All posts tagged: billionaires

Battle of the Billionaires: What’s at Stake as Elon Musk and Sam Altman Face Off in Court

Battle of the Billionaires: What’s at Stake as Elon Musk and Sam Altman Face Off in Court

Published by Sam Flores

When Elon Musk finally faces off in court against Sam Altman this week, he’ll be forced to reckon with a question whose answer has seemingly eluded him his entire life: What exactly does he want? Sure, we know what he’s asking the federal court to do: force OpenAI and Microsoft to pay billions—OpenAI for allegedly defrauding him out of his donations, Microsoft for allegedly aiding and abetting that fraud. Also block OpenAI’s restructuring to a for-profit entity. Also strip Altman of his position of authority atop OpenAI. But one thing Musk wants to make sure we all know—the jury included—is that it’s not about the money. Just ahead of the trial, his side filed a motion saying he’s not going to touch a penny of the potential winnings. Instead, in a bit of pious showmanship, he promised it would all go to charity—specifically the nonprofit organization that governs OpenAI. So what does that leave him with? And why has the trial between Musk and Altman, which is ramping up to be a true spectacle, captivated …

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat

Published by José Betancourt

At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake. Explore the May 2026 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells. No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken …

‘Beef’ With Billionaires: Everything You Need to Know About South Korean Chaebols

‘Beef’ With Billionaires: Everything You Need to Know About South Korean Chaebols

Published by Sam Flores

While the country club’s GM, Joshua Martín (Oscar Isaac, coiffed in a surprisingly inoffensive mullet), and his interior-decorator wife, Lindsay Crane-Martín (a quietly brilliant Carey Mulligan), have respect for chairwoman Park’s extreme wealth, the cultural nuances of her position are lost on them. When Lindsay shows the chairwoman a room at the club that she’s just decorated, interpreter Eunice (Seoyeon Jang) tells her that the chairwoman finds the design “very colonial.” Lindsay reverently bows and replies, “Thank you so much,” only for Eunice to clarify: “She does not like colonial.” What Lindsay doesn’t understand is that many Koreans of chairwoman Park’s generation have long-standing beef with Japan—the nation that occupied Korea under colonial rule from 1910 to 1945. The chairwoman’s money and prestige stem from that break with colonization, and also operate under its shadow. The show doesn’t spell this out, though, leaving it in the realm of if you know, you know—displaying the same culturally specific confidence it did in season one. That said, if you do want a primer on how the real …

Eric Swalwell’s Beverly Hills Benefactor Wonders If He Missed “a Big Known Secret in DC”

Eric Swalwell’s Beverly Hills Benefactor Wonders If He Missed “a Big Known Secret in DC”

Published by Sam Flores

Two days before Eric Swalwell ended his campaign for California governor amid a string of sexual assault and misconduct allegations, the now former congressman recorded a video at Stephen Cloobeck’s Beverly Hills mansion—reportedly worth $26 million—where he had stayed numerous times during the race. “A lot has been said about me today through anonymous allegations, and I thought it was important that you see and hear from me directly,” Swalwell said, staring into the camera. “These allegations of sexual assault are flat false. They’re absolutely false.” On Tuesday, he resigned from Congress. Cloobeck is an offbeat, self-described billionaire who made his fortune in timeshare real estate—though some estimates place his net worth in the mere many millions. He had been making his own bid for governor before dropping out in November and throwing $1 million behind Swalwell. In an interview with Vanity Fair on Monday, he insisted that the allegations that ended Swalwell’s campaign came as a surprise. “If this was such a big known secret in DC,” Cloobeck tells me, referring to a consensus …

How to Tax Billionaires – The Atlantic

How to Tax Billionaires – The Atlantic

Published by Sam Flores

If you made money last year, you will almost certainly owe taxes on April 15. And if you made a lot, you will probably owe a lot. That’s true for most Americans—just not the richest ones. And if that makes you angry, you’re justified in feeling that way. But the solution you’re hearing from a lot of politicians at the state and federal levels—wealth taxes—isn’t the answer. Instead of introducing a new, difficult-to-administer, and potentially unconstitutional tax, we should do something simpler: Bring billionaires back into the income-tax system. Believe it or not, the way to do this starts with abolishing the estate tax. You probably think that sounds nuts. But the estate tax hardly raises any money—less than 0.5 percent of federal revenue—and yet at the same time makes it seem like the rich pay more in taxes than they do. Our current jumble of tax rules, with separate taxes for income and estates, stokes confusion and misunderstanding. The tax system that we currently have—a progressive income tax with an additional estate tax—was enacted …

Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev Wants You to Vibecode Your Way Out of the Permanent Underclass

Robinhood’s Vlad Tenev Wants You to Vibecode Your Way Out of the Permanent Underclass

