Forbes October 2020

I’m writing from New York’s Catskills, where I’ve been running a month-long math, music and mountains camp for 12 girls. If you’d told me in February that I’d write that sentence, I’d have countered with about a trillion more likely ones. But my daughters (and their friends, it turned out) needed acceleration and opportunity. And so here I am, and here they are, along with two teacher-counselors, a dog, a trampoline and more cereal, pasta and avocados than I can count. We’re calling it DIY Camp, as in Dad Innovates, Yo! With or without the yo!, success or sometimes even just normalcy demands innovation right now. Forbes has celebrated that word for more than a century, but never has the need for entrepreneurs to rethink, reinvent and reimagine been more urgent.…

“With all thy getting, get understanding” It’s called universal basic income, and the idea is gaining ground here and in Europe, especially with Covid-19 hitting economies so hard. The government would pay every adult a certain amount of money every month, whether you work or not. Democratic party activists love the idea. So do some Republicans. The Pope came out in favor of the notion. A candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, Andrew Yang, advocated paying every adult $1,000 a month. He didn’t win, but his idea is catching on. Italy has a minimum-income measure that tops up one’s income if it falls below a certain level. Spain is mulling over something similar. While Yang’s proposal sounds enticing—who wouldn’t want an extra $12,000 a year?—it would do real harm. Let’s make clear that…

Aided by a stock market that has defied the pandemic, the very wealthiest Forbes 400 members are doing better than ever. The top 20 are worth a combined $1.3 trillion, up 21% from a year ago, while the average Forbes 400 member’s wealth is up 8% from last year. In all, these 21 ultra-rich individuals (there’s a tie at No. 20) account for 42% of the total wealth of this year’s list. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has finally bested Warren Buffett for the No. 3 spot, while Elon Musk breaks into the top 20 for the first time. Forbes calculated net worths using stock prices from July 24, 2020. 1. JEFF BEZOS $179 billion SELF-MADE SOURCE: Amazon AGE: 56 • RESIDENCE: Seattle, WA PHILANTHROPY SCORE: The world’s richest person has his troubles, including coronavirus-related protests by Amazon workers…

Hundreds of billions of dollars sit in Forbes 400 members’ private charitable foundations. But because the IRS effectively requires them to pay out only a tiny fraction each year, just a sliver of that sum is deployed annually to causes and communities in need. To shine a light on those putting their philanthropic dollars to work, we’ve changed the methodology for The Forbes 400 philanthropy score. Instead of counting the dollars that list members have parked in their foundations over a lifetime, we tallied the grants made by those foundations (technically, “adjusted qualifying distributions”), plus direct gifts we could track, to estimate how much The Forbes 400 has actually given away. We did not count gifts to donor-advised funds, except when list members shared details about grants paid by such…

In late July, hours after President Trump issued his latest threat to ban TikTok in the U.S., 19-year-old Addison Rae Easterling posted a new video to the app, imagining what her life would be like in such a world: She’d be back at Louisiana State University, where a year ago she was just another anonymous freshman. Today she has 55.3 million followers and ranks No. 1 on our inaugural list of TikTok’s highest-paid stars. Easterling (above), who became famous for her dance TikToks, earned an estimated $5 million in the past year through branded merchandise (T-shirts, hoodies, phone cases) and sponsorships with companies including Reebok. She recently inked a deal to be the global face of American Eagle; began a weekly Spotify podcast, in which she discusses her life with her…

Akash Nigam 28 Evan Rosenbaum 28 COFOUNDERS, GENIES L.A.-based pair built some 10 apps before creating AI avatars that can mimic you on messaging services like Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp. With millions of avatars created, Genies has raised $40 million. Joe Thomas 30 Vinay Hiremath 28 Shahed Khan 25 COFOUNDERS, LOOM Slack meets Zoom: Bay Area trio has raised $73 million for software enabling 5.5 million users to record video presentations shared instantly via chat. Ariel Pasternak 29 Atara Bernstein 30 COFOUNDERS, PINEAPPLE COLLABORATIVE Friends from a D.C. farmers’ market transformed their potluck into this 100,000-strong community—90% women, including celebrity chefs Christina Tosi, Carla Hall—to share recipes and host cooking demos. Tyler Faux 30 COFOUNDER, SUPERGREAT After helping to build crime-tracking app Citizen, this New Yorker now hosts more than 150,000 user-generated beauty and skin-care product reviews. The site’s viewership has tripled during the pandemic. Hayley Leibson…