The enemy gets a vote, too. That military aphorism took on a chilling immediacy for Brandon Tseng when he was training for an Afghanistan deployment as a Navy SEAL in 2012. His team was simulating clearing a house of enemy fighters when the Naval Academy graduate was suddenly shot in the face. Fortunately it was just a paintball, not a real bullet. “I’d followed my training exactly as taught,” he remembers—but it didn’t matter. One point of the exercise was that preparation isn’t always enough, because adversaries are smart and unpredictable. “If that was real-life combat, I would’ve been killed.”

Clearing hostile buildings was part of the daily grind for the United States military post-9/11. It is extraordinarily dangerous work and killed or injured several people Tseng knew. When he left the military in 2015 after seven years, he couldn’t stop thinking of ways that AI and autonomy tech could reduce risks to troops, like by letting them scan inside structures before they barged in. Tseng convinced his older brother, Ryan, already a successful entrepreneur who had sold his wireless charging company to Qualcomm, and Andrew Reiter, an engineer with a master’s in robotics from Harvard, to join him in starting a drone company they called Shield AI. (Tseng got his Harvard MBA concurrently.) Its first product was a small “Nova” quadcopter specialized for scouting and mapping buildings while sending live video back to frontline soldiers.

Today Shield AI is one of the most valuable defense tech unicorns in the nation, worth $12.7 billion after its most recent fundraising in March. Israelis used the more than $400 million (revenue) company’s Novas to survey Hamas tunnels in Gaza and rescue hostages after the attacks of October 7, 2023; Ukrainians are using Shield AI’s bigger V-BAT drone to identify targets deep inside Russian-held territory. Forbes estimates that the Tsengs, who are co-presidents, each have a stake worth around $400 million.

By Monica Hunter-Hart,

Reporter

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IN LATE APRIL, Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for his 26th trip to Palm Beach of his second term. War was stirring in the Middle East. Gas prices and grocery costs were rising across America. But the president had more important business to attend to. He was headed to Mar-a-Lago, where nearly 300 holders of his memecoin were gathering for a private event.

Launched three days before Trump’s inauguration, the coin had provided him with about $635 million during his first year in office. The event added appeal to an asset devoid of intrinsic value, treating top buyers to a lineup of prominent guests, including billionaire Tim Draper, investor Cathie Wood and boxer Mike Tyson. The main attraction, however, was the president himself.

Guests filed into a ballroom bedizened with the trappings of the Trump brand: crystal chandeliers, walls spattered with gold ornaments, merchandise bearing the president’s name. On seats throughout the room sat goodie bags featuring trading cards with Trump’s picture, gold statuettes in his image and MAGA-red watches imprinted with his signature. 

Bill Zanker, the guy behind this bazaar, took to the stage to warm up the crowd with some personal stories. “At around midnight two months ago, I get a call from the president,” he said. “I’m in bed. Kind of drowsy, sleepy a little bit. He calls up. He says, ‘What are you doing?’ I go, ‘I’m in bed, sleeping.’ He goes, ‘Hey, listen, I’ve looked at our Trump watch logo. I don’t think it’s great.’ Now, this is the president of the United States. Busy. He says, ‘I think we’ve got to change the logo to make it more modern.’

By Dan Alexander,

Senior Editor

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Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX went public on June 12. But his four-comma-fortune didn’t last long, as his rocketmaker’s once soaring stock came crashing back to earth and Musk lost a record $363 billion in July. That’s more than the entire net worth of each of the world’s next nine richest people, including No. 2 Larry Page, whose fortune inched upward by $1 billion, to an estimated $292 billion, as of August 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. Musk, meanwhile, is the poorest he’s been since December, worth an estimated $690 billion. 

Shares of SpaceX, which had soared by as much as 67% above their IPO price in June, sank by 37% in July. That shaved $320 billion off the fortune of Musk, whose 38% stake in SpaceX is now valued at $552 billion. His 11% stake in Tesla, meanwhile, is worth $43 billion less than last month ($123 billion in all), after the electric vehicle maker reported Q2 earnings that fell short of analysts’ expectations on July 22 and Tesla’s stock slid by 26% during the month. 

The biggest winner of July was Jeff Bezos, whose fortune grew by $29 billion, to an estimated $278 billion, as shares of Amazon climbed by 14%. That helped Bezos end the month as the world’s third richest person for the first time since March. He overtook Page’s cofounder Sergey Brin, who fell to No. 4, despite also being worth $1 billion more than last month, or an estimated $269 billion.

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If Jay Shetty was going to level up his podcast, he figured he needed to upgrade the studio in which he records it. So before his seven-year-old show, On Purpose, relaunched this month on Netflix, the 38-year-old self-help guru says he spent around $500,000 to renovate the space with specific colors and custom artwork (including a piece of glass covered in bubble wrap) to evoke the kind of vulnerability and fragility he hopes to encourage from his guests.

Sitting inside his sprawling Hollywood Hills home, worth an estimated $8 million, Shetty’s digs are a far cry from the Hindu monk principles of humble detachment he once practiced and has encouraged to display. But for a star in media’s hottest category—who recently signed a new podcast deal with Spotify and Netflix that will pay him a combined $100 million over the next three years—the studio and residence are fitting.

“I mean, I’m not a monk anymore,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Today I consider myself an entrepreneur and a leader in this space, and that allows me to have the ability to use money as a resource to do good in the world and create impact in the way that we've chosen to do that.”

By Matt Craig,

Reporter

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On a Tuesday evening in early July, Anushka Ahuja, a dentist in Gurgaon, India, opens the door for the house help she booked ten minutes ago on Pronto, an app that provides instant professional cleaning services like sweeping, mopping and laundry across 11 cities in India. A woman clad in a crisp uniform greets her with a polite smile, then asks: Can she strap a small camera onto her head to record her work? 

