Forbes Daily Briefing

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
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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/
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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
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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/

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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/

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