Millionaires

Some millionaires wanted to build a city in the middle of a desert that did not convince anyone. They have had another idea: a shipyard

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Residents of Solano County, northwest of the San Francisco Bay Area, realized that someone had been secretly shopping a large amount of farmland. In fact, even the army He asked who had been purchasing all the land around one of his military bases located in that county. After much investigation, it was learned that behind these purchases there was a group of Silicon Valley billionaires with a plan as utopian as it is controversial: build an entire city from scratch, in the middle of dry fields. A secret land purchase. It all started in 2018, when a company called Flannery Associates was acquiringlittle by little, agricultural plots throughout the county. The owners received figures well above the market value, but no one knew who was behind the purchase. The county itself detected that a single company was purchasing large amounts of land and asked for an explanation. It wasn’t until 2023 when it came to light that Flannery was actually the real estate arm of California Foreverand that investors had been secretly buying land in Solano since 2018, until finally announcing their true purpose: to build there a new city. By then they already had some 24,281 hectares and between 800 and 900 million dollars invested. Who puts the money. The name that shows the face is Jan Srameka former Goldman Sachs trader of Czech origin. But behind the project there are Silicon Valley investors like Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell JobsLinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, as well as Michael Moritz, former partner at Sequoia Capital. His initial idea was to build a walkable city in the style of New York’s West Village, designed to attract high-net-worth employees driven by housing shortage in Silicon Valley. The plan stood on paper, but I needed something to only county voters of Solano could grant: change the law Solano County’s “Orderly Growth Initiative” of 1984, known as Measure A, which protects agricultural soil. Without that permission from the citizens there was no city possible. Water, the great obstacle. That’s where the problems started. Solano It is not an area with water leftover, and the neighbors immediately saw the risk of shortage to build a new city and increase consumption. Congressman John Garamendi, one of the most critical voices of the project, assured that “From the beginning, I have maintained that the proposed project was just a pipe dream, not a real plan. Accelerating the process without a comprehensive environmental and community review would have been disastrous for the current residents of Solano County”, criticizing that the project did not take into account that it was a site without water, without sanitation and without roads. The company tried to promote a campaign to win the vote of the citizens in 2024, which became one of the most expensive in the history of the county, and even then it was not enough. The vote was withdrawn and the project was, for the moment, frozen. The turn towards the shipyard. After that blow to the continuity of the project, California Forever changed its arguments. Instead of first selling a city in the middle of nowhere, he now sells a plan of industrialization with connections to the military: a shipyard in which to build ships equipped with the latest technology in naval defense, and close to the Travis military base. The new plan pivots on two axes. On the one hand, the Solano Foundryan industrial park of about 850 hectares located just over an hour from San Francisco that aims to become the factory for robotics projects and materialize all the R&D of Silicon Valley. On the other hand, the Solano Shipyarda complex of about 3,035 hectares designed to house several shipyards dedicated to military and civil naval construction. The idea with this turn is clearly to first attract the industrial fabric and employment, and then cover the housing needs of its workers by building the city that had been projected from the beginning. Unions, Trump and what remains to be decided. To win over Solano this time, California Forever has played another card: unions. The company signed with the construction union council and the carpenters union a labor agreement for the next 40 years on the 28,328 hectares of land it owns, in which it undertakes to hire your affiliates in the construction of that city. The speech is also supported by national politics and from California Forever they defend that building shipyards on the west coast is necessary to stand up to Chinaand has sought to fit the project into the SHIPS Actthe law that Trump has promoted to reindustrialize the US naval industry. A report Commissioned by the Bay Area Council, it estimates some $215 billion in private investment and the generation of 530,000 jobs in this industrialization plan for the area. However, the shipyard remains without a permit from the county, and the chosen land is next to the Suisun Marsh protected areaone of the largest brackish water wetlands on the West Coast. Water, again, will decide if this project remains a promise or becomes something real. In Xataka | The other war between the US and China is in the shipyards Image | Unsplash (Daniel J. Schwarz, Charlie Huston)

millionaires love it

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Where would you live if money were no problem? There are those who will say that they would go to the countryside, where there is no Internet connection, to live life and take care of a garden and some chickens (spoiler: it is quite sacrificial), but the reality is rather different. The millionaires of the world have other preferences and a recent report by the firm Henley & Partners has shed a lot of light on the matter. It turns out that millionaires care little about the field, the garden and the chickens. Your favorite destinations are others. The report. He “Henley Private Wealth Migration Report 2026” is a report that measures the structural competitiveness of countries to attract and retain the fortunes of millionaires. Each country receives a score from zero to 100 based on several factors, such as tax treatment, quality of life, geopolitical stability, etc. The higher the score, the more “interesting” that country is to live, invest or deposit capital. That score, as a curious fact, is called “Wealth Mobility Competitiveness Score”, which sounds much more fancy that “competitiveness index in terms of asset mobility”. Panoramic of Singapore | Image: Song Kaiyue A little house in Singapore… According to the report, the most interesting country for millionaires is Singapore, whose score is 79.5. The reason, the firm argues, is that it is a country “with political stability, solid institutions, deep capital markets and sustained demand for assets with international mobility throughout Asia.” Their proximity to Hong Kong and China clearly makes them win points economically. …another in New Zealand… With a score of 75.8, New Zealand is attracting investors thanks to the “relaunch of its Active Investor Plus Visa Programme, stable legal and regulatory environment, geopolitical stability and its position as a safe destination away from geopolitical hotspots,” the report states. Panoramic view of Mount Cook in Canterbury, New Zealand | Image: Donovan Kelly …and of course, spend the summer in the Cayman Islands. Not because of its beaches, not because of how beautiful the Pedro St. James Castle is (now converted into a museum), not because of how good Seven Mile Beach is, but because, according to the report, “a leading jurisdiction in wealth structuring, supported by a neutral fiscal framework, legal certainty and a sophisticated financial services ecosystem.” This is what it means to be a tax haven.which allows you to achieve a score of 74.3. The other contenders. There are a total of 16 countries that equal or exceed 70 points. The three mentioned above top the list, but it is worth highlighting the large presence of European countries with Cyprus, the Netherlands, Italy, Latvia, Switzerland, Greece and Monaco. The report places special emphasis on Italy, a country considered an “example of success” thanks to its “single tax regime for new residents, a favorable tax framework for inheritance matters and access to the EU market.” Here is the list of the top countries: Those who do, but with doubts. The report also includes some countries that have implemented changes in their policies and regulations and that, therefore, are “creating pressure on their long-term competitiveness.” Among those countries are Germany (69.7), France (65.7), Norway (69) and the United Kingdom (68.3), countries that are debating or have already applied wealth taxes, or that are facing political uncertainties. The most striking case is that of the United Kingdom, which “faces competitiveness pressures that began after Brexit and have accelerated with recent tax reforms.” The paradoxical case of the United States. It is one of the main creators of wealth, but it is not attractive to maintain it. The reason, the report states, is “taxation based on citizenship, fiscal complexity and the long processing times for immigration files.” The norm, the firm explains, is that large American fortunes want to go to European countries and, to a lesser extent, Latin America and the Caribbean. And what does this tell us? Beyond curiosity, this report could be understood as a canary in the mine for millionaires. An increase in the migration of the wealthy population could be an indicator of the health of a country’s economic policy, while a greater outflow (in the case of the United States) would be an indicator of the opposite. However, it is not a perfect indicator nor can it be understood as such. The relationship “millionaires are leaving” = “the country is going badly” is not direct and may respond, for example, to a risk diversification strategy. It is what the report calls “sovereign portfolio” and, in essence, it is an idea that responds to something simpler: uprooting. The great fortunes are not attached to their country of origin, but diversify their residence, citizenship and business interests in different countries. It is, however, a short-term strategy that understands that states do not change, when this is not the case. What is an advantage today, in the long run, implies simultaneous dependence on several legislative and regulatory systems that, in short, increase the risk. Not to mention that a good country is not only one that has greater fiscal competitiveness, but also one that provides a solid social system. Cover image | Diego F. Parra In Xataka | Luxury homes in the US are selling like hotcakes and experts think they know why: AI

who’s who in the new AI millionaires

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The Forbes Millionaires List of 2026 added 45 new names of millionaires. What is relevant about these new incorporations is the origin of their fortune: it comes from companies related, directly or indirectly, to the rise of AI. The most surprising thing about this new list of new millionaires is that, just a year ago, practically no one knew who they were. Today, the combined fortune of this group of AI billionaires exceeds $2.9 trillion. If this small group of visionaries formed a country, it would be the fifth largest economy in the world. Jensen Huang: the man in the leather jackets. Jensen Huang began his career washing dishes at a Denny’s for less than three dollars an hour. In 1993 co-founded NVIDIA and for two decades it opted for GPUs for video games. Then AI came along and turned NVIDIA upside down. All models in the world needed their chips. Suddenly, NVIDIA had become the main engine of a great expanding industry and Huang in its main director. Huang’s fortune is around 166 billion dollarsand NVIDIA is worth more than five billion in the stock market, making it the most expensive company in the world. 97% of the CEO’s assets are in shares of the company itself, so his personal fortune is closely linked to NVIDIA obtaining good results. If the AI ​​craze cools, its fortunes will fade at the same rate. But for now, Huang is the only shovel seller in the biggest gold rush of technological history. Alexandr Wang: the child prodigy of Los Alamos. Alexandr Wang was barely unknown three years ago. This 29-year-old was born in the same town where Oppenheimer built the atomic bomb. His parents were physicists and he dropped out of MIT in his first year. At the age of 19, he founded Scale AI, a company that data label to train AI models. The most invisible job in the development of AI and, according to himself, the most necessary. At 24 years old he was already the youngest billionaire of the world. At 28, Meta bought 49% of Scale AI for 14.3 billionwhich gave him the label of “AI whiz kid“Wang went on to lead Mark Zuckerberg’s AI strategy with a clear goal: build Meta superintelligence from the ground up. The company he led already has his first modelcalled Muse Spark. His alliance with Mark Zuckerberg has skyrocketed his personal wealth, which is now around 3.2 billion dollars. Dario Amodei: the one who builds what he fears most. Dario Amodei was vice president of research at OpenAI. One day he decided that he did not agree with the AI ​​development guidelines, considering that the technology he was helping to create it was dangerous. His sister Daniela He also did not agree and both resigned from their positions at the company that created ChatGPT. Together they founded Anthropic, which in May 2026 closed a round of 65 billion and reached a valuation of 965,000 million. Amodei wrote a 15,000 word essay where he argues that AI can cure cancer and reverse climate change. He wrote it while designing security systems so that the same AI would not do just the opposite. Dario’s personal fortune is around $15.5 billion. according to Forbes. Amodei has become a millionaire by building something that he considers a real threat…and is not the only one. Sam Altman: the “rara avis” of Silicon Valley. Sam Altman has led OpenAI since its founding with Elon Musk. According to what he said Bloombergin June 2026, the company filed the documentation for its IPO with the SEC with a valuation of 852,000 million. However, according to his own statements, his annual salary It is $76,001. And he doesn’t have a single share in the company. Its co-founders accumulate between 30,000 and 35,000 million each. He Altman’s personal wealth is around 3.5 billion, thanks to investments on Reddit, Stripe or Airbnb that you did before OpenAI existed. He built the most influential company of the decade and was left without part of the cake. Whether it was a mistake or a calculated move ahead of the IPO is the most interesting question in the entire industry. The second wave of millionaires has already arrived. The 45 new billionaires that Forbes included in its latest fortune compilation are not all from OpenAI or NVIDIA. There is a second wave of founders who apply AI to specific sectors: law, medicine, code. AI for lawyers Harvey automates legal investigation with a valuation of 11,000 million. Mercor recruits with AI and went from 100 to 1,000 million in revenue in one year. Edwin Chen founded Surge AI and debuted on Forbes with 18 billion. almost no one knows who. He Bloomberg index documents 19 new AI millionaires in the last year alone, with a combined wealth of 59.3 billion. We are no longer talking about chips or large general models, but about founders of small startups who have developed AI tools with real clients and income statements that they don’t stop growing. In Xataka | We already know who has won the AI ​​race: the OpenAI employees who sold their shares Image | Scale AI, Brendan Foody, Wikimedia Commons

“I would rather 20,000 employees be happy and well fed than a few become millionaires”

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Three Kings’ Eve in 1914 appeared in The New York Times a surprising announcement: Henry Ford, Head of Ford Motor Company, will distribute ten million dollars among his employees throughout 1914. He will do so semi-annually and it will be an addition to the salary of each of the workers. The figure of 10 million dollarsas Henry Ford himself would confirm to the newspaper in an edition a few days later, was an estimate. He planned to distribute that amount at the end of the year but it could rise to 12 million dollars. Or it could be less. Those 10 million represented half of the profits expected at the end of the year. The day after the publication of the announcement, The New York Times echoed the madness: 10,000 employees showed up at the door of the Ford factory in Detroit to get a new job. That day, the company was already paying another 15,000 employees for whom entering the factory was more complicated than ever. “I think it is better for the nation, and much better for humanity, for 20,000 or 30,000 people to be happy and well fed than for a few to become millionaires,” Ford himself assured the journalist who went to cover the news. The announcement caused such commotion at the time that many changed jobs to form lines on the Ford Model T assembly line, as explained at the beginning of that same article in which the case of a 16-year-old boy who changed fields from the factory is told. But it also raised eyebrows among the competition to the point that it was questioned whether the owner of the company was not engaging in some type of anti-competitive action, they state in Barrons. “If Ford wants to have fun, so be it. He can afford it. Others can’t,” noted rival automaker Joseph J. Cole on Five Dollar Day. Five Dollar Day On Three Kings’ Day 1914, the day following the appearance of the aforementioned advertisement in The New York Timeshe Detroit Free-Press He referred to it as “Five Dollar Day”. This exemplified that Ford would pay at least five dollars to its employees with this new measure, double what it had been doing until now. As we said and as Henry Ford himself tried to explain in the article in The New York Times, It was not a salary increase. The worker continued to earn the same amount but, he calculated, this is what he would earn if a dividend of 10 million dollars was distributed among everyone. Ford was asked if he was a “socialist” for distributing profits among his employees, which was immediately denied. But he presented his theory: if workers performed at a good level, they should enjoy part of those benefits. And if they had the incentive to win it, they would work better. Furthermore, no exceptions were made, the sweeper and the person in charge of his line would collect the dividends that corresponded to them. That is, a payment strategy for objectives without distinctions. What Henry Ford discovered is that chain assembly was essential to impose his car on the competition. The higher the production volume, the lower the cost for the brand and the lower the cost for the customer. If the worker was attracted by the salary, there were more possibilities of attracting workers and continuing to feed the production chain. The result is that in a market where no one else could produce their cars at that rate and price, the Ford Model T became the best-selling car in the world. In fact, It is still among the 10 best-selling cars in history despite the fact that the production process has been perfected to the point of satiety. Car mass production completely changed the industry. He fordism It laid its foundations by rewarding workers. Much has been written about it, about Henry Ford’s intention to create a new middle class and for them to be the consumers of the products they manufactured. In Forbes They cast doubt on this theory repeated over time. By increasing the money to be received, they explain, what Henry Ford intended was to establish a workforce committed to the company and with a very low turnover. Employment was tough and in 1913 alone more than 52,000 people passed through the company despite the fact that 13,000 people worked in the factory. This high turnover prevented the assembly line from operating at full capacity because replacements had to be found and employees had to be retrained. They even claim that the assembly line came to a standstill due to the number of employees who left their jobs in search of a different job even though at that time charging just over two dollars was already good money. Doubling them and growing them to five dollars was a promise that was difficult to believe but also difficult to reject. Forbes He points out that Ford even hired people who went to employees’ homes to certify that the worker was behaving “in the American way.” That is to say, he kept himself from bad company and from getting drunk outside of office hours. And alcoholism was one of the biggest problems that the company’s assembly line was dealing with. Whether or not the corresponding part of the bonus was delivered depended on the verdict of these people. What they explain in this medium is that the theory that Ford wanted its own employees to buy its products is not true because, simply, it would have a very small impact on the company’s final accounts, but they do highlight that, sometimes, the quickest way to reduce costs is to increase salary costs, as paradoxical as it may sound. They say that John R. Lee, Ford’s advisor, defended his position by pointing out that “a man who comes from a well-balanced home, who does not fear for the basic necessities of life of those he cares for, who does not live in constant … Read more

