Forbes Daily Briefing

May was a good month to be a billionaire, as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq climbed by 5% and 8%, respectively, boosting the fortunes of the world’s ten richest people to $2.9 trillion combined as of June 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. As a group, they’re $220 billion richer than they were a month ago. No one had a better May than Larry Ellison, who is back in the top five after adding a staggering $71 billion to his fortune (which is now an estimated $276 billion). For that, Ellison can thank red-hot demand for AI. The software giant he cofounded and runs as chairman and chief technology officer is building multiple gigawatt-scale data centers across the U.S. and, on May 1, announced an agreement with the U.S. Department of War to deploy its AI tools on classified networks for government warfighting, intelligence and enterprise operations. Oracle stock, of which Ellison owns around 40%, climbed 40% in May. Hot on Ellison’s heels is Michael Dell, the month’s second-biggest gainer after adding $67 billion as the AI boom continues to lift his Dell Technologies, too. The tech giant reported banner earnings on May 28, smashing expectations and disclosing a 757% year-over-year surge in annual AI server revenue—helping drive the stock up 33%, its best trading day ever. In all, Dell stock jumped more than 100% in May. Both Ellison and Dell edge past Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, who drops to No. 7—despite getting $7 billion richer, as shares of the Facebook parent company climbed just 3%, underperforming the broader market and Zuck’s billionaire competitors amid huge AI capital expenditures and employee layoffs at Meta. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 3 June 2026

It’s hard to imagine now, but back in 2021 venture capitalists weren’t sold on Anthropic. The mega-AI startup is now valued at $380 billion, but at the time it had no public product, no revenue and was trying to raise hundreds of millions of dollars. “AI was not viewed as this supersexy, exciting thing that you would want to invest in,” says cofounder and president Daniela Amodei, who had been an early OpenAI employee before leaving with six of her colleagues to start Anthropic that year.  Her brother, CEO Dario Amodei, quickly drummed up $1.1 billion in funding from a range of billionaire investors, including Facebook alum Dustin Moskovitz and soon-to-be-disgraced crypto bro Sam Bankman-Fried. It was enough to cobble together an early version of Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, but not nearly enough to fully train it to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which exploded onto the scene in November 2022. Scared of spending billions backing what appeared to be an also-ran, most traditional VCs shied away—except Spark Capital partner Yasmin Razavi. By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 2 June 2026

Two former Benchmark investors are pitching something you don’t usually see this soon: a joint, $800 million AI fund—less than a year after each left to raise smaller, founder-led vehicles on their own. Victor Lazarte left the Silicon Valley fund in July 2025 after backing companies like Mercor, Heygen and Applied Compute in his two-year stretch as a partner. After exiting Benchmark, he quickly raised $200 million for his own fund, VL. Now, Lazarte is pitching a much bigger fund to make bets on early and growth stage startups. He’s telling prospective limited partners he plans to raise a new fund called Diffusion and co-manage it with Kris Fredrickson, according to several investors who say they were pitched on the effort. The target is roughly $800 million, one of the larger first-time venture raises of the year. Fredrickson started his investing career at Benchmark before moving to hedge fund Coatue, where he backed companies like Instacart, Chime and Scale AI. Forbes reported last July that Fredrickson had raised $175 million for his own fund, Verified, to back growth stage AI startups like legal platform Harvey and search engine Perplexity. By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 1 June 2026

Ina sheltered bit of the Chesapeake Bay in front of Jim Perdue’s home in Berlin, Maryland, the scion of America’s most famous chicken family raises clams. Each year he sells about a thousand to local crab shacks. The rest are eaten by the Perdue clan. The clam farm is the last remainder of his dream of striking out on his own and farming seafood, which inspired him, in 1974 at 25, to walk away from his family’s successful poultry business. “You don't know if you're getting a pat on the back because you did a good job, or because your name is on the door,” says the 77-year-old Perdue, from a barn on the property. The structure is adorned with memorabilia from the company’s history, including the famous ads featuring his father, Frank, with his signature slogan: “It takes a tough man to make a tender chicken.” Frank was the legendary poultry magnate who grew his own father’s hatchery (founded in 1920) into a $1 billion (sales) business by the time he turned over the reins to Jim in 1991. Jim had come back to the family coup a few years earlier—and only after Frank threatened to sell the company unless he returned.  “My dad didn't trust a lot of people,” Perdue says, “but he trusted me.” By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 31 May 2026

The Department of Justice is demanding major tech providers Amazon, Apple and Google provide identities, addresses and purchase histories of at least 100,000 people who used a car tinkering app made by Cayman Islands-based EZ Lynk. The subpoenas are part of the DOJ’s ongoing court case against EZ Lynk over its alleged role in Clean Air Act violations, which the company disputes. It’s a rare example of the government obtaining subpoenas to grab data on anyone who downloaded an app. In one case in 2019, Forbes revealed Apple and Google were ordered to provide information on over 10,000 people who installed a gun scope app on their phone. In this latest case, the government is asking for information on at least 10 times more individuals. EZ Lynk, privacy advocates and car enthusiasts say the subpoenas represent overreach by the government and a threat to Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches.  The DOJ first sued EZ Lynk in 2021, accusing the company of breaking the Clean Air Act by selling “defeat devices,” which are designed to remove emissions controls on a vehicle. EZ Lynk denies its primary purpose is to help drivers circumvent emissions laws, as its apps can be used for other tweaks and software upgrades, as well as to monitor a car’s performance. By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 30 May 2026

It is 10 a.m. in Chiswick, a pleasant west London suburb, in late April, and Sir David Beckham has already been on set for two hours. This should have been expected: The 51-year-old retired soccer superstar is notorious for being early. Cranes, tents and trailers clutter the driveway of a two-story brick home, giving it the outside appearance of a film studio. Inside, a few dozen crew members move through the rooms with practiced efficiency, managing cameras and lighting rigs. Beckham’s production firm, Studio 99, has set up today’s shoot for British speaker company Bowers & Wilkins. Yesterday’s shoot was for appliance maker SharkNinja. There are several more scheduled in the coming days, all in service of the machine that is David Beckham, Inc. By Maneet Ahuja, Editor-at-Large Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 29 May 2026

Ten years have passed since Cristiano Ronaldo first topped the Forbes list of the highest-paid athletes—a decade in which the Portuguese soccer superstar has jumped from Spain’s Real Madrid to Italy’s Juventus to England’s Manchester United and, finally, to Saudi Arabia’s Al-Nassr. Yet for all of those frequent flyer miles, the 41-year-old Ronaldo is right back where he started—atop the sports world’s earnings throne. For the fourth year in a row, and the sixth time overall, Ronaldo leads the athlete income ranking, racking up an estimated $300 million over the past 12 months before taxes and agent fees. The total includes an estimated $235 million from his playing contract with Al-Nassr as well as $65 million from endorsements, appearances, licensing, memorabilia and other business endeavors. While a forward who is rapidly closing in on 1,000 career goals is no doubt used to a big score—Ronaldo now matches Michael Jordan with his six stints atop the athlete earnings ranking and is surpassed only by Tiger Woods, who has led the list 11 times—his latest haul is historic. At $300 million, he ties boxer Floyd Mayweather Jr.’s 2015 total for the largest that Forbes has measured since it began publishing the athletes ranking in 1990. (Of course, adjusting for inflation, Mayweather comes out ahead, at $427 million.) By Brett Knight, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 28 May 2026

“At a time when much of the business conversation is defined by speed, scale and disruption, family businesses reflect a different model of success, one grounded in endurance, stewardship, resilience and trust,” says Byron Trott, the legendary chairman and co-CEO of merchant bank BDT & MSD Partners, in an essay for Forbes published Wednesday. “Their impact is often felt not only in revenues or valuations, but in livelihoods, institutions and the strength of local communities. That is why Forbes’ inaugural list of America’s top family businesses matters now,” says Trott, who has worked with companies founded and controlled by families with names like Koch, Pritzker, Mars and Cox.  There’s no doubt that America’s family businesses–including the 100 largest ones featured on Forbes’ new ranking–are what Trott calls “the quiet engine driving the economy.” They account for 25% of U.S. companies, 23% of the American workforce and 23% of private sector GDP, according to what four leading academics described in a recent paper as the “middle definition” of a family business. Family businesses are everywhere around us. The ones on Forbes’ list own grocery stores where we shop (Wegmans), hotels where we stay (Hyatt), newspapers that keep us informed (The Wall Street Journal) and cosmetics that keep us looking our best (Estee Lauder). They make some of the most popular brands in product categories like candy (M&Ms), chicken (Perdue) and concrete (Quikrete). And they’re based all over the country, in 31 different states, ranging from Arizona to Wisconsin to North Carolina. By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff and Andrea Murphy, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 May 2026

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a document Tuesday giving Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and his company broad immunity for potential tax disputes with the federal government. It’s the clearest way that the president is personally benefitting from his settlement with the Internal Revenue Service, which he sued days after taking office for failing to prevent the release of his personal tax returns. The settlement lands at a convenient moment. Donald Trump earned an estimated $1.4 billion from crypto and licensing ventures in 2025, as he turned his first year back in the White House into the most lucrative year of his life. If the president received an extension for his 2025 return, his preparers may be sorting through exactly how to present this year’s welter of income right now. Trump has never hidden the animating principle. When Hillary Clinton accused him of paying no taxes in the 2016 debates, he replied: “That makes me smart.” Also much richer. If Trump is able to conjure up theories to avoid taxes for his 2025 income, he could save more than a half-billion dollars, according to Forbes estimates.  The conflict-of-interest underpinning all of this is so obvious that even Trump has acknowledged it. “I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” he mused in the Oval Office in October. “You know, that decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” Trump first suggested he would send whatever judgement he received to charity, before settling on a more creative approach. The government would not pay Trump. Instead, Trump would get a pass enabling him to pay less to the government. The move harkens the old cliché—a penny saved is a penny earned—with the same result: more money in Trump’s pocket. By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 26 May 2026

The robot, a pair of disembodied arms with crablike pincers at the end, wasn’t supposed to pick up the bag. It had been told to do a single tedious job: open plastic bags on a conveyor belt and stuff toy potted plant plushies inside them. Then one plushie snagged halfway in. The robot paused — briefly, as if assessing its work — then did something it had not been programmed to do. It raised its other arm, grabbed the other side of the bag, gave it a quick shake so the toy slid all the way down, and then placed it back on the belt. For a human worker that’s muscle memory. For the engineers at Generalist, a Silicon Valley startup developing robot “brains”, it was a tell: the robot wasn’t just replaying a scripted task. It was improvising. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 25 May 2026

China’s push for self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacturing has benefited companies across the supply chain. The latest to get a boost is Hubei Dinglong, which supplies materials essential for the chip making process. Its Shenzhen-listed shares have surged nearly 116% over the past year, propelling cofounders Zhu Shuangquan and Zhu Shunquan into the three comma club. Shuangquan, the company’s 61-year-old chairman, and his 57-year-old brother Shunquan, who serves as CEO, own stakes of roughly 15% each. Forbes estimates the siblings are worth $1.3 billion apiece based on Friday’s closing price of 64.19 yuan. Hubei Dinglong didn’t respond to a comment request regarding the pair’s billionaire status.  The Wuhan-based company is China’s key player in chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), a process to flatten the surface of silicon wafers so that circuits can be printed and chips can be stacked. The company says it is China’s only supplier that covers the full range of CMP materials, from the semi-liquid known as slurries for flattening to the cleaning fluid for removing any residue after the process.  Since the U.S. imposed chip-related export controls on China in 2022, Dinglong has expanded into materials for lithography, a major hurdle for China’s self-reliance in semiconductors where ultraviolet light is used to print circuits onto silicon wafers. In lithography, Dinglong manufactures photoresist, a chemical that captures the circuit design, though its most advanced products can only be used in lower-end chip manufacturing. By Zinnia Lee, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 24 May 2026

On Wednesday, Forbes published its inaugural list of America’s Largest Family Businesses by revenue. But sales are hardly the only way to measure the magnitude of a business. That’s why for the first time ever, we’ve valued the nation’s top private family firms. Most aren’t flashy, preferring to remain low key. Despite their reticence, three of them are worth more than $100 billion, by our estimates, making them more valuable than all but a handful of the hottest tech unicorns like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. Occupying the number one spot is $185 billion (estimated valuation) Koch Inc., the Wichita, Kansas-based conglomerate formerly known as Koch Industries, which is 84% owned by the families of 90-year-old chairman and co-CEO Charles Koch and Julia Koch, the widow of Charles’ brother David (d. 2019). The oldest of the top 25 is food and agriculture giant Cargill, which was founded by William Wallace Cargill in 1865. By Andrea Murphy, Forbes Staff Matt Durot, Forbes Staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 23 May 2026

