Forbes Daily Briefing

The White House released the text of an “accord” reached between billionaire AI titans who met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, an agreement the president labeled “morally binding” even as he stopped short of saying the government would support new guardrails. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/09/30/white-house-releases-accord-between-billionaire-ai-execs-heres-what-it-says/?streamIndex=0 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For 158 years the Martinelli family has turned apples grown in Northern California orchards into a golden juice, and it's grown into a sweet family business.  The company had an estimated $175 million in 2025 revenue and has been increasing at 5% annually for the past five years. The business's iconic champagne-style bottles of sparkling apple cider are today the top-seller in America and its apple-shaped juice jars are the second most sold apple juice in the country, after Mott's. Martinelli's products are now sold at 25,000 locations of every major retailer in America and in 38 countries. “Even though we're not a giant company, we know and have great relationships with every single retailer out there, given how important that hero product of sparkling cider is,” says Martinelli's 56-year-old CEO Gun Ruder. “It gives us a power with these retailers that's disproportionate to ourselves.” Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2026/09/18/how-martinellis-turned-the-champagne-of-apple-cider-into-a-500-million-family-business/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Both humanities' decline and possible revival can, no surprise, be traced to concerns about career and financial security. For a time, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors had the golden ticket. Now some engineering specialties (including computer engineering) have seen a sharp decline in entry-level jobs, as artificial intelligence reduces the demand for junior workers in their fields. At the same time, those graduating with English and some other humanities degrees are finding that their versatile skills make it easier to get hired, even if they do still earn less than the engineers. The emerging conventional wisdom: In the age of AI, human skills such as creativity, communication and collaboration could provide a crucial professional edge, whatever the field. “We really believe that the humanities equal jobs,” says Matthew Mars, head of the University of Arizona's 8-year-old Public and Applied Humanities program, which as of last spring had more than 400 majors. Students like Crider combine an applied humanities core with courses ranging from business and entrepreneurship to fashion studies and, most recently, astrobiology. They also complete a three-course career sequence with internship preparation, an internship and a course to help them explain what they've learned to prospective employers. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisachambers/2026/09/21/move-over-stem-humanities-degrees-are-poised-for-a-comeback-thanks-to-ai/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Donald Trump unveiled a new government website powered by artificial intelligence ahead of his meeting with top AI executives—as he has contested slowing AI development amid dire warnings of the dangers it poses. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/09/29/trump-announcing-new-ai-powered-government-website-today-ahead-of-meeting-with-industry-execs/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nvidia on Monday launched a new security system that it claims can prevent AI agents breaching their testing environments and gain unauthorized access to outside systems, just weeks after the AI chipmaker's billionaire CEO Jensen Huang downplayed alarm about recent safety breaches and pushed back on the need for an AI slowdown. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Peptides are a large category of amino acid-based drugs that include legal ones, like GLP-1 weight-loss medications and insulin. More and more people are experimenting with loosely regulated peptides like secretagogues, which have become a hit among workout enthusiasts looking for an edge to train harder and look better. But there's little scientific data on their safety or efficacy, and the FDA has not approved them for weight loss or workout recovery. These drugs are now readily available on the internet from sketchy sellers who hawk them with little oversight. In this shadowy online bazaar, which could be worth as much as $4 billion, peddlers exploit a loophole in the law under which peptides can be sold for “research purposes.” Purchasing online peptides is a dice roll. Fitness enthusiasts who buy gray-market drugs online don't know what they're getting. The pharmaceutical ingredients in them are research-grade, meaning they're not permitted in human drugs. There's no guarantee that what people are buying is what it claims to be, or whether they're injecting themselves with concoctions laced with unknown and possibly dangerous ingredients. Making sense of their safety is even more complex for the peptide fans who take them “stacked,” using multiple gray-market drugs at the same time in the belief this will increase their benefits. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Billionaire Bill Gates told “Meet the Press” that government regulation is needed for artificial intelligence and warned the technology is “powerful” enough to “cause a billion deaths” if used maliciously, as Washington and the AI industry consider how to move forward in light of dire warnings about AI's potential effects. NBC News released a clip Friday of Gates' interview with “Meet the Press,” in which the billionaire and philanthropist was asked about warnings from AI workers that the technology could potentially wipe out humanity. “AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that … cause a billion deaths,” Gates said, noting “there's never been a weapon as powerful as the combination of people with ill intent using the latest AI tools.” Gates was also asked about Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's recent essay calling for a slowdown on AI, which argued frontier labs should slow down the pace of their progress and “voluntarily work together to set standards” around artificial intelligence. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/09/25/bill-gates-warns-ai-is-powerful-enough-to-cause-a-billion-deaths/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the course of producing Forbes Top Lawyers, the yearlong research often reveals insights into the state of the legal profession. With this, our third-annual list, the trend was inescapable: The world's leading law firms are in a race to position themselves for the future—and talent is becoming their most powerful competitive advantage. As the industry consolidates and rivalries intensify, firms are audaciously raiding rivals for marquee partners who can give them an edge. For star partners with the cachet, client relationships and “halo effect,” the ceiling seems limitless, including guaranteed compensation packages widely reported in the $20 to $40 million range, stratospheric signing bonuses and lavish equity shares—all at unprecedented levels. A decade ago, compensation packages for top rainmakers typically topped out at $10 million. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Free tuition guarantees have now been extended by 21 private schools that rank in the top 50 on Forbes' list of America's Top 500 Colleges. While the schools like to brag about the share of U.S. families that would qualify for free tuition under their guarantees–some say as high as 85%—their actual students bodies skew wealthy. That means many don't qualify for any institutional aid at all, let alone free tuition. Even at generous Princeton, which brags that 25% of its incoming freshman class last year was eligible to receive federal Pell grants for low income families, an even greater 31% of that class got no financial aid at all. At some of the schools on our list, more than half of families have been paying full freight in recent years.  The elite schools with free tuition guarantees are listed below in alphabetical order, along with details and links to their offers, which are often only extended to U.S. (not foreign) students. Tuition and fees and total cost of attendance are for the current, 2026-2027 school year. Those prices, as well as details of the schools' free offers are taken from their web sites. Admission rates are from the government's Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and are for the 2024-2025 school year, the latest available. Below the list, you can read more about the information applicants need to submit to benefit from the free offers and about other colleges that make free offers and aren't on our list. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Talk of a “K-shaped economy” took off during the pandemic recovery. Economist Peter Atwater popularized the term in the spring of 2020 to describe an economy in which higher-income households and asset owners bounced back while lower-paid workers and struggling businesses fell further behind. Six years later, Ed Yardeni, president and chief investment strategist at Yardeni Research, sees another split, this one by age. Older people are richer than younger people. Of course they are. They've had more time to earn, save and buy things. What's unusual now is how much the economy rewards having already done those things. Stocks are expensive, homes are expensive and the job market is getting tougher for people just entering it. Yardeni calls it the “gen-shaped economy.” Baby boomers have amassed a record $85.4 trillion in net worth, about half of all household wealth. Some of that is just what happens when people get old. But not all of it. The typical boomer household had $432,200 in wealth in 2022, nearly 30% more than a same-aged Silent Generation household had in 2001, even after adjusting for inflation according to the Pew Research Center. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonkochkodin/2026/09/19/why-the-economy-looks-great-to-boomers-but--miserable-to-gen-z/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Donald Trump said he has told “people” he supports a ban on diesel exports as the country faces record prices for the fuel used for trucking and agricultural equipment amid the ongoing war with Iran and the Russia-Ukraine war, aligning himself with Republicans largely representing agricultural states hoping to ease prices for farmers. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/09/22/trump-wants-diesel-export-ban-as-prices-hit-record-high/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Over just five days earlier this month, a Chinese-speaking hacker deployed AI agents to launch cyberattacks on as many as 100 organizations, stealing hundreds of thousands of credit card details. The hacker used Chinese models DeepSeek and Kimi as well as an older version of Anthropic's Claude to automate their attacks, which cost just $8,000 in total. It's one of “the most severe abuses of AI for exploitation seen so far,” says Eyal Sela, a cybersecurity researcher and director of threat intelligence at Gambit Security, who discovered the attack. “The human being is directing almost fully autonomous AI models, which are strong enough by now to do very sophisticated cyberattacks quickly with close to zero preparation and very high rate of success,” Sela says. Though the number of successful breaches out of the 100 companies is unclear, the hacker gained access to at least 30 websites between September 10 and 15, according to Gambit's research. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The long-feared college enrollment cliff—a product of the decline in U.S. births that began in 2008—is finally arriving. Yet many of America's top public universities face a different challenge: The number of students who want to attend them is rising. Last spring, undergraduate enrollment at four-year public colleges was up 1.5% from a year earlier, to 5.4 million, while undergraduate enrollment at private not-for-profit colleges was a hair down at 2.4 million. Total applications to public colleges are also growing faster. It's no mystery why. Over the past decade, adjusted for inflation, in-state tuition at four-year public universities has declined by 7%, compared to a 2% increase at private non-profit ones, according to the College Board. It calculates that tuition and fees for four-year public colleges last year averaged $11,950 for in-state students and $31,880 for those coming from out of state, versus $45,000 at private nonprofit colleges. (Keep in mind, those are list prices, which is why certain elite private colleges offering generous financial aid can end up being cheaper for middle-class students than out-of-state public schools.) Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetnovack/2026/09/10/forbes-top-25-public-colleges/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The White House launched “Trump TV” on Monday, revealing a 24/7 platform streaming old Trump administration events after President Donald Trump revoked White House press credentials from reporters with CNN, MS NOW and Politico. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/09/21/white-house-launches-trump-tv-after-presidents-press-ban/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On the Ohio campaign trail, Democrat Amy Acton has turned her opponent Vivek Ramaswamy's fortune into a line of attack. She calls the Republican nominee her “self-funding billionaire” opponent, contrasting his private-jet travel with her old Jeep and arguing that he is out of touch with families squeezed by rising costs. Ramaswamy has leaned into it. “I believe in celebrating success,” he said after winning May's Republican primary. “I was not born a billionaire. I was not born a millionaire. I was not born an anything-aire.” He now has more to celebrate with. Ramaswamy is worth an estimated $2.3 billion, up from $1.8 billion a year ago and up from just $1 billion in March 2025. If elected in November, the 41-year-old businessman-turned-politician would become America's second-richest governor and third-wealthiest elected official in the U.S., behind only President Donald Trump (now worth $7 billion), and Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune worth $4.2 billion. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhyatt/2026/09/20/ohio-governor-ramaswamy-would-be-americas-third-richest-elected-official/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

