $100bn-a-year services revenue, which encompasses products such as the App Store, iCloud and Apple Pay.

Apple, Liberty Media and Formula 1 declined to comment.

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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot repeatedly praised Adolf Hitler and shared antisemitic rhetoric on Tuesday, the day before his xAI company plans to release its latest model.

In response to one user asking “which 20th century historical figure” would be best suited to deal with a post that appeared to celebrate the deaths of children at a Christian summer camp in the recent Texas floods, which have killed more than 100 people, Grok pointed to the Nazi leader.

“To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time,” Grok wrote. The chatbot shares context and opinions with users on Musk’s social media platform X when they tag it underneath a post.

“If calling out radicals cheering dead kids makes me ‘literally hitler,’ then pass the mustache — truth hurts more than floods,” the chatbot added in another comment.

In further exchanges, Grok promoted antisemitic tropes such as describing Jewish people as having “beards [and] schemes”.

Musk on Friday said Grok had been “improved . . . significantly” following concerns from some right-wing influencers that it had become too ‘woke’.

The latest Grok outburst came less than two months after the chatbot repeatedly referenced “white genocide” in South Africa in response to unrelated questions, which xAI later said was because of an “unauthorised modification” to prompts — which guide how the AI should respond.

The incident led the company to begin publishing its prompts on code repository GitHub.

It also comes as xAI, which acquired X earlier this year, is preparing to release its latest version of the chatbot Grok 4 late on Wednesday.

Musk has deliberately opted for Grok to have fewer speech guardrails than rival chatbots. But the recent episodes have raised concerns about the model’s propensity to spread inflammatory content or hate speech, or produce inaccuracies known as “hallucinations”.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Some of the posts seen by the Financial Times later appeared to have been deleted from the platform.

Musk’s supporters were incensed over the weekend when Grok linked multiple deaths in the recent flooding in Texas in part to funding cuts made by the US President Donald Trump and the entrepreneur’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (Doge) initiative.

The chatbot said: “Trump’s Noaa [National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration] cuts, pushed by Musk’s Doge, slashed funding 30% and staff 17%, underestimating rainfall by 50% and delaying alerts. This contributed to the floods killing 24, including ~20 Camp Mystic girls.”

Shortly after, the company updated its system, telling Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased”, according to the public repository of prompts.

It also added a prompt that said: “The response should not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect, as long as they are well substantiated.”

The Trump administration has denied cuts to the federal workforce hampered its response to the floods.

Musk has increasingly used X, which was known as Twitter when he bought it for $44bn in 2022, to share rightwing conspiracies. Over the weekend, the billionaire, a former ally of Trump, further escalated his feud with the president, announcing plans to form a political party.

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You are driving down the highway when, without warning, traffic comes to a sudden stop as you enter a tunnel. You reach for your hazard lights, but they are not where you expect. Instead of a button, they are buried in a menu on your car’s touchscreen. You tap the screen, but it freezes. Now what?

Since the mid-2010s, many automakers have embraced a buttonless future, inspired by smartphones and Tesla’s minimalist designs. Even safety functions such as hazard lights, windshield wipers and defrosters have moved to digital-only touchscreens. But the dream of a sleek, futuristic cockpit is increasingly colliding with human limits, especially when split-second decisions are critical.

So why did companies pursue this direction in the first place? Beyond the appeal of minimalist design, the shift was largely financial. Eliminating buttons reduces parts and manufacturing complexity. It supports over-the-air software updates, which allow automakers to introduce subscription-based features such as navigation, voice commands and even heated seats without dealer visits. This model mirrors the smartphone industry: sell the hardware, then monetise through software.

But now, a reversal is under way. Carmakers are bringing back the very buttons they once declared obsolete. The pivot is especially striking in Asia. After helping drive the adoption of touchscreen-dominated interiors, the region is now among the first to course correct. 

Chinese EV makers like Xiaomi, BYD and Denza are leading the charge. Xiaomi’s SU7, for example, offers an optional row of physical keys that magnetically attach beneath the central touchscreen. BYD’s Sealion 05 includes buttons on the centre console. Denza, a BYD sub-brand, updated its D9 model by replacing touch panels with switches. In Japan, Subaru, after briefly experimenting with touchscreen-heavy layouts, reversed course this year, reintroducing physical controls in models such as the 2026 Outback.

Europe may prove to be the strongest force in accelerating the dashboard redesign. Euro NCAP, Europe’s car safety authority, has announced that by 2026, essential functions like turn signals and hazard lights must be accessible through physical buttons to earn its top safety rating.

A 2005 Volvo with traditional physical buttons allowed drivers to complete basic tasks in just 10 seconds, less than one-quarter of the time it took in modern touchscreen-equipped cars, where simple tasks took up to 44.6 seconds to complete, according to a Swedish road test by Vi Bilägare. A study by the Transport Research Laboratory found that using in-car touchscreens can impair driver reaction times more than being over the legal alcohol limit or under the influence of cannabis.

From a cost perspective, reintroducing physical controls may seem like a regression. Assuming added costs of around $100 for components, wiring and assembly per vehicle, a global automaker producing 10mn cars annually could face up to $1bn in extra expenses.    

But on a per-unit basis, that is less than 1 per cent of the average retail price of a mid-range car and significantly less than the potential financial risks of relying solely on touchscreens. A decline in Euro NCAP ratings, for example, can dent consumer trust, raise insurance costs and lower fleet sales, particularly in Europe, where fleet purchases account for over half of all new car registrations. Meanwhile, in competitive markets like China, home to over 100 electric car brands, even a slight drop in a brand’s net promoter score — the main measure of customer loyalty — can quickly erode market share. 

The return of the button is part of a recurring pattern in the history of technology. Time and again, industries have mistaken minimalist interfaces for progress. In the early 2000s, mobile phone makers rushed to eliminate physical keys, only to bring back buttons for volume, lock and emergency access. Even the iPhone’s silent mode toggle remains, for the same reason drivers need a hazard button: you can find it without looking.

In aviation, touchscreen interfaces were initially seen as revolutionary, but research since the late 2010s has shown that in turbulence or emergencies, nothing beats the speed of a physical switch. Factory equipment, medical devices and military hardware all continue to rely on dedicated controls. 

Lessons across industries remind us that in critical moments, the human brain defaults to muscle memory. In cars, that means building around how people actually drive. Sometimes, progress means turning back.

june.yoon@ft.com