Plus: With Trump’s TikTok Ban On Hold, ByteDance Is Quietly Launching AI Apps |
Good morning,
The healthcare industry is experiencing critical staffing shortages of doctors and nurses, and startup Medallion wants to ease at least some of the paperwork burden that physicians face. The company launched a new financial intermediary called CredAlliance on Monday to streamline credentialing, a messy and time-consuming process that costs more than $1 billion each year. Doctors can only practice medicine in states where they’re licensed, and each insurer has to verify their credentials—it all adds up to roughly 25 million times a year that providers need to get credentialed, according to CEO and founder Derek Lo, a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum. Lo says five of the nation’s 10 largest health plans are considering joining.
Let’s get into the headlines, |
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| A record number of public companies are adding crypto to their balance sheets—purportedly to diversify their holdings, hedge against inflation and attract new investors. But in reality, it also helps boost their stock price. A year ago, a small group of corporate buyers collectively held just over 416,000 bitcoin. Today, no less than 152 publicly traded companies control more than 950,000 coins worth over $110 billion, according to BitcoinTreasuries.net. President Donald Trump said Monday he called Russian President Vladimir Putin after holding meetings with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and European leaders, adding that he “began the arrangements” for a discussion between the two leaders. Earlier in the day, Trump told Zelenskyy he would give Ukraine “very good protection and very good security” when asked about security guarantees that Ukraine is seeking, and in a post on social media, Zelenskyy called Monday’s meeting “a significant step toward ending the war.” |
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 | | Illustration by Philip Smith for Forbes |
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| In 2024, Congress passed a law saying that TikTok—and any other app owned by its Chinese parent company, ByteDance—would have to be sold, or they would be banned in the U.S. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice not to enforce that law, a reprieve that has kept TikTok online past the law’s January deadline. But the non-enforcement order has done more than just “save” TikTok: it has enabled ByteDance to continue developing and introducing new products into markets in the U.S. and across the world. In many cases, these products have focused on new uses for AI. In addition to new apps for the Chinese market, ByteDance has launched English-language tools like Trae, an AI coding assistant; Dreamina, an AI image generator; PicPic, a generator of “AI Replicas” or avatars; EasyOde, a music licensing platform; and an open source AI agent called Agent TARS. Some of these products have not disclosed their ties to ByteDance, which often releases new apps under development through Singapore-based subsidiaries. ByteDance’s flood of new products is, to some extent, just the company keeping up with its competition. Trae’s offerings, for example, are similar to the Microsoft juggernaut VS Code, while Dreamina’s are comparable to Midjourney and Google Veo. But the new apps also make clear that ByteDance will remain a central part of the geopolitical struggle for AI supremacy between the U.S. and China. And as Trump has said he intends to broker a deal in which ByteDance would sell at least some of its interest in TikTok’s U.S. operations, one TikTok insider recently told Forbes that any such deal would likely go beyond TikTok and include other ByteDance apps, too. |
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| “ByteDance is an enormous tech giant whose international offerings go far beyond just TikTok,” says Forbes senior writer Emily Baker-White. “Congress intentionally scoped the sell-or-ban bill to address its full suite of offerings, and as the AI race heats up, the company will remain a major player on the world stage. How Trump—and Congress—handle this next phase will be pivotal to ByteDance’s future.” |
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| Startup Grid Aero believes it has a solution to a perennial Department of Defense need to move troops and supplies all over the world—ideally with the right combination of range, capacity and affordability. The company aims to build a fleet of affordable, autonomous cargo planes, and it came out of stealth on Monday with a prototype aircraft that it developed in just six months. |
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| President Donald Trump said he would sign an executive order to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines ahead of next year’s midterms, though it is sure to face legal challenges as voting laws are established by states with guidelines from Congress. Trump has long claimed without evidence that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election, even as he supported mail-in ballots in the 2024 election. In her 2024 financial disclosure, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) failed to mention her book agreement with Donald Trump Jr.’s publishing house, which could be illegal, though she’s unlikely to be prosecuted. Even though Greene’s memoir was published in 2023, she would still have to disclose the deal in 2024, per federal rules, since she continues to receive funds from it, one campaign finance and government ethics attorney told Forbes. |
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| The country’s largest measles outbreak in 30 years is officially over, the Texas Department of State Health Services declared, as it has been over 42 days since a new case was reported in the affected areas. Children were most impacted by the outbreak, accounting for at least 511 out of 762 cases, and two deaths. |
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| Air Canada and its unionized flight attendants reached a tentative contract deal early Tuesday, which could potentially end a strike that forced the airline to suspend flights impacting nearly half a million passengers. The news comes after the airline pulled its financial guidance Monday, and Air Canada’s CEO Michael Rousseau cautioned that the complete restoration of all flights could take up to a week. |
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$67 million | How much Newsmax will pay to Dominion Voting Systems over the next three years | |
| Over $800 million | The amount Dominion has won from settlements in its defamation cases | |
| ‘Fair’ and ‘Balanced’ | How Newsmax described its reporting on Dominion machines, continuing to deny that its reporting was defamatory |
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| Feeling bored while on the clock doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with you—it could be a sign your role is no longer keeping up with your potential. And while your first instinct might be to search for a new job, you can also speak to your manager and explore opportunities to take on new projects or be exposed to different groups. It’s important for managers to create a workplace culture where employees can speak up about boredom before it turns into disengagement. |
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| GAMES | | QUIZ | | A horror film dominated the box office for the second week in a row, grossing $26 million this past weekend. Which movie is it? | |
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