Forbes Daily Briefing

During an all-hands meeting earlier this year at data labeling startup Mercor, its then 22-year-old billionaire CEO Brendan Foody pulled up a slide with a single word: fraud. An employee had embezzled company funds, he told his staff of more than 200. The person had since been fired. There would be no tolerance for this behavior, Foody said, according to four people familiar with the meeting. Foody didn’t identify the employee or disclose the amount stolen at the meeting. But Forbes has learned that the culprit was an early hire and lead manager on the Anthropic account, one of the company’s most important, where Mercor’s contractors create training data to help build Claude. Multiple former Mercor employees said the manager had recruited his brother and father as “experts” and sent them hundreds of thousands of dollars in so-called bonus payments. He was reported in late December after it was discovered that contractors were paid more than the amount billed to Anthropic for multiple data generation projects, two sources said. Anthropic was not aware of the incident, they added. Mercor eventually recovered the fraudulent bonus payments and it did not end up costing customers any money, Mercor spokesperson Heidi Hagberg told Forbes. The former Anthropic account lead, whom Forbes is not identifying, declined to comment for this story. Anthropic declined to comment. By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Anna Tong, Forbes Staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Artificial intelligence has become part of our lives, increasingly core to how we work, search for information and express ideas. In the last year, the startups spearheading this paradigm shift have raised gobs of money from venture firms to build applications used by hundreds of millions of people across professions like law, software engineering, banking and even music. Three years into the AI frenzy, startups are starting to prove they can turn lofty ideas into sustainable businesses. That’s evident in Forbes’ eighth annual AI 50 list, which spotlights the most promising privately-held AI companies in the world. Juggernauts like OpenAI and Anthropic continue to be the largest companies on the list, attracting unprecedented sums of cash from marquee Silicon Valley venture capitalists and tech behemoths alike as they reportedly head towards blockbuster IPOs. The two AI giants have accumulated a combined $242.6 billion in venture funding, about 80 percent of the total $305.6 billion that the companies on this year’s AI 50 list have raised. Massive adoption of their tools has led to strong revenue growth: At the end of February, OpenAI reportedly had more than $25 billion in annualized revenue and in early April Anthropic said its revenue run rate had crossed $30 billion. And with products like Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex, the AI labs are dominating into markets like coding where players like Cursor (valued at $29.3 billion) must innovate to compete. Edited by Rashi Shrivastava Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Vercel isn’t a household name like OpenAI or Google, but it’s a crucial vendor for some of the world’s biggest brands, including Under Armour, Stripe and Sonos, who use Vercel to host their digital infrastructures. (One of the most popular ways to view the Epstein Files, an interface called Jmail that mimics a Gmail inbox, is hosted on Vercel.) In September, the company raised $300 million, co-led by blueblood venture firm Accel and GIC, one of Singapore’s sovereign wealth funds. The fundraising round lifted the startup’s valuation to $9.3 billion, up from $3.25 billion the year before. The influx of cash also makes Rauch, an Argentine immigrant, a billionaire, worth at least $2.1 billion, according to Forbes estimates. Vercel is certainly benefiting from its ties to Claude Code. It’s not because of any sort of commercial relationship. Instead, it’s Vercel’s popularity in the developer ecosystem that has organically turned it into a go-to web hosting tool for Claude. One of the most popular ways to build websites is through an open source framework called Next.js, a tool built and maintained by Vercel. As a result, language models like Claude have become very good at writing Next.js code, thanks to the training data fed into the models. So when a user vibe codes an app, Vercel becomes the natural tool for Claude to suggest when it comes time to deploy. “LLMs seem to love Vercel, and we love them back,” says Accel partner Dan Levine, an early Vercel backer. It’s early, but the boost from Claude Code is taking shape. Vercel clients that use Claude represent a little over 1% of users, but they generate almost 15% of overall Vercel deployments. More broadly, Vercel deployments that come from apps vibe coded by AI agents — everything from to-do list apps to customer service bots — have grown too, from almost 5% in June 2025 to more than 21% in February. Of those deployments made by agents, almost 70% of them come from Claude Code. The boom from AI coding has helped to spike sales for Vercel. Run-rate GAAP revenue hit $340 million at the end of February, up 86% year over year, the company told Forbes. By Richard Nieva, Senior Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If there’s anything romance novelist Colleen Hoover has learned from working in Hollywood for the past few years, it’s that movie production moves far slower than publishing. The 46-year-old author released an astonishing 24 novels in the first decade of her career, becoming the best-selling author in the world in 2022 with titles like It Ends with Us and Heart Bones. But she has spent much of the last four years cowriting and producing an adaptation of one of them, Reminders Of Him, for big screen release this weekend. During that time, Hoover’s novels have become a force at the box office. The movie adaptation of It Ends With Us raked in $350 million worldwide in 2024—despite months of nasty legal battling between stars Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni—and Regretting You scored a respectable $90 million in late 2025. This October’s Verity, starring Anne Hathaway