As the LIV Golf tour began siphoning top players away from the PGA Tour, the Ponte Vedra Beach-based golf tour began implementing major changes to its business model.
But PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp, who will become tour commissioner Jan. 1, said the changes weren’t a response to the Saudi Arabia-backed LIV tour.
“I’ve been pretty public by saying whatever happened with LIV or happened in the golf ecosystem before I got here, there was some good that came of it in that it maybe exposed some weaknesses in the PGA Tour and our model, but this work was never about that,” Rolapp said at a June 23 news conference at the Travelers Championship golf tournament in Connecticut.
“This was never about any competition. It was more about how do we compete successfully in a really competitive world where there are a million things for people’s time and attention,” he said, according to a PGA Tour transcript of the news conference.
Rolapp, a former NFL executive, was appointed CEO of the PGA Tour in June 2025 with expectations he would succeed Jay Monahan as commissioner when he retires at the end of this year.
The PGA Tour announced June 23 that Rolapp’s appointment as commissioner was approved by the PGA Tour Boards.
The LIV tour launched in 2022 and in June 2023, the PGA Tour announced it would form a partnership with LIV. But that partnership never came to fruition and LIV’s future is in question as its financial backers have pulled out.
Meanwhile, the PGA Tour announced in January 2024 that a group of high-profile sports owners invested $1.5 billion in the nonprofit organization, forming a separate for-profit entity.
However, the tour has never given specific details about how the nonprofit and for-profit organizations work together and how the money is used.
The PGA Tour is the largest employer in St. Johns County, excluding government and healthcare organizations.
It said total employment was 1,342 when it held The Players Championship tournament at TPC Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach in March, but the organization cut 56 jobs in April.
Rolapp said media dollars are “the economic lifeblood of every sport in this country” and changes implemented in the structure of the tour will help the organization compete with other sports for that money.
“We feel pretty good about the economic model,” he said.
Bill Foley’s Vegas Golden Knights hockey team has won one Stanley Cup championship and made the Cup finals two other times in the nine seasons since the expansion team began play in the NHL.
Now Foley, chairman of Jacksonville-based Fidelity National Financial Inc., wants to add an NBA team in Las Vegas to his growing portfolio of sports franchises.
Foley Entertainment Group announced June 23 that Foley has retained financial advisers to pursue an NBA franchise.
Foley is majority owner of the Golden Knights and also leads a group that owns several soccer teams, including AFC Bournemouth in the English Premier League.
His sports group also owns minor league hockey and indoor football franchises in Nevada.
“Las Vegas has earned its place among the great sports cities in America, and an NBA team belongs here,” Foley said in a news release.
“We built the Golden Knights into a championship organization in a world-renowned arena from the ground up, and we are prepared to do it again for the NBA – with the same standard, the same commitment to this community, and the same insistence on winning,” he said.
Foley he said he expects the NBA ownership group to include minority partners.
Foley remains chairman of Fidelity but he moved from Jacksonville to Las Vegas in 2016 when he was awarded the NHL expansion franchise.
Duos Technologies Group Inc. has never been profitable since going public through a merger in 2015.
But with the company getting a windfall from Elon Musk’s acquisition of the assets of APR Energy, one analyst is projecting a big profit for Jacksonville-based Duos in the second quarter.
Duos owned a 5% stake in APR, and the company disclosed in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing it received $50.4 million in net proceeds from the sale of Jacksonville-based APR.
The buyer was not disclosed in the filing but a notice on the Federal Trade Commission’s website indicated Musk bought the company in May.
With those proceeds, Ascendiant Capital Markets analyst Edward Woo is projecting Duos to record a net profit of $41.4 million, or $1.41 a share, in the second quarter.
Woo’s optimism for Duos extends beyond the one-time gain from the APR sale. As the company focuses its operations on providing services for edge data centers, he expects Duos’ backlog of contracts to produce net income of $4 million in the fourth quarter.
Duos reported a net loss of $3.5 million in the first quarter but with the big second-quarter gain and the potential profit in the fourth quarter, Woo is projecting net income of $41 million for the full year.
The company has been projecting revenue of $50 million this year, excluding the APR proceeds, and Woo is projecting revenue of $80 million and net income of $10.4 million in 2027.
“Duo’s EDC business has long commercialization challenges ahead, but we believe the approximate billion dollar market potential and massive growth presents high rewards for the risks,” Woo said in his research note.
Woo maintained a “buy” rating on the stock but increased his 12-month price target from $17 to $22, with the stock trading at $11.68 at the time of his June 14 report.
“This represents significant upside from the current share price and we believe appropriately balances out the high risks with large upside opportunities,” he said.
After closing 16 other restaurants in this fiscal year, Maple Street Biscuit Co. closed its Jacksonville Beach restaurant.
The restaurant at 410 Third St. N. was the second Maple Street restaurant opened after the chain was founded with a San Marco site in 2012.
The chain had grown to 33 restaurants when it was acquired by Cracker Barrel Old Country Store Inc. for $36 million in 2019, and expanded to 70 restaurants in early 2025.
However, Cracker Barrel began retrenching the Maple Street chain a year ago. It closed two restaurants in the fourth quarter of its fiscal year ended Aug. 1, 2025, and said in its year-end report it planned to close 14 locations in the current fiscal year.
However, the Jacksonville Beach restaurant is its 17th closure in the fiscal year, reducing the chain to 51 locations.
Cracker Barrel officials have stopped talking about Maple Street and the publicly traded company does not report data for the Maple Street chain in its financial reports.
The company’s media relations department did not respond to phone and email messages about the Jacksonville Beach closure.
A sign on the door of the Beaches site encourages customers to visit its other Northeast Florida restaurants in Point Meadows (the Baymeadows neighborhood of Jacksonville), San Marco, Julington Creek, Fleming Island and St. Augustine.
Evercore ISI analyst Jonathan Chappell is expecting major railroad companies, including CSX Corp., to report strong earnings for the second quarter.
“The Class I rails are setting up for a 2Q earnings season filled with beats and raises as volumes largely accelerated through the period, fuel surcharges caught up with the material price spikes driving double digit revenue growth in many cases, and the long-awaited incremental margin expansion associated with productivity and the prior front loading of resources tempers the margin impact of still-elevated fuel prices,” Chappell said in a June 25 report on the industry.
“CSX is posting a very strong volume result for 2Q, which coupled with favorable pricing/yield momentum (also helped by fuel), should drive double-digit revenue growth in 2Q,” he said.
Jacksonville-based CSX’s stock was up 28% for the year at the time of Chappell’s report, so he is not expecting the earnings report (scheduled for July 22) to spark more gains.
“CSX has been the best-performing stock in the rail group YTD and over the last three months by a wide margin, and as we believe much of the expected EPS upside is priced into the present multiple premium, we maintain our In Line rating,” he said.
After expanding into the Jacksonville market with its $86 million acquisition of TC Federal Bank in December, Colony Bankcorp is expanding into another new market with an acquisition.
Fitzgerald, Georgia-based Colony announced a $163 million agreement June 24 to acquire Florence, South Carolina-based First Reliance Bancshares Inc.
The deal will add 10 South Carolina branches to the company’s Colony Bank subsidiary which has 32 offices in Georgia, plus one each in Jacksonville and Tallahassee.
Colony only operated in Georgia until the addition of TC Federal’s offices in Jacksonville and Tallahassee marked its entry into Florida.
TC Federal was headquartered in Thomasville, Georgia, and had another branch in Savannah.
It opened its Jacksonville office at 10970 San Jose Blvd. in 2023.