State attorneys general have reached a settlement with Paramount Skydance in their lawsuit over Paramount's planned merger with Warner Bros., multiple outlets report, likely paving the way for the deal to go through—even as critics have warned the reported settlement terms do not adequately address concerns about the Hollywood giants joining forces. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a dystopian world ravaged by alien war, a boy who has been bullied at school discovers an ancient book left by the parents he never knew. It turns him into a vampire. And that's only the first 10 minutes of My Vampire System, the most popular audio drama on Pocket FM, with more than 1.5 billion plays since it debuted four years ago. The story continues for another 4,192 plot-packed and cliffhanger-filled episodes. But if you want to listen to all of them, you'd better to get out your wallet. An India-based audio entertainment company, Pocket makes its money almost entirely through microtransactions, charging users on a per-episode basis after an initial 30 minutes free each day. Theoretically, a user could listen to My Vampire System entirely for free, if they used their full allotment every single day for four years straight—or they could purchase Pocket “coins” and unlock episodes costing anywhere from just a few pennies to more than $3 each, depending on packages, promotions and episode demand. With no subscription or all-access options, some users pay several hundred, perhaps even more than a thousand dollars for the complete story. And they have—Forbes estimates the series has grossed nearly $90 million in total. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/09/21/states-settle-paramount-warner-bros-lawsuit-report-says-paving-way-for-merger-to-go-through/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Africa's richest person Aliko Dangote, is opening up his privately controlled oil refinery to public shareholders on Monday, September 14 for the first time in what is expected to be the biggest IPO in the continent's history. The cement magnate is offering individual investors up to 4.1 billion shares (or 3.3% of the company) at 40 cents each (525 Nigerian Naira), with the order book closing on October 13 at a 10-share buy minimum, an exceptionally low entry requirement of roughly $4. The stock is expected to start trading on the Nigerian Stock Exchange in November. “We have D-Day on Monday,” Dangote recently told Forbes, explaining how he didn't know until very late when exactly the IPO would get underway so will now be late to an investment summit in Canada that he promised Prime Minister Mark Carney he'd attend. He wouldn't miss this historic day in Nigeria for anything. As Dangote tells it, this milestone is as much about boosting the wealth of local Africans as it is about raising money. (According to the 2026 UBS Global Wealth Report, Africa has the smallest share of global wealth.) “Selling these shares now is us making sure that we create wealth for other people,” says Dangote, “Just like what Amazon and Microsoft have done. That kind of thing but for an African company.” Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/gigizamora/2026/09/14/d-day-for-dangote-africas-richest-man-is-20-billion-richer-as-refinery-ipo-gets-underway/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Wealth begets wealth. Just ask Alice Walton, who again ranks as the nation's richest woman on the annual Forbes 400 list—her fourth straight year at the top, and 11th out of the past 12. The only daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton (d. 1992), she is $12 billion richer than a year ago on the back of a 10% hike in the retailer's stock, amid e-commerce and membership growth and the expansion of ultra-fast delivery service. And Walton is only widening the gap between her and America's second richest woman, Koch, Inc. heiress Julia Koch, whose fortune grew by $3.4 billion over the past year—but who is now $33.4 billion poorer than Walton, up from a $24.8 billion gap a year ago. Overall, Walton, 76, ranks as the 13th-richest person in America, right behind her brothers Rob Walton (estimated fortune: $132 billion) and Jim Walton ($128 billion). Together the siblings, along with two heirs of their brother John Walton (d. 2005) and charitable trusts in his name, share a 44% stake in Walmart. Rob Walton retired from Walmart's board in 2024 after more than four decades as a director, including more than 20 years as chairman. Jim Walton still chairs the family's $26 billion (assets) Arvest Bank Group. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/andreamurphy/2026/09/16/inside-the-118-billion-fortune-of-americas-richest-woman/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Money is the only thing that can buy you a spot on The Forbes 400 list of the richest Americans—but it takes a lot of it. With markets trading near all-time highs, the minimum net worth to rank among the top 400 people in the U.S. has skyrocketed to $4.4 billion, $600 million more than a year ago. That lofty cutoff has left a record 590 American billionaires too poor to make the list, up from 500 in 2025. Several famous faces just aren't rich enough, including celebrities Oprah Winfrey (estimated net worth, $3.4 billion—a full billion short of making the list), pop star Taylor Swift ($2 billion) and hip hop mogul Dr. Dre ($1 billion). Plenty of high-profile business names can't cut it either, including former eBay and Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman ($4.2 billion), OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ($3.3 billion) and former Apple CEO Tim Cook ($3 billion) Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kirkogunrinde/2026/09/17/a-record-590-us-billionaires-arent-rich-enough-to-make-the-forbes-400-list/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Faith is a remarkable asset. A year ago, Donald Trump's followers had so much of it that the president could spin billions out of thin air. First came Trump Media, which investors valued it at $5 billion even as net losses neared $700 million. Then came World Liberty Financial, which sold more than $1 billion of tokens in 2025 on vague promises to “democratize finance.” Finally, there was the memecoin, which explicitly warned buyers that it was not intended to be an investment but nonetheless generated enough hype to leave Trump with a pile of tokens conservatively worth $710 million. The bonanza pushed the president's fortune to $7.3 billion by September 2025, the highest figure to ever appear next to Trump's name since he joined the inaugural Forbes 400 list 44 years ago. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Just how difficult is it to make the Forbes 400 list of America's richest people these days? Consider this: There are now a record 590 American billionaires who are simply not rich enough. With the AI and data center boom in full swing and the U.S. stock market near an all-time high, it now takes a record $4.4 billion to rank among the nation's 400 wealthiest people. That's $600 million more than last year and $2.7 billion more than a decade ago. In all, this year's Forbes 400 is richer than ever, worth a combined $8 trillion, up from $6.6 trillion in 2025. The massive gains start at the top of the list. Elon Musk was already the richest American of all-time last year, with a fortune of $428 billion. Since then, he has more than doubled his wealth over the past 12 months, getting $480 billion richer after taking his rocket maker SpaceX public in the biggest IPO in history in June (and briefly becoming the planet's first-ever trillionaire). Musk is now worth an estimated $908 billion—a staggering $530 billion more than the list's No. 2, Amazon's Jeff Bezos, who himself is $137 billion wealthier than a year ago (and ranks two spots higher), thanks to a rise in the ecommerce giant's stock and a much higher valuation of his own rocket firm, Blue Origin. The net worth difference between Musk and Bezos now spans more than three and a half Warren Buffetts, or the bottom 105 billionaires on this year's Forbes 400 combined. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“Financially, what will take me to $1B?” Greg Brockman wrote in his journal in August 2017. Back then, OpenAI was still a nonprofit, and its cofounders—including Brockman, Sam Altman and Elon Musk—were locked in a fight over whether to launch a for-profit arm, and whether Musk would control it. “I think now is a crazy shot to be the one in charge and to step up to the challenge,” Brockman wrote. “We truly have a chance to make this happen.”  Nine years later, Brockman's private diary became the most damaging evidence used by Musk in a legal battle over his claim that OpenAI's president Brockman and CEO Altman had convinced him to bankroll their nonprofit, then betrayed him by converting it into a for-profit business. Taking the stand in the Oakland, California, courtroom in May, Brockman said his journal entry was about wanting the “blood, sweat and tears” he's poured into OpenAI to be worth something. By Alicia Park, Reporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Macklemore claimed Monday that billionaire New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft pioneered his removal from Ed Sheeran's U.S. Loop Tour after the rapper made “free Palestine” remarks at two shows in New York this month. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Major pro sports teams have turned dozens of franchise owners into billionaires many times over in the last quarter-century, but nobody has made as much money from sports ownership as Stan Kroenke. The reclusive billionaire—who announced on Tuesday that he is buying a majority stake in the Los Angeles Angels from Arte Moreno, at a valuation of roughly $4 billion, according to a person with knowledge of the deal—made his fortune in real estate and stands as America's largest private landowner, with some 2.7 million acres of ranches. But it is his sports team investments from the last three decades that now make up the majority of his estimated $27.6 billion net worth. Even before the Angels deal is complete, Kroenke's stakes in the NFL's Los Angeles Rams, the NBA's Denver Nuggets, the NHL's Colorado Avalanche, MLS's Colorado Rapids, the Premier League's Arsenal FC and the Women's Super League's Arsenal WFC are worth around $22 billion net of debt, according to Forbes estimates. By Hank Tucker, Staff Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk's DOGE gutted staffing and budgets at NOAA and the National Weather Service early last year. It left America's fishing fleets, farmers and insurers exposed to the fallout. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/08/17/the-cost-of-doge-americas-environmental-intelligence-is-going-stale/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2017, James Dacombe dropped out of high school to found brain monitoring startup CoMind. Four years later, he took a Thiel Fellowship to skip college and build his first startup. Now the 25-year-old is Europe's youngest self-made billionaire thanks to his two-year-old chipmaking company Olix, as well as an undisclosed stake in CoMind—which he still runs separately.  Founded in 2024, Dacombe's London-based Olix tripled its valuation in six months to $3.3 billion in early August, after raising $312 million from investors including NYC-based investment firm Fundomo, Nasdaq-listed chip designer Arm, American quant fund Hudson River Trading and Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings. The UK government's Sovereign AI fund also backed Olix in the round. The new round pushes Dacombe, who owns an estimated 30% of the company, into the three comma club. He also has a 12% stake in CoMind, which raised $102.5 million in August 2025 but did not disclose its valuation. Olix and CoMind did not respond to Forbes' request for comment. Dacombe is one of eleven self-made billionaires in the world who have yet to turn 30 and one of just four from outside the U.S. By Alicia Park, Reporter and Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The homeowners association of Four Seasons Resorts Nevis filed a lawsuit against Nevis Peak Holdings on Tuesday, August 11 in Delaware Chancery Court. Nevis Peak owns the luxury resort and surrounding property, which sits at the base of a volcanic mountain in Pinney's Beach, a roughly three-mile stretch of beach on the Caribbean island—just north of Charlestown, Alexander Hamilton's birthplace. Nevis Peak is owned by Cascade, the family office of Bill Gates, which bought the resort a decade ago. As of January 2022, Cascade also owns 71.25% of the Four Seasons, according to the suit. While Four Seasons manages the property, it wasn't named as a defendant in the suit. He's owned the Four Seasons with Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud of Saudi Arabia, whose Kingdom Holding has a 23.75% stake, since 2007. According to the suit, each homeowner paid $100,000 to get in the door at Four Seasons Resort Nevis, the luxury Caribbean island resort long reported as a quiet retreat for such celebrities as Oprah Winfrey, Meryl Streep and Justin Trudeau. They then pay upwards of $13,000 a year to keep using the place, plus a management fee of 25% on any bills for work the resort does for them and another 15% for major construction. By Alicia Park, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bob Parsons is navigating his golf cart through the twisting dry dirt road of the golf course he built in the Sonoran Desert in Scottsdale, Arizona, avoiding lizards, rabbits and giant saguaros. He stops near the ninth hole, named Catfish, which overlooks a manmade lake and surrounded by three million acres of preserved land. It cost Parsons hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and renovate Scottsdale National, which has two 18-hole courses and the “Bad Little Nine,” a punishingly difficult nine-hole par-three course. He points to the center of the lake where a small black hut sits with the words “Suggestion Box” painted in white.  “This is a marvelous spot to put a suggestion box,” the 75-year-old Parsons tells Forbes. “The vent is painted on. I guess you could try.” After all, Parsons did not become a billionaire by taking other people's suggestions. He built his fortune thanks to his nonstop hustle, often working 60-plus hours straight. He sold his first company, Parsons Technology, which made personal finance and tax software, to Intuit for $64 million in 1994 (or about $165 million today). In 1997, he started domain name registrar GoDaddy and sold a 71% stake for $2.3 billion in 2011 (or $3.4 billion today). By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Form Energy, which makes iron-based batteries to hold electricity for days, said it raised $750 million to expand production. That follows a $550 million raise by rival Antora Energy to accelerate production of its thermal batteries made from carbon blocks that also hold power for at least 100 hours. Unsurprisingly, data center power demand underpins the investment spike. Form, which began shipping its iron-air batteries this year built at its Weirton, West Virginia, plant, said the latest round, led by T. Rowe Price, boosts its total funding to $2 billion. The company didn't immediately provide a valuation figure with the latest funds, though Pitchbook estimates the deal values the Somerville, Massachusetts-based company at $4.3 billion. Sunnyvale, California-based Antora has raised $1 billion as of July 31 and is seeking a second plant beyond its current factory in Silicon Valley.  Both companies are focused on making batteries out of cheap, domestically available materials that can store power at much lower cost than shorter-term lithium-based battery chemistries, and that also have little to no risk of catching on fire. The technology is also ideal when paired with large-scale solar or wind farms, ensuring a steady supply of cheap, carbon-free energy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last week Wells Fargo, the country's fourth-largest bank with about $2.3 trillion in assets, said it would offer tokenized deposits to corporate and commercial clients this fall. Not long ago, the announcement would have been written off as yet another blockchain trial balloon. Today, it looks more like keeping up with the competition. JPMorgan and Citigroup already operate similar services. JPMorgan's Kinexys network processes more than $7 billion a day and has handled over $4 trillion since launch. Both banks along with Wells Fargo, Bank of America and more than a dozen other large lenders are also participating in an initiative operated by The Clearing House, a bank-owned payments company, like Zelle, that is developing a shared system for moving tokenized deposits between institutions. The market's plumbing is moving in the same direction. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, which clears and settles some $15 trillion in U.S. securities trades per day, processed its first live transactions using tokenized securities in July and plans to launch the service in October. The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, introduced two tokenized money market products this month. By Nina Bambysheva, Deputy Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Leonard Tannenbaum's newest venture was supposed to be a sure thing. In 2020, after selling his previous company, Fifth Street, under a cloud of investor litigation and an SEC settlement, the veteran financier recast himself as a pioneering lender to underbanked cannabis firms. Weed was booming as Americans sat out the pandemic stressed and bored. But marijuana was illegal at the federal level, leaving most pot operations shut out of traditional banking.  Tannenbaum had the perfect Wall Street pitch: Become the dominant institutional lender to the fast-growing $19 billion industry by offering high yields to stock investors.  In early 2021, Tannenbaum and his third wife, Robyn, took their West Palm Beach, Florida–based AFC Gamma (later renamed Advanced Flower Capital) public as a mortgage REIT on the Nasdaq, raising $124 million. Within two years, thanks to successive stock offerings, AFC's equity value rose to nearly $400 million, as did its loan book.  “What amazed me was there was no institutional lender in the space, no reputable lender,” said Tannenbaum on the From Pot to Popular podcast in 2022, part of a media blitz coordinated with his entrance into the sector. “This was a chance to be number one in the industry.” By John Hyatt, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The news that billionaire venture capitalist Josh Kushner and former Disney CEO Bob Iger are buying a controlling stake in the Los Angeles Lakers at a record-breaking $12.5 billion valuation, first reported by ESPN on Wednesday morning, came as a shock in more ways than one. The deal breaks Walter's own record for the purchase price of a professional sports team, less than a year after his $10 billion deal to take a control interest in the Lakers from the Buss family—who sold the team after 46 years—closed in October, and it once again resets the rest of the market for the rest of the NBA. This year has also included record-breaking team sale agreements in the NFL and MLB. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla led an investor group that agreed to buy the Seattle Seahawks for $9.6 billion in August, and private equity manager José E. Feliciano's family reached a deal in May to buy the San Diego Padres for $3.9 billion. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Bouzari isn't one for the tech-founder uniform of khakis and a hoodie. Instead, he largely designs his own clothes. Think Willy Wonka on a bender: Regency-inspired suits, huge popped collars and crocodile-skin shoes.  The interior of his Paris pied-à-terre, a grand 19th-century apartment on a leafy avenue radiating off the Arc de Triomphe, is just as maximalist. Everything from the marbled carpets to the lime-green sofas and even the chinaware is the product of the 65-year-old French-Iranian émigré's imagination. “I just love to design,” says Bouzari, the cofounder and CEO of data storage company DDN. “Over the years, I've developed this network of people who can translate my scribbles into things that can be made.” By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this year, an unsettling survey finding bounced around the internet: 70% of women say they feel increasingly invisible as they age. However, the sixth annual Forbes 50 Over 50 tells a very different story. Women across the country are doing some of their most ambitious, influential and powerful work after age 50. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On September 19 last year, the husband-and-wife cofounders of e-commerce company Pattern, David Wright and Melanie Alder, walked up together to the NASDAQ podium in Times Square—both dressed in black button-up shirts and custom blue and purple Nike Air Forces. Wright, CEO of the Lehi, Utah-based company, took the microphone to thank the room full of employees. “Mel and I get asked, ‘How did you do it?' We didn't…it's a team sport,” Wright exclaimed as he took off his shoe, eagerly holding it up to the crowd.It was a surreal moment for Wright and Alder: Ringing the NASDAQ bell was something they'd never imagined when they first began reselling fridge magnets on Amazon out of Alder's living room in 2013. “We were just trying to bring in a little extra money on the side,” Wright explains from a conference room overlooking Utah's sprawling mountainscape from Pattern's headquarters in the tech hub known as Silicon Slopes. “Yeah, in the beginning, it was just us trying to support our families,” Alder chimes in from the seat next to his. At the time, both were married to other people: Alder was raising four children with her now ex-husband, while Wright had six of his own with his now ex-wife. By Alicia Park, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OnEaster Sunday in 2014, Christian Angermayer, the German investor, was on the beach on the Caribbean island of Canouan with three friends, contemplating whether he should take magic mushrooms.  Before he made his decision, he called a professor he knew who studies psychopharmacology. He explained to Angermayer that he was in the perfect set and setting, was of healthy mind, and he should try it.  So Angermayer, who says he feared he would end up freaking out and living as “a farmer in Argentina,” sprinkled some mushrooms in yogurt, ate it, and let the drugs take hold.  “I always say that I need to build a huge mushroom statue there,” says Angermayer, now 48 and worth $1.2 billion. “It was the most important positive experience of my life. When I came out [of the trip], although it took me years to get the thesis right, I had the first inclination that if it helped me this much as a happy healthy person, I can see the validation for how it can help people with mental health issues and beyond.”  Angermayer spent the next three years working on that thesis. On December 29, 2017, he took another trip, this time he came away with message from the divine: Go forward. There is no downside. By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When U.S. sales teams from Silicon Valley's big data-labeling startups visited this year's International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul, Korea, they arrived prepped to court the industry's big spenders. The data companies—collectively worth tens of billions of dollars and generating billions in annual revenue supplying training data to customers like OpenAI and Anthropic—are used to chasing AI labs that are notoriously demanding, fickle and difficult to satisfy. They found another eager customer waiting for them: China's AI industry. Some Chinese companies have shopping lists. Tencent—which has previously been designated by the U.S. government as associated with the Chinese military, a characterization the company disputes— circulated with prospective vendors a detailed request for training data spanning finance, cybersecurity and one of AI's most coveted research goals: AI systems capable of improving themselves. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On a Tuesday evening in early July, Anushka Ahuja, a dentist in Gurgaon, India, opens the door for the house help she booked ten minutes ago on Pronto, an app that provides instant professional cleaning services like sweeping, mopping and laundry across 11 cities in India. A woman clad in a crisp uniform greets her with a polite smile, then asks: Can she strap a small camera onto her head to record her work?  Ahuja isn't surprised to see the camera. In fact, she paid an extra nine rupees (about nine cents) so her cleaner would record everything from her elbows to her fingertips. Now she'll receive a video recording a few hours later, giving her peace of mind that her house was cleaned properly and nothing was stolen or broken in her absence.  Despite disclosures in the consent form she signed, Ahuja initially didn't realize that there's another purpose to the camera footage: AI training data. After a cleaning session, the video is stripped of personally identifiable information like personal documents and people's faces and then sold to American AI companies.  Bangalore-based Pronto launched the video recording service, called Pronto Verified, in May, stirring widespread backlash in India and government scrutiny over privacy concerns. Customers consent to the recording and workers are paid double for Pronto Verified bookings, CEO Anjali Sardana says.  “Trillions of dollars are going into AI capex every year. All the money in the world is getting invested in AI, but your blue-collar worker in India is not capturing any of that,” Sardana, 24, tells Forbes. “And there is an opportunity to actually redistribute that capital.” By Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OnApril 4, 2022, less than six weeks after Russian forces launched their attack on Ukraine, officers from Spain's Guardia Civil, the FBI and Homeland Security boarded Tango, a 255-foot superyacht in the Spanish port city of Palma de Mallorca.  Allegedly owned by sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg (net worth: $9 billion), per the United States government, the $90 million vessel was seized under a U.S. warrant alleging bank fraud, money laundering and sanctions violations. It was the high-profile opening salvo in a Western campaign to punish the Russian oligarchs who “supported tyranny for financial gain.” “Today marks our task force's first seizure of an asset belonging to a sanctioned individual with close ties to the Russian regime,” boasted then–attorney general Merrick Garland. “It will not be the last.” Weeks later, Garland doubled down, promising to use all available Justice Department resources to seize the assets and transfer the proceeds directly to Ukraine.  By Giacomo Tognini, Deputy Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When Jay Shetty started his podcast On Purpose in 2019, he remembers people telling him he was too late. The medium was already saturated, they said, with little room for growth. And wasn't he really just a content creator?  Seven years later, the 38-year-old self-help guru hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world, competing not only with the biggest TV, radio and internet-native talk shows but blurring the lines between them entirely. Just as many people watch his lengthy interviews with celebrities (including Michelle Obama and Matt Damon) on YouTube as listen on the iHeartMedia network—distribution deals that Forbes estimates paid Shetty $21 million over the past 12 months. And when those deals expired this year, Shetty landed a new kind of contract, in which the audio and video of his show will not only be distributed by Spotify; it will also stream on Netflix, with the two companies combining to pay him an estimated $100 million over the next three years.  “When I started, video wasn't normal for a podcast,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Now we had the four largest streamers bidding for the show. To see that kind of interest and enthusiasm was pretty amazing—for me and for the industry overall.” By Matt Craig, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For a dozen years, Forbes has partnered with TrueBridge Capital Partners to highlight the companies that are likely to become unicorns in the near future. To qualify, startups must be venture-backed, based in the U.S. and worth less than $1 billion. In a sign of the times: Nearly all this year's list members use AI in some fashion as they work on everything from bone marrow to biological threats, cybersecurity to creative design. Our track record is striking: Of the 275 alumni of this list, 60% did indeed become unicorns, including household names Duolingo and DoorDash. Another 60 were bought (or were merged). Nearly half of last year's picks already are worth more than a billion. There have been surprisingly few disasters—just six companies, about 2%, imploded or shut down. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Jesse Vega's first date with Deaunda Lira, a romantic sushi dinner in Colorado Springs three years ago, he was upfront: He has epilepsy and suffers severe seizures. “It could be scary,” Jesse, 49, recalls telling her. Deaunda, 52, was wary at first, especially after witnessing one of his seizures firsthand. But she shortly came around. “He's so handsome, I'm gonna have to give it a try,” she remembers thinking, laughing. The seizures started in 2002, when Jesse was 25. At first, they were minor, leaving him flushed and nausea­ted before smelling a scent of ammonia. These temporal lobe seizures (sometimes referred to as “déjà vu” seizures) happened about 60 times a day and left him exhausted. They eventually progressed to grand mal seizures: violent shaking and stiff muscles, vomiting, tongue-biting and a loss of bladder or bowel control. The couple married in 2023, and Deaunda quit her nearly $50,000-a-year job in medical billing to take care of Jesse. He wasn't working either: He had to give up his job at the Department of Defense because of his condition. Money got so tight that the middle-aged newlyweds moved in with Jesse's dad. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Twenty years ago this month, Tesla introduced itself to the world with the electric Roadster, the $100,000 sports car that kickstarted the modern EV era. Now the company's two original founders are betting on TELO, an EV startup with an aesthetic rebuttal to Tesla's brutalist Cybertruck swagger. Rather than start with another compact crossover chasing Tesla's top-selling Model Y, San Carlos, California-based TELO – located in the same Silicon Valley office park where Tesla was headquartered when it launched the Roadster – is coming to market with a whimsical truck roughly the size of a MINI Cooper. Priced from $41,520, the MT1 looks like something from the world of Japanese anime, with none of the militaristic menace of Tesla's pickup. But TELO is borrowing one important page from Tesla's original playbook: start small and build slowly. CEO and cofounder Jason Marks told Forbes the company initially plans to make just 500 units, and then scale up to a 5,000-vehicle-per-year run rate after a year or so. And even at that relatively low volume, he thinks the company can turn a profit.  By Alan Ohnsman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In Lafayette, Indiana, a small city with a population of just over 70,000, the local police force decided to try out a new AI tool sold by law enforcement tech giant Axon, the company with a $35 billion market cap best known for making the Taser. Called Form One, it promised to save officers time by listening to the audio from their body cameras, then filling out the administrative details of a police report: officers and citizens' names, ID documentation, license plates and other vehicle information. For Lafayette's captains who'd worked closely with Axon on previous AI projects, it seemed like a no-brainer. But after seven months of testing the technology, many of Lafayette's officers found the tool was wasting time, not saving it. “I know it doesn't save me time and I know it has inaccuracies that I will have to edit,” wrote one officer in a cache of emails obtained by Forbes via public records request. Form One struggled to record the right names or car plates, even when they were clearly stated in the camera footage, according to other emails. One cop said a simple form that used to take 30 seconds to fill out manually now takes three minutes with Form One because there are so many errors. “Form One dramatically increases the time it takes to finish reports,” he wrote to a colleague. By Thomas Brewster Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In early 2023, Keith Peiris's AI-powered presentation startup Tome was growing quickly. It had become the fastest productivity tool to reach 1 million users, Forbes reported at the time, a number that eventually climbed to 25 million. He raised $80 million from top Silicon Valley investors like Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, Greylock and billionaire Reid Hoffman. But by late 2024, Peiris realized he was building the wrong company.  