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Wealth & Business

882 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 11 of 15.

601. 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…
602. 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…
603. 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 …
604. 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…
605. 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…
606. 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…
607. 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…
608. 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…
609. 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…
610. 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…
611. 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…
612. 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…
613. 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…
614. 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 …
615. 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 …
616. 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…
617. 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…
618. Queen Camilla left school with one O-level and ended up crowned in Westminster AbbeyCamilla Shand left her London school in 1964 with a single O-level; her parents saw no need for her to stay on for A-levels. She went to a Swiss finishing school, did secretarial …
619. Bridgestone is its founder's surname, Stone Bridge, flipped into EnglishShōjirō Ishibashi's family name means stone bridge in Japanese. When he launched a tyre company in 1931, he translated it and swapped the order to get Bridgestone. The business gr…
620. British Airways traces its roots to the world's first daily international flightsOn 25 August 1919, a small British company began flying passengers between London and Paris every day, the first regular international air service anywhere. That airline was one o…
621. Volkswagen revived Bugatti in Alsace and then handed it to a Croatian electric-car founderEttore Bugatti started building racing and luxury cars at Molsheim in Alsace in 1909. Nearly a century later, Volkswagen bought the name, built a new factory beside his old guest …
622. Buick is the car company that gave birth to General MotorsDavid Dunbar Buick would rather have kept building stationary and boat engines than cars. His chief engineer quit in frustration, and Buick himself sold out in 1906, later dying i…
623. Burberry dressed polar explorers and Everest climbers before it dressed the catwalkWhen Roald Amundsen raced to the South Pole and Ernest Shackleton set out to cross Antarctica, their gear came from a draper's shop founded in Basingstoke. Thomas Burberry had inv…
624. BP began with a 1908 oil strike in Persia and a navy switching from coalIn May 1908 British geologists struck oil at Masjed Soleyman in south-west Persia, the first commercially significant find in the Middle East. A company formed the next year to ex…
625. Brøndby rose from Denmark's sixth tier to the Champions League in a generationIn 1964 two village clubs west of Copenhagen merged so their municipality would build them a stadium. The new Brøndby IF started in the sixth tier of Danish football as amateurs. …
626. A $10 million payout after losing his job built the Bloomberg empireIn 1981 Salomon Brothers was taken over and Michael Bloomberg, one of its partners, left with a $10 million settlement. He had built computer systems for Salomon, so he used the m…
627. A small London publisher's gamble on a rejected manuscript changed its fortunesFor most of its early life Bloomsbury was a minor name in British publishing. Then in 1997 it took a chance on a children's fantasy series that several other publishers had alread…
628. Blue Origin's first rocket climbed just 285 feet before the company went bigJeff Bezos founded Blue Origin in 2000 and then said almost nothing about it for years. Its first test vehicle, a rocket called Goddard, flew in November 2006 from a ranch in West…
629. The French bank that fired the first warning shot of the 2008 crisisOn 9 August 2007, BNP Paribas closed two investment funds exposed to American subprime mortgages, becoming the first major financial group to admit the damage publicly. That day i…
630. Boeing once owned an airline, until a 1934 law split it apartIn its early years Boeing built planes and flew them too. By 1931 its parent group had merged four small airlines into United Airlines. Then a 1934 rule demanded that aircraft man…
631. Bombardier went from snowmobiles to subway cars to supersonic-speed business jetsJoseph-Armand Bombardier founded his company in Valcourt, Quebec, in 1942 to sell snowmobiles. Within decades it had become one of the world's largest makers of trains and aircraf…
632. Borgward was liquidated in 1961, yet creditors were paid in full with money left overCarl Borgward insisted until his death in 1963 that his car company had been solvent when creditors forced it into liquidation. In a sense he was right: after every creditor was p…
633. A charity owns almost all of Bosch but gets no say in running itBosch, the world's largest car-parts supplier, is 94 percent owned by a charitable foundation. Yet that foundation holds no voting rights over the company and spends its income on…
634. Warren Buffett took over Berkshire Hathaway out of pique and later called it his worst mistakeIn 1964 the boss of a struggling Massachusetts textile firm agreed to buy back Warren Buffett's shares for 11.50 dollars each, then sent a written offer an eighth of a dollar lowe…
635. Germany's Bild began as a paper of pictures and became Europe's biggest sellerIn 1977 the undercover reporter Günter Wallraff joined Bild's Hanover newsroom for four months under the false name Hans Esser. His books described colleagues who showed contempt …
636. BioNTech built its mRNA science for cancer, then used it on COVID in monthsFor years Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci worked on a single goal: using messenger RNA to make cancer treatments tailored to each patient. In January 2020, days after the new coronavi…
