Forbes

• 1. Introduction

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  Forbes magazine was born on the 15th of September 1917, the product of an unlikely partnership between a financial columnist and a publishing executive. B. C. Forbes had spent years writing for the Hearst papers, building a reputation for making the business world legible to ordinary readers. His partner, Walter Drey, ran the general manager's office at the Magazine of Wall Street. Forbes brought the money and the name; Drey brought the machinery to print and sell a magazine. The original title was not simply Forbes. It was Forbes: Devoted to Doers and Doings. That phrase tells you something about what the founders believed a business publication should do: celebrate the people behind commerce, not just the numbers.

  More than a century later, the magazine that carries B. C. Forbes's name is published eight times per year, has editions in more than 40 countries, and is arguably best known not for its journalism but for its lists. The Forbes 400, the Forbes 30 Under 30, the Global 2000, the world's billionaires. Whether those rankings reflect the soul of what Forbes set out to be is one of the questions this documentary will sit with. So is the story of what happened to Forbes.com, a website that in 1996 was breaking genuine investigative scoops and by 2022 was being called, by Harvard's Nieman Lab, a platform for scams, grift, and bad journalism.

• 2. A Family Grip on Power

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  B. C. Forbes held the editor-in-chief title until his death in 1954, a tenure of nearly four decades. In his later years, he was assisted by his two eldest sons, Bruce Charles Forbes, who lived from 1916 to 1964, and Malcolm Forbes, who lived from 1919 to 1990. The family structure meant that succession was never an open question. Bruce Forbes stepped in after his father died, and what he brought to the job was not editorial flair but operational discipline. Streamlining and marketing were his strengths, and during his decade at the helm, from 1954 to 1964, the magazine's circulation nearly doubled.

  When Bruce died in 1964, Malcolm Forbes took over as president, chief executive officer, and editor-in-chief. Between 1961 and 1999, the magazine was edited by James Michaels, a tenure that bracketed several shifts in American business culture. In 1993, under Michaels, Forbes was a finalist for the National Magazine Award. Steve Forbes, B. C.'s grandson, eventually became chairman and editor-in-chief, and under his watch the magazine expanded into television with the weekly Fox show Forbes on Fox and into radio with Forbes on Radio.

• 3. Money, Deals, and Dilution

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  In 2006, an investment group called Elevation Partners, which included the rock star Bono, bought a minority interest in the company. The deal involved a reorganization that created Forbes Media LLC, a holding structure that brought Forbes magazine and Forbes.com together under one roof alongside other media properties. A 2009 report in The New York Times stated that 40 percent of the enterprise had been sold for a reported $300 million, implying a total valuation of $750 million. Mark M. Edmiston of AdMedia Partners was quoted three years later saying the company was probably not worth half of that. It was later revealed that the actual price had been $264 million.

  The headquarters had its own arc. In January 2010, Forbes reached an agreement to sell its Fifth Avenue building in Manhattan to New York University. The deal included a five-year sale-leaseback arrangement, meaning Forbes kept using the space while NYU owned it. By 2014, the company had relocated to the Newport section of downtown Jersey City, New Jersey, where it is headquartered today.

  Also in 2014, Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media Investments purchased a 51 percent majority stake in the company. The Forbes family had bought out Elevation Partners first, then sold the controlling interest to the new investor. A 2017 piece in The Washington Post by Isaac Stone Fish, a senior fellow at the Asia Society, cited several instances of what he described as editorial meddling on stories involving China, raising questions about the publication's commitment to editorial independence.

• 4. The SPAC That Fell Apart

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  On the 26th of August 2021, Forbes announced it would go public by merging with a special-purpose acquisition company called Magnum Opus Acquisition, with plans to trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker FRBS. The announcement came the same year the company reported a return to profit, with revenue rising 34 percent to $165 million. CEO Mike Federle cited a consumer business that was up 83 percent year-over-year. In February 2022, it was announced that cryptocurrency exchange Binance would acquire a $200 million stake in Forbes as part of the SPAC deal.

  By June 2022, the SPAC merger was dead, with the company citing unfavorable market conditions. That August, Forbes announced it was exploring a broader sale. In May 2023, a new buyer appeared: Austin Russell, the billionaire founder of Luminar Technologies, agreed to acquire an 82 percent stake in a deal that valued the company at $800 million. Russell's purchase would have included the Forbes family's remaining ownership not already held by Integrated Whale Media. The deal drew scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Russell publicly denied reports that Russian businessman Magomed Musaev had any involvement. By November 2023, the deal had collapsed; Russell had been unable to assemble the required funds.

• 5. Forbes.com and the Contributor Problem

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  David Churbuck founded the Forbes website in 1996. Early on, the site earned a reputation for doing real journalism. In 1998 it uncovered Stephen Glass's fabrications at The New Republic, a story that drew wide attention to what the internet could do for accountability reporting. In 2010, at the height of coverage surrounding alleged sudden unintended acceleration in Toyota vehicles, the site exposed the California so-called runaway Prius as a hoax, while also publishing five articles by Michael Fumento that challenged the broader media narrative about Toyota's cars.

  Also starting in 2010, Forbes.com shifted toward a contributor model in which thousands of freelancers wrote and published directly to the website, paid according to the traffic their pages attracted. The site received contributions from over 2,500 individuals; some contributors earned more than $100,000, according to the company. By 2019, the site was publishing 100 articles per day from roughly 3,000 outside contributors who were paid little or nothing. Damon Kiesow, the Knight Chair in digital editing and producing at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, said the model changed Forbes's reputation from that of a respectable business publication to that of a content farm.

  Forbes also launched a program called BrandVoice, which allowed advertisers to publish blog posts alongside regular editorial material. That program accounted for more than 10 percent of the site's digital revenue. In July 2018, Forbes deleted an article by a contributor who had argued that public libraries should be closed and Amazon should open bookstores in their place. In 2017, the site began blocking users with ad-blocking software, requiring those users to whitelist Forbes before they could read articles. Forbes won the 2020 Webby People's Voice Award for Business Blog/Website, even as malware attacks linked to the site were also being reported.

• 6. Lists, Licensing, and New Ventures

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  The Forbes 400, ranking the richest Americans, is the list the magazine is perhaps most associated with. Alongside it sit the Forbes 30 Under 30, which names 30 notable people under the age of 30; the Forbes Global 2000, covering the world's top companies; and the annual list of the world's billionaires. These rankings gave the brand a recurring calendar of cultural events, generating press coverage well beyond the eight annual issues.

  In 2013, Forbes licensed its brand to Ashford University and helped launch the Forbes School of Business and Technology. CEO Mike Federle described the arrangement in 2018 as almost a pure-profit business because it functioned as an annual annuity. Forbes ran limited promotions for the school in limited issues but never formally endorsed it. The same year, Forbes published the first Forbes Travel Guide, a franchise it has maintained since 2009.

  In November 2019, Forbes launched a streaming platform called Forbes8, aimed at entrepreneurs and featuring business tips from notable figures. In 2020, Forbes8 announced several documentary series, including Forbes Rap Mentors, Driven Against the Odds, Indie Nation, and Titans on the Rocks. Meanwhile, the international footprint continued to grow: the magazine now has 42 editions covering 69 countries, though several editions including Forbes Russia, Forbes Indonesia, and Forbes Baltic have ceased publication. Steve Forbes's daughter Moira Forbes launched ForbesWoman, a quarterly magazine with a companion website, with the company beginning publication that same year the international edition count was noted to be reaching 10 foreign editions.