Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, December 24th.

Today on Forbes, how the king of beef jerky became a billionaire.

Back in 1985, the Link family's Wisconsin meatpacking business had just gone bankrupt,

and Jack Link was taking his then teenageteenage sons hunting when they stopped at a

convenience store to buy a few packages of jerky. After paying, Link couldn't believe how expensive

it was. Link, now 79 years old, tells Forbes, quote, I said, wow, that's quite a lot of money.

The idea stuck with Link, who soon realized that he could make these products himself, and that he even already had ovens in his shut down plant.

In a rare interview, Link says, quote, so he laid some jerky in there, and it came out just

wonderfully, and that's where it all began.

Using his German immigrant great-grandfather's 1880s recipe, Link's jerky became a hit.

And now as the eponymous brand Jack Lynx, it is the top-selling jerky brand in America.

With $2 billion in estimated annual revenue, and 34% of the U.S. meat

snacks market cornered, the company has made him a billionaire. Today, Jack Link's beef sticks,

and jerkeys are sold across more than 200,000 stores at nearly every major retailer in America,

as well as in 55 countries around the world.

The business manufactures more than 800 million packages of meat products each year.

As the king of the $9 billion in annual sales global meat snack industry,

a hot market that over the past decade has attracted an investor-led frenzy

of an estimated

$1 billion in funding alongside nine-figure acquisitions by large publicly traded companies,

Jack Lynx has withstood the challengers, while a few became major flameouts. Throughout this

rise, Jack's younger son, Troy, now 53 years old, has been navigating the path forward,

...