Forbes Daily Briefing

Jensen Huang, billionaire and CEO of AI chip giant Nvidia, resigned his position on Thursday morning, the company’s board of directors announced, after reports of a second affair with a Nvidia employee days after he admitted to a relationship with another tech executive that intelligence officials believe may have been a Chinese spy.

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Now-former Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s admission of an extramarital affair—and reports of two more with Nvidia employees—have sparked speculation he and his wife Lori Huang could be headed toward divorce, with Lori potentially walking away with tens of billions if they do, though the exact number remains uncertain.

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Jim Higdon is planning for the best Black Friday of his life. It may also be the last. Inside Cornbread Hemp’s 25,000-square-foot gummy factory in Louisville, Kentucky, the lines are running full and the warehouse is filling up for the biggest sales day of the year. Two weeks after that, on December 11, a federal ban on hemp-derived THC takes effect. If it holds, Cornbread’s record $65 million in revenue this year ends, and so does most of the $38.5 billion industry around it, a market that now outsells legal marijuana. Higdon has 106 employees, a personally guaranteed loan on the facility expansion, and a month to make as much money as possible.

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In 2025, when AI startup Spellbook signed a long-term deal with Anthropic to use its models to review legal contracts, CEO Scott Stevenson wasn’t worried about the AI giant coming for his lunch. Anthropic staffers told him explicitly they didn’t see the firm directly competing with Spellbook in the legal space, he recalls. A year later, he was caught off guard when Anthropic informed him that it was launching Claude for Legal. The tool, tailored for law firms, has dozens of capabilities ranging from contract review to citation checking to tracking regulatory changes — many of which overlap with Spellbook. That made things, “a little bit awkward,” Stenvenson says. He decided to be more cautious sharing data and product roadmaps with the AI giant. “Anthropic has been a great partner but it made us realize that they are a massive company and two parts of the org can have conflicting mandates,” he says. “Ultimately this is inevitable.” Up until recently, Spellbook used Claude to carry out over 500,000 monthly contract reviews for its customers, but it’s now moved a lot of its spend to OpenAI. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/11/02/inside-silicon-valleys-love-hate-relationship-with-anthropic/

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Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the electric car maker will wind down production of the Cybertruck at its Texas Gigafactory next year to allow for expanded production of the Cybercab robotaxi, signaling a major shift after the company’s electric pickup struggled with poor sales and quality issues. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/11/06/musk-says-tesla-will-wind-down-cybertruck-production-next-year/

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Billionaire soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo announced Thursday he will retire from Portugal’s national team, ending a record-breaking career that spanned two decades and made him one of the world’s wealthiest athletes, just a month after longtime rival Lionel Messi played his final game for Argentina. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/11/05/billionaire-soccer-legend-cristiano-ronaldo-announces-retirement-from-portugal-national-team/

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Elon Musk’s brief stint as the chainsaw-waving face of the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative did little to curb federal spending, though it helped push more than 300,000 federal workers out of government through firings, voluntary resignations and early retirements last year. It also sparked anti-Tesla protests in the U.S. and Europe, some of which ended with cars ablaze. At best, DOGE was “a little successful,” he said with a sigh in a podcast interview last December with Katie Miller, the wife of White House advisor Stephen Miller who’d briefly worked with both DOGE and for Musk. But he acknowledged that if he had the chance to do it again, he wouldn’t. “I think instead of doing DOGE I would have basically worked on my companies,” Musk said. “And [then] they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.” Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/11/05/lawyer-up-elon-musks-doge-bill-comes-due/

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Following Tuesday’s midterm elections, which resulted in major victories for Democrats, prominent tech investors and some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals offered vastly different responses. Reid Hoffman, a billionaire and key Democratic donor, called out Elon Musk over his heavy financial backing of Texas Republicans, while the world’s richest man made light of the outcome with comments about election interference and “space lasers”. In a post on X early on Wednesday, Musk—who was the largest individual donor in the 2026 elections—joked, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” as Democrats won both the U.S. Senate and governor’s races in his home state of Texas. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/11/04/billionaires-react-to-democratic-midterm-sweep-musk-jokes-about-space-lasers-as-hoffman-calls-him-out/

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Elon Musk’s pinned tweet—at least until Tuesday night—sums up his thoughts succinctly: If Democrats won the midterms, and then the presidency in 2028, it would be “the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.” In his telling, Democrats would abolish the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, expand the Senate and institute open borders, all policies that he claims would lock Republicans out of power forever. In the waning days of the campaign, the richest man in the world put his money where his mouth was, flooding races across the country with at least $458 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings and other reporting. That’s far more than any other donor—at least three times as much as the billionaire Uihlein couple in second place, per New York Times estimates. It’s also close to three times what George Soros, the man Musk has spent years casting as the hidden hand behind the Democratic Party, disclosed spending in his biggest election ever. It didn’t buy him much. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2026/11/04/elons-roi-458-million-didnt-buy-much-in-the-midterms/

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China’s enthusiasm for new stocks has helped to mint two billionaires on paper, as the surging shares of tape maker Crown New Materials Technology during its trading debut on Tuesday have made its Chairman and CEO, former elementary school teacher Mai Michael, and his sister immensely rich. Mai, 62, who now has Australian citizenship and is a permanent resident of Hong Kong, has a net worth of $2.5 billion based on his stake, according to Forbes estimates. His sister, Mai Huixia, 64, a Chinese citizen and the company’s vice chairman, has amassed a $2 billion fortune from her stake, according to Forbes. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment on their net worth. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2026/11/03/former-elementary-school-teacher-and-sister-become-billionaires-after-tape-makers-stock-surges-787-in-ipo/

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The world’s top ten richest people lost a total of $273 billion over the past month, as disappointing tech earnings and concerns over AI spending drove the tech-heavy Nasdaq down nearly 5%. The wealthiest person on Earth, Elon Musk, was the biggest loser, as his fortune fell by an estimated $68 billion, to $869 billion as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on November 1. That’s because shares of SpaceX, which account for nearly four-fifths of Musk’s net worth, fell by 11%, more than offsetting a 13% increase in Tesla’s stock price. But Musk is still more than twice as rich as his runner-up, Jeff Bezos, whose fortune dipped by an estimated $8 billion, to $361 billion, as shares of Amazon slid by 4%. The second and third biggest losers were Google cofounders Larry Page (world wealth rank: No. 3) and Sergey Brin (No. 5), whose fortunes tumbled by an estimated $53 billion and $49 billion, respectively, as shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet dropped by more than 18%. Page and Brin are now worth $233 billion and $214 billion, respectively. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/

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Mukesh Ambani, the head of India’s most valuable company, overtook Bytedance’s Zhang Yinmin to become Asia’s richest person on Monday after a nearly 12% surge in Reliance Industries stock added $8.5 billion to his net worth.

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DoorDash is acquiring its competitor Instacart for $17 billion, the company announced Thursday. A majority of the deal will be paid in cash and shareholders will have the option to receive cash, DoorDash stock or a combination of both. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/10/29/doordash-will-acquire-instacart-in-17-billion-deal/

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In January, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz announced it had raised $15 billion in new funds. It was a monster fundraising haul that boosted the 17-year-old firm’s assets to more than $90 billion, nearly double the amount it held in 2024. It also marked an opportunity for the firm’s co-founders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, to telegraph their lofty ambitions for how to remake the country—and the world. “As the American leader in venture capital, the fate of new technology in the United States rests partly on our shoulders,” Horowitz wrote in a blog post announcing the fundraise. “Our mission is ensuring that America wins the next 100 years of technology. That starts with winning the key architectures of the future—AI and crypto.” Forgive him if he sounds a bit boastful. After all, America may win the next century but his firm is already one of the winningest tech investors of the past year and decade. It first invested in OpenAI in April 2023 when it was worth $29 billion; the AI giant’s valuation hit $852 billion in March and is expected to go public next year with a valuation north of $1 trillion. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/giacomotognini/2026/10/28/billionaires-andreessen-and-horowitz-are-betting-on-pro-ai-politicians-who-could-boost-their-massive-fortunes/

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Anthropic filed for its blockbuster IPO on Monday, bringing the AI behemoth closer to what could be the largest public debuts in stock market history. The 335-page filing revealed the Claude maker generated around $16.3 billion in revenue for the first half of the year, up from $1.2 billion a year earlier, but incurred a $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of the year (most of which is due to a non-cash accounting charge). The company touts more than 300,000 enterprise customers, 250 of which spend over $10 million on Anthropic’s products every year. It plans to list under the ticker symbol “ANT” and is on track to go public as soon as mid-November. Forbes estimates that its two most prominent cofounders: CEO Dario Amodei and his sister, Anthropic president Daniela Amodei, are worth $13.6 billion and $13.7 billion, respectively. Each cofounder owns an estimated 1.4% stake. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/the-prompt/2026/10/27/inside-anthropics-ipo-prospectus-revenue-losses-and-surprising-details/

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As cannabis prices crash around the country, struggling cannabis companies with big industrial buildings outfitted with power, fiber, water and HVAC systems thought they had a golden ticket to the AI race. But moratoriums, NIMBYISM and power constraints crushed most of their dreams. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/willyakowicz/2026/10/21/inside-the-weed-industrys-ai-data-center-pipe-dream/

