Forbes Daily Briefing

Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche signed a document Tuesday giving Donald Trump, his two eldest sons and his company broad immunity for potential tax disputes with the federal government. It’s the clearest way that the president is personally benefitting from his settlement with the Internal Revenue Service, which he sued days after taking office for failing to prevent the release of his personal tax returns. The settlement lands at a convenient moment. Donald Trump earned an estimated $1.4 billion from crypto and licensing ventures in 2025, as he turned his first year back in the White House into the most lucrative year of his life. If the president received an extension for his 2025 return, his preparers may be sorting through exactly how to present this year’s welter of income right now. Trump has never hidden the animating principle. When Hillary Clinton accused him of paying no taxes in the 2016 debates, he replied: “That makes me smart.” Also much richer. If Trump is able to conjure up theories to avoid taxes for his 2025 income, he could save more than a half-billion dollars, according to Forbes estimates. The conflict-of-interest underpinning all of this is so obvious that even Trump has acknowledged it. “I’m the one that makes the decision, right?” he mused in the Oval Office in October. “You know, that decision would have to go across my desk. And it’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself.” Trump first suggested he would send whatever judgement he received to charity, before settling on a more creative approach. The government would not pay Trump. Instead, Trump would get a pass enabling him to pay less to the government. The move harkens the old cliché—a penny saved is a penny earned—with the same result: more money in Trump’s pocket. By Dan Alexander, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The robot, a pair of disembodied arms with crablike pincers at the end, wasn’t supposed to pick up the bag. It had been told to do a single tedious job: open plastic bags on a conveyor belt and stuff toy potted plant plushies inside them. Then one plushie snagged halfway in. The robot paused — briefly, as if assessing its work — then did something it had not been programmed to do. It raised its other arm, grabbed the other side of the bag, gave it a quick shake so the toy slid all the way down, and then placed it back on the belt. For a human worker that’s muscle memory. For the engineers at Generalist, a Silicon Valley startup developing robot “brains”, it was a tell: the robot wasn’t just replaying a scripted task. It was improvising. By Anna Tong, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s push for self-sufficiency in semiconductor manufacturing has benefited companies across the supply chain. The latest to get a boost is Hubei Dinglong, which supplies materials essential for the chip making process. Its Shenzhen-listed shares have surged nearly 116% over the past year, propelling cofounders Zhu Shuangquan and Zhu Shunquan into the three comma club. Shuangquan, the company’s 61-year-old chairman, and his 57-year-old brother Shunquan, who serves as CEO, own stakes of roughly 15% each. Forbes estimates the siblings are worth $1.3 billion apiece based on Friday’s closing price of 64.19 yuan. Hubei Dinglong didn’t respond to a comment request regarding the pair’s billionaire status. The Wuhan-based company is China’s key player in chemical mechanical polishing (CMP), a process to flatten the surface of silicon wafers so that circuits can be printed and chips can be stacked. The company says it is China’s only supplier that covers the full range of CMP materials, from the semi-liquid known as slurries for flattening to the cleaning fluid for removing any residue after the process. Since the U.S. imposed chip-related export controls on China in 2022, Dinglong has expanded into materials for lithography, a major hurdle for China’s self-reliance in semiconductors where ultraviolet light is used to print circuits onto silicon wafers. In lithography, Dinglong manufactures photoresist, a chemical that captures the circuit design, though its most advanced products can only be used in lower-end chip manufacturing. By Zinnia Lee, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Wednesday, Forbes published its inaugural list of America’s Largest Family Businesses by revenue. But sales are hardly the only way to measure the magnitude of a business. That’s why for the first time ever, we’ve valued the nation’s top private family firms. Most aren’t flashy, preferring to remain low key. Despite their reticence, three of them are worth more than $100 billion, by our estimates, making them more valuable than all but a handful of the hottest tech unicorns like SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic. Occupying the number one spot is $185 billion (estimated valuation) Koch Inc., the Wichita, Kansas-based conglomerate formerly known as Koch Industries, which is 84% owned by the families of 90-year-old chairman and co-CEO Charles Koch and Julia Koch, the widow of Charles’ brother David (d. 2019). The oldest of the top 25 is food and agriculture giant Cargill, which was founded by William Wallace Cargill in 1865. By Andrea Murphy, Forbes Staff Matt Durot, Forbes Staff. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The launch of Anthropic’s AI model Mythos a month ago sent shockwaves through the cybersecurity world. The tech was so advanced, the AI company said, that it had found dozens of severe bugs in critical internet code. Now, cyber startup Depthfirst says its own AI model has found even more bugs that Mythos missed for just a tenth of the cost, including critical flaws that could affect the majority of people using the web today. Depthfirst CEO Qasim Mithani says that because Depthfirst optimizes its models for one task, it can do for $1,000 what Mythos does for $10,000. Depthfirst, which raised $80 million at a $580 million valuation in March, is also launching Open Defense Initiative, a program that offers companies and open source developers a total of $5 million in credit to use its artificial intelligence to find bugs in their code. It’s similar in concept to Anthropic’s limited release of Mythos, which it gave to a group of nearly 50 companies (and it’s now expanding). Depthfirst won’t pick and choose who can access its model, but will review applicants, at first limiting it to open source developers whose code is widely used or deployed in critical infrastructure. By Thomas Brewster, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The middle-aged Pennsylvania couple had lived together for more than a decade, buying a home together and sharing other assets. They never got married. It didn’t matter, they thought. But after he died of cancer recently, leaving her his entire estate, it did matter. A lot. Pennsylvania is one of a handful of states that still imposes an inheritance tax–a tax on transfers from a person who has died to the people who inherit, with rates based on the category of recipient. Transfers to spouses, but not to unmarried partners, are exempt. Pennsylvania subjected everything she was left to inheritance tax at the state’s top 15% rate. The woman, who asked not to be identified, was shocked. Americans spend a lot of time thinking about where to live for tax purposes. States like Florida and Texas lure both billionaires and ordinary workers by touting their lack of a state income tax. Other states lure seniors with generous exemptions for retirement income. But another question gets less attention: Where is the most expensive place in the U.S. to die? By Kelly Phillips Erb, Senior Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For decades, DIYers and construction pros have picked up yellow and red bags of Quikrete concrete mix from the shelves of America’s big box stores like Home Depot and used it for everything from anchoring mailboxes to patching driveways and making outdoor benches and steps. That in turn has generated billions of dollars for the little-known company and the little-known family behind the brand. But their time in the shadows may have come to an end. In February 2025, the privately-held building materials firm made a big splash when it paid $11.5 billion to acquire publicly traded competitor Summit Materials. The deal, which Forbes estimates boosted Quikrete’s revenue by around 50% to an estimated $12 billion, helped propel the Atlanta-based company onto Forbes’ first ever ranking of America’s Largest Family Businesses, published this week, at No. 43. Based on Forbes’ estimates, Quikrete is the 17th most valuable privately-held family business in America, making its founding Winchester family one of the country’s richest clans, worth an estimated $18 billion, thanks to their estimated 100% ownership of Quikrete. “We’re proud of our heritage as an American, family-run company that has helped revolutionize the building and home improvement industries,” said Quikrete’s longtime former CEO Jim Winchester in a press release celebrating the company’s 75th anniversary in 2015. “From day one, my father Gene Winchester was driven to meet the needs of both contractors and homeowners with the highest-quality products at fair market value, and that commitment remains a core value of Quikrete today.” By Matt Durot, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Onan overcast April day in the middle of Rhode Island’s Narragansett Bay, Paul Lwin looks like he’s playing a vintage video game. He huddles over a laptop on the deck of the spartan vessel he’s taking out on the water today. Tiny boat icons float across the screen; he draws a box around them, selects a few parameters, and clicks “Start Play.” Seconds later, a set of driverless boats in the bay a mile away begin gliding in parallel with the icons, which leave bright blue tracks on the screen in their wake. Lwin flashes an enormous grin. Each of those autonomous crafts is a “Rampage,” the 14-foot flagship boat of Lwin’s Providence-based company, Havoc, which outfits its vessels with technology that theoretically lets a single human control thousands at once. Lwin, 40, and his cofounder Joe Turner, 42, both Navy vets, aim to become the U.S. military’s go-to maker of specialized software for not just uncrewed boats, but all domains, after recently acquiring a couple of small aerial and land drone startups as well. “The goal here is to make sure you don’t need to know anything about robotics or autonomy,” Lwin explains, showing the steps again on the laptop. “If it’s not this simple, it’s a science experiment. Operators—especially warfighters who don’t have PhDs in robotics, who don’t have PhDs in search algorithms—will never use it if it’s more difficult than this.” By Monica Hunter-Hart, Reporter Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

From dinner at the White House for owners of his meme coin to a $400 million jet gifted by a petromonarchy that will be donated to his presidential library after he leaves office, Donald Trump has led the charge on extracting private gains from public office. His Cabinet appears to have absorbed the lesson. Take Sean Duffy, the former Fox host-turned-Secretary of Transportation. On Friday, his department dropped a trailer on YouTube unveiling the Great American Road Trip, an initiative purportedly designed as a “guide to the historic landmarks, open roads, and small towns that tell 250 years of this country’s story.” But what the trailer showed was a reality show in which Duffy, his still-a-Fox-host wife Rachel Campos-Duffy and their nine children gallivant around America. They meet a Ben Franklin impersonator in Philadelphia, ride snowmobiles in Montana and hang out with Kid Rock along the way. All in good fun. “We live in a PornHub world, and this is really good, wholesome family stuff,” Campos-Duffy said in an interview on—where else?—Fox. By Kyle Khan-Mullins, Forbes Staff Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When ride-hailing app Uber listed on the New York Stock Exchange in May 2019, it reset the scales for all venture capitalists. In one of the all-time largest initial public offerings in the United States, the company raised $8.1 billion on a $82 billion valuation. Early backers like venture fund Benchmark, Google Ventures and Lowercase Capital held stakes worth over $12 billion at the time of the float. But the numbers for that deal — one of the best of the last era of startups — now look quaint. That’s because the valuation of just three startups, SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic, have exploded over the last year. Elon’s space giant is now tipped to go public at a valuation of over $1.5 trillion as soon as June following its merger with xAI in February, which valued the combined business at $1.25 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are now valued at $852 billion and $380 billion respectively, with Anthropic reportedly in talks to at least match its archrival’s valuation in a new fundraise. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Every company these days wants to figure out how to automate people’s work with AI. Turns out, AI can also help with that. Founded in 2019, San Francisco- based startup Scribe makes a browser extension that sits on employees’ laptops, recording their screens and silently watching them work. Along with giving businesses insight into the steps involved in repetitive tasks, Scribe’s AI software can then automatically generate step-by-step guides and tutorials that clearly explain how different teams operate, complete with annotated screenshots and click instructions. That’s also perfect for teaching AI agents how people work: what to do, which tools to use and how to handle different tasks on their own. “Companies are realizing we need to make our organizations legible to humans and agents,” says CEO and cofounder Jennifer Smith. Today 80,000 customers including LinkedIn, HubSpot and T-Mobile use Scribe’s guides to train new employees on complex workflows and zero-in on inefficiencies, helping them save time and money. (Teaching agents, rather than humans, is still nascent.) By Rashi Shrivastava, Writer Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Martin Varsavsky has trouble keeping track of all the ventures he’s started. There are more than a dozen of them, including a handful that became worth more than $1 billion. But Certuma, which launched quietly this winter, may be his biggest idea yet: He plans to build the first FDA-approved AI doctor. “What’s happening now is everyone you know, and probably you yourself, are checking your medical problems with AI. But then what happens when you want action? The AI, after giving you a wonderful, accurate diagnosis of what’s wrong with you, says, ‘I am not a doctor,’” Varsavsky tells Forbes. He ticks off all the questions it might answer this way, from getting a prescription to scheduling imaging. “I want to fix the ‘I am not a doctor’ problem by building AI that is recognized by the FDA and recognized by the states.” AI doctors could help solve an important problem, much like telemedicine did during the Covid-19 pandemic. There simply aren’t enough physicians to serve all the people who need them, especially in rural areas. The shortage is only getting worse. More than 100 million people in the United States face barriers to accessing primary care.Meanwhile, some 46% of counties don’t have a cardiologist; in rural counties, that number rises to 86%. By Amy Feldman, Senior Editor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Last winter, Groq cofounder and CEO Jonathan Ross walked into a meeting with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang with a pitch for the companies’ tech to work together. He now describes the synergy with a logistics analogy: stop building AI data centers as if every workload wants the same hardware. Training is bulk hauling; inference is last-mile delivery. GPUs can do both, but using the 18-wheeler even when you just need a van can be a lot slower. So: Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs are the big trucks. Groq’s specialized chips—LPUs, or language processing units, designed to run models fast—are the smaller vans. “If you were building out a logistics network for the entire United States, and I told you your two options were all 18-wheelers or just delivery vans, which one would you pick?” Ross said. “The best answer is both.” Ross wasn’t just pitching a worldview. He wanted Nvidia’s permission to buy around 100,000 Blackwell chips, likely worth billions. Huang grilled him on the technical details, and then the meeting ended. When Huang called back three days later, Ross expected a discussion about his GPU purchase order. Instead, the Nvidia CEO cut to the chase. “We should probably move really fast,” Ross recalled him saying. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices