Intellect PlusBusiness stories
479 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 6 of 8.
Gravity Falls ended after two seasons because its creator chose to finish itMost cartoons end when a network cancels them. Gravity Falls stopped because Alex Hirsch said the story was done. He insisted the show wasn't being cancelled but finished, entirel…
The first Green Lantern's magic ring was useless against anything woodenThe original Green Lantern, in 1940, was a railroad engineer whose magic ring needed recharging every 24 hours and could not touch wood. Nineteen years later DC reinvented the her…
Fugazi turned down millions from record labels and festivals, repeatedlyIn 1993 the head of Atlantic Records went backstage at a sold-out Fugazi show and offered them anything they wanted, including their own label. They said no. Two decades later the…
Nintendo's boss cancelled the Game Boy, and its creator quietly kept goingIn the summer of 1988, Nintendo president Hiroshi Yamauchi looked at a Game Boy prototype, found the screen unreadable and cancelled it on the spot. Designer Gunpei Yokoi refused …- Nobody agrees exactly when Generation Z begins, or what to call itZoomers, iGen, Homelanders, Centennials: the cohort after Millennials has collected more nicknames than almost any before it. Even its birth years shift depending on who is counti…
Generative AI's family tree reaches back to a 1906 poem analysisChatbots seemed to appear from nowhere in late 2022, but machines producing text have a surprisingly long pedigree. It starts with a Russian mathematician counting vowels and cons…
Fox Corporation is what remained after Disney bought most of Murdoch's empireIn 2019 Disney swallowed the film studio 20th Century Fox and much of Rupert Murdoch's entertainment business. What Disney legally could not or would not take was spun off the day…
Francesco Totti's mother turned down Milan so he could stay in RomeWhen scouts came calling for a gifted Roman boy, his mother refused a lucrative offer from AC Milan. His youth club had nearly sold him to city rivals Lazio. Instead Francesco Tot…
English's most notorious swear word is not an acronym, whatever the legends claimPopular stories say the rudest word in English began as a legal acronym stamped above punished adulterers, or as a taunt by medieval archers. Neither is true. Its real history is …
The EP was invented to squeeze more music onto a small recordIn the late 1940s a 7-inch 45 rpm single held only about four minutes a side. To compete with Columbia's new long-player, RCA Victor launched Extended Play 45s in 1952, cutting na…
Fight Club flopped in cinemas and then became a defining cult filmStudio executives disliked David Fincher's Fight Club so much that they reworked his marketing plan to limit expected losses. Released in October 1999, it disappointed at the box …
Two former Amazon staff built Flipkart into India's biggest online storeIn October 2007 Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal, IIT Delhi graduates who had worked at Amazon, started selling books online from a two-bedroom flat in Bengaluru's Koramangala. Each…
Fortnite grew from a slow zombie project into a global free-to-play platformFortnite started at an Epic Games game jam around 2011 as an idea to combine Minecraft-style building with shooting. Development dragged for years through an engine switch and a c…
Foxconn quietly assembles much of the world's electronicsYou may never have bought anything branded Foxconn, but you have probably owned something it made. The Taiwanese contract manufacturer has built iPhones, Kindles, PlayStations, ev…
Cory Doctorow gave a rude name to the way online platforms rotCanadian writer Cory Doctorow popularised enshittification in a November 2022 blog post to describe a familiar pattern. A platform treats its users well, then squeezes them to ple…
Epic Games began as a one-man company pretending to be bigIn 1991 Tim Sweeney, a mechanical engineering student at the University of Maryland, released a shareware game called ZZT from his parents' house in Potomac. His father packed the…
The Emmy takes its name from an early camera tubeEarly television cameras relied on an image orthicon tube, nicknamed the Immy by engineers. When the young television academy needed a name for its prize, engineer Harry Lubcke su…
A letter from an Aston Villa director created the world's oldest football leagueIn March 1888 clubs still arranged their own fixtures, often chaotically. William McGregor, a Scot on Aston Villa's board, wrote to five other clubs proposing a league that would …
Enron's revenue soared on paper while billions in debt stayed hiddenAt the end of 2000, Fortune rated Enron the most innovative large company in America, and its market value topped $60 billion. Barely a year later the Houston energy trader was ba…- Didier Drogba scored 10 goals in 10 finals and earned a big-game reputationDidier Drogba scored in ten finals out of ten, including four FA Cup finals, and in the 2012 Champions League final against Bayern Munich he equalised in the 88th minute, then str…