The launch of Anthropic’s AI model Mythos a month ago sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity world. The tech was so advanced, the AI company said, that it had found dozens of severe bugs in critical internet code. Now, cyber startup Depthfirst says its own AI model has found even more bugs that Mythos missed for just a tenth of the cost, including critical flaws that could affect the majority of people using the web today. Depthfirst CEO Qasim Mithani says that because Depthfirst optimizes its models for one task, it can do for $1,000 what Mythos does for $10,000. Depthfirst, which raised $80 million at a $580 million valuation in March, is also launching Open Defense Initiative, a program that offers companies and open source developers a total of $5 million in credit to use its artificial intelligence to find bugs in their code. It’s similar in concept to Anthropic’s limited release of Mythos, which it gave to a group of nearly 50 companies (and it’s now expanding). Depthfirst won’t pick and choose who can access its model, but will review applicants, at first limiting it to open source developers whose code is widely used or deployed in critical infrastructure. By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 22 May 2026

The middle-aged Pennsylvania couple had lived together for more than a decade, buying a home together and sharing other assets. They never got married. It didn’t matter, they thought. But after he died of cancer recently, leaving her his entire estate, it did matter. A lot. Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states that still imposes an inheritance tax–a tax on transfers from a person who has died to the people who inherit, with rates based on the category of recipient. Transfers to spouses, but not to unmarried partners, are exempt. Pennsylvania subjected everything she was left to inheritance tax at the state’s top 15% rate. The woman, who asked not to be identified, was shocked.  Americans spend a lot of time thinking about where to live for tax purposes. States like Florida and Texas lure both billionaires and ordinary workers by touting their lack of a state income tax. Other states lure seniors with generous exemptions for retirement income. But another question gets less attention: Where is the most expensive place in the U.S. to die? By Kelly Phillips Erb, Senior Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 21 May 2026

For decades, DIYers and construction pros have picked up yellow and red bags of Quikrete concrete mix from the shelves of America’s big box stores like Home Depot and used it for everything from anchoring mailboxes to patching driveways and making outdoor benches and steps. That in turn has generated billions of dollars for the little-known company and the little-known family behind the brand.  But their time in the shadows may have come to an end. In February 2025, the privately-held building materials firm made a big splash when it paid $11.5 billion to acquire publicly traded competitor Summit Materials. The deal, which Forbes estimates boosted Quikrete’s revenue by around 50% to an estimated $12 billion, helped propel the Atlanta-based company onto Forbes’ first ever ranking of America’s Largest Family Businesses, published this week, at No. 43. Based on Forbes’ estimates, Quikrete is the 17th most valuable privately-held family business in America, making its founding Winchester family one of the country’s richest clans, worth an estimated $18 billion, thanks to their estimated 100% ownership of Quikrete. “We’re proud of our heritage as an American, family-run company that has helped revolutionize the building and home improvement industries,” said Quikrete’s longtime former CEO Jim Winchester in a press release celebrating the company’s 75th anniversary in 2015. “From day one, my father Gene Winchester was driven to meet the needs of both contractors and homeowners with the highest-quality products at fair market value, and that commitment remains a core value of Quikrete today.” By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 20 May 2026

Onan overcast April day in the middle of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, Paul Lwin looks like he’s playing a vintage video game. He huddles over a laptop on the deck of the spartan vessel he’s taking out on the water today. Tiny boat icons float across the screen; he draws a box around them, selects a few parameters, and clicks “Start Play.” Seconds later, a set of driverless boats in the bay a mile away begin gliding in parallel with the icons, which leave bright blue tracks on the screen in their wake. Lwin flashes an enormous grin. Each of those autonomous crafts is a “Rampage,” the 14-foot flagship boat of Lwin’s Providence-based company, Havoc, which outfits its vessels with technology that theoretically lets a single human control thousands at once. Lwin, 40, and his cofounder Joe Turner, 42, both Navy vets, aim to become the U.S. military’s go-to maker of specialized software for not just uncrewed boats, but all domains, after recently acquiring a couple of small aerial and land drone startups as well. “The goal here is to make sure you don’t need to know anything about robotics or autonomy,” Lwin explains, showing the steps again on the laptop. “If it’s not this simple, it’s a science experiment. Operators—especially warfighters who don’t have PhDs in robotics, who don’t have PhDs in search algorithms—will never use it if it’s more difficult than this.” By Monica Hunter-Hart, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 19 May 2026

From dinner at the White House for owners of his meme coin to a $400 million jet gifted by a petromonarchy that will be donated to his presidential library after he leaves office, Donald Trump has led the charge on extracting private gains from public office. His Cabinet appears to have absorbed the lesson. Take Sean Duffy, the former Fox host-turned-Secretary of Transportation. On Friday, his department dropped a trailer on YouTube unveiling the Great American Road Trip, an initiative purportedly designed as a “guide to the historic landmarks, open roads, and small towns that tell 250 years of this country’s story.”  But what the trailer showed was a reality show in which Duffy, his still-a-Fox-host wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine children gallivant around America. They meet a Ben Franklin impersonator in Philadelphia, ride snowmobiles in Montana and hang out with Kid Rock along the way.  All in good fun. “We live in a PornHub world, and this is really good, wholesome family stuff,” Campos-Duffy said in an interview on—where else?—Fox. By Kyle Khan-Mullins, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 18 May 2026

When ride-hailing app Uber listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2019, it reset the scales for all venture capitalists. In one of the all-time largest initial public offerings in the United States, the company raised $8.1 billion on a $82 billion valuation.  Early backers like venture fund Benchmark, Google Ventures and Lowercase Capital held stakes worth over $12 billion at the time of the float. But the numbers for that deal — one of the best of the last era of startups — now look quaint.  That’s because the valuation of just three startups, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, have exploded over the last year. Elon’s space giant is now tipped to go public at a valuation of over $1.5 trillion as soon as June following its merger with xAI in February, which valued the combined business at $1.25 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are now valued at $852 billion and $380 billion respectively, with Anthropic reportedly in talks to at least match its archrival’s valuation in a new fundraise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 17 May 2026

Every company these days wants to figure out how to automate people’s work with AI. Turns out, AI can also help with that. Founded in 2019, San Francisco- based startup Scribe makes a browser extension that sits on employees’ laptops, recording their screens and silently watching them work. Along with giving businesses insight into the steps involved in repetitive tasks, Scribe’s AI software can then automatically generate step-by-step guides and tutorials that clearly explain how different teams operate, complete with annotated screenshots and click instructions.  That’s also perfect for teaching AI agents how people work: what to do, which tools to use and how to handle different tasks on their own. “Companies are realizing we need to make our organizations legible to humans and agents,” says CEO and cofounder Jennifer Smith.  Today 80,000 customers including LinkedIn, HubSpot and T-Mobile use Scribe’s guides to train new employees on complex workflows and zero-in on inefficiencies, helping them save time and money. (Teaching agents, rather than humans, is still nascent.) By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 16 May 2026

Martin Varsavsky has trouble keeping track of all the ventures he’s started. There are more than a dozen of them, including a handful that became worth more than $1 billion. But Certuma, which launched quietly this winter, may be his biggest idea yet: He plans to build the first FDA-approved AI doctor. “What’s happening now is everyone you know, and probably you yourself, are checking your medical problems with AI. But then what happens when you want action? The AI, after giving you a wonderful, accurate diagnosis of what’s wrong with you, says, ‘I am not a doctor,’” Varsavsky tells Forbes. He ticks off all the questions it might answer this way, from getting a prescription to scheduling imaging. “I want to fix the ‘I am not a doctor’ problem by building AI that is recognized by the FDA and recognized by the states.” AI doctors could help solve an important problem, much like telemedicine did during the Covid-19 pandemic. There simply aren’t enough physicians to serve all the people who need them, especially in rural areas. The shortage is only getting worse. More than 100 million people in the United States face barriers to accessing primary care.Meanwhile, some 46% of counties don’t have a cardiologist; in rural counties, that number rises to 86%. By Amy Feldman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 15 May 2026

Last winter, Groq cofounder and CEO Jonathan Ross walked into a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with a pitch for the companies’ tech to work together. He now describes the synergy with a logistics analogy: stop building AI data centers as if every workload wants the same hardware. Training is bulk hauling; inference is last-mile delivery. GPUs can do both, but using the 18-wheeler even when you just need a van can be a lot slower. So: Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs are the big trucks. Groq’s specialized chips—LPUs, or language processing units, designed to run models fast—are the smaller vans. “If you were building out a logistics network for the entire United States, and I told you your two options were all 18-wheelers or just delivery vans, which one would you pick?” Ross said. “The best answer is both.”  Ross wasn’t just pitching a worldview. He wanted Nvidia’s permission to buy around 100,000 Blackwell chips, likely worth billions. Huang grilled him on the technical details, and then the meeting ended.  When Huang called back three days later, Ross expected a discussion about his GPU purchase order. Instead, the Nvidia CEO cut to the chase. “We should probably move really fast,” Ross recalled him saying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 14 May 2026

The financial technology industry has become a world of haves and have-nots. Take San Francisco payments company Stripe, which helps millions of merchants accept credit cards, process stablecoin transactions and manage billing tasks. In 2025, it brought in $6.9 billion of net revenue and $1.2 billion of earnings before factoring in interest, tax, depreciation and amortization expenses, according to a person familiar with its finances. Revenues were up more than 30% from 2024. That’s world-class scale and growth, but its recent valuation of $159 billion, which has afforded each of the Collison brothers a $17.5 billion fortune, means its private backers think it’s worth nearly five times Adyen, a Dutch fintech and close competitor. Unlike Stripe, Adyen is publicly traded. It processed $1.6 trillion in payments last year compared with Stripe’s $1.9 trillion. Stripe loyalists will point out that it has more business lines than Adyen and is growing faster off of a larger base. But the chances that Stripe could maintain a $159 billion valuation if it went public today are slim. Public investors value e-commerce platform Shopify at $165 billion, and it grew nearly as fast as Stripe last year and had more than double the profits. A Stripe spokesperson declined to comment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 13 May 2026

After moving to a new city in North Carolina in 2024, Cookie (a pseudonym) felt the weight of a new city. Their husband was traveling a lot for work, and as a stay-at-home parent with a now 4-year-old daughter, the days were “very draining”. Since Cookie didn’t know anybody in their new town, they turned to Janitor AI, a social chatbot site known for its unbounded, often explicit, fantasy roleplay. It was a “nice release,” Cookie told Forbes. Cookie grew up around fantasy and romance novels—their mother kept a collection—and Janitor AI became an easy way to escape the drudgery of the day-to-day. By the time their daughter is down for a nap or tucked in for the night, Cookie is creating "slow burn" romance characters with detailed and often explicit prompts. There’s Charlie, a nudist werewolf roommate; Marcus, a seven-foot ghoul with a taste for dive bars; Greenwood, Colorado, a fictional town where humans live alongside supernatural “demihumans.” Beneath Greenwood’s romance and monster lore is a civic rot: a glossy new church masking an organ-harvesting operation, with seedy bars serving as bait. Cookie is one of Janitor AI’s 2.5 million daily, die-hard users. The platform claims more than 15 million total users and with 100 million monthly visitors, and it's the tenth most popular consumer AI app, according to Similarweb, a digital market intelligence company. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 12 May 2026

The WNBA tips off its 30th season on Friday, but across those three decades, it has never experienced anything like the Golden State Valkyries, on the court or off it. Last year, the Valkyries became the first expansion franchise in league history to reach the playoffs in its inaugural season and sold out all 22 of their home games to set a league record with average attendance of 18,064. By the end of the regular season, Golden State had generated $78 million in revenue, not only breaking another WNBA record but also surpassing more than half of the clubsin a more mature men’s league, MLS. As the team enters its second season, the Valkyries have raised prices yet managed to expand their season-ticket base by 2,000 seats, to 12,000, proving that there is still room to run—and helping them race to the top of the WNBA’s most valuable teams, worth an estimated $780 million. The Valkyries are not the only ones on a financial fast break, however. The 2025 WNBA season also saw the three next-best revenue totals in league history—the Indiana Fever’s $58 million, the New York Liberty’s $43 million and the Las Vegas Aces’ $34 million, according to Forbes estimates—and no team is now worth less than $250 million. By Brett Knight, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 11 May 2026

