Tag: billionaires

Billionaire Sports Mogul Has Quietly Become America’s Largest Private Landowner

Stan Kroenke, the billionaire sports magnate who owns the NFL’s Los Angeles Rams and England’s Arsenal FC, has quietly ascended to the top of America’s private landownership rankings, controlling more than 2.7 million acres following a blockbuster off-market acquisition in December, according to The Land Report.

The deal saw Kroenke purchase over 937,000 acres of ranchland in New Mexico from the heirs of Teledyne founder Henry Singleton, marking the largest single private land transaction in the U.S. in more than a decade, according to The Land Report’s 2026 ranking of the nation’s 100 largest landowners.

The noncontiguous parcels, focused on cattle and horse operations, vaulted Kroenke from fourth place into the No. 1 spot, surpassing the Emmerson family’s 2.44 million acres of timberland through Sierra Pacific Industries, Liberty Media’s John Malone at 2.2 million acres, and former CNN owner Ted Turner’s 2 million acres, Fox Business reports.

Kroenke, who built his fortune in real estate development before expanding into professional sports, has assembled his sprawling portfolio – primarily ranching and grazing land – across the American West and into Canada over decades.

Key holdings include the 560,000-acre Q Creek Ranch in Wyoming, the historic 535,000-acre Waggoner Ranch in Texas, Montana’s Broken O Ranch, Nevada’s Winecup Gamble Ranch, and British Columbia’s Douglas Lake Ranch, according to The Land Report.

How staggering is Kroenke’s total land holdings?

Well, it now exceeds the size of Yellowstone National Park and equates to roughly 2 million football fields, according to Fox Business.

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The $134 Billion Betrayal: Inside Elon Musk’s Explosive Lawsuit With OpenAI

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft has evolved into a high-stakes dispute over whether OpenAI stayed true to the mission it was founded on or quietly outgrew it while relying on that original promise.

Musk is seeking between $79 billion and $134 billion in damages, a figure derived from an expert valuation that treats his early funding and contributions as foundational to what OpenAI later became. While the number is enormous, the heart of the case is simpler: Musk argues he helped create and fund a nonprofit dedicated to AI for the public good, and that OpenAI later abandoned that commitment in a way that amounted to fraud.

According to Musk’s filings, his roughly $38 million in early funding was not just a donation but the financial backbone of OpenAI’s formative years, supplemented by recruiting help, strategic guidance, and credibility. His damages theory, prepared by financial economist C. Paul Wazzan, ties those early inputs to OpenAI’s current valuation of around $500 billion.

The claim is framed as disgorgement rather than repayment, with Musk arguing that the vast gains realized by OpenAI and Microsoft flowed from a nonprofit story that attracted support and trust, only to be discarded once the company reached scale, according to TechCrunch. 

Much of the public attention has centered on internal documents uncovered during discovery, particularly private notes from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman in 2017.

One line has become central to Musk’s argument: “I cannot believe that we committed to non-profit if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”

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California Billionaires Are Leaving the State in Response to Proposed Wealth Tax

The ultrarich are leaving California as a result of a proposed billionaire tax. “Eat the rich” may be a popular rallying cry, but it’s not viable public policy.

The ballot measure, which was submitted in November 2025 by Suzanne Jimenez, a health care union representative, would impose a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires who were California residents as of the measure’s tax “obligation date” of January 1. Even though the initiative has not yet passed, venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya estimates that $1 trillion of billionaire wealth “has left California” in advance of the measure’s tax obligation date. California billionaires have also taken “income tax revenue, sales tax revenue, real estate tax revenue and all their staffs (and their salaries and income taxes) with them,” says Palihapitiya.

The measure would create a Billionaire Tax Health Account, which would receive 90 percent of the revenue generated by the tax. Funds from this account would go “to protect or enhance Medi-Cal,” California’s Medicaid program. (That same program was found by the Biden administration to have improperly claimed nearly $53 million in federal funding on behalf of noncitizens with ineligible immigration statuses from October 2018 through June 2019.) The remaining 10 percent would go to a new Billionaire Tax Education and Food Assistance Account, which would subsidize public K-12 education, plus two years of community college. This account would also help pay for “CalFresh, CalFAP, CalFood or California’s Universal Meals Program for school meals.”

The government should not be in the business of redistributing wealth, and a wealth tax is an especially ineffective means of generating revenue for any purpose. Moving costs might make it hard for other individuals and businesses headquartered in California to leave, but billionaires are highly mobile; they can easily become residents of another state by purchasing a house, acquiring a driver’s license, and registering to vote there.

California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom understands this eventuality. The New York Times reports that Newsom opposes “‘state-level wealth taxes’ because they encouraged those who would be affected to move to another state.” To avert this outcome, Newsom has been “relentlessly working behind the scenes against the proposal” and “he would fight the measure if it reached the November ballot,” according to the Times.

The act itself recognizes billionaires’ ability to evade taxation: “A large percentage of billionaire wealth is never taxed by the State due to billionaires’ unique ability to control the timing, location, and amount of income tax that they pay.” This tax avoidance is exactly what has happened since the ballot measure was submitted.

Importantly, the tax conflates voting shares with equity, as Garry Tan, president and CEO of venture capital firm Y Combinator, recently explained on X. This means that under the law, Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin—who each possess 30 percent of the voting rights in Google, but only own 3 percent of its equity—would have to pay a 5 percent tax on the value of their voting control. Tan estimates that this figure would come to about $60 billion each, and in order to pay this, both Page and Brin would have to liquidate 50 percent of their Google shares. The two co-founders recently fled the state to avoid this potential penalty.

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Trump Says He Will Speak to Musk About Restoring Internet Access in Iran​

President Donald Trump said on Jan. 11 he was planning to speak with tech billionaire Elon Musk about restoring internet access in Iran after the regime blocked online services amid protests.

“As you know, he’s very good at that kind of thing. He’s got a very good company. So we may speak to Elon Musk, and heck, I’m going to call him as soon as I’m finished with you,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Musk’s SpaceX company offers the Starlink service, which allows users access to the internet without any wired connection via a constellation of satellites surrounding Earth.

The flow of information from Iran has been hampered by an internet blackout since Jan. 8.

Neither Musk, who also owns social media platform X and electric car company Tesla, nor Starlink has yet commented publicly on Trump’s statement about the use of the technology in Iran.

The Epoch Times contacted SpaceX for comment but received no comment by publication time.

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Small Pennsylvania town locked in bitter dispute as billionaire buys up village to revamp under his control

Residents of a wealthy Pennsylvania village confronted developers this week after learning that a billionaire has quietly bought up much of the town’s commercial core, fueling fears that one family now wields outsized control over its future.

The backlash centers on Jeff Yass, Pennsylvania’s richest man, whose family has spent more than $15 million acquiring homes, storefronts, and civic properties in Gladwyne, a community of just under 5,000 residents and where median home prices top $2.3 million.

At a packed public meeting in a school auditorium, developers working with Yass unveiled their first detailed redevelopment plans for the village center.

The moment that drew both applause and skepticism from residents alarmed by shuttered businesses, rising rents, and unanswered questions about the scope of the billionaire-backed project.

Standing before the crowd, Andre Golsorkhi, founder and CEO of design firm Haldon House, unveiled a sweeping redevelopment plan crafted in partnership with Yass and his wife, Janine. 

Golsorkhi framed the effort as a ‘community impact project,’ insisting the billionaire family’s intentions were rooted in preservation rather than profit.

But for a town already rattled by closed storefronts, the presentation drew plenty of suspicion and unease.

Over the past several years, Haldon House and the Yass family have acquired multiple properties clustered around the intersection of Youngs Ford and Righters Mill Roads – effectively Gladwyne’s commercial heart.

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Musk: AI Will Make Cash Worthless, Work Optional, Retirement-saving Obsolete — and More

If “work ennobles man,” as the saying goes, are we headed for a very ignoble future? If “cash is king” today, what will reign tomorrow? If an abundance of the material can bury the spiritual, are we headed for an ever-more intensified secularism?

These questions could and should be asked with a prediction billionaire industrialist Elon Musk recently made.

Our not-too-distant future is one, he says, in which cash will be worthless and work merely an option. Why, Musk adds, there may not even be a reason to save for retirement. How come?

Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics will in a decade or two, he states, deliver a world of mechanical slaves that will satisfy every human need and want. In fact, the only limit to the abundance might be energy constraints and raw materials’ finiteness.

The Ant and The Grasshopper — Mr. Hopper’s Time Has Come?

Reporting on the story earlier this week, The Daily Overview wrote:

Musk has moved beyond warning that AI will disrupt jobs and is now arguing that it will underwrite a new baseline of prosperity. As Tesla CEO, he has said that advanced systems will create a kind of universal high income that makes traditional saving less important, because machines will be able to produce almost everything people need with minimal human labor. In his view, the combination of AI and robotics [AI-Bot] will eliminate poverty by driving the cost of goods and services toward zero….

He has gone further, arguing that as AI systems scale, money itself will soon be useless in the way people currently understand it. In one account, the argument is framed explicitly as “According to Elon Musk, Money Will Soon Be Useless, Why Does He Predict the End of Poverty,” with Musk contending that AI and robotics will become the backbone of a utopian society where scarcity is engineered away and financial incentives lose their central role. That framing captures his claim that the same technologies that threaten existing jobs could, if managed correctly, also dismantle material deprivation….

This may sound fanciful to some. But the only real question is whether we’ll destroy ourselves, or whether AI will, before or soon after this technology’s full flowering. What’s for certain is that if we don’t, AI-Bot will eventually be able to perform every or virtually every job. Why, need a plumber? A dexterous AI android may be repairing your pipes.

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Bill Gates, Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla Ordered to Testify in Dutch COVID Vaccine Injury Lawsuit

Bill Gates and Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla will have to appear in person in the Netherlands to testify at a hearing in a COVID-19 vaccine injury lawsuit, a Dutch court ruled late last month.

The court order relates to a lawsuit filed in 2023 by seven people injured by COVID-19 vaccines. One of the victims has since died.

The lawsuit centers around the question “of whether the COVID-19 injections are a bioweapon,” Dutch newspaper De Andere Krant reported. In addition to Gates and Bourla, the suit names 15 other defendants, including former Dutch prime minister and current NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, the Dutch state, and several Dutch public health officials and journalists.

De Andere Krant said last month’s ruling “is a significant setback for the defendants, who are accused of misleading victims about the ‘safety and effectiveness’ of the vaccines.” However, it “remains to be seen” whether the defendants will comply with the court’s order and appear at next year’s hearing.

The defendants may face additional legal challenges in Dutch courts in the new year. A second lawsuit, filed in March by three COVID-19 vaccine injury victims in the Netherlands, presents a similar set of allegations and names the same defendants.

At a press conference last week, Dutch attorney Peter Stassen, who represents the vaccine-injured plaintiffs in both cases, earlier this month petitioned the courts in both cases to hear in-person testimony by five expert witnesses regarding the safety and efficacy of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

According to Stassen, oral hearings will be held in both cases next year, but hearing dates have not yet been scheduled. Stassen seeks to consolidate the cases.

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Bill Gates Thinks Anything He Disagrees with Is ‘Misinformation’ that Should Be Policed by AI

Billionaire tech tycoon Bill Gates has expressed concern about the impact of “misinformation” on future generations, claiming that AI should be used to police ideas he disagrees with online. The creepy Microsoft founder has a long history of taking radical positions on issues including climate alarmism that he’d like to stifle dissent against.

Fortune reports that in a recent interview, Bill Gates discussed what he sees as the growing problem of misinformation and its potential to negatively affect the lives of his children and future generations. Gates, who reinvented himself as a creepy advocate for climate alarmism and other leftist causes,, noted that the spread of false information online has become a significant concern for him and his family.

The billionaire’s comments came in light of a recent incident involving his daughter, Phoebe Gates, who claims she was subjected to online harassment. This experience led Gates to reflect on the broader implications of misinformation and its ability to cause harm to individuals and society as a whole.

“Seeing my daughter targeted by false claims and harassment online was a wake-up call,” Gates said. “It made me realize that the problem of misinformation is not just about the present, but it’s also about the future we’re leaving for our children.”

Gates argues that the spread of what he considers to be “misinformation” can have far-reaching consequences, from undermining public trust in institutions to hindering progress on critical issues such as public health and climate change. He noted that the proliferation of false information online has the potential to erode the foundations of democracy and create a more polarized and divided society.

“Misinformation is a complex problem that requires a multi-faceted approach,” Gates explained. “We need to invest in media literacy programs, support fact-checking organizations, and encourage responsible behavior from social media platforms. But we also need to foster a culture of critical thinking and healthy skepticism, so that people are better equipped to distinguish between credible information and false claims.”

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Trump Says Mega-Donor Offered Him $250 Million to Run for Third Term

President Donald Trump lit up the White House Tuesday night after Israeli-American billionaire mega-donor Miriam Adelson floated the idea and even dangled another $250 million if he ran for a third term.

The stunning exchange took place during the annual Hanukkah candle-lighting ceremony at the White House, where Trump proudly praised Adelson as his campaign’s top donor from the 2024 election cycle.

According to Trump, Adelson had already contributed an eye-popping $250 million to help propel him back into office.

“Miriam gave my campaign indirectly, $250 million. She was number one. When somebody can give you $250 million, I think we should give her the opportunity to say hello,” Trump said.

Trump then invited Adelson to the podium, introducing her as an “incredible woman” and praising her late husband, Sheldon Adelson, as a fierce and unapologetic champion of Israel.

During her remarks, Adelson recounted her long-standing admiration for Trump, including attending one of his speeches at the Israeli Knesset despite being in physical pain at the time.

The moment quickly took a political turn when she revealed a conversation she had recently had with Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz.

“And now I met Alan Dershowitz,” Adelson said. “And he said, the legal thing about four more years. And I said, Alan, I agree with you. So we can do it. Think about it.”

That line immediately ignited the room. The audience erupted into chants of “Four more years! Four more years!”

Trump returned to the microphone with a wide grin and dropped the bombshell.

“She said, ‘Think about it. I’ll give you another $250.”

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The billionaire family poised to rewire U.S. media in Israel’s favor

In early September, the Hollywood producer Lawrence Bender — known for his work with Quentin Tarantino on films including “Pulp Fiction” and “Inglourious Basterds” — had what he later described as “a really tough conversation” with the investors in “Red Alert,” an Israeli miniseries that dramatizes the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.

With just weeks remaining before the anticipated release on the second anniversary of the attacks, the show, produced by Israeli mass media company Keshet Media Group, was struggling to secure distribution outside of Israel. The news environment was far from favorable: Israeli fighter jets had just attacked a residential compound in Qatar, and a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that were “implicated” in the genocide in the Gaza Strip had collected thousands of signatures in Hollywood.

“No one’s going to want to buy something from the Israelis,” Bender, an executive producer of “Red Alert,” told the investors, as he recalled on stage at a Jewish National Fund–USA conference the following month. Among those investors was the Israel Entertainment Fund, which JNF–USA established last year with the Israeli streaming service Izzy to produce television and film for international audiences, with a focus on projects filmed in the “Gaza Envelope” region of southern Israel. “We were pretty stressed about what we were going to do,” Izzy CEO Nati Dinnar‏, interviewing Bender on stage, recalled.

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