Tesla Reward CEO Elon Musk With ‘Good Faith’ Stocks

From Beatlemania in the 1960s to Taylor Swift’s seemingly permanent residence on today’s Billboard charts, pop culture fandoms can drive real business.

Take the cult classic TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While its final season wrapped more than 20 years ago, Buffy and its spinoff series Angel have made over $120 million for Hulu since the start of 2020 alone, and the streaming platform is now planning a new reboot series. The “Buffyverse,” or Buffy universe, is also a merch magnet, inspiring recent collaborations with Adidas and Loungefly.

More than just nostalgia for ’90s trends, these devoted fans are a lucrative community. When Buffy actor Charisma Carpenter hosted a recent live taping for her new podcast, the packed event generated a waitlist and spawned adjacent Buffy meetups in New York—not to mention the fans paying $7 per month for premium podcast content.

FIRST UP

Tesla approved a stock award worth about $29 billion to CEO Elon Musk, even as his previous multibillion-dollar pay package remains hung up in court. In a regulatory filing with the SEC, the carmaker said it would grant 96 million shares of common stock to Musk as an interim reward, with the company telling shareholders the award served as a “good faith” payment. The company also noted that a “longer-term CEO compensation strategy” for Musk will be put to a shareholder vote in November.

The lawyers of President Donald Trump and Rupert Murdoch have agreed to pause an effort to force the 94-year-old media magnate to testify before a federal court in the president’s defamation case against the Wall Street Journal’s reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. Neither side will “engage in discovery” until the Journal’s motion to dismiss the case is heard—but if the motion is denied, Murdoch will have to provide the court with “regularly scheduled updates” on his health.

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BUSINESS + FINANCE

President Donald Trump said he will raise India’s 25% tariff rate “substantially,” citing the country’s continued purchases of discounted oil from Russia. While it’s unclear what the new rate will be, Trump threatened last month to place 100% levies on countries doing oil business with Moscow unless it signs a peace deal with Ukraine.

MONEY + POLITICS

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump were named members of an advisory board to a new special-purpose acquisition company seeking to merge with businesses advancing “U.S. industrial capacity.” The SPAC—called New America Acquisition I Corp.—will target businesses that play ​​“a meaningful role in revitalizing domestic manufacturing,” the company said. The company plans to raise $300 million in stock by selling shares at $10, and the siblings received a combined 5 million founder shares, according to SEC filings.

With the U.S. House balanced on a razor-thin margin, President Donald Trump’s call for updates to the congressional map in Texas has inspired newly aggressive strategies by Democrats to also pursue gerrymandering in California, New York, Illinois and Maryland. More than 50 state Democratic lawmakers fled Texas on Sunday to deny quorum in the Republican-dominated state house, a move that temporarily blocked a vote on a new congressional map that would give Republicans five additional seats in the House.

MORE: The Texas House greenlit a measure directing state police to find and arrest the Democratic lawmakers who fled the state, though the warrants will not result in civil or criminal charges. However, Texas Governor Greg Abbott also directed law enforcement to investigate the lawmakers for “potential bribery” linked to their blocking of the quorum.

TRAVEL + LIFESTYLE

The State Department is launching a pilot program that would require international travelers from select countries to post bonds of $5,000, $10,000 or $15,000 when they apply for a visa. The program targets people “applying for visas as temporary visitors for business or pleasure” from countries with “high visa overstay rates,” though the preview of the department’s announcement does not detail the affected countries.

TRENDS + EXPLAINERS

Continuing its efforts to move more business online, the Social Security Administration is again pushing for changes to its phone service options. The proposed changes would require callers to go online to get a one-time code before accessing various services over the phone. But the AARP has voiced concerns over the shift, which the SSA wants to implement later this month, saying the change would be a challenge for “the one in four older adults who report never going online.”

DAILY COVER STORY

Meet The Other Billionaire Behind Skydance’s Paramount Deal

The year-long saga of Skydance Media’s $8 billion Paramount takeover could be its own Paramount+ mini-series: There’s departing boss Shari Redstone’s apparent capitulation to President Donald Trump to get the deal approved, CBS’s agreement to pay $16 million to Trump’s future presidential library, and the subsequent announcement that it was cancelling popular Trump critic Stephen Colbert’s late-night show in 2026. And that doesn’t even get into the Succession-esque family intrigue of Skydance’s David Ellison teaming up with his father Larry Ellison, the world’s second richest person and founder of software giant Oracle.

Flying under the radar, beneath all the high-stakes drama, is Gerry Cardinale, a private equity investor who is poised to be an influential figure in the new-look Paramount. His firm RedBird Capital Partners is a shareholder in Skydance, having first invested in 2020. Now the firm is putting $1.8 billion toward the $8 billion purchase price.

Cardinale will join Paramount as a director and will appoint a yet-to-be-named second director. Under the new ownership structure, Cardinale will hold 22.5% of Paramount’s voting rights, while David Ellison will hold 50% and Larry, who is Skydance’s biggest investor, will hold the remaining 27.5%. This complicated familial-financial dynamic is likely to make Cardinale a pivotal voice in scenarios where the Ellisons butt heads.

Paramount will become Cardinale’s highest-profile investment, but it’s hardly his first big bet. In the worlds of sports, entertainment and media, the 57-year-old investor has been striking high-stakes deals for over a quarter of a century, first at Goldman Sachs and for the last decade at RedBird, which he founded in 2014. RedBird bought Italian football club AC Milan for $1.2 billion in 2022, and has backed household names like LeBron James, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and Ben Affleck and Matt Damon in their independent entertainment ventures.

WHY IT MATTERS “Paramount is a marquee American entertainment company with over 1,200 film titles, and hallmark TV properties like CBS News, MTV and Nickelodeon,” says Forbes staff writer John Hyatt. “As one of just three people with voting rights at the new Paramount, along with the two Elllisons, Cardinale becomes overnight one of the most important figures in Hollywood.”

MORE How Jeffrey Epstein Got So Rich

FACTS + COMMENTS

Nearly 90% of Americans say they’re stressed about the cost of groceries, a new poll finds, as the price of food items from meats, fish and eggs to nonalcoholic beverages, fruits and cereals continue to rise in 2025:

53%: The share of Americans that view grocery prices as a major source of stress, according to the poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. Another 33% view groceries as a minor source of stress

3%: How much the price of food has risen in the past 12 months, faster than the overall inflation rate measured by the Consumer Price Index, at 2.7%

81 cents: How much the price of chicken breast increased per pound over the last year, making it the largest price hike among staples tracked by NBC News

STRATEGY + SUCCESS

Artificial intelligence has dominated the headlines about Wall Street’s performance this year, but some of 2025’s best performing stocks so far aren’t the household names you might expect. Among the leaders, Palantir’s rise is notable for its pivot from government contractor to enterprise software provider, as well as Seagate Technology’s move from consumer goods to data infrastructure.

VIDEO

QUIZ

President Donald Trump praised actor Sydney Sweeney for having the “HOTTEST ad out there,” a reference to a recent marketing campaign that has caused controversy for which major clothing brand?

A. American Eagle

B. Old Navy

C. Levi’s

D. Ralph Lauren

Check your answer.

Thanks for reading! This edition of Forbes Daily was edited by Chris Dobstaff.