Forbes December 2021

Exactly ten years ago, Forbes produced a new list, the 30 Under 30, that proved perfect for the times. It highlighted young disruptors and innovators at the exact moment the “technology industry” ceased to exist. Every single industry, of course, underwent tech-driven change, with the digital natives—those born in the 1980s and then the ’90s—driving it. Forbes readers therefore learned early about Vlad Tenev and Robinhood, Whitney Wolfe Herd and Bumble, Zhang Yiming and ByteDance. Future Nobel Peace Prize winners (Malala Yousafzai), future pop-entrepreneurs (Rihanna), future billionaires (too many to name), all chronicled in their flight’s takeoff stage. “It felt like getting drafted into the big leagues,” says Dropbox cofounder Drew Houston of making the list. We began convening these young superstars at Under 30 Summits globally and connecting them digitally.…

The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has temporarily blocked President Biden’s sweeping vaccine mandate. As a result, OSHA has backed off enforcing it. The case is now in the hands of another appeals court. Ultimately, the issue will go to the Supreme Court, which will throw out this executive order—and rightly so. Last September President Biden issued an executive order to force private-sector companies with 100 or more employees to have their workers get vaccinated or be tested weekly and wear face masks. Noncompliant employers could face fines of more than $13,000 per violation. Such a sweeping order would set a dreadful precedent. For instance, what would stop future decrees from banning or limiting the sale and consumption of sugary sodas in the name of fighting the scourge of obesity? Not to…

The best thing for the future of Big Apple restaurants is the city’s new mayor, Eric Adams, who actually likes the industry and delights in dining out. He’s the happy antithesis of his lazy, nasty, utterly inept, chip-on-the-shoulder predecessor, Bill de Blasio, who took grim joy in making life unnecessarily more miserable for eateries during the pandemic. Adams, who wants his city to thrive again, is also well aware of how critical this industry is to such a renaissance. Fine dining in places with traditional and excitingly creative offerings was a crucial attraction for tourists of all kinds, not to mention one of the things that made Gotham a magnet for the ambitious. Our stellar team of discerning tasters—Forbes’ chief content officer, Randall Lane; Forbes contributor Richard Nalley; preeminent media…

CLASS OF 2012 Daniel Ek THEN: His music streaming experiment Spotify had just entered the U.S. and had 10 million active users and was worth $2 billion. NOW: Today (see page 104), Spotify streams 70 million songs to nearly 400 million users across 184 markets. It’s worth $50 billion; Ek is worth $4.4 billion. Drew Houston THEN: Dropbox, the file storage and sharing company that Houston cofounded in 2007 at age 24, was already one of Silicon Valley’s hottest startups, with 200 million users. NOW: A billionaire since 2014, Houston is still CEO of Dropbox, which went public in 2018 and has a $10 billion market cap; the company says it has more than 700 million registered users. LeBron James THEN: The Miami Heat forward, then 27, was an NBA all-star and owned a small stake in the…

CHINA Tse Ping fronts Forbes China’s list of the country’s 100 richest people. His $7.5 billion fortune comes from founding Hong Kong–listed Sino Biopharmaceutical, which gained FDA approval this year for an injection to fight chemotherapy nausea. COLOMBIA In October, President Iván Duque granted citizenship to Howard Buffett (below), the middle child of billionaire investor Warren. The 66-year-old philanthropist has contributed $160 million to Colombia since 2008, initially teaming up with singer Shakira to feed and educate GEORGIA Oregon architecture firm ZGF is working with Georgian real estate developer m2 and CEO Nikoloz Medzmariashvili on a residential concept in Tbilisi. It will include more than 10 buildings encompassing 2,800 housing units, shops and more. HUNGARY Bestselling author and retired physician Gábor Máté, who hails from Budapest and lives in Vancouver, has established a clinical theory and training…

Hobbits stand no more than four feet tall but carry the power to “shape the fortunes of us all.” So says royal elf Galadriel at the start of the first Lord of the Rings movie. That has certainly proven true for Peter Jackson. The director of that beloved trilogy and the later Hobbit films, Jackson became a billionaire in November when he sold the tech unit of his Weta Digital visual-effects house to video-game software maker Unity Software for about $1.6 billion. The deal piled some $975 million in cash and stock onto his three decades of Hollywood earnings, giving him an estimated net worth of $1.5 billion. It also sent Unity’s stock up 15% in a week, boosting the fortunes of its two billionaire cofounders, Iceland-born David Helgason and German…