Forbes Daily Briefing

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

Tom Mueller is driving his candy green Porsche Taycan Turbo S the way he builds rocket engines: with a terrifying amount of instantaneous thrust and little regard for the local speed limits of El Segundo. He is headed west on Marine Avenue, cutting through the smog-tinted sunlight of Los Angeles' South Bay aerospace corridor, talking about Earth's limitations.  “If we continue to grow like we have, eventually you just use up all the metals, you use up all the energy,” says Mueller, 65, who is especially concerned by the energy demand of AI data centers. “By about 2045, the total power that the world is generating right now would be needed just for compute. Exponential growth can crush resources on Earth.” From behind his reflective wrap-around shades, Mueller spots a gap in the afternoon congestion. His electric sports car can rocket from zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds, and Mueller seems eager to demonstrate the point. “This is where we accelerate,” he says, stomping on the pedal. The torque hits like a physical blow, pinning us against the leather seats as Mueller cackles. “The moon and the near-Earth asteroids,” he continues moments later, now parked at a red light, “contain billions of tons of metal, silicon, water and ice, so we have to start using it. It seems a little farfetched to start using it now, because we just haven't built the space economy. We haven't got there yet.” By John Hyatt, Forbes Staff Alicia Park, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's almost 8 a.m. when Gloria Moncrief arrives at her oil firm's hangar at Meacham Airport in Fort Worth, Texas. She climbs into an eight-seater Cessna Citation, explaining that her Boeing 737, Lucky Liz, is in the shop. The flight to a small airfield in southern Louisiana takes about an hour. Then it's a 45-minute drive along the levee into the Atchafalaya river basin, the largest swamp in North America, followed by 15 minutes on a flat-bottomed boat past alligators, nesting bald eagles and fishermen muscling their bass boats into the bayou. Rounding a bend in the waterway, the boat arrives at a giant drilling rig with a 150-foot-tall derrick and roaring engines. Tall and thin, decked out in jeans and knee-high ostrich-skin boots, the 44-year-old Moncrief steps onto the rig, where a handful of mud-covered roughnecks maneuver 40-foot lengths of steel pipe with massive hydraulic tongs.  Moncrief is the head of Montex Drilling Company, the family business that owns Moncrief Oil and has been spending $300,000 a day to rent the rig and staff it around the clock with 60 folks working 12-hour shifts, 14 days on, 14 days off, all to drill the second-deepest natural gas well ever in the U.S. The Highlander 2 goes down 30,862 feet (almost six miles), where it intersects an 800-foot-thick (gross) zone of sand saturated with trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. The well was recently completed after 389 days of drilling. By Christopher Helman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After news broke that Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund would cease backing LIV Golf beyond this season, putting its future in doubt, Jon Rahm was asked in May about the status of his contract with the tour. “I don't see many ways out,” the 31-year-old Spaniard answered pragmatically. Rahm's next steps appear dependent on whether LIV can secure external funding to continue operating beyond this year—if its 2026 schedule can even be completed—but in the meantime, his golden handcuffs haven't been so bad. Rahm's contract, which reportedly guaranteed him at least $300 million when the former world No. 1 left the PGA Tour in December 2023 to sign with LIV, has made him the world's highest-paid golfer for the third consecutive year. Forbes estimates Rahm hauled in $111 million over the last 12 months before taxes and agent fees, sending his total pay for the past three years north of $400 million. His compensation since last June includes an estimated $101 million in prize money and on-course bonuses as well as $10 million in off-course earnings from brand partnerships, appearance fees and licensing income. In addition to his contractual guarantee with LIV, which Forbes estimates to be worth $50 million for the past year, Rahm pulled in an $18 million bonus in 2025 as LIV's individual champion for the second year in a row, and he has won two tournaments so far this season, helping push his total up 9% from the estimated $102 million he pocketed in the 12 months that ended in June 2025. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2008, just days before one of SpaceX's early rocket launches failed to reach orbit, Peter Thiel's fund wrote the first institutional check into the nascent, six-year-old startup.  Now, as Elon Musk's rocket and AI company goes public today at a nearly $2 trillion valuation, the fund's stake is worth a staggering $67 billion — making that first check, and the additional $600 million Founders Fund invested over the following decade, into one of the most lucrative in venture capital history.  The company started trading just before noon E.T., with an opening price of $150, which is the figure Forbes used for all of the stakes in this story. It soon popped up about 20% in the first few minutes of trading. As the largest single shareholder, the IPO has now minted Musk as the world's first trillionaire. Thousands of his employees are now millionaires and the fortunes of many of his billionaire colleagues and investors have soared.  That doesn't mean everyone can cash out immediately. Most companies going public put restrictions on insiders and investors from selling shares for at least six months to avoid painful share price slides from major shareholders dumping stock — a problem for previous tech IPOs like Facebook, where shares slumped 31% below the opening price in the 12 months after its listing, according to data from bank Truist. By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For most of James Dolan's tenure in charge of the New York Knicks since he became Madison Square Garden's chairman in 1999, he has been an easy punching bag for Knicks fans—and much of the damage was self-inflicted. But now, after one magical spring, that turbulent past might be water under the bridge. The Knicks are NBA champions for the first time in 53 years, a moment many fans never thought would be possible with Dolan in charge. “Hey, New York, I'm sorry it took so long, but here we are, and hopefully it won't take that long again!” Dolan shouted on stage after Saturday night's 94-90 victory over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 clinched the title. The 71-year-old Cablevision heir also has plenty of reason to celebrate off the court. Forbes recently valued the Knicks at $9.75 billion—No. 3 in the NBA—and Dolan's NHL team, the Rangers, at $4 billion, the second-best mark in hockey. While that combined total of $13.75 billion easily outpaces the $9.26 billion market cap of the publicly traded MSG, the stock is up 103% over the past year. Meanwhile, Dolan's other company, Sphere Entertainment, which owns the Sphere just off the Las Vegas Strip and the MSG regional sports TV and radio networks, has seen its share price soar 291%. By Hank Tucker, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 per share Thursday, implying a $1.8 trillion market cap for the company. That boosted Musk's net worth by $188 billion to an estimated $982 billion, according to Forbes' calculations. Then on Friday, the rocketmaker's stock started trading at $150 per share and closed the day at $160.95 per share, implying a valuation of $2.2 trillion for the company. That easily made Elon Musk the world's first trillionaire, worth an estimated $1.1 trillion. He was briefly worth a record $1.2 trillion, when SpaceX's stock peaked at $176.52 per share Friday.  Musk, who serves as chairman, CEO and chief technical officer of SpaceX, owns 4.8 billion shares of the rocketmaker, worth $767 billion at Friday's close. He has another 350 million stock options with an exercise price of $8.40 per share, worth $53 billion, giving him a 38% stake in the company, worth $821 billion. Before SpaceX priced its IPO Thursday, Forbes had been valuing Musk's estimated 40% stake (before dilution from the public offering) at around $500 billion, based on the $1.25 trillion valuation of SpaceX's merger with Musk's artificial intelligence and social media company xAI in February. (xAI previously merged with X–formerly Twitter–in March 2025.)  Musk also owns just over 10% of $1.5 trillion (market cap) Tesla, worth $168 billion, plus options to acquire another nearly 8% stake, worth $116 billion billion. Rounding out his net worth are smaller stakes in his brain interface startup Neuralink and his tunneling firm Boring Company, plus several billion dollars of wealth from previous Tesla share sales. By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2024, Meida Marek (her online pseudonym), was a recent college graduate working an entry-level finance job when she started doing the mental math that's fast becoming a rite of passage in such industries: What happens when AI can do this better than I can? So Marek took inventory. She was intelligent and naturally supportive. She was good at talking to people. She likes futurist rabbit holes: AI, biohacking, cryptocurrency, the sort of topics that can turn dinner into a three-hour debate. So she decided to turn that toolkit into a new career—and became an escort. For Marek, it's sex work with a particular angle: high-end companionship for Silicon Valley's most online, most technical clients—often the kind who work in AI or around it. Lately, she's been getting a lot of clients from Nvidia. There are only a handful of women like Marek. And like their clientele, they are also killing it financially. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are many firsts at this year's FIFA World Cup. For the first time in the tournament's 96-year history, there will be 48 teams. It's also the first World Cup to be held across three countries (the United States, Canada and Mexico), in a record 16 cities. And it will be the first to feature a billionaire player—actually two—with 41-year-old Cristiano Ronaldo captaining Portugal and 38-year-old Lionel Messi leading Argentina in its title defense. Then again, with ticket prices in the stratosphere, billionaires may be the only ones who can afford to attend. FIFA recently listed a ticket for the July 19 final at New Jersey's MetLife Stadium for $32,970, triple the price from a ticket drop in April—and more than 20 times what the equivalent ticket cost for the 2022 final in Qatar. And even the world's richest might have to think twice about buying tickets on the secondary market. In April, FIFA's resale site listed four seats to the final for a little less than $2.3 million each. (Section 124, Row 45, Seats 33-36, if you're scalping at home.) By Brett Knight, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rocket ships. AI chips. Chinese food. Clothing. Construction. Chatbots. America's self-made women billionaires have found dozens of ways to prosper. In our first listing focusing just on those with 10-figure fortunes, Forbes found 43 self-made queens of capitalism, up from 38 a year ago as many of their businesses hit new highs. That's despite the passing of two legendary women, Gap cofounder Doris Fisher (d. May 2026 at age 94) and Bio-Rad Laboratories' Alice Schwartz (d. September 2025, 99). Among the new billionaires are Beyonce Carter-Knowles, who climbs into the ranks on the back of her 2025 Cowboy Carter Tour; Nvidia CFO Colette Kress, who's benefitting from the AI boom; Caryn Seidman-Becker, who runs Clear Secure, an ID technology outfit used for security checkpoints at airports, among other places; and Luana Lopes Lara, the 30-year-old Brazilian ballerina and MIT graduate who cofounded prediction market firm Kalshi. Edited by  Andrea Murphy and Grace Chung Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“I am so sick of hearing about SpaceX,” says Phil DeAngelo, managing director of Focused Wealth Management, a registered investment advisor with $2.4 billion of assets under management. Then he laughs. “We're getting a lot of questions from clients.” For many investors, this isn't just another IPO. It's a rare chance to buy into one of the world's most closely watched private companies. SpaceX has said roughly 30% of its IPO shares will be allocated to retail investors, far above the 5% to 10% allocation that typically goes to individual investors. Investors aren't just talking about SpaceX. They're lining up for it. Reports suggest demand for the offering is approaching four times the number of shares available.  That could translate into a big price bump on the first day of trading, which will tempt some everyday investors into selling quickly – and potentially encountering a little-known Wall Street rule. Many brokerages discourage “IPO flipping,” or selling newly allocated shares shortly after trading begins, by restricting access to future offerings. By Brandon Kochkodin, Senior Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk loudly quit California after years of attacking its taxes, politics and business climate, moving SpaceX to Texas. Now the biggest fiscal event of his career could hand the state he trashed a giant tax windfall anyway. That is the awkward punchline hanging over SpaceX's expected IPO next week. Because while the company's relocation gave it a new Texas headquarters, it did not move the thousands of soon-to-be-wealthy SpaceX employees who still live and work in the Los Angeles area, and will face California's so-called millionaires' tax. Texas, which doesn't tax personal income, won't get that bump.  SpaceX is preparing to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, raising about $75 billion and valuing the company at roughly $1.77 trillion. For investors, that is a Mars-shot valuation. For California, it is something more terrestrial: taxable income landing in Los Angeles County. By Alan Ohnsman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jimmy Carter hosted an ice skating exhibition at the White House, and George W. Bush once staged a friendly game of T-ball at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but the prospect of mixed martial arts fights on the South Lawn would have never arisen if anyone other than Donald Trump were president and anyone other than Dana White ran the UFC. When Trump, a longtime fan of the fight promotion and steadfast friend to its chief executive, first suggested the idea to White at a UFC event last April, the pugnacious promoter said he would do