Forbes Daily Briefing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

U.S. airline executives say higher fares due to the Iran war have not dampened demand for tickets yet—but analysts say that could change with a protracted conflict in the Middle East. Key Facts Looking at ticket sales for the six largest U.S. airlines, the average transaction grew by 2% (American Airlines) to 16% (Delta Air Lines) for the week ending March 8 compared to the previous week, according to new data from Consumer Edge, a provider of consumer spending data. Speaking Tuesday at a J.P. Morgan investor conference, executives of major U.S. airlines agreed travel demand remained robust enough to offset much of the huge spike in jet fuel prices caused by the war in Iran.  Several executives suggested travelers are locking in summer airfares now before rates climb further. Jet fuel, which typically accounts for one fifth to one quarter of airlines' operating expenses, was $3.93 a gallon Tuesday on the Argus U.S. Jet Fuel Index—up 57% since the U.S. and Israel began airstrikes on Iran 18 days ago.  How Robust Is Travel Demand? The strong demand airlines are seeing now may be short-lived, as some of this strength “may reflect consumers booking trips ahead of potential fare increases tied to rising jet fuel costs,” Jeff Windau, senior analyst at Edward Jones, wrote in a note to investors, adding “tax refunds are likely to provide a short-term boost to discretionary travel spending.” A protracted war could make Americans less willing to spend on higher airfares. “If oil prices remain elevated for an extended period, travel demand could soften as inflation further constrains consumers' disposable income,” Windau wrote. One big factor that could dampen travel demand would be a drop in the stock market. “As long as the stock market goes up, higher-income people will feel more confident in a way that lower income people won't, and that impacts their discretionary spending,” Michael Gunther, senior vice president of research and market intelligence at Consumer Edge, told Forbes. Could Premium Passengers See Bigger Fare Hikes? Instead of raising airfare prices across the board, airlines may decide to hike some fare classes, such as premium and business class, before others. Generally speaking, the legacy airlines—American, Delta and United—attract higher-income customers who are less price sensitive than those who favor budget airlines. At the J.P. Morgan conference Tuesday, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian said the upper arm of the K-shaped economy, representing the most affluent Americans, was still strong “and we serve the top end of that K, and probably the highest end of that K,” noting the wealthiest demographic “is, candidly, a bit immune to what goes on with geopolitical events.” But while U.S. airlines “would like to charge more, they know they can't just go out and start charging 20% more, 30% more,” Katy Nastro, spokesperson for the flight-deal company Going, told Forbes this month. “I don't think we can assume premium travelers are just going to eat up this additional cost and lie down and take it.”  Will Airlines Cut Back Their Schedules? For now, U.S. airlines are operating with their schedules mainly intact from before the war. But if the Middle East conflict continues, domestic carriers may begin to rein in capacity to offset their increased costs from jet fuel prices. Around the world, some carriers have already begun cutting flights. Scandinavia's SAS said it plans to nix roughly 1,000 flights in March and April, Air New Zealand announced it would reduce capacity by 5% through early May and Vietnam Airlines warned it soon may have to scrub flights from its schedule What We Don't Know How long the war will continue. “The duration of the Iran conflict will be a key factor for the travel industry,” wrote Windau to investors. “Airport delays associated with the partial government shutdown, ongoing headlines about geopolitical tensions, and rising costs all have the potential to weigh on consumer sentiment and discretionary travel plans.” Read the full story on Forbes: By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2026/03/18/iran-war-airfares-climbing/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ona muggy February afternoon, the Kopi Kenangan café at the Alam Sutera mall in suburban Jakarta is buzzing with customers. The bestseller on its menu is Kopi Kenangan Mantan, a blend of Indonesian robusta and arabica beans, milk, creamer and gula aren, the local palm sugar. Queuing up to place his order, 23-year-old marketing management student Elson Rochilie says he appreciates the range of premium coffees on offer at pocket-friendly prices. Rochilie fits the customer profile the chain's cofounder and CEO, Edward Tirtanata, was going after when he opened the first Kopi Kenangan grab-and-go store in the Indonesian capital in 2017: young people looking for an alternative to cheap instant coffee sold by street vendors but who didn't want to pay more than double the price charged by international chains such as Starbucks and Dunkin' Donuts. Positioning itself in that sweet spot has paid off for Kopi Kenangan, which became a unicorn in 2021 after raising $96 million in a series C funding round and overtook the local unit of Starbucks in retail reach two years later. Today, it claims to be Indonesia's biggest coffee chain with a third of the market and 1,136 outlets, as well as 188 overseas, as of December. Eyeing what he reckons is a burgeoning customer base for quality Indonesian coffee, 37-year-old Tirtanata is brewing a plan to invest $200 million to more than triple the store count to 4,000 by 2030. By Gloria Haraito, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