637. The BlackBerry kept growing after the iPhone arrived, until it suddenly stoppedHeadlines called the 2007 iPhone a BlackBerry killer, yet BlackBerry kept adding users for years and still ran 43 percent of American smartphones in early 2010. Six years later it…
638. BlackRock began as a Blackstone side business that its partner later regretted sellingIn the late 1980s Larry Fink was still smarting from a 90 million dollar loss at First Boston, and he wanted to build a firm obsessed with risk. Blackstone gave him a credit line …
639. Ben & Jerry's chunky ice cream owes its texture to a founder who cannot smellBen Cohen has severe anosmia, meaning almost no sense of smell, so he judges food by how it feels in the mouth. That preference gave Ben & Jerry's its trademark lumps of cookie, b…
640. Benetton sold jumpers with billboards that rarely showed any clothesGuinness World Records once listed Benetton for the most controversial advertising campaign. The Italian knitwear firm spent years putting up billboards about race, AIDS and hatre…
641. Rolls-Royce secretly bought Bentley so its quiet 8-litre car would stop competingWhen Bentley went into receivership in 1931, the winning sealed bid came from a body called the British Central Equitable Trust. Not even W. O. Bentley knew who was behind it unti…
642. Today's Bank of America is really NationsBank of Charlotte wearing a borrowed nameWhen NationsBank bought BankAmerica in 1998, the Charlotte bank was the buyer and the legal survivor. It kept its own headquarters, stock price history and chief executive, yet ad…
643. Bank of China's overseas branches were divided between two headquarters after 1949When the civil war ended, the Bank of China's foreign offices did not all follow one boss. London, Singapore and Hong Kong stayed with the bank run from Beijing, while New York, T…
644. Japan's first central bank notes turned out to be a treat for ratsWhen Japan's new central bank put its own paper money into circulation in 1885, the notes contained konjac powder as a defence against counterfeiters. The unintended result was mo…
645. BASF was pushed across the Rhine by a town worried about its smokeBASF was founded in Mannheim in 1865, but the town council feared the chemical works would foul the air for residents. So the plant went up on the opposite bank of the Rhine, in L…
646. A coin toss decided whose name came first on Baskin-RobbinsTwo brothers-in-law in postwar Southern California bet that Americans were bored of chocolate, strawberry and vanilla. Their promise of 31 flavours, one for every day of the month…
647. Bayer once sold heroin as a cough remedy, named for feeling heroicFrom 1898 to 1910 Bayer marketed diacetylmorphine as a supposedly non-addictive substitute for morphine, sold over the counter for coughs and even pneumonia. Its head of pharmacol…
648. A famous climate scientist designed the hangar at Belgrade's first proper airportWhen Belgrade opened its international airport on the flat land across the Sava in 1927, the reinforced concrete hangar was designed by Milutin Milanković, the Serbian scientist b…
649. Baidu's founder ranked web pages by their links two years before Google didIn 1996, working for a Dow Jones division in New Jersey, Robin Li built RankDex, the first search engine to judge a site's quality by how many other sites linked to it. Google's P…
650. Bamboo Airways ordered dozens of jets, then shrank to a single planeVietnam's Bamboo Airways launched in 2019 with talk of five-star service and multibillion-dollar orders from Airbus and Boeing. Three years later its founder was arrested, owners …
651. One British company inherited the Spitfire, Concorde, the Comet and Marconi's radio firmBAE Systems, formed in 1999, is the family tree of British engineering compressed into one firm. Its ancestors include Marconi's pioneering radio company, the makers of the Spitfi…
652. Atari took its name from Go and even secretly launched its own rivalNolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney named their 1972 company after a term from the board game Go, meaning a group of stones about to be captured. Atari went on to define early video gam…
653. The Canadian chipmaker behind the graphics in the GameCube, Wii and Xbox 360Founded in 1985 in Markham, Ontario, ATI Technologies grew from making graphics cards for IBM and Commodore into one of the two giants of PC graphics alongside Nvidia. It also dre…
654. Austria's railway had to wait years for its own initials because a Swiss line had themWhen Austria's national railway was founded in 1923, the obvious abbreviation ÖBB was already taken by a small Swiss line, the Oensingen-Balsthal-Bahn. So it called itself BBÖ ins…
655. Autodesk's founder thought computer drafting was a niche, then AutoCAD took offIn 1982, John Walker and fifteen fellow programmers pooled $60,000 and planned several software products to see which would stick. Walker doubted design software could be big, sin…
656. Romania's Dacia 1300 stayed in production, in one form or another, for 35 yearsThe first Dacia 1300, a licence-built Renault 12, rolled off the line in time for a 1969 national parade. Romanians loved it, and the waiting lists were always long. The same basi…
657. A Soviet car factory built a whole town named after an Italian communistIn 1966 the Soviet government teamed up with Fiat to build a vast car plant on the banks of the Volga. A new town grew up around it and was named Tolyatti, after Italian Communist…
658. AXA stands for nothing, and its first name idea turned out to mean mooseWhen French insurer Claude Bébéar needed a short name that sounded the same in every language, he used a computer search. The first pick, Elan, was dropped after Canadian executiv…
659. Japan dreamed up the Asian Development Bank, then lost it to Manila by one voteIn December 1965, eighteen future members voted three times on where to put Asia's new development bank. On the final ballot, taken after lunch, Manila beat Tokyo nine to eight wi…
660. Asiana broke Korean Air's monopoly in 1988 and is now merging into itFor two decades Korean Air was the only airline South Korea had. Asiana arrived in 1988 to challenge it, grew into a global Star Alliance carrier, and after years of regulatory wr…

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