Inside a climate-controlled room at lender Luxury Asset Capital’s Manhattan office, rows of Hermès handbags line the shelves: Mini Kellys in exotic skins worth roughly $75,000 each, diamond-encrusted Birkin bags and other limited-edition pieces that are worth six figures. Nearby, a first edition of The Catcher in the Rye (which can sell for as much as $50,000) sits alongside contemporary artwork, including a Yoshitomo Nara drawing, worth more than $200,000. Down the hall, safes hold scores of Rolex watches, diamonds and gold jewelry, all meticulously tagged and sealed.  And none of it is for sale. The items are all collateral—pledged by ultra-wealthy borrowers seeking quick cash. Denver-based Luxury Asset Capital runs its operation with the basic mechanics of a neighborhood pawn shop and the discretion of a Swiss bank. Borrowers pledge their watches, jewelry, handbags and fine art in exchange for short-term, nonrecourse loans—often funded within a day.  One borrower who manages a large hedge fund hocked his wife’s eight-carat diamond ring—worth upwards of $600,000—after receiving a large margin call (the loan was eventually repaid and the ring was returned. Another client once brought in an Emmy award as collateral. By Sergei Klebnikov, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 10 May 2026

Over the last year, as its CEO Sam Altman preached a gospel of insatiable compute, OpenAI has created a web of deals that tie a meaningful chunk of Silicon Valley’s AI buildout to its own trajectory. Big names like Nvidia, Oracle and SoftBank have all inked infrastructure contracts with the ChatGPT maker, but there is one company perched further out on a limb than the rest: CoreWeave, an AI cloud company with a roughly $60 billion market cap. The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that OpenAI missed internal projections for revenue and user growth. It claimed OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar is worried the company may not be able to pay for future computing contracts. If that’s even directionally right, it will land hardest on CoreWeave—which counts OpenAI as one of its biggest customers and has borrowed more than $40 billion in mostly high-interest debt used to finance GPUs and data centers. CoreWeave’s view, at least publicly: it can ride out turbulence as long as demand for AI compute keeps outrunning supply. "OpenAI is a terrific partner, but not our only one,” a CoreWeave spokesperson said, namechecking other big-name customers including Meta, Anthropic, Microsoft and Google. “As more companies build and deploy AI, demand for compute continues to grow. We continue to see demand exceed supply across the AI ecosystem.” Problem is: that “AI ecosystem” is not a broad-based consumer market so much as a coterie of spenders writing very large checks. Trillions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure commitments are concentrated in a few places: big tech balance sheets (Oracle, Meta, Microsoft and Nvidia) and a handful of newer entrants that buy AI capacity and then rent it out (like CoreWeave, Nebius and Nscale). CoreWeave’s model—buy GPUs, spin up data centers, lease the capacity to labs—turns that concentration into both opportunity and fragility. By Phoebe Liu, Reporter Richard Nieva, Senior Writer. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 9 May 2026

Spend enough time on X these days and you may see a number of posts marveling at Sam Bankman-Fried’s venture “genius.” Had FTX not imploded, its founder might now be remembered as one of the greatest venture investors ever, they say. Anthropic, Cursor, Robinhood — these were just a few of the hundreds of bets Bankman-Fried made when his crypto empire was thriving.  “The fact that Sam invested early in Anthropic and Cursor is astonishing,” marvels Rory O’Driscoll, a partner at Scale Venture Partners, of two of Silicon Valley's leading artificial intelligence companies. Cursor, an AI coding specialist, has recently struck a deal with SpaceX potentially valuing it at $60 billion, and Anthropic, one of the AI leaders, is being valued at $900 billion. “To pick two of the most important companies in the post-’21 crash and nail it…What a talent, what a willingness to look at new stuff before the ChatGPT moment, when people were saying, ‘this might work, who knows.’” Except, of course, for the matter of whose money Bankman-Fried was investing. Once hailed as the “next Warren Buffett,” he is serving a 25-year federal prison sentence in San Pedro, CA for orchestrating one of the largest financial frauds in history and stealing more than $8 billion from FTX customers, in part to fund these investments. Before his arrest in December 2022, he graced the cover of the Forbes 400 and was estimated to have a personal fortune of $24 billion at its peak. By Nina Bambysheva, Deputy Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 8 May 2026

Last year, the GOP’s legacy donor class and its newer crop of tech and finance billionaires found common cause: writing enormous checks to support Donald Trump.  In February, billionaire Kelcy Warren and his fossil fuel pipeline company, Energy Transfer, each sent $12.5 million to MAGA Inc., a Trump-aligned super PAC. Just a few months later, OpenAI cofounder and president Greg Brockman and his wife cut checks for $12.5 million each.  That makes Warren and Brockman the biggest individual donors to MAGA Inc. But the roster is deeper than two names and four eight-figure checks. Forbes counts at least 24 billionaires or billionaire families who have given over $1 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings covering through the end of March. (Brockman is not currently on Forbes’ list of billionaires, but he did claim to be one in testimony related to Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI). Collectively, these ten-figure club members, plus Brockman, donated $118 million, about a third of the $350 million war chest MAGA Inc has built. By Kyle Khan-Mullins, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 7 May 2026

Last week, Strategy overtook BlackRock, issuer of the world’s largest bitcoin exchange-traded fund, IBIT, to become the world’s largest institutional holder of bitcoin. The milestone followed yet another enormous purchase: between April 13 and April 19, according to a recent Securities and Exchange Commission filing, Strategy bought $2.54 billion worth of bitcoin, its largest acquisition since November 2024. The purchase brought the company’s total holdings to 815,061 BTC—about 3.88% of bitcoin’s fixed 21 million supply—currently worth around $65 billion. The only larger holder is thought to be Satoshi Nakamoto, the elusive founder of the cryptocurrency who disappeared 15 years ago. The funding for Strategy’s latest bitcoin buying spree is not coming from flooding the market with common shares or convertible debt, but mainly from what traders affectionately call “Stretch,” a high-yield perpetual preferred stock the company has been issuing under the symbol STRC. Saylor, Strategy’s chairman, has been touting Stretch as the critical underpinning of the next phase of his bitcoin empire. From 2020 through 2024, Strategy financed its bitcoin binge largely by selling convertible notes and issuing common stock. It was a shrewd display of financial engineering while it lasted. As bitcoin climbed and investors bid Strategy shares to eye-popping premiums over the value of the company’s underlying bitcoin, Saylor could keep issuing more bonds convertible into stock and selling common shares to hedge funds and other investors anticipating a windfall. At points, the stock traded at two to three times the value of bitcoin on its balance sheet. By Nina Bambysheva, Deputy Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 6 May 2026

The AI boom created a colossal market for compute—GPUs, networking gear and the massive datacenters that run it all. It also bolstered a second less celebrated market: protecting those facilities and the crown-jewel chips inside from threats. On top of rising anti-data center sentiment stateside, the war in Iran has turned that problem into a line item. “Data centers are secondary targets right after obvious military sites,” says Matt McCrann, former executive at drone defense company DroneShield, who has worked with data centers in the U.S. and Middle East. That shift matters because the AI data centers being built these days aren’t just expensive—they’re also possible strategic infrastructure during times of war. Enemies don’t need to hit a military site to degrade an opponent’s capability; they can hit compute that potentially underpins communications, logistics, payments and even military planning. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2026

There’s a new member of the $300 billion club and a second sibling from America’s richest family among the planet’s ten wealthiest people. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 5 May 2026

Mariana Minerals CEO and cofounder Turner Caldwell is betting that the next big use for AI won’t be another chatbot—it’ll be a copper mine. His startup, Mariana Minerals, is launching the world’s first autonomous mining operation today at its Copper One mine in remote southeast Utah: automated drills do the digging, giant robotic haul trucks move ore for processing, and an AI-enabled platform called MarianaOS will track and direct the entire operation. The company is even using Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, packed with sensors, to patrol the 10,000-acre site and inspect conditions. If it works, Mariana could help boost both U.S. copper supply and U.S. copper refining as demand for the metal climbs and the politics around “critical minerals” grows louder. In a few years, the company could be generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from both the Utah copper mine and a separate lithium refining operation it’s setting up in Texas, recovering the mineral from wastewater from oil and gas fields. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 4 May 2026

Shulman is spinning up a new song. His electric bass guitar hangs idly on a nearby wall. A 61-key synthesizer and drum kit remain untouched a few doors away. Instead, he types a few sparse phrases – pedal steel guitar, country Americana folk, acoustic guitar — into his startup Suno’s AI music generation software.  A few seconds later, a song comes to life: fluid guitar strums and human-sounding vocals with a smooth Southern accent soar over an upbeat tempo. It’s instantly catchy, like if Ella Langley met Lana Del Rey.  The tune isn’t a chart-topper or a summer hit, but it’s evidence enough for why more than 100 million people have now used Suno to make music. Suno-created songs have gone viral on TikTok, debuted on Billboard charts and racked up millions of streams. Over 7 million songs are made on the app every day, catapulting it to the top of the Apple App Store’s most downloaded music apps in April — surpassing Spotify.  “The technology finally allows for billions of people to be creative, to have the fruits of their labor, to feel fulfillment in a different way,” says CEO Shulman, 39. He calls it a “new form of consumer entertainment.” By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 1 May 2026

“Mommy and daddy would always bring home boring notebooks, pens, and chargers with company names on them, but that would just go in the trash. But why not stuffies? You never throw stuffies away.” Quincy Fuller is 8 and already delivering that line like he spent too much time in pitch meetings. He and his 10-year-old brother, Jackson, are co-CEOs of Stuffers, a family-run business that makes custom stuffies, or plush toys, for corporate swag. Their customers include companies like Reddit and marketing agency New Engen. Their office is their play room. Their design team includes an AI model. Their first-year revenue: $100,000.  That makes the Fuller siblings a case study for the "AI-native" generation, one where the gap between a child’s imagination and the finished product has effectively vanished. In previous decades, kids’ entrepreneurship was limited by what they could do physically. Delivering newspapers. Squeezing lemons for lemonade. Mowing lawns. But with AI, the internet, and parents handling the adult work, the gap between a kid’s idea and a manufacturable product has dramatically narrowed. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 1 May 2026

Eric Trump jumped on an earnings call in February ready to do what Trumps do best—sell. His company, American Bitcoin, had debuted just a year earlier and was already trading on the Nasdaq. “We are fast becoming the leader in the bitcoin world, and I truly think we have the greatest brand of all,” Eric said. “I want to recognize Mike, Asher, Matt and everybody at American Bitcoin.” It was a noteworthy closing—“and everybody at American Bitcoin”—given that there is hardly anyone else at American Bitcoin. An annual report filed one month after the earnings call stated that the company has just two full-time employees, presumably chief executive Mike Ho and president Matt Prusak. Maybe there are a couple of others—Ho also serves as an executive at another company. Someone who worked in investor relations at Ho’s other company for less than a year now calls herself “chief of staff” at American Bitcoin on her LinkedIn page. Another person says she started as American Bitcoin’s social-media manager in January. (Asher Genoot, the executive chairman, sits on a five-person board with Ho and three independent directors.) The Trump family learned long ago that there is money to be made in acting like things are bigger than they actually are. Fred Trump, Donald’s father, allegedly juiced his profits by duping authorities into thinking his projects cost more than they actually did. Donald Trump lied to banks (and media outlets like Forbes) about the value of his assets, leading a New York judge to conclude that he committed fraud. Eric Trump got caught up in that case, too, and was banned from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for two years. He created his own company anyway, incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Florida, then marketed it in a way that would make his forefathers proud. By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 30 April 2026

The Berlin world premiere of Michael—the new Antoine Fuqua-directed biopic starring Michael Jackson’s nephew Jaafaar in the title role—saw thousands of King of Pop fans gather outside the theater, rapturous applause after each of the movie’s musical numbers, and fawning praise over the lead performance. Left out of the celebratory film and tightly controlled red carpet rollout was any mention of thesexual abuse accusations that complicate his legacy. Yet producer Graham King admitted to being “nervous and anxious” to see the film with audiences for the first time. “A lot has happened on this film that I question how, why,” said King, who also produced the Queen biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. “I used to say Freddie Mercury was throwing hurdles down at me. Michael did the same. So Michael and Freddie are up there together laughing right now.” With an initial $150 million budget, Michael was already the most ambitious biopic of all time when it wrapped initial production in May 2024. That was before the estate’s executors learned of a clause in a 1994 settlement with one of Jackson’s child molestation accusers agreeing to never dramatize their story on screen, rendering a significant amount of footage useless. Instead of a 3.5-hour epic, Lionsgate and the filmmakers decided to end the movie in the late 1980s at the height of Jackson’s career following Thriller and Bad—and the estate agreed to fund 22 days of additional production at a cost Forbes estimates to be more than $25 million (some reports put it at as much as $50 million). By Matt Craig, Reporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 30 April 2026

Tesla’s biggest problem may no longer be Chinese competitors, slowing demand for its EVs or the still-theoretical payoff from robotaxis and humanoid robots. It might be SpaceX. If Elon Musk’s rocket and satellite-internet company goes public at anything close to the rumored $1.75 trillion valuation, it will not just be one of the biggest IPOs in history. It will give Tesla investors tired of waiting for the CEO’s promises to materialize something they haven’t had in a while: a potentially bigger, more exciting way to invest in the Musk myth. Certainly, SpaceX, with its reliable and steady leadership under long-time president Gwynne Shotwell, is shaping up to be a shinier proxy — with fewer close competitors or awkward quarterly questions about exactly when Tesla can take on Waymo in self-driving tech or actually deliver its C-3PO-style robot. “There are many Tesla investors who perceive SpaceX to be a better investment for many reasons,” Ross Gerber, a Tesla investor and CEO of Santa Monica, California-based Gerber Kawasaki, which manages over $4 billion, told Forbes. “If I sell my Tesla shares, nobody's going to argue that it's not overvalued. And if I want to buy the sizzle, I'm going to buy SpaceX. And that's what people want to do. A lot of people think this is going to be easy money.” By Alan Ohnsman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 28 April 2026

When Chad Janis had the idea to sell gummy-bear-shaped nutritional supplements four years ago, he had to convince manufacturers it could be done and retailers that customers would prefer his green gummies.  He didn’t know how right he was. His brand, Grüns (from the German word for greens) now ships around 10 million gummies every day, and this week, London-based conglomerate Unilever announced it was acquiring Grüns for an estimated $1.2 billion.  The 33-year-old former private equity investor has now cemented his place in the consumer packaged goods industry as a founder who has secured one of the sector’s best—and quickest—exits in the past decade. The Beaverton, Oregon-based Grüns currently has some one million customers and its superfood gummy bear is the top-selling green supplement on Amazon and across retailers nationwide.  “We didn’t build it to sell it. But we want to make an impact on millions of people’s lives,” Janis tells Forbes. “We think [Unilever has] a track record of brands that have success and they help them have more impact. They’ve done it multiple times before with peers we look up to.” By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 April 2026

The trend of mainland Chinese tech companies flocking to list in Hong Kong shows no sign of abating. The latest to make its stock market debut is Gpixel Changchun Microelectronics, a developer of CMOS image sensors that enable robots to “see.” Shares of the company, headquartered in the Chinese industrial hub of Changchun, rose 144% since its listing on Friday, making founder and chairman Wang Xinyang a billionaire. Wang, 46, is Gpixel’s largest shareholder with a 23% stake. Together with the 1.6% holding of his wife Zhang Yanxia, Gpixel’s chief operation officer, Wang is worth $1.3 billion based on Tuesday’s closing price of HK$97.5. Gpixel didn’t respond to a request for comment regarding Wang’s billionaire status. Gpixel’s IPO raised HK$2.6 billion ($332.4 million), drawing cornerstone investors including private equity giants Hillhouse Investment and Boyu Capital, as well as early ByteDance backer Source Code Capital and Hong Kong-based Value Partners. Gpixel disclosed in its prospectus that it will use 76% of the IPO proceeds for R&D investments, including building a new R&D center in Hangzhou, and the rest to expand operations in Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan.  The company specializes in CMOS image sensors, which are chips that convert light into electrical signals to capture images, and are embedded in a range of electronic products from smartphones and cameras to X-ray machines and robots. Operating under a fabless model, Gpixel designs sensors that are mostly used for industrial applications, such as detecting defects in semiconductor manufacturing and robot navigation. They are also deployed in advanced cameras, such as those used for scientific research. By Zinnia Lee, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 27 April 2026

Elon Musk is the planet’s richest person by far, worth $839 billion as of Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list. He also ranks among the least philanthropic billionaires. Sure, Musk has transferred $8.5 billion of Tesla stock to his charitable foundations (1% of his net worth)—but nearly all of it is still sitting there idle. Only an estimated $500 million, or 0.06% of Musk’s vast fortune, has ever been disbursed to those in need. His lack of giving raises a question: What would our billionaires ranking look like if the world’s most generous people—such as Warren Buffett (who has donated more than half of his Berkshire Hathaway stock so far) and Bill Gates (who has moved, alongside his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, more than $60 billion into the Gates Foundation)—had never donated a dollar to charity? To find the answer, we adjusted the net worths of the planet’s most generous billionaires, assuming they kept any shares they’ve given away and that cash gifts were instead invested at market rates of return. The result: our True Net Worth ranking, detailed by Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane in a recent TED Talk. By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Chase Peterson-Withorn, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 26 April 2026

A U.S. special forces soldier who participated in the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the operation to win more than $400,000 on the online betting platform Polymarket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 26 April 2026

Kalshi caught and suspended three political candidates who bet on the outcomes of their own elections, the prediction market company said in a statement on Wednesday, fining the three politicians and issuing five-year bans from their platform. Minnesota State Senator Matt Klein, a candidate running for the Democratic nomination for Minnesota’s second district in the House of Representatives, agreed to pay a $539.85 fine. Ezekiel Enriquez, a former candidate for the Republican primary for a congressional district in Texas, was fined $784.20. Enriquez lost this race after the primary elections in March. Both Klein and Enriquez bought less than $100 worth of contracts on their own elections, according to Kalshi’s filings, and both were also issued five-year suspensions. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 25 April 2026

Elon Musk is the planet’s richest person by far, worth $839 billion as of Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list. He also ranks among the least philanthropic billionaires. Sure, Musk has transferred $8.5 billion of Tesla stock to his charitable foundations (1% of his net worth)—but nearly all of it is still sitting there idle. Only an estimated $500 million, or 0.06% of Musk’s vast fortune, has ever been disbursed to those in need. His lack of giving raises a question: What would our billionaires ranking look like if the world’s most generous people—such as Warren Buffett (who has donated more than half of his Berkshire Hathaway stock so far) and Bill Gates (who has moved, alongside his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, more than $60 billion into the Gates Foundation)—had never donated a dollar to charity? To find the answer, we adjusted the net worths of the planet’s most generous billionaires, assuming they kept any shares they’ve given away and that cash gifts were instead invested at market rates of return. By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Chase Peterson-Withorn, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 24 April 2026

