Forbes Daily Briefing

Stephen Mathew Morrow, better known by his nom de casino, Vegas Matt, looks like a caricature of a high-stakes gambler. A large, one-pound gold chain hangs around his neck with a matching bracelet on his right wrist, a Rolex SkyDweller on his left, and a Rolls-Royce Cullinan parked outside the El Cortez Hotel and Casino in Downtown Las Vegas.

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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he believes artificial intelligence could generate enough productivity gains to allow Americans to have a three-day workweek or rely on a single-income for the whole household—pushing back against fears that the technology could lead to large-scale job losses for American workers.

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Brett Adcock has spent the past decade turning tomorrow into money.

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Federal agencies are working together to monitor travelers arriving from Siberia after a potential pneumonic plague case was identified in Russia, though health officials say they’re confident the threat to Americans is “extremely low” and President Donald Trump says Russia claims to have the situation “very much under control.”

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The biggest pile of consumer debt in America isn’t sitting on credit cards or student loan balances. It’s in our homes.

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Hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio said the artificial intelligence bubble is nearing the point where it may burst as interest rates rise and technology companies borrow heavily to fund the AI infrastructure build out.

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After graduating from the University of Virginia in 2019 with a bachelor’s in business analytics and finance, Megan Lieu took a job at EY Consulting. She spent two years there and then began job hopping, staying at one place for just six months. Yet each of her three moves, she proudly recalls, brought her a hefty income bump of around 20%. 

Now 30 and self-employed since 2024, Lieu advises friends and new grads not to job hop as she did, because it just doesn’t pay these days. She left her first job in 2021, she explains, “during the initial boom of the post-COVID era when many people were getting new jobs and the power was very much in the employees hands rather than the employers.” But that post-Covid “Great Resignation” has given way to what is now being called the “Big Stay.” At a time when hiring is slow and employers seem to have the upper hand, workers are far less likely to job hop and those who do switch jobs are seeing more meager pay gains. Just 1.9% of nonfarm workers quit their jobs this past August, down from 3% in April of 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.

That’s a particular problem for Generation Z and younger millennials since job hopping early in a career is one of the ways that new workers have achieved income gains, setting them on the path to higher lifetime earnings. Historically, workers see their fastest real wage growth (that is, increases above inflation) before they hit 35, with gains leveling off until 45 and real wages pretty much flat after that.

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Elon Musk’s net worth topped $1 trillion Monday morning as stocks for his companies SpaceX and Tesla climbed after the stock market opened, restoring the controversial tech mogul’s trillionaire status after he first hit that milestone in June.

Forbes estimates Musk’s net worth at $1 trillion on Monday, which is up by $30.6 billion over Friday, the last day the stock market was open.

The surge cements Musk’s status as the richest person in the world, with Amazon leader Jeff Bezos in a distant second place with a net worth of $371.5 billion.

Musk previously became the world’s first trillionaire in June after SpaceX first began trading on the Nasdaq, though he lost that status days later as stock prices for SpaceX and Tesla slumped.

His net worth has neared the trillionaire mark in recent days as SpaceX and Tesla shares have rallied, with Tesla’s third-quarter deliveries beating analyst expectations last week and helping to bump Musk’s net worth by $61 billion on Friday alone.

Tesla’s stock price continued to rise more than 1% Monday morning, while SpaceX’s stock price more dramatically went up by more than 5% Monday morning to a share price of $167 as of 10:30 a.m. EDT, enabling Musk to regain his trillionaire title.

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Ona bright August morning, Bob Clark, the founder of construction giant Clayco, stops by the new $850 million, 19-acre Obama Presidential Center, which he helped build, in Jackson Park on the South Side of Chicago.

After a quick checkup on the “Obamalisk,” as he fondly calls the complex’s central eight-story spire of granite, glass and concrete, he gives a speedy hello to former White House senior advisor Valerie Jarrett, who is now CEO of the Obama Foundation. Then he’s off, hopping in the back of a white Escalade and speeding down Lake Shore Drive to another of his projects, which could arguably be of even greater importance to Chicago and the world.

