Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, December 9th.

Today on Forbes, Inside Shabuzzi's breakout year, quote, I was right about not giving up.

Cowboy boots are click-clacking on the hardwood floors and hands are up in the air at New York's Irving Plaza Theater on a Wednesday night in September.

On stage, Shibuzi takes a gulp from a bottle of Jack Daniels to commemorate the sixth stop

on his first headliner tour. Nearly an hour later, he walks off and the crowd cries out in

unison. Despite performing 16 songs, he never played his number one hit, a bar song, Tipsy, and the audience

knows what's coming for an encore. After five minutes, he bounds onto the stage and performs the song,

twice. At 29 years old, Shibuzzi has never been happier, or at least he's never felt an

adrenaline rush like this.

Born Collins-Obina-Cibweze to Nigerian immigrants, his stage name comes from a high school

football coach who mispronounced his last name, he left his hometown of Woodbridge, Virginia,

in pursuit of his musical dreams eight years ago. Not long ago, he was sleeping on couches in Los Angeles.

He's now traveling on his tour bus to greet the thousands of fans coming to watch him perform.

He likes to play it cool, but with six Grammy nominations this year, including Best New Artist,

the genre-blending musician is finally finding the validation he was looking for after three studio

albums. Shibuzi, a 2025 Forbes Under 30 honoree, says, quote, some of my friends are in L.A. to

this day and haven't been able to find that breakthrough for themselves. I was right about not

giving up. The newfound success is owed to his big hit, which puts a country spin on Jayquan's

2004 hip-hop song, Tipsy.

The track tied the record at 19 weeks for the longest-running number one song on the Billboard

Hot 100 chart.

It's hitting nearly 2 billion streams globally, and Sirius XM alone has aired it

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