Forbes Daily Briefing

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

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