Primal screams and money dreams on the floor of Miami’s celebrity business forum
The motivational speaker Tony Robbins paced with possessed energy around a stage erected on the floor of Miami’s Kaseya Center. It was Wednesday morning. He had come to energize the America Business Forum, a two-day, entrepreneurial extravaganza whose guest speakers ranged from President Donald J. Trump to Lionel Messi.
What began as a relatively composed reflection on what makes someone a creator had, through persistent, show-of-hands crowdwork — How many of you have children? How many of you sing when no one’s around? How many of you have a relationship with a human?, the latter of which drew most hands — snowballed into a hand-shaking rhapsody that flirted with the Pentecostal.
Energy, Robbins proffered, was a — perhaps the — essential trait of all the world’s doers, some of whom would take the same stage that very day or the next.
“Turn to somebody,” Robbins commanded the crowd, which filled maybe two-thirds of the stadium, “and go ‘I own you.’” The mass murmured warily.
“No, ‘I own you,’” Robbins encouraged, before shepherding the few thousand present to the discourse’s zenith — a collective primal scream.
Way up in the rafters, Juan Perdomo was rapt. The 32-year-old mine pump technician from Tampa had taken off two days of work, bid his wife and four children farewell, and driven four hours southeast to downtown Miami to attend.
Assembled by Miami Mayor Francis Suarez, the Forum’s chief booster, some of the world’s most prosperous people converged on the Kaseya Center for an event billed as an unprecedented opportunity to hear how they had become successful. Tickets started at $100 for general admission and went up to $10,000 for an all-access pass.
The Forum, the Forum declared of itself, would be a “gift of access and inspiration” that would color attendees’ views of the world and of their own potential. So at a time of heightened economic anxiety, when 42% of Americans have trouble paying for basic living expenses, thousands attended to hear how they, too, could unlock their potential and arrive at a place of financial freedom.
Perdomo came plotting an ascension to management, a move he figured would demand a strategic plan and hard work, though he already reported working 12-plus hour days. He aimed to soon double his paycheck to around $200,000 to more comfortably provide for his wife and kids.
And he hoped the America Business Forum — which he learned about from a podcast — would motivate and enlighten him as he maps out his “next five moves.”
Eder Elias’ expectations were similar. Elias, 35 and a single parent, had made the trek from Homestead on his day off from his job as a hotel maintenance technician. Elias said he was looking for inspiration and advice on how to actualize some of his business ideas. “A health food restaurant,” he mused as he picked halfheartedly at a $22 platter of chicken strips and waffle fries.
Miami Dade College, where he takes a leadership management course, gave him a free ticket. Ultimately, he said, this was all in service of achieving financial freedom for himself and his 7-year-old daughter.
“I don’t want to have to be concerned about, like, what I’m going to eat today,” he said, or “having money to respond to an emergency.”
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Of Uruguayan origin, the America Business Forum began in 2016 as a platform for people of influence to share their perspectives.
It made its leap to the U.S. this year, apparently at the behest of Mayor Suarez, who convened an impressively prominent lineup.
Speakers included Nobel Peace Prize winner María Corina Machado; decabillionaire Citadel CEO and recent Miami transplant Ken Griffin; FIFA President Gianni Infantino; sports champions Lionel Messi, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal; Argentine President Javier Milei; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; and the unofficial keynote, Trump.
“For the first time in history,” the event website boasted, “these voices are accessible to you.”
“This is the best and most incredible moment for America,” Suarez said in a promotional video replete with quick cutaways to planes flying and rockets launching and the Earth as seen from space.
It was that advertising that brought Mitch Barnes, an affable 35-year-old Australian who owns a marketing business, to the United States for the first time.
“It’s a rare opportunity to have all these people all in one place,” he said Wednesday morning as he waited to pass through a Secret Service security checkpoint. He wore a dark suit, thick, black-rimmed Burberry sunglasses and a red “Trump 2028” hat.
“I was scrolling on X, and I saw this poster with all the faces on them. It looked like a Marvel movie,” he chuckled.
On top of his travel expenses, Barnes had sprung for a Diamond-level ticket, which included a front-row floor seat. He wanted to be up close “for that picture,” which, in this case, was worth $10,000.
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However that picture turned out, it was likely framed by the techno-futurist, imperial space-themed stage, which could well have been a plenary hall aboard the Death Star. It might’ve featured white-robed dancers jabbing blue lightsabers as they marched synchronously around the set.
And it probably included the enlarged, projected forms of any one of the days’ speakers as they walked through a portal-like tunnel to booming percussive music and hissing columns of smoke before settling in on plush chairs on the main stage for what were generally staid and often quite biographical conversations.
“Did you ever think you’d come back to Miami?” Suarez, the event’s principal moderator, inquired of Jeff Bezos, who spent some of his childhood in the area.
“What is it about Miami that changed from a sort of regional center” to a more tech-centered place?, the mayor asked the world’s third-wealthiest human.
Bezos riffed about “dynamism” and “energy” and “the Latin part of the culture here,” to modest applause.
And while Barnes, the Australian marketing executive, said it was impactful to see the man in person, he left hungry for actionable specifics he could take home to grow his business.
“You want to hear the details like, ‘I had this much money in the bank account. I had to buy this, invest this,’” he said. “You want to hear that step-by-step journey, because otherwise it doesn’t really help that much.”
Bezos’ own journey, he told the crowd, began with him cleaning bathrooms in a North Miami McDonald’s.
It was a familiar rags-to-riches story at the Forum, which featured a collection of started-from-the-bottom chronicles.
“The event sells that you can make it to being those types of people if you work hard enough,” observed Juan Patino, a 31-year-old from Hollywood who started a small business teaching swimming lessons eight years ago and has since started a pressure-washing business and a marketing firm.
And many of those attendees, especially those still in the “rags” stage of their material lives, were eager to buy.
“Showing you the challenges they have faced, the difficulties and how they succeed — this is the inspiration that I came for,” said Elias.
Elias had just listened to Patrick Bet-David, a conservative podcaster, recount his war-torn childhood in post-revolutionary Iran. Bet-David contrasted that experience with the exuberance he felt in 2022 at selling an insurance company for so many millions of dollars that neither he nor his children would ever need to work again.
Inspiring as that may be, “I feel like the gap is huge,” Patino admitted.
And the bridge over that chasm — between not having to consider money, and nearly suffocating from a lack of it — remained shrouded for some in the fog of South Florida’s, indeed the country’s, mounting affordability crisis.
“Things are really expensive,” Elias said, despite Trump’s repeated assertions to the contrary on the Forum’s first day. “We are delivering an economic miracle,” Trump had announced.
That miracle has yet to reach Elias, who’s struggling to stay afloat and maintain his entrepreneurial ambitions. His full-time maintenance job notwithstanding, Elias hasn’t been able to save for an apartment for himself and his daughter on his $22 an hour wage. They’ve been living with his parents for the last year and a half.
But Elias hopes his sacrifices and hard work will pay off. Within five years he hopes money won’t be a stressor for him.
Eventually, and if the Forum’s speakers were any inspiration, money might not even be a consideration.
“Part of the whole genesis of this conference,” Suarez told Bezos, “is people in the audience seeing and hearing someone like you tell that story and understanding that they can be up here one day.”
Still, Patino described a canyon between the preoccupations and paths of people like Bezos and Griffin and the people in attendance like himself.
“I feel like sometimes it’s just harder than what you think it could be,” he said.
Patino didn’t show up for day two of the Forum. Instead, he was back on the hustle, attending client meetings — paving his path, stone by stone, toward “making it.”
“I love to hear the great speakers talk about their accomplishments, but if a lead comes in, they have my priority,” he said.
“Business comes first.”
Miami Herald politics reporter Claire Heddles contributed reporting.
This story was produced with financial support from supporters including The Green Family Foundation Trust and Ken O’Keefe, in partnership with Journalism Funding Partners. The Miami Herald maintains full editorial control of this work.
This story was originally published November 8, 2025 at 5:00 AM.
