Forbes Daily Briefing

Joe Strada is getting his picture taken and his employees are giving him a hard time about it. Professional photos are apparently not a common occurrence around the Strada Services warehouse in Sanford, Florida. Giving the boss a hard time is. The building is long and low, mostly concrete and metal, with loading doors punched into its sides and a wide slab of pavement out front. Company vans litter the lot.

Inside, Strada is staring at a container of wire scraps, cut lengths tossed together until the pile looks like a snake pit. Strada wonders aloud whether anyone checked what they already had before buying more. Copper wire isn’t cheap.

“I don’t have a job, but I walk around and I ask a lot of questions,” Strada says. “Like, why are we doing this?”

Strada, 63, no longer runs the business day to day. A CEO does that. Strada Services installs and services electrical, air-conditioning, plumbing and security systems for homebuilders and homeowners. The company had $534 million in revenue in 2025 and has more than 4,000 employees across 13 states. Strada is executive chairman and owns 45% of the business. Forbes estimates his net worth at $800 million. While new-home construction remains well below its pandemic boom, a rebound in homebuilding would likely propel Strada into the ranks of self-made billionaires.
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Billionaire Mark Cuban has emerged as one of the most prominent critics of humanoid robots for consumer households, repeating his criticism on Monday after previously predicting both robots and their manufacturers would “fail miserably” within five to ten years—contradicting the bets placed on the technology from other billionaires like Elon Musk.

In an appearance on tech livestream show TBPN in March, Cuban first predicted a 5-10 year lifespan for both humanoid robots and their manufacturers, adding household robots would take more optimal shapes designed for their specific tasks.

Cuban doubled down on that prediction on Monday in a post on X, noting that humanoid robots are large in size and difficult to make for multiple functions.

“Would you rather have a roomba or a humanoid that pushes around a vacuum cleaner or broom?” Cuban asked.

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The White House released the text of an “accord” reached between billionaire AI titans who met with President Donald Trump on Tuesday, an agreement the president labeled “morally binding” even as he stopped short of saying the government would support new guardrails.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/09/30/white-house-releases-accord-between-billionaire-ai-execs-heres-what-it-says/?streamIndex=0
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For 158 years the Martinelli family has turned apples grown in Northern California orchards into a golden juice, and it's grown into a sweet family business.

The company had an estimated $175 million in 2025 revenue and has been increasing at 5% annually for the past five years. The business’s iconic champagne-style bottles of sparkling apple cider are today the top-seller in America and its apple-shaped juice jars are the second most sold apple juice in the country, after Mott’s. Martinelli’s products are now sold at 25,000 locations of every major retailer in America and in 38 countries.

“Even though we're not a giant company, we know and have great relationships with every single retailer out there, given how important that hero product of sparkling cider is,” says Martinelli’s 56-year-old CEO Gun Ruder. “It gives us a power with these retailers that's disproportionate to ourselves.”

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chloesorvino/2026/09/18/how-martinellis-turned-the-champagne-of-apple-cider-into-a-500-million-family-business/
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Both humanities’ decline and possible revival can, no surprise, be traced to concerns about career and financial security. For a time, STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors had the golden ticket. Now some engineering specialties (including computer engineering) have seen a sharp decline in entry-level jobs, as artificial intelligence reduces the demand for junior workers in their fields.

At the same time, those graduating with English and some other humanities degrees are finding that their versatile skills make it easier to get hired, even if they do still earn less than the engineers. The emerging conventional wisdom: In the age of AI, human skills such as creativity, communication and collaboration could provide a crucial professional edge, whatever the field.

“We really believe that the humanities equal jobs,” says Matthew Mars, head of the University of Arizona’s 8-year-old Public and Applied Humanities program, which as of last spring had more than 400 majors. Students like Crider combine an applied humanities core with courses ranging from business and entrepreneurship to fashion studies and, most recently, astrobiology. They also complete a three-course career sequence with internship preparation, an internship and a course to help them explain what they’ve learned to prospective employers.

Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisachambers/2026/09/21/move-over-stem-humanities-degrees-are-poised-for-a-comeback-thanks-to-ai/
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