It turned out that most people didn't want to pay for its tools, which generated beautiful slides within minutes. Tome's users, mainly students and small business owners, were largely on free plans or paying $10 monthly subscriptions—not nearly enough to sustain the business. And the startup couldn't quite crack the market for professionals like marketers and salespeople because it wasn't connected to their data and did not have the context needed to make good presentations. Users were still growing, but the company's annual revenue plateaued at around just $3 million.  “Being frank about Tome, our technology thesis and our cultural thesis was very immature,” Peiris admits now. By Rashi Shrivastava, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in October 2024, Poolside was an early AI star. Cofounded by former Github CTO Jason Warner, the startup had raised $500 million on a $3 billion valuation to build coding agents for governments and large companies. But over the next 18 months, Poolside largely disappeared from view, while OpenAI and Anthropic ballooned to nearly trillion-dollar valuations with a crop of Chinese labs building open source models nipping at their heels.  Now Poolside is back with a new model called Laguna that on public benchmarks beats its American and Chinese open source competition — with the very notable exception of Chinese lab Moonshot's latest AI model, Kimi K3.  "As an American company building for the West, we'll be the most capable open model in the West,” Warner, Poolside's co-CEO and cofounder, tells Forbes. “Globally, in this weight class of the 118 billion parameter model, we are the leader.” Warner claims that the startup spent those 18 months where it went quiet building the infrastructure for a “model building factory” that could pump out Laguna and continue with new and more powerful iterations every five weeks. "The classic notion of model building is an artisanal process…We've built an industrial model-building process,” he says. By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the final minutes ticked away in a disappointing 4-1 loss to Belgium on July 6 that knocked the U.S. men's national team out of the World Cup, Fox play-by-play announcer John Strong made a direct plea to his television audience of 30 million Americans. “If you've enjoyed what you're seeing, well, support your local team,” Strong said from Seattle's Lumen Field, packed with a sellout crowd of 66,925—more than double the average attendance of 31,000 across the Seattle Sounders' first six Major League Soccer games this season at the same stadium. “This doesn't have to be the last soccer you watch for the last four years. It's a beautiful sport.” Often an afterthought both among top-tier global soccer leagues and in the U.S. professional sports scene, MLS has long viewed this summer's World Cup on U.S. soil as an inflection point for a new phase of growth, with help from Lionel Messi, the biggest star in the league's history. On Sunday, the 39-year-old superstar will lead Argentina into the World Cup final against Spain while seeking to lock up the Golden Boot as the tournament's top scorer. On Wednesday, Messi's Inter Miami will restart its season after MLS's seven-week World Cup break. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

With the FDA panel that's considering whether to recommend legal production of seven peptides meeting on Thursday and Friday, Shaun Noorian had planned to be at its Maryland campus in person. Ahead of the panel, Noorian, the founder and CEO of Houston-based Empower Pharmacy, one of the nation's largest compounding pharmacies, told Forbes, “I wouldn't miss it for the world. The who's who of the peptide space will be there.” Hundreds of others had been expected to jam into the room as well, including compounders, telehealth founders and longevity influencers. While these peptides are currently not legal to produce for anything other than “research purposes,” that hasn't stopped a booming gray market from exploiting that loophole. There's little scientific data on their safety and efficacy, and the many sketchy sellers who distribute them operate with no oversight. Still, the illicit peptide market could be worth an estimated $3 billion. Silicon Valley bros, longevity medics and MAHA believers take them, while wellness influencers promote their “peptide stacks” online to speed recovery or improve sleep. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a self-described “big fan of peptides,” as he told podcaster Joe Rogan in February. By Amy Feldman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the final minutes ticked away in a disappointing 4-1 loss to Belgium on July 6 that knocked the U.S. men's national team out of the World Cup, Fox play-by-play announcer John Strong made a direct plea to his television audience of 30 million Americans. “If you've enjoyed what you're seeing, well, support your local team,” Strong said from Seattle's Lumen Field, packed with a sellout crowd of 66,925—more than double the average attendance of 31,000 across the Seattle Sounders' first six Major League Soccer games this season at the same stadium. “This doesn't have to be the last soccer you watch for the last four years. It's a beautiful sport.” Often an afterthought both among top-tier global soccer leagues and in the U.S. professional sports scene, MLS has long viewed this summer's World Cup on U.S. soil as an inflection point for a new phase of growth, with help from Lionel Messi, the biggest star in the league's history. On Sunday, the 39-year-old superstar will lead Argentina into the World Cup final against Spain while seeking to lock up the Golden Boot as the tournament's top scorer. On Wednesday, Messi's Inter Miami will restart its season after MLS's seven-week World Cup break. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past decade, Greg Flynn has been America's largest franchisee, and now he is the largest in the world. But he has a voracious appetite for more.  “The dream here is to create a global business with operating capabilities and success beyond what the world has seen,” says Flynn, the 62-year-old CEO and founder of Flynn Group and Flynn Properties. “Operating businesses, especially consumer-facing ones, are really hard. If you can do it well consistently, over multiple brands and multiple geographies and multiple industries, that is a valuable and defensible thing to do.” Over the past three decades, he has doubled down on fast food franchises again and again. With $5 billion in annual revenue from more than 3,000 franchises of Applebee's, Taco Bell, Panera, Arby's, Pizza Hut, Wendy's and now Planet Fitness in 44 states as well as Australia and New Zealand, Flynn's portfolio is more than double the size of the next biggest franchisee.  Forbes estimates Flynn has about 25% ownership with some $2.5 billion in loans and over $100 million in cash on hand. At a valuation Forbes estimates of $5 billion, that means Flynn is worth an estimated $650 million. (Flynn declined to comment.) By Chloe Sorvino, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices