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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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“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

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