Federal Election Commission filings for the first quarter of 2026 showed that billionaires Miriam Adelson and George Soros were the biggest donors backing GOP and Democratic super PACs, respectively, ahead of this year’s midterms, while billionaire Marc Andreessen’s venture capital firm poured $25 million into a pro-artificial intelligence Super PAC.

KEY FACTS

• According to the filings published on Wednesday night, GOP megadonor Adelson donated $30 million to the Senate Leadership Fund, the major super PAC backing Republican Senate candidates.
• Filings made by the GOP-aligned Congressional Leadership Fund—which backs GOP House candidates—showed Adelson had given the super PAC $10 million, bringing her overall contribution to $40 million so far this year.
• Billionaire George Soros, one of the biggest backers of Democratic candidates, donated $50 million to his Democracy PAC in January through an associated group, the Fund for Policy Reform.
• The Democracy PAC then donated $9 million to Senate Majority PAC—which backs Democratic Senate candidates.

FORBES VALUATION

According to Forbes’ Real Time Billionaire’s list, Adelson’s total fortune is worth $37.3 billion, making her the 58th richest person in the world. In comparison Soros’ net worth stands at $7.5 billion as of Thursday morning.

WHAT DO WE KNOW ABOUT FUNDING FROM SILICON VALLEY

?Leaders from Silicon Valley launched the pro-AI super PAC Leading the Future in August last year, with venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz among its main backers. Wednesday’s filings showed that the venture firm donated $25 million to the political action committee, with $12.5 million each coming from co-founders Benjamin Horowitz and billionaire Marc Andreessen.

BIG NUMBER

$27 million. That is how much Democratic Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico has raised in the first three months of the year so far, according to the New York Times. Talarico’s strong numbers appear to reflect Democratic optimism about the race in deep-red Texas, as the GOP has been besieged by infighting among its top two candidates.

SURPRISING FACT

Filings for a Win for America, a super PAC backed by sports betting platforms, showed it raised more than $40 million in the first three months of the year. FanDuel contributed $19.5 million while DraftKings’ holding company, DK Crown Holdings, donated 17.5 million. An additional $4 million came from Fanatics’ subsidiary FBG Enterprises Opco.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Siladitya Ray

https://www.forbes.com/sites/siladityaray/2026/04/16/billionaire-adelson-pours-40-million-to-back-gop-soros-gives-50-million-to-his-democrat-pac/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Iran reopened the Strait of Hormuz to all commercial shipping traffic Friday, citing Thursday’s ceasefire with Israel in Lebanon, signaling a major breakthrough in the conflict and sending oil prices plummeting, though President Donald Trump said the U.S. Naval blockade on Iran will remain in effect until a permanent peace deal is reached.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Live Nation shares tumbled over 6% on Wednesday after a New York jury found it and Ticketmaster operated as a monopoly, marking a win for dozens of states that accused the live entertainment company of violating antitrust laws around ticketing, music venues and concert promotion—claims Live Nation has denied.

KEY FACTS

• The verdict was reached after four days of deliberations in a trial that lasted several weeks, in which Live Nation was accused of overcharging fans for tickets and pressuring venues into using Ticketmaster—one of its subsidiaries.
• Live Nation shares closed down 6.3% Wednesday, erasing almost two weeks’ worth of gains.
• The jury found Ticketmaster overcharged customers by $1.72 per ticket, The New York Times reported.
• The terms of the incoming settlement will be determined by Judge Arun Subramanian in a later proceeding.
• Forbes has reached out to Live Nation for comment.

WHAT TO WATCH FOR

A breakup of Live Nation and Ticketmaster is being sought by some of the states suing the parent company. Live Nation acquired Ticketmaster in an all-stock deal valued at $2.5 billion.

SURPRISING FACT

Ticketmaster sells around 10 times the number of tickets sold by its closest rival, AEG, the Times reported, citing testimony from the trial.

KEY BACKGROUND

The landmark ruling is another knock against Live Nation, which reached a settlement with the Justice Department just last month requiring it to pay $280 million in damages, divest from 13 of its amphitheaters and introduce a cap on ticketing service fees at 15%. Live Nation generated $690.7 million in revenue in 2025, according to its full-year results, which noted the company brought in a record-breaking $25.2 billion that year. Over 30 states rejected the settlement and instead pressed Live Nation in the current trial. New York Attorney General Letitia James said the settlement “fails to address the monopoly at the center of this case, and would benefit Live Nation at the expense of consumers.”

