Forbes Daily: Chime, America's Largest Digital Bank Faces, IPO Reality
The 100 entrepreneurs, executives and entertainers on Forbes' tenth annual ranking are worth a collective record of $155 billion. The list includes 38 billionaires, who made their fortunes through everything from cars to cosmetics to chardonnay.
The list is once again topped by billionaire Diane Hendricks, the 78-year-old chair and owner of roofing and building materials wholesaler ABC Supply. But it also features newcomers like the majority owner of the Washington Spirit Michele Kang, and musician and actor Selena Gomez.
And more than half of the women on the list saw their fortunes grow since last year.
Photo Illustration by Davide Bonaldo/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Chime, America's largest digital bank, is aiming for an IPO valuation of about $11 billion, a sharp drop from the $25 billion it fetched in a private fundraise in August 2021, near the peak of the fintech market bubble. But despite economic uncertainty, the 13-year-old bank is moving forward with its IPO plan, having grown its active customer base to 8.6 million by offering a no-fee checking account and debit card.
In its latest economic outlook report, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—an intergovernmental group that includes 38 of the world's top economies—warned that global economic growth is set to face a significant slowdown due to increased uncertainty over President Donald Trump's tariffs. The OECD projects that global economic growth will drop from 3.3% in 2024 to 2.9% in 2025 and 2026, with the U.S. economy expected to be among the hardest hit.
Wall Street's top watchdog, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, scored a key victory as the Supreme Court declined to hear a penny stock broker's legal challenge to its constitutionality. But FINRA still faces a threat in a new bill in Congress that would move the self-regulatory body's key powers to the SEC.
Photo by Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via Getty Images
As Elon Musk still aims to make X an 'everything app,' he said this week he will start rolling out XChat, an encrypted messaging and calling platform that could be a competitor to WhatsApp. The update will expand the platform's direct messaging function, which Musk says will include encryption, file sharing, vanishing messages and audio or visual phone calls that can be made without a phone number.
Kristi Noem testified before a House committee in May about the Department of Homeland Security's budget request.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem often emphasizes her rough-and-tumble rural roots, but today she's worth about $5 million, Forbes estimates. Much of that is due to her husband Bryon's insurance business: Noem Insurance has generated $1.1 million in salary and profits for him over the past two years.
David Richardson, the acting head of FEMA, reportedly told staffers he was unaware that the U.S. had a hurricane season. While an agency spokesperson told various outlets the comments were made as a joke, they come as FEMA's workforce has been severely gutted by DOGE, with the USA Today reporting that about 2,000 of the agency's 6,100 full-time staff have been fired or resigned in recent months.
Skims cofounder Kim Kardashian, TV talk show queen Oprah Winfrey and pop star Beyoncé Knowles-Carter
Even celebrities are feeling the effects of the cooling economy. Forbes' new list of America's Richest Self-Made Women features 16 celebrities among its ranks, worth a combined $14.1 billion. But after years of booming entrepreneurship, the market is softening for celebrity-backed companies: Other than Selena Gomez, most of the stars' fortunes are little changed from a year ago.
The suspect in the attack on a Boulder, Colorado gathering in support of Israeli hostages in Gaza was charged with a federal hate crime Monday after telling authorities while in custody that he wanted to 'kill all Zionist people.' Mohamed Soliman threw two Molotov cocktails at the group gathered in front of the Boulder Courthouse on Sunday and yelled 'Free Palestine!' leaving eight injured, according to court documents.
Gun control laws in Maryland and Rhode Island will stay in place, the Supreme Court ruled, as it declined to take up challenges to the bans. Nine states have assault weapons bans in place, as gun control has become a hot topic at the Supreme Court.
Chris and Angie Long privately financed the Kansas City Current's $140 million CPKC Stadium
When CPKC Stadium, the new home of the National Women's Soccer League's Kansas City Current, opened in March 2024, it was the first venue in the world developed primarily for a professional women's sports franchise.
And while that milestone would be impressive enough on its own, the value that the 11,500-seat stadium has unlocked for the Current has been nothing short of transformative. The team, which previously played at Children's Mercy Park as a tenant under MLS's Sporting Kansas City, saw a 'more than $20 million revenue swing' in its first season at its new home, says Angie Long, who bought the franchise in 2020 with her husband Chris and privately financed the construction of the $140 million stadium.