monitors the private jets of millionaires

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There is a question that many people have asked themselves: if the world was about to end, who would be the first to know? The answer, according to a programmer based in Los Angeles, is obvious: the richest and most powerful of the planet. Under this premise, Kyle McDonald has created a website that, at least in theory, allows an alarm signal to be raised before the chaos begins. Is called Apocalypse Early Warning System (Apocalypse Early Warning System) and the idea, although disturbing, is quite simple: if suddenly there are many private and corporate jets in the air at the same time, it is that the millionaires and people in power (not always politicians) who rule already know something that you don’t. The logic behind the tracker. The system works with public data from the ADS-B signals (Automatic Dependent Surveillance – Broadcast) in real time. This location system is the one that all aircraft must emit to indicate their position, altitude and speed with the aim of maintaining order in air traffic. As explained on its website, McDonald filters all that data that is public to keep only the signals that emit private and charter jets. There is more than 23,000 private jets in operation around the world, so the website filters them and compares them with a historical average that takes into account the day, time and holidays. The result is a score that assigns an alert level from 1 to 5. 1 is total normality, while 5 means that private jet traffic has registered an abnormally high volume compared to the previous year, alerting that something anomalous is happening and may not have made the news yet. The spike that proved it works. Until now, the highest level recorded by the system shot on April 6. That day, Iran launched a massive offensive with drones and missiles against US and Israeli targets. In an interview for Business InsiderMcDonald claimed that “I was frozen. I thought, ‘Oh my God, it really works.’” The creator himself clarifies that a level 5 does not guarantee any disaster. It can coincide with a long vacation or with a specific event or with a political summit and, when it departs from the historical pattern, the alert is raised. Therefore, context matters. But the coincidence of the increase in private jets in the air with one of the most tense days of the year in the Middle East is consistent enough to be an indication that the millionaires are getting safe. https://www.xataka.com/transporte/2016-aeropuerto-badajoz-vivio-horas-estresantes-su-historia-aterrizaje-boeing-747-emir-dubai The Pentagon pizzas, but with private jets. The idea of ​​using seemingly unconnected data to detect unusual activity on the flights of millionaires and top executives of large companies is not new. There is a very famous precedent: the so-called Pizza Meteror Pentagon pizzometer. The theory goes that when Pentagon staff work late because of an impending crisis, orders to nearby pizzerias spike. During the Cold warit is believed that the Soviets monitored these deliveries as a sign of American strategic activity. There is no official data to confirm this, and critics treat it more as a meme than real intelligence. However, this index has been successful for decades as an early warning system that something is brewing in the Pentagon. He went ahead to Operation Desert Storm in 1991 and in June 2025, they anticipated the alert in the face of an imminent bombing by Israel and the US on the Iran nuclear facilities. Millionaires, bunkers and signs of escape. Millionaires wear decades in the making for an apocalyptic event. After the pandemic, they were shot the sales of land in New Zealand by millionaires, on which mansions have been built under which luxurious bunkers are hidden. The premise is that, when the time comes, they will be the first to run and get to safety before everything jumps into the air. McDonald’s system turns that intuition into something measurable thanks to the details of your private jets. In Xataka | The Boeing 747 that the Emir of Dubai uses as a private plane is so luxurious that even the pilot’s controls are made of gold Image | Unsplash (Jacob Rosen), Gerd Altmann

Elon Musk is going to turn 4,000 workers into millionaires and himself into a billionaire thanks to one thing: SpaceX

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Trevor Hise was 22 years old when he graduated and, as is often the case, his parents begged him to accept a stable, well-paying position at General Electric. However, led by the passion of youth and curiosity, he preferred to dedicate the next 12 years of his professional career to the madness of launch rockets into space and catch them in flight again on their return to earth. The company was called SpaceX and Hise no longer works there. However, as how did he count The New York TimesHise has discovered that the Space The story of this former employee of Elon Musk could seem like one of those caroms that life sometimes gives. But, broadly speaking, it is the story of thousands of people who are going to wake up tomorrow with a fortune in your stock portfolio after Space X’s IPO. The largest IPO in history. Friday, June 12, 2026 has been marked in red on the calendars of thousands of investors for months: SpaceX debuts on the Nasdaq under the symbol SPCX. The company’s maneuvers in the months prior to its listing on the stock market make its figures be the most ambitious ever recorded in a stock market IPO: a fixed price of $135 per share and 555.6 million securities placed to raise $75 billion. It is almost three times higher than the previous record held Saudi Aramco since 2019. The expectation it has raised is no wonder, since the company founded by Elon Musk stands on three of the legs with the greatest growth projection: artificial intelligence with xAI integrationspace race as the main activity of Space X and communications deployment via satellite with Starlink. The total valuation of the company before its IPO reaches 1.77 trillion dollarsa figure that places it above JPMorgan, Berkshire Hathaway, Meta and Tesla itself. Only six S&P 500 companies are valued above Space NVIDIA in the lead with 5.2 billion. More than 4,000 people about to become millionaires. According to published Fortunemore than 4,400 Space X employees and former employees will become millionaires thanks to the company’s stock market debut. Of that group, some 400 employees and managers will earn more than $100 million or more from the operation. The fact of turning its employees into millionaires is another of the peculiarities of this IPO since, as Andrew Benson, executive director of the platform, recognized Hill.com investments to the American media, “you usually only see founders become billionaires.” The company included participations in the compensation packages of welders, cooks and facility technicians who agreed to collect part of their salary on paper. It was a risky bet on their part because those shares could have remained a dead letter, but trust in the company will bring them a juicy reward. Gavin Petit joined in 2012 as a launch engineer with a salary of $80,000 and received shares valued at $13.80 each at the time. The engineer agreed to collect his bonuses in more shares year after year, something considered risky in a company whose rockets were still failing. Now more than 50,000 shares, which are equivalent to about 6.75 million dollars. Those who endured Among the great beneficiaries of this Initial Public Offering is Gwynne Shotwellpresident and chief operating officer of SpaceX. She was employee number 11 when she joined the company in 2002, leaving a stable job to bet on a startup that then had everything to prove. The board accumulates almost 12.6 million shares, according to the documents presented before the SEC, which at IPO price represents a fortune of about 1.7 billion dollars. Shotwell herself recognized to CNBC that for years it was not clear that they would go public: “Now seems like the right time.” As and as you remember Expansionthe IPO will also generously reward those investors who have provided financial support to the company since its inception, as is the case with Peter Thiel o Luke Nosek, co-founders of PayPal and members of the group known as “PayPal Mafia“. The first billionaire in history. According to official data According to the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Elon Musk owns approximately 42% of SpaceX shares. That’s about 4.8 billion shares, plus hundreds of millions of additional stock options. At the IPO price, that stake alone is around $688 billion. Adding that figure to his stake in Tesla and the rest of his businesses, Forbes esteem and his fortune at $982.3 billion before the stock market debut, which leaves him just a breath away from crossing $1 trillion, a milestone that no one has reached before. To gauge the magnitude of this figure, his personal fortune already exceeds the capitalization of ExxonMobil and rivals that of Berkshire Hathaway. Although, as Musk himself has pointed out on more than one occasion, almost all of that money They are stocks, not cash.. A number on a screen that goes up and down according to the market. In Xataka | The who’s who of SpaceX’s competitors: which other companies are making a big splash in space Image | Flickr (Gage Skidmore), SpaceX

A bank convinced people in a poor town in the US to spend their savings. Now it’s full of millionaires

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Stories of lucky breaks and millionaires there are manybut they almost always have a common denominator: we speak in singular. That is why what happened in a small town in Florida whose families were going through serious difficulties to get ahead is so special. Even today, the enclave continues to seem like a nondescript and inhospitable town. But don’t be fooled, a large number of millionaires still live there among the people. And all thanks to Coca-Cola. Quincy and the banker. This is the name of the town in one of the most fascinating stories of the United States economy. There, in the midst of the Great Depression of the 1920s and 1930s and with part of the census in serious difficulties, a figure appears who was going to change everyone’s lives. Your name: Pat Munroean astute banker, a businessman who focused on a key detail to convince all citizens. No matter how impoverished they were in Quincy or how dire the financial situation of the families, the man observed that almost religiously, people spent every penny on a nice ice-cold glass of Coca-Cola. What if that devotion turned it into a stroke of luck? Coca-Cola in a bag. The sugar giant It went public in 1919 at $40 a share.but a conflict with the sugar industry and its bottlers caused a 50% drop shortly after, when it reached $19 per share. Put another way, there was a time in history when Coca-Cola was trading for less than cash in the bank and its stock was extremely cheap. And among others, Munroe was at the right time. The bargain of the century. What did he do? Invest. The man began to acquire Coca-Cola shares as if there were no tomorrow. However, he did not do it alone. He encouraged all his acquaintances and friends of acquaintances in town to buy a stake in the company. Focusing on bottom line profits and brand power, Pat Munroe kept buying and buying. And as he did so he kept telling everyone in Quincy who would listen to him to buy too. He took advantage of the trust and respect the community had for him and went on a crusade to get anyone who could to get on the Coca-Cola train. Loans for shares. The man was so sure of his success that every time a person went to his bank to ask for a loan, encouraged him to accept another in exchange for shares. Farmers, shopkeepers, teachers: absolutely anyone who could spend money was tempted by Munroe. For the banker, the fact that Coca-Cola shares were at $19 each was an opportunity that no one in the city should escape. That is why he never tired of urging people to buy and, almost as important, to remain firm in the decision regardless of the market fluctuations that occurred in the short term. The ball Finally, the banker’s observations turned out to be a historic success. Quincy, an eminently agricultural city, not only stayed afloat in difficult times thanks to Coca-Cola dividends, brought a wealth that is still studied in universities. In fact, the enclave became the richest city per capita in the entire United States for a time, and dozens of its inhabitants were nicknamed “the secret Coca-Cola millionaires.” People who trusted Munroe’s good eye and invested all their money (and what they didn’t have), and who amassed enormous fortunes with those first shares, which they then passed down from generation to generation, turning them into the eponymous Coca-Cola millionaires, ones who, effectively, established entire dynasties of financial prosperity that transcended generations. How much are we talking about? It is difficult to speak in total terms, but to give us an idea of ​​the money, in 2013 it was made a study evaluating what happened in Quincy. The results showed that a single share with reinvested dividends was worth $10,000,000. $270,000 in pre-tax cash dividends would be sent to the owner by sending a check for approximately $67,500 in March, June, September and November of each year. Thus, if the great-grandmother and the great-grandfather on duty had acquired a round lot of 100 shares for between $1,900 and $4,000, depending on the purchase price, they would have more than a billion dollars, excluding the effects of estate taxes. By the way, the current value is considerably higher, since the stock has more than doubled its price since then and the quarterly dividend now exceeds $0.53 per share. Money for crisis. That investment has been a lifesaver every time a tough time approaches. When the local economy was supported by coca and the crisis arrived, tail dividends. In fact, these assets have supported the city through every recession since. When crops failed, it was Coca-Cola money that kept people employed. When the national economy collapsed, it was Coca-Cola’s cash that allowed people to stay in their homes. When times were good and Coca-Cola was cheap, they bought more shares. Quincy today. It is a unique story, because it is unusual. Every family that amassed a fortune then passed it on to their children and grandchildren, in some cases through direct donations and in others through the use of trust funds. Even the bank where it all started has a Coca-Cola on display and, according to data from the early 2010s, a staggering 65% of trust assets under management were still invested in Coca-Cola stock. Quincy’s appearance today is not much different from the Great Depression era. It remains a quiet and eminently agricultural city with a population around to 7,000 inhabitants. But don’t let your eyes fool you, some of the grandchildren whose families built an empire, that of the secret Coca-Cola millionaires, still walk through those streets. A version of this article was published in July 2025 Image | PXHere, Ebyabe, PXHere In Xataka | Jeff Bezos asked his parents for their life savings to found Amazon. They only asked him one question: “What is the Internet? In Xataka | Madrid may … Read more

There is a new wave of startups creating new AI millionaires

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The rise of AI has generated a new hypermillionaire saga who are breaking all limits of wealth to date. All you have to do is go through the list of 10 of the greatest fortunes in the world of Forbes to discover that eight of these great assets arise from this technology. However, this was only what Bloomberg called “the first wave”, in which the founders of the great generalist AI models such as OpenAI have risen. Anthropic either deepseek. Now is the time for specialized AI agents and their founders they are also getting rich. The 19 new barons of AI. As and as I pointed out BloombergAmerican AI startups have created 19 new billionaires in the last year with a combined fortune estimated at about $59.3 billion. These 19 new millionaires join the 41 founders who, thanks to the success of their AI models they had already become millionaires in the “first wave.” However, what is striking about this increase is not only the number, but the profiles of who are behind these million-dollar startups: a poet, three scholarship recipients from the Peter Thiel program without a university degree or a self-taught immigrant. AI agents are the new oil. Reflection AI It is one of the most obvious cases of this new wave of AI millionaires. The startup is dedicated to creating agents capable of programming, debugging and understanding code almost independently. This new market It has turned its founders into millionaires. It is estimated that Ioannis Antonoglou and Misha Laskin have achieved a fortune valued at around $4 billion each. However, the company did not emerge from nowhere, Antonoglou was part of the team that developed AlphaGo, from the revolutionary Google DeepMind model that achieved beat humans at Go. An AI wants to be your lawyer and your doctor. Without leaving aside AI agents, Harvey is another success story in this segment, allowing the automation of legal research, the drafting of legal documents and the review of contracts with AI. Founded by lawyer Winston Weinberg and AI researcher Gabe Pereyra while they shared a flat, its AI agent Harvey, named after the protagonist of the popular lawyer series Suits, has become one of the most used in companies and law firms. Each of its founders is the owner of an estimated fortune of 1.6 billion. In the healthcare field, OpenEvidence has followed a similar path. Its founder, Daniel Nadler, already sold the financial analysis platform Kensho to S&P Global in 2018 for $550 million. With OpenEvidence, it applied the same logic to the medical sector: its AI assistant has accumulated more than 100 million consultations and the company has almost quadrupled its valuation in six months to reach 12 billion, raising Nadler’s assets to 7.2 billion dollars at the beginning of 2026. The Thiel Fellows: from recruitment to labeling. Mercor is another example that was difficult to imagine just a few years ago. Their three foundersBrendan Foody, Adarsh ​​Hiremath and Surya Midha, met at a high school debate. The three classmates left the university to join the Thiel Scholarshipthe PayPal co-founder’s program that pays $250,000 to young people to leave their studies and start a company. Initially it was a recruiting platform, but they switched to data labeling providers for OpenAI and Anthropic, hiring doctors, engineers and scriptwriters to train AI models specialized in these areas. As a result of this change, Mercor went from earning 100 million in 2025 to 1,000 million at the beginning of 2026, with a valuation of 10 billion. That leaves each of the founders with an estimated fortune of $1.9 billion. The ecosystem versus the giants. Vercel is another example of how the startups that are succeeding in this second wave of unicorns emerged from AI. We are no longer talking about AI models, but about the infrastructure that allows deploying applications generated with AI. Its founder, Guillermo Rauchimmigrant Argentinian and self-taught who learned English by reading software manuals to learn how to program, turned a tool for developers into a very profitable platform that has given him an estimated fortune of more than 1.9 billion dollars In Xataka | We already know who has won the AI ​​race: the OpenAI employees who sold their shares Image | Brendan Foody

The trial against Sam Altman seemed like a duel between two millionaires. It has ended up uncovering the ins and outs of OpenAI

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Three weeks of testimonies, 78 messages between Sam Altman and Mira Murati during the night they were going to kill him as CEOemails where Greg Brockman wrote in his personal diary how nice it would be to “earn billions” and Satya Nadella describing the OpenAI board as ““amateur city”. This Thursday the final arguments of the Musk vs. Altman trial were held in a federal court in Oakland. The lawsuit asked for 150,000 million in damages and the dismissal of Altman. What has been left for the public has not so much to do with the verdict. Why is it important. OpenAI is, despite its name, one of the most secretive companies in Silicon Valley. Its internal functioning, until now, was known through highly selected profiles in The New Yorker or specific leaks. The trial has forced the company to publish emails, text messages, personal diaries and depositions that depict an organization very different from the one that sells its official communication. A company plagued by power struggles, mutual suspicions between founders and a board that in 2023 could not explain why it fired its own CEO. behind the scenes. The most illuminating episode occurred not on the stand, but in a chain of late-night messages between Altman and Murati during “The Blip“, the weekend of November 2023 in which the board removed the CEO. At 2:30 a.m. Monday morning, Altman was asking his then-CTO if things were going well or badly. “This is going in a very bad direction. Sam, this is very serious,” Murati responded. Minutes later, Altman offered to leave to avoid lawsuits. Murati replied that the council already had a replacement: “uncle random of Twitch”, in reference to Emmett Shear. That same day, Murati signed the first of the letters from employees asking for Altman’s return. The contrast. What Murati’s deposition leaked is that she herself had fed the board with complaints about Altman before the firing. Helen Toner, a former councillor, testified that Murati and co-founder Ilya Sutskever had conveyed to the council a pattern of behavior about Altman’s honesty. Sutskever wrote a 52-page memorandum. On the stand, Sutskever himself confirmed writing to the board that Altman “demonstrates a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his executives, and pitting them against each other.” Murati, in his deposition, maintained his criticisms but framed them as “purely managerial.” Go deeper. The term that the Microsoft leadership used to describe what they saw in those days was said by Satya Nadella from the stand: ‘amateur city. The CEO of Microsoft, the main investor in OpenAI with more than 13 billion contributed, said that he never received a concrete explanation of why Altman was fired. “I was very concerned that employees would leave en masse,” he said. Nadella offered Altman a position at Microsoft with an open invitation to the entire OpenAI team. Altman admitted at trial that he was on the verge of accepting: “I would have made a lot of money and had a much easier life at Microsoft.” He ended up coming back to OpenAI with some new advice. The outgoing board’s accusation was that Altman “had not been consistently candid” with them. The money trail. The trial has also exposed Altman’s web of personal interests in companies that do business with OpenAI. While under interrogation, Altman acknowledged stakes worth more than $2 billion in companies such as Helion Energy, Cerebras –just went public–, Reddit or Stripe. His third of Helion (from which he has just left as president) is valued at 1,650 million. OpenAI has signed a framework agreement with Helion for future energy supplies. Forbes has recalculated his assets at more than 4,000 million after these revelations. Brockman, who according to Musk “did not invest a cent”, now appears with a stake valued at 30 billion. Yes, but. None of this changes the legal background. The jury must decide on two specific civil claims: breach of fiduciary trust and unjust enrichment. Musk’s lawyer, Steven Molo, has tried to turn this into a trial about Altman’s credibility. In his closing arguments he put an unflattering photo of the CEO on screen and asked the jury to imagine a bridge over a ravine “built on Sam Altman’s version of the truth.” And now what. OpenAI has been preparing for a long time an IPO that could value it at close to a billion dollars. Musk, meanwhile, flew to China with Trump despite the judicial warning that he could be called to testify again. Regardless of the ruling, the reputational damage has already been done. The narrative that OpenAI has tried to project for years (that of being an idealistic laboratory guided by the mission of benefiting humanity) now coexists with another version documented in a judicial process: that of a company where the co-founder sends messages to the CEO at two in the morning to tell him that it is finished and a few hours later she signs the letter asking for her return. A company where the president wrote in his diary that “it would be nice to earn billions.” And where the reference investor, seeing the chaos from the outside, called ‘amateur city to its governing bodies. The jury’s verdict will come next week. What can no longer be archived are the documents. In Xataka | There is a thing called “Ornn price index”, it is out of control and it is bad news for everyone Featured image | Xataka

In 1962, someone donated shares in a company to the elderly in his town. The company was Nokia and today they live like millionaires

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There are stories that seem taken from a Hollywood script. That of Onni Nurmi, a young Finnish entrepreneur, has a name, surname, date and even a street named after him. The story of our protagonist It has all the elements for a script worthy of an Oscar: a man who was born in misery, fell into debt with his neighbors, crossed the Atlantic to settle his outstanding accounts and returned to his country. Decades after he died, he has become the greatest benefactor of his people. All this, for having donated to the nursing home in his town the shares of a rubber company that did not attract anyone’s attention. A Nurmi always pays his debts Onni Nurmi was born in 1885 in Savijoki, a small town within the municipality of Pukkila, in Finland, a town of just under 1,700 inhabitants. Nurmi grew up in a humble home marked by the hardships of being raised by a single mother who worked in the fields and ran a small canning store in the town. When she died unexpectedly at age 49, Onni was only 13 years old and had no future in Pukkila, so he moved to Helsinki. In 1912, he returned to Pukkila and resumed the family business by opening a store. However, his business did not work out. The following year, indebted to dozens of neighborstook a ship to America and spent 15 years working as a game warden in Minnesota. When he returned in 1928, he went door to door paying off every outstanding debt owed to Pukkila residents, some of them incurred a decade earlier. He didn’t do it because no one demanded it. Onni was simply that type of person. Onni Nurmi. Source: Kylä Savijoki Helsinki’s most unlikely investor With his debts paid off, Onni moved back to Helsinki, where he worked as a property manager and led an orderly, quiet life. He never married or had children. At some point he discovered investments in the stock market and, without financial training and with the only help of his intuition, he decided to buy shares of a small company that manufactured paper, rubber, rubber tires and boots which had its headquarters in the city that gave it its name: Nokia. In 1959 he wrote his will and decided to leave all the shares of that company that manufactured wellies to the municipality of Pukkila, with two conditions: They should never be sold and his donation was to be used solely for the well-being of the town’s elders. Onni Nurmi died in 1962 at the age of 77. The 780 shares he donated to the town where he had lived most of his life were then worth about $30,000, the equivalent of about $320,000 today. His gesture was undoubtedly generous, but not extraordinary…yet. The Buffett Effect: Let Time Do Its Work The clause preventing the sale of the shares seemed a problem at first. If the town had been able to cash in on the stock portfolio at any time, it would have obtained funds to improve the nursing home. However, the will was blunt on that point: shares had to be keptand they could only use dividends that these actions will generate over time. However, what seemed like a limitation to local authorities eventually became the best investment decision anyone in Pukkila could have made. The will was forcing them to apply a technique that for more than six decades has become a millionaire to Warren Buffett: leave let time do its work. Throughout the 80s and 90s, Nokia left rubber boots behind to become the largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world, position he held between 1998 and 2012. The original 780 shares that Nurmi had donated multiplied by a thousand due to its growth in the stock market and the overwhelming sales domain of their phones. At the height of the technology boom, Pukkila’s portfolio was valued at around 90 million dollarsmaking their Pukkila retirees the most prosperous in Finland, at least on paper. What do we do with so much money? The prosperity of the actions opened a new debate among the residents of Pukkila. They were sitting on a fortune and doing nothing to profit from it. In 1997, the city council proposed selling part of the shares to diversify the portfolio and reduce the risk of a hypothetical fall of Nokia. Not everyone agreed. A section of the town argued that selling the shares was against Nurmi’s will. Another sector even proposed that the benefits be used so that residents would not pay municipal taxes for 12 years. Given the disagreement, the debate reached the courts and lasted for several years. Ironically, the “Buffett effect” came into play again, and the judicial paralysis was the best possible news for the people’s coffers: while the issue of the sale of shares was being settled in court, Nokia shares did not stop increase its value. The courts finally approved an agreement by which the municipality could sell a part of the portfolio and diversify its funds, always respecting the original will of the will to support the town’s elders. as main beneficiaries of those actions. With that money the Onni Wellness Centeropened in 2008. The building stands on Onnintie Street (which in Finnish literally means Happiness Street) and includes sheltered housing, spaces for people with memory disorders, a health center, pharmacy, swimming pool, gym, library, cafeteria and a Japanese garden. All this in a municipality of less than 2,000 inhabitants. Onni Nurmi never imagined the magnitude of his donation decades after his death, but in some ways, he more than repaid the patience his neighbors had in waiting decades to pay off their debt. In Xataka | Giving money away wasn’t enough: Warren Buffett turned Christmas into an investing masterclass for his family Image | Unsplash (Pawel Czerwinski, Joe Zlomek, MW), Kylä Savijoki.

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