Forbes Daily Briefing

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
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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
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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
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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/
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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/
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