Arthur Mensch’s vision for Mistral, and AI itself, can be summed up in one word: independence. Unlike its black-box Silicon Valley rivals, most of Mistral’s AI models are what techies call “open weight.” In this sort of open-source model, customers are free to get under the hood, customize the AI using their own data or download it for free to run offline (or from a laptop).  The message resonates. Old-school execs are spooked by the world-consuming rhetoric of OpenAI and Anthropic and the emerging threat of Chinese AI companies. Mensch’s talk of control and sovereignty is soothing, as is his pitch that Mistral will deploy engineers to set up and run the tech for them. Your data doesn’t even need to leave the office, let alone the country. “We are really the only company that allows [building] core business automation and products on top of an open stack, and that is something that is valuable everywhere in the world,” says Mensch, 33, from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris, as kids play soccer in the courtyard out back. By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 24 April 2026

Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump’s pick for Federal Reserve chair, faced the Senate Banking Committee at a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning. While he addressed Senate Democrats’ concerns over Fed independence and pressure from the president, Warsh largely avoided discussing details about his fortune. Senator Elizabeth Warren had already taken particular issue with Warsh’s vague financial disclosure. In addition to accusing Warsh of mishandling the 2008 financial crisis while he was a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011 and calling him “[President Trump’s] chosen sock puppet,” Warren criticized Warsh’s disclosure for its “failure to disclose the full extent of his assets,” which in turn poses immediate issues. “One or more of his dozens of funds and entities could hold stock in a prohibited financial institution, and the public would never know,” stated an April 15 report by Warren’s Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. At yesterday’s hearing, Warren continued to press Warsh—whose father-in-law is Trump’s billionaire pal Ronald Lauder—asking whether his Juggernaut Fund L.P. invested in Chinese-controlled firms or any companies affiliated with President Trump and his family or with Jeffrey Epstein. Warsh simply responded that “those assets will be sold” if he’s confirmed. In his financial disclosure filed on April 10, he had written that the assets weren’t disclosed “due to pre-existing confidentiality agreements.” By Giacomo Tognini, Deputy Editor Simone Melvin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 23 April 2026

In dueling court filings the Rowling and Justice families are at loggerheads. At stake is control of the Greenbrier Resort. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2026/04/17/texas-hotel-billionaires-set-to-foreclose-on-greenbrier-owner-senator-jim-justice/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 23 April 2026

Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 22 April 2026

Kim Rivers, CEO of Florida-based Trulieve, was instrumental in getting the president to issue an executive order to reschedule marijuana. Now she is trying to build her $1.2 billion company into the Starbucks of weed. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2026/04/17/meet-trulieve-ceo-kim-rivers-the-cannabis-industrys-trump-whisperer/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 21 April 2026

Founded in 2023 by 20-somethings, data labeling startup Mercor exploded to $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate earlier this year. Now it’s confronting a wave of challenges, including an employee stealing money, security blunders and cultural growing pains. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/04/15/mercors-23-year-old-billionaire-founders-grapple-with-employee-fraud-and-north-korean-infiltration/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 21 April 2026

Fueled by AI, prediction markets and online gambling, there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before, 13 up from a previous record of 7. ON October 7, Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) invested $2 billion into Polymarket, pushing up the prediction market platform’s valuation to $9 billion. That made Polymarket’s 27-year-old founder, Shayne Coplan, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His reign was short: 20 days later, he was overtaken by the three cofounders of AI startup Mercor. That trio of 22-year-olds became the youngest self-made billionaires ever, gaining 10-figure status even earlier than Mark Zuckerberg did 17 years ago at age 23. “It’s definitely crazy,” Mercor’s Foody told Forbes in October. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.” Then, in a remarkable stretch from November until December, another seven entrepreneurs under the age of 30 became billionaires, including Kalshi cofounder and former ballerina from Brazil Luana Lopes Lara, 29—now the youngest self-made woman billionaire on Earth and the only self-made woman billionaire in her 20s. (She turns 30 in May.) That means there are now a record 13 self-made billionaires under 30. For all the hand-wringing about artificial intelligence killing off entry-level jobs, it’s creating something else at mind-blowing speed: billionaires barely old enough to rent a car. Industries and innovations that didn’t meaningfully exist a decade ago, including prediction markets and AI, now mint entrepreneurs with three-comma fortunes with astonishing speed. The last time Forbes counted anywhere close to this many young self-made billionaires was in 2022, when there were just seven self-made billionaires under age 30. Back in April when Forbes published our annual World’s Billionaires list, there were only two under 30 entrepreneurs in the ranks: Alexandr Wang, 28, who sold a 49% stake in his AI startup Scale AI to Meta this summer for about $14 billion and left to become Meta's chief AI officer, and Australian online casino mogul Ed Craven, 29, who is one of six on this list that hail from outside of the U.S. (including American citizen Tarek Mansour, 29, of Kalshi, who was born in California but grew up in Lebanon). Craven and Fabian Hedin, the 26-year-old cofounder of Swedish AI coding startup Lovable, are the only self-made billionaires under age 30 who have built and run their businesses outside the U.S. Wang and Craven are the two richest entrepreneurs under 30, worth $3.2 billion and $2.8 billion, respectively. Beyond these 13 are an even larger and growing group of 17 Under 30 billionaires who inherited fortunes from their families, the youngest of which is 20-year-old German pharmaceuticals heir Johannes von Baumbach (estimated fortune: $5.8 billion). Altogether, there are 30 billionaires in their 20s. Despite this relative youth boom, these young entrepreneurs continue to be extraordinary outliers in a billionaire class that remains overwhelmingly older; there are at least 500 billionaires aged 80 or older and the average age of the world’s more than 3,100 billionaires is 67. Plus, even in a year defined by unprecedented youth, the clock keeps ticking. Three of these self-made billionaires are already 29, meaning their stay on the Under 30 list will be brief. Read the full story on Forbes: By Matt Durot https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-are-suddenly-so-many-self-made-billionaires-under-30/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcribed - Published: 21 April 2026