Steve Forbes: What's Ahead

Steve Forbes reacts to this week's meeting of the Federal Reserve and calls for Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh to take drastic action when he takes over from outgoing Chair Jerome Powell.

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Steve Forbes explains why the Trump Administration’s possible bailout of Spirit Airlines will only hurt the market, consumers and the airline industry, and will set a terrible precedent.

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Steve Forbes calls out Democrats for outright calling to impose onerous and destructive taxes on the wealthiest, which won't solve systemic issues and only stifle business and innovation, and calls on Republicans to forcefully back economy-juicing tax cuts.

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With Congress and the U.S. political system resembling a gerontocracy, many including possible 2028 Democratic presidential contender Rahm Emanuel are calling for age limits for political offices—but term limits may be the best way to ensure leadership from the best and brightest of any age.

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Federal Election Commission filings for the first quarter of 2026 showed that billionaires Miriam Adelson and George Soros were the biggest donors backing GOP and Democratic super PACs, respectively, ahead of this year’s midterms, while billionaire Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm poured $25 million into a pro-artificial intelligence Super PAC.

KEY FACTS

FORBES VALUATION

According to Forbes’ Real Time Billionaire’s list, Adelson’s total fortune is worth $37.3 billion, making her the 58th richest person in the world. In comparison Soros’ net worth stands at $7.5 billion as of Thursday morning.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT FUNDING FROM SILICON VALLEY

?Leaders from Silicon Valley launched the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future in August last year, with venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz among its main backers. Wednesday’s filings showed that the venture firm donated $25 million to the political action committee, with $12.5 million each coming from co-founders Benjamin Horowitz and billionaire Marc Andreessen.

BIG NUMBER

$27 million. That is how much Democratic Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico has raised in the first three months of the year so far, according to the New York Times. Talarico’s strong numbers appear to reflect Democratic optimism about the race in deep-red Texas, as the GOP has been besieged by infighting among its top two candidates.

SURPRISING FACT

Filings for a Win for America, a super PAC backed by sports betting platforms, showed it raised more than $40 million in the first three months of the year. FanDuel contributed $19.5 million while DraftKings’ holding company, DK Crown Holdings, donated 17.5 million. An additional $4 million came from Fanatics’ subsidiary FBG Enterprises Opco.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/04/16/billionaire-adelson-pours-40-million-to-back-gop-soros-gives-50-million-to-his-democrat-pac/

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Jonathan Panikoff, the director of the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Middle East Security Initiative, joined "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss the negotiations between the U.S. and Iran over the weekend that failed to produce a deal, the potential for another round of talks, and the U.S. blockade of Iranian ports in the Strait of Hormuz.

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On "Forbes Newsroom," Emerson Senior Director Matt Taglia discussed a new Emerson poll of the California Governor race after former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) dropping out following rape and sexual misconduct allegations.

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Liz Muller convinced her dad Richard to forego retirement and become an entrepreneur. The result is a revolutionary approach to making atomic energy cheaper and safer.

For more than a decade, Elizabeth Muller and her father have taken a three-mile hike, usually twice a week, through the hills of Berkeley, California, stopping for coffee and brainstorming on the way. “I would have an idea and she would have an idea,” says Richard A. Muller, who devised the modern carbon dating method used to determine the age of ancient plant and animal remains before he was 33 and won a MacArthur Foundation “genius” award at 38. Now, after 40 years of teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, the 82-year-old physicist is on the verge of having his greatest commercial impact, thanks to his business-minded daughter and those long walks.

“Nuclear brings out big emotions on all sides,” says Liz, 47. “As a kid growing up in Berkeley, all my teachers and friends were anti-nuclear, and the city became a nuclear-free zone.” She too leaned anti-nuke, even though her father’s mentor, Nobel Prize winner Luis Alvarez—who worked with Robert Oppenheimer on the first atomic bomb—was “like a grandfather to me.” But after college at UC San Diego, she moved to Paris in 1999 to earn a master’s at ESCP Business School and worked in international finance there for eight years. In France, she explains, everyone supported nuclear power as a “clean, reliable global warming solution.” She returned to Berkeley determined to tap her dad’s genius. 