Published by Sam Flores

Tenev finds himself in a unique position among his fellow Forbes listers, in that his wealth has been accumulated on the back of a populist message. Robinhood, which was founded on the idea of democratizing access to investing, has always played on the popular resentment of wealthy investor-insider types who might be partying on yachts with Tenev today. This month, Robinhood launched the next iteration of this vision: Robinhood Ventures, a closed-end fund that promises to open access to private companies to Joe Schmo—and with them, the kinds of returns previously accessible only to venture capitalists. It’s an intriguing portfolio, full of companies that have long been on my radar but always out of reach for anyone besides my sources in VC, including the cloud platform Databricks, AI-data-labeling start-up Mercor, health-tracking ring-maker Oura, and supersonic flight company Boom. In a way, it’s a large-scale version of the secondary markets that have sprung up around hot investments. So-called “special purpose vehicles” bundle small checks from regular people, are laden with layers of fees, and are usually …

The billionaires made a promise — now some want out

The billionaires made a promise — now some want out

Published by skeptic

In 2010, Warren Buffett and Bill Gates launched a disarmingly simple campaign they called the Giving Pledge: a public commitment, open to the world’s wealthiest people, to give away more than half their fortune during their lifetime or upon their death. The moment seemed to call for it. Tech was minting billionaires faster than any industry in history, and the question of how those fortunes would impact society was just beginning to take shape. “We’re talking trillions over time,” Buffett told Charlie Rose that year. The trillions materialized. The giving, less so. The numbers are no longer shocking to anyone paying attention. The top 1% of American households now hold roughly as much wealth as the bottom 90% combined — the highest concentration the Federal Reserve has recorded since it began tracking wealth distribution in 1989. Globally, billionaire wealth has grown 81% since 2020, reaching a whopping $18.3 trillion, while one in four people worldwide don’t regularly have enough to eat. This is the world in which a small group of extraordinarily wealthy people are …

Tech Billionaires Are Quietly Rooting for AI Bubble to Collapse

Tech Billionaires Are Quietly Rooting for AI Bubble to Collapse

Published by José Betancourt

Sign up to see the future, today Can’t-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech Some of the wealthiest business people in the world are chopping it up about something that defies orthodoxy: the AI bubble, they hope, will soon collapse. Gone are the days of debating whether AI is an economic bubble. Having already fallen $800 billion short of turning a profit on the AI boom, some of the tech industry’s biggest players have accepted that the financial arithmetic on AI just doesn’t add up. But here’s the catch: though the AI bubble objectively makes life harder for the rest of us, to the silicon valley elite, the economic consequences of its downfall could actually be a good thing. New reporting by the Atlantic details the heterodox sentiment sweeping through the tech industry. The pro-Bubble stance has its roots in a 2024 book called “Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation,” by tech investors Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart. These fellas argued that there are essentially two kinds of economic bubble: the …

These stars are the newest members of the billionaires club

These stars are the newest members of the billionaires club

Published by Daniella Wilson

Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Stay ahead of the curve with our weekly guide to the latest trends, fashion, relationships and more Beyoncé, Dr. Dre and James Cameron are among America’s most famous new billionaires, joining the ranks of long-established figures, such as Warren Buffett, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. The 44-year-old “Crazy in Love” pop star was named on Forbes’s newly published list of “New Billionaires 2026” after her net worth reached $1 billion in December following years of music success. Beyoncé now joins her husband, rapper Jay-Z, who is currently estimated to be worth $2.8 billion. He became a billionaire in 2019. Hip-hop legend Dr. Dre, 61, has also finally been recognized as a billionaire by the financial magazine, more than a decade after he and investors sold his Beats by Dre headphones to Apple in 2014 for an impressive $3.2 billion in cash …

Inside the exodus of California tech billionaires to Florida

Inside the exodus of California tech billionaires to Florida

Published by Sam Flores

MIAMI and PALM BEACH, Fla. — Last December, a large coterie of Silicon Valley billionaires descended upon Miami to attend Art Basel, the ritzy, contemporary art fair that marks the end of the moneyed set’s yearly social calendar. Much of the buzz surrounded the spectacle of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, among the world’s richest men, docking his 466-foot, $450-million yacht, the Dragonfly, in Biscayne Bay while he stepped ashore to view the art installations. But the chatter pivoted quickly among a contingent of a dozen California billionaires. Weeks earlier a new ballot measure — backed by the SEIU-United Healthcare Workers West — was floated that would impose a one-time, 5% tax on the wealth of the state’s billionaires to help offset the Trump administration’s federal healthcare funding cuts. “One said, ‘Listen I don’t know what’s going to happen, it may or may not get passed,’” said Julian Johnston, a broker with the Corcoran Group in Miami, recalling a conversation with a California tech leader who said he was ready to move quickly if the measure passed. “‘I’ll …