Forbes

Overview

Forbes is the magazine that turned wealth into a beat — and then, over a decade of failed sales, nearly sold itself out from under the beat. CJR Founded in 1917 by B.C. Forbes, a financial columnist for Hearst, and Walter Drey, the general manager of the Magazine of Wall Street, it became synonymous with the Rich List: the annual ranking of the 400 wealthiest Americans that Malcolm Forbes introduced and his son Steve inherited when Malcolm died in 1990. CJR But the most distinctive thing about Forbes today isn’t the lists — it’s the business model underneath them, a contributor network of more than 2,000 writers that the Columbia Journalism Review spent years dissecting, and a decade-long ownership saga that saw the company SPAC itself, take Binance money, and nearly sell to a lidar billionaire. CJR

The contributor model and its scandals

Forbes.com’s growth engine is the contributor network: thousands of outside writers publishing under the Forbes masthead with far less editorial oversight than the roughly 200 journalists in the newsroom. CJR The model produced scale — and one of the strangest media scandals of the decade. Heather Morgan, the rapper known as Razzlekhan, wrote more than 50 pieces for Forbes before her 2022 arrest for laundering $4.5 billion in stolen cryptocurrency. CJR The episode became CJR’s emblem of what the contributor model, at its worst, enabled: brand authority rented out under thin supervision. CJR

Events have become the other pillar of the business — the 30 Under 30 franchise and its conferences account for roughly 30% of media revenue, a reminder that Forbes today is as much a live-events company as a magazine. CJR The company’s own history is tangled with the family that named it: B.C. Forbes’s column in the first issue declared that “Business was originated to produce happiness, not to pile up millions,” his elder son Bruce Charles succeeded him, and the younger son Malcolm turned the magazine into a lavish lifestyle brand — festivals at his French château, a Moroccan-palace birthday party with Rupert Murdoch, Barbara Walters and Henry Kissinger — before Steve Forbes, Malcolm’s son and a two-time Republican presidential candidate, took over in 1990. CJR

The never-ending sale

The Forbes family sold 95% of the company to Hong Kong-based Integrated Whale Media in 2014 at a $475 million valuation, keeping a small stake. CJR What followed was a decade of attempted exits. In 2006 an investment group including Bono’s Elevation Partners had bought a minority interest; by 2022 the company called off a SPAC merger with Magnum Opus — a deal that had drawn Binance money — after the market soured. CJR TechCrunch CJR also reported on the deal’s regulatory shadow: the involvement of overseas capital in the attempted sale drew scrutiny tied to CFIUS, the committee that reviews foreign investment in U.S. media assets. CJR

Then came the strangest chapter. In May 2023, Luminar founder Austin Russell — at 28, billed as the world’s youngest self-made billionaire — agreed to buy an 82% stake in Forbes at a valuation of nearly $800 million. TechCrunch The deal was supposed to close November 1, but it collapsed after Indian investment firm Sun Group — whose vice chair Shiv Khemka had committed $300 million — and others failed to wire the money they were contractually obligated to send. TechCrunch Integrated Whale Media terminated the agreement. TechCrunch Through it all, the magazine kept publishing its lists — in 2007 it had named NVIDIA its “Company of the Year,” a verdict that looks prophetic two decades later. Britannica

Through the turmoil, the company kept one continuity: longevity of staff. In December 2024, Forbes named Sherry Phillips — who joined the company in 1996 as Publisher of ForbesLife and became chief revenue officer in 2022 — as chief executive effective January 1, 2025, succeeding Mike Federle. Forbes Media She is the first woman to lead Forbes in its 107-year history. Forbes Media

What this profile does not claim

It does not assert who ultimately stood behind the failed 2023 Russell bid — competing allegations appeared in outlets this profile did not read in full, and only the bid’s structure, valuation, and collapse are documented here. TechCrunch It does not claim the contributor model is “pay-to-play” as a statement of fact; it reports CJR’s investigation of the model’s oversight failures, including the Razzlekhan case. CJR And it does not treat the company’s traffic and revenue claims from the 2024 announcement as independently verified. Forbes Media