April 1927: B.C. Forbes takes on automobile pioneer Henry Ford, praising his manufacturing successes, but railing against his virulent anti-Semitism. Ford issues an apology.
May 1929: A B.C. Forbes column warns &#8220;Stocks too high&#8221; five months before the market begins a slide that will take it down 85%.
December 1929: Though Forbes declares the worst is over for stocks, the market remains down for the next three years.
June 1932: A little-known Columbia University lecturer named Benjamin Graham writes an article saying crash had been way overdone, saying stocks are cheap. With the Dow at 45, it was nearly the bottom.
July 1956: Forbes is the first magazine to launch an Annual Report on Mutual Funds, including performance grades in Up and Down markets. The survey is widely followed and copied.
July 1963: A Forbes cover story examines the evidence that tobacco causes cancer and concludes, &#8220;The U.S. tobacco industry is headed for trouble of a kind no other industry has ever seen.&#8221;
September 1972: &#8220;The New Super Money Men&#8221; cover is the first to identify the rise of professional athletes and their managers as business-focused enterprises.
December 1972: A cover story predicts Mazda&#8217;s rotary engine will take over Detroit. Its popularity stalls soon after.
November 1974: In the depths of a bear market, Warren Buffett tells Forbes that stocks are cheap. &#8220;I feel like an oversexed man in a harem. This is the time to start investing.&#8221; Stocks soon rise.
August 1980: Chrysler is near bankruptcy and written off by the media. Forbes accurately predicts a comeback under the leadership of auto veteran Lee Iacocca.
November 1984: A Forbes investigative team is the first to shine a light on Drexel Burnham&#8217;s Michael Milken and his junk bond money machine.
November 1987: Despite dire predictions, a Forbes cover story assures readers that there would be no serious economic downturn as a result of the October 1987 crash. The market ends the year with a gain.
May 1990: &#8220;How Rich Is Donald?&#8221; A cover story digs deep into Trump&#8217;s finances, exposing a liquidity crunch and revealing a net worth of only $500 million versus the $4 billion he claimed.
April 1992: The magazine puts a tulip bulb on the cover and advises our readers not to put any new money into the stock market. The bull market rages on, almost without interruption, for eight more years.
March 1993: George Gilder&#8217;s cover story &#8220;Telecosm &#8221; in Forbes ASAP, predicts the coming wireless Web and computers the size of a wallet that would store your life&#8211;smartphones.
April 1994: Midway through Bill Clinton&#8217;s first term as president, a cover exclaimed: &#8220;Why Bill Clinton Looks Like a One-Termer.&#8221;
December 1996: In &#8220;Gilbert Amelio&#8217;s Grand Scheme to Save Apple&#8221; Forbes predicts that a new OS will save Apple, which would squash Microsoft. Amelio is ousted within seven months&#8211;by Steve Jobs.
December 1996: In &#8220;Is He the Godfather of the Kremlin?&#8221; Forbes reveals how Russia&#8217;s Boris Berezovsky, is the real muscle behind President Yeltsin. The oligarch will factor heavily in the selection of Vladimir Putin.
December 1998: A cover story on &#8220;Tax Shelter Hustlers&#8221; reveals a myriad of income tax avoidance maneuvers by leading accounting firms and their corporate clients and prompts alarm at Treasury and in Congress.
January 1999: &#8220;Amateur Hour on Wall Street&#8221; warns that a growing mob of novices, armed with cheap, fast PCs and e-brokerage accounts, is fueling a dangerous speculative tech stock bubble. Fourteen months later&#8211;pop!
April 2008: A cover story, &#8220;No Thain, No Gain,&#8221; gushes over Merrill Lynch and its ill-fated CEO, John Thain. Within a year, Merrill Lynch is bailed out by Bank of America and Thain is ousted amid scandal.
November 2008: With the financial crisis in full bloom, Steve Forbes&#8217; cover story, &#8220;How Capitalism Will Save Us&#8221; extols the underlying strengths of the U.S. economy and accurately predicts a resumption of the global boom.
October 2011: The magazine calls Chesapeake Energy&#8217;s CEO Aubrey McClendon, &#8220;America&#8217;s Most Reckless Billionaire.&#8221; Two years later, he&#8217;s out as CEO. Within five years, he dies in a car accident one day after being indicted for bid-rigging.
February 2013: A cover story on Airbnb identifies the share-economy as a new disruptive threat in a myriad of industries from hotels to car rentals to camping.
September 2015: In &#8220;Money&#8217;s New Operating System&#8221; Forbes predicts that the blockchain will become the &#8220;dial tone for the 21st-century global economy.&#8221;
June 2016: Forbes exposes billionaire Peter Thiel as the hidden money behind Hulk Hogan&#8217;s $140 million libel case against Gawker.
December 2016: The magazine chronicles how billionaire Kenneth Feld keeps Ringling Brothers circus alive. Within six months, the 146-year old entertainment business is shuttered.
March 2017: A cover package called &#8220;In Trump They Trust&#8221; exposes the vast web of global business partners&#8211;from Indonesia to Panama&#8211;cashing in on the 45th president.
Paul Klebnikov (1963-2004)
Bold journalism takes brave journalists, and Forbes has produced none braver than Paul Klebnikov, who climbed the ranks to become founding editor of Forbes Russia. Klebnikov launched the magazine at a time, like now, when the powers-that-be didn&#8217;t appreciate tough questions. And he asked them, chronicling the looting of the country by crony capitalists, the rise of organized crime and the war in Chechnya.
On July 9, 2004, Klebnikov was shot nine times with a semiautomatic pistol as he left his Moscow office. Just 41, he left behind a wife and three children. While Russian officials have never brought his killer to justice, some investigators have tried to pin the killing on now-deceased oligarch Boris Berezovsky, whom Klebnikov had dubbed the &#8220;Godfather of the Kremlin.&#8221; Others point to Chechen criminals. A team of investigative reporters, Project Klebnikov, continues to seek answers. And a generation of Forbes journalists, inspired by his fearless reporting, continue to ask tough questions.
&#8211; Written by <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/schifrin/" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-ga-track="contrib block byline">Matt Schifrin</a>, FORBES STAFF

Forbes Magazine: 100 Years Of Hits And Flops

Any visitor to Palestine is guaranteed a few things. Delicious deep-fried balls of ground chickpeas inside pita bread, the call of the muezzin five times a day, a permeating strong smell of black coffee through a cacophony of hooting cars and shouting in Arabic. And getting lost.
Driving, especially through the bustling streets of the de facto capital Ramallah, is a nightmare. Not because the roads are particularly unsafe but because assistance comes in the form of no street names, no street signs and no house numbers. A colleague of mine spent the better part of a year paying the wrong electricity bill because, well, he couldn’t read Arabic and the bill kept arriving under his door. It turned out to be for another apartment in another street – neither his street nor apartment were named or numbered!
Only in the last seven years, following the Ramallah centenary celebrations, have street names caught on in the growing metropolis. Yasser Arafat, former chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, now has his square and dozens of Palestinian fighters have their streets. The criteria are simple – heroes, places and ideas supported by the Palestinian people.
So it’s no surprise that South African anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela has been given his spot – if anything, the  surprise is that it took so long. But residents say it was worth waiting for. The east of the city is now nestled in the shadow of Madiba’s towering figure – a six-meter, two-ton bronze statue with right fist raised.
The statue is the first of its kind outside South Africa and took artists Christina Salvodi, Lungisa Khala and Tanya Lee seven months to create – and another 30 days to get through Israeli customs. But that’s nothing, muses Ramallah’s Mayor Mussa Hadid, compared to the 27 years Mandela spent in prison.
“The erection of Mandela’s sculpture in Ramallah carries a symbolic significance,” he says. “Mandela was an international symbol of peace and a torch to people striving for freedom and liberty.”
A staunch supporter of the Palestinian struggle against Israel, Mandela once declared that, “We know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.” It’s a view he repeated after warmly embracing Arafat in their first meeting in Zambia after his release in 1990.
“Like us, he is fighting against a unique form of colonization,” Mandela said of the Palestinian leader at the time, “and we wish him success in his struggle.”
Mandela is revered across the Arab and Palestinian world. The square now boasting his name is in a quiet part of the city and traffic here slows down to circle around his statue so drivers can get a good glance – looking upwards – of their hero. If you stand on tiptoes it’s almost possible to reach up high enough to touch his left hand.
Mamoun, a 19-year-old engineering student who lives not far from the now aptly renamed Mandela Square, exclaims, “He is our hero and it’s only right that a man who stood for the fight against oppression, now stands tall and proud in our city!”
Amira is another Ramallah resident who believes the square bearing Mandela’s name will become a major tourist attraction in her city.
“I am so excited that we have our own Mandela in Ramallah now,” she smiles. “Our struggle is like the struggle of South Africa – and hopefully he can watch over us just like he watched over his own people.”
Mandela’s relationship with Israel was more complicated. He was a firm supporter of the right of Jews to a national homeland, but he never forgot Israel’s support for the apartheid regime during the 1970s and 80s.
“We insist on the right of the State of Israel to exist within secure borders,” he remarked in 1993, but “with equal vigor” stressed support of “the Palestinian right to national self-determination.”
Mandela didn’t visit Israel during his presidency but agreed to receive an honorary doctorate from one of the country’s universities shortly after leaving office. He used the opportunity to impress upon the then newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak his concern about the conflict with the Palestinians and the failure of the Oslo peace process.
Israelis, like most people in the world, hold Mandela in high esteem but unsurprisingly, whereas the ceremony to unveil his statue in Ramallah received much attention in the South African and Palestinian press, it was hardly mentioned in the Israeli media.
Speaking at the inauguration, Johannesburg’s Mayor Parks Tau, who presented the statue as a gift from his city said, “Nelson Mandela himself would have been extremely proud of what has been done here today.”

Mandela Stands Tall Over People Fighting For Liberation

A few weeks before Floyd Mayweather swaggered into the ring in Las Vegas, a forgotten centenary slipped by that lends context to the struggle of the black man.
On April 5, 1915, the first ever black heavyweight champion of the world lost his title after 26 brutal rounds at a racetrack in Havana, Cuba. It was the end of a remarkable story of pride, skill and refusal to back down in the face of cruel and repulsive racism. Each of his stirring fights was punctuated by a torrent of vile abuse – mostly in the United States, the self-proclaimed land of the free – that would have made a neo-Nazi blush.
They called Jack Johnson, the son of a slave from Texas, the Galveston Giant, for he was every inch so. He was over six foot, with a broad chest that looked chiselled out of mahogany; he bowed for no man and boxed into his 60s. Out of the ring, Johnson was a flamboyant man about town who smoked huge cigars, drank champagne, dressed in the finest suits and drove expensive cars at a time when most of the world was walking.
In the ring, Johnson was a supreme mover and technical genius that few could lay a glove on. He started each fight with beguiling ease, as if he was kidding his opponent to death, in the words of his biographer Geoffrey C. Ward in his book Unforgivable Blackness. As the rounds went by the punching power would grow steadily, with lurking devastating uppercuts that threatened to rip off a boxer’s head.
This was how Johnson won his world title in Sydney, Australia, the day after Christmas in 1908. The fact there was an unofficial color bar in boxing makes the title win ever more remarkable. For two years, Johnson haunted the corner of the heavyweight title holder Canadian Tommy Burns. As corner men towelled Burns down, after another victory, Johnson shouted from ringside that Burns was no champion until he had fought him. Yes, these things happened before Don King was even thought of.
Money twisted the arm of Burns, who said many times he would never fight a black man. Greed and money had always ruled boxing.
Round after round, in Sydney, Burns, who had power but little sense, insulted Johnson’s race and called him a coward as he charged. Johnson smiled and taunted back.
“Poor little Tommy, who told you you were a fighter?” joked Johnson.
“This is what is known as a left hook, Tommy,” before stepping and letting fly with a bone-shuddering left.
In the 14th round, as Johnson hammered Burns to the floor, there came press censorship. Legend has it that the police ordered the camera to stop filming during the knockout. Certainly, the edited footage cuts out the moment when Burns hit the canvas; it was deemed unseemly to show a black man victorious over a white.
Despite this, Johnson landed a resounding blow for the black man in Sydney. Sadly, in the United States (US), angry lynch mobs murdered more than 20 innocent black men, in racial retribution.
Johnson defended his title eight times in six and a half years. The tirade against him grew as the newspapers made a meal of his lavish lifestyle and relationships with white women. The man himself, one of the greatest boxers ever to lace up a pair of gloves, didn’t give a damn.
The great man’s reign also gave rise to the phrase: the ‘great white hope’ for any boxer attempting to wrest the title back from black hands. One of them, former heavyweight champion James J Jeffries, came out of retirement on US Independence Day, July 4, 1910. Trains carried thousands to the fight, in Reno, Nevada, that could have doubled as a Nuremburg rally. Guns weren’t allowed because the organizers thought someone was going to shoot Johnson. The crowd satisfied itself by firing racist insults throughout.
Johnson had the last laugh, pummelling Jeffries to the floor, earning $121,000, in modern money a sum near the amount for the Mayweather fight. He drove to pick up the money, in cash, from a nearby diner on the way home.
The end came in Havana just over 100 years ago. A hard right hand from Jess Willard, the Pottawatomie Giant, in the 26th round knocked Johnson to the canvas. Age, heat and exhaustion had caught up; there were whispers Johnson had thrown the fight for money. Maybe, maybe not?
Either way, Johnson never wore the crown again and his life ended on a sad note of bathos; the Galveston Giant died, aged 67, when his car hit a telegraph pole. He had driven away angrily from a North Carolina diner after yet more discrimination against the color of his skin.
The centenary is maybe time to pause and think. One hundred years on, from Johnson to Mayweather, the world of boxing may have cleaned up its act, but has the world?

Tag: Centenary

FORBES AFRICA SOCIAL MEDIA

Forbes Magazine: 100 Years Of Hits And Flops

Mandela Stands Tall Over People Fighting For Liberation

The Giant Who Laughed In The Face Of Racism