and Dakota Johnson, will mark her fourth adaptation in just over two years. By Matt Craig, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Against a backdrop of economic uncertainty, geopolitical tensions and a sustained ‘Trump Slump’ of declining international visitation, the substantial World Cup bump U.S. hotels were promised may not materialize, according to CoStar, the industry’s leading benchmarking and analytics firm. By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For the past few months, neurosurgeons at hospitals in Florida, Connecticut and New York have been preparing for a wildly experimental operation designed to treat Alzheimer's disease, the dementia that leads to devastating memory loss. The surgery, which they've been practicing on cadavers, aims to clear the drainage pathways to the brain. This could help patients' own lymphatic systems flush out toxins that scientists believe are the hallmarks of the disease, which affects 7 million people in the U.S. alone. To do so, they're turning to the smallest surgical robotic instruments in the world that can hold tiny needles the size of eyelashes, with scissors and dilators roughly the width of a human hair. The lymph vessels in the neck that surgeons would operate on for the Alzheimer’s procedure can be as little as 0.2 millimeters in diameter, the equivalent thickness of two sheets of paper. “It’s like taking a couple of strands of your hair and tying them together with little bitty sutures,” says Mark Toland, CEO of Jacksonville, Florida-based startup MMI, which makes the microrobots. They aim to perform the first of these microrobotic surgeries on five people in March. While a very early-stage clinical study, it builds off reports from some 5,000 experimental surgeries performed in China and other Asian countries over the past five years that help the lymphatic system clear out build-up in the brain. They've shown remarkable, if largely anecdotal, results. Surgeons were not only able to slow the disease’s progression — they took patients with moderate Alzheimer’s back to a more mild stage of the disease, Toland says. By Amy Feldman, Senior Editor. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American companies are increasingly skipping traditional price hikes on goods in favor of new surcharges and fees added to checkout screens and monthly bills—often far less visible—as a way to pass rising prices onto consumers amid surging inflation. Key Facts Restaurants, hotels, airlines, retailers and other businesses are increasingly breaking price hikes into separate line items—often labeled as a “fuel surcharge,” “service fee” “processing fee” or “resort fee”—that allow them to preserve advertised prices but still pass inflation-related price increases on to the consumer. Often these costs only show up on a final bill or check—separate from the original, advertised price. One of the most common examples is a credit card use surcharge—used by one-third of American small businesses—which see companies try to recoup the fees charged to them by credit card companies by hitting customers with a 2% to 4% fee if they use a card instead of cash. More than 15% of restaurants nationally also now tack on extra fees to the bill at the end of a meal, according to the National Restaurant Association, with some adding credit card surcharges while others opt for automatic gratuity or vague “service charges” to help cover increased supply costs or employee wages. Airlines advertise ticket prices without including hidden taxes, fees and charges—that can increase ticket prices by roughly 20% at checkout—and carriers like American, Alaska, Delta, United and Southwest this month announced they were hiking the price of baggage fees by $10 per bag to cover Iran war-caused jet fuel increases. Grab, a Nasdaq-listed rideshare and food delivery company that operates in Southeast Asia, told customers it will implement a fuel surcharge through May 31 and Uber Australia said it will introduce a temporary 5-cent-per-kilometer fuel surcharge starting April 15. What To Watch For More price hikes or fees for consumers as businesses themselves fall victim to new surcharges. Amazon has added a 3.5% fuel surcharge for its third-party sellers. UPS, FedEx and the USPS have implemented their own fuel-related price hikes, ranging from 3.5% to 8%, since the Iran war spiked energy costs. Experts have said those logistics companies have little choice but to offset the skyrocketing costs of gasoline and diesel, and as many as 30 to 40% of Amazon sellers subject to the new surcharge will pass it directly on to consumers, a supply chain expert told the New York Post. The owner of Ash & Erie, a small men’s clothing brand, told the Wall Street Journal the fuel surcharges are like “tariffs 2.0” and said he’ll likely have to raise prices to make up for them. Similarly, fresh food distributors are billing restaurants and grocery markets to make up for the rising price of diesel, which could soon get passed along to shoppers and diners. Grocery prices will rise 2% in the next few weeks, according to The Food Institute. Contractor Plus, a management app designed for contractors and businesses like plumbing and electricians, is advisingits clients on how to add fuel surcharges directly to invoices. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Amazon have all started offering fuel price relief options for its delivery and rideshare drivers, the New York Times reported, and that could soon turn into a surcharge for riders or delivery recipients. When the war in Ukraine caused gas prices to jump in 2022, Uber and Lyft added surcharges directly to customers. Will The New Fees Ever Go Away? Probably not. Often, a fee gets introduced to solve a seemingly temporary cost problem but then becomes permanent, even after the original justification fades. Restaurant service fees, for example, were born amid higher prices and fewer sales during the pandemic but many stayed around when costs dropped. Airline checked baggage fees were introduced during the 2008 oil price spike, when jet fuel costs surged, but didn't disappear once fuel prices stabilized. Rental car companies added "temporary"...

Inside a century-old church in Pasa­dena, California, Blake Shelton sits alone on a faded wooden pew, praying. Smoke and lights are pumped into the darkened sanctuary as a camera circles, filming the video for his latest single, “Let Him In Anyway.” It’s a ballad about a recently deceased best friend whose eternal salvation is in doubt, but the director has an idea to inject some optimism into the song that is not suggested by the lyrics. He instructs two crew members to open the church doors as the song concludes, letting in streams of Cali­fornia sunshine that hint at an answered prayer. “I try to make all my decisions by listening to what everyone else has to say,” Shelton tells Forbes. “We’ll go edit it—and if it works it works, and if it doesn’t, nobody besides you ever knows it happened.” The 49-year-old country music superstar describes all his ventures with similar aw-shucks humility. But those he works closest with say not to underestimate the business savvy of a man who has recorded 31 No. 1 country radio hits, opened a national chain of restaurants, launched a Hollywood production company and amassed a personal fortune that Forbes estimates at more than $200 million. By Matt Craig, Reporter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Grit. Hustle. Resilience. The American Dream is built on the audacious belief that anyone can make it to the top. Every elementary school kid is imbued with the belief that anyone can become president of the United States. Or a hip-hop megastar. Or a space-faring billionaire. The notion is as old as the Republic and stands self-consciously in contrast to class-ridden Europe where one’s prospects were often determined at birth. This ideal has always had its heroes: from Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned immigrant who crafted America’s first financial system, to Andrew Carnegie, who went from working as a young teen in a textile mill to forging a vast steel empire. Since 1917, it has been the prime subject matter of this publication. So, in honor of America’s semiquincentennial, we feel uniquely qualified to rank the 250 greatest living self-made Americans. Edited By Alex Knapp and Luisa Kroll, Forbes StaffReported By Jessica Jacolbe and Chase Peterson-Withorn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canadian visitation to the U.S. is down 35% since President Trump returned to office—dealing a massive, sustained economic blow to the U.S. economy that shows no sign of reversing in 2026. Key Facts The number of Canadians taking road trips into the U.S.—the most common way of visiting—dropped by 5% last month compared to March 2025 and is down 35% compared to March 2024, according to data released Monday from Statistics Canada. There was also a 14% year-over-year decline in air travelers from Canada to the U.S. in March. In contrast, the volume of Americans visiting Canada in March was up 4% compared to a year ago. For the third consecutive month, more Canadians flew to overseas destinations than drove to the U.S.—flipping a long-established pattern. Canadian visitation overseas was up 5% year over year—a sign Canadians are swapping the U.S. for other international destinations. Nearly a quarter (23%) of Canadian travelers have canceled a previously planned trip to the U.S., according to a Longwoods International tracking study of Canadian travelers. Crucial Quote “In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off,” Amir Eylon, President and CEO of Longwoods International, told Forbes. How Much Has The 14-Month Canadian Boycott Cost The U.s. Economy? In the years leading to President Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term, Canadian tourists were the biggest single source of international visitors to the U.S., comprising roughly one-quarter of all foreign travelers, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). In 2024, Canadian tourists injected $20.5 billion into the U.S. economy. But in early 2025, the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) warned even a 10% reduction in Canadian inbound travel could translate to $2.1 billion in lost spending and 140,000 lost jobs in the hospitality sector. The actual decline was 22%—more than double that hypothetical drop—which works out to a drop of roughly $4.5 billion in visitor spending. The boycott continued into 2026, with double-digit declines in both January and February, and cumulative two-year drops of more than 30% each month. Read the full story on Forbes: By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2026/04/13/canadian-visits-us-down-35-percent/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the 49-year-old billionaire founder of Binance, has written a memoir. It arrives with the unmistakable timing of a man determined to tell the world his version of his meteoric crypto rise and fall, and foreshadow