During an all-hands meeting earlier this year at data labeling startup Mercor, its then 22-year-old billionaire CEO Brendan Foody pulled up a slide with a single word: fraud.  An employee had embezzled company funds, he told his staff of more than 200. The person had since been fired. There would be no tolerance for this behavior, Foody said, according to four people familiar with the meeting.  Foody didn't identify the employee or disclose the amount stolen at the meeting. But Forbes has learned that the culprit was an early hire and lead manager on the Anthropic account, one of the company's most important, where Mercor's contractors create training data to help build Claude. Multiple former Mercor employees said the manager had recruited his brother and father as “experts” and sent them hundreds of thousands of dollars in so-called bonus payments. He was reported in late December after it was discovered that contractors were paid more than the amount billed to Anthropic for multiple data generation projects, two sources said. Anthropic was not aware of the incident, they added.  Mercor eventually recovered the fraudulent bonus payments and it did not end up costing customers any money, Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg told Forbes. The former Anthropic account lead, whom Forbes is not identifying, declined to comment for this story. Anthropic declined to comment. By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Anna Tong, Forbes Staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives, increasingly core to how we work, search for information and express ideas. In the last year, the startups spearheading this paradigm shift have raised gobs of money from venture firms to build applications used by hundreds of millions of people across professions like law, software engineering, banking and even music. Three years into the AI frenzy, startups are starting to prove they can turn lofty ideas into sustainable businesses. That's evident in Forbes' eighth annual AI 50 list, which spotlights the most promising privately-held AI companies in the world. Juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to be the largest companies on the list, attracting unprecedented sums of cash from marquee Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech behemoths alike as they reportedly head towards blockbuster IPOs. The two AI giants have accumulated a combined $242.6 billion in venture funding, about 80 percent of the total $305.6 billion that the companies on this year's AI 50 list have raised. Massive adoption of their tools has led to strong revenue growth: At the end of February, OpenAI reportedly had more than $25 billion in annualized revenue and in early April Anthropic said its revenue run rate had crossed $30 billion. And with products like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex, the AI labs are dominating into markets like coding where players like Cursor (valued at $29.3 billion) must innovate to compete. Edited by Rashi Shrivastava Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vercel isn't a household name like OpenAI or Google, but it's a crucial vendor for some of the world's biggest brands, including Under Armour, Stripe and Sonos, who use Vercel to host their digital infrastructures. (One of the most popular ways to view the Epstein Files, an interface called Jmail that mimics a Gmail inbox, is hosted on Vercel.) In September, the company raised $300 million, co-led by blueblood venture firm Accel and GIC, one of Singapore's sovereign wealth funds. The fundraising round lifted the startup's valuation to $9.3 billion, up from $3.25 billion the year before. The influx of cash also makes Rauch, an Argentine immigrant, a billionaire, worth at least $2.1 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Vercel is certainly benefiting from its ties to Claude Code. It's not because of any sort of commercial relationship. Instead, it's Vercel's popularity in the developer ecosystem that has organically turned it into a go-to web hosting tool for Claude. One of the most popular ways to build websites is through an open source framework called Next.js, a tool built and maintained by Vercel. As a result, language models like Claude have become very good at writing Next.js code, thanks to the training data fed into the models. So when a user vibe codes an app, Vercel becomes the natural tool for Claude to suggest when it comes time to deploy. “LLMs seem to love Vercel, and we love them back,” says Accel partner Dan Levine, an early Vercel backer.  It's early, but the boost from Claude Code is taking shape. Vercel clients that use Claude represent a little over 1% of users, but they generate almost 15% of overall Vercel deployments. More broadly, Vercel deployments that come from apps vibe coded by AI agents — everything from to-do list apps to customer service bots — have grown too, from almost 5% in June 2025 to more than 21% in February. Of those deployments made by agents, almost 70% of them come from Claude Code. The boom from AI coding has helped to spike sales for Vercel. Run-rate GAAP revenue hit $340 million at the end of February, up 86% year over year, the company told Forbes.  