Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Wednesday, January 8th.

Today on Forbes, why the founder of the right-wing video platform, Rumble, is now a billionaire.

Plenty of people got presents at the end of December, but Rumble founder and CEO Chris Pavlovsky

had a particularly lucrative holiday season.

On December 20th, Povlovsky's cash-strapped YouTube alternative,

which claims the mantle of free speech and is popular with the political right,

announced a $775 million investment from crypto giant Tether.

That sent Rumble's stock soaring by more than 100% over the next week, and made Pavlovsky a billionaire. Forbes estimates that Pavlovsky is now

worth around $1.3 billion, thanks to his 25% stake in Rumble, plus options to acquire an additional 6%

stake with a bargain basement exercise price of 3 cents per share.

And that's with Rumble's volatile stock down 17% to $13.43 per share Friday after closing

at a peak of $16.27 on December 26th.

Not included in Forbes's estimate of Pavlovsky's fortune are the so-called earn-out shares

and options that could boost his stake in Rumble to as high as 44%.

That would be if the company's stock trades above $17.50 per share for 20 days

in a 30-day period prior to September 2027, a scenario that now seems a little less outlandish

than it did a month ago. As part of the deal, Tether will inject $250 million into the still-unprofitable platform's bank account

to be used, quote, to support growth initiatives.

The remaining $525 million of proceeds from the transaction, which values rumble at only $7.50 per share,

will be used to buy back as much as a quarter of the

company's stock, including as much as a 4% stake from Pavlovsky. The cash injection

couldn't have come at a better time. Rumble reported net losses of over $100 million

...