Oracle traded as high as $233.72 Monday, after surging about 11% Friday to cap software's strongest month since 2001.

The company has pivoted from a mature software vendor into a major player in the AI boom, renting compute power to the largest AI developers like OpenAI.

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The Knicks first host the San Antonio Spurs at Madison Square Garden on June 8 for Game 3, with the cheapest resale ticket priced at $4,247, before the get-in price drops slightly to $3,728 for Game 4 on June 10, according to TickPick.

If the series extends to a Game 6, the cheapest price for a ticket to the late-series game rises to a Finals high of $4,917 for Game 6, according to TickPick.

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The filing sets neither a share count nor a price. 

The move arrives just days after the company closed a $65 billion round that valued it at $965 billion—eclipsing rival OpenAI and cementing its status as the most valuable startup in artificial intelligence.

Anthropic’s most recent round nearly tripled its valuation of $380 billion in roughly three months.

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The U.S. has replaced China as the largest market for clients seeking secondary or tertiary citizenships, Eric Major, CEO and chairman of the investment migration advisory firm Latitude World, told Forbes.

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The upgrade was the highest target of any of the 46 Wall Street firms covering Micron, well above the consensus price target of $684.32, per FactSet data

Micron is up 177% this year and has surged more than 800% over the past 12 months, making it one of the best-performing stocks in the S&P 500 this year.

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Legacy tech firm IBM is expected to receive the largest grant, worth about $1 billion, which it will use alongside $1 billion of its own funds to build a quantum chip foundry to build the specialized semiconductors necessary to power quantum computers in the U.S., the company announced in a separate press release on Thursday.

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Spacex’s IPO valuation could reach between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, according to multiple reports, which would best the previous all-time IPO valuation record of $1.7 trillion set by Saudi Aramco in 2019.

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SpaceX, which filed confidential initial public offering registration with the Securities and Exchange Commission in April, will likely make public its paperwork—offering insight into the firm’s operations and finances—this week as it plans for a June 12 debut on the Nasdaq, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter.

Some have expressed concerns about SpaceX’s stock listing, including PitchBook analyst Franco Granda, who wrote in March that SpaceX may act like Tesla’s stock “on steroids,” suggesting trading volatility.

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Musk filed a lawsuit against Altman and OpenAI in 2024, alleging Altman reneged on an initial promise to operate the AI company as a nonprofit for the public good, making claims of unjust enrichment and breach of charitable trust.

Musk’s claims, though, were subject to three-year statutes of limitations, and the jury ruled Monday after two hours of deliberation that he had missed the deadlines to file his lawsuit.

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The war has cost around $29 billion, Defense Department Comptroller Jay Hurst told Congress Tuesday, attributing the increase to “updated repair and replacement of equipment cost and also just general operational cost.”

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Calbee, Japan's biggest snack maker, on Tuesday warned its products will switch from their famously colorful packaging to black-and-white labels by the end of the month due to an Iran war-spurred shortage of an ink ingredient, the latest disruption to hit the supply chain due to the conflict in the Middle East.

The packaging change is reportedly due to a shortage of naptha, an ink ingredient derived from petroleum, of which Japan imports 40% of its consumption from the Middle East via the Strait of Hormuz shipping channel that has been closed since the U.S. and Israel attacked Iran at the end of February.

The closure of the strait has caused other shortages around the world, including in India, where a lack of the aluminum needed to make cans has led to a scarcity of Diet Coke and spurred "Diet Coke parties," where the drink is treated as limited-availability item and often sold at significant markups.

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Nvidia’s market cap reached just over $5.5 trillion as shares surged 3% as of early afternoon.

The rise in shares was accompanied by news that Huang was traveling with Trump to China, where the president will meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping, following earlier reports that said he was not invited.

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Tesla’s Elon Musk, Blackstone’s Stephen Schwarzman, Apple’s Tim Cook, General Electric’s Larry Culp and BlackRock’s Larry Fink are among the billionaires expected to travel to Beijing with Trump, Bloomberg reported, citing an unnamed White House official.

Other high-profile CEOs joining the trip include Boeing’s Kelly Ortberg, Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon and Citigroup’s Jane Fraser, among 17 total executives from U.S. companies reportedly expected to attend the summit.

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“It’s not going to be a short-term issue, because it can’t be easily solved,” Matt Smith, director of commodity research at Kpler, the energy data and analytics platform, told Forbes, having likened the jet fuel shortage to a “slow-motion car crash.”

“We’re going to be in crisis mode,” John Gradek, who teaches aviation risk management at McGill University, told Forbes, noting “the industry has never seen this before, where the actual supply of the product needed to support aviation, that pipeline, is drying up.”

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On Thursday, May 7th, Oceanwide Expeditions, operator of the cruise ship MV Hondius, says at least 29 living passengers from 12 countries disembarked the ship and went home after the death of the first passenger on board. This was before officials knew of the outbreak. 

Those countries are Canada, Denmark, Germany, Netherlands, New Zealand, Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Turkey, United Kingdom and the United States.

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Nearly 80% of U.S. hoteliers in 11 World Cup host cities say bookings are tracking below original forecasts, with some describing the tournament as a “non-event,” according to an American Hotel & Lodging Association (AHLA) survey of members released Monday.

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Low-cost carriers—including Allegiant, Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit and Sun Country—combined for 35.5% of market share in February, down from 38.2% a year earlier, according to Cirium data.

Spirit flew 1.7 million passengers in February—a 24% year-over-year drop, per Cirium.

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Suno is expected to close a Series D funding round in the coming weeks, Axios and Billboard reported Monday morning, which Axios reported could value the startup at more than $5 billion.

The new funding round comes six months after Suno raised $250 million at a valuation of $2.45 billion.

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GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen told CNBC on Monday the video game retailer’s half-cash, half-stock bid for eBay may rely on issuing stock, or the process in which a company creates and gives new shares of itself to complete a deal instead of paying cash.

GameStop has yet to discuss the bid with eBay’s management after publicly announcing its offer on Sunday, Cohen said.

Morgan Stanley analysts, in a note last week before GameStop’s offer was made public, said the broader market would be quote “skeptical of a potential deal’s feasibility.”

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Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List estimates Page’s net worth at $313.1 billion as of Friday morning, as the Google cofounder ranks as the second-wealthiest person in the world.

Fellow Google cofounder Sergey Brin also had his fortune surge, hitting $288.8 billion as of Friday morning, as he now ranks as the world’s third-richest person ahead of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, whose net worth sank $3.5 billion to $267 billion as of Thursday.

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LIV intends to tell staff and players, some of whom were among the PGA Tour’s most popular when they were poached, on Thursday that the league will lose funding after the conclusion of this season.

LIV is in discussions with outside investors to keep the league operating, the Journal reported, though it noted maintaining its current form would be QUOTE “nearly impossible,” as the league has incurred mounting losses.

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Brin, who has moved from a backer of liberal causes to a supporter of Republican President Donald Trump, told the New York Times in a rare statement: “I fled socialism with my family in 1979 and know the devastating, oppressive society it created in the Soviet Union. I don’t want California to end up in the same place.”

The proposed tax would apply to California residents with assets worth at least $1.1 billion and has pushed a number of bold-faced billionaires, including Brin, to leave the state.

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The UAE made the announcement to leave the so-called oil cartel via the state-run WAM news agency, and cited “near-term volatility” in the market and a desire to ramp up investment in domestic energy production.

The statement referred to the Iran war started by the U.S. and Israel in February, which has choked oil transport through the important Strait of Hormuz, and the government’s desire to meet what it thinks will be the “sustained growth” of energy demand in the medium to long term.

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Minnesota State Senator Matt Klein, a candidate running for the Democratic nomination for Minnesota’s second district in the House of Representatives, agreed to pay a $539.85 fine.

Ezekiel Enriquez, a former candidate for the Republican primary for a congressional district in Texas, was fined $784.20. Enriquez lost this race after the primary elections in March.

Both Klein and Enriquez bought less than $100 worth of contracts on their own elections, according to Kalshi’s filings, and both were also issued five-year suspensions.

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The move will not legalize marijuana for medical or recreational use under federal law, but instead moves state-licensed medical marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III, aligning it with dozens of states that have already legalized medical marijuana.

Blanche also scheduled a hearing for June for the Drug Enforcement Administration to consider reclassifying marijuana more broadly as Schedule III.

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• Shares of Rivan jumped 8.2% in premarket trading on Thursday, marking what would be a slight rebound for the stock after stumbling by more than 14% this year.
• Uber said Thursday it would invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian through 2031, with plans to purchase 10,000 of Rivian’s upcoming R2 vehicle and an option to buy an additional 40,000 robotaxis in 2030.
• An initial $300 million investment from Uber to Rivian is expected shortly after the deal’s signing and is subject to regulatory approval, Uber said.
• The R2 robotaxis are expected to be available through Uber in 25 cities across the U.S., Canada and Europe, with San Francisco and Miami as the launching sites in 2028, the companies said. 

Uber’s Robotaxi Expansion: From Rivian To Nvidia

Uber has announced several partnerships over the last year as it competes with the Alphabet-backed Waymo in the robotaxi market. The company announced a strategic partnership with the Amazon-backed Zoox last week, with plans for Zoox’s robotaxis to be made available through Uber by 2027. In October, Stellantis announced a joint project with Uber, Nvidia and Foxconn, with plans for Uber to deploy robotaxis from the automotive conglomerate—spanning Jeep, Dodge, Chrysler and more—in the U.S. That same day, Nvidia said it was partnering with Uber to increase Uber’s autonomous vehicle fleet to 100,000, starting in 2027. Lucid, in September 2025, announced a $300 million investment from Uber, which said it would later deploy Lucid’s robotaxis.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/03/19/rivian-shares-rally-8-after-uber-invests-up-to-125-billion-in-robotaxi-deal/

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• Khosla wrote on X the AI boom will require a "rethink of capitalism and equity" and suggested increasing capital gains taxes would allow the government to eliminate "the bottom 125 million taxpayers from the tax rolls." 
• He also suggested eliminating certain tax breaks—like tax-free borrowing against unrealized gains—would help to make up the deficit. 
• There are only about 160 million taxpaying Americans, and Khosla’s plan would exempt almost 80% of them from income taxes. 
• Last year, Khosla suggested it may be necessary to implement a universal basic income for lower-income Americans whose jobs are eliminated due to AI automation, predicting 80% of jobs will soon be handled by AI. 
• A video Khosla shared this week highlighted dozens of jobs being replaced by AI in his venture capital firm's portfolio, including personal assistants, financial analysts, doctors, accountants, customer service agents and more. 

Big Number

92 million. That's how many jobs will be displaced by AI by 2030, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025.

Key Background

Economic experts have been warning about the loss of jobs due to artificial intelligence automation for years. More than 50,000 jobs cuts in 2025 were blamed on AI, according to career services firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas, with another 20,000 in 2023 and 2024. Aneesh Raman, LinkedIn’s chief economic officer, said in a New York Times op-ed that AI is destroying the “bottom rungs of the career ladder,” eliminating entry level jobs and significantly cutting into the hiring of recent college graduates. Tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, as well as leaders like Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, have all suggested artificial intelligence is on its way to automating a significant portion of white-color work and, in some scenarios, could eliminate the need for traditional jobs altogether. Last May, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted AI could drive unemployment up 10% to 20% in the next five years. Women and people of color are expected to be disproportionately impacted by AI job automation.

Crucial Quote

“In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there’s this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would’ve been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman saidlast year.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Mary Whitfill Roeloffs

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/02/17/billionaire-khosla-if-125-million-are-unemployed-by-ai-they-shouldnt-pay-taxes/

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“This room is all money,” says Kim, who is 37 and has tattoos covering his arms, including a portrait of Ben Franklin and a rose made from a $100 bill.

These days, Stiiizy is bringing in plenty of Benjamins. The company—which was founded in 2017 and grows cannabis, manufacturers vapes, pre-rolls, gummies and flower—has nearly 50 branded dispensaries across California and generates more than $800 million a year in revenue. Stiiizy, which is also California’s biggest cannabis retailer, is the best-selling weed brand in the country, according to sales data firm Headset. A vertically integrated powerhouse that now operates in seven states, one out of every eight cannabis products sold in the United States is a Stiiizy product.

The company, which Forbes estimates to be valued at $1.5 billion, is privately held, secretive and mysterious—out of four original co-founders, only Kim would agree to speak, and he would not confirm the names of his partners. Founded in the gray market days before California legalized recreational marijuana, Stiiizy has also been dogged by lawsuits, rumors of illicit activity (all of which the company denies) and scandals, but none of that has changed the fact that in the $32 billion regulated cannabis industry, Stiiizy is the brand to beat.

“We’re the number-one brand in the nation,” says Kim. “I always tell people, if we’re number one in the nation, we’re number one in the world.”

A floor below the grow room, Kim walks through his production facility where dozens of employees in blue hairnets and facemasks brush mini blunts with a brown liquid and roll them into a half-pound of kief and put them into trays. In another room, a woman uses a machine to fill 100 Stiiizy vape pens at a time—by the end of the day, workers here will make nearly 100,000 of them. Every month, Stiiizy grows 15,000 pounds of weed and produces about $70 million worth (retail sales) of cannabis products in California, not including how much it produces in Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, Illinois, and New York, where Stiiizy launched in February and rose to be among the top 10 best-selling brands within a month, according to Lit Alerts. 

Kim walks out of his warehouse and jumps in the back of his black Cadillac Escalade and his driver takes him a few minutes down the road to Stiiizy’s DTLA headquarters. “We always had dreams of the brand getting big,” says Kim, while Notorious BIG’s “Juicy” plays over the car speakers. “But we didn’t know it would be this big.” 

Kim, who sports an Audemars Piguet Royal Oak chronograph on his wrist, grew up humbly in Cerritos, California. He shared a bed with his older sister so his parents, both immigrants from South Korea, could rent out the other bedroom to help make ends meet. His parents sold women’s clothing at the local Santa Fe Springs Swap Meet and starting at six years old, young James was in charge of setting up the tent, manning the cash register and helping his mom set prices for clothes. (His mom taught him her strategy, which was to price each item at double her cost.) 

“They put me to work,” he says. “That swap meet was my life.”

Read the full story here: By Will Yakowicz

https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2025/04/18/inside-stiiizy-the-worlds-best-selling-weed-brand/

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KEY FACTS

• According to the filings published on Wednesday night, GOP megadonor Adelson donated $30 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the major super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates.
• Filings made by the GOP-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund—which backs GOP House candidates—showed Adelson had given the super PAC $10 million, bringing her overall contribution to $40 million so far this year.
• Billionaire George Soros, one of the biggest backers of Democratic candidates, donated $50 million to his Democracy PAC in January through an associated group, the Fund for Policy Reform.
• The Democracy PAC then donated $9 million to Senate Majority PAC—which backs Democratic Senate candidates.

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.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Siladitya Ray

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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KEY FACTS

• The verdict was reached after four days of deliberations in a trial that lasted several weeks, in which Live Nation was accused of overcharging fans for tickets and pressuring venues into using Ticketmaster—one of its subsidiaries.
• Live Nation shares closed down 6.3% Wednesday, erasing almost two weeks’ worth of gains.
• The jury found Ticketmaster overcharged customers by $1.72 per ticket, The New York Times reported.
• The terms of the incoming settlement will be determined by Judge Arun Subramanian in a later proceeding.
• Forbes has reached out to Live Nation for comment.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

A breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster is being sought by some of the states suing the parent company. Live Nation acquired Ticketmaster in an all-stock deal valued at $2.5 billion.

SURPRISING FACT

Ticketmaster sells around 10 times the number of tickets sold by its closest rival, AEG, the Times reported, citing testimony from the trial.

KEY BACKGROUND

The landmark ruling is another knock against Live Nation, which reached a settlement with the Justice Department just last month requiring it to pay $280 million in damages, divest from 13 of its amphitheaters and introduce a cap on ticketing service fees at 15%. Live Nation generated $690.7 million in revenue in 2025, according to its full-year results, which noted the company brought in a record-breaking $25.2 billion that year. Over 30 states rejected the settlement and instead pressed Live Nation in the current trial. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the settlement “fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case, and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers.”

Read the full story on Forbes: By ByAntonio Pequeño IV

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/15/jury-says-live-nation-operated-monopoly-in-landmark-decision-for-ticketing-market/

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• In a press release issued on Wednesday, the struggling footwear company said it raised $50 million through an unnamed institutional investor to become an “AI compute infrastructure” company.
• The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, according to the release
• As part of the pivot, the company sold its entire footwear business to brand manager American Exchange Group—a $39 million deal announced in March.
• The company said the shoes’ “brand and legacy will continue under the ownership of American Exchange Group,” whose portfolio includes other fashion brands like Aerosoles and Ed Hardy.
• The announcement caused Allbirds stock to skyrocket, rising over 800% after markets opened—although the company’s stock was still only trading around $20 per share, up over 700%, by 11:45 a.m. EDT.

BIG NUMBER

Over $4 billion. That’s how much Allbirds was valued at after its blockbuster IPO in November 2021, which raised over $300 million for the shoemaker. Allbirds’ stock price quickly sank in the months after the IPO, and the company’s stock was trading at $2.49 per share before the pivot was announced.

KEY BACKGROUND

Allbirds is not the first company to pivot away from its core business to a trend in tech. The Long Island Iced Tea Company made a similar move in 2017, announcing it would become primarily a blockchain company. Although the stock price also skyrocketed immediately after the announcement, the pivot didn’t exactly work in the long run—the company was delisted by the Securities and Exchange Committee in 2021, which claimed in an order the company’s new “blockchain business never became operational.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Zachary Folk

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/04/15/shoemaker-allbirds-suddenly-says-its-an-ai-company-and-stock-jumps-800/

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• Restaurants, hotels, airlines, retailers and other businesses are increasingly breaking price hikes into separate line items—often labeled as a “fuel surcharge,” “service fee” “processing fee” or “resort fee”—that allow them to preserve advertised prices but still pass inflation-related price increases on to the consumer. 
• Often these costs only show up on a final bill or check—separate from the original, advertised price.
• One of the most common examples is a credit card use surcharge—used by one-third of American small businesses—which see companies try to recoup the fees charged to them by credit card companies by hitting customers with a 2% to 4% fee if they use a card instead of cash. 
• More than 15% of restaurants nationally also now tack on extra fees to the bill at the end of a meal, according to the National Restaurant Association, with some adding credit card surcharges while others opt for automatic gratuity or vague “service charges” to help cover increased supply costs or employee wages. 
• Airlines advertise ticket prices without including hidden taxes, fees and charges—that can increase ticket prices by roughly 20% at checkout—and carriers like American, Alaska, Delta, United and Southwest this month announced they were hiking the price of baggage fees by $10 per bag to cover Iran war-caused jet fuel increases.
• Grab, a Nasdaq-listed rideshare and food delivery company that operates in Southeast Asia, told customers it will implement a fuel surcharge through May 31 and Uber Australia said it will introduce a temporary 5-cent-per-kilometer fuel surcharge starting April 15.

What To Watch For

More price hikes or fees for consumers as businesses themselves fall victim to new surcharges. Amazon has added a 3.5% fuel surcharge for its third-party sellers. UPS, FedEx and the USPS have implemented their own fuel-related price hikes, ranging from 3.5% to 8%, since the Iran war spiked energy costs. Experts have said those logistics companies have little choice but to offset the skyrocketing costs of gasoline and diesel, and as many as 30 to 40% of Amazon sellers subject to the new surcharge will pass it directly on to consumers, a supply chain expert told the New York Post. The owner of Ash & Erie, a small men’s clothing brand, told the Wall Street Journal the fuel surcharges are like “tariffs 2.0” and said he’ll likely have to raise prices to make up for them. Similarly, fresh food distributors are billing restaurants and grocery markets to make up for the rising price of diesel, which could soon get passed along to shoppers and diners. Grocery prices will rise 2% in the next few weeks, according to The Food Institute. Contractor Plus, a management app designed for contractors and businesses like plumbing and electricians, is advisingits clients on how to add fuel surcharges directly to invoices. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Amazon have all started offering fuel price relief options for its delivery and rideshare drivers, the New York Times reported, and that could soon turn into a surcharge for riders or delivery recipients. When the war in Ukraine caused gas prices to jump in 2022, Uber and Lyft added surcharges directly to customers.

Will The New Fees Ever Go Away? 

Probably not. Often, a fee gets introduced to solve a seemingly temporary cost problem but then becomes permanent, even after the original justification fades. Restaurant service fees, for example, were born amid higher prices and fewer sales during the pandemic but many stayed around when costs dropped. Airline checked baggage fees were introduced during the 2008 oil price spike, when jet fuel costs surged, but didn't disappear once fuel prices stabilized. Rental car companies added "temporary" surcharges after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to offset falling travel demand and pay for added airport security and facility costs, but they stuck around after the travel industry recovered. Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian recently implied airfares likely won't go back down even if oil prices drop, instead saying the lowered fuel costs would "certainly help us boost our margins this year and clearly into next year as well."

Read the full story on Forbes: By Mary Whitfill Roeloffs

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/04/13/here-are-the-hidden-fees-for-food-flights-more-youre-paying-because-of-the-affordability-crisis/

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1. Oprah Winfrey
2. Harold Hamm
3. David Steward
4. Thomas Peterffy
5. LeBron James
6. Jan Koum
7. Dolly Parton
8. Bill Clinton
9. Diane Hendricks
10. J.D. Vance

Grit. Hustle. Resilience. The American Dream is built on the audacious belief that anyone can make it to the top. Every elementary school kid is imbued with the belief that anyone can become president of the United States. Or a hip-hop megastar. Or a space-faring billionaire. The notion is as old as the Republic and stands self-consciously in contrast to class-ridden Europe where one’s prospects were often determined at birth. 

This ideal has always had its heroes: from Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned immigrant who crafted America’s first financial system, to Andrew Carnegie, who went from working as a young teen in a textile mill to forging a vast steel empire. Since 1917, it has been the prime subject matter of this publication. So, in honor of America’s semiquincentennial, we feel uniquely qualified to rank the 250 greatest living self-made Americans. (Our list of the 250 greatest historical ones will be released on Friday).

To identify these revolutionaries, we first mined Forbes’ 109-year-deep archive for classic tales of entrepreneurial capitalism. Then we asked our current crop of beat reporters for their ideas. We canvassed AI, running hundreds of queries through both ChatGPT and Gemini. While we put a heavy emphasis on rags-to-riches billionaires, we also included pioneering scientists, Supreme Court justices and others whose “wealth” is measured in influence and impact, not just dollar signs. 

Next, we ran names past a panel of expert judges: DeAngela Burns-Wallace, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Keith Dunleavy, Founder, Inovalon; Rich Karlgaard, Former Publisher, Forbes; Steven Klinsky, Founder and CEO, New Mountain Capital; Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Block (formerly Square); and Ryan Rippel, CEO of NextLadder Ventures.

An invaluable resource was , a 1-to-10 ranking that quantifies the “distance traveled” by each individual—separating those who started with nothing from those with a big head start. Only those ranking nine or ten made the cut. The final ranking encompasses financial success, obstacles overcome and enduring impact.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Alex Knapp

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2026/04/09/forbes-self-made-250-the-greatest-living-self-made-americans/

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Key Facts

• The number of Canadians taking road trips into the U.S.—the most common way of visiting—dropped by 5% last month compared to March 2025 and is down 35% compared to March 2024, according to data released Monday from Statistics Canada.
• There was also a 14% year-over-year decline in air travelers from Canada to the U.S. in March.
• In contrast, the volume of Americans visiting Canada in March was up 4% compared to a year ago.
• For the third consecutive month, more Canadians flew to overseas destinations than drove to the U.S.—flipping a long-established pattern.
• Canadian visitation overseas was up 5% year over year—a sign Canadians are swapping the U.S. for other international destinations. 
• Nearly a quarter (23%) of Canadian travelers have canceled a previously planned trip to the U.S., according to a Longwoods International tracking study of Canadian travelers.

Crucial Quote

“In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off,” Amir Eylon, President and CEO of Longwoods International, told Forbes.

How Much Has The 14-Month Canadian Boycott Cost The U.s. Economy?

In the years leading to President Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term, Canadian tourists were the biggest single source of international visitors to the U.S., comprising roughly one-quarter of all foreign travelers, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). In 2024, Canadian tourists injected $20.5 billion into the U.S. economy. But in early 2025, the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) warned even a 10% reduction in Canadian inbound travel could translate to $2.1 billion in lost spending and 140,000 lost jobs in the hospitality sector. The actual decline was 22%—more than double that hypothetical drop—which works out to a drop of roughly $4.5 billion in visitor spending. The boycott continued into 2026, with double-digit declines in both January and February, and cumulative two-year drops of more than 30% each month.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2026/04/13/canadian-visits-us-down-35-percent/

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China’s dominance in batteries is powering a global auto industry shakeup. The country didn’t just get better at making them. It got better at making a lot of them cheaply and fast enough to let automakers like BYD and Geely sell electric vehicles at prices that can look like a misprint next to U.S. and European models.

Now, SandboxAQ, a moonshot company spun out of Google in 2022, is betting the U.S. doesn’t need to win by outbuilding China cell-for-cell. It just needs to come up with better battery designs. And it says its AI-enabled tech platform can help battery scientists accelerate their research to create new types of safer, cheaper solid-state batteries for EVs, military equipment and data centers. 

The Palo Alto, California-based company, which has raised $950 million from backers including Alphabet, Nvidia and AI scientist Yann LeCun, is today releasing a new version of its research platform, AQVolt26. The pitch: compress the earliest, most uncertain part of battery R&D—screening and evaluating candidate materials—so scientists can dump bad ideas quickly and focus their efforts on the ones that might actually ship. The goal is to slash development time to create new battery chemistries, which now takes 10 to 15 years, said Ang Xiao, who leads SandboxAQ’s materials science team.

“It's hard to give an exact figure for how many years we can save, but I can tell you that for the discovery phase, we can reduce the time of that by 90% to 95%,” he told Forbes. “Our technology is only focused on the discovery phase, phase one. … But in the end, we will accelerate the entire development pipeline.”

The company, chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, says it’s already generating revenue from its tech from customers, including battery developer Novonix and the U.S. Army, as well as other battery and auto companies it declined to name. It also won’t say how much revenue it expects this year. SandboxAQ’s battery strategy is to make money from fees paid by users of its research platform, licensing its tech to other companies or doing research on their behalf, as well as developing its own unique battery materials. With demand rising for batteries across EVs, energy and grid storage and defense applications, it’s chasing a market with real money behind it.

“We see the battery market as a $500 billion opportunity this decade, expanding toward $1 trillion as electrification and AI-driven energy demand accelerate,” Xiao said. “Our focus is on the high-value segment of materials discovery and performance optimization.”

Like Waymo, another Google Moonshot, Sandbox is using AI for physical applications rather than chatbots. In addition to battery tech, which is part of its chemicals and materials unit, it’s also focused on using AI for drug discovery and medical diagnostics, among other areas. Unlike OpenAI and Google’s Gemini, which lean on large language models (LLMs), Sandbox says its approach is built on large quantitative models (LQMs) trained on physics-based data and scientific principles. Read the full story on Forbes: By Alan Ohnsman

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/04/07/this-google-spinout-thinks-ai-can-fix-americas-ev-battery-problem/

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InJanuary, OpenAI’s CEO of applications Fidji Simo defended OpenAI’s spaghetti-at-the-wall product approach—ads, shopping, health, a social network, browser, physical devices, video generation and an App Store-like marketplace—as variations on the same theme. “AI is going to transform everything,” Simo told Forbes at the time. “And so we don’t really think of these as completely separate bets.” 

But just two months later, OpenAI reversed course on its flashiest initiative yet: its once-viral, beloved-by-some Sora video model and app, and a “landmark” licensing deal with Disney that was set to include a $1 billion equity investment. The retreat points to a strategic shift toward more financial discipline within the company. Facing pressure to build products that actually make money ahead of a potential upcoming IPO — and with rival Anthropic gaining steam — OpenAI has been shedding so-called “side quests” left and right. With $13 billion in 2025 revenue but still deeply unprofitable, the company is now refocusing on areas where demand is already proven: coding and enterprise productivity tools.

Every startup pivots if things aren’t working. “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly,” CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post about Sora in October. 

But OpenAI’s reversals have felt like whiplash. And with many other projects and deals announced but not yet realized — like an AI hardware product designed by famed Apple designer Jony Ive, whose company OpenAI acquired for more than $6 billion in (mostly unvested) stock, or a secretive social network based on people’s biometrics — it’s not clear which of Altman’s many promises will turn into reality. 

Here are all the products and deals that OpenAI announced which haven’t lived up to the hype, whether it’s because they’re dead, delayed or still to be determined.

Read the full story on Forbes: BY Phoebe Liu

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/31/openai-graveyard-deals-and-products-havent-happened-openai/

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