his comeback. The book, Freedom of Money: A Memoir of Protecting Users, Resilience, and the Founding of Binance, runs 364 pages, self-published in English and Chinese, and is available on Amazon Kindle for $9.99, where it's already ranked #4 among all Kindle books. The book traces Zhao’s path from rural China to Canada, then through jobs in Tokyo, New York and Shanghai, and finally to building Binance, the crypto exchange that grew with extraordinary speed into the largest in the world. Zhao also recounts Binance's long battle with U.S. regulators, the company's record $4.3 billion settlement over anti-money-laundering and other charges, his four-month prison sentence in California, where he says he began writing the book, and his recent pardon by President Trump. He says the memoir is for readers who know him only from headlines, for those who have followed him for years, and for anyone curious how one founder could help shape an industry "and pay for it." Like most memoirs, this one is an exercise in selection and emphasis. The glowing and inspiring portrait Zhao assembles is of a man philosophically untouched by his success. Forbes estimates his fortune at roughly $110 billion, placing him ahead of Bill Gates. But wealth, he insists, was never the point. "I don't care about money," he writes. "I don't care about power. I don't care about fame. I don't even care about legacy." As evidence of his selflessness, Zhao cites charitable efforts such as Giggle Academy, his nonprofit education platform, and includes a foreword from Yi He, Binance’s cofounder and the mother of his three children. She says even after Binance became a global juggernaut, Zhao still wore clothes ordered from Amazon, biked to meetings and drove an old Toyota minivan. Yet the book is equally intent on establishing Zhao firmly within the world’s power circles. He writes of traveling the world and being received by political leaders and royalty, from Saudi Arabia's de facto leader, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to the king of Bhutan, who contributed praise for the book alongside Ray Dalio and Larry Fink. The anecdotes that follow serve the same function. Binance invested $500 million in X in 2022 — "a finger in the air number," as Zhao puts it — after little financial analysis and a brief conversation with Elon Musk. Thanks to its corporate reshuffling, Zhao adds, Binance wound up with a small stake in SpaceX, which will soon IPO with an astronomical valuation as high as $2 trillion. When Bahrain's central bank governor complained that ChatGPT was blocked in his country, Zhao writes that he reached out to Sam Altman and had the matter resolved the following day. Forbes appears numerous times in his memoir—sometimes as a marker of validation, sometimes as a source of grievance. Zhao recalls a 2017 Hong Kong photo shoot that put him on the cover, Binance hoodie and all, prompting him to turn to a friend and ask, "Does this mean I'm rich?" He writes that he considered a $200 million investment in Forbes in 2022, a deal that never materialized. And then there is the 2020 "Tai Chi" article, Forbes' report on an alleged scheme by Binance to evade U.S. regulators. Zhao casts it as part of the machinery closing in on him, suggesting prosecutors may have tipped off the reporter and later used the piece to help open an investigation. Binance sued Forbes for defamation over the article, but then dropped its lawsuit three months later. The book is at its most interesting when details slip in sideways. Zhao describes a friendly relationship with Gary Gensler before Gensler became chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission. By Nina Bambysheva Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Top 10 Greatest Living Self-Made Americans Oprah Winfrey Harold Hamm David Steward Thomas Peterffy LeBron James Jan Koum Dolly Parton Bill Clinton Diane Hendricks J.D. Vance Grit. Hustle. Resilience. The American Dream is built on the audacious belief that anyone can make it to the top. Every elementary school kid is imbued with the belief that anyone can become president of the United States. Or a hip-hop megastar. Or a space-faring billionaire. The notion is as old as the Republic and stands self-consciously in contrast to class-ridden Europe where one’s prospects were often determined at birth. This ideal has always had its heroes: from Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned immigrant who crafted America’s first financial system, to Andrew Carnegie, who went from working as a young teen in a textile mill to forging a vast steel empire. Since 1917, it has been the prime subject matter of this publication. So, in honor of America’s semiquincentennial, we feel uniquely qualified to rank the 250 greatest living self-made Americans. (Our list of the 250 greatest historical ones will be released