Plus: The AI Billionaire You've Never Heard Of |
Good morning,
Private equity is coming for mom-and-pop businesses, but one industry group is fighting back.Nexstar Network, a member-owned organization that supports contractors in the residential service industry, decided to cut ties with every private-equity backed firm—amounting to about one-third of its membership. The move will cost Nexstar roughly half of its revenue, but president and CEO Julian Scadden is betting that its members value independence over selling out. Whether that’s true remains to be seen.
Let’s get into the headlines, |
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| Make Forbes your preferred source in Google. Here’s how. |
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| President Donald Trump pushed back a potential shutdown of TikTok to December 16, shortly after telling reporters he reached a deal with Chinese officials on the popular app. It’s the fourth such extension since January, and Tuesday’s executive order will allow for more time to finalize the sale. MORE: Sources say the deal involves a group, led by Larry Ellison’s Oracle, private equity firm Silver Lake and Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm, taking a controlling stake in a new U.S. company that will operate TikTok, the Wall Street Journal reported. The U.S. investors will hold 80%, with Chinese shareholders owning the remaining shares, and Oracle will control user data at its facilities in Texas. |
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| An alum of Google, Facebook and Twitter, Edwin Chen started data labeling company Surge in 2020 to encode the “richness of humanity.” For him, that means getting the smartest humans (including professors from Stanford, Princeton and Harvard) to train AI, translating their specialized knowledge to the 1s and 0s underpinning large language models. In addition to the Ivy League brainiacs, Chen employs an army of a million-plus gig workers from more than 50 countries around the world who help come up with questions that might stump AI, evaluating the models’ responses and writing criteria that help AI generate a perfect response. Surge, which helps tech companies get the high-quality data they need to improve their AI models, brought in $1.2 billion in revenue in 2024, from customers including Google, Meta, Microsoft and AI labs Anthropic and Mistral. (It helped train Google’s Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude.) It’s been profitable from nearly day one, according to Chen. Based on those numbers, the company is worth an estimated $24 billion. Surge is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $30 billion valuation, though the round hasn’t closed yet. By revenue, Surge is the largest in the business right now, but competitors including Scale AI, Turing, Mercor and Invisible AI are moving fast. Companies spent $104 billion on AI infrastructure in 2024, tech research firm International Data Corporation estimates, and are on pace to spend more this year. |
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| “Edwin Chen holds outsized influence in the race to improve AI models and, hopefully, create artificial general intelligence—since models like Claude or ChatGPT wouldn’t exist or improve without increasingly specialized human data annotators,” says Forbes reporter Phoebe Liu. “‘I definitely control the destiny of the company,’ says Chen, who owns an estimated 75% of Surge and believes that humans have but one chance to get AGI right. Eschewing traditional fundraising and marketing, he also hates much of what he thinks Silicon Valley stands for. After building quietly for years, he wants to be more of a public figure now. It’s important to understand why that is and what he represents.” |
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| Ben & Jerry's co-founder Jerry Greenfield announced his exit from the ice cream maker late on Tuesday, alleging that parent firm Unilever had taken away the company’s independence and “silenced” its social activism. In a statement, Unilever-owned Magnum Ice Cream Company—Ben & Jerry’s parent company—said it disagreed with Greenfield, and has “sought to engage both co-founders in a constructive conversation.” After President Donald Trump’s executive order on direct-to-consumer drug advertising, the FDA is now warning dozens of drugmakers to correct “false or misleading claims” about some of their popular weight-loss products. Pharmaceutical giants Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk were among those targeted, along with telehealth company Hims & Hers, whose stock fell nearly 6% Tuesday. |
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| A cluster of YouTube accounts are posting AI-generated, anti-Trump slapstick skits, amassing more than 2.2 billion views since they began appearing earlier this year. According to platform analytics company Zelf, eight of the 10 most-viewed YouTube videos about President Donald Trump in 2025 came from this set of accounts. |
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| Hollywood legend Robert Redford died Tuesday at his home in Utah, his publicity firm said. Redford, who began his career as a theater and TV actor in the 1960s, is famous for his roles in films like All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, later directing award-winning films including Ordinary People and founding the Sundance Institute. Paramount’s former chair Shari Redstone, who served in the role until its merger with Skydance, joined Israeli film studio Sipur as its chair, in the midst of a growing movement in Hollywood to boycott the Israeli film industry. Redstone previously told the New York Times she wanted to devote more time to pro-Israel activism. |
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$49 billion | The size of the U.S. secondhand apparel market in 2024, up from $28 billion in 2019 | |
| 40% | The surge in foot traffic to thrift stores in this year’s second quarter, compared to the same quarter of 2019 | |
| 40 million | The number of members of The RealReal, considered the leader in luxury resale |
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| Employers are falling short when it comes to providing adequate support for laid-off workers. If you’ve experienced a layoff, tap into allies in the company for job leads and references. Treat your job search like a full-time job: Schedule networking meetings, continually update your résumé and cover letter template, and keep track of your application status. |
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| GAMES | | QUIZ | | An early 2000s era company won rights to the infamous Fyre Festival in an auction held on eBay. Which firm is it? | | A. | Napster | | B. | LimeWire | | C. | Enron | | D. | MapQuest |
| | | FRASE BY FORBES |  | Unscramble today’s anagram to solve this hidden phrase!
Stumped? Scroll to the bottom of today’s newsletter for a hint. |
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