Read the full story on Forbes: By ByAntonio Pequeño IV

https://www.forbes.com/sites/antoniopequenoiv/2026/04/15/jury-says-live-nation-operated-monopoly-in-landmark-decision-for-ticketing-market/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Allbirds, the former minimalist shoe company that briefly surged in popularity among Silicon Valley tech workers a decade ago, announced it would suddenly become an “AI compute and cloud services company,” selling its branding and footwear assets and rechristening itself “NewBird AI”—and causing its cratering stock to jump over 800% after the announcement. KEY FACTS

• In a press release issued on Wednesday, the struggling footwear company said it raised $50 million through an unnamed institutional investor to become an “AI compute infrastructure” company.
• The deal is expected to close in the second quarter of 2026, according to the release
• As part of the pivot, the company sold its entire footwear business to brand manager American Exchange Group—a $39 million deal announced in March.
• The company said the shoes’ “brand and legacy will continue under the ownership of American Exchange Group,” whose portfolio includes other fashion brands like Aerosoles and Ed Hardy.
• The announcement caused Allbirds stock to skyrocket, rising over 800% after markets opened—although the company’s stock was still only trading around $20 per share, up over 700%, by 11:45 a.m. EDT.

BIG NUMBER

Over $4 billion. That’s how much Allbirds was valued at after its blockbuster IPO in November 2021, which raised over $300 million for the shoemaker. Allbirds’ stock price quickly sank in the months after the IPO, and the company’s stock was trading at $2.49 per share before the pivot was announced.

KEY BACKGROUND

Allbirds is not the first company to pivot away from its core business to a trend in tech. The Long Island Iced Tea Company made a similar move in 2017, announcing it would become primarily a blockchain company. Although the stock price also skyrocketed immediately after the announcement, the pivot didn’t exactly work in the long run—the company was delisted by the Securities and Exchange Committee in 2021, which claimed in an order the company’s new “blockchain business never became operational.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Zachary Folk

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/04/15/shoemaker-allbirds-suddenly-says-its-an-ai-company-and-stock-jumps-800/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

American companies are increasingly skipping traditional price hikes on goods in favor of new surcharges and fees added to checkout screens and monthly bills—often far less visible—as a way to pass rising prices onto consumers amid surging inflation. Key Facts

• Restaurants, hotels, airlines, retailers and other businesses are increasingly breaking price hikes into separate line items—often labeled as a “fuel surcharge,” “service fee” “processing fee” or “resort fee”—that allow them to preserve advertised prices but still pass inflation-related price increases on to the consumer. 
• Often these costs only show up on a final bill or check—separate from the original, advertised price.
• One of the most common examples is a credit card use surcharge—used by one-third of American small businesses—which see companies try to recoup the fees charged to them by credit card companies by hitting customers with a 2% to 4% fee if they use a card instead of cash. 
• More than 15% of restaurants nationally also now tack on extra fees to the bill at the end of a meal, according to the National Restaurant Association, with some adding credit card surcharges while others opt for automatic gratuity or vague “service charges” to help cover increased supply costs or employee wages. 
• Airlines advertise ticket prices without including hidden taxes, fees and charges—that can increase ticket prices by roughly 20% at checkout—and carriers like American, Alaska, Delta, United and Southwest this month announced they were hiking the price of baggage fees by $10 per bag to cover Iran war-caused jet fuel increases.
• Grab, a Nasdaq-listed rideshare and food delivery company that operates in Southeast Asia, told customers it will implement a fuel surcharge through May 31 and Uber Australia said it will introduce a temporary 5-cent-per-kilometer fuel surcharge starting April 15.

What To Watch For

More price hikes or fees for consumers as businesses themselves fall victim to new surcharges. Amazon has added a 3.5% fuel surcharge for its third-party sellers. UPS, FedEx and the USPS have implemented their own fuel-related price hikes, ranging from 3.5% to 8%, since the Iran war spiked energy costs. Experts have said those logistics companies have little choice but to offset the skyrocketing costs of gasoline and diesel, and as many as 30 to 40% of Amazon sellers subject to the new surcharge will pass it directly on to consumers, a supply chain expert told the New York Post. The owner of Ash & Erie, a small men’s clothing brand, told the Wall Street Journal the fuel surcharges are like “tariffs 2.0” and said he’ll likely have to raise prices to make up for them. Similarly, fresh food distributors are billing restaurants and grocery markets to make up for the rising price of diesel, which could soon get passed along to shoppers and diners. Grocery prices will rise 2% in the next few weeks, according to The Food Institute. Contractor Plus, a management app designed for contractors and businesses like plumbing and electricians, is advisingits clients on how to add fuel surcharges directly to invoices. Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart and Amazon have all started offering fuel price relief options for its delivery and rideshare drivers, the New York Times reported, and that could soon turn into a surcharge for riders or delivery recipients. When the war in Ukraine caused gas prices to jump in 2022, Uber and Lyft added surcharges directly to customers.

Will The New Fees Ever Go Away? 

Probably not. Often, a fee gets introduced to solve a seemingly temporary cost problem but then becomes permanent, even after the original justification fades. Restaurant service fees, for example, were born amid higher prices and fewer sales during the pandemic but many stayed around when costs dropped. Airline checked baggage fees were introduced during the 2008 oil price spike, when jet fuel costs surged, but didn't disappear once fuel prices stabilized. Rental car companies added "temporary" surcharges after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks to offset falling travel demand and pay for added airport security and facility costs, but they stuck around after the travel industry recovered. Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastian recently implied airfares likely won't go back down even if oil prices drop, instead saying the lowered fuel costs would "certainly help us boost our margins this year and clearly into next year as well."

Read the full story on Forbes: By Mary Whitfill Roeloffs

https://www.forbes.com/sites/maryroeloffs/2026/04/13/here-are-the-hidden-fees-for-food-flights-more-youre-paying-because-of-the-affordability-crisis/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Top 10 Greatest Living Self-Made Americans

1. Oprah Winfrey
2. Harold Hamm
3. David Steward
4. Thomas Peterffy
5. LeBron James
6. Jan Koum
7. Dolly Parton
8. Bill Clinton
9. Diane Hendricks
10. J.D. Vance

Grit. Hustle. Resilience. The American Dream is built on the audacious belief that anyone can make it to the top. Every elementary school kid is imbued with the belief that anyone can become president of the United States. Or a hip-hop megastar. Or a space-faring billionaire. The notion is as old as the Republic and stands self-consciously in contrast to class-ridden Europe where one’s prospects were often determined at birth. 

This ideal has always had its heroes: from Alexander Hamilton, the orphaned immigrant who crafted America’s first financial system, to Andrew Carnegie, who went from working as a young teen in a textile mill to forging a vast steel empire. Since 1917, it has been the prime subject matter of this publication. So, in honor of America’s semiquincentennial, we feel uniquely qualified to rank the 250 greatest living self-made Americans. (Our list of the 250 greatest historical ones will be released on Friday).

To identify these revolutionaries, we first mined Forbes’ 109-year-deep archive for classic tales of entrepreneurial capitalism. Then we asked our current crop of beat reporters for their ideas. We canvassed AI, running hundreds of queries through both ChatGPT and Gemini. While we put a heavy emphasis on rags-to-riches billionaires, we also included pioneering scientists, Supreme Court justices and others whose “wealth” is measured in influence and impact, not just dollar signs. 

Next, we ran names past a panel of expert judges: DeAngela Burns-Wallace, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; Keith Dunleavy, Founder, Inovalon; Rich Karlgaard, Former Publisher, Forbes; Steven Klinsky, Founder and CEO, New Mountain Capital; Jim McKelvey, cofounder of Block (formerly Square); and Ryan Rippel, CEO of NextLadder Ventures.

An invaluable resource was , a 1-to-10 ranking that quantifies the “distance traveled” by each individual—separating those who started with nothing from those with a big head start. Only those ranking nine or ten made the cut. The final ranking encompasses financial success, obstacles overcome and enduring impact.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Alex Knapp

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexknapp/2026/04/09/forbes-self-made-250-the-greatest-living-self-made-americans/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Canadian visitation to the U.S. is down 35% since President Trump returned to office—dealing a massive, sustained economic blow to the U.S. economy that shows no sign of reversing in 2026.

Key Facts

• The number of Canadians taking road trips into the U.S.—the most common way of visiting—dropped by 5% last month compared to March 2025 and is down 35% compared to March 2024, according to data released Monday from Statistics Canada.
• There was also a 14% year-over-year decline in air travelers from Canada to the U.S. in March.
• In contrast, the volume of Americans visiting Canada in March was up 4% compared to a year ago.
• For the third consecutive month, more Canadians flew to overseas destinations than drove to the U.S.—flipping a long-established pattern.
• Canadian visitation overseas was up 5% year over year—a sign Canadians are swapping the U.S. for other international destinations. 
• Nearly a quarter (23%) of Canadian travelers have canceled a previously planned trip to the U.S., according to a Longwoods International tracking study of Canadian travelers.

Crucial Quote

“In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off,” Amir Eylon, President and CEO of Longwoods International, told Forbes.

How Much Has The 14-Month Canadian Boycott Cost The U.s. Economy?

In the years leading to President Donald Trump’s re-election to a second term, Canadian tourists were the biggest single source of international visitors to the U.S., comprising roughly one-quarter of all foreign travelers, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Travel and Tourism Office (NTTO). In 2024, Canadian tourists injected $20.5 billion into the U.S. economy. But in early 2025, the U.S. Travel Association (USTA) warned even a 10% reduction in Canadian inbound travel could translate to $2.1 billion in lost spending and 140,000 lost jobs in the hospitality sector. The actual decline was 22%—more than double that hypothetical drop—which works out to a drop of roughly $4.5 billion in visitor spending. The boycott continued into 2026, with double-digit declines in both January and February, and cumulative two-year drops of more than 30% each month.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Suzanne Rowan Kelleher

https://www.forbes.com/sites/suzannerowankelleher/2026/04/13/canadian-visits-us-down-35-percent/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

SandboxAQ has an AI platform to help materials researchers speed the development of safer, higher-powered, solid-state batteries for autos, the military and data centers.

China’s dominance in batteries is powering a global auto industry shakeup. The country didn’t just get better at making them. It got better at making a lot of them cheaply and fast enough to let automakers like BYD and Geely sell electric vehicles at prices that can look like a misprint next to U.S. and European models.

Now, SandboxAQ, a moonshot company spun out of Google in 2022, is betting the U.S. doesn’t need to win by outbuilding China cell-for-cell. It just needs to come up with better battery designs. And it says its AI-enabled tech platform can help battery scientists accelerate their research to create new types of safer, cheaper solid-state batteries for EVs, military equipment and data centers. 

The Palo Alto, California-based company, which has raised $950 million from backers including Alphabet, Nvidia and AI scientist Yann LeCun, is today releasing a new version of its research platform, AQVolt26. The pitch: compress the earliest, most uncertain part of battery R&D—screening and evaluating candidate materials—so scientists can dump bad ideas quickly and focus their efforts on the ones that might actually ship. The goal is to slash development time to create new battery chemistries, which now takes 10 to 15 years, said Ang Xiao, who leads SandboxAQ’s materials science team.

“It's hard to give an exact figure for how many years we can save, but I can tell you that for the discovery phase, we can reduce the time of that by 90% to 95%,” he told Forbes. “Our technology is only focused on the discovery phase, phase one. … But in the end, we will accelerate the entire development pipeline.”

The company, chaired by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, says it’s already generating revenue from its tech from customers, including battery developer Novonix and the U.S. Army, as well as other battery and auto companies it declined to name. It also won’t say how much revenue it expects this year. SandboxAQ’s battery strategy is to make money from fees paid by users of its research platform, licensing its tech to other companies or doing research on their behalf, as well as developing its own unique battery materials. With demand rising for batteries across EVs, energy and grid storage and defense applications, it’s chasing a market with real money behind it.

“We see the battery market as a $500 billion opportunity this decade, expanding toward $1 trillion as electrification and AI-driven energy demand accelerate,” Xiao said. “Our focus is on the high-value segment of materials discovery and performance optimization.”

