On August 12, Rashad Bilal, co-founder of the financial media company Earn Your Leisure, rejected a description of Invest Fest that many people had long taken for granted. “I’m not even on the Black thing no more,” he said during an episode of the BlackOut podcast. “I never was on the Black thing. Not a Black event.” He went on to say, “It’s going to be even more white people next year. And Spanish and the Filipinos, of course.”
The line came moments after he asked why he would cater to Black people only to be torn down by them. Invest Fest drew 31,000 people to Atlanta this August by his own count, up from 4,400 in its first year. The anger in the exchange drew most of the attention. The larger brand question sits inside Bilal’s account of the past. Invest Fest may never have carried the formal title of a Black investment conference. An institution’s meaning extends beyond its name, and Invest Fest’s own public record shows that Black economic advancement was more than an interpretation imposed by its audience.
The record matters
In 2022, an announcement for Invest Fest London described the festival’s founding mission as revolutionizing how Black and Brown people secure wealth. The event closed the United Kingdom’s Black History Month, and Bilal called that timing a message to the African diaspora. Troy Millings described the work as a financial revolution intended to bring useful information to people who had been overlooked, underserved and underrepresented.
That same year, Bilal and Millings said they had created Earn Your Leisure and Invest Fest to “marry culture and commerce” because financial literacy, investing, entrepreneurship and generational-wealth resources had traditionally been inaccessible “for our culture.” Steve Harvey and Harvey Ventures served as strategic partners and co-producers. The programming joined business leaders with figures rooted in Black popular culture, including Tyler Perry, Rick Ross, T.I., Charlamagne Tha God and Harvey himself.
The positioning remained visible after the early launch. In 2024, Bilal told REVOLT that Invest Fest arose from a need to create a “new Black Wall Street” in the mind by encouraging Black people to work with, embrace and network with one another at scale. REVOLT described the festival as a platform designed to equip millennials of color with wealth-building strategies and advance financial empowerment in the Black community. TIME later characterized Earn Your Leisure as financial education specifically tailored to Black audiences historically excluded from financial systems.
I understood the brand in that context before I ever attended. I followed Earn Your Leisure because the energy around what they were building was hard to miss: a growing platform, a committed audience and the sense of a movement taking shape. They had made investing, ownership and generational wealth part of a broader cultural conversation. When I attended Invest Fest in 2023, the program included prominent Black figures such as Steve Harvey and T.D. Jakes, alongside speakers including Grant Cardone. The event welcomed people beyond a single racial group while keeping visible the cultural and economic proposition that had drawn many of them.
That history does not give the audience ownership of Invest Fest’s strategy. The founders may broaden the audience, recast the category or build a different institution altogether. Their strategic judgment remains theirs. The record does establish what they previously invited people to believe, and reputation forms through the accumulation of those claims, choices and experiences.
When the founder is also the signal
Bilal’s declaration mattered because founders speak with unusual authority about the future of their brands. At Earn Your Leisure, the founders are strategists, distributors and trusted interpreters of the enterprise. Their direct relationship with the audience helped create the platform’s value. It also allows an angry sentence to become evidence of strategy before the organization has publicly explained it.
The issue is not whether white, Hispanic or Filipino people belong at Invest Fest. It is what Bilal’s demographic declaration appeared to reveal about the event’s direction. He named people he expected to see more of before explaining what Invest Fest intended to become, what the broader audience would make possible or what the institution would preserve. People were left to decide whether growth meant expanding a distinctive center or moving away from it.
The online response shows how many interpreted that gap. A LinkedIn post by Craig Brimm asked whether a community can help build a brand’s meaning, only to be told that meaning was never part of the brand at all. The post documents audience interpretation. Invest Fest’s earlier statements establish why that interpretation was available.
This is where the second quotation did its damage. “Even more white people next year” described a future audience as the answer to criticism without providing the strategic logic behind it. The language cast race as evidence of the event’s future importance. Bilal did not say Black attendees would matter less. He left them to determine whether the new direction meant that they would.
What the apology accomplished
Six days later, Bilal addressed the controversy on Market Mondays. He began by defending Invest Fest’s impact and explaining why the criticism felt personal. He then acknowledged that his anger had drawn loyal supporters into a fight that was not theirs and apologized to those he had offended. Those who had been “rocking with us from day one” did not deserve what landed on them, he said.
The sequence matters. Bilal reached the injury only after defending the institution and himself. The acknowledgment still widened the response beyond his intent and recognized the people who received the signal. That created an opening for repair. An apology can change the posture of a response; only subsequent choices can change the record people carry forward.
Repositioning requires a stakeholder strategy
A stakeholder strategy explains a decision to the people who carry the brand’s meaning before the decision needs them to accept it. Invest Fest retained full authority to evolve, and no amount of explanation transfers that authority. What explanation determines is whether the new position succeeds, since the audience being repositioned is the one the position depends on. Exercising that authority well required an explanation of the change that went beyond the racial composition of the next audience.
That account should say what a broader platform makes possible that the current one cannot, which parts of Invest Fest’s original value remain central, whose expertise defines the agenda, which entrepreneurs gain access to capital and what changes in the festival’s relationship with Atlanta. Those decisions will say more about the strategy than the demographic mix in the room.
Founder-led organizations also need a way to prevent one person’s frustration from becoming the only explanation for institutional change. Who can speak when the founder is unwilling or unable to do so? How will a consequential shift be disclosed before it must be defended? Who has the authority to recognize that a founder’s remarks are being interpreted as strategy and supply a coherent institutional account? A governance gap of that kind often remains invisible until it surfaces as a communications crisis.
Invest Fest’s founders can decide what they build in 2027. They can invite a broader audience, change the category and pursue the global ambition Bilal has compared with Davos and the Milken Institute. They can also accept that some people may choose not to follow. What they cannot credibly do is treat the brand’s Black meaning as a misunderstanding created entirely outside the institution. Their own record helped establish it.
The next Invest Fest will add new evidence. The agenda, speakers, capital, vendors, partnerships and experience will show whether the institution expanded its center, moved it or built something else. The founders will make those choices. The audience will remember what came before and decide what the new direction means.
S O U R C E S
TheGrio, “Rashad Bilal of Earn Your Leisure sounds off on Invest Fest backlash, reiterates it’s not a ‘Black’ conference,” August 14, 2026.
BlackOut video, “Final Word to the Haters | Invest Fest Recap, Will Money Save You?, Long Distance Love & Big Meech,” August 12, 2026. Relevant exchange: 17:58-18:27; “even more white people next year”: 18:19.
TheGrio, “’Accountability is important’: Rashad Bilal addresses backlash to viral Invest Fest comments,” August 18, 2026.
Market Mondays video, Episode 325, “EYL Addresses the Public,” August 18, 2026.
BLACK ENTERPRISE, “Tyler Perry, Steve Harvey, T.I., Rick Ross & More Shut Down Atlanta for Invest Fest,” August 9, 2022.
BLACK ENTERPRISE, “Earn Your Leisure and Steve Harvey Assemble Lineup for Invest Fest London,” October 6, 2022.
REVOLT, “Rashad Bilal and Troy Millings announce 2024 Invest Fest in Atlanta,” March 26, 2024.
TIME, “These Podcasters Think You Deserve More Money,” February 6, 2025.
LinkedIn, Craig Brimm, “Black Community’s Role in Defining Invest Fest’s Meaning,” August 2026.
Editorial note: This essay was written by Shrita Hernandez and edited with the assistance of AI. The argument, analysis and final judgment are the author’s own.