it without hesitation. “He knows the day he asked me to do this event that I was going to show up and deliver,” White tells Forbes. “I love that type of stuff. Tell me it can't be done, tell me it's a huge challenge, tell me it's going to cost us a bunch of money. Tell me this, that. That's the stuff that I run right into.” White's tenure with the UFC has been defined by audacious risk-taking, propelling the company over the last 25 years from a bloody sideshow into a $1.5 billion (revenue) sports powerhouse. But Freedom 250 on June 14 (not coincidentally President Trump's birthday) is, even by his standards, “difficult on a whole other level.” In addition to the 4,300-seat outdoor venue that has now been erected on the South Lawn—and its 87-foot canopy, which towers above the White House itself—the weekend will include a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial and a two-day fan fest for as many as 85,000 people at the Ellipse. (The president likes the temporary structure so much he compared it to the Eiffel Tower, saying this week, “Maybe we'll never, ever take it down.”) Because the UFC controls its own TV productions, it will pick up the tab for not only the infrastructure but also the broadcasts, with nine production trucks' worth of equipment and crew. By Matt Craig, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a windowless room in a rented warehouse in Oakland in 2019, Nabis cofounders Vince C. Ning and Jun Sup Lee, a few of their employees and a friend they met at the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Luana Lopes Lara(who would go on to cofound prediction market Kalshi and become one of the world's youngest self-made billionaires), were counting $2 million in cash by hand.  The money was earmarked for marijuana excise taxes in California. San Francisco-based Nabis had recently launched as a cannabis distributor during the medical marijuana heyday of the country's biggest weed market and it was Ning and Lee's job to collect and pay taxes on the product they delivered to retailers. The duo had hired an armed guard to watch the door. Once the cash was counted, banded and bagged, Ning put the money into two suitcases, $1 million in each, threw on a Hawaiian shirt—he thought he was less likely to get mugged if he looked like a tourist, but in the end he looked more like a scrawny narco-wannabe—and headed to the state government building to deliver the money. By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In years past, when a great athlete retired, they typically told their story through a ghost-written memoir or perhaps even a biopic. But Hall of Fame basketball player Carmelo Anthony opted instead for the storytelling medium of the moment, striking a partnership with Utopai Studios, the Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in AI movies and TV shows. The 41-year-old NBA legend will produce AI-generated video content about his life and other sports stories through his Creative 7 Productions label. Anthony's investment into Utopai—which both sides declined to share the size of, but Forbes estimates around $5 million—was at a staggering $1 billion valuation. It's an astronomical amount for a company with revenue that Forbes estimates was less than $50 million in 2025, and has yet to put out a full-length movie or TV show. Still, with projects in the pipeline and strong 2026 projections, the premium price tag announces Utopai as a true competitor in the ongoing Hollywood AI arms race. By Matt Craig, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As New York celebrates the Knicks' first trip to the NBA finals since 1999, controlling owner James Dolan has earned a newfound respect among the franchise's notoriously critical fan base. And soon, the 71-year-old billionaire hopes to command the same respect from another tough crowd: stock market investors. For years, the value of publicly traded Madison Square Garden Sports—the entity through which Dolan owns both the Knicks and the Rangers, the city's NHL team—has lagged far behind Forbes' valuation of the two franchises. MSG Sports has an enterprise value of $9.9 billion while Forbes values the Knicks at $9.75 billion and the Rangers at $4 billion in the latest team valuations. Among New York sports fans, who have suffered through decades of mediocre play on the court and the ice, this gap has often been referred to as the “Dolan discount,” equating his mismanagement of the teams to a lack of business savvy. But historically, there has often been a loose connection between sports team values and how many games a team wins—let alone how many championships. In the first 20 years of Dolan's tenure, the Knicks had the worst cumulative winning percentage of any team in the NBA yet led Forbes' ranking as the most valuable franchise 16 times. Similarly, the Dallas Cowboys haven't won a Super Bowl since 1996 but remain the NFL's most valuable team (at $13 billion) while the Kansas City Chiefs, who have won three titles in the past seven years, are the 22nd-most-valuable franchise in the league. By Matt Craig, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The next hot electric vehicle may not come with gullwing doors, a self-driving mode or the ability to provide backup power to your home. It may be an 80-foot tugboat, nearly four stories tall, built to pull massive cargo ships around the Port of Long Beach. That's the bet Arc is making. The Los Angeles startup, cofounded by software engineer Mitch Lee and former SpaceX rocket designer Ryan Cook, launched their electric boat startup to target the luxury watercraft market, selling sleek, fast $300,000 e-boats for wealthy weekenders. Now, with oil prices at historic highs, it's pushing into the commercial marine space with $20 million battery-powered tugs capable of pulling ginormous cargo ships into container ports. It's an opportunistic, timely shift from polished recreational toys to industrial machines with brutal duty cycles, big fuel bills and regulators at the door. Arc's first commercial boats, being built at a Seattle-area shipyard, are already heading toward proof of concept. Its tech is being used to power the world's first electric tugs that are about to go into service at the Port of Long Beach, under a deal worth $160 million announced in late 2025. If they perform as well as Arc and initial customer Curtin Maritime expect, the company aims to expand into electric ferries, barges and even military watercraft, CTO Cook told Forbes. By Alan Ohnsman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Donald Trump on Tuesday issued an executive order requesting that companies allow federal oversight of new AI models before they are publicly released, marking a reversal in Trump's policy toward the technology after first signaling a relaxed approach. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2014, Australian entrepreneur Tuhin Srivastava had scored a meeting with Sarah Guo, then the youngest partner at storied VC firm Greylock. He was pitching her on a healthcare startup that used machine learning to analyze a person's medical history. Guo was impressed — not by the idea, which was “generic,” she says, but by him and his cofounder. Five years later, he tried again, this time with something far more promising: tools that make it easier to build and run AI applications.  It was years before the stunning launch of ChatGPT mainstreamed artificial intelligence, but Guo was already confident that more businesses would soon turn to AI and need cheap and efficient ways to use it. She wrote a $1.5 million check into what became Baseten, co-leading the startup's $3 million seed round in 2019. “All we had was some idea of a company on scratch paper,” Srivastava says. For the first four years, the company made no money. AI tools weren't being rapidly adopted back then. The best thing to do was to wait for the market to come around. Almost overnight, it did. Today, Baseten is valued at $5 billion, with revenue growing over 10 times in the past year. (It's now reportedly in talks to raise at an $11 billion valuation.) Guo invested in every round, first from Greylock and then from her own VC firm Conviction, which she launched in October 2022. Today, she says her stake is worth 10 times its initial value. “We own the most from day zero and it's clearly going to be a winner company,” says Guo, 36. By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ina 12-acre industrial campus in Sacramento across the street from a U.S. Navy recruiting center, Natura grows 80,000 pounds of weed a year inside 18 glass-ceilinged hot houses. Most of the cannabis will eventually be ground up and made into pre-rolled joints, which are infused with hash and dusted with an extra punch of THC, the compound that gets people high.  Every day, Natura produces 40,000 of its pre-rolls for its in-house brand Sluggers Hit, or about 1.2 million joints a month, generating around $60 million in revenue last year and is on track to hit $85 million by the end of 2026. Leaning into sports tropes, Sluggers' best-selling product is its five-pack of pre-rolls in a tin wrapped in a metallic mylar bag like the kind collectible sports cards come in. Sluggers' branding is eye-catching and riffs off sports teams—its New York Diesel pack is emblazoned with a logo reminiscent of the Knicks' orange and blue and its Green Monster five-pack is an ode to Fenway Park. Sluggers even has a collaboration with actor Chauncey Leopardi, who played Squints in the classic 1993 baseball movie The Sandlot, and just released a limited edition run with rapper Xzibit. By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

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

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

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

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