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This summer represented a bit of a changing of the guard on the soccer pitch, as exemplified by Spain’s winger Lamine Yamal, who hoisted the World Cup trophy at age 19 by beating Argentine legend Lionel Messi—the very man who had bathed him when he was an infant for a now-viral photoshoot in 2007. But while Yamal is already reaping the rewards of his star turn on American soil, he and the rest of soccer’s new generation still have a long way to go to close the financial gap on Messi and his Portuguese rival Cristiano Ronaldo, two of the greatest money-making machines the sports world has ever seen. For the fourth consecutive season, and the 12th time in the last 13 years, Ronaldo and Messi are the world’s two highest-paid soccer players, due to haul in $300 million and $145 million, respectively, according to Forbes estimates. (French striker Kylian Mbappé, who lands at No. 3 on Forbes’ list of the top-earning soccer players this year with an estimated $100 million, made a cameo at No. 1 in 2022 thanks to a massive signing bonus he received when he extended his contract with Paris Saint-Germain, two years before he left the club for Real Madrid.) Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/hanktucker/2026/10/17/the-worlds-highest-paid-soccer-players-2026/

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Elon Musk on Monday announced he plans to give every child in America one share in his aerospace and AI company SpaceX next year, shortly after he criticized rival Anthropic’s plan to pledge 5% of its shares to a public benefit fund and urged the company to distribute its shares directly to the public. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/10/19/elon-musk-says-hell-give-every-child-in-america-one-spacex-share-next-year/

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Tyler Shultz, a former Theranos employee who blew the whistle on the ill-fated biotech company, alleged its founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes “misled” Nathan Fielder about the technology her company developed in a key scene in his new documentary, “You Can See Everything.” Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2026/10/19/theranos-whistleblower-alleges-elizabeth-holmes-misled-nathan-fielder-in-documentary-scene/

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The Chinese-owned social network has run dozens of ads promoting the sale of counterfeit currency. One even directed users to a Telegram account offering a discount code for 10% off fake money: “TikTok10.”

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Stephen Curry was the NBA’s first unanimous MVP, in 2016. The first player to lead the league in 3-pointers four times, then five times, then six and seven and eight times. The first player to launch 10,000 attempts from beyond the arc—and the first to drain 4,000 of them. But for all of the ways the Golden State Warriors’ 38-year-old sharpshooter has transformed basketball, he is just as much of a game-changer financially. Already the first NBA player with a $40 million salary (in 2019-20) and a $50 million salary (2023-24), Curry is set to cross the $60 million threshold this season, banking $62.6 million on the court. Meanwhile, after splitting with his longtime sponsor Under Armour last fall and unveiling a new deal with Chinese shoe brand Li-Ning in June, Curry projects to earn an estimated $141 million from endorsements and other business endeavors—demolishing the NBA-record $100 million he made off the court in 2024-25. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/brettknight/2026/10/20/highest-paid-nba-players-2026-curry-is-basketballs-first-200-million-man/

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IN SEPTEMBER 2025, staff from an environmental nonprofit descended on Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida. Over three days, they looked for the kind of things that excite naturalists—bird species, bat calls, plant varieties—then recorded their discoveries in a 180-page report. It barely mentioned the thing they were really looking for: a tax break for Donald Trump. The president needed one, desperately. Trump’s return to the White House, and his eagerness to profit from it, yielded $1.4 billion of crypto earnings in 2025. His real-estate empire supplied more than $200 million on top of that, according to Forbes calculations. The president’s projected tax bill snowballed to over $500 million. Enter the environmentalists. Among the many peculiarities of the U.S. tax code is a provision allowing landowners to cut their bills by giving up development rights—even if they retain the land itself. The premise is straightforward: Forgoing development can preserve natural habitats, a public benefit that can qualify as a charitable gift. The 180-pager made the case that Trump’s golf course qualified as a natural habitat worth protecting. He then donated the right to further develop it to an environmental nonprofit—without giving up ownership of the golf club itself. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danalexander/2026/10/19/trumps-golf-empire-is-a-billion-dollar-tax-shelter/

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As CEO of the largest, most successful drugmaker on the planet, Dave Ricks sure spends a lot of time thinking about risk. Eli Lilly’s weight-loss and diabetes drugs have become wildly successful beyond anyone’s imagination. Its latest 12-month revenue (through June 30) surged 50% to $79.7 billion, with Zepbound (for weight loss) and Mounjaro (for diabetes) accounting for 62% of the total. In November 2025, its market cap crossed the $1 trillion mark, making it the first pharma company to do so (it’s currently hovering around $1.1 trillion). Lilly has more weight-loss game-changers coming. A pill called Foundayo gained FDA approval in April. It plans to submit a next-gen experimental drug, retatrutide, to the FDA in the first quarter of 2027. (People are so excited about “reta,” as it’s called online, that they’re buying substances claiming to be the drug on the black market.) But the clock is ticking. All drugs have a shelf life because of how pharma patents work. Likely at some point in the 2030s, the exploding market for its weight-loss drugs will collapse as generics flood in. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2026/10/15/glp-1s-took-eli-lilly-to-1-trillion-ceo-dave-ricks-is-betting-billions-he-can-do-it-again/

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