Forbes Daily: Cannabis World Has High Hopes For Trump’s Second Term

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As companies urge employees to stay silent on causes and keep politics out of the workplace, there’s one growing exception: charitable giving.

Workplace giving isn’t new, but as donations to United Way have declined, a new type of giving platform is emerging, enabling workers to choose where their money goes. And often, employers are matching those gifts 100%, too.

The main platform is Canadian fintech Benevity, which in 2023 processed $3.2 billion of donations to 265,000 unique causes, from workers at companies like Adobe, Cisco, Merck, Microsoft, Nike, UPS and Visa. Employees can deduct their contributions from their paycheck, make a credit card donation, or both.

Workplace giving still makes up a fraction of total contributions in the U.S., but it’s growing faster than other channels.

FIRST UP

President-elect Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100% tariff on BRICS nations—Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, Iran, Egypt, Ethiopia and the United Arab Emirates. Brazilian President Inacio Luiz called on BRICS nations to develop an alternative to the dollar in foreign trade last year, arguing countries that don’t use the dollar shouldn’t be forced to trade with the currency.

MORE: Trump announced a string of appointments Saturday, including Kash Patel as his choice to lead the FBI, a controversial figure in his first administration who has remained close to Trump since he left office. He also selected Charles Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, to be the U.S. ambassador to France.

John Ratcliffe, Trump’s pick for CIA director, shifted campaign funds to his own pocket after he stepped down from Congress, according to a Forbes analysis of FEC filings. First, he paid his wife, and apparently used campaign funds to promote his consulting business, though federal regulations explicitly prohibit candidates from using campaign money for personal expenses.

BUSINESS + FINANCE

The secret sauce at private equity firm Lead Edge is its network—most of its $5 billion in assets comes from more than 700 individual investors. Crowdsourcing advice from this group is more work than answering to a smaller group, but founder Mitchell Green’s model is proving itself. Lead Edge targets annualized returns in the mid-20s in its funds, expecting to make two to five times its money on each investment over a span of three to seven years.

Indian billionaire Gautam Adani broke his silence Saturday after the U.S. Department of Justice accused him and Adani Group executives of running a large-scale bribery scheme. “What I can tell you is that every attack makes us stronger and every obstacle becomes a stepping stone for a more resilient Adani Group,” Adani said, likely a reference to a critical 2023 report from Hindenburg Research.

WEALTH + ENTREPRENEURSHIP

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to talk about the incoming Trump Administration without mentioning centibillionaire Elon Musk. As he becomes more involved in the federal government, Forbes put together a definitive breakdown of Musk’s net worth, how he earned it, and how he spends it.

MORE: Our newsroom is also ranking Musk and other key influencers in President-elect Donald Trump’s inner circle, like chief of staff Susie Wiles, Trump transition chair Howard Lutnick and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

TECH + INNOVATION

The Department of Government Efficiency, a planned agency announced by President-elect Donald Trump to cut government excess, is seeking 100 full-time hires in the nation’s capital, sources tell Forbes, attracting a mix of college students and executives. DOGE, to be helmed by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, posted on its X account that it is seeking “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries” willing to work “80+ hours per week.”

The FTC is reportedly launching a large-scale investigation into several facets of Microsoft’s business, demanding information on its practices as part of the Biden Administration’s last-minute Big Tech regulatory push. The probe will look into Microsoft’s artificial intelligence products, cybersecurity offerings, software licensing business and its cloud computing division, according to Bloomberg.

Just before the Thanksgiving holiday, billionaire Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg met with Trump at Mar-A-Lago last week, in an attempt to mend fences with Trump—who previously accused the social media company of trying to censor him and his supporters. Despite being a target of Trump’s insults, Zuckerberg praised the president-elect in July, pointing to his resilience after the first assassination attempt against him.

MONEY + POLITICS

New Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota is relatively prosperous himself, especially considering the fact that virtually every dollar he’s made has been thanks to the government. Forbes estimates the 63-year-old Republican and his wife Kimberley are worth about $3 million, with their largest assets being Thune’s federal pension and retirement accounts, along with their Sioux Falls home.

Pro-crypto super PAC Fairshake notched 48 wins in down-ballot races this past election cycle after raising $171 million from backers like Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz. Forbes spoke with spokesperson Joshua Vlasto about how Fairshake is rehabbing crypto’s reputation, its recent successes and how he is gearing up for the 2026 midterms.

