Forbes Daily Briefing

Elon Musk loudly quit California after years of attacking its taxes, politics and business climate, moving SpaceX to Texas. Now the biggest fiscal event of his career could hand the state he trashed a giant tax windfall anyway.

That is the awkward punchline hanging over SpaceX’s expected IPO next week. Because while the company’s relocation gave it a new Texas headquarters, it did not move the thousands of soon-to-be-wealthy SpaceX employees who still live and work in the Los Angeles area, and will face California’s so-called millionaires' tax. Texas, which doesn’t tax personal income, won’t get that bump. 

SpaceX is preparing to sell 555.6 million shares at $135 apiece, raising about $75 billion and valuing the company at roughly $1.77 trillion. For investors, that is a Mars-shot valuation. For California, it is something more terrestrial: taxable income landing in Los Angeles County.

By Alan Ohnsman,

Senior Editor
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Jimmy Carter hosted an ice skating exhibition at the White House, and George W. Bush once staged a friendly game of T-ball at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, but the prospect of mixed martial arts fights on the South Lawn would have never arisen if anyone other than Donald Trump were president and anyone other than Dana White ran the UFC. When Trump, a longtime fan of the fight promotion and steadfast friend to its chief executive, first suggested the idea to White at a UFC event last April, the pugnacious promoter said he would do it without hesitation.

“He knows the day he asked me to do this event that I was going to show up and deliver,” White tells Forbes. “I love that type of stuff. Tell me it can’t be done, tell me it’s a huge challenge, tell me it’s going to cost us a bunch of money. Tell me this, that. That’s the stuff that I run right into.”

White’s tenure with the UFC has been defined by audacious risk-taking, propelling the company over the last 25 years from a bloody sideshow into a $1.5 billion (revenue) sports powerhouse. But Freedom 250 on June 14 (not coincidentally President Trump’s birthday) is, even by his standards, “difficult on a whole other level.” In addition to the 4,300-seat outdoor venue that has now been erected on the South Lawn—and its 87-foot canopy, which towers above the White House itself—the weekend will include a press conference at the Lincoln Memorial and a two-day fan fest for as many as 85,000 people at the Ellipse. (The president likes the temporary structure so much he compared it to the Eiffel Tower, saying this week, “Maybe we’ll never, ever take it down.”) Because the UFC controls its own TV productions, it will pick up the tab for not only the infrastructure but also the broadcasts, with nine production trucks’ worth of equipment and crew.

By Matt Craig,

Reporter
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In a windowless room in a rented warehouse in Oakland in 2019, Nabis cofounders Vince C. Ning and Jun Sup Lee, a few of their employees and a friend they met at the startup accelerator Y Combinator, Luana Lopes Lara(who would go on to cofound prediction market Kalshi and become one of the world’s youngest self-made billionaires), were counting $2 million in cash by hand. 

The money was earmarked for marijuana excise taxes in California. San Francisco-based Nabis had recently launched as a cannabis distributor during the medical marijuana heyday of the country’s biggest weed market and it was Ning and Lee’s job to collect and pay taxes on the product they delivered to retailers. The duo had hired an armed guard to watch the door. Once the cash was counted, banded and bagged, Ning put the money into two suitcases, $1 million in each, threw on a Hawaiian shirt—he thought he was less likely to get mugged if he looked like a tourist, but in the end he looked more like a scrawny narco-wannabe—and headed to the state government building to deliver the money.

By Will Yakowicz,

Forbes Staff
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In years past, when a great athlete retired, they typically told their story through a ghost-written memoir or perhaps even a biopic. But Hall of Fame basketball player Carmelo Anthony opted instead for the storytelling medium of the moment, striking a partnership with Utopai Studios, the Silicon Valley-based startup specializing in AI movies and TV shows. The 41-year-old NBA legend will produce AI-generated video content about his life and other sports stories through his Creative 7 Productions label. Anthony’s investment into Utopai—which both sides declined to share the size of, but Forbes estimates around $5 million—was at a staggering $1 billion valuation.

It’s an astronomical amount for a company with revenue that Forbes estimates was less than $50 million in 2025, and has yet to put out a full-length movie or TV show. Still, with projects in the pipeline and strong 2026 projections, the premium price tag announces Utopai as a true competitor in the ongoing Hollywood AI arms race.

By Matt Craig,

Reporter
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As New York celebrates the Knicks’ first trip to the NBA finals since 1999, controlling owner James Dolan has earned a newfound respect among the franchise’s notoriously critical fan base. And soon, the 71-year-old billionaire hopes to command the same respect from another tough crowd: stock market investors.

For years, the value of publicly traded Madison Square Garden Sports—the entity through which Dolan owns both the Knicks and the Rangers, the city’s NHL team—has lagged far behind Forbes’ valuation of the two franchises. MSG Sports has an enterprise value of $9.9 billion while Forbes values the Knicks at $9.75 billion and the Rangers at $4 billion in the latest team valuations.

Among New York sports fans, who have suffered through decades of mediocre play on the court and the ice, this gap has often been referred to as the “Dolan discount,” equating his mismanagement of the teams to a lack of business savvy. But historically, there has often been a loose connection between sports team values and how many games a team wins—let alone how many championships. In the first 20 years of Dolan’s tenure, the Knicks had the worst cumulative winning percentage of any team in the NBA yet led Forbes’ ranking as the most valuable franchise 16 times. Similarly, the Dallas Cowboys haven’t won a Super Bowl since 1996 but remain the NFL’s most valuable team (at $13 billion) while the Kansas City Chiefs, who have won three titles in the past seven years, are the 22nd-most-valuable franchise in the league.

By Matt Craig,

Reporter
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