By Richard Nieva, Senior Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there's anything romance novelist Colleen Hoover has learned from working in Hollywood for the past few years, it's that movie production moves far slower than publishing. The 46-year-old author released an astonishing 24 novels in the first decade of her career, becoming the best-selling author in the world in 2022 with titles like It Ends with Us and Heart Bones. But she has spent much of the last four years cowriting and producing an adaptation of one of them, Reminders Of Him, for big screen release this weekend. During that time, Hoover's novels have become a force at the box office. The movie adaptation of It Ends With Us raked in $350 million worldwide in 2024—despite months of nasty legal battling between stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni—and Regretting You scored a respectable $90 million in late 2025. This October's Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, will mark her fourth adaptation in just over two years. By Matt Craig, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and a sustained ‘Trump Slump' of declining international visitation, the substantial World Cup bump U.S. hotels were promised may not materialize, according to CoStar, the industry's leading benchmarking and analytics firm. By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past few months, neurosurgeons at hospitals in Florida, Connecticut and New York have been preparing for a wildly experimental operation designed to treat Alzheimer's disease, the dementia that leads to devastating memory loss. The surgery, which they've been practicing on cadavers, aims to clear the drainage pathways to the brain. This could help patients' own lymphatic systems flush out toxins that scientists believe are the hallmarks of the disease, which affects 7 million people in the U.S. alone.  To do so, they're turning to the smallest surgical robotic instruments in the world that can hold tiny needles the size of eyelashes, with scissors and dilators roughly the width of a human hair. The lymph vessels in the neck that surgeons would operate on for the Alzheimer's procedure can be as little as 0.2 millimeters in diameter, the equivalent thickness of two sheets of paper. “It's like taking a couple of strands of your hair and tying them together with little bitty sutures,” says Mark Toland, CEO of Jacksonville, Florida-based startup MMI, which makes the microrobots.  They aim to perform the first of these microrobotic surgeries on five people in March. While a very early-stage clinical study, it builds off reports from some 5,000 experimental surgeries performed in China and other Asian countries over the past five years that help the lymphatic system clear out build-up in the brain. They've shown remarkable, if largely anecdotal, results. Surgeons were not only able to slow the disease's progression — they took patients with moderate Alzheimer's back to a more mild stage of the disease, Toland says. By Amy Feldman, Senior Editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American companies are increasingly skipping traditional price hikes on goods in favor of new surcharges and fees added to checkout screens and monthly bills—often far less visible—as a way to pass rising prices onto consumers amid surging inflation. Key Facts Restaurants, hotels, airlines, retailers and other businesses are increasingly breaking price hikes into separate line items—often labeled as a “fuel surcharge,” “service fee” “processing fee” or “resort fee”—that allow them to preserve advertised prices but still pass inflation-related price increases on to the consumer.  Often these costs only show up on a final bill or check—separate from the original, advertised price. One of the most common examples is a credit card use surcharge—used by one-third of American small businesses—which see companies try to recoup the fees charged to them by credit card companies by hitting customers with a 2% to 4% fee if they use a card instead of cash.  More than 15% of restaurants nationally also now tack on extra fees to the bill at the end of a meal, according to the National Restaurant Association, with some adding credit card surcharges while others opt for automatic gratuity or vague “service charges” to help cover increased supply costs or employee wages.  Airlines advertise ticket prices without including hidden taxes, fees and charges—that can increase ticket prices by roughly 20% at checkout—and carriers like American, Alaska, Delta, United and Southwest this month announced they were hiking the price of baggage fees by $10 per bag to cover Iran war-caused jet fuel increases. Grab, a Nasdaq-listed rideshare and food delivery company that operates in Southeast Asia, told customers it will implement a fuel surcharge through May 31 and Uber Australia said it will introduce a temporary 5-cent-per-kilometer fuel surcharge starting April 15. What To Watch For More price hikes or fees for consumers as businesses themselves fall victim to new surcharges. Amazon has added a 3.5% fuel surcharge for its third-party sellers. UPS, FedEx and the USPS have implemented their own fuel-related price hikes, ranging from 3.5% to 8%, since the Iran war spiked energy costs. Experts have said those logistics companies have little choice but to offset the skyrocketing costs of gasoline and diesel, and as many as 30 to 40% of Amazon sellers subject to the new surcharge will pass it directly on to consumers, a supply chain expert told the New York Post. The owner of Ash & Erie, a small men's clothing brand, told the Wall Street Journal the fuel surcharges are like “tariffs 2.0” and said he'll likely have to raise prices to make up for them. Similarly, fresh food distributors are billing restaurants and grocery markets to make up for the rising price of diesel, which could soon get passed along to shoppers and diners. Grocery prices will rise 2% in the next few weeks, according to The Food Institute. Contractor Plus, a management app designed for contractors and businesses like plumbing and electricians, is advisingits clients on how to add fuel surcharges directly to invoices. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Amazon have all started offering fuel price relief options for its delivery and rideshare drivers, the New York Times reported, and that could soon turn into a surcharge for riders or delivery recipients. When the war in Ukraine caused gas prices to jump in 2022, Uber and Lyft added surcharges directly to customers. Will The New Fees Ever Go Away?  Probably not. Often, a fee gets introduced to solve a seemingly temporary cost problem but then becomes permanent, even after the original justification fades. Restaurant service fees, for example, were born amid higher prices and fewer sales during the pandemic but many stayed around when costs dropped. Airline checked baggage fees were introduced during the 2008 oil price spike, when jet fuel costs surged, but didn't disappear once fuel prices stabilized. Rental car companies added "temporary" surcharges after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to offset falling travel demand and pay for added airport security and facility costs, but they stuck around after the travel industry recovered. Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian recently implied airfares likely won't go back down even if oil prices drop, instead saying the lowered fuel costs would "certainly help us boost our margins this year and clearly into next year as well." Read the full story on Forbes: By Mary Whitfill Roeloffs https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/04/13/here-are-the-hidden-fees-for-food-flights-more-youre-paying-because-of-the-affordability-crisis/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Inside a century-old church in Pasa­dena, California, Blake Shelton sits alone on a faded wooden pew, praying. Smoke and lights are pumped into the darkened sanctuary as a camera circles, filming the video for his latest single, “Let Him In Anyway.” It's a ballad about a recently deceased best friend whose eternal salvation is in doubt, but the director has an idea to inject some optimism into the song that is not suggested by the lyrics. He instructs two crew members to open the church doors as the song concludes, letting in streams of Cali­fornia sunshine that hint at an answered prayer.  “I try to make all my decisions by listening to what everyone else has to say,” Shelton tells Forbes. “We'll go edit it—and if it works it works, and if it doesn't, nobody besides you ever knows it happened.” The 49-year-old country music superstar describes all his ventures with similar aw-shucks humility. But those he works closest with say not to underestimate the business savvy of a man who has recorded 31 No. 1 country radio hits, opened a national chain of restaurants, launched a Hollywood production company and amassed a personal fortune that Forbes estimates at more than $200 million. By Matt Craig, Reporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grit. Hustle. Resilience. The American Dream is built on the audacious belief that anyone can make it to the top. Every elementary school kid is imbued with the belief that anyone can become president of the United States. Or a hip-hop megastar. Or a space-faring billionaire. The notion is as old as the Republic and stands self-consciously in contrast to class-ridden Europe where one's prospects were often determined at birth. This ideal has always had its heroes: from Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned immigrant who crafted America's first financial system, to Andrew Carnegie, who went from working as a young teen in a textile mill to forging a vast steel empire. Since 1917, it has been the prime subject matter of this publication. So, in honor of America's semiquincentennial, we feel uniquely qualified to rank the 250 greatest living self-made Americans. Edited By Alex Knapp and Luisa Kroll, Forbes StaffReported By Jessica Jacolbe and Chase Peterson-Withorn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canadian visitation to the U.S. is down 35% since President Trump returned to office—dealing a massive, sustained economic blow to the U.S. economy that shows no sign of reversing in 2026. Key Facts The number of Canadians taking road trips into the U.S.—the most common way of visiting—dropped by 5% last month compared to March 2025 and is down 35% compared to March 2024, according to data released Monday from Statistics Canada. There was also a 14% year-over-year decline in air travelers from Canada to the U.S. in March. In contrast, the volume of Americans visiting Canada in March was up 4% compared to a year ago. For the third consecutive month, more Canadians flew to overseas destinations than drove to the U.S.—flipping a long-established pattern. Canadian visitation overseas was up 5% year over year—a sign Canadians are swapping the U.S. for other international destinations.  Nearly a quarter (23%) of Canadian travelers have canceled a previously planned trip to the U.S., according to a Longwoods International tracking study of Canadian travelers. Crucial Quote “In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off,” Amir Eylon, President and CEO of Longwoods International, told Forbes. How Much Has The 14-Month Canadian Boycott Cost The U.s. Economy? In the years leading to President Donald Trump's re-election to a second term, Canadian tourists were the biggest single source of international visitors to the U.S., comprising roughly one-quarter of all foreign travelers, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). In 2024, Canadian tourists injected $20.5 billion into the U.S. economy. But in early 2025, the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) warned even a 10% reduction in Canadian inbound travel could translate to $2.1 billion in lost spending and 140,000 lost jobs in the hospitality sector. The actual decline was 22%—more than double that hypothetical drop—which works out to a drop of roughly $4.5 billion in visitor spending. The boycott continued into 2026, with double-digit declines in both January and February, and cumulative two-year drops of more than 30% each month. Read the full story on Forbes: By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2026/04/13/canadian-visits-us-down-35-percent/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, has written a memoir. It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese, and is available on Amazon Kindle for $9.99, where it's already ranked #4 among all Kindle books. The book traces Zhao's path from rural China to Canada, then through jobs in Tokyo, New York and Shanghai, and finally to building Binance, the crypto exchange that grew with extraordinary speed into the largest in the world. Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement over anti-money-laundering and other charges, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump. He says the memoir is for readers who know him only from headlines, for those who have followed him for years, and for anyone curious how one founder could help shape an industry "and pay for it." Like most memoirs, this one is an exercise in selection and emphasis. The glowing and inspiring portrait Zhao assembles is of a man philosophically untouched by his success. Forbes estimates his fortune at roughly $110 billion, placing him ahead of Bill Gates. But wealth, he insists, was never the point. "I don't care about money," he writes. "I don't care about power. I don't care about fame. I don't even care about legacy." As evidence of his selflessness, Zhao cites charitable efforts such as Giggle Academy, his nonprofit education platform, and includes a foreword from Yi He, Binance's cofounder and the mother of his three children. She says even after Binance became a global juggernaut, Zhao still wore clothes ordered from Amazon, biked to meetings and drove an old Toyota minivan. Yet the book is equally intent on establishing Zhao firmly within the world's power circles. He writes of traveling the world and being received by political leaders and royalty, from Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to the king of Bhutan, who contributed praise for the book alongside Ray Dalio and Larry Fink.  The anecdotes that follow serve the same function. Binance invested $500 million in X in 2022 — "a finger in the air number," as Zhao puts it — after little financial analysis and a brief conversation with Elon Musk. Thanks to its corporate reshuffling, Zhao adds, Binance wound up with a small stake in SpaceX, which will soon IPO with an astronomical valuation as high as $2 trillion. When Bahrain's central bank governor complained that ChatGPT was blocked in his country, Zhao writes that he reached out to Sam Altman and had the matter resolved the following day. Forbes appears numerous times in his memoir—sometimes as a marker of validation, sometimes as a source of grievance. Zhao recalls a 2017 Hong Kong photo shoot that put him on the cover, Binance hoodie and all, prompting him to turn to a friend and ask, "Does this mean I'm rich?" He writes that he considered a $200 million investment in Forbes in 2022, a deal that never materialized. And then there is the 2020 "Tai Chi" article, Forbes' report on an alleged scheme by Binance to evade U.S. regulators. Zhao casts it as part of the machinery closing in on him, suggesting prosecutors may have tipped off the reporter and later used the piece to help open an investigation. Binance sued Forbes for defamation over the article, but then dropped its lawsuit three months later. The book is at its most interesting when details slip in sideways. Zhao describes a friendly relationship with Gary Gensler before Gensler became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. By Nina Bambysheva Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shohei Ohtani's historic payday—despite a playing salary of only $2 million—leads a top ten set to collect an estimated $537 million this year. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2026/03/24/the-highest-paid-mlb-players-2026/

Forget the drug discovery hype. Here's how the world's largest pharma company is seeing a payoff from AI right now. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2026/03/07/how-lilly-used-ai-to-crank-up-production-of-its-popular-glp-1s/

Already champions on the field, the Dodgers are now threatening to claim the Yankees' financial crown, with MLB clubs worth $2.9 billion on average. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinteitelbaum/2026/03/20/baseballs-most-valuable-teams-2026/

Luyu Zhang is part of a new wave of Chinese founders who are building at home but betting their companies in America. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/02/24/this-middle-school-dropout-built-his-ai-startup-in-china-now-hes-scaling-it-in-silicon-valley/

Alex Kwon's Active makes hardware for some of America's biggest weed brands. He now has his sights set on conquering Europe. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2026/03/13/this-100-million-vape-company-is-a-pillar-of-the-cannabis-industry/

In an exclusive interview, Google's new AI infrastructure chief says the tech giant has a “significant investment” planned. At current levels, Forbes projects it could be a very big number indeed. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/03/02/googles-data-center-buildout-could-top-1-trillion/

Since the 1980s, the Lorenzen family has grown its protein powder business, Puris, into an AgTech power player. Now the preferred supplier for food brands seeking craveable recipes for GLP-1 users—it's helping America become ‘protein independent Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2026/02/26/how-puris-pea-protein-is-fueling-the-ozempic-generation/

When a little-known South Korean company started buying up dozens of supertankers, rumors emerged that the purchases were backed by shipping tycoon Gianluigi Aponte. A Forbes investigation confirmed that Aponte is indeed the true buyer of many of those ships—and with the Iran war sending tanker rates soaring, that now seems to be a well-timed bet.

India-based conglomerate Reliance Industries is backing the first new oil refinery project to be constructed in the U.S. in 50 years.

Many of the teams in the NCAA men's basketball tournament are bankrolled by super-rich superfans. Here is this year's C-Suite 16, with a combined net worth of $365 billion.

As the war in Iran continues into its third week, few oil tankers are making their way through the Straight of Hormuz. Amid oil rationing and shortages, which countries are most in danger of winning the race to empty?

The small group of people worth a dozen digits has hit a record high, just as Elon Musk approaches trillionaire territory.

Amjad Masad's Replit allows users to build apps together like they're doodling on a white board. It also made the Jordanian immigrant a billionaire along the way.

Tesla's robotaxi and humanoid-robot promises remain unproven businesses. Its energy division isn't. And therein lies the company's next bright idea.