Forbes Daily Briefing

In 2025, when AI startup Spellbook signed a long-term deal with Anthropic to use its models to review legal contracts, CEO Scott Stevenson wasn’t worried about the AI giant coming for his lunch. Anthropic staffers told him explicitly they didn’t see the firm directly competing with Spellbook in the legal space, he recalls. A year later, he was caught off guard when Anthropic informed him that it was launching Claude for Legal. The tool, tailored for law firms, has dozens of capabilities ranging from contract review to citation checking to tracking regulatory changes — many of which overlap with Spellbook. That made things, “a little bit awkward,” Stenvenson says. He decided to be more cautious sharing data and product roadmaps with the AI giant. “Anthropic has been a great partner but it made us realize that they are a massive company and two parts of the org can have conflicting mandates,” he says. “Ultimately this is inevitable.” Up until recently, Spellbook used Claude to carry out over 500,000 monthly contract reviews for its customers, but it’s now moved a lot of its spend to OpenAI. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/rashishrivastava/2026/11/02/inside-silicon-valleys-love-hate-relationship-with-anthropic/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced the electric car maker will wind down production of the Cybertruck at its Texas Gigafactory next year to allow for expanded production of the Cybercab robotaxi, signaling a major shift after the company’s electric pickup struggled with poor sales and quality issues. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/11/06/musk-says-tesla-will-wind-down-cybertruck-production-next-year/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Billionaire soccer legend Cristiano Ronaldo announced Thursday he will retire from Portugal’s national team, ending a record-breaking career that spanned two decades and made him one of the world’s wealthiest athletes, just a month after longtime rival Lionel Messi played his final game for Argentina. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/11/05/billionaire-soccer-legend-cristiano-ronaldo-announces-retirement-from-portugal-national-team/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk’s brief stint as the chainsaw-waving face of the Trump administration’s DOGE initiative did little to curb federal spending, though it helped push more than 300,000 federal workers out of government through firings, voluntary resignations and early retirements last year. It also sparked anti-Tesla protests in the U.S. and Europe, some of which ended with cars ablaze. At best, DOGE was “a little successful,” he said with a sigh in a podcast interview last December with Katie Miller, the wife of White House advisor Stephen Miller who’d briefly worked with both DOGE and for Musk. But he acknowledged that if he had the chance to do it again, he wouldn’t. “I think instead of doing DOGE I would have basically worked on my companies,” Musk said. “And [then] they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.” Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/11/05/lawyer-up-elon-musks-doge-bill-comes-due/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following Tuesday’s midterm elections, which resulted in major victories for Democrats, prominent tech investors and some of the nation’s wealthiest individuals offered vastly different responses. Reid Hoffman, a billionaire and key Democratic donor, called out Elon Musk over his heavy financial backing of Texas Republicans, while the world’s richest man made light of the outcome with comments about election interference and “space lasers”. In a post on X early on Wednesday, Musk—who was the largest individual donor in the 2026 elections—joked, “Guess my election-interfering space lasers didn’t work this time,” as Democrats won both the U.S. Senate and governor’s races in his home state of Texas. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/11/04/billionaires-react-to-democratic-midterm-sweep-musk-jokes-about-space-lasers-as-hoffman-calls-him-out/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Elon Musk’s pinned tweet—at least until Tuesday night—sums up his thoughts succinctly: If Democrats won the midterms, and then the presidency in 2028, it would be “the end of democracy in any meaningful sense of the word.” In his telling, Democrats would abolish the filibuster, pack the Supreme Court, expand the Senate and institute open borders, all policies that he claims would lock Republicans out of power forever. In the waning days of the campaign, the richest man in the world put his money where his mouth was, flooding races across the country with at least $458 million, according to Federal Election Commission filings and other reporting. That’s far more than any other donor—at least three times as much as the billionaire Uihlein couple in second place, per New York Times estimates. It’s also close to three times what George Soros, the man Musk has spent years casting as the hidden hand behind the Democratic Party, disclosed spending in his biggest election ever. It didn’t buy him much. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kylemullins/2026/11/04/elons-roi-458-million-didnt-buy-much-in-the-midterms/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

China’s enthusiasm for new stocks has helped to mint two billionaires on paper, as the surging shares of tape maker Crown New Materials Technology during its trading debut on Tuesday have made its Chairman and CEO, former elementary school teacher Mai Michael, and his sister immensely rich. Mai, 62, who now has Australian citizenship and is a permanent resident of Hong Kong, has a net worth of $2.5 billion based on his stake, according to Forbes estimates. His sister, Mai Huixia, 64, a Chinese citizen and the company’s vice chairman, has amassed a $2 billion fortune from her stake, according to Forbes. The company didn’t respond to a request for comment on their net worth. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/ywang/2026/11/03/former-elementary-school-teacher-and-sister-become-billionaires-after-tape-makers-stock-surges-787-in-ipo/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world’s top ten richest people lost a total of $273 billion over the past month, as disappointing tech earnings and concerns over AI spending drove the tech-heavy Nasdaq down nearly 5%. The wealthiest person on Earth, Elon Musk, was the biggest loser, as his fortune fell by an estimated $68 billion, to $869 billion as of 12 a.m. Eastern time on November 1. That’s because shares of SpaceX, which account for nearly four-fifths of Musk’s net worth, fell by 11%, more than offsetting a 13% increase in Tesla’s stock price. But Musk is still more than twice as rich as his runner-up, Jeff Bezos, whose fortune dipped by an estimated $8 billion, to $361 billion, as shares of Amazon slid by 4%. The second and third biggest losers were Google cofounders Larry Page (world wealth rank: No. 3) and Sergey Brin (No. 5), whose fortunes tumbled by an estimated $53 billion and $49 billion, respectively, as shares of Google’s parent company Alphabet dropped by more than 18%. Page and Brin are now worth $233 billion and $214 billion, respectively. Read the full story on Forbes: https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbeswealthteam/article/the-top-ten-richest-people-in-the-world/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mukesh Ambani, the head of India’s most valuable company, overtook Bytedance’s Zhang Yinmin to become Asia’s richest person on Monday after a nearly 12% surge in Reliance Industries stock added $8.5 billion to his net worth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is one of Forbes most famous portraits deceiving us or just telling us what we want to hear? Examining the extraordinary afterlife of an iconic image. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices