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How Uncle Nearest Founder Fawn Weaver Built a Billion-Dollar Whiskey Business

Fawn Weaver founded Uncle Nearest to honor the formerly enslaved master distiller who taught Jack Daniel the secret to making great whiskey. Seven years later, she owns the most successful Black-owned liquor empire, worth $1.1 billion, with ambitious plans for the future. Including real estate, Weaver’s 40% stake makes her worth $480 million, landing her at No. 68 on Forbes’ Richest Self-Made Women list.

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How To Give Away A $500,000
Comic Book Collection

Seven decades after he became addicted to Superman, Gary Prebula’s collection of graphic novels and comics has a permanent home at the University of Pennsylvania library. The collection is now going through more processing, by both librarians and by an appraiser hired by the Prebulas. (While the collection is worth north of $500,000, it’s up to the appraiser to determine its final value for tax deduction purposes.)

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Meet The New AI Robot Billionaire

Armed with more than $750 million in funding, Brett Adcock vows that Figure will become one of the most important businesses in the world. First, there is a lot of work to do. Adcock, the 38-year-old founder and CEO of robot maker Figure, is riding high. In January, the company announced a collaboration with BMW, with the goal of putting Figure’s robots to work at the German automaker’s Spartanburg, South Carolina manufacturing plant. 

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How Three Car Guys And A Winemaker Want To Save America’s Farms With Tractorbots

Monarch CEO Praveen Penmetsa expects sales to triple or more this year as it gets its autonomous electric tractors in the hands of farmers, earning the Livermore, California-based company a coveted spot on our annual list of the Next Billion-Dollar Startups.

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Beaches and Billionaires: Inside DJ Kygo’s Quest To Become The Gen-Z Jimmy Buffett

Kygo, whose birth name is Kyrre Gørvell-Dahl, debuted on the 2017 Forbes Under 30 Europe list at age 25. The soft spoken Norwegian is harnessing his world-wide fanbase, tropical techno sound, and high-powered fans turned friends to grow his music juggernaut into a global consumer brand—Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville for the Gen Z crowd. 

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Could MrBeast Be the First YouTuber Billionaire?

Why would anyone spend 50 hours buried alive just

to make a YouTube video? Jimmy Donaldson – aka MrBeast – had 54 million reasons last year. The world’s top-earning creator is already worth $500 million — and thinks he can double that.

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Tiger Woods Is
Finally A Billionaire

Triumph, injury, scandal, failure and triumph again have filled the intervening years. But through it all, the 46-year-old Woods has maintained his supremacy as one of the top-earning athletes in the world, raking in over $1.7 billion in salary, endorsements and other income over the course of his 27-year career—more than anyone else Forbes has tracked.

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Minnesota’s Only Black-Owned Bookstore Is Creating A Space For Black Storytelling

America's national reckoning with systemic racism has touched nearly every industry, including publishing. For Black Americans of all ages, it can be still be difficult to find stories by Black authors featuring Black characters. This lack of Black storytelling led Dionne Sims to found Black Garnet Books, the only Black-owned bookstore in Minnesota. Sims tells Forbes her journey into entrepreneurship including the various steps she has taken along the way to turn her dream into a reality.

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Over the last half century, Jimmy Rane transformed his family's backyard lumber treating plant in $1.8 billion (2021 sales) Great Southern Wood Preserving, the country's biggest producer of pressure treated lumber.

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How Two Chefs Became Farmers And Racial Justice Advocates In The Midwest

Minnesota’s restaurant and agricultural industries are overwhelmingly white and present few opportunities for people of color. Chefs Erin Lucas and Mateo Mackbee are hoping to change that. They left the Minneapolis food scene and moved to St. Joseph, a rural, mostly white Minnesota town where they are using their restaurant group and farm to promote racial justice and teach young people about sustainable farming.

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How An Entrepreneur's Partnership With Target Is Helping Build Racial Equity In Minneapolis

Houston White is the owner, founder, and designer of Houston White Men’s Room, a barber shop and apparel store located in the Camden Town neighborhood of North Minneapolis. In a city with a long history of systemic racism and inequality, White has made it his mission to help create racial equity and build generational wealth for Black citizens of the Twin Cities.

 

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