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. Inside Dana White’s $60 Million Plan To Stage UFC Freedom 250 At The White House

    vor 1 Tag

    Inside Dana White’s $60 Million Plan To Stage UFC Freedom 250 At The White House

    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

    6 Min.
  2. Why Now Is The Time For James Dolan To Sell A Stake In The Knicks

    vor 4 Tagen

    Why Now Is The Time For James Dolan To Sell A Stake In The Knicks

    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

    6 Min.
  3. How The Iran War Oil Shock Is Helping Launch A Market For Electric Tugboats

    vor 5 Tagen

    How The Iran War Oil Shock Is Helping Launch A Market For Electric Tugboats

    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

    7 Min.
  4. Sarah Guo Bet Everything On AI Pre-ChatGPT. Now She’s One Of The World’s Top Investors

    5. Juni

    Sarah Guo Bet Everything On AI Pre-ChatGPT. Now She’s One Of The World’s Top Investors

    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

    7 Min.

Info

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.

Das gefällt dir vielleicht auch