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Good morning,
There is a trend among the fresh faces featured in this year’s Forbes 50 Over 50 list—nearly half of the 200 women in the 2023 edition have either founded or own their business.
The inimitable Patti LaBelle is one of them, keep reading for her story. Also featured is Tracie D. Hall, who is the the first Black woman to lead the American Library Association. With book bans on the rise in the U.S.—more than 1,400 in the first half of the ’22-’23 school year—her job is more important than ever before.
BREAKING NEWS
The U.S. Women’s National Team survived a major scare against Portugal, with the team’s first-round game at the Women’s World Cup ending in a 0-0 tie this morning. The tie secured the U.S. team a spot in the “Round of 16,” but this marks the first time since 2011 that the USWNT has not topped their group in the first round of the World Cup (Netherlands finished first in Group E). Speaking after the game, USWNT co-captain Alex Morgan said: “It’s tough to be second. We wanted to go through [in] first [place]. This team gave everything; we just didn’t put the ball in the back of the net.”
President Joe Biden on Monday rejected a controversial decision by former President Donald Trump to move the U.S. Space Command headquarters to Alabama, keeping the military’s space operations in Colorado, according to the Associated Press. Rep. Dale Strong (R-Ala.) slammed Biden’s decision, arguing the president is “ignoring what is best for our nation’s security and is instead using their woke agenda to make this decision.”
BUSINESS + FINANCE
Yellow Corp., the nation’s third largest carrier for less-than-truckload freight, plans to file for bankruptcy and will lay off its 30,000 employees, the Teamsters union announced Monday. The 99-year-old company received a $700 million loan from the federal government during the pandemic, which a congressional probe recently found the Treasury Department at fault for.
WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Convicted fraudster Leslie Greyling hasn’t let a long list of legal troubles keep him from touting stocks that are intriguingly volatile, like that of an obscure company called Tingo Inc. It’s linked to a similarly named company that Hindenburg Research called “an exceptionally obvious scam with completely fabricated financials” in a June report.
Cathie Wood is ever-optimistic about Bitcoin, and bullish on robotics and AI over the next five years, she said in a wide-ranging interview with Forbes contributor Nicole Casperson. The iconic investor also reflected on the storms weathered by ARK Invest, and how it was her mother who taught her most about money. “But boy, did she clip every coupon!” Wood says.
TECH + INNOVATION
X, formerly known as Twitter, threatened to “employ any and all tools at its disposal” against the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate. A viral June report from the organization suggested the social media company did not remove hateful content posted by paying Twitter Blue subscribers 99% of the time. The analysis contained “inflammatory, misleading, and unsupported claims,” according to Alex Spiro, Elon Musk’s personal lawyer.
MONEY + POLITICS
Former President Donald Trump expects to be indicted by the Justice Department over his conduct surrounding the January 6 Capitol riots “any day now,” he wrote on Truth Social on Monday. The indictment would mark Special Counsel Jack Smith’s second against Trump, and Trump’s third since announcing his latest run for president. Smith’s office indicted Trump in June on 37 counts related to his handling of classified documents after leaving office.
It took Mike Pence nearly two decades of government service to become a millionaire on taxpayers’ dime through his state and federal pensions in 2019—and less than three years to quadruple his fortune as a public speaker, writer and consultant after leaving the vice presidency in January 2021. The 64-year-old darling of conservative evangelicals is wealthier (and more liquid) than he’s ever been, worth an estimated $4 million, according to Forbes’ estimates.
SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT
Paul Reubens, an actor and comedian best known for his Pee-wee Herman character, died Sunday at age 70. Reubens came up with the Pee-wee Herman character while a member of the comedy troupe The Groundlings in 1978. The character soon became a hit franchise, with two feature films and a children’s show on CBS. Reubens died after a private battle with cancer, issuing a posthumous apology on his Instagram for not publicly addressing his health struggles.
A New York cricket team owned by Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s family defeated a squad partly controlled by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on Sunday in the inaugural championship match for Major League Cricket, the latest attempt to bring the hugely popular international sport into the U.S. mainstream. MI New York beat the Seattle Orcas by seven wickets at Grand Prairie Stadium near Dallas, Texas. Forbes estimates Ambani’s net worth to be $91 billion, making him the 15th richest person in the world and the richest man in India.
SCIENCE + HEALTHCARE
The National Institutes of Health is seeking people who are experiencing long Covid symptoms to participate in one of four trials as part of its Researching Covid to Enhance Recovery, or RECOVER, initiative. The NIH is spending $1.15 billion on the initiative, making RECOVER the largest program in the world aimed at understanding, treating and preventing long Covid.
DAILY COVER STORY
TOPLINE She’s a two-time Grammy winner, the voice behind “Lady Marmalade” (the original), and The Godmother of Soul. But at 79 years young, Patti LaBelle is also winning as an entrepreneur.
Fifteen years ago, the acclaimed singer started Patti’s Good Life in Philadelphia, her lifelong hometown, to sell a line of hot sauces. She has since expanded into a whole cupboard’s worth of comfort foods: peach cobbler, sweet potato pie, chicken and biscuits, mac n’ cheese. Every dish is based on one of LaBelle’s own recipes.
LaBelle started cooking when she was 10 years old, escaping to the family garage to whip up her signature spicy ketchup. She never gave it up. Throughout her performing career, she cooked for Elton John, Prince and the Rolling Stones, going as far as labeling the tinfoil trays with her name so there was no mistaking Patti LaBelle’s food for the catered stuff. Her first cookbook was published in 1999. “Friends of mine would always say, ‘Why don’t you open a restaurant or start your own line of food?’ ” she says.
Patti’s Good Life gross sales hit nearly $200 million last year. It’s a royalty deal, meaning LaBelle pays a factory to bake her goods, then sells them to America’s largest grocers, including Target and Walmart; the latter alone accounted for $85 million of 2022 sales.
LaBelle is one of the 200 founders, innovators and creators on the third annual Forbes 50 Over 50, which highlights women making power plays at age 50, 60, 70 and beyond.
WHY IT MATTERS Back in 2003, LaBelle experimented with selling clothes on the Home Shopping Network, but she wasn’t satisfied with the quality of the garments, and her heart just wasn’t in it. The experience taught her that she would rather wholly own a business than merely license her name and personal brand to a third party. With Patti’s Good Life, she’s near obsessively hands-on, and the attention to detail pays off. “My cooking is going places where my singing career has not gone,” she told us.
MORE: The Age Of Disruption: Meet The 50 Over 50 2023
FACTS AND COMMENTS
California’s York Fire, the biggest in the state so far this year, expanded over a remote section of the Mojave Desert on Monday, prompting officials to close roads as the blaze threatens to scorch California’s desert.
77,000: Estimated size of the York Fire in acreage, the biggest in California since the McCash Fire, which burned nearly 95,000 acres in Northern California in 2021
Less than 25%: Percentage of the state that qualifies as “abnormally dry” or in “moderate drought” conditions, compared with 100% that was in some stage of drought last year
Just over 50 miles: The distance to Las Vegas from where the fire started on private land in the New York Mountains of the Mojave National Preserve
STRATEGY AND SUCCESS
Can $50 in a college savings account for a kindergarten student really make a difference in their lives? San Francisco’s Kindergarten 2 College program started doing exactly that in 2011, and those students graduated from high school last May with an average of $1,422 in their accounts. That might not be much, but that does cover a year at California’s cheapest-in-the-nation community colleges. Plus, a 2009 study found students with college savings accounts were nearly twice as likely to expect they’d attend college.
VIDEO
QUIZ
In 2021, Shohei Ohtani won the Most Valuable Player Award by a unanimous vote of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. This season, the superstar has been even better, and has a chance to become the first player in Major League Baseball history to win the MVP unanimously on multiple occasions. Since 2000, five players have won unanimous MVPs. Which of the following is not one of them?
A. Barry Bonds (2002)
B. Alex Rodriguez (2005)
C. Mike Trout (2014)
D. Bryce Harper (2015)
ACROSS THE NEWSROOM
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