There is already plenty on Pinky Cole’s plate as she works to rebuild her brand, and this week brought more. Aaron Mattison, who previously served as chief financial officer of Bar Vegan, her now shuttered Atlanta restaurant, has been indicted in Georgia on three counts: theft by taking, first degree forgery, and money laundering.
According to prosecutors, Mattison used falsified financial records to transfer more than $87,000 from the company into his personal accounts. Separately, investigators say he made a pattern of $600 cash withdrawals over the course of nearly a year, totaling more than $24,000, before moving those funds through multiple accounts in an effort to conceal the trail. All told, the alleged scheme amounts to more than $111,000.
Cole has not been charged and has not been implicated in any wrongdoing. She has been focused on restructuring Slutty Vegan under a franchise model following the company’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing earlier this year. The case is a sobering reminder that financial vulnerability inside a business does not always come from outside threats. Sometimes, it comes from the people closest to the books.
Shaq’s Dunkman brand is backing women’s basketball
Shaquille O’Neal has made no secret of his support for women’s sports, and he is now putting that support into tangible form. His Dunkman brand built around a professional dunking league he launched in partnership with TNT Sports and accompanied by an apparel line has announced a new partnership with the UPSHOT League, a women’s professional basketball organization preparing to tip off its inaugural season on May 15.
Under the agreement, Dunkman will outfit the entire league. The UPSHOT League is launching with four teams, based in Jacksonville, Charlotte, Savannah, and Greensboro, with two additional cities already confirmed for its second season. O’Neal has consistently argued that women’s basketball deserves larger platforms and greater investment, and this partnership represents a direct follow through on that position.
Will.i.am just wrapped his first semester as an AI professor
The idea of will.i.am standing at the front of a college classroom might take a moment to process, but it is very much a real thing. The Black Eyed Peas frontman just completed his inaugural semester teaching a 15 week course at Arizona State University’s GAME School in Tempe. The class, titled The Agentic Self, was designed around helping students understand and practically engage with artificial intelligence agents.
What made the course particularly notable was the range of people in the room. Students came from all different stages of life, not just traditional undergraduates, and by semester’s end they had built real, functioning AI-powered projects. Those included tools designed to help veterans navigate their benefits and AI agents built to make certain African languages more accessible an area the largest technology companies have consistently overlooked.
Will.i.am has been candid about the anxiety many people feel around the pace of AI development, acknowledging that most adults are genuinely unprepared for what is already here. A second semester of the course is already in the works for those who want to explore further.
Zoom awards $150,000 to independent founders
Zoom just made a meaningful move toward the solopreneur economy with its first ever Solopreneur 50 program, awarding five independent founders $30,000 each with no strings attached on how the money is used. Thousands of people applied from nearly every state in the country. Winners were selected by an independent panel based on factors including community impact and business sustainability. Each recipient also receives access to Zoom’s mentorship network and technology resources. For founders who have been building without investors, a team, or a financial safety net, this kind of recognition from a major company is both practical and long overdue.
Teens are turning to influencers for their news
A major new study from the Media Insight Project a research collaboration involving AP-NORC, the American Press Institute, Northwestern’s Medill School, and the University of Maryland found that 81% of teenagers rely on influencers and independent online creators for news at least some of the time. Among all age groups surveyed, that figure was 57%, which confirms this is not a trend confined to any single generation. Traditional media has not disappeared, but it has clearly lost its grip as the first stop for younger audiences. For Black creators who spent years building loyal audiences without meaningful support from legacy media institutions, the data simply confirms what their subscriber counts already showed.