In 2022, on one of those walks, the Mullers hatched the idea behind their nuclear power startup, Deep Fission. The concept is surprisingly simple: Drill a 30-inch-diameter borehole a mile into the earth, fill it with water, then insert a teeny-tiny nuclear reactor that will boil the water at the bottom and send it up a separate pipe to run a steam turbine. Each hole will generate 15 megawatts, enough to power 12,000 homes. Put 70 of them in a field and you can power a one-gigawatt artificial intelligence data center. 

Once up and running, it should also be cheap (about six cents a kilowatt hour, they estimate), because sticking a reactor deep in the ground under 160 times atmospheric pressure eliminates 80% of traditional power plant costs, which go to concrete buildings and thick steel vessels. “We are using the gravity of the water to give the reactor the same pressure,” Richard explains. 

Last August the Department of Energy inclu­ded Deep Fission as one of ten companies in its Reactor Pilot Program, designed to quickly test a new generation of smaller reactors that are easier to build. “The pull of electric demand from data centers warranted a new approach,” says Rian Bahran, deputy assistant secretary for nuclear at the DOE. While the other reactors are innovative in their own ways, they’re all variations of the traditional above-ground model.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2026/04/02/acclaimed-physicist-and-his-daughter-are-burying-tiny-nuclear-reactors-a-mile-underground/

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President Donald Trump is considering moving U.S. troops from North Atlantic Treaty Organization members that have not backed the war against Iran and moving them to more supportive countries, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday, while he also mulls trying to withdraw the U.S. from NATO altogether.

KEY FACTS

The proposal would involve removing American troops stationed in countries Trump believes were not supportive of the U.S. and Israel’s war with Iran and moving them to countries deemed helpful amid the conflict, the Journal reported.

The potential punishment against some NATO members is one of several being circulated in the White House, according to the Journal.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, who met with Trump in a closed-door meeting Wednesday, did not speak to the validity of the Journal’s report in an interview with CNN, remaining tight-lipped and saying he had a very “frank” and “open discussion” with Trump.

Trump and Rutte’s meeting came after Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump has considered withdrawing from NATO, the 32-member alliance that acts as a collective military defense for the countries under its banner.

But Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw the U.S. from NATO under a 2023 law that says withdrawal requires a two-thirds Senate approval (right now, including at least 14 Democrats supporting it) or a formal act of Congress.

That law was co-sponsored by then Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Trump’s secretary of state, who recently told Fox News that after the war with Iran, “we are going to have to reexamine” the U.S. relationship with NATO.

TANGENT

The U.S. and Iran reached a ceasefire agreement Tuesday night, with Trump saying the two countries would “work closely” to establish a regime change and remove nuclear materials. The agreement was reached after Trump threatened strikes on civilian infrastructure alongside a statement in which he said “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Iran accused the U.S. of breaking the ceasefire after Israel conducted bombings in Lebanon. Trump and Vice President JD Vance claimed Iran misunderstood the terms of the ceasefire and that Lebanon was not included within it.

WHAT NATO COUNTRIES HAVE BACKED TRUMP’S WAR ON IRAN?

Canada, the Czech Republic, Albania, North Macedonia, Lithuania and Latvia are the only NATO countries to issue letters of support for the strikes the U.S. and Israel have carried out against Iran.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/08/trump-mulls-pulling-us-troops-out-of-nato-countries-opposing-iran-war-report-says/

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Steve Forbes slams Gov. Kathy Hochul's (D-NY) proposal to impose a 75 percent tax on nicotine pouches, pointing out that doing so may encourage smokers to stick to cigarettes and end up causing untold deaths.

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