Ahuja isn’t surprised to see the camera. In fact, she paid an extra nine rupees (about nine cents) so her cleaner would record everything from her elbows to her fingertips. Now she’ll receive a video recording a few hours later, giving her peace of mind that her house was cleaned properly and nothing was stolen or broken in her absence. 

Despite disclosures in the consent form she signed, Ahuja initially didn’t realize that there’s another purpose to the camera footage: AI training data. After a cleaning session, the video is stripped of personally identifiable information like personal documents and people’s faces and then sold to American AI companies. 

Bangalore-based Pronto launched the video recording service, called Pronto Verified, in May, stirring widespread backlash in India and government scrutiny over privacy concerns. Customers consent to the recording and workers are paid double for Pronto Verified bookings, CEO Anjali Sardana says. 

“Trillions of dollars are going into AI capex every year. All the money in the world is getting invested in AI, but your blue-collar worker in India is not capturing any of that,” Sardana, 24, tells Forbes. “And there is an opportunity to actually redistribute that capital.”

By Rashi Shrivastava,

Forbes Staff

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OnApril 4, 2022, less than six weeks after Russian forces launched their attack on Ukraine, officers from Spain’s Guardia Civil, the FBI and Homeland Security boarded Tango, a 255-foot superyacht in the Spanish port city of Palma de Mallorca. 

Allegedly owned by sanctioned Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg (net worth: $9 billion), per the United States government, the $90 million vessel was seized under a U.S. warrant alleging bank fraud, money laundering and sanctions violations. It was the high-profile opening salvo in a Western campaign to punish the Russian oligarchs who “supported tyranny for financial gain.”

“Today marks our task force’s first seizure of an asset belonging to a sanctioned individual with close ties to the Russian regime,” boasted then–attorney general Merrick Garland. “It will not be the last.” Weeks later, Garland doubled down, promising to use all available Justice Department resources to seize the assets and transfer the proceeds directly to Ukraine. 

By Giacomo Tognini,

Deputy Editor

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When Jay Shetty started his podcast On Purpose in 2019, he remembers people telling him he was too late. The medium was already saturated, they said, with little room for growth. And wasn’t he really just a content creator? 

Seven years later, the 38-year-old self-help guru hosts one of the most popular podcasts in the world, competing not only with the biggest TV, radio and internet-native talk shows but blurring the lines between them entirely. Just as many people watch his lengthy interviews with celebrities (including Michelle Obama and Matt Damon) on YouTube as listen on the iHeartMedia network—distribution deals that Forbes estimates paid Shetty $21 million over the past 12 months. And when those deals expired this year, Shetty landed a new kind of contract, in which the audio and video of his show will not only be distributed by Spotify; it will also stream on Netflix, with the two companies combining to pay him an estimated $100 million over the next three years. 

“When I started, video wasn’t normal for a podcast,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Now we had the four largest streamers bidding for the show. To see that kind of interest and enthusiasm was pretty amazing—for me and for the industry overall.”

By Matt Craig,

Reporter

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For a dozen years, Forbes has partnered with TrueBridge Capital Partners to highlight the companies that are likely to become unicorns in the near future. To qualify, startups must be venture-backed, based in the U.S. and worth less than $1 billion. In a sign of the times: Nearly all this year’s list members use AI in some fashion as they work on everything from bone marrow to biological threats, cybersecurity to creative design. Our track record is striking: Of the 275 alumni of this list, 60% did indeed become unicorns, including household names Duolingo and DoorDash. Another 60 were bought (or were merged). Nearly half of last year’s picks already are worth more than a billion. There have been surprisingly few disasters—just six companies, about 2%, imploded or shut down.

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On Jesse Vega’s first date with Deaunda Lira, a romantic sushi dinner in Colorado Springs three years ago, he was upfront: He has epilepsy and suffers severe seizures. “It could be scary,” Jesse, 49, recalls telling her. Deaunda, 52, was wary at first, especially after witnessing one of his seizures firsthand. But she shortly came around. “He’s so handsome, I’m gonna have to give it a try,” she remembers thinking, laughing.

The seizures started in 2002, when Jesse was 25. At first, they were minor, leaving him flushed and nausea­ted before smelling a scent of ammonia. These temporal lobe seizures (sometimes referred to as “déjà vu” seizures) happened about 60 times a day and left him exhausted. They eventually progressed to grand mal seizures: violent shaking and stiff muscles, vomiting, tongue-biting and a loss of bladder or bowel control. The couple married in 2023, and Deaunda quit her nearly $50,000-a-year job in medical billing to take care of Jesse. He wasn’t working either: He had to give up his job at the Department of Defense because of his condition. Money got so tight that the middle-aged newlyweds moved in with Jesse’s dad.

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Twenty years ago this month, Tesla introduced itself to the world with the electric Roadster, the $100,000 sports car that kickstarted the modern EV era. Now the company’s two original founders are betting on TELO, an EV startup with an aesthetic rebuttal to Tesla’s brutalist Cybertruck swagger.

Rather than start with another compact crossover chasing Tesla’s top-selling Model Y, San Carlos, California-based TELO – located in the same Silicon Valley office park where Tesla was headquartered when it launched the Roadster – is coming to market with a whimsical truck roughly the size of a MINI Cooper. Priced from $41,520, the MT1 looks like something from the world of Japanese anime, with none of the militaristic menace of Tesla’s pickup. But TELO is borrowing one important page from Tesla’s original playbook: start small and build slowly. CEO and cofounder Jason Marks told Forbes the company initially plans to make just 500 units, and then scale up to a 5,000-vehicle-per-year run rate after a year or so. And even at that relatively low volume, he thinks the company can turn a profit. 

By Alan Ohnsman,

Senior Editor

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