Intellect PlusBusiness stories
479 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 8.
Tom Brokaw was the first English-language reporter on the Berlin Wall's fallOn November 9, 1989, an East German spokesman fumbled through his notes at a press conference and said new travel rules applied immediately. East Berliners rushed the Wall. Tom Br…
TNA Wrestling was dreamed up on a fishing trip to rival WWEWhen World Championship Wrestling collapsed in 2001, WWE was left with the American wrestling business to itself. On a fishing trip, Jeff Jarrett, his father Jerry and Bob Ryder s…
Golf's Tour Championship once gave its leader a head startFor six seasons the PGA Tour's finale began before anyone hit a shot: the points leader teed off at ten under par, while the last qualifiers started at even. The idea, borrowed fr…
Taipei 101 stands tall beside a fault line by bending, not resistingTaipei 101 rises 508 metres just 200 metres from a major fault line, in a region lashed by typhoons. Its engineers designed it to ride out winds of 60 metres per second and the st…
The small New York publisher that bought its way into Grand Theft AutoTake-Two Interactive began in 1993 as a tiny publisher betting on video games that starred real actors, including Dennis Hopper. A few years later it scooped up the assets of a co…
Starbucks spent its first decade refusing to sell a cup of coffeeWhen Starbucks opened near Seattle's Pike Place Market in 1971, it sold beans and brewing gear, nothing you could drink. Its founders wanted to stay that way. It took a marketing …
Before hosting Family Feud, Steve Harvey slept in his car for three yearsIn the late 1980s a struggling comic named Steve Harvey went three years without a home, sleeping in his car between gigs and washing at gas stations and public pools. Decades lat…- No university wanted Steve Nash until one coach watched a highlight tapeHis high school coach mailed letters and highlight reels to more than 30 American universities, and not one recruited him. Then Santa Clara's coach asked for footage, saw the Cana…
Stranger Things built a Netflix empire out of 1980s nostalgiaA boy vanishes from a small Indiana town in November 1983, and a girl with a shaved head and a number instead of a name escapes from the government lab nearby. From that premise t…
Why a small family firm can own the company behind James BondIn corporate family trees, the parent need not be the giant. DanJaq, a closely held family company, controls Eon Productions, the much larger business that runs the James Bond fil…
Taco Bell began with a hot dog seller studying the queue across the streetIn 1948 Glen Bell ran a hot dog stand in San Bernardino, California, and kept noticing the long line outside the Mitla Cafe opposite, famous for crunchy hard-shell tacos. He tried…
Secretariat went to the owner who lost a coin tossIn the autumn of 1969, two horse owners met in a New York office to flip a coin, and each secretly hoped to lose. The winner would get one foal; the loser, two, including one not …
Selena learned Spanish phonetically to sing Tejano music, then became its queenThe Queen of Tejano Music grew up speaking English and wanted to record English songs. Her father insisted she sing in the Spanish-language style of her heritage, so she learned t…
Siemens started with a telegraph that pointed at letters instead of using MorseIn 1847 Werner von Siemens and Johann Georg Halske opened a Berlin workshop around a telegraph whose needle spelled out letters. Within twenty years their firm had strung a line 1…- Skype was sold three times for billions before Microsoft switched it offSkype got its name because a domain was taken. Its founders wanted Skyper, from sky and peer-to-peer, but the web addresses were gone, so they dropped the last letter. Over the ne…
How a Coca-Cola spinoff became the Hollywood studio owned by SonyOne of Hollywood's Big Five studios began life as a leftover from a soft-drink company. Coca-Cola bundled Columbia Pictures with TriStar in 1987, then within two years sold its st…- Spike Lee's first feature cost 175,000 dollars and took two weeks to shootSpike Lee made his first feature in two weeks on 175,000 dollars, writing, directing, producing, editing and acting in it himself. She's Gotta Have It went on to earn over 7 milli…
The S&P 500 grew out of a railroad guide from 1860America's best-known share index traces back to Henry Varnum Poor's 1860 handbook on railroads and canals. Today its 500 firms account for roughly 83 per cent of the value of all …
One anonymous 4chan post about a moving statue spawned 10,400 fictional monstersIn June 2007 someone posted a mock classified report to 4chan's paranormal board about a concrete statue that moves only when nobody is looking. Readers copied the format, and the…
Rivian beat Ford, GM and Tesla to sell the first electric pickupRivian began in 2009 as Mainstream Motors, planning a hybrid sports car that was shelved. Twelve years later it put the world's first fully electric pickup truck in consumers' han…- Rob Riggle spent 23 years as a Marine officer while building a comedy careerMost comedians do not hold the rank of lieutenant colonel. Rob Riggle joined the Marines in 1990 planning to fly, left flight school to chase laughs, and then kept serving in the …
Ronaldinho is the only player to win every major football trophy there isWorld Cup, Copa América, Confederations Cup, Champions League, Copa Libertadores and the Ballon d'Or: no other footballer has collected all six. Ronaldinho, nicknamed the Wizard, …- The defence giant behind radar missiles also gave kitchens the microwave ovenRaytheon began in 1922 making a tube that let radios run from the mains instead of costly batteries. During the Second World War it built most of the Allies' radar magnetrons, and…
- Sabrina Carpenter placed third in a Miley Cyrus talent search before EspressoAt ten, Sabrina Carpenter was posting YouTube covers of Adele and Christina Aguilera from a home studio her father built. A decade of Disney roles and four modestly selling albums…
Apple built Safari because it was tired of relying on Microsoft's browserFor years Macs shipped with Internet Explorer as the default, under a 1997 deal with Microsoft. On 7 January 2003 Steve Jobs unveiled Apple's own answer, which he called a turbo b…- Israel's first king went looking for lost donkeys and found a crownIn one biblical telling, a young man from the tribe of Benjamin is sent to track down his father's runaway donkeys. On the way he consults a seer named Samuel and leaves anointed …
- Scottie Scheffler learned golf curving ping-pong balls between rooms at homeGiven plastic clubs at three, Scottie Scheffler practised by bending ping-pong balls from one room of the family home into the next. His father shovelled snow off a New Jersey dri…
- Rafael Nadal's lethal left-handed forehand began as his uncle's ideaRafael Nadal's left-handed game was a deliberate choice. His uncle and coach Toni moved him off a two-handed forehand and onto the left side for the natural edge it brings, and th…
Raising Cane's grew from a business plan graded B-minusRaising Cane's began as a college business plan that earned a B-minus and was turned down by investor after investor. Its founders paid their own way with manual labour jobs, open…
Ramen is named after pulled noodles it has nothing to do withRamen takes its name from Chinese lamian, the hand-pulled noodles of the north, yet the dish has no direct link to them. It grew from Cantonese noodle soups served by Chinese immi…
Reddit began after its founders' food-ordering app idea floppedReddit's founders arrived at Y Combinator with a different plan, a mobile food-ordering service called My Mobile Menu. When it failed, the two college roommates built a site where…- A role-playing gamer co-founded LinkedIn and backed Silicon Valley's futureReid Hoffman grew up hooked on tabletop role-playing games and edited for Chaosium, a game publisher close to his California home. He went on to co-found LinkedIn, one of the firs…
- The Finnish studio behind Max Payne started out in a basementRemedy Entertainment made its first game in a team member's basement. The Finnish studio, founded in 1995 by members of the demoscene group Future Crew, went on to create Max Payn…
Saying you were going to Reno once meant you wanted a divorceFor much of the 20th century, telling a friend you were going to Reno meant you were ending your marriage. A 1931 law cut Nevada's residency requirement to six weeks, and that sam…- The Steelers went four decades without a playoff win, then built a dynastyFor almost forty years, Pittsburgh's football team was the NFL's great also-ran, the oldest franchise never to win a league title. It took one playoff game in its first four decad…
- Pizza Hut got its name because the sign only had room for eight lettersTwo Wichita State students borrowed 600 dollars from their mother in 1958 and opened a pizza place. The sign they had fit just eight letters, so the name had to be short: Pizza Hu…
- In Pokopia, a shapeshifting Ditto pretends to be human to rebuild an empty worldThe hero of Pokémon Pokopia is not a trainer at all. It is a Ditto, the blob that copies other creatures, which finds its old trainer's Pokédex in a world abandoned by people and …
- Politico set out to cover Washington the way ESPN covers sportIn 2007 two Washington Post journalists left to start a website that would treat politics like a sports channel: fast, granular, obsessed with every play. Reporters carried video …
- Poutine's name may come from a cook's outburst about a damn messA regular at a café in rural Quebec reportedly asked the owner to toss cheese curds into his bag of fries. The owner is said to have warned it would make a damn mess, a maudite po…
The only constitutional amendment ever passed to cancel another one ended ProhibitionOn the last evening before a wartime alcohol ban took effect in 1919, Boston's grand hotels ran dry of gin by late afternoon. Respectable families crowded trams and trains, luggin…
ASML's leaky first machine gave way to the world's chipmaking gatekeeperASML's debut product moved silicon wafers with oil pressure, and it leaked. Four decades later the Dutch firm is the only company building the extreme ultraviolet machines needed …
Japan's biggest airline still carries the code of a 1952 helicopter startupThe letters NH on every All Nippon Airways ticket are a fossil. They come from Nippon Helicopter, a small company founded in December 1952 whose first scheduled flight carried fre…
The invisible engine driving the global meat industryIt is the world's most widely grown legume, yet most people only encounter it indirectly. From the protein in your meat substitutes to the massive scale of global livestock farmin…
The surprising linguistic roots of the word bookWe often think of books as modern paper objects, but their very name points to an ancient forest. From clay tablets to digital screens, the evolution of the book is a story of tec…- How a $1,300 garage startup became a $4 trillion titanIn 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak raised just $1,300 by selling a Volkswagen bus and a calculator. Today, Apple is a global powerhouse valued at over $4 trillion, having survi…
- How a garage-based bookstore became the world's largest revenue-generating companyIn 1994, Jeff Bezos launched a company called Cadabra to sell books online. Today, that venture has evolved into a global conglomerate so vast it has become the world's largest co…
How Did a Graphical Shell Become the World's Dominant OS?The concept of 'Windows' began as a simple graphical shell layered over MS-DOS. Yet, this initial iteration evolved through complex architectural shifts, achieving a market domina…
How a family of weavers built the world's largest automakerBefore it conquered the global highways, Toyota was a company built on looms. By applying the logic of automated weaving to the assembly line, a Japanese family transformed a text…
How a two-cent news bulletin became a global financial powerhouseIn 1889, it was a four-page sheet costing just two cents. Today, The Wall Street Journal commands millions of subscribers. Discover how a specialized stock market bulletin survive…
Is it murder if there is no premeditation?The legal line between murder and manslaughter is often thinner than you think. While we often imagine a cold-blooded killer planning for weeks, many legal systems define murder t…- How a penniless orphan became the architect of a global empireBefore he was a prophet, Muhammad was a man of modest means, facing poverty and rejection. Yet, through a combination of business acumen and spiritual conviction, he transformed t…
How a 1975 software deal created 12,000 millionairesBefore it was a trillion-dollar titan, Microsoft was a small venture selling interpreters for a single microcomputer. A strategic pivot in the 1980s didn't just dominate the PC ma…
The shifting meaning of liberalism: from a 'necessary evil' to the welfare stateOnce a movement to dismantle absolute monarchy and royal monopolies, liberalism has undergone a profound transformation. While its roots lie in protecting individuals from state c…- Beyond the acronym: the complex history and diverse identities of the LGBTQ communityWhile the acronyms vary, the movement represents a vast spectrum of sexual and gender identities. From the 1969 Stonewall Uprising to the legal milestones of the early 2000s, unde…
- The disputed origin of the world's most famous sandwichWas the hamburger born in a German city, a Texas lunch counter, or a Wisconsin fair? While global icons like the Big Mac dominate the market, the true inventor of the hamburger re…
How a medicinal tonic for morphine addiction became a global empireIn 1886, John Pemberton sought a cure for his own morphine addiction. He didn't just find a remedy; he created a patent medicine that would eventually evolve into the world's sixt…- The 13% genetic gap between humans and our closest living relativesWe often view chimpanzees as mere shadows of ourselves, but the biological reality is far more complex. While our DNA sequences are remarkably similar, the true divergence lies in…
- The legal shield that protects your personal wealth from business failureWhen a business fails, who pays the debts? For many entrepreneurs, the answer is 'everyone.' Understanding the critical distinction between a sole proprietorship and a corporation…
How a private wireless consortium became a global public service monopolyIn 1922, the BBC began as a private company funded by royalties on radio sets. Today, it is a global giant with 22,000 employees. Discover how a period of intense industrial crisi…