Intellect PlusBusinesspeople
283 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 5 of 5.
A rich men's fishing club lowered the dam above JohnstownAbove the steel town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a group of Pittsburgh industrialists led by Henry Clay Frick turned an old canal reservoir into a private resort lake. They trimme…
Kansas mixed heartland boogie with symphonic rock and a fiddleMost progressive rock violinists leaned on jazz and classical music. In Kansas, Robby Steinhardt's violin sounded like the American heartland, riding over boogie rhythms and shift…
Coppola spent decades and his wine fortune getting Megalopolis madeFrancis Ford Coppola first imagined Megalopolis in 1977, near the end of filming Apocalypse Now. Studios turned the project down again and again, so he waited until winemaking had…
Only up to 60 people a year join the Royal Society's fellowshipEach spring, from roughly 700 nominees, the Royal Society elects at most 60 new fellows, foreign members and honorary fellows. The honour, given to Isaac Newton in 1672 and Charle…
Guy Pearce appeared in back-to-back Best Picture winnersGuy Pearce played a bomb disposal sergeant in The Hurt Locker and the future Edward VIII in The King's Speech, and both films won the Oscar for Best Picture. That made him the fir…
Horace Mann, father of American public schools, taught his own children at homeHorace Mann persuaded Massachusetts and then most northern states to fund elementary schools through taxes and to train teachers in normal schools. Yet the reformer later called t…
Warren Buffett charged his son Howard rent on the family's first farmWhen Howard Graham Buffett began farming in Tekamah, Nebraska, in 1977, his father Warren bought the land for $760,000 and then charged him rent. Nearly five decades later, on Sep…- Howard Warren Buffett wants philanthropy managed like an investment portfolioWarren Buffett's grandson Howard Warren Buffett argues that nonprofits should be lined up systematically against social needs, an idea he calls social value investing. He set it o…
Jamie Dimon's college paper on Shearson mergers launched his banking careerAs a Tufts student, Jamie Dimon wrote a paper on the mergers at Shearson, and his mother sent it to Sandy Weill. Weill hired him for a summer, later coaxed him away from Goldman S…- The Russell dukes of Bedford once held 86,335 acres, not counting LondonIn 1883 the 9th Duke of Bedford's country estates covered 86,335 acres across England, from 32,269 in Bedfordshire to a single acre in Lincolnshire, bringing in £141,793 a year. T…
- England's Dissenters ranged from Quakers to Muggletonians who cursed their criticsBetween the 16th and 19th centuries, many English Protestants broke away from the Church of England, which they saw as too Catholic, though they rarely agreed on the remedy. Some …
- America's national cemetery was planted in Robert E. Lee's front gardenWhen Union burial grounds near Washington filled up in 1864, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs chose the estate of Confederate general Robert E. Lee. The high ground rarely f…
Arteriosclerosis is the slow stiffening of the body's blood pipesThe word comes from Greek for artery and hardened, and that is the core of it. Artery walls thicken, stiffen and lose their stretch, gradually squeezing the flow of blood to organ…- Bear Stearns survived the 1929 crash but not a week of rumoursFounded in 1923, Bear Stearns came through the Wall Street Crash without laying off a single employee. Eighty-five years later its ready cash fell from 18.1 billion dollars to 2 b…
Charles Koch grew his father's oil firm two thousandfoldIn 1967 Charles Koch took charge of a medium-sized Wichita oil company and renamed it after his father. By 2006 Koch Industries was bringing in 90 billion dollars a year, growth o…
Condoleezza Rice trained to be a concert pianist before switching to Soviet studiesCondoleezza Rice began French, music, figure skating and ballet at three, and took up serious piano at 15 aiming for the concert stage. At the Aspen music festival she met student…- Cyrus Mistry ran the Tata empire without carrying the Tata nameWhen Cyrus Mistry took charge of the Tata Group in 2012, he became only the second chairman in its history not named Tata. His family had owned a slice of the holding company sinc…
A sewing machine label gave AC/DC its nameBrothers Malcolm and Angus Young were searching for a band name in 1973 when their sister Margaret pointed at the AC/DC symbol on her sewing machine's power adapter. Alternating c…
Jobs saw Xerox’s mouse GUI and bet Apple’s future on itSteven Paul Jobs (1955–2011) co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak and helped drive the personal-computer revolution. After Reed College and a 1974 India trip, he studied Zen. A 197…
Ted Turner built CNN and gave a billion to the UN FoundationRobert Edward Turner III (1938–2026) founded CNN, the first 24-hour cable news network, and WTBS, a pioneering superstation. After his father’s 1963 suicide he took over a $1 mill…
A gold-rush merchant helped drive the Central PacificAmasa Leland Stanford (1824–1893)—attorney, industrialist, philanthropist, Republican politician—grew rich as a California merchant after 1852, then as a Central Pacific Railroad …
A Chaozhou refugee built a Pacific business archipelagoSir Ka-shing Li, born 1928 in Guangdong to Teochew parents, chaired CK Hutchison and CK Asset before retiring from those roles. Investments span transport, property, finance, reta…
Rome's richest man died on a doomed Parthian campaignMarcus Licinius Crassus (115–53 BC), often called Rome's richest man, bankrolled Julius Caesar and joined Pompey in the First Triumvirate. After a second consulship he governed Sy…
Frankfurt's Rothschilds built Europe's private banking webThe Rothschilds, an Ashkenazi Jewish banking dynasty from Frankfurt, rose from sixteenth-century records to nineteenth-century dominance of European finance, holding what was then…- An Adelaide paper became a global News Corp empireKeith Rupert Murdoch, born 1931 in Melbourne, inherited his father's small Adelaide paper The News in 1952 and scaled it into News Corp—hundreds of local, national, and internatio…
- Morgan welded U.S. Steel and calmed panic-era financeJohn Pierpont Morgan Sr. (1837–1913) dominated Wall Street through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, organizing giants such as U.S. Steel, International Harvester, and General E…
- Wedgwood sold taste with science-tuned clay bodiesJosiah Wedgwood (1730–1795) founded his pottery firm in 1759, experimenting systematically to improve ceramic bodies. Classical mania of the late 1760s–70s powered sales to elites…
- One bet against the pound made Soros a billion dollarsA Hungarian philosophy graduate built the Quantum Fund from twelve million dollars into history's most successful hedge fund. His theory of reflexivity argues that market prices c…
Westinghouse won the war of currents Edison startedA Civil War veteran patented 360 inventions and founded 61 companies across Pittsburgh industry. His compressed-air train brakes saved thousands of lives, then he bet on alternati…
Half of American cars were Model Ts by 1918Henry Ford did not invent the assembly line, but he perfected it—and priced a car at $825 in 1908, then $360 by 1916. Fifteen million Model Ts later, he had reshaped both American…
Howard Hughes bought Hollywood and sold it for profitHe inherited a drill-bit leasing fortune, spent millions on aviation records and blockbuster films, then treated a major Hollywood studio like a stock trade—walking away from RKO …- Jakob Fugger may have held two percent of Europe's GDPA merchant from Augsburg turned textile profits into copper monopolies and Habsburg loans. He bankrolled emperors, bought mines with shares instead of cash, and built the world's …
Jamsetji Tata planned a steel city before steel existedBorn into a Parsi priest family, he broke tradition to build India's largest conglomerate. Four lifelong ambitions—a steelworks, hydroelectric power, a research university, and a …- Rockefeller refined oil when competitors drilled and wasted itA Cleveland bookkeeper who tracked freight rebates built Standard Oil into a kerosene giant controlling ninety percent of US production. Antitrust breakup made him America's first…
- Astor quit fur for Manhattan dirt and never looked backGermany's youngest son of a butcher became America's first multi-millionaire by monopolizing beaver pelts, then pivoted before European hat fashions changed. He leased Manhattan l…
Slim learned compound interest from a bond at age elevenCarlos Slim Helú, born 28 January 1940 in Mexico City to Maronite parents of Lebanese origin, built a conglomerate across telecom, industry, retail, and more. Rankings have repeat…- The Commodore turned ferries and rails into a dynastyCornelius Vanderbilt (1794–1877), nicknamed the Commodore, built one of history's great American fortunes in shipping and railroads. He founded the Vanderbilt clan's wealth. Dutch…
- Musk founded SpaceX in 2002 after leaving South AfricaElon Musk, born 28 June 1971 in Pretoria, emigrated to Canada in 1989 and later built companies spanning software, cars, and rocketry. In 2002 he founded SpaceX, serving as CEO an…
- Estée Lauder built a beauty empire from a Queens hardware childhoodEstée Lauder (1908–2004), born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens, to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, co-founded the cosmetics company that still bears her name. She grew up …
- Buffett ran Berkshire from 1970 through early 2026Warren Buffett, born 30 August 1930 in Omaha to congressman Howard Buffett, learned value investing from Benjamin Graham before launching Buffett Partnership Ltd. in 1956. From 19…
- Carnegie gave away a fortune after forging steel AmericaAndrew Carnegie (1835–1919), born in a Dunfermline weaver's cottage, reached Pittsburgh at twelve in 1848 and went on to lead America's steel boom. In his last eighteen years he g…
- Mellon's Treasury fame collapsed with the 1929 crashAndrew Mellon (1855–1937) rose from his father's Pittsburgh bank, T. Mellon & Sons, into industrial and political power. Warren Harding named him Treasury secretary in 1921; he se…
- Gates left daily Microsoft work for giant-scale philanthropyBill Gates, born 28 October 1955 in Seattle, co-pioneered microcomputer software with Paul Allen after Lakeside School tinkering. He later stepped back from Microsoft to run the B…