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Wealth & Business

879 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 8 of 15.

421. Slavia Prague: the literary cycling club that became a Czech football powerMedical students in Vinohrady founded Slavia on 2 November 1892 as a society for literature and cycling. Football arrived in 1896, along with a goalless draw against Sparta that s…
422. SkyTeam: the last of the big three airline alliances and its shifting rosterSkyTeam was born on 22 June 2000, when Delta, Aeroméxico, Air France and Korean Air met in New York. Arriving after Star Alliance and Oneworld, it has grown into the second larges…
423. SM Entertainment: how a failed hip hop bet built the K-pop idol factoryIn 1989 Lee Soo-man opened a small studio in Seoul's Apgujeong and signed a hip hop singer whose career collapsed after a drug arrest. Burned, Lee pivoted to carefully trained ido…
424. Shein: from wedding-dress drop shipper to the world's biggest fashion retailerShein began in Nanjing in October 2008 under the name ZZKKO, reselling clothes from Guangzhou wholesalers without designing a single garment. Within about fourteen years it had be…
425. The riveted jean was a Reno tailor's idea, patented with Levi's moneyJacob Davis, a tailor in Reno, had a customer who kept tearing his trousers. Davis hammered copper rivets into the stress points, but he could not afford a patent. So he wrote to …
426. LG's two letters stand for a chemical firm and GoldStarThose two letters on televisions and washing machines worldwide are an abbreviation of two old Korean brands: Lucky, a chemical company, and GoldStar, its electronics arm. GoldSta…
427. Lidl bought its name from a retired teacher to avoid 'black market'Dieter Schwarz had an awkward problem when he opened discount shops in the 1970s: his family name would turn them into Schwarz-Markt, German for black market. He wanted his father…
428. Henry Ford bought Lincoln from the man who had once pushed him outIn 1902 investors led by Henry Leland forced Henry Ford out of his own car company and reorganised it as Cadillac. Twenty years later Leland's next venture, Lincoln, was bankrupt,…
429. Seiko's quartz watch cost as much as a car and shook SwitzerlandOn sale in 1969, Seiko's Astron was the first quartz wristwatch anyone could buy, and it was priced about the same as a mid-sized car. Quartz soon became cheap, and the shift it b…
430. SBS won Korean viewers by airing the evening news an hour earlyWhen SBS arrived in 1990 as South Korea's first new private broadcaster in a decade, it needed a way to stand out. One tactic was simply timing: its flagship bulletin went out at …
431. Sharp takes its name from a mechanical pencil invented in 1915The electronics giant behind Aquos televisions and one of the first camera phones is named after a pencil. In 1915 Tokuji Hayakawa, a Tokyo metalworker, invented the Ever-Ready Sh…
432. Lehman Brothers started as an Alabama dry-goods shop paid in cottonThe bank whose collapse in September 2008 became the largest bankruptcy in American history began 158 years earlier as a small store in Montgomery, Alabama, run by three Bavarian …
433. Leica turned movie film sideways and made cameras pocket-sizedLeica's key trick in the 1920s was simple: turn the frame. Cinema cameras exposed 35 mm film across the strip; Leica ran the image lengthwise, getting a bigger picture from the sa…
434. Lenovo renamed itself because too many companies were already called LegendFor its first two decades, the Chinese computer maker now called Lenovo went by Legend in English. When it tried to expand abroad, it found the name already taken by businesses al…
435. Labubu, the toothy toy monster built on surprise and scarcityLabubu is a scruffy little monster with big ears and nine sharp teeth, and in June 2025 a 1.2-metre mint-green version sold for $170,000 at an auction in Beijing. Most fans pay fa…
436. Lamborghini was founded by a tractor maker who refused to go racingFerruccio Lamborghini already made tractors, boilers and air conditioners when he set up a car company in 1963 to take on Ferrari. Unlike Enzo Ferrari, who saw road cars mainly as…
437. The first Land Rovers were green because of surplus aircraft paintEarly Land Rovers came only in shades of light green, and not for style. After the war, Rover used leftover military supplies of aircraft cockpit paint. The vehicle itself was ske…
438. Lay's crisps began in the boot of a salesman's carHerman Lay started selling snacks in Nashville in 1932 and drove across the American South peddling potato chips from the trunk of his car. Three decades later his company merged …
439. Kia began with bicycle parts and was once banned from building carsKia, whose name roughly means rising from East Asia, started in 1944 making steel tubing and bicycle parts. It built South Korea's first domestic bicycle, then motorcycles and tru…
440. A snubbed bicycle repair letter started the company behind Škoda carsIn 1894 a young Czech bookseller named Václav Klement sent his broken German bicycle back to its maker with a letter written in Czech. The reply told him to write in a language th…
441. Kodak built the first digital camera prototype, then went bankrupt anywayIn the mid-1970s Kodak developed the first self-contained digital camera prototype and invented integral colour image sensors. Yet the company that taught the world to take snapsh…
442. The tiny hypercar maker that nearly bought Saab from General MotorsIn 2008 Koenigsegg had 45 staff and built 18 cars. Saab employed 3,400 people and made more than 93,000. Yet in June 2009 General Motors chose the little Swedish hypercar maker as…
443. Konami started out renting and repairing jukeboxes in OsakaOne of Japan's best-known game companies began in 1969 fixing and renting out jukeboxes. Its name blends the surnames of its three founders. When jukeboxes went into decline, Kona…
444. JYP Entertainment: one singer's agency that became a K-pop giantIn 1997 the singer-songwriter J.Y. Park started a small agency called Tae-Hong Planning and signed a single act. Renamed after his own stage name in 2001, it grew into one of Sout…
445. KAMAZ built a giant truck plant and a city on the Kama RiverWhen Soviet planners chose a small town on the Kama River for a vast truck factory in 1969, about 27,000 people lived there. The complex eventually sprawled over 57 square kilomet…
446. Kellogg split in two, and the snack half became KellanovaIn October 2023 the Kellogg Company broke itself apart. North American breakfast cereal went to a new firm, while the rest, from Pringles to Pop-Tarts, took an invented name: Kell…
447. Kering began as a Breton timber yard before owning GucciThe group behind Gucci, Balenciaga and Yves Saint Laurent started in 1962 as a timber business in Brittany, launched by François Pinault with a 100,000-franc bank loan. Over four …
448. SsangYong survived repeated bankruptcies, then changed its nameFew carmakers have changed hands as often as South Korea's SsangYong. Its owners included a chaebol, Daewoo, China's SAIC and India's Mahindra, and it went into receivership twice…
449. Jägermeister: a hunter's herbal digestif turned global party shotCurt Mast, a keen hunter from Wolfenbüttel, devised a herbal liqueur in 1934 using 56 herbs, fruits, roots and spices. The recipe has never changed. What did change was its image:…
450. John Deere's polished steel plough cut open the American prairieMidwestern soil was so rich and sticky that it clung to iron and wooden ploughs, forcing farmers to stop constantly to scrape them clean. A bankrupt Vermont blacksmith named John …
451. Johnson & Johnson grew out of a lecture on germs by Joseph ListerAt the 1876 Centennial Exposition, a young businessman named Robert Wood Johnson heard Joseph Lister explain how germs infect wounds. A decade later he and two brothers began maki…
452. JVC gave the world VHS and won the home video format warIn 1976 JVC unveiled the first VHS video recorder in Tokyo, priced at the equivalent of US$1,060. Sony's Betamax had arrived a year earlier with smaller cassettes and slightly sha…
453. David Caruso quit a hit show, flopped in films, then came backIn 1994 David Caruso walked away from NYPD Blue just four episodes into its second season, after winning a Golden Globe, because he did not get the raise he wanted. TV Guide later…
454. The O in David O. Selznick stood for absolutely nothingThe producer behind Gone with the Wind was born plain David Selznick. He tacked on an O to set himself apart from an uncle who shared his name, and because he liked how it looked.…
455. David Rockefeller ran a bank like a private foreign ministryