Forbes Daily Briefing

The so-called “Winter White House” has become a billionaire magnet—and riding Palm Beach’s popularity and rising profits, it’s now worth over half a billion dollars Donald Trump just couldn’t resist a low-stakes flex in a high-attention zip code. On Monday, the president waded into Tuesday’s special election in Florida State House District 87 with a Truth Social post: “JON MAPLES HAS MY COMPLETE AND TOTAL ENDORSEMENT!” Maples, a Republican financial advisor, ended up losing Tuesday’s race by two points to Democrat Emily Gregory, a small business owner. Which means Gregory now represents two constituencies that really matter in modern Republican politics: the voters in her district—including Donald Trump himself—and the private club where the sitting president resides and often hosts power, money and, increasingly, government. For the first time this March, when Forbes recalculated Trump’s net worth for our World’s Billionaires List, we estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value at over half a billion dollars. It now stands at $564 million, by a wide margin the single most valuable property in his portfolio and up over 50% from a year ago.  Much of that can be chalked up to a sort of election win premium that has made the club, perhaps, the most efficiently networked driveway in America. Forbes estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value at about $340 million in September 2024 for the Forbes 400 list, the last valuation round before Trump returned to the White House. Not long after, Palm Beach real estate experts were already granting it higher valuations. “My head tells me at least $500 million,” Corcoran Group’s Dana Koch said in January 2025, a $100 million jump from a previous estimate. “I have people who would fight me tooth and nail to tell me it’s worth $750 million, a billion, $1.25 billion, $1.5 billion—seriously, they’d fight me on it, real estate people,” he added. Aperture Global founding agent Isaac Klein made a similar case around the same time, explicitly framing the bump as stemming from public goodwill attached to a “unique president.” A better term for goodwill might be gravitational pull. Since Trump won the 2024 election, Forbes found at least 32 billionaires who reportedly made the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago. Of those 32, 25 are wealthier than they were a year ago; collectively they’re worth a combined $2.3 trillion, up $700 billion.  After rebuilding his relationship with Trump, Elon Musk attended a Mar-a-Lago wedding in February. The list reads like a Gilded Age guestbook. Trump business partner Hussain Sajwani (net worth: $15.3 billion) visited. The world’s richest person, Elon Musk ($839 billion), did too. The third, fourth, fifth and sixth richest members of Forbes’ 2026 Billionaires List—Sergey Brin ($237 billion), Jeff Bezos ($224 billion), Mark Zuckerberg ($222 billion) and Larry Ellison ($190 billion)—have also apparently been spotted. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang ($154 billion) reportedly stopped by quietly to attend a $1 million-a-head fundraiser in April—shortly before the administration reversed course on restricting the company’s chip sales in China. (A person familiar with Huang’s visit denied that he made a donation, but confirmed he was at Mar-a-Lago.) Other billionaire guests include members of Trump’s administration, including commerce secretary Howard Lutnick ($7.2 billion), education secretary Linda McMahon ($3.6 billion) and ambassador to Italy Tilman Fertitta ($11.7 billion).  Mar-a-Lago’s soaring valuation also has a boring but important underpinning: cash flow. In his most recent financial disclosures, Trump reported about $50 million in resort-related revenue in 2024, nearly double 2021’s $27 million. Forbes estimates that the club, a go-to location for all sorts of MAGA events, made Trump some $33 million in profits in 2024, up from $14 million in 2021. Palm Beach’s rising tide has helped, too: The luxury market there has skyrocketed in recent years. “Everyone wants to be around Trump right now,” Compass agent Chris Deitz told Forbes in December, noting intensified demand for homes in the “security zone” around the club. Trump’s three nearby mansions are collectively worth about $100 million, up from $88 million a year ago and $42 million in 2021. Hedge fund titan Ken Griffin ($49.8 billion) is building a colossal 28-acre estate down the street; mining magnate Gina Rinehart ($25.5 billion), casino billionaire Steve Wynn ($3.9 billion) and activist investor Nelson Peltz ($1.6 billion) are among the billionaires with glitzy properties nearby.  Read the full story on Forbes: By Kyle Khan-Mullins https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2026/03/26/how-the-presidency-made-mar-a-lago-trumps-most-valuable-property-by-far/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Zhao Jianhui, the 66-year-old chairman of Epiworld International, joins the billionaire ranks following his company’s $209 million Hong Kong IPO. Zhao Jianhui, the founder and chairman of Epiworld International, joined the billionaire ranks after shares of his Xiamen-based power chip wafer manufacturer jumped 35% in their Hong Kong trading debut on Monday.  The listing values Epiworld at HK$43.8 billion ($5.6 billion) based on its closing price of HK$103 on Monday. Zhao, 66, is Epiworld’s largest shareholder with a 27% stake, which gives him an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion.  Epiworld raised HK$1.6 billion in the initial public offering. The company disclosed in its prospectus that it will use the bulk of the IPO proceeds to expand production capacity in China over the next five years. Epiworld did not respond to a request for comment regarding Zhao’s billionaire status. Established in 2011, Epiworld manufactures epitaxial wafers for silicon carbide (SiC) chips. Epitaxy is the complex process of growing a thin layer of SiC, a combination of silicon and carbon, on a wafer. SiC chips act as a power switch mostly in electric vehicles and increasingly in AI data centers. Compared to traditional silicon chips, SiC chips can withstand higher voltage and extreme heat, thereby reducing power loss. They enable fast EV charging and efficient power delivery for AI chips.  Epiworld is a supplier to power chip companies including Germany’s Infineon Technologies and Japan’s Rohm Semiconductor. In its prospectus, Epiworld said it is the world’s largest SiC epitaxial wafer company by revenue with a 29% market share as of 2024, leading Resonac Holdings’ 26%, citing China Insights Industry Consultancy. It also said it is the world’s first company to achieve large-scale commercialization of 8-inch SiC epitaxial wafers, a generation ahead of today’s commonly used 6-inch wafers.  Epiworld has recently been buffeted by a price war triggered by a supply glut from competitors such as Resonac and Shanghai’s Inventchip Technology. In the first nine months of 2025, Epiworld’s revenue dropped 34% year-on-year to 535 million yuan ($77.4 million) due to “downward price pressure” in the industry. Between December 2024 and September 2025, it nearly halved the average selling price of its 8-inch wafers. With lower margins, net profit in the nine months of 2025 plunged 82% to 21.1 million yuan. During the period, Greater China accounted for nearly two-thirds of its sales, with 22% from South Korea and Japan, followed by Europe and North America.  Epiworld’s pre-IPO investors include Hubble Technology, the venture capital arm of Chinese tech giant Huawei, as well as China Resources Microelectronics, the semiconductor unit of state-owned conglomerate China Resources.  Zhao is a veteran scientist in the field of SiC technology. He is currently a chair professor at the college of physical science and technology at Xiamen University, his alma mater where he earned a bachelor’s degree in physics. Zhao also has a Ph.D. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. Zhao is the latest Chinese billionaire to make a fortune from the semiconductor sector. Others include Zhang Xingang, the chairman and CEO of photonic chip maker Yuanjie Semiconductor Technology. Read the full story on Forbes: By Zinnia Lee https://www.forbes.com/sites/zinnialee/2026/03/30/chinese-american-professor-behind-huawei-backed-power-chip-wafer-maker-becomes-billionaire/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oracle on Tuesday conducted a round of layoffs affecting thousands of employees, citing “current business needs,” according to multiple reports, resulting in a rise in the software maker’s stock as it plans to ramp up spending on AI this year. KEY FACTS Oracle notified thousands of employees they would be cut on Tuesday, CNBC reported, citing people familiar with the move. It’s not immediately clear why the employees were let go, though a company memo obtained by Business Insider cited “careful consideration of current business needs.” Oracle employed 162,000 people as of May 2025, the last time the company reported employment figures, according to a Securities and Exchange Commission filing. Shares of Oracle rose by 2.5% as of noon Tuesday, marking positive traction for the stock that has declined more than 27% this year. An Oracle spokesperson declined to comment on the layoffs to Forbes. Read the full story on Forbes: ByTy Roush https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2026/03/31/oracle-fires-thousands-of-employees-as-ai-spending-ramps-up-shares-rise-2/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The digital asset industry has longed for mainstream adoption but has mostly come up short. Now it’s betting on the emerging agentic economy, arguing blockchain infrastructure was built for machines all along. Crypto has spent the better part of the last 15 years asking ordinary people to put up with an absurd amount of hassle just to move money around. Memorize this 12-word phrase. Understand gas fees. Accept that your money is gone forever because you pasted the wrong address into a box.  But it has finally found an explanation for why it was built this way. Crypto was never really designed for people, the argument goes. It was meant for machines—the tireless bots that don’t care about ugly interfaces, lose seed phrases or need an 18-year-old Polymarket trader to explain the difference between Base, Polygon and Optimism. Coinbase’s chief executive, Brian Armstrong, has become one of the loudest evangelists of this idea. “Very soon there are going to be more AI agents than humans making transactions,” he wrote on X earlier this month. “They can’t open a bank account, but they can own a crypto wallet.” “We started to move to an AI-first mentality throughout the company," added Armstrong on a recent podcast. What a convenient new pitch for the industry that has spent years promising to rewire finance but mostly succeeded at reinventing speculation. But it may also be the first one in years that feels intuitively plausible. For all its chaos, crypto offers something traditional finance still does not: the ability to move funds permissionlessly, near-instantly, globally, at any hour. McKinsey projects that AI agents could mediate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in