Forbes December 2020

Within minutes of our publication of the first Forbes 30 Under 30 list nine years ago, our phones and inboxes filled up, Forbes.com lit up and Twitter blew up. Even the biggest professional successes tend to take a while to prove out—it’s a nice and rare feeling to know you’re sitting on an instant winner. We got a lot of things right out of the gate. First, timing. A generation ago, the Bill Gates and Michael Dell types were the exception. But over the past decade, wunderkinds became the rule: Digital natives had the vision and tools to disrupt pretty much every industry, and funders lined up to write billion-dollar checks to entrepreneurs not yet old enough to rent a car. Second, our process enabled us to evaluate thousands of nominees…

“With all thy getting, get understanding” Knowing the fundamentals of our government and history is essential to being an informed and effective citizen. Yet few Americans today know the basics about their country—that is, its history and how its government works. Having an elementary knowledge of what makes the United States tick, so to speak, and why the U.S. has been a magnet and an inspiring example to countless numbers of people around the world for more than two centuries, are important for Americans to understand, and that’s why we require those immigrants who want to become citizens to study for and pass a test on these crucial elements. For years, however, most of our schools have been derelict in teaching kids what used to be called “civics,” the fundamentals of U.S.…

Given the gargantuan, Covid-19-caused increase in the national debt, the new administration should finance a big portion of it by issuing 100-year Treasury bonds with a coupon of, say, 2%. The duration would be fitting for this once-in-a-century pandemic. The appetite for such securities in the current almost 0% interest-rate environment would be huge, attracting enormous amounts of money here at home and around the world. Insurers, pension funds and others with long-term liabilities would be especially keen on super-safe bonds with a real yield. So would foreign institutions, including central banks, as well as individual investors. We could raise literally trillions of dollars to help pay for coronavirus relief packages, as well as that much-talked-about-but-yet-to-see-the-light-of-day infrastructure bill. The bonds would lock in a rate that by historic standards is ultralow. When interest…

During the pandemic, no part of the economy has taken a harder hit than restaurants. A high-casualty, customarily thin-margin industry in the best of times, eateries were devastated by the nationwide lockdowns. Making things worse for many were the unreasonably slow steps to reopen taken in parts of the country. Unbelievably, the worst offender was New York City. This is shocking because the Big Apple has long been the center for outstanding, stunningly creative restaurants. Pre-Covid, the industry employed more than 300,000 people in New York. The prospect of fine dining was a critical attraction for tourists, whose visits were a key part of the city’s economy. Yet New York’s nasty and indescribably incompetent mayor, Bill de Blasio, took sadistic delight in unjustifiably delaying any meaningful reopening of traditional restaurants. He made…

Dr. Seuss $33 million DIED: Sept. 24, 1991 (87) CAUSE: Cancer Thanks to a series of seven-figure television and film deals, Seussville is a much wealthier neighborhood. But books remain one of the good doctor’s biggest income streams: He sold nearly 6 million in the United States this year. Sam-I-Am now has a lot more green to go with those eggs and ham. The estate of Theodor Seuss Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss) nearly doubled its income in 2020, earning an estimated $33 million in a very Grinch-like year. The bigger payday is thanks to a smart new strategy from the team at Dr. Seuss Enterprises, which transformed the 60-plus books from the beloved children’s author into a multimedia universe: Think Marvel’s Avengers without crossover characters. First up in the Seuss-iverse was Netflix’s Green Eggs and…

Big Hit Entertainment, the creative agency behind BTS, the global K-pop boy-band sensation, went public in October, making its founder, Bang Shi-hyuk (above), South Korea’s newest billionaire. With his 35% stake in the company, Bang, 47, has an estimated net worth of $1.8 billion. The seven members of BTS, all of whom are in their 20s, also received an IPO windfall: Each now has a stake in Big Hit worth more than $10 million. Nicknamed “the Hitman,” Bang was a cofounder of JYP, one of South Korea’s top creative agencies, before starting Big Hit in 2005. He enjoyed modest success with two earlier K-pop groups, 8Eight and 2AM. He later formed BTS by signing seven largely unknown young men who had never previously performed together. The group’s first single, “No More…