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.

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
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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.
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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.
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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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