A landmark court decision against two social media giants on Wednesday is the latest chapter in the growing backlash over the platforms’ addictive qualities.

A jury found Meta and Google, the parent company of YouTube, liable for harming a woman’s mental health due to addictive design features, and must pay $3 million in damages. In a separate decision one day earlier, a New Mexico jury ordered the Facebook parent firm to pay $375 million for enabling child exploitation. The companies plan to appeal the verdicts.

“I see firsthand how hard the company is trying to ensure there is not harmful content, to ensure that we are empowering parents to the best of our ability,” Meta president and vice chair Dina Powell McCormick said at an Axios conference shortly after Wednesday’s verdict was announced.

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ARE WE HEADED TOWARD A RECESSION?

As the war with Iran sends ripples through the economy, the risks of a recession are mounting.

Several key firms hiked their recession outlook over the next 12 months, including Moody’s Analytics, which now puts the chances of a recession at 48.6%, while Goldman Sachs raised its odds from 25% to 30% this week.

“This still isn’t a recession, but given how fragile the [U.S.] economy was even before the conflict began, not much else would have to go wrong in the Middle East to precipitate a downturn,” Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi wrote on X.

Higher energy prices impact not only how much consumers pay at the pump but also, crucially, the cost of shipping goods. On Thursday, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development warned that headline inflation in the U.S. could hit 4.2% this year due to the spike in global oil prices.

Still, economists say the extent of the damage comes down to how long—and by how much—prices remain elevated. Oxford Economics predicted in a research note this month that if global oil prices averaged around $140 per barrel for two months, it could tip some of the global economy into a mild recession.

Shares of British chip designer Arm Holdings skyrocketed 16% on Wednesday as the company’s CEO projected a windfall from its new in-house AI chip. Chief executive Rene Haas said the chip is expected to generate $15 billion annually, with Citi analysts writing that the decision to manufacture chips was the “most significant shift in the company’s history.”

WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP

For the first time this March, when Forbes recalculated President Donald Trump’s net worth for our World’s Billionaires List, we estimated Mar-a-Lago’s value at over half a billion dollars. It now stands at $564 million, by a wide margin the single most valuable property in his portfolio and up roughly 50% from a year ago. Much of that can be chalked up to an election-win premium, as Forbes found at least 32 billionaires who reportedly made the pilgrimage to the club since Trump won the 2024 election.

After OpenAI suddenly shuttered its Sora video tool, billionaire Elon Musk said he would double down on Grok Imagine, his AI company’s controversial image and video generator. The tool, along with its “spicy” mode that allows users to create sexually explicit images and videos, has drawn significant backlash and mounting lawsuits.

President Donald Trump tapped Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Oracle’s Larry Ellison and Nvidia’s Jensen Huang for a new AI advisory panel Wednesday, as the industry has forged a close relationship with the president during his second term. The Trump Administration issued a new legislative framework last week to establish a uniform national policy on artificial intelligence that would supersede state-specific rules.

Bipartisan legislation introduced in Congress aims to prohibit lawmakers and officials in the executive branch from trading on prediction market platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi based on political events. Several bets on the platforms related to government policy, including an anonymous trader who made over $400,000 in January betting that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro would leave office, have raised suspicions.

The TSA staffing shortages caused by the ongoing partial government shutdown could force some airports to close, acting TSA administrator Ha Nguyen McNeill testified to Congress on Wednesday. TSA worker call-outs are expected to continue rising as workers prepare to miss a second full paycheck this weekend, and Congress has failed to work through a stalemate to fund DHS.

MORE: The White House turned down an offer from billionaire Elon Musk to pay TSA officers during the partial government shutdown, with a White House spokesperson telling Forbes that it “would pose great legal challenges due to his involvement with federal government contracts.”

Meet The Billionaire Dentist That Other Docs Want To Punch In The Teeth

Dr. Rick Workman has become a billionaire by creating the largest dental operation in the U.S.

His Effingham, Illinois-based Heartland Dental has 1,900 practices with 3,100 dentists in 39 states. Among some dentists, Workman is persona non grata because they believe dental conglomerates like his prioritize productivity and profits over patient care, making their once-cushy profession hypercompetitive.“

I learned the Chicago way,” he says, nodding to the city’s reputation for bare-knuckle politics. The fights over corporate dentistry and private equity often get loud and personal. But Workman’s solution is what he calls staying “underneath the cabbage patch.” Keep your head down. Keep building.

In 2024, Heartland Dental generated about $3.6 billion in revenue and $455 million in earnings, handling the business side of dentistry: payroll, staffing, marketing and supplies. The dentists focus on treating patients, an approach that helped reshape a profession long dominated by solo practices. Private equity firm KKR, which manages $744 billion in assets, bought a 58% stake in the company in 2018 at a $2.8 billion valuation. Today Heartland is worth about $6 billion, giving Workman, who serves as chairman, an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion.

WHY IT MATTERS “Dentistry used to be a fragmented, small-business world, with about two-thirds of dentists working in solo practices just a few decades ago,” says Forbes reporter Brandon Kochkodin. “Workman and companies like Heartland helped change that, bringing scale, standardized processes and outside capital into an industry that had long resisted it. The shift wasn’t universally welcomed, especially by dentists who saw the profession as a lifestyle business rather than a competitive one. Today, only about one-third of practices are solo. Not all disruption is about new technology. Sometimes it’s about taking an existing business and scaling it.”

MORE No AI Plan, No Loan. Small Business Lenders Force Main Street To Face The Future

Several countries are adopting measures to curb energy use amid the Iran war’s impact on global oil prices. Countries in Asia and Africa, which heavily rely on petroleum supplies from the Middle East, are the most affected:

‘The largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,’ the International Energy Agency said of the crisis

15 million: The daily supply deficit of barrels of crude oil

Four days: The length of the workweek instituted by Pakistan in response

If you’ve just been promoted to a leadership role for the first time, it’s important to avoid the following key mistakes: only providing orders without accepting input, lacking compassion, and taking sole credit for your team’s work. To be successful, you must recognize that leadership involves shining the spotlight on others, not just yourself.

A humanoid robot accompanied first lady Melania Trump into a White House technology summit on Wednesday. Which company developed the robot?

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

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