Newsette Founder Is Latest Forbes 30 Under 30 Alum Facing Fraud Accusations

It happened again! Daniella Pierson, founder of Newsette Media Group, became the latest entrepreneur from Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list to face allegations of fraud.

In public and in pitch decks to advertisers, Pierson claimed her newsletter has 1.3 million subscribers and raked in $40 million.

However, a recent investigation by Business Insider of company documents found that in 2024, the same year Pierson announced the newsletter hit the 1 million mark, Newsette’s subscriber base had fallen below 500,000.

In its cover story on Pierson, released just hours after BI’s investigation, Forbes came to a similar conclusion: “For all the celebrity plaudits and press love, Pierson’s businesses seem to be unraveling.” 

One former employee called Pierson’s success “all smoke and mirrors.” Another claimed she routinely inflated subscriber numbers, misled clients, and was “pushed out” of her co-founder role at Wondermind after “clashing” with Selena Gomez’s mom. 

Forbes has previously admitted poor judgment on its 30 Under 30 nominations, even posting a “Hall of Shame” of 30 Under 30 alums. In its cover story on Pierson, the magazine reveals its previous $200 million valuation of Newsette was based on RXBar founder Peter Rahal’s blue-chip investment in 2022. However, Rahal now admits to Forbes that he never actually looked at the company’s financials before investing. 

As of the publication of this article, Pierson has not been charged with a crime. The same can not be said, however, for many of her fellow 30 Under 30 founders who have been caught grossly inflating their company’s data points to major league investors. 

Most famously, there’s the Bonnie and Clyde of millennial financial crimes: Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison. Their crypto exchange company, FTX, enjoyed the mark of legitimacy from not only the most prolific investors in the financial world, but even regulatory authorities in the U.S. government.

The pair’s golden reputations as “effective altruists” and Bankman-Fried’s low-maintenance, billionaire image put most skeptics off the scent. Bankman-Fried, who made the 30 Under 30 list in 2021, was sentenced to 25 years on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy back in March.

After becoming a key witness for the prosecution, Ellison, who made Forbes’ list in 2022, was sentenced to just two years for conspiring with Bankman-Fried to steal $8 billion. 

Though not as prolific, Joanna Smith-Griffin was also honored on the 30 Under 30 list in 2021 for her AI startup Allhere Education. Smith-Griffin raised $10 million from investors based on falsified contracts with school districts.

Though she now faces up to 14 years in prison for defrauding one of the biggest banks in the Western Hemisphere, Charlie Javice graced Forbes’ 30 Under 30 list in 2022 for her student financial aid company, Frank.

Despite a troubled history of litigation and pending FTC investigations, Javice’s media savviness gave JPMorgan Chase enough pause to believe her company had indeed accumulated 4.25 million users— all of whom were financially naive college students the bank was looking to target for its high-interest credit cards.

The actual number was around 300,000, even less than Newsette’s. Javice paid a programmer friend $18,000 to generate a few million fake customers, which was apparently good enough to trick JPMorgan Chase into handing over $175 million. 

Lucas Duplan, founder of fintech Silicon Valley startup Clinkle, rivals Bankman-Fried and Ellison for defrauding the most recognizable names in the venture capital world. It started with Richard Branson, who was ready to invest millions before its pre-beta launch.

In a matter of months, Clinkle raised $25 million from the likes of Peter Thiel, Andreessen Horowitz, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, and many more— the largest seed round in Silicon Valley at the time.

In 2014, Duplan didn’t just get a profile in Forbes’ 30 Under 30; he was the cover boy. Despite the hype, Clinkle had little consumer engagement and was miles behind competitors like Venmo and Square. It shuttered in 2016, investors tried every legal avenue to get their money back, and Duplan was named on Forbes’ Hall of Shame. 

Note: Elizabeth Holmers technically never made 30 Under 30, but she did headline the Forbes Under 30 Summit in 2015. Martin Skrelli was on the list, but it’s impossible to fit his crimes and controversies into fewer than 600 words.

All young, charismatic founders who convinced titans of venture capital to invest millions in grossly exaggerated or flat-out non-existent projects. Many of these former tech wünderkins say they were told to “fake it ‘til you make it” —a common phrase used by young entrepreneurs. 

“Ever since the Dot Com bust, we have seen this over and over again,” says Asha Jadeja, a veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist. “The reason it’s happening is because of ignorance.”

A lot of young people “think it’s easy to ‘fake it,’” she says. “If some unsuspecting investor comes in and puts in the money, and then you can, sort of, fake the numbers… and get a high valuation. I know so many people who have done that. And I’m so glad that this is getting exposed.”

While Jadeja says she does her best to avoid red flags in founders, she admits she was recently “taken for a ride” when she invested in a fashion-tech startup called CaaSTLE. Last month, its founder, 48-year-old Christine Hunisicker, was charged with defrauding investors out of $300 million through “false statements, misleading claims, and fabricated documents,” per the Southern District of New York. Though she never made Forbes’ 30 Under 30, Hunisicker was honored in Crain’s New York Business “40 Under 40” back in 2016. 

One person who knows all too well the dangers of taking ‘fake it ‘til you make it’ too literally is Andy King, a former associate of Fyre Fest fraudster Billy McFarland.

“I think ‘fake it till you make it’ has existed all through history, but young people today take it to a completely different level…that’s where scamming comes into play,” he says. So far, many of the white collar criminals from Forbes’ 30 Under 30 lists have been Millennials. With Gen Z becoming the anti-hustle culture generation, it will be interesting to see if the Forbes’ 30 Under 30 to federal fraud charges pipeline will continue into the 2030s. 

“Gen Z are still definitely feeling the pressure, but there’s a slow swing to adopting a much less stressful life,” according to King, who says they may not idolize hustle culture; however, being a generation raised on Instagram, they still pine after displays of wealth. 

As financial stability becomes more and more elusive, venture capitalists and angel investors may be looking at a whole new class of young fraudsters pretending to be the Gen Z Zuckerberg.