By bolstering business lines such as premium seating and tapping into new streams, including concessions, naming rights and third-party events, the Current generated $36 million in revenue in 2024—the best mark in the NWSL and nearly quadruple the league's median of $9.5 million, according to Forbes estimates. The club is now worth an estimated $275 million, second only to $280 million Angel City FC, despite playing in the fourth-smallest market in the 14-team league.
The way the Longs see it, the growth has only just begun. The Current purposely held back in certain areas last season—limiting the number of non-NWSL events they hosted to keep the field pristine, for instance, and retaining some sponsorship assets until they had a better handle on what they were selling. With those guardrails now being lifted, the franchise is projecting $45 million in revenue in 2025.
'We're scratching the surface in every single way,' says Angie Long, a Kansas City native.
WHY IT MATTERS 'Most other NWSL clubs would face plenty of hurdles trying to replicate the Current's model, but everyone around the sport is paying close attention to the experiment unfolding in Kansas City, and as the league continues to expand beyond 14 teams, facilities are becoming a much more important part of bids by new host markets,' says Forbes staff writer Justin Birnbaum. 'Women's soccer remains a long way from catching up to established men's pro leagues, but the Current are blazing a trail toward billion-dollar team valuations—perhaps in the not-too-distant future.'
MORE The NWSL's Most Valuable Teams 2025
The buy now, pay later industry has exploded in recent years, but shares of Affirm Holdings have fallen in 2025. The default rate on such loans is rising, though industry executives say they're not worried:
13%: Affirm's stock losses so far this year
$560 billion: The size of the BNPL industry in 2025, according to one report
'A Band-Aid on top of their credit card debt': How a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official described Americans' use of buy now, pay later loans to the New York Times
If you've just found out you've been laid off, the next few days and weeks are critical. Don't panic apply just because you're anxious—it's better to identify a few employers you want to work for, connect with decision-makers at these companies and find the jobs for which they're hiring. And if you've been out of the job market for a number of years, consider rebranding yourself to highlight your most in-demand skills.
We're officially in hurricane season, but another natural phenomenon is also approaching U.S. skies. What is it?
A. The northern lights
B. Tornadoes
C. Saharan dust
D. Wildfire smoke
Check your answer.
Thanks for reading! This edition of Forbes Daily was edited by Sarah Whitmire and Chris Dobstaff.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNBC
3 hours ago
- CNBC
Asia-Pacific markets set to open lower as investors assess U.S.-Vietnam trade deal
The Otemachi One Tower building in Tokyo, Japan. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Asia-Pacific markets were set to open mostly lower Thursday as investors await details on the U.S.-Vietnam trade agreement that President Donald Trump announced on Wednesday. The U.S. is imposing a 20% tariff on goods imported from the Southeast Asian nation, while the latter will impose "ZERO Tariff," Trump said on Truth Social. This comes as the deadline for Trump's 90-day tariff reprieve draws closer. Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 was set to open marginally lower, with the futures contract in Osaka last trading at 39,740, against the index's last close of 39,762.48. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 is similarly set for a lower open, with futures tied to the benchmark at 8,587 compared to its last close of 8,597.7. Futures for Hong Kong's Hang Seng index stood at 24,174, lower than its last close of 24,221.41. — CNBC's Sean Conlon and Brian Evans contributed to this report. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that the United States has struck a trade deal with Vietnam that includes a 20% tariff on the Southeast Asian country's imports to the U.S. The deal will give the U.S. tariff-free access to Vietnam's markets, Trump said on Truth Social. Vietnam also agreed that goods would be hit with a 40% tariff rate, he added, if they originated in another country and were transferred to Vietnam for final shipment to the United States. The process, known as transshipping, is used to circumvent trade barriers. China, a top exporter to the U.S., has reportedly used Vietnam as a transshipment hub. Read the full story here. —Kevin Breuninger Hello from Singapore! Asia-Pacific stock markets are looking at a lower open after mixed trading on Wednesday. Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 was set to open marginally lower, with the futures contract in Osaka last trading at 39,740, against the index's last close of 39,762.48. Australia's S&P/ASX 200 is similarly set for a lower open, with futures tied to the benchmark at 8,587 compared to its last close of 8,597.7. Futures for Hong Kong's Hang Seng index stood at 24,174, lower than its last close of 24,221.41. We will also be on the lookout if Singapore equities can maintain their streak after notching a new high on Wednesday. — Lee Ying Shan The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite finished Wednesday's session in the green. The broad market index rose 0.47% to close at 6,227.42, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq jumped 0.94%, finishing at 20,393.13. The blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average, meanwhile, dropped 10.52 points, or 0.02%, to end the day at 44,484.42. — Sean Conlon
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
The Worst Part of Trump's Big Bill Is Getting Almost No Attention
For many weeks now, Senate Democrats have been trying to home in on the right message against the Republicans' preposterously titled Big Beautiful Bill. While the budget bill narrowly cleared the House after some false starts, its deficit-busting characteristics have thus far kept it from the unified GOP support it needs to clear the Senate. Yet the Democrats similarly are not united on the best strategy to turn the bill into a political loser among voters: The bill is a tax break for the rich. It will kick millions of people off Medicaid and food stamps. It will explode the federal deficit. All of this is true. But the Democrats have been largely silent on perhaps the bill's most ominous characteristic: an orgy of resources for Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller's shock troops to carry out President Trump's indiscriminate crackdown on immigration and protest. My sense is that Democrats are used to their Republican counterparts (and some within their own ranks) pushing for increased 'border security' and immigration enforcement funding during budget negotiations and think the public will view it as old hat. This is a sort of learned defeatism, but it also ignores that we are talking about an entirely different scale here. Taking into account previously allocated funding this fiscal year, we're looking at some $200 billion in spending on immigration enforcement, far above what's allocated to any other federal law enforcement function and more than has ever been spent on immigration enforcement. The bill is effectively a blank check, funding pretty much every aspect of the administration's ramp-up of enforcement, detention, and surveillance: hiring nearly 20,000 additional immigration agents across Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, constructing more border walls, building detention facilities for tens of thousands of additional people, and so on. It would take everything we've seen so far—the targeting of activists for their speech, masked agents grabbing people off the street, sudden flights to Guantánamo or out of the country, ramping up detentions—and crank it to 11. Beyond that, the bill furthers the transformation of federal law enforcement toward a focus on immigration enforcement specifically. The Cato Institute estimates that immigration and border funding would equal about eight times the FBI's entire budget and 36 times more than tax and financial crimes enforcement. That funding disparity is compounded by Trump's penchant for pulling agents from other functions to the all-encompassing immigration dragnet: For months now, thousands of federal agents who work on everything from child abuse to money laundering have been reassigned to raiding businesses in search of undocumented workers. Meanwhile, ICE is spending so wildly on its crackdown that it may run out of money next month—unless Republicans manage to pass this bill. These elements should be slam dunks for Democrats as they fight the bill without majorities in either chamber. The masked and unidentified agents trawling around in tactical gear, breaking windows, raiding Home Depot, dragging away soon-to-graduate high schoolers, and arresting protesters? Republicans want tens of thousands more of them, and quickly, which will almost certainly mean lowering hiring standards (just as Trump did during his first term when quickly trying to ramp up the immigration agent head count). Trump and his minions want to cram tens of thousands more people who mostly have either no criminal contact or minor infractions into slapdash new facilities as they already struggle to provide basic safety and living standards in existing detention spaces while illegally preventing oversight. And they want to do all of this while making it the best time in generations to be a child predator—the most infamous of whom, Jeffrey Epstein, Trump's former BFF Elon Musk just publicly tied him to—or a financial scammer or a bona fide terrorist as the Trump administration surges resources away from policing all that and toward dragging off your bodega guy or your child's teacher while breaking your skull if you use your constitutionally protected right to protest it. And still, presented with this ready-made argument that appeals to Americans' foundational disdain for authoritarianism and natural distaste for a secret police, Democratic leaders have largely ignored it, preferring instead to focus on the bill's cuts to social services, raising of prices, explosion of the deficit, and the wealth transfer up to the rich, all of which are valid criticisms. Cuts to services like Medicaid directly threaten lives, a reality to which Republican counterparts have had very unsatisfactory answers, most infamously Iowa Senator Joni Ernst, in her retort that 'we all are going to die.' But a lot of the fiscal responsibility stuff that the Dems are most comfortable harping on seems frankly pedestrian in comparison to a massive expansion of Trump's police—nay, military—state. Democrats clearly are still reeling from Trump's victory, which convinced them that immigration is his most popular issue and thus their own weakest line of attack. The leadership's strategy seems to be that the less they say about immigration, the better—which explains why they've been largely silent on the Los Angeles protests, as if waiting for some more politically advantageous news to emerge. If it were up to these leaders, the party would talk only about Medicaid cuts and egg prices every day. Democrats are failing to grasp that, despite their minority power, they're able to shape political opinion rather than simply responding to it. Their timid strategy on immigration also ignores two key facts. The first is that this is only tangentially about immigration. Immigration enforcement is just the pretext for, and the mechanism to execute, an autocratic power grab to crush civil society and democratic constraints, as we're seeing now in Los Angeles. Democrats don't even have to tease out this argument; officials in the administration reportedly are talking about using the resources provided by the legislation to make an L.A.-style assault happen in every oppositional blue city, a prospect Trump apparatchik Stephen Miller is practically frothing at the mouth over. Second, Trump is not really that popular on immigration; he's been underwater for a while and dropping fast, with a Quinnipiac poll of registered voters this past week putting him at 54 percent disapproval on immigration and 56 percent disapproval on deportations specifically, basically matching his terrible numbers on the economy. The public pushback and the panic from businesses that rely on immigrant workers has gotten so acute that the administration reportedly is ordering agents to cool off on raids in the agriculture and hospitality industries. Trump's supposed political strength on immigration is proving to be a weakness, and his bumbling deployments in L.A., which seem to be further sinking his popularity, are the perfect opportunity for Democratic leaders to drive the point home, in the process striking not only at the Big Ugly Bill but at Trump's broader project to make himself look invincible. If they can associate the bill in Americans' minds with images of armed, masked men racially profiling a U.S. citizen who's minding his own business on the sidewalk and drawing their guns on a church pastor (after stuffing one of her parishioners into a black SUV), the bill is probably dead in the water.
New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
Iran executes 6 people, arrests hundreds in espionage crackdown
Iranian authorities have executed six people and arrested 700 in a nationwide espionage crackdown during its 12-day war with Israel, officials and human rights groups said. After Israel's bombardments on Tehran's nuclear program exposed the extent of the Jewish state's infiltration of Iran, the Islamic republic began sweeping up residents on suspicion of treachery, with a half dozen killed in lightning-fast trials, according to the Center for Human Rights in Iran. Human rights groups and local media estimate that more than 700 were arrested across five Iranian provinces, with many of the incarcerated clueless about the charges being levied against them. 4 Iran conducted mass sweeps for alleged spies during the 12-day war with Israel that saw dozens of Iranian scientists and military commanders killed. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto/Shutterstock Advertisement 4 The strikes saw Tehran come under direct attack from Israel, with police going after residents who posted about the airstrikes on social media. UGC/AFP via Getty Images Asghar Jahangir, a spokesman for Iran's judiciary, said that the state will soon reveal exactly how many people were arrested in the sweeps, as well as what charges they will face. He told reporters Sunday that many were arrested for 'spying for the Zionist regime' — just as the Iranian parliament announced an emergency bill to impose harsher punishments, including the death penalty, over espionage charges. Advertisement Jahangir said the judiciary was also expanding its monitoring of electronic communications to go after online accounts that were allegedly cooperating with Israel. The US-based human rights website HRANA claimed that nearly 300 of the people detained so far were arrested for their online activities, including for making posts on social media regarding the Israeli bombardments. 4 Iranians said they're falling in line with Tehran's strict demands as they fear being targeted as spies for Israel. Getty Images Amnesty International first rang the alarm over the crackdowns during the war, reporting that one man was killed over espionage accusations just three days after the Israeli attacks began on June 13. Advertisement 'Official calls for expedited trials and executions of those arrested for alleged collaboration with Israel show how the Iranian authorities weaponize the death penalty to assert control and instill fear among the people of Iran,' the human rights group said of Tehran's alleged misuse of the judicial system. 'The authorities must ensure all those detained are protected from enforced disappearance, torture and other ill-treatment, and afforded fair trials at all times, including during armed conflict,' the group added. 4 Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared victory in Iran's war against Israel. IRIB NEWS AGENCY/AFP via Getty Images The crackdown has created a chilling effect across Iran, with many opting to lose their colorful clothes and don more traditional outfits lest they be marked traitors and targeted by authorities. Advertisement 'As long as this government exists, I am concerned about the chances of increased repression, but during times when there's an 'external threat,' the repression gets much worse, as they have more excuse to see us as enemies,' a 26-year-old from Tehran told the Washington Post. An activist who identified herself only as Zahra, 41, told the outlet that at least four of her colleagues were arrested during the sweeps, with more arrests likely to come as Iran tries to keep its iron grip on its citizens firm. Iran has a history of rounding up and executing dissenters in crackdowns that date back to the Islamic republic's founding in 1979. In 2022, 22-year-old lawyer Mahsa Amini died in police custody following her arrest for allegedly violating the country's strict hijab rules — sparking nationwide protests.
