Forbes Daily Briefing

Forbes

The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

  1. Sam Bankman-Fried’s Venture Bets Would Have Made Him $100 Billion Richer Had He Stayed Out Of Prison

    HÁ 15 H

    Sam Bankman-Fried’s Venture Bets Would Have Made Him $100 Billion Richer Had He Stayed Out Of Prison

    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

    7 min
  2. The Billionaire Donors Behind Trump’s Midterm Superweapon

    HÁ 1 DIA

    The Billionaire Donors Behind Trump’s Midterm Superweapon

    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

    7 min
  3. How Michael Saylor Turned Preferred Stock Into Jet Fuel For Buying Bitcoin

    HÁ 2 DIAS

    How Michael Saylor Turned Preferred Stock Into Jet Fuel For Buying Bitcoin

    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

    7 min
  4. The Next AI Arms Race Is About Fortifying Data Centers

    HÁ 3 DIAS

    The Next AI Arms Race Is About Fortifying Data Centers

    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

    7 min
  5. The Top 10 Richest People In The World | May 2026

    HÁ 3 DIAS

    The Top 10 Richest People In The World | May 2026

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

    6 min
  6. This Tesla Veteran Is Running A Copper Mine With AI-Powered Robots

    HÁ 4 DIAS

    This Tesla Veteran Is Running A Copper Mine With AI-Powered Robots

    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

    7 min
  7. Inside Suno’s $2.5 Billion Bet That AI-Made Music Is Here To Stay

    1 DE MAI.

    Inside Suno’s $2.5 Billion Bet That AI-Made Music Is Here To Stay

    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

    7 min
  8. For This Family, AI Is The New Lemonade Stand

    1 DE MAI.

    For This Family, AI Is The New Lemonade Stand

    “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

    7 min
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Sobre

The Forbes Daily Briefing shares the best of Forbes reporting on wealth, business, entrepreneurship, leadership and more. Tune in every day, seven days a week, to hear a new story. The Daily Briefing is edited, produced and hosted by Kieran Meadows.

Informações

  • Canal
    Forbes
  • Criado por
    Forbes
  • Anos de atividade
    2024 - 2026
  • Episódios
    13
  • Classificação
    Livre
  • Copyright
    © Forbes Media LLC

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