SPORTS + ENTERTAINMENT

Disney’s Moana 2 brought in $221 million in U.S. ticket sales over the five-day holiday weekend, making it the highest-grossing Thanksgiving release of all time and contributing to a record-breaking holiday box office stretch. Moana 2 sales from Wednesday to Sunday shattered the previous $125 million Thanksgiving weekend record set by Frozen II in 2019.

WORLD

The historic Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris will reopen this week, more than five years after sustaining severe damage in a fire. The restored interiors of the UNESCO world heritage site were publicly unveiled last week in a special event attended by French President Emmanuel Macron.

TRAVEL + LIFESTYLE

Cannabis is still illegal federally, and while Donald Trump’s first term in the White House does not exactly paint him as a friend of the industry, the cannabis world has high hopes for his second term. Since leaving office, Trump’s stance on weed has evolved, voicing support on the campaign trail for rescheduling, passing banking reform and reiterating his belief in a states’ rights approach to legalization.

DAILY COVER STORY

Coders Worry The AI From This $2 Billion Startup Could Replace Their Jobs. But Is It Real?

TOPLINE San Francisco-based AI startup Cognition’s vision is for AI to take the grunt work out of coding.

The company’s coding assistant Devin is handling basic engineering jobs—spotting and fixing bugs, updating chunks of code and migrating them between platforms. Give it a simple prompt—“clean up this codebase”—and it creates a plan of action and executes it. Most times, it works.

It’s a different approach from other better-known and bigger players in the still-burgeoning field, like Github (which Microsoft bought for $7.5 billion in 2018) and $1.3 billion-valued Codeium, both of which provide digital assistants that help people write code with AI-powered suggestions. But Devin is an autonomous AI agent that, in theory, writes the code itself—no people involved—and can complete entire projects typically assigned to developers.

That may not be great news for the 5 million Americans who work as programmers, earning a median salary of $130,000, much less the 13 million coders in India and China. Cognition cofounder and CEO Scott Wu insists that massive job losses are not imminent and that the field has been “capped by supply.”

But AI-generated code is already beginning to reshape the industry. In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said more than a quarter of new code at the tech giant is written by AI. At Github, which hit a $2 billion annual run rate in 2024, its code completion tool has accounted for 40% of revenue growth this year, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in July.

Pitchbook analyst Brendan Burke says AI coding has become the most-funded use case in generative AI, with startups focused on it raising over $1 billion in the first half of 2024 alone.

WHY IT MATTERS Workaday programmers may be wary, but investors love it. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures are betting on Wu and his crew of 25, investing $176 million in Cognition in a Series B round in April, spiking its valuation to $2 billion just six months after its founding. The cash injection came only three months after the startup closed a $21 million Series A in January.

MORE Codeium’s New Tool Is Meant To Bridge The Gap Between Human And AI Coding

FACTS + COMMENTS

Taxpayers who use PayPal, Venmo or other third-party payment platforms to conduct business will get another year to transition toward a new $600 threshold for reporting, and the IRS’s announcement last week will impact the 2024 tax year:

$5,000: For the 2024 tax year, third-party settlement organization reporting will only be required if the taxpayer receives more than $5,000 in transactions

$600: The new reporting threshold enacted under the American Rescue Plan, which is set to take effect for the 2026 tax year, after a $2,500 threshold in the 2025 tax year

Form 1099-K: Some companies may still send this form for totals over $600, but it won’t change the tax treatment

STRATEGY + SUCCESS

Even the most charismatic leaders can find themselves with performance anxiety before a big speech or presentation, and as Stanford lecturer Matt Abrahams puts it, “Research tells us that 85% of people feel nervous in high-stake speaking situations. And quite frankly, I think the other 15% are lying.” Stay above your nerves by focusing on what you can control—practice helps here—and try to reframe the anxiety as excitement.

VIDEO

QUIZ

Australia is now the first country in the world to ban social media for children, after its parliament passed a bill last week that will make platforms liable for fines for allowing children under a certain age to hold accounts. Once the law goes into effect, how old will Australians need to be to use social media?

A. At least 12

B. At least 14

C. At least 16

D. At least 18

Check your answer.

Thanks for reading! This edition of Forbes Daily was edited by Sarah Whitmire.