Forbes

“The meltdown at the Museum of Ice Cream.”

A journalist shares what her experience with prescription painkillers taught her about the value of decriminalization.

Atlanta’s Rollins family has long been known for two things: throwing great parties and spawning the Orkin pest control empire. Forbes investigates the $8 billion family feud that has brought their name back into the headlines.

The rags-to-riches tale of how Jan Koum built WhatsApp into Facebook’s new $19 billion baby:

Jan Koum picked a meaningful spot to sign the $19 billion deal to sell his company WhatsApp to Facebook earlier today. Koum, cofounder Brian Acton and venture capitalist Jim Goetz of Sequoia drove a few blocks from WhatsApp’s discreet headquarters in Mountain View to a disused white building across the railroad tracks, the former North County Social Services office where Koum, 37, once stood in line to collect food stamps. That’s where the three of them inked the agreement to sell their messaging phenom –which brought in a miniscule $20 million in revenue last year — to the world’s largest social network.

A profile of the Wall Street billionaire taking on Dell, Netflix, and other billionaire rivals:

“Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, is learning to accept Icahn since he took a 10% stake in the company last fall. Icahn’s purchase prompted the company to adopt a so-called poison pill to prevent Icahn from buying more shares. ‘It’s like a chess opening. He does that move, and we do the pill. It’s pretty standard in all of these things,’ says Hastings. ‘I was worried about him when we didn’t know him, but I now must say that I enjoy his company.’ Responds Icahn: ‘We like Reed Hastings. I told him when a guy makes me 800 million bucks, I don’t punch him in the mouth.'”

Inside a Saudi billionaire’s obsession with his own Forbes wealth ranking—and the magazine’s subsequent investigation into his real worth:

“But for the past few years former Alwaleed executives have been telling me that the prince, while indeed one of the richest men in the world, systematically exaggerates his net worth by several billion dollars. This led FORBES to a deeper examination of his wealth, and a stark conclusion: The value that the prince puts on his holdings at times feels like an alternate reality, including his publicly traded Kingdom Holding, which rises and falls based on factors that, coincidentally, seem more tied to the FORBES billionaires list than fundamentals.

“Alwaleed, 58, wouldn’t speak with FORBES for this article, but his CFO, Shadi Sanbar, was vociferous: ‘I never knew that FORBES was a magazine of sensational dirt-digging and rumor-filled stories.’ Our discrepancy over his net worth says a lot about the prince, and the process of divining someone’s true wealth.”

A look at the 59-year-old Microsoft cofounder who has invested $500 million into the Allen Institute for Brain Science with the goal of decoding how the human brain works:

“Four years later six brains have been donated and four analyzed to some degree. The project is due to be finished this year, but the first brain images, put online in 2010, are already yielding scientific results. So far, the gene expression from the first two human brains in the new atlas varies only a little, yielding hope that scientists will be able to understand some of what it all means.

“How might this work? A young University of California, San Francisco neuroscientist named Bradley Voytek used software to match words that frequently appeared together in the scientific literature with matches of where genes are expressed in the Allen atlas. For instance, he found that scientists studying serotonin, the neurotransmitter hit by Prozac and Zoloft, were ignoring two brain areas where the chemical was expressed in their research. It might even play a role in migraines. This data-driven approach led to 800 new ideas about how the brain may work that scientists can now test, leading to hope that computational methods can help decipher the computer in our heads.”

[Not single-page] Sara Blakely went from auditioning to play Goofy at Disney World to founding an undergarment empire: Spanx. She still owns 100% equity in the company, making her the youngest female billionaire at age 41:

“Like many startups, Spanx began life as an answer to an irritating problem. The panty hose Blakely was forced to wear at both Disney and Danka were uncomfortable and old-fashioned. ‘It’s Florida, it’s hot, I was carrying fax machines,’ she says. She hated the way the seamed foot stuck out of an open-toe sandal or kitten heel. But she noticed that the control-top eliminated panty lines and made her tiny body look even firmer. She’d bought a new pair of cream slacks for $78 at Arden B and was keen to wear them to a party. ‘I cut the feet off my pantyhose and wore them underneath,’ she says. ‘But they rolled up my legs all night. I remember thinking, “I’ve got to figure out how to make this.” I’d never worked in fashion or retail. I just needed an undergarment that didn’t exist.'”

[Not single-page] The secret life of Manoj Bhargava, whose 5-Hour Energy caffeine and vitamin shot has rung up more than $1 billion in sales:

“Bhargava, 58, is so under the radar that he barely registers on Web searches. His paper trail is thin, consisting primarily of more than 90 lawsuits. This is his first press interview. ‘I’m killing it right now,’ he says, adjusting a black zip-up cardigan from behind the table of a soulless conference room in a beige low-rise building in a suburban business park in Farmington Hills, Mich. ‘But you’ll Google me and find, like, some lawyer in Singapore.’

“Vague and inscrutable is how ­Bhargava likes things. The names of 5-Hour’s parent company, Living Essentials LLC, and that company’s parent firm, Innovation Ventures, are purposely bland. ‘They were intended as placeholders, and they stuck,’ he says, smiling.”

While Gates’ vaccine-based giving—closing in on $6 billion to fight measles, hepatitis B, rotavirus and AIDS, among others—is part of the largest, most human-driven philanthropy in the history of mankind, what’s missing in his language are the individual ­humans.

In many ways that’s the point. Gates’ clipped manner in discussing the children he and his wife met in India and Africa (“Melinda and I spend time with these kids, and we see that they’re suffering; they’re dying”) disappears when the underlying numbers come up, his speech getting more rapid, his voice ever higher. “A 23-cent vaccine,” he says, “and you’ll never get measles,” a disease that “at its peak was killing about a million and a half a year; it’s down below 300,000.” Gates rattles off milestones in the history of global health and the prices of vaccines down to the penny, but blanks on the name of one of his favorite vaccine heroes, John Enders, the late Nobel laureate, or Joe Cohen, a key inventor of the new malaria vaccine Gates helped bankroll.