Austin Russell youngest self-made billionaire in 2021; new Owner of Forbes

The Wall Street Journal reported earlier today that the 28-year-old founder and CEO of Luminar, which creates vision-based lidar and machine perception technologies primarily for self-driving cars, is purchasing an 82% stake in Forbes Global Media Holdings in a deal that values the company at close to $800 million.
The WSJ claims that Russell’s share in the business comprises the residual stake held by the firm’s namesake family, who in 2014 sold 95% of the business to the Hong Kong-based investor group Integrated Whale Media. From the moment Forbes cancelled its merger with a special-purpose acquisition business in June of last year, when the market deteriorated and investors lost interest in SPACs
he timing of Luminar’s IPO through a SPAC merger in 2021, when retail investors were still clamouring for shares of mobility tech companies, was superior. Even then, practically every mobility SPAC was trading below its offering price by the time Forbes decided to cancel its own SPAC plans, and Luminar has not been exempt from the general decline. When it first appeared on Wall Street, it was worth $3.4 billion; today, it is only worth about $2 billion. Three days ago, losses were announced that were a little wider than anticipated.
Despite the fact that Russell told the Silicon Valley Business Journal last year that he had no regrets regarding the SPAC, some retail investors might not be as pleased with its performance. (The alternative, in his opinion, would have been to potentially run out of money
as chequebooks of private market investors started to close quickly.)
Some people may find it worrying that Russell, who Forbes itself referred to as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire in 2021, will soon be focusing some of his attention elsewhere.
Employees at Luminar as well as shareholders may be perplexed by the deal.
Buying Forbes while so many outlets are battling for existence defies common wisdom, despite the fact that it has become popular to operate multiple businesses at once (Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey), as well as to be a billionaire owner of a media organisation (Jeff Bezos, Laurene Powell Jobs, Marc Benioff).
Russell, however, has been concentrating on Luminar since 2012, when he left Stanford to create the business with the help of a $100,000 grant from a well-known investor.