INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA – APRIL 06: Former basketball participant Shaquille O’Neal on air earlier than the 2026 NCAA Males’s Basketball Match Nationwide Championship between the Michigan Wolverines and the Connecticut Huskies at Lucas Oil Stadium on April 06, 2026 in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Photograph by Mitchell Layton/Getty Pictures)
Welcome to Black Wealth Watch, the place we spherical up the largest tales in Black enterprise and financial information every week – the wins, the setbacks, the offers being made, and the conversations we must be having about cash, energy, and who really will get a seat on the desk.
This week got here with a full plate. Pinky Cole goes by means of one other storm associated to her catering enterprise, and this time it includes a felony cost concentrating on somebody she trusted together with her cash. Shaq exhibits up as soon as once more for girls’s basketball. Will.i.am simply completed his first semester as a school professor, and earlier than you ask, no, the topic wasn’t music. Zoom is writing checks for lonely founders who’re constructing their corporations with no security internet (in the event you’re a founding father of coloration, it is most likely you), and a brand new research has confirmed one thing many people have suspected for a while about the place the subsequent era will get their information. Learn on to be taught extra about this week’s prime tales.
Former CFO of Pinky Cole’s Vegan Bar charged
Pinky Cole has sufficient on his plate proper now (in the event you noticed what Angela Oakley mentioned on final week’s present) RHOA episode, you will know what I am speaking about), and this week I added extra. Aaron Mattison, the previous chief monetary officer of Bar Vegan, his now-shuttered Atlanta restaurant, was indicted in Georgia on costs of theft by kidnapping, first-degree forgery and cash laundering. Prosecutors say he used false monetary paperwork to switch greater than $87,000 out of the corporate to his personal accounts, and that he individually made a sequence of $600 withdrawals over practically a 12 months, totaling greater than $24,000, earlier than transferring that cash to a number of accounts to cowl his tracks. Cole has not been charged, and he or she has been headlong rebuilding Slutty Vegan right into a franchise mannequin since submitting for Chapter 11 earlier this 12 months. Tales like this are additionally a reminder that the individuals closest to your small business can generally do essentially the most injury.
Shaq brings DUNKMAN to ladies’s soccer
Everybody loves ladies’s sports activities, together with Shaquille O’Neal. His Dunkman model, which is the platform he constructed round his new skilled dunk league with TNT Sports activities which additionally has an attire line, simply introduced a partnership with the UPSHOT League, a brand new skilled ladies’s basketball league. Starting its inaugural season on Could 15, Dunkman will outfit the league from head to toe. The UPSHOT League launches with 4 groups in Jacksonville, Charlotte, Savannah and Greensboro, with two different cities already dedicated to subsequent season. Shaq has made no secret of his place on this matter. “It’s time for girls’s basketball to be acknowledged,” O’Neal mentioned in a press release. “I am a giant fan: these gamers can actually play. He is lengthy mentioned that ladies’s basketball deserves larger platforms, and now he is investing in that perception.
Will.i.am simply completed his first semester educating AI at ASU
Professor William, and sure, that is an actual sentence now. The Black Eyed Peas frontman simply completed his first semester educating “The Agentic Self,” a 15-week course at Arizona State College’s GAME College centered on find out how to perceive and work with synthetic intelligence brokers. He taught at his Hollywood studio and on ASU’s Tempe campus, and his college students weren’t all 20-year-olds recent out of highschool. Individuals arrived at each stage of life and, on the finish, they left with AI-based tasks that they’d constructed themselves, together with instruments to assist veterans perceive their advantages and AI brokers designed to make sure African languages accessible in ways in which the largest tech corporations have by no means prioritized. Will.i.am has made it clear that he does not dismiss the anxiousness individuals really feel about AI. He acknowledged that the tempo of this expertise is unsettling and that almost all adults are unprepared for what already exists. For those who’re intrigued and wish to presumably test it out for your self, a second semester is already developing.
Zoom removes checks for solo founders
For those who began your small business by yourself, with no traders, no workforce, and no security internet, Zoom simply put $150,000 on the desk for individuals such as you. By means of its first-ever Solopreneur 50 program, the corporate awarded 5 impartial founders $30,000 every, with no strings hooked up on how they will spend it. 1000’s of individuals utilized in practically each state throughout the nation, and winners had been chosen by an out of doors panel of judges issues like influence and sustainability. Every winner additionally positive factors entry to Zoom’s mentoring community and expertise sources. With so many individuals working for themselves proper now, it is a step in the proper course to see an organization of this measurement lastly acknowledge how huge the solopreneur financial system has grow to be.
Teenagers get their information from influencers, and the numbers aren’t shut
It is these fucking telephones!! And a significant new research from the Media Perception Venture has simply confirmed it. A analysis collaboration between AP-NORC, the American Press Institute, Northwestern’s Medill College and the College of Maryland discovered that 81 p.c of teenagers flip to influencers and impartial creators for info at the least a number of the time. Throughout all ages, this determine was 57%, which signifies that it’s now not simply Technology Z. Conventional media has not disappeared, however they’re clearly now not those that younger audiences primarily flip to. For each Black creator who spent years constructing an viewers whereas legacy media pretended they did not exist, this knowledge is the income. The general public discovered you.