consumer commerce by 2030—more than the current value of the entire crypto market, which sits at about $2.4 trillion. “This changes a lot about how we think about the investment landscape and about building products,” says Matt Huang, managing partner at Paradigm, crypto’s largest venture capital firm. “You really have to think agent-first now and assume that most of your customers are going to be agents rather than people.” Countless crypto firms, including Huang’s new payments-focused startup Tempo, are now racing to invent, or reinvent, themselves for this emerging class of users. Justin Sun, the billionaire founder of the Tron blockchain and a major investor in Trump’s crypto projects, is already calling it Web 4.0 (as if Web 3.0 was ever really built!). MoonPay, which helps people—and now, increasingly, software—buy and sell crypto using ordinary payment methods, completely revamped its AI strategy after OpenClaw, the open-source AI assistant that can interact directly with a user’s files and applications, took off a few months ago.  “The bet that MoonPay is making is that we don’t need to double down on reinvesting in a beautiful UX (user experience) because agents become the interface,” says Kevin Arifin, the firm’s product lead. That might be excellent news for anyone who still cannot, or simply will not, make themselves care about the finer points of crypto plumbing. You’ll just tell your AI what you want done—buy some bitcoin, find a lending service with decent rates, put the assets to work—and it will handle all. Except none of this is happening at a meaningful scale yet. Read the full story on Forbes: ByNina Bambysheva https://www.forbes.com/sites/ninabambysheva/2026/03/25/why-crypto-is-obsessed-with-ai-agents/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Everyone has an opinion, but Forbes has the answer: $6.5 billion, according to our most recent tally, updated in March. Trump added $1.4 billion over the past year, leveraging the presidency for profit. Trump’s Cryptocurrency and Liquid Assets: $2.1 billionFORBES ESTIMATE AS OF MARCH 2026 Spencer Platt/Getty Images The president is flush with cash, having collected hundreds of millions from cryptocurrency sales and an estimated $200 million more, after tax, from selling a chunk of one venture, reportedly to an Emirati royal. Those earnings added to a stockpile he had already been accumulating by selling his Washington, D.C. hotel and refinancing a San Francisco office complex. Trump launched a memecoin days before his second term began, capitalizing on the buzz surrounding his inauguration. A portion of his coins now unlock on a daily basis, though their value has fallen by almost 70% since a year ago.  The Trump family’s primary crypto project, World Liberty Financial, got off to a rocky start. Things accelerated after Trump won the election and Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a United Arab Emirates royal, reportedly arranged a purchase of almost half the company in January. Buyers have now snapped up more than $1 billion of tokens. The Trump family kept a pile for themselves, which Forbes discounts while they remain locked up. World Liberty Financial also launched a stablecoin, USD1, which ties to the dollar and allows people to make crypto transactions with limited volatility. It’s not a new idea. “Everybody can mint a stablecoin,” says Matt Zhang, the founder of digital-asset firm Hivemind. “The difficult part is how you drive adoption.” A firm created by the UAE’s president offered some help to Trump’s venture, agreeing to use USD1 to make a $2 billion investment in a major crypto exchange. A publicly traded firm named Alt5 purchased a bundle of World Liberty tokens in August 2025. The deal left the Trump family with a bunch of cash and World Liberty with a small stake in Alt5. From a financial standpoint, Trump’s social media venture is one of the most absurd businesses in America, generating sales of just $3.7 million in 2025 and recording a net loss of $712 million. The company is scrambling to find a business model: It became a Bitcoin treasury in May, announced a merger with a fusion power company in December and published potential plans to spin off Truth Social in February. Thanks to Trump-loving traders, shares remain at head-scratching levels, but have lost over 80% of their value since the company went public, driving down the value of the president’s stake.  Trump’s golf game took off after he left the White House the first time. Estimated operating profits at his clubs jumped from $19 million in 2020 to $66 million in 2024. The private club has benefited from politics more than any other property, something Trump foreshadowed in a 2016 deposition. “The manager told me recently, he said, ‘Boy, it is actually the best year we’ve ever had at Mar-a-Lago.’ And I was looking at the numbers. I said, ‘What do you attribute this to?’ He said, ‘The campaign.’” Since then, business has only gotten stronger. The indebted Florida golf resort lost much of its northeastern clientele after Trump got into politics, nearly putting it underwater. But plenty of new customers arrived in the aftermath of the Covid-19 pandemic, pushing estimated profits to $25 million, double their best year during Trump’s first term. Liquid assetsNet value: $1.3BMemecoin tokensNet value: $393MWorld Liberty Financial tokensNet value: $175MStablecoin BusinessNet value: $242MAlt5Net value: $400,000Truth Social’s Parent Company: $1.2 billionFORBES ESTIMATE AS OF MARCH 1, 2026Trump Media and Technology GroupNet Value: $1.2B🌴🏌️‍♂️Trump’s Golf Clubs And Resorts: $1.5 billionFORBES ESTIMATE AS OF MARCH 2026U.S. golf clubsTotal value: $638MLiabilities: Est. $89MNet value: $549MWhat Trump owns: 10 courses in 6 statesMar-a-LagoTotal value: $596MLiabilities: Est. $32MNet value: $564MWhat Trump owns: Private club in Palm Beach, Fla. Trump National Doral MiamiTotal value: $390MLiabilities: Est. $135MNet value: $255MWhat Trump owns: ResortThree European golf propertiesTotal value: $116MDebt: $0Net value: $116MWhat Trump owns: Two golf resorts in Scotland, one in IrelandThe Trump Organization declared losses of more than $100 million at its European golf resorts, according to an analysis of records from Ireland and the United Kingdom. Business has picked up recently. Read the full story on Forbes: By Dan Alexander and Kyle Khan-Mullins https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/article/the-definitive-networth-of-donaldtrump/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Donald Trump seemed to preemptively attack Supreme Court justices as “stupid” and “dumb”—ignoring a warning from Justice John Roberts about “dangerous” rhetoric—as they prepare to hear oral arguments Wednesday in a landmark case challenging Trump’s executive order limiting birthright citizenship. Key Facts The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in Trump v. Barbara, a case concerning the legality of Trump’s executive order saying babies born in the U.S. cannot be citizens if their parents aren’t U.S. citizens or permanent residents themselves. Trump claimed Monday morning the U.S. is “the only Country in the World that dignifies” the topic of birthright citizenship “with even discussion”—which is false—and expressed pessimism the Supreme Court would rule in his favor, after the court previously ruled against his signature tariff policy. Other countries are “laughing at how STUPID our U.S. Court System has become” while taking advantage of U.S. citizenship by birth, Trump claimed on Truth Social, adding, “Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!” The 14th Amendment grants citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof,” which has long been interpreted as guaranteeing citizenship by birth in nearly all cases, except for children of foreign diplomats or enemy soldiers. The Trump administration has adopted a novel legal theory claiming children of undocumented immigrants or temporary U.S. residents are not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the U.S., with Trump’s executive order stating children born in the U.S. are not citizens unless at least one of their parents is a citizen or permanent resident at the time of their birth. Parents and children impacted by the decision, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have challenged the order in court, arguing it’s unlawful and the court should affirm the 14th Amendment guarantees citizenship to children even when their parents aren’t permanent residents or citizens. What To Watch For The court will hear oral arguments Wednesday in the birthright citizenship case and issue a ruling in the coming months, sometime before the court’s term ends in late June. Trump’s order limiting birthright citizenship is not in effect while the court is deliberating, meaning babies born in the U.S. to temporary or undocumented immigrants will still be granted citizenship at least until the court rules. Big Number 255,000. That’s the approximate number of babies who would be affected by Trump’s executive order each year if it takes effect, according to the Migration Policy Institute and Penn State’s Population Research Institute.  Surprising Fact Trump’s order limiting birthright citizenship is part of the president’s broader crackdown on undocumented immigration. If it takes effect, the Migration Policy Institute projects the number of undocumented immigrants would significantly increase, however, estimating there would be an additional 2.7 million by 2045 and 5.4 million by 2075. Do Other Countries Have Birthright Citizenship? Yes. While Trump has claimed birthright citizenship is unique to the U.S., nearly 40 other countries have policies guaranteeing citizenship to people who are born there. Countries with birthright citizenship policies are largely concentrated in North, Central and South America and include Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Canada, Ecuador, Mexico, Pakistan and Venezuela, among others. Read the full story on Forbes: ByAlison Durkee https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2026/03/30/trump-slams-stupid-supreme-court-ahead-of-birthright-citizenship-case/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

OnlyFans has been a money-printing machine for its secretive billionaire owner Leonid Radvinsky. Investors were puzzled by an obscure debt fund’s pitch to buy him out, until they learned of his terminal cancer diagnosis. The pitch was arguably taboo. But while investors blushed at OnlyFans’ NSFW content, they were undeniably turned on by its balance sheet. A deal pulled together by an obscure San Francisco-based debt fund put a $5.5 billion price tag on the British website, which became a global sensation during the pandemic. It’s a rock-bottom number for a money machine that raked in $1.4 billion in revenue and $720 million in operating profit in 2024 for secretive billionaire owner Leonid Radvinsky.  But then investors learned that Radvinsky, 43, had been diagnosed with terminal cancer. His declining health was the reason for the sale and its accelerated pace, according to several sources close to the deal.  OnlyFans announced Radvinsky’s death on Monday (without specifying when or where he died). His heir apparent is his wife, Yekaterina Chudnovsky, who a source close to the couple describes as Radvinsky’s de facto business partner. The deal still hangs in the balance with the terms being revised just weeks before Radvinsky’s death, the sources said. The hopeful buyer is Architect Capital, a San Francisco-based fund that got its start in 2020 offering credit to fast-growing Latin American startups like Colombian food delivery app Rappi. Now it seems focused on working with companies in crisis.  That’s not the case right now for OnlyFans. Under Radvinsky’s ownership, the company exploded from a niche website into a juggernaut used by 377 million users and 4.6 million creators, including both sex workers and celebrities like actor Amanda Bynes, singer Lily Allen and UFC fighter Paige VanZant. In 2024, it generated $7.2 billion with only 46 full-time employees. The company takes a 20% cut of every transaction, according to a British corporate filing. “It's a risk and reputation problem. It's not a financial problem.” But investors who reviewed the deal told Forbes they saw warning signs around slowing growth and risks for the site’s relationships with its biggest creators, regulators and the card companies that underpin the business — and which could pull out at any time.  Architect’s pitch is that new ownership would bring big changes, according to multiple investors who heard it. The firm said it would push OnlyFans to compete with mainstream rivals like Patreon by hosting content from more creators who keep their clothes on. It hopes to acquire a banking license to break OnlyFans’ expensive reliance on credit card companies, which wield an uncomfortable amount of power over the business, helping its adult content creators get paid more reliably and at a lower cost, the sources said. Architect hopes to turn OnlyFans into a more PG place “where you can connect with your favorite boxer or athlete,” says one investor who received the proposal.  Shawn Silver, CEO of Payment NerdsOnlyFans’ success earned Radvinsky, a Ukrainian-American entrepreneur who got his start building porn referral websites, a $4.7 billion fortune. But its size, scale and notoriety has made it hard to sell. The company positions itself as a platform for content creators but is best known for hosting images and videos that involve nudity and sexually explicit material. That makes it off-limits to many venture capitalists and buyout funds due to so-called “vice” clauses with their own backers, restricting them from investing in controversial categories like tobacco, gambling, weapons and pornography. Read the full story on Forbes: By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff and Martina Di Licosa, Forbes Staff. https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2026/03/26/inside-the-race-to-sell-onlyfans/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Growing up on a family farm convinced Rick Workman that he didn’t want to be a farmer. He became a dentist instead – and then built the largest dental conglomerate in the nation and made a billion dollars. Dr. Rick Workman sits in his wood-paneled home office in a gated golf community outside Orlando, Florida. The room has a clubby old-money vibe. Floor-to-ceiling windows draped in royal blue curtains frame an ornate golden chandelier, and a large silver statue of Ferrari’s horse prances on his desk. Outside, in the driveway of the estate, sits an even bigger statue of the famous Cavallino Rampante, a tribute to his large collection of exotic sports cars.  Workman leans back in his chair and begins talking about the cold reception he has received from others in his profession. “I’ve had people walk up to me at a conference and want to get in a fistfight with me,” he says.  At 71, Workman has the energy of someone who expects an argument and welcomes it. His voice carries the blunt rhythm of rural southeastern Illinois, where he grew up on a farm and learned early that work was something you did whether you liked it or not. On this day, he’s wearing a satiny navy button-down shirt that catches the light whenever he moves. It’s a fashion choice flashier than you might expect from a dentist.  Then again, no other dentist made a billion dollars treating teeth. Workman has spent the last four decades creating the largest dental operation in the United States. His Effingham, Illinois–based Heartland Dental has 1,900 practices with some 3,100 dentists across 39 states. Among some dentists, Workman is persona non grata, as they believe dental conglomerates like his prioritize productivity and profits over patient care and have made their once-cushy profession hyper­competitive.  “I learned the Chicago way,” he says, nodding to the city’s reputation for bare-knuckle politics. The fights over corporate dentistry and private equity often get loud and personal. But Workman’s solution is what he calls staying “underneath the cabbage patch.” Keep your head down. Keep building.  In 2024, Heartland Dental generated about $3.6 billion in revenue and $455 million in earnings handling the business side of dentistry: payroll, staffing, marketing and supplies. The dentists focus on treating patients, an approach that helped reshape a profession long dominated by solo practices. Private equity firm KKR, which manages $744 billion in assets, bought a 58% stake in the company in 2018 at a $2.8 billion valuation. Today Heartland is worth $6 billion, giving Workman, who serves as chairman, an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion.  Workman grew up on a farm outside Clay City, Illinois. His grade school had three classrooms and six students in his class. His mother was his teacher. The family farm grew corn and soybeans. Work started early. His first job was gathering eggs when he was 4 years old. By age 7 he was milking cows. Summer days meant sitting on a tractor for ten or 12 hours at a stretch. Saturdays often brought the chores nobody wanted: cleaning manure sheds. Baling hay.  “That wasn’t much fun,” Workman says, admitting the experience snuffed out any interest he might have had in farming.  College was the first step away from the farm. Workman began at Olney Central College, a community college about 20 miles from home. He thought about becoming a chiropractor. A doctor he knew suggested dentistry instead.  He was already studying science, so the switch required no change in coursework. Workman transferred to Southern Illinois University, where he completed his degree in biological science in 1977 and went on to dental school.  In 1980, Workman opened his first practice in Effingham, about 40 minutes from the family farm. He found a basement location, borrowed $35,000 (the equivalent of $150,000 today) from his parents and grandparents and set up a two-chair office. His advertising budget was a $15 hand-painted sign on the front of the building. His goal for the first year was ambitious, but reasonable. “Twenty-five thousand dollars,” he says, which was 20% more than the national median family income at the time. Read the full story on Forbes: By Brandon Kochkodin https://www.forbes.com/sites/brandonkochkodin/2026/03/26/meet-the-billionaire-dentist-that-other-docs-want-to-punch-in-the-teeth/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Meta and Google, the parent company of YouTube, were found liable for harming a woman’s mental health due to addictive design features, a California jury found in a landmark decision on Wednesday, just one day after a jury in New Mexico ordered the Facebook parent company to pay $375 million for enabling child exploitation and misleading the users about safety features. Key Facts Meta and Google are liable to pay $3 million in damages to the plaintiff, only identified as a 20-year-old woman named K.G.M., who said she became addicted to the two companies’ apps due to addictive features. Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, was ordered to pay out 70% of the damages, while YouTube was ordered to pay the remaining 30%, the Wall Street Journal reported. The lawsuit also named TikTok and Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, as defendants, but both companies settled out of court for undisclosed sums. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram chief Adam Mosseri both testified at the trial, where Zuckerberg insisted the company was “building this thing to be a good thing that has value in people’s lives,” Courthouse News reported in February. “We respectfully disagree with the verdict and are evaluating our legal options,” Meta spokesperson Francis Brennan told Forbes in a statement, while Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a separate statement the company disagrees with the verdict and plans to appeal, adding, “this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.” The verdict did not appear to impact stock prices, Meta shares up slightly (0.46%) and Google parent Alphabet’s down slightly (0.3%). Read the full story on Forbes: By Zachary Folk https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/03/25/meta-and-google-found-liable-in-social-media-addiction-trial/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A top 25 now collectively worth $903 billion has a new No. 1 as a French luxury goods mogul dethrones Steve Ballmer—and an American rival also leapfrogs the embattled face of the Clippers. Owning a sports team is often reserved for the ultra-wealthy in popular leagues like the NFL and the NBA, where every franchise is now worth more than $3 billion, but Bernard Arnault tops Forbes’ annual list of the world’s richest owners thanks to a club with a comparatively puny price tag. The 77-year-old Frenchman, whose estimated net worth of $171 billion places him No. 7 overall on Forbes’ 2026 World’s Billionaires ranking, controls Paris FC through his family holding company after acquiring a majority stake in the French soccer club in 2024 at a reported valuation of around $100 million—or about 0.06% of his current net worth. Arnault has a $45 billion lead on Los Angeles Clippers owner and former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, who held the crown as the world’s richest sports owner for the past two years and is now worth an estimated $126 billion. But Arnault’s coronation is also the result of a reclassification. For the annual owners ranking, Forbes counts only majority stakes in certain major sports leagues, including France’s Ligue 1. However, Paris FC was stuck in the second-tier Ligue 2 at the time of Arnault’s purchase, keeping the LVMH CEO and chairman—once the world’s richest person—off the owners list until the club earned a promotion to the top division with a second-place finish in 2025. Ballmer actually falls to No. 3 among sports owners this year, with his net worth up a modest 7% from 2025’s $118 billion after an uneven 12 months for Microsoft’s stock, which closed at a record high in October but has fallen 25% since as the high costs and competitive pressures of the AI boom weigh on software companies. Leapfrogging him in the ranking is the Denver Broncos’ Rob Walton, a Walmart heir with a $146 billion fortune, up 33% from last year’s $110 billion. The 25 richest sports owners are now collectively worth $903 billion, an astonishing 49% increase from the 2025 list’s $607 billion, and all 25 exceed $10 billion for the first time, with Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank setting the floor at $11.1 billion. It’s indicative of a new generation of owners who in many cases made billions in other industries before entering sports, rather than having most of their fortunes tied up in teams that they acquired at bargain prices decades ago. Even though the NFL is the world’s most valuable sports league, its concentration of longtime family-owned franchises means only eight of the league’s owners made the cut, with the NBA not far behind with seven owners listed. The most popular sport represented is soccer, part of the portfolios of 13 owners in the ranking, across seven leagues. The commercialization of the beautiful game is fitting for a group of global billionaires gearing up for a World Cup year, although four owners from Major League Soccer—David Tepper, Stanley Kroenke, Robert Kraft and Blank—also control more valuable NFL teams. The 2026 list features three new additions alongside Arnault: Indonesian billionaire R. Budi Hartono, who owns Italian soccer club Como 1907 with his brother, Michael; Peter Mallouk, the new owner of MLS’s Sporting Kansas City; and Dan Friedkin, who owns the Premier League’s Everton and Serie A’s A.S. Roma. Read the full story on Forbes: ByHank Tucker,Forbes Staff. https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2026/03/12/the-worlds-richest-sports-team-owners-2026/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bonuses for Wall Street employees jumped to a record $49.2 billion overall pool, New York’s state comptroller Thomas DiNapoli said Thursday morning, which he attributed to strong trading activity and a 30% rise in Wall Street’s profits. KEY FACTS The $49.2 billion pool is 9% higher than the pool for 2024, DiNapoli said. The average bonus paid to securities industry employees was $246,900, which is 6% higher than the year prior. “Wall Street saw strong performance for much of last year, despite all of the ongoing domestic and international upheavals,” ⁠DiNapoli said⁠ in a release Thursday morning, adding the higher Wall Street profits are “good for our state and city budgets, which are reliant on the industry’s significant tax contributions.” Though this year's bonus pool is the highest on record, the 2006 pool adjusted for inflation edges it out at $53.7 billion in today’s dollars. Securities industry employment edged down slightly to 198,200 in 2025, DiNapoli said, adding financial sector job growth has been faster in other parts of the country, though New York still has the nation’s highest share of securities industry employees at 17.9%. DiNapoli estimated the bonuses would generate $199 million more in state income tax revenue and $91 million more for New York City over the previous year, but he said tax revenue may fall short of expectations as Governor Kathy Hochul’s proposed budget assumed Wall Street bonuses would rise 25.9%. Read the full story on Forbes: By Conor Murray https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/03/26/wall-street-bonuses-surged-to-a-record-492-billion-pool-last-year/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lucia Penrod opened the first ‘barefoot luxury’ club in South Beach nearly 30 years ago with her late husband as a tribute to his daughter. Today, she runs the $400 million hospitality brand that stretches from Saint Tropez to Saint Barth—and has a plan to reinvent it in her own image. On any given sunny day at one of the 12 Nikki Beach clubs around the world, there are rows of day beds overflowing with models and a steady stream of rosé, and lots of chic resort wear, which is not coincidentally for sale at the gift shop. Oh, and dancing on tables is not only encouraged, the management endorses it. “You go to Nikki's and you go there at two o'clock for lunch,” says Lucia Penrod, the cofounder, owner and CEO of Nikki Beach Hospitality Group. “You might stay till seven, eight o'clock. You drink. You dance on the tables. But then you go home and you have enough time to rest, recover and be ready the next day.” Penrod’s recipe for success at Nikki Beach has changed little in the past three decades: Serve up overpriced food and drinks—with an emphasis on bottle service—and a sprinkle of celebrity in glamorous destinations along the global party belt, stretching from Ibiza to St. Barth. Penrod has run the $150 million (estimated annual revenue) beach club business for the past 8 years, after founding it with her late husband, Jack, in 1998. The Penrods built the original Café Nikki on South Beach as a tribute to his 18-year-old daughter, Nicole, who was killed by a drunk driver in 1997. They wanted the garden spot to inspire customers to “celebrate life every day because we don't know when we're not going to be here.” The following year, the expanded the café to the beach, renamed it, and the first Nikki Beach was born. Read the full story on Forbes: ByChloe Sorvino,Forbes Staff. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2026/03/14/famed-miami-dayclub-nikki-beach-may-be-closing-but-the-party-continues-around-the-world/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After becoming the hottest, fastest growing AI coding company, Cursor is confronting a new reality: developers may no longer need a code editor at all. Read the full story byAnna Tong, and Rashi Shrivastava: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/03/05/cursor-goes-to-war-for-ai-coding-dominance/ On January 5, employees at Cursor returned from the holiday weekend to an all-hands meeting with a slide deck titled “War Time.”  During the break, employees playing with Anthropic’s latest model, Opus 4.5, had experienced an uncomfortable realization: its coding abilities had advanced to the point where developers no longer needed to review every line of output. Instead of collaborating with an AI assistant inside Cursor’s code editor, developers could issue high-level instructions to autonomous agents and receive back completed features — sometimes, even the finished product. And that was a problem. Cursor was built on a different premise. CEO Michael Truell described it to Forbes in 2024 as a kind of “Google Docs for programmers,” a collaborative editor where humans and AI refined code together.  But if the AI doesn’t need a human collaborator, why bother with the editor? If writing and editing code line by line was no longer central to a programmer’s workflow, Cursor’s central product thesis was suddenly in question. At the all-hands, Cursor leadership warned that the months ahead would be turbulent ones. Projects might be scrapped, priorities shifted. The company’s new mandate was labeled “P0 #1”—priority zero: “Build the best coding model.”  Not the best wrapper. The best model. Call it a vibe shift. Inside Cursor, it felt like a reckoning. Which is what makes this moment so jarring. Until recently, Cursor seemed nearly unstoppable. The company began 2025 with roughly $100 million in annualized revenue. By November, that figure had surpassed $1 billion. Its latest financing round valued the company at nearly $30 billion, minting its four cofounders as billionaires and placing Cursor among the top 20 most valuable private companies in the world.  But in the fast-moving world of AI, perceived momentum can appear – or evaporate – overnight. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Windrose has started selling a China-built electric big rig that looks an awful lot like Tesla’s Semi. Even with import duties of 70%, the CEO says it will make money on each one it sells in the U.S. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/03/23/tesla-semis-biggest-rival-might-be-its-chinese-twin/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

“For immigrant workers in the U.S., particularly Hispanics, their north star is not being able to buy a better car or get a shiny new toy. Their north star is, ‘I need to take care of my family,’” declares Andres Santos, CEO and cofounder of Común, a bilingual banking app. That insight is crucial to the success so far of his New York-based fintech, which offers free checking accounts, Visa debit cards and free access to a network of 88,000 ATMs, as well as some more unusual services: convenient and reasonably priced foreign money transfers; bilingual text and phone support; and the ability to open an account online using more than 100 different forms of identification from Latin America.  At a time when the nation’s foreign-born population is under attack by the Trump Administration and immigration (both documented and undocumented) has screeched to a halt, Común is making a go of it. It now has 276,000 open accounts and last year its revenue more than doubled to $12.5 million. That momentum was impressive enough to win it a first-time spot on Forbes’ 2026 Fintech 50 list.  But Común’s future is hardly guaranteed. Faced with competition from traditional banks and digital banking heavyweight Chime, at least six affinity bank startups have shut down or been acquired in the last four years. Significantly, the most recent to disappear was Seis, which offered a debit card for Hispanic immigrants. When it shut down last month, its CEO blamed declines in immigration. Santos, for his part, stresses that 65 million folks of Hispanic descent are already living in the U.S.—meaning he doesn’t have to rely on new arrivals for growth. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sophiaacevedo/2026/02/22/this-fintech-is-winning-with-hispanic-immigrants-now-it-has-to-survive-trump/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Shohei Ohtani’s historic payday—despite a playing salary of only $2 million—leads a top ten set to collect an estimated $537 million this year. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2026/03/24/the-highest-paid-mlb-players-2026/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forget the drug discovery hype. Here’s how the world’s largest pharma company is seeing a payoff from AI right now. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2026/03/07/how-lilly-used-ai-to-crank-up-production-of-its-popular-glp-1s/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Already champions on the field, the Dodgers are now threatening to claim the Yankees’ financial crown, with MLB clubs worth $2.9 billion on average. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/justinteitelbaum/2026/03/20/baseballs-most-valuable-teams-2026/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Luyu Zhang is part of a new wave of Chinese founders who are building at home but betting their companies in America. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/02/24/this-middle-school-dropout-built-his-ai-startup-in-china-now-hes-scaling-it-in-silicon-valley/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Alex Kwon’s Active makes hardware for some of America’s biggest weed brands. He now has his sights set on conquering Europe. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2026/03/13/this-100-million-vape-company-is-a-pillar-of-the-cannabis-industry/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices