Forbes Daily Briefing

There’s a new member of the $300 billion club and a second sibling from America’s richest family among the planet’s ten wealthiest people.
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Mariana Minerals CEO and cofounder Turner Caldwell is betting that the next big use for AI won’t be another chatbot—it’ll be a copper mine.

His startup, Mariana Minerals, is launching the world’s first autonomous mining operation today at its Copper One mine in remote southeast Utah: automated drills do the digging, giant robotic haul trucks move ore for processing, and an AI-enabled platform called MarianaOS will track and direct the entire operation. The company is even using Boston Dynamics’ Spot robot dog, packed with sensors, to patrol the 10,000-acre site and inspect conditions.

If it works, Mariana could help boost both U.S. copper supply and U.S. copper refining as demand for the metal climbs and the politics around “critical minerals” grows louder. In a few years, the company could be generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue from both the Utah copper mine and a separate lithium refining operation it’s setting up in Texas, recovering the mineral from wastewater from oil and gas fields.
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Shulman is spinning up a new song. His electric bass guitar hangs idly on a nearby wall. A 61-key synthesizer and drum kit remain untouched a few doors away. Instead, he types a few sparse phrases – pedal steel guitar, country Americana folk, acoustic guitar — into his startup Suno’s AI music generation software. 

A few seconds later, a song comes to life: fluid guitar strums and human-sounding vocals with a smooth Southern accent soar over an upbeat tempo. It’s instantly catchy, like if Ella Langley met Lana Del Rey. 

The tune isn’t a chart-topper or a summer hit, but it’s evidence enough for why more than 100 million people have now used Suno to make music. Suno-created songs have gone viral on TikTok, debuted on Billboard charts and racked up millions of streams. Over 7 million songs are made on the app every day, catapulting it to the top of the Apple App Store’s most downloaded music apps in April — surpassing Spotify. 

“The technology finally allows for billions of people to be creative, to have the fruits of their labor, to feel fulfillment in a different way,” says CEO Shulman, 39. He calls it a “new form of consumer entertainment.”

By Rashi Shrivastava,

Writer
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“Mommy and daddy would always bring home boring notebooks, pens, and chargers with company names on them, but that would just go in the trash. But why not stuffies? You never throw stuffies away.”

Quincy Fuller is 8 and already delivering that line like he spent too much time in pitch meetings. He and his 10-year-old brother, Jackson, are co-CEOs of Stuffers, a family-run business that makes custom stuffies, or plush toys, for corporate swag. Their customers include companies like Reddit and marketing agency New Engen. Their office is their play room. Their design team includes an AI model. Their first-year revenue: $100,000. 

That makes the Fuller siblings a case study for the "AI-native" generation, one where the gap between a child’s imagination and the finished product has effectively vanished. In previous decades, kids’ entrepreneurship was limited by what they could do physically. Delivering newspapers. Squeezing lemons for lemonade. Mowing lawns. But with AI, the internet, and parents handling the adult work, the gap between a kid’s idea and a manufacturable product has dramatically narrowed.

By Anna Tong,

Forbes Staff
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Eric Trump jumped on an earnings call in February ready to do what Trumps do best—sell. His company, American Bitcoin, had debuted just a year earlier and was already trading on the Nasdaq. “We are fast becoming the leader in the bitcoin world, and I truly think we have the greatest brand of all,” Eric said. “I want to recognize Mike, Asher, Matt and everybody at American Bitcoin.”

It was a noteworthy closing—“and everybody at American Bitcoin”—given that there is hardly anyone else at American Bitcoin. An annual report filed one month after the earnings call stated that the company has just two full-time employees, presumably chief executive Mike Ho and president Matt Prusak. Maybe there are a couple of others—Ho also serves as an executive at another company. Someone who worked in investor relations at Ho’s other company for less than a year now calls herself “chief of staff” at American Bitcoin on her LinkedIn page. Another person says she started as American Bitcoin’s social-media manager in January. (Asher Genoot, the executive chairman, sits on a five-person board with Ho and three independent directors.)

The Trump family learned long ago that there is money to be made in acting like things are bigger than they actually are. Fred Trump, Donald’s father, allegedly juiced his profits by duping authorities into thinking his projects cost more than they actually did. Donald Trump lied to banks (and media outlets like Forbes) about the value of his assets, leading a New York judge to conclude that he committed fraud. Eric Trump got caught up in that case, too, and was banned from serving as an officer or director of any New York corporation for two years. He created his own company anyway, incorporated in Delaware and headquartered in Florida, then marketed it in a way that would make his forefathers proud.

By Dan Alexander,

Senior Editor
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