Like Waymo, another Google Moonshot, Sandbox is using AI for physical applications rather than chatbots. In addition to battery tech, which is part of its chemicals and materials unit, it’s also focused on using AI for drug discovery and medical diagnostics, among other areas. Unlike OpenAI and Google’s Gemini, which lean on large language models (LLMs), Sandbox says its approach is built on large quantitative models (LQMs) trained on physics-based data and scientific principles. Read the full story on Forbes: By Alan Ohnsman

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2026/04/07/this-google-spinout-thinks-ai-can-fix-americas-ev-battery-problem/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Forbes Reporter Phoebe Liu sat down to discuss the escalating legal battle between Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman ahead of their upcoming April trial. Liu also discusses the allegations of anti-competitive behavior and the financial pressures facing leading AI firms as they navigate rapid innovation, massive capital requirements, and intense competition for market dominance in the emerging artificial general intelligence sector. 00:00 Origins Of The Altman And Musk Partnership 01:47 OpenAI's Transition From Nonprofit To For Profit 03:10 The Upcoming Trial 05:08 Allegations Of Anti Competitive Behavior And Opposition Research 08:12 Financial Motives Versus The Public Good 10:47 Outlook For AI IPOs And Market Valuations

InJanuary, OpenAI’s CEO of applications Fidji Simo defended OpenAI’s spaghetti-at-the-wall product approach—ads, shopping, health, a social network, browser, physical devices, video generation and an App Store-like marketplace—as variations on the same theme. “AI is going to transform everything,” Simo told Forbes at the time. “And so we don’t really think of these as completely separate bets.” 

But just two months later, OpenAI reversed course on its flashiest initiative yet: its once-viral, beloved-by-some Sora video model and app, and a “landmark” licensing deal with Disney that was set to include a $1 billion equity investment. The retreat points to a strategic shift toward more financial discipline within the company. Facing pressure to build products that actually make money ahead of a potential upcoming IPO — and with rival Anthropic gaining steam — OpenAI has been shedding so-called “side quests” left and right. With $13 billion in 2025 revenue but still deeply unprofitable, the company is now refocusing on areas where demand is already proven: coding and enterprise productivity tools.

Every startup pivots if things aren’t working. “We will make some good decisions and some missteps, but we will take feedback and try to fix the missteps very quickly,” CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post about Sora in October. 

But OpenAI’s reversals have felt like whiplash. And with many other projects and deals announced but not yet realized — like an AI hardware product designed by famed Apple designer Jony Ive, whose company OpenAI acquired for more than $6 billion in (mostly unvested) stock, or a secretive social network based on people’s biometrics — it’s not clear which of Altman’s many promises will turn into reality. 

Here are all the products and deals that OpenAI announced which haven’t lived up to the hype, whether it’s because they’re dead, delayed or still to be determined.

Read the full story on Forbes: BY Phoebe Liu

https://www.forbes.com/sites/phoebeliu/2026/03/31/openai-graveyard-deals-and-products-havent-happened-openai/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After a rough stretch, investment firm AQR is on a 5-year hot streak thanks to a new AI infused investing strategy and strong tax-friendly returns, beloved by financial advisors.

Last year was a banner year for many hedge funds and quant shops, and Greenwich, CT-based Applied Quantitative Research—better known as AQR—was no exception. Its assets under management have ballooned to $187 billion, increasing $73 billion in 2025. All three of its billionaire founders saw their net worths double.

Cliff Asness, AQR’s PhD-holding chief investment officer and largest individual shareholder with an estimated 30% stake, is now worth $6.3 billion, making him the 664th richest in the world. Cofounders John Liew and David Kabiller each saw their net worths jump to over $2 billion. The three founders—who started AQR in 1998 after working together at Goldman Sachs Asset Management—are all heavily invested in AQR’s funds, tying their own fortunes to the firm’s performance. 

Last year AQR’s core multi-strategy Apex fund, which has $6.7 billion in assets, returned 19.4%, while its Delphi long-short fund (also $6.7 billion in assets) returned 16.7%, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked for anonymity to share private information. On average over the last five years the two funds have each returned 16.6% on an annualized basis, the person added. (For comparison, the S&P 500 returned 14.4% annualized over that same time period). Among the firm’s more than two dozen open-ended mutual funds, AQR’s Equity Market Neutral Fund, with $3.2 billion in assets and around 2,000 positions, held both long and short, gained 26.5% in 2025. Over the last 5-years it has averaged 19.6% annually versus around 8% for most funds in its category.

