Forbes Daily Briefing

On September 19 last year, the husband-and-wife cofounders of e-commerce company Pattern, David Wright and Melanie Alder, walked up together to the NASDAQ podium in Times Square—both dressed in black button-up shirts and custom blue and purple Nike Air Forces. Wright, CEO of the Lehi, Utah-based company, took the microphone to thank the room full of employees. “Mel and I get asked, ‘How did you do it?’ We didn’t…it’s a team sport,” Wright exclaimed as he took off his shoe, eagerly holding it up to the crowd.It was a surreal moment for Wright and Alder: Ringing the NASDAQ bell was something they’d never imagined when they first began reselling fridge magnets on Amazon out of Alder’s living room in 2013. “We were just trying to bring in a little extra money on the side,” Wright explains from a conference room overlooking Utah’s sprawling mountainscape from Pattern’s headquarters in the tech hub known as Silicon Slopes. “Yeah, in the beginning, it was just us trying to support our families,” Alder chimes in from the seat next to his. At the time, both were married to other people: Alder was raising four children with her now ex-husband, while Wright had six of his own with his now ex-wife.

By Alicia Park,

Reporter

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OnEaster Sunday in 2014, Christian Angermayer, the German investor, was on the beach on the Caribbean island of Canouan with three friends, contemplating whether he should take magic mushrooms. 

Before he made his decision, he called a professor he knew who studies psychopharmacology. He explained to Angermayer that he was in the perfect set and setting, was of healthy mind, and he should try it. 

So Angermayer, who says he feared he would end up freaking out and living as “a farmer in Argentina,” sprinkled some mushrooms in yogurt, ate it, and let the drugs take hold. 

“I always say that I need to build a huge mushroom statue there,” says Angermayer, now 48 and worth $1.2 billion. “It was the most important positive experience of my life. When I came out [of the trip], although it took me years to get the thesis right, I had the first inclination that if it helped me this much as a happy healthy person, I can see the validation for how it can help people with mental health issues and beyond.” 

Angermayer spent the next three years working on that thesis. On December 29, 2017, he took another trip, this time he came away with message from the divine: Go forward. There is no downside.

By Will Yakowicz,

Forbes Staff

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When U.S. sales teams from Silicon Valley’s big data-labeling startups visited this year’s International Conference on Machine Learning in Seoul, Korea, they arrived prepped to court the industry’s big spenders. The data companies—collectively worth tens of billions of dollars and generating billions in annual revenue supplying training data to customers like OpenAI and Anthropic—are used to chasing AI labs that are notoriously demanding, fickle and difficult to satisfy.

They found another eager customer waiting for them: China’s AI industry.

Some Chinese companies have shopping lists. Tencent—which has previously been designated by the U.S. government as associated with the Chinese military, a characterization the company disputes— circulated with prospective vendors a detailed request for training data spanning finance, cybersecurity and one of AI’s most coveted research goals: AI systems capable of improving themselves.

By Anna Tong,

Forbes Staff

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Back in 2015, talent manager Ian Schwartzman emailed Spotify with a request—his client, rapper Joe Budden, wanted to add episodes of his newly launched podcast to his artist profile on the music streaming platform. “And the response I got was comical,” Schwartzman tells Forbes, “It was, ‘What is podcasting?’”

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Howard University, one of the nation’s top Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), burst into the national news in July when it abruptly canceled enrollment for 500 freshmen, a fifth of the incoming class. The students had ostensibly missed the deadline for establishing they could cover the Washington, D.C. school’s $66,182 total annual cost of attendance. 

Isabella Williams, who graduated from Russell County High School in Alabama last May with a 4.3 grade point average and a raft of honors and scholarships, received one of those jarring notices. Howard was more than her dream school; it was a chance to reclaim her family’s legacy, she told Forbes. Her own mother had been forced to drop out of Howard for financial reasons, but an uncle later served as the university’s vice-provost. "I wasn't able to experience much of my family's culture as a child," she said, "so being able to be closer to them and kind of get the same education that they've had was really important to me.” She eventually got her enrollment reinstated (as did more than 200 other students) after her scholarship money was confirmed. Williams insists that she and some of the others who were disenrolled had documented their payment plans on time and were simply waiting for money from loans, scholarships and veterans benefits to be disbursed.

By Asia Alexander,

Fellow

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s two days before the Monaco Grand Prix in early June, and Abbas Sajwani emerges from a golden elevator onto the main deck of his 348-foot superyacht, Amadea, in a white linen shirt and gray pants. He’s anchored the vessel—which he bought from the U.S. government at a secret auction last September, after it was seized from alleged Russian oligarch Suleiman Kerimov three years earlier—just off the coast of the postcard-sized principality, as many billionaires do during the summer.

Walking past the intricately inlaid teak walls, a bar carved out of marble from the Greek island of Thassos and a hand-painted baby grand piano—custom-made for the yacht by centuries-old, Paris-based piano maker Pleyel—he sits on a cream-colored couch, framed by the Mediterranean and the Monaco skyline. But the 27-year-old Dubai real estate scion is eager to talk about his real estate firm AHS Properties’ latest acquisition. “We bought the Shangri-La [Dubai] at the end of May for $300 million,” he says, adjusting his rimless glasses. “That shows you my personal conviction and faith in the Dubai market.”

By Giacomo Tognini

Deputy Editor

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chinese automakers are now the de facto global standard for electric vehicles. BYD is outselling Tesla with highly affordable models. Consumer electronics giant Xiaomi is rolling out stylish sedans and SUVs outfitted with dizzying in-cabin infotainment tech. But staggeringly high tariffs, hovering at 127.5% for Chinese-built EVs, have kept those cars largely out of American driveways.

But they have not kept them out of Waymo’s fast-growing U.S. robotaxi fleet.

In late May, Alphabet’s self-driving vehicle company began deploying small electric vans, built by China’s Zeekr brand–which it calls the Waymo Ojai–in cities including Los Angeles and San Francisco. At the time, Waymo would only say it had “more than 100” of the friendly-faced, periwinkle-colored minivans on the road. Most industry watchers assumed the Mountain View, California-based company would ultimately operate fewer than 1,000 owing to the excessive import fees. That’s not the case.

By Alan Ohnsman,

Senior Editor

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices