Black Wealth Watch: Adwoa Beauty Could Shut Down, Rashaun Williams Builds $450M Sports Fund, Taye Diggs Expands Into Media Ownership – Essence

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 we saw another harsh reality that as a Black woman founder you can do everything right and still get forced out of your business, a Shark Tank investor who just made a very grown-up move in professional sports, and Taye Diggs doing what more Black entertainers should be doing by taking their ownership seriously. Plus, two college kids at Yale raised $5.1 million before graduation, and Meta decided that if you work there your computer activity is company property now. Intrigued? Keep reading.

Adwoa Beauty Is Being Forced To Liquidate

First Ami Cole, now this (silently weeps). The Black-owned beauty space is having a brutal season, and Adwoa Beauty is the latest brand we are losing. Julian Addo started it in 2017 with $80,000 out of her own pocket and earned it a spot in Sephora locations across the U.S., U.K., and Canada. This week a judge ordered it into Chapter 7 liquidation after a legal dispute with lender Aurous Financial that included a November situation where a significant retail payment was sent to the lender at a moment when Addo says it had no business going there, which knocked the business down in a way it never recovered from. She has been documenting all of it publicly on Substack. She told Beauty Independent she is already building something new and is genuinely excited about what comes next. The brand may be gone, but Julian Addo is not.

Rashaun Williams Just Closed A $450M Sports Fund

If you know who Rashaun Williams is, you saw this coming. If you do not, get familiar. Williams, the Shark Tank investor and Atlanta Falcons minority owner, has been making the case for years that minority ownership in professional sports is one of the most undervalued and deliberately closed investments in this category. This week, Harbinger Sports Partners, the Atlanta-based firm he co-founded with Steve Cannon, Mark Cuban, and Jonathan Mariner, announced it wrapped up its first fund with well over $400 million secured from long-term capital sources who want sustained exposure to professional sports. What separates Harbinger from outside capital trying to buy its way in is that its entire leadership team has previously sat at the ownership table in a major league franchise. The market is starting to see what Williams saw first, and $450 million is the receipt, so clap for that man.

Taye Diggs Is In His Ownership Era

We love to see it when the talent becomes the owner… or shall we say, the best man for the job? On April 30, Taye Diggs and partners Autumn Federici, Shelby Stone, James Black, and Troy Brookins announced Microhouse Films, a mobile-first vertical storytelling platform set to launch this spring. Filmmakers pay nothing to get their work on it, set their own pricing, and collect their own revenue through a system where viewers use in-app currency to unlock episodes. The team came together after collaborating on the microdrama Tides of Temptation, and they are betting that the infrastructure behind vertical content matters just as much as the content itself. In a space where creators are constantly getting squeezed, Diggs is building the alternative.

Two Yale Seniors Raised $5.1M Before Graduation

Yale seniors Nathaneo Johnson and Sean Hargrow would like a word with your startup. The two founded Series, a social networking app that lives entirely inside iMessage: you text it, describe who you are trying to connect with, and it sends back a swipeable set of potential matches with no download required. They closed a $5.1 million pre-seed round with backing from Pear VC, Venmo co-founder Iqram Magdon-Ismail, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and GPTZero founder Edward Tian. Johnson says the platform has already spread to students at well over 700 schools, with early retention numbers tracking ahead of where major social platforms were at a comparable stage. They had not even graduated yet. Respect to these young kings.

Meta Is Using Its Employees’ Keystrokes To Train AIIf you work at Meta right now, it might be time to start thinking about your next move (literally). The company rolled out an internal tracking tool called Model Capability Initiative that captures workers’ mouse movements, keystrokes, and intermittent recordings of what appears on their screens, feeding all of it into its AI development pipeline. Workers raised concerns internally about how much sensitive information a system like that could sweep up, and those concerns are fair. Meta says the data is strictly for building better AI models and is not connected to performance reviews, but that reassurance lands differently when it comes from a company that built its entire business model around collecting data about people. Apparently 2026 is the year AI changes how we work, and if they’re starting here, imagine what else is to come down the line.