If AQR maintains last year’s growth trajectory it will soon eclipse its previous all-time high of $226 billion in assets (in 2018), which would cap an impressive comeback for the firm, which managed less than $100 billion as recently as four years ago amid underperformance and customer outflows. 

AQR’s turnaround has coincided with its full-throated embrace of AI and deliberate expansion of machine-learning techniques across research and trading. As a factor-based investor, AQR traditionally sought to use value investing metrics like price-to-book or return on equity to determine which equities in the market are over or undervalued. It then relied on human input to assign weights to the various factors they use to drive stock selection. Now, machine learning is helping do that—detecting complex interactions between factors, recalibrating their weights in real time, mining huge datasets for predictive signals. On the research side, natural language processing (think ChatGPT or Claude) is helping analysts comb through reams of data to improve their models. 

AQR, whose founders Asness and Liew were schooled under the University of Chicago’s efficient market Nobel Laureate economist Eugene Fama, was late to the AI party compared to peers like Renaissance Technologies and D.E. Shaw. AQR hired its first head of machine learning in 2018, and that person lasted just seven months in the job. But his replacement, Brian Kelly, a Yale finance professor, has made a big splash. In December 2021, Kelly co-published a 141-page academic paper, The Virtue of Complexity in Return Prediction, which concluded that more sophisticated machine learning models outperformed simpler models in forecasting stock returns and constructing investment portfolios. Several academics wrote their own papers in response that disputed Kelly’s findings saying that the research relied on an overly narrow dataset. AQR has defended the paper and continues to stand by its findings. 

More recently, Asness himself has taken up the mantle of AI evangelizer-in-chief. He remarked that AQR has “surrendered more to the machine” and that AI was coming for his own job. Despite all the talk, AQR insiders insist AI has not extinguished human input. “ML and AI are definitely paying dividends in our process, but they’re evolutionary, not revolutionary, to what we do,” says a person at the company.

To wit, the revolutionary stuff appears to be happening in the less sexy distribution side of the business, where AQR is meeting rising demand from financial advisors seeking tax-friendly funds for their wealthy clients. This category of investor—rather than AQR’s traditional institutional client base like pension funds and endowments—is now its largest source of inflows. The CEO of Affiliated Managers Group, which owns a minority stake in AQR, said during last month’s earnings call that AQR’s advisory client base is “driving significant organic growth,” and that its own full-year net inflows of $51 billion were “primarily driven by AQR.” 

Read the full story on Forbes: By John Hyatt

https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnhyatt/2026/03/16/how-3-billionaire-investors-used-ai-to-double-their-fortunes-in-a-year/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The Justice Department is investigating the National Football League over alleged anticompetitive practices that harm consumers, the Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday citing anonymous sources familiar with the probe, although the exact scope of the investigation was not immediately clear and not confirmed by investigators or the league.

• KEY FACTS Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have written to federal regulators, including the DoJ and the Federal Communications Commission, in recent months detailing high costs placed on consumers due to the NFL’s exclusive deals with streaming platforms and cable channels.
• The NFL has historically been protected from some antitrust regulation by the Sports Broadcasting Act of 1961.
• Both the Justice Department and the NFL declined to comment on the Journal’s report, and neither organization immediately returned a request for comment from Forbes.

KEY BACKGROUND

In March, Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, asked the Justice Department to examine the NFL’s practice of simultaneously licensing the rights to broadcast games to “subscription streaming platforms, premium cable networks, and technology companies.” The Utah senator said this practice might no longer be protected as “sponsored telecasting” of games as protected in the Sports Broadcasting Act, which was written when games were only available on broadcast television available to all. According to Lee’s letter, a person who wanted to watch every NFL game last season would have had to pay almost $1,000 on various cable and streaming service subscriptions, as well as fees for high-speed internet or satellite connections. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Patrick Ryan, D-N.Y., sent their own letter to the FCC in April, asking regulators to examine whether acquisitions and “forced bundling” have forced consumers to pay higher prices for packages including games they don’t want.

Read the full story on Forbes: By Zachary Folk

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zacharyfolk/2026/04/09/federal-investigators-probing-nfl-for-alleged-anticompetitive-practices-report-says/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices