Forbes Daily Briefing

The enemy gets a vote, too. That military aphorism took on a chilling immediacy for Brandon Tseng when he was training for an Afghanistan deployment as a Navy SEAL in 2012. His team was simulating clearing a house of enemy fighters when the Naval Academy graduate was suddenly shot in the face. Fortunately it was just a paintball, not a real bullet. “I’d followed my training exactly as taught,” he remembers—but it didn’t matter. One point of the exercise was that preparation isn’t always enough, because adversaries are smart and unpredictable. “If that was real-life combat, I would’ve been killed.”

Clearing hostile buildings was part of the daily grind for the United States military post-9/11. It is extraordinarily dangerous work and killed or injured several people Tseng knew. When he left the military in 2015 after seven years, he couldn’t stop thinking of ways that AI and autonomy tech could reduce risks to troops, like by letting them scan inside structures before they barged in. Tseng convinced his older brother, Ryan, already a successful entrepreneur who had sold his wireless charging company to Qualcomm, and Andrew Reiter, an engineer with a master’s in robotics from Harvard, to join him in starting a drone company they called Shield AI. (Tseng got his Harvard MBA concurrently.) Its first product was a small “Nova” quadcopter specialized for scouting and mapping buildings while sending live video back to frontline soldiers.

Today Shield AI is one of the most valuable defense tech unicorns in the nation, worth $12.7 billion after its most recent fundraising in March. Israelis used the more than $400 million (revenue) company’s Novas to survey Hamas tunnels in Gaza and rescue hostages after the attacks of October 7, 2023; Ukrainians are using Shield AI’s bigger V-BAT drone to identify targets deep inside Russian-held territory. Forbes estimates that the Tsengs, who are co-presidents, each have a stake worth around $400 million.

By Monica Hunter-Hart,

Reporter
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IN LATE APRIL, Donald Trump boarded Air Force One for his 26th trip to Palm Beach of his second term. War was stirring in the Middle East. Gas prices and grocery costs were rising across America. But the president had more important business to attend to. He was headed to Mar-a-Lago, where nearly 300 holders of his memecoin were gathering for a private event.

Launched three days before Trump’s inauguration, the coin had provided him with about $635 million during his first year in office. The event added appeal to an asset devoid of intrinsic value, treating top buyers to a lineup of prominent guests, including billionaire Tim Draper, investor Cathie Wood and boxer Mike Tyson. The main attraction, however, was the president himself.

Guests filed into a ballroom bedizened with the trappings of the Trump brand: crystal chandeliers, walls spattered with gold ornaments, merchandise bearing the president’s name. On seats throughout the room sat goodie bags featuring trading cards with Trump’s picture, gold statuettes in his image and MAGA-red watches imprinted with his signature.

Bill Zanker, the guy behind this bazaar, took to the stage to warm up the crowd with some personal stories. “At around midnight two months ago, I get a call from the president,” he said. “I’m in bed. Kind of drowsy, sleepy a little bit. He calls up. He says, ‘What are you doing?’ I go, ‘I’m in bed, sleeping.’ He goes, ‘Hey, listen, I’ve looked at our Trump watch logo. I don’t think it’s great.’ Now, this is the president of the United States. Busy. He says, ‘I think we’ve got to change the logo to make it more modern.’

By Dan Alexander,

Senior Editor
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Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire when SpaceX went public on June 12. But his four-comma-fortune didn’t last long, as his rocketmaker’s once soaring stock came crashing back to earth and Musk lost a record $363 billion in July. That’s more than the entire net worth of each of the world’s next nine richest people, including No. 2 Larry Page, whose fortune inched upward by $1 billion, to an estimated $292 billion, as of August 1 at 12 a.m. Eastern time. Musk, meanwhile, is the poorest he’s been since December, worth an estimated $690 billion.

Shares of SpaceX, which had soared by as much as 67% above their IPO price in June, sank by 37% in July. That shaved $320 billion off the fortune of Musk, whose 38% stake in SpaceX is now valued at $552 billion. His 11% stake in Tesla, meanwhile, is worth $43 billion less than last month ($123 billion in all), after the electric vehicle maker reported Q2 earnings that fell short of analysts’ expectations on July 22 and Tesla’s stock slid by 26% during the month.

The biggest winner of July was Jeff Bezos, whose fortune grew by $29 billion, to an estimated $278 billion, as shares of Amazon climbed by 14%. That helped Bezos end the month as the world’s third richest person for the first time since March. He overtook Page’s cofounder Sergey Brin, who fell to No. 4, despite also being worth $1 billion more than last month, or an estimated $269 billion.
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If Jay Shetty was going to level up his podcast, he figured he needed to upgrade the studio in which he records it. So before his seven-year-old show, On Purpose, relaunched this month on Netflix, the 38-year-old self-help guru says he spent around $500,000 to renovate the space with specific colors and custom artwork (including a piece of glass covered in bubble wrap) to evoke the kind of vulnerability and fragility he hopes to encourage from his guests.

Sitting inside his sprawling Hollywood Hills home, worth an estimated $8 million, Shetty’s digs are a far cry from the Hindu monk principles of humble detachment he once practiced and has encouraged to display. But for a star in media’s hottest category—who recently signed a new podcast deal with Spotify and Netflix that will pay him a combined $100 million over the next three years—the studio and residence are fitting.

“I mean, I’m not a monk anymore,” Shetty tells Forbes. “Today I consider myself an entrepreneur and a leader in this space, and that allows me to have the ability to use money as a resource to do good in the world and create impact in the way that we've chosen to do that.”

By Matt Craig,

Reporter
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On a Tuesday evening in early July, Anushka Ahuja, a dentist in Gurgaon, India, opens the door for the house help she booked ten minutes ago on Pronto, an app that provides instant professional cleaning services like sweeping, mopping and laundry across 11 cities in India. A woman clad in a crisp uniform greets her with a polite smile, then asks: Can she strap a small camera onto her head to record her work?

Ahuja isn’t surprised to see the camera. In fact, she paid an extra nine rupees (about nine cents) so her cleaner would record everything from her elbows to her fingertips. Now she’ll receive a video recording a few hours later, giving her peace of mind that her house was cleaned properly and nothing was stolen or broken in her absence.

Despite disclosures in the consent form she signed, Ahuja initially didn’t realize that there’s another purpose to the camera footage: AI training data. After a cleaning session, the video is stripped of personally identifiable information like personal documents and people’s faces and then sold to American AI companies.

Bangalore-based Pronto launched the video recording service, called Pronto Verified, in May, stirring widespread backlash in India and government scrutiny over privacy concerns. Customers consent to the recording and workers are paid double for Pronto Verified bookings, CEO Anjali Sardana says.

“Trillions of dollars are going into AI capex every year. All the money in the world is getting invested in AI, but your blue-collar worker in India is not capturing any of that,” Sardana, 24, tells Forbes. “And there is an opportunity to actually redistribute that capital.”

By Rashi Shrivastava,

Forbes Staff
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