Situated on a 440-acre Lake Michigan site that used to be a U.S. Steel factory, “Quantum Shore” will be one of the lar­gest quantum computing campuses in the country when it opens at the end of 2027. Tenants include IBM and Palo Alto, Cali­fornia–based PsiQuantum, which plans to build a million-qubit quantum computer here. Such a machine would be unimaginably powerful, able to crack the usual types of encryption that keep most of the world’s computers (and bank accounts) secure. It could even someday speed up AI learning by dramatically reducing training time for certain complex deep-learning architectures.

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Announced Friday by Argentina’s Minister of Economy, Luis Caputo, and set to launch before the end of 2026, the country’s citizenship-by-investment program is the first in South America, the first for a G20 country, and the first to recognize same-sex married couples.

There are two ways to buy into the program: make a one-time, non-refundable donation or invest in a seven-year, no interest bond.

High-net-worth Americans are increasingly seeking a “plan B” as “an insurance policy” against instability in a volatile world, two investment migration advisers who counseled the Argentinian government, told Forbes.

Since 2020, immigration attorneys and ancestry services have also seen surging interest among Americans seeking dual citizenship through descent, but the Trump administration’s staffing cuts at the National Archives have made it more challenging for people to access the necessary genealogy records, the Boston Globe reported.

“I think every wealthy American will consider this,” Nuri Katz, president of Apex Capital Partners, told Forbes. “It’s so unique that it’ll be seen both as an insurance policy and as a kind of a status symbol, like the Amex Black Card. As in, ‘oh, you don’t have Argentina.’”

Before launching its citizenship-by-investment product, Argentina’s government consulted with a consortium of five global immigration migration advisory firms, including Latitude World, Apex Capital Partners, Passport Legacy, Arton Capital and AIM Global Residency and Citizenship. The resulting program offers two pathways to citizenship. An applicant can make a one-time donation of $350,000 for an individual or $450,000 for a couple, plus $25,000 for each child under 18 and $100,000 for each adult child 18 to 24. Alternatively, an applicant can purchase a seven-year, no-interest treasury bond for $800,000 for an individual or $900,000 for a couple, plus $25,000 for each child under 18 and $100,000 for each adult child 18 to 24. Katz expects the first option to be more popular. “Any decent investor should be able to double their money in seven years,” he said. “For a family of four, paying $950,000 for a seven-year bond with zero interest means losing $950,000 in the future,” he said. “That’s worse than giving up $500,000 now.”

Surveys show geopolitical tensions have most Americans on edge. “The world is in a lot of flux right now,” Katz said. “Not only in North America, but in Europe, Africa, the Middle East, all over the world.” Eric Major, CEO and chairman of Latitude World, told Forbes Americans now make up roughly three-quarters of his business, and that many clients are worried about doomsday scenarios. “They’re thinking, ‘if we have tanks rolling down streets in Washington or World War III or what have you, I may need to pick up my bags and move until the dust settles.’ What we offer is a form of insurance, and it’s one of those things where people would rather not pay for insurance unless they feel they really need it.”

“In the same way we want to diversify our assets and our holdings in our portfolio, with exposure to the Japanese, Chinese, European and American markets, Americans are starting to realize there is value in having a European passport, a South American passport, an Australian passport—wherever they can get one,” Major told Forbes. Katz sees the same shift in thinking. “It shocks me that Americans, when they think of diversifying their finances, they think about buying stocks versus bonds versus real estate versus private equity, but it’s all in the United States. And yet the United States is facing a debt crisis of historical proportions that has never been seen before.” For Americans, a second citizenship in Argentina also has the geographic advantage of staying in the same general time zone. “For a North American businessperson, whether that’s a banker, an investment manager, or whatever, when you come to Argentina, there’s no jet lag. You don’t miss a beat,” Katz said.

Since 2010, acquiring Argentinian citizenship brings another significant benefit. The Mercosur Residence Agreement gives citizens of nine South American nations—Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay—the right to reside, work, and study freely within the bloc. Citizens can also travel within the bloc without a passport or visa as long as they carry a national ID. “It’s the South American version of the European agreement, where citizens of one country can live or work in any other member country,” Major told Forbes.

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