Black Wealth Watch: Pinky Cole’s Former CFO Faces Fraud Charges, Shaq Expands Into Women’s Basketball, Will.i.am Teaches AI At ASU

Welcome to Black Wealth Watch, where we round up the biggest stories in Black business and economic news each week — the wins, the setbacks, the deals getting done, and the conversations we should be having about money, power, and who actually gets a seat at the table.

This week came with a full plate. Pinky Cole is navigating yet another storm tied to her restaurant business, and this time around it involves a criminal indictment attached to someone she trusted with her money. Shaq is showing up yet again for women’s basketball. Will.i.am just finished his first semester as a college professor, and before you ask, no, the subject was not music. Zoom is writing checks for solo founders who are building their businesses without a safety net (if you’re a founder of color, this is probably you), and a new study confirmed something a lot of us have suspected for a while about where the next generation gets its news. Read on for more of this week’s top stories.

Pinky Cole’s Former Bar Vegan CFO Has Been Indicted

Pinky Cole has enough on her plate right now (if you saw that read from Angela Oakley on last week’s RHOA episode, you’ll know what I’m talking about), and this week added more. Aaron Mattison, the former chief financial officer of Bar Vegan, her now-closed Atlanta restaurant, has been indicted in Georgia on charges of theft by taking, first-degree forgery, and money laundering. Prosecutors say he used phony financial documents to move more than $87,000 out of the company and into his own accounts, and separately made a series of $600 withdrawals over nearly a year that added up to more than $24,000 before shuffling that money through multiple accounts to cover his tracks. Cole has not been charged, and she has been heads-down rebuilding Slutty Vegan toward a franchise model since filing for Chapter 11 earlier this year. Stories like this are also a reminder that the people closest to your business can sometimes do the most damage.

Shaq Is Bringing DUNKMAN to the Women’s Game

Everyone loves women’s sports, including Shaquille O’Neal. His Dunkman brand, which is the platform he built around his new professional dunking league with TNT Sports that also has an apparel line, just announced a partnership with the UPSHOT League, a new women’s professional basketball league. Tipping off its inaugural season on May 15, Dunkman will be outfitting the league from head to toe. The UPSHOT League is launching with four teams across Jacksonville, Charlotte, Savannah, and Greensboro, with two more cities already locked in for next season. Shaq has made no secret of where he stands on this. “It’s about time women’s basketball is being recognized,” O’Neal said in a release. “I’m a big fan—these players can really play. He’s long said women’s basketball deserves bigger platforms, and now he’s putting money behind that belief.

Will.i.am Just Finished His First Semester Teaching AI at ASU

Professor will.i.am, and yes, that is a real sentence now. The Black Eyed Peas frontman just completed his first semester teaching “The Agentic Self,” a 15-week course at Arizona State University’s GAME School built around how to understand and work with artificial intelligence agents. He taught the class out of his Hollywood studio and on ASU’s Tempe campus, and his students were not all 20-year-olds fresh out of high school. People came in at every stage of life, and by the end, they were walking out with AI-powered projects they built themselves, including tools to help veterans navigate their benefits and AI agents built to make certain African languages accessible in ways the biggest tech companies have never prioritized. Will.i.am has been clear that he is not dismissing the anxiety people have around AI. He has acknowledged that the pace of this technology is unsettling, and that most adults are not prepared for what is already here. If you’re intrigued and want to potentially check it out for yourself, a second semester is already coming.

Zoom Is Cutting Checks for Solo Founders

If you have been building your business by yourself with no investors, no team, and no safety net, Zoom just put $150,000 on the table for people like you. Through its first-ever Solopreneur 50 program, the company awarded five independent founders $30,000 each, with zero conditions on how they spend it. Thousands of people applied from nearly every state in the country, and winners were chosen by an outside panel looking at things like impact and sustainability. Each winner also gets access to Zoom’s mentorship network and tech resources. With so many people working for themselves right now, it’s a step in the right direction to see a company this big finally acknowledging how massive the solopreneur economy has become.

Teens Are Getting Their News From Influencers, and the Numbers Are Not Close

It’s them d*mn phones!! And a major new study from the Media Insight Project just proved it. A research collaboration between AP-NORC, the American Press Institute, Northwestern’s Medill School, and the University of Maryland, found that 81 percent of teenagers turn to influencers and independent creators for news at least some of the time. Across all ages surveyed, that figure was 57 percent, which means this is not just a Gen Z thing anymore. Traditional media has not vanished, but it is clearly no longer where younger audiences go first. For every Black creator who has spent years building an audience while legacy outlets acted like they did not exist, this data is the receipts. The audience found you.