Forbes Daily Briefing

Tom Mueller is driving his candy green Porsche Taycan Turbo S the way he builds rocket engines: with a terrifying amount of instantaneous thrust and little regard for the local speed limits of El Segundo. He is headed west on Marine Avenue, cutting through the smog-tinted sunlight of Los Angeles’ South Bay aerospace corridor, talking about Earth’s limitations. 

“If we continue to grow like we have, eventually you just use up all the metals, you use up all the energy,” says Mueller, 65, who is especially concerned by the energy demand of AI data centers. “By about 2045, the total power that the world is generating right now would be needed just for compute. Exponential growth can crush resources on Earth.”

From behind his reflective wrap-around shades, Mueller spots a gap in the afternoon congestion. His electric sports car can rocket from zero to 60 in 2.3 seconds, and Mueller seems eager to demonstrate the point. “This is where we accelerate,” he says, stomping on the pedal. The torque hits like a physical blow, pinning us against the leather seats as Mueller cackles. “The moon and the near-Earth asteroids,” he continues moments later, now parked at a red light, “contain billions of tons of metal, silicon, water and ice, so we have to start using it. It seems a little farfetched to start using it now, because we just haven’t built the space economy. We haven’t got there yet.”

By John Hyatt,

Forbes Staff

Alicia Park,

Reporter
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It’s almost 8 a.m. when Gloria Moncrief arrives at her oil firm’s hangar at Meacham Airport in Fort Worth, Texas. She climbs into an eight-seater Cessna Citation, explaining that her Boeing 737, Lucky Liz, is in the shop. The flight to a small airfield in southern Louisiana takes about an hour. Then it’s a 45-minute drive along the levee into the Atchafalaya river basin, the largest swamp in North America, followed by 15 minutes on a flat-bottomed boat past alligators, nesting bald eagles and fishermen muscling their bass boats into the bayou.

Rounding a bend in the waterway, the boat arrives at a giant drilling rig with a 150-foot-tall derrick and roaring engines. Tall and thin, decked out in jeans and knee-high ostrich-skin boots, the 44-year-old Moncrief steps onto the rig, where a handful of mud-covered roughnecks maneuver 40-foot lengths of steel pipe with massive hydraulic tongs. 

Moncrief is the head of Montex Drilling Company, the family business that owns Moncrief Oil and has been spending $300,000 a day to rent the rig and staff it around the clock with 60 folks working 12-hour shifts, 14 days on, 14 days off, all to drill the second-deepest natural gas well ever in the U.S. The Highlander 2 goes down 30,862 feet (almost six miles), where it intersects an 800-foot-thick (gross) zone of sand saturated with trillions of cubic feet of natural gas. The well was recently completed after 389 days of drilling.

By Christopher Helman,

Senior Editor
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After news broke that Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund would cease backing LIV Golf beyond this season, putting its future in doubt, Jon Rahm was asked in May about the status of his contract with the tour. “I don’t see many ways out,” the 31-year-old Spaniard answered pragmatically.

Rahm’s next steps appear dependent on whether LIV can secure external funding to continue operating beyond this year—if its 2026 schedule can even be completed—but in the meantime, his golden handcuffs haven’t been so bad. Rahm’s contract, which reportedly guaranteed him at least $300 million when the former world No. 1 left the PGA Tour in December 2023 to sign with LIV, has made him the world’s highest-paid golfer for the third consecutive year.

Forbes estimates Rahm hauled in $111 million over the last 12 months before taxes and agent fees, sending his total pay for the past three years north of $400 million. His compensation since last June includes an estimated $101 million in prize money and on-course bonuses as well as $10 million in off-course earnings from brand partnerships, appearance fees and licensing income. In addition to his contractual guarantee with LIV, which Forbes estimates to be worth $50 million for the past year, Rahm pulled in an $18 million bonus in 2025 as LIV’s individual champion for the second year in a row, and he has won two tournaments so far this season, helping push his total up 9% from the estimated $102 million he pocketed in the 12 months that ended in June 2025.

By Hank Tucker,

Forbes Staff
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In 2008, just days before one of SpaceX’s early rocket launches failed to reach orbit, Peter Thiel’s fund wrote the first institutional check into the nascent, six-year-old startup. 

Now, as Elon Musk’s rocket and AI company goes public today at a nearly $2 trillion valuation, the fund’s stake is worth a staggering $67 billion — making that first check, and the additional $600 million Founders Fund invested over the following decade, into one of the most lucrative in venture capital history. 

The company started trading just before noon E.T., with an opening price of $150, which is the figure Forbes used for all of the stakes in this story. It soon popped up about 20% in the first few minutes of trading. As the largest single shareholder, the IPO has now minted Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. Thousands of his employees are now millionaires and the fortunes of many of his billionaire colleagues and investors have soared. 

That doesn’t mean everyone can cash out immediately. Most companies going public put restrictions on insiders and investors from selling shares for at least six months to avoid painful share price slides from major shareholders dumping stock — a problem for previous tech IPOs like Facebook, where shares slumped 31% below the opening price in the 12 months after its listing, according to data from bank Truist.

By Iain Martin,

Forbes Staff
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For most of James Dolan’s tenure in charge of the New York Knicks since he became Madison Square Garden’s chairman in 1999, he has been an easy punching bag for Knicks fans—and much of the damage was self-inflicted. But now, after one magical spring, that turbulent past might be water under the bridge. The Knicks are NBA champions for the first time in 53 years, a moment many fans never thought would be possible with Dolan in charge.

“Hey, New York, I’m sorry it took so long, but here we are, and hopefully it won’t take that long again!” Dolan shouted on stage after Saturday night’s 94-90 victory over the San Antonio Spurs in Game 5 clinched the title.

The 71-year-old Cablevision heir also has plenty of reason to celebrate off the court. Forbes recently valued the Knicks at $9.75 billion—No. 3 in the NBA—and Dolan’s NHL team, the Rangers, at $4 billion, the second-best mark in hockey. While that combined total of $13.75 billion easily outpaces the $9.26 billion market cap of the publicly traded MSG, the stock is up 103% over the past year. Meanwhile, Dolan’s other company, Sphere Entertainment, which owns the Sphere just off the Las Vegas Strip and the MSG regional sports TV and radio networks, has seen its share price soar 291%.

By Hank Tucker,

Forbes Staff
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