on Friday). To identify these revolutionaries, we first mined Forbes’ 109-year-deep archive for classic tales of entrepreneurial capitalism. Then we asked our current crop of beat reporters for their ideas. We canvassed AI, running hundreds of queries through both ChatGPT and Gemini. While we put a heavy emphasis on rags-to-riches billionaires, we also included pioneering scientists, Supreme Court justices and others whose “wealth” is measured in influence and impact, not just dollar signs. Next, we ran names past a panel of expert judges: DeAngela Burns-Wallace, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Keith Dunleavy, Founder, Inovalon; Rich Karlgaard, Former Publisher, Forbes; Steven Klinsky, Founder and CEO, New Mountain Capital; Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Block (formerly Square); and Ryan Rippel, CEO of NextLadder Ventures. An invaluable resource was , a 1-to-10 ranking that quantifies the “distance traveled” by each individual—separating those who started with nothing from those with a big head start. Only those ranking nine or ten made the cut. The final ranking encompasses financial success, obstacles overcome and enduring impact. Read the full story on Forbes: By Alex Knapp https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2026/04/09/forbes-self-made-250-the-greatest-living-self-made-americans/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SandboxAQ has an AI platform to help materials researchers speed the development of safer, higher-powered, solid-state batteries for autos, the military and data centers. China’s dominance in batteries is powering a global auto industry shakeup. The country didn’t just get better at making them. It got better at making a lot of them cheaply and fast enough to let automakers like BYD and Geely sell electric vehicles at prices that can look like a misprint next to U.S. and European models. Now, SandboxAQ, a moonshot company spun out of Google in 2022, is betting the U.S. doesn’t need to win by outbuilding China cell-for-cell. It just needs to come up with better battery designs. And it says its AI-enabled tech platform can help battery scientists accelerate their research to create new types of safer, cheaper solid-state batteries for EVs, military equipment and data centers. The Palo Alto, California-based company, which has raised $950 million from backers including Alphabet, Nvidia and AI scientist Yann LeCun, is today releasing a new version of its research platform, AQVolt26. The pitch: compress the earliest, most uncertain part of battery R&D—screening and evaluating candidate materials—so scientists can dump bad ideas quickly and focus their efforts on the ones that might actually ship. The goal is to slash development time to create new battery chemistries, which now takes 10 to 15 years, said Ang Xiao, who leads SandboxAQ’s materials science team. “It's hard to give an exact figure for how many years we can save, but I can tell you that for the discovery phase, we can reduce the time of that by 90% to 95%,” he told Forbes. “Our technology is only focused on the discovery phase, phase one. … But in the end, we will accelerate the entire development pipeline.” The company, chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, says it’s already generating revenue from its tech from customers, including battery developer Novonix and the U.S. Army, as well as other battery and auto companies it declined to name. It also won’t say how much revenue it expects this year. SandboxAQ’s battery strategy is to make money from fees paid by users of its research platform, licensing its tech to other companies or doing research on their behalf, as well as developing its own unique battery materials. With demand rising for batteries across EVs, energy and grid storage and defense applications, it’s chasing a market with real money behind it. “We see the battery market as a $500 billion opportunity this decade, expanding toward $1 trillion as electrification and AI-driven energy demand accelerate,” Xiao said. “Our focus is on the high-value segment of materials discovery and performance optimization.” Like Waymo, another Google Moonshot, Sandbox is using AI for physical applications rather than chatbots. In addition to battery tech, which is part of its chemicals and materials unit, it’s also focused on using AI for drug discovery and medical diagnostics, among other areas. Unlike OpenAI and Google’s Gemini, which lean on large language models (LLMs), Sandbox says its approach is built on large quantitative models (LQMs) trained on physics-based data and scientific principles. Read the full story on Forbes: By Alan Ohnsman https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/04/07/this-google-spinout-thinks-ai-can-fix-americas-ev-battery-problem/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices