As the infamous sports bar franchise Hooters has floundered, the restaurant chain’s original founders have concocted a plan to return it to its former glory.
The group is leading a deal to acquire 111 Hooters locations out of bankruptcy and plans to invest about $40 million in its turnaround. The first step, says Neil Kiefer, CEO of the Original Hooters Founders Group, is creating a more wholesome image—he believes the previous owners “oversexualized the concept.”
“We don’t want to leave the Hooters world in the condition it is in. We have a moral obligation,” Kiefer says.
Organizers of Saturday’s “No Kings” protests said more than 7 million attended demonstrations in at least 2,600 locations, to show their opposition to President Donald Trump’s policies. The turnout was markedly higher than the 5 million who protested at its previous nationwide events in June.
The U.S. struck another Colombian boat Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said was carrying drugs, and killed three people on board. Trump called Colombian President Gustavo Petro a “drug leader,” and promised to cut off subsidies and raise tariffs. Petro accused U.S. officials of murder following a previous strike, but wrote in a post Sunday, “The problem is with Trump, not with the U.S.”
The good times for crypto investors hit a snag as bitcoin slid to a four-month low Friday, falling nearly 18% from its all-time high earlier this month. Investors had seemed to rally around crypto as a safe haven investment during the government shutdown, but appeared to react negatively to broader credit concerns expressed recently by regional banks.
The Muhlenkamp Fund, once a star on the Forbes annual mutual fund Honor Roll list, is making a comeback as one of the few actively managed mutual funds to beat the S&P 500 over the past five years. Key to that strategy is gold, which has more than doubled in the last five years amid fears of inflation and geopolitical instability.
Ukrainian entrepreneur Anton Pavlovsky, founder of Headway, launched the company’s educational app to help users distill information from books. Even in the midst of a war, he has grown Headway to 160 million users across its five-product portfolio, and Forbes values the firm at $720 million.
The world’s second-richest person Larry Ellison was $24 billion poorer on Friday as Oracle shares took a beating, even as analysts celebrated its revenue growth expectations. Oracle closed down 7%, a drop that could be attributed to executives failing to provide additional details about the company’s capital expenditure plans.
Startup Sage Care aims to help patients and healthcare systems deal with navigation—which can be anything from appointment booking to referrals, part of an increasing number of firms using technology to address healthcare administration. The company is now emerging from stealth with $20 million in funding at a valuation of around $90 million, and customers that include Michigan’s Bronson Healthcare and White Plains Hospital in New York.
Parents are increasingly concerned about the impacts of chatbots on young people’s mental health, and Instagram unveiled new safety features for teens who use the app’s AI chatbots. The company said the new features will include more parental controls by “early next year,” and the announcement comes after the death of a California teenager who was allegedly encouraged by OpenAI’s ChatGPT to take his own life.
The U.S. government has proposed the controversial “gold card,” which would give wealthy foreign nationals who pay $1 million a fast pass to U.S. permanent residency, along with the “platinum card” at a $5 million price point. While both share the goal of attracting international capital to the country, they differ in terms of cost, tax implications and intended beneficiaries.
DAILY COVER STORY
There’s an emerging class of artificial intelligence users: Older people who use generative AI to combat isolation.
Loneliness is a mounting crisis for the elderly. About one third of U.S. adults between the ages of 50 and 80 feel isolated, according to a national study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Social isolation is tied to increased risk of depression, anxiety and heart disease, research suggests.
A flurry of startups have emerged to use AI to solve one key facet of this—companionship. And for good reason: The market for AI in aging and elderly care was $35 billion last year and is predicted to grow to more than $43 billion this year (though that includes AI-enabled devices and other applications besides chatbots), according to a study by the firm Research and Markets.
Founded in 2024, nascent AI startup Meela (with just $3.5 million in seed funding) is answering the companionship question by enabling “friend-like” personalized conversations with AI. For about $40 a month, family members can arrange for Meela to call their elderly relatives on the phone at a certain time of day. To avoid any confusion, Meela identifies itself as an AI companion at the start of every call. “I don’t want to dupe anybody into talking to a robot,” Meela AI CEO and founder Josh Sach told Forbes.
WHY IT MATTERS “Loneliness is a burgeoning crisis for elderly Americans—one that can eventually have detrimental impacts on a person’s health,” says Forbes staff writer Rashi Shrivastava. “Thanks to advances in generative AI, a bunch of startups are betting that artificial intelligence can help tackle the companionship problem that several older adults face. And even though the technology is still nascent (and far from perfect), seniors are one of the earliest, most avid adopters of AI companions.”
MORE Meet The Stanford Dropout Building An AI To Solve Math’s Hardest Problems—And Create Harder Ones
Revenue from Latin music is surging in the U.S., outpacing the growth across all genres. Billboard’s Latin charts have been dominated this year by upcoming Super Bowl performer Bad Bunny, who released his latest album in January:
$490.3 million: The revenue generated by Latin music in the U.S. for the first half of 2025, according to the Recording Industry Association of America
8.8%: The share that Latin music represented of all U.S. music revenue during that same period, a market share that’s been growing
14: The number of No. 1 hits from Bad Bunny on Billboard’s Latin songs chart
A college degree has long been sold as the ticket to the middle class—but with millions saddled with student debt, that’s not necessarily the case anymore. Be sure to calculate the ROI of a potential degree the way you would for any investment, and don’t worry about conventional wisdom if an apprenticeship or skills-first program can get you to a well-paid career faster. For employers, it’s critical to build a skilled workforce and not cling to outdated hiring practices.
A heist in broad daylight rocked the Louvre in Paris on Sunday, where thieves made off with “priceless” French crown jewels. The robbery was described as a “professional” operation, about how long did it take?
A. 15 minutes
B. 10 minutes
C. 7 minutes
D. 4 minutes
Thanks for reading! This edition of Forbes Daily was edited by Sarah Whitmire and Chris Dobstaff.