The Dow weights companies by share price, not by sizeThe Dow Jones Industrial Average adds up the share prices of just 30 big American companies and divides by a tiny number, about 0.168. That quirk means a pricier stock counts for …- José Sarria handed friends labels reading I am a boyWhere dressing as a woman in public could lead to arrest, the drag queen José Sarria handed out labels reading I am a boy, so friends could not be charged with female impersonatio…
- Edgar Davids wore goggles on the pitch because of glaucomaWith dreadlocks and wraparound protective glasses, Edgar Davids was impossible to miss. The goggles were no fashion choice: glaucoma, which developed after eye injuries in 1995, r…
Eli Lilly began with three workers and a sign reading ChemistIn 1876 Civil War veteran Eli Lilly opened a small drug works in Indianapolis with three employees, one of them his son, under a sign reading Eli Lilly, Chemist. First-year sales …
Registering a .com cost nothing at all until 1995For its first decade, the internet's .com suffix was free, run under contract for the US Department of Defense. Only in 1995 did registrants start paying, at $50 a year. By 2020 m…
The compact disc's centre hole matches a small Dutch coinThe hole in the middle of every compact disc is 15 mm wide because a Philips engineer based it on a Dutch ten-cent coin. That detail hides inside a format sold more than 200 billi…- Data centres now draw about 1.5 percent of the world's electricityEvery search, stream and chatbot reply runs through a building full of servers. Worldwide, those buildings consumed roughly 415 terawatt hours in 2024, about 1.5 percent of global…
DC Comics was born from a debt-ridden publisher's unpaid printing billsThe DC in DC Comics stands for Detective Comics, a title its founder could barely afford to print. Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson owed so much to his distributor that he had to t…
Columbia Pictures began as a Poverty Row outfit mocked as Corned Beef and CabbageHollywood insiders once joked that CBC, the initials of a tiny studio on low-rent Gower Street, stood for Corned Beef and Cabbage. That outfit became Columbia Pictures, home of Fr…- Only one college offered Colin Kaepernick a football scholarship, and he rewrote its recordsColin Kaepernick got most of his high school praise as a baseball pitcher and had scholarship offers in that sport. He wanted football, and only the University of Nevada, Reno, of…
Chick-fil-A shuts every Sunday and still outsells rivals per restaurantIn 2022 the average Chick-fil-A took in $6.71 million, more than any other American fast-food chain, while opening only six days a week. Founder Truett Cathy closed on Sundays fro…- Firms led by award-winning CEOs tend to do worse afterwardsA 2009 study by Ulrike Malmendier and Geoffrey Tate found that companies whose chief executives win prestigious awards go on to underperform, both in share price and operations. I…
- Chipotle was meant to fund a fine-dining restaurant until burritos took overSteve Ells opened the first Chipotle in Denver in 1993 with an $85,000 loan from his father. They reckoned it needed to sell 107 burritos a day to make money. A month later it was…
- Chrisann Brennan named her daughter Lisa, and Steve Jobs named a computer the sameIn 1978 Chrisann Brennan chose the name Lisa for her baby daughter, and Steve Jobs, then denying he was the father, was strongly attached to it. Apple soon unveiled a computer cal…
- Clarence Thomas grew up speaking Gullah before rising to the Supreme CourtClarence Thomas was born in 1948 in a wooden shack in Pin Point, Georgia, a community founded by freed slaves near Savannah, and his first language was the creole Gullah. In 1955 …
- Claude is trained on a written constitution that grew from 2,700 to 23,000 wordsAnthropic's Claude models learn their manners partly from a document the company calls a constitution. The 2023 version held 75 guidelines in about 2,700 words, some drawn from th…
People in the Andes have chewed coca leaves for at least 8,000 yearsLeaves mixed with calcite, dug from ancient home floors in the Nanchoc Valley of Peru, show people chewing the plant at least 8,000 years ago, around the time farming took hold. C…- CODA's financiers balked at casting deaf actors until Marlee Matlin threatened to quitWhen CODA was being put together, the money men wanted hearing actors for the deaf roles. Marlee Matlin, the first cast member signed, said she would walk unless deaf performers p…
The Charlotte Hornets left town, came back as Bobcats, then reclaimed their own pastCharlotte's NBA team moved to New Orleans in 2002. A new franchise, the Bobcats, arrived in 2004, and a decade later, once New Orleans had become the Pelicans, it took back the Ho…- A father who couldn't afford a tennis career raised Carlos Alcaraz, Grand Slam record-breakerCarlos Alcaraz's father once hoped to turn professional but quit as a teenager because the family could not pay for it. He became a coach at a club in Murcia, where his son picked…
Why white people got named after a mountain range between Europe and AsiaCalling people of European descent Caucasian goes back to eighteenth-century scholars who believed humanity began in the Caucasus Mountains, where Noah's Ark was said to have land…- Bruno Fernandes turned down Porto's academy because Boavista would drive him to trainingAs a boy in Maia, Bruno Fernandes had an offer from Porto's academy, but his parents could not ferry him there every day. Boavista offered transport, so he went there instead, sta…
BTS started as a hedge against collapsing CD sales at a small Seoul labelAround 2010, Bang Si-hyuk of Big Hit Entertainment faced a squeeze: CD sales were falling and streaming did not yet pay enough to replace them. He bet that an idol group, with con…- Bungie went from hand-packed boxes in a Chicago flat to a Sony takeoverBungie's first game was a free Pong clone called Gnop!, with its source code sold for $15. Its founders later folded Macintosh game boxes by hand in a one-bedroom Chicago apartmen…
Buzz Aldrin wrote his way to the Moon with a doctorate on orbital rendezvousNASA turned Buzz Aldrin down in 1962 because he had never been a test pilot. So he leaned on something no other candidate had: an MIT doctorate on how spacecraft could meet in orb…- C++ got its name from a programmer's joke about adding one to CIn C, writing ++ after a variable bumps its value up by one. In 1983 Rick Mascitti suggested borrowing that operator to name Bjarne Stroustrup's upgraded C, and later admitted it …
- Caitlin Clark put the WNBA on a third-grade dream board, then went and got thereAsked in third grade to draw her hopes for the future, Caitlin Clark filled 12 clouds, including a college basketball scholarship and a place in the WNBA. She had started at five …
- Canada's men waited forty years between their first and second World CupsCanada's men reached their first World Cup in 1986 and did not return until 2022. Their best showing came in 2026, when they co-hosted the tournament and made the round of 16. Yet…
- A 99-year lease decided when Britain would hand Hong Kong backHong Kong Island and Kowloon had been ceded to Britain permanently, but the New Territories, making up 86.2 per cent of the colony's land and over half its people, were only lease…
Australia's richest sports league began as a breakaway over sharing gate moneyIn 1896 six of Victoria's strongest football clubs faced a proposal to split gate takings equally with weaker teams that drew smaller crowds. Rather than vote, they walked out and…- Back to the Future Part II was never planned until the first film became a hitThe original ended with Jennifer climbing into the DeLorean, a gag that later boxed in its creators. When box office success demanded a sequel, Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale had to…
- Before the ballads, Barry Manilow wrote the jingle about being stuck on Band-AidThroughout the late 1960s a young Brooklyn musician paid his bills singing advertising slogans. He wrote the tune and supplied a childlike voice for a bandage brand, composed the …
Bell Labs gave the world the transistor, the laser, Unix and CEleven Nobel Prizes and five Turing Awards trace back to one telephone company research lab. Its staff are credited with radio astronomy, the transistor, the laser, solar cells, t…- Benefit corporations let directors weigh community and planet alongside profitSince a 1919 court case involving Ford, American corporate law has leaned toward one aim: maximise returns for shareholders. Directors who put social goals first could face lawsui…
- Bilibili started as a Hatsune Miku fan site during a rival's outageWhen the Chinese video site AcFun went dark for a month in 2009 amid internal feuding, an early user called Xu Yi spotted an opening. He built Mikufans.cn, a fan community for the…
- For years Billboard's Hot 100 ignored some of radio's biggest hitsGoo Goo Dolls' Iris ruled radio airplay for 18 weeks in 1998, yet it could not appear on America's main singles chart. The reason was a rule held for four decades: a song had to b…
Bluesky began as a Twitter research project to decentralise social mediaIn 2019 Twitter's own chief executive, Jack Dorsey, announced a plan to explore an open standard that could make his platform decentralised. Inspired by Mike Masnick's essay Proto…
A&W's cheaper, bigger Third Pounder lost because diners misread fractionsIn 1985 A&W launched a burger with a third of a pound of beef, priced below McDonald's Quarter Pounder and winning taste tests. It flopped. Owner A. Alfred Taubman later blamed re…- The first Apple Watch prototype was an iPhone strapped to a wristBefore any watch hardware existed, Apple's designers tested their software by fastening an iPhone to their wrists with Velcro, drawing a crown on screen and later plugging a physi…
The Ark of the Covenant's biblical journey ends in a mystery nobody has solvedThe Book of Exodus gives the Ark exact dimensions: two and a half cubits long, one and a half wide and high, roughly 131 by 79 by 79 centimetres of acacia wood covered in gold. Wh…