Forbes Daily Briefing

The trend of mainland Chinese tech companies flocking to list in Hong Kong shows no sign of abating. The latest to make its stock market debut is Gpixel Changchun Microelectronics, a developer of CMOS image sensors that enable robots to “see.” Shares of the company, headquartered in the Chinese industrial hub of Changchun, rose 144% since its listing on Friday, making founder and chairman Wang Xinyang a billionaire. Wang, 46, is Gpixel’s largest shareholder with a 23% stake. Together with the 1.6% holding of his wife Zhang Yanxia, Gpixel’s chief operation officer, Wang is worth $1.3 billion based on Tuesday’s closing price of HK$97.5. Gpixel didn’t respond to a request for comment regarding Wang’s billionaire status. Gpixel’s IPO raised HK$2.6 billion ($332.4 million), drawing cornerstone investors including private equity giants Hillhouse Investment and Boyu Capital, as well as early ByteDance backer Source Code Capital and Hong Kong-based Value Partners. Gpixel disclosed in its prospectus that it will use 76% of the IPO proceeds for R&D investments, including building a new R&D center in Hangzhou, and the rest to expand operations in Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan. The company specializes in CMOS image sensors, which are chips that convert light into electrical signals to capture images, and are embedded in a range of electronic products from smartphones and cameras to X-ray machines and robots. Operating under a fabless model, Gpixel designs sensors that are mostly used for industrial applications, such as detecting defects in semiconductor manufacturing and robot navigation. They are also deployed in advanced cameras, such as those used for scientific research. By Zinnia Lee, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk is the planet’s richest person by far, worth $839 billion as of Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list. He also ranks among the least philanthropic billionaires. Sure, Musk has transferred $8.5 billion of Tesla stock to his charitable foundations (1% of his net worth)—but nearly all of it is still sitting there idle. Only an estimated $500 million, or 0.06% of Musk’s vast fortune, has ever been disbursed to those in need. His lack of giving raises a question: What would our billionaires ranking look like if the world’s most generous people—such as Warren Buffett (who has donated more than half of his Berkshire Hathaway stock so far) and Bill Gates (who has moved, alongside his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, more than $60 billion into the Gates Foundation)—had never donated a dollar to charity? To find the answer, we adjusted the net worths of the planet’s most generous billionaires, assuming they kept any shares they’ve given away and that cash gifts were instead invested at market rates of return. The result: our True Net Worth ranking, detailed by Forbes chief content officer Randall Lane in a recent TED Talk. By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Chase Peterson-Withorn, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A U.S. special forces soldier who participated in the raid to capture Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has been charged with using classified information about the operation to win more than $400,000 on the online betting platform Polymarket. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kalshi caught and suspended three political candidates who bet on the outcomes of their own elections, the prediction market company said in a statement on Wednesday, fining the three politicians and issuing five-year bans from their platform. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk is the planet’s richest person by far, worth $839 billion as of Forbes’ annual World’s Billionaires list. He also ranks among the least philanthropic billionaires. Sure, Musk has transferred $8.5 billion of Tesla stock to his charitable foundations (1% of his net worth)—but nearly all of it is still sitting there idle. Only an estimated $500 million, or 0.06% of Musk’s vast fortune, has ever been disbursed to those in need. His lack of giving raises a question: What would our billionaires ranking look like if the world’s most generous people—such as Warren Buffett (who has donated more than half of his Berkshire Hathaway stock so far) and Bill Gates (who has moved, alongside his ex-wife Melinda French Gates, more than $60 billion into the Gates Foundation)—had never donated a dollar to charity? To find the answer, we adjusted the net worths of the planet’s most generous billionaires, assuming they kept any shares they’ve given away and that cash gifts were instead invested at market rates of return. By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Chase Peterson-Withorn, Assistant Managing Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Arthur Mensch’s vision for Mistral, and AI itself, can be summed up in one word: independence. Unlike its black-box Silicon Valley rivals, most of Mistral’s AI models are what techies call “open weight.” In this sort of open-source model, customers are free to get under the hood, customize the AI using their own data or download it for free to run offline (or from a laptop). The message resonates. Old-school execs are spooked by the world-consuming rhetoric of OpenAI and Anthropic and the emerging threat of Chinese AI companies. Mensch’s talk of control and sovereignty is soothing, as is his pitch that Mistral will deploy engineers to set up and run the tech for them. Your data doesn’t even need to leave the office, let alone the country. “We are really the only company that allows [building] core business automation and products on top of an open stack, and that is something that is valuable everywhere in the world,” says Mensch, 33, from Mistral’s offices in the trendy 10th arrondissement of Paris, as kids play soccer in the courtyard out back. By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kevin Warsh, President Donald Trump’s pick for Federal Reserve chair, faced the Senate Banking Committee at a confirmation hearing Tuesday morning. While he addressed Senate Democrats’ concerns over Fed independence and pressure from the president, Warsh largely avoided discussing details about his fortune. Senator Elizabeth Warren had already taken particular issue with Warsh’s vague financial disclosure. In addition to accusing Warsh of mishandling the 2008 financial crisis while he was a Fed governor from 2006 to 2011 and calling him “[President Trump’s] chosen sock puppet,” Warren criticized Warsh’s disclosure for its “failure to disclose the full extent of his assets,” which in turn poses immediate issues. “One or more of his dozens of funds and entities could hold stock in a prohibited financial institution, and the public would never know,” stated an April 15 report by Warren’s Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs. At yesterday’s hearing, Warren continued to press Warsh—whose father-in-law is Trump’s billionaire pal Ronald Lauder—asking whether his Juggernaut Fund L.P. invested in Chinese-controlled firms or any companies affiliated with President Trump and his family or with Jeffrey Epstein. Warsh simply responded that “those assets will be sold” if he’s confirmed. In his financial disclosure filed on April 10, he had written that the assets weren’t disclosed “due to pre-existing confidentiality agreements.” By Giacomo Tognini, Deputy Editor Simone Melvin, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In dueling court filings the Rowling and Justice families are at loggerheads. At stake is control of the Greenbrier Resort. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2026/04/17/texas-hotel-billionaires-set-to-foreclose-on-greenbrier-owner-senator-jim-justice/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Defunct startups are being liquidated for their Slack archives, Jira tickets, and email threads—operational exhaust that AI labs now treat as premium training data. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026/04/16/ais-new-training-data-your-old-work-slacks-and-emails/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kim Rivers, CEO of Florida-based Trulieve, was instrumental in getting the president to issue an executive order to reschedule marijuana. Now she is trying to build her $1.2 billion company into the Starbucks of weed. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2026/04/17/meet-trulieve-ceo-kim-rivers-the-cannabis-industrys-trump-whisperer/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Founded in 2023 by 20-somethings, data labeling startup Mercor exploded to $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate earlier this year. Now it’s confronting a wave of challenges, including an employee stealing money, security blunders and cultural growing pains. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/04/15/mercors-23-year-old-billionaire-founders-grapple-with-employee-fraud-and-north-korean-infiltration/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fueled by AI, prediction markets and online gambling, there are more self-made billionaires under 30 than ever before, 13 up from a previous record of 7. ON October 7, Intercontinental Exchange (the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange) invested $2 billion into Polymarket, pushing up the prediction market platform’s valuation to $9 billion. That made Polymarket’s 27-year-old founder, Shayne Coplan, the world’s youngest self-made billionaire. His reign was short: 20 days later, he was overtaken by the three cofounders of AI startup Mercor. That trio of 22-year-olds became the youngest self-made billionaires ever, gaining 10-figure status even earlier than Mark Zuckerberg did 17 years ago at age 23. “It’s definitely crazy,” Mercor’s Foody told Forbes in October. “It feels very surreal. Obviously beyond our wildest imaginations, insofar as anything that we could have anticipated two years ago.” Then, in a remarkable stretch from November until December, another seven entrepreneurs under the age of 30 became billionaires, including Kalshi cofounder and former ballerina from Brazil Luana Lopes Lara, 29—now the youngest self-made woman billionaire on Earth and the only self-made woman billionaire in her 20s. (She turns 30 in May.) That means there are now a record 13 self-made billionaires under 30. For all the hand-wringing about artificial intelligence killing off entry-level jobs, it’s creating something else at mind-blowing speed: billionaires barely old enough to rent a car. Industries and innovations that didn’t meaningfully exist a decade ago, including prediction markets and AI, now mint entrepreneurs with three-comma fortunes with astonishing speed. The last time Forbes counted anywhere close to this many young self-made billionaires was in 2022, when there were just seven self-made billionaires under age 30. Back in April when Forbes published our annual World’s Billionaires list, there were only two under 30 entrepreneurs in the ranks: Alexandr Wang, 28, who sold a 49% stake in his AI startup Scale AI to Meta this summer for about $14 billion and left to become Meta's chief AI officer, and Australian online casino mogul Ed Craven, 29, who is one of six on this list that hail from outside of the U.S. (including American citizen Tarek Mansour, 29, of Kalshi, who was born in California but grew up in Lebanon). Craven and Fabian Hedin, the 26-year-old cofounder of Swedish AI coding startup Lovable, are the only self-made billionaires under age 30 who have built and run their businesses outside the U.S. Wang and Craven are the two richest entrepreneurs under 30, worth $3.2 billion and $2.8 billion, respectively. Beyond these 13 are an even larger and growing group of 17 Under 30 billionaires who inherited fortunes from their families, the youngest of which is 20-year-old German pharmaceuticals heir Johannes von Baumbach (estimated fortune: $5.8 billion). Altogether, there are 30 billionaires in their 20s. Despite this relative youth boom, these young entrepreneurs continue to be extraordinary outliers in a billionaire class that remains overwhelmingly older; there are at least 500 billionaires aged 80 or older and the average age of the world’s more than 3,100 billionaires is 67. Plus, even in a year defined by unprecedented youth, the clock keeps ticking. Three of these self-made billionaires are already 29, meaning their stay on the Under 30 list will be brief. Read the full story on Forbes: By Matt Durot https://www.forbes.com/sites/mattdurot/2025/12/22/why-there-are-suddenly-so-many-self-made-billionaires-under-30/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

James Kim’s Los Angeles-based cannabis company grew from a scrappy startup in 2017 to a legal unicorn worth $1.5 billion. Allegations of black-market activity and lawsuits be damned—Stiiizy aims to be the Nike of cannabis. Inside a warehouse in Downtown Los Angeles, next to a strip club, James Kim, the CEO and cofounder of the California-based cannabis brand Stiiizy opens the door to one of his grow rooms, revealing 972 pot plants, thriving three-foot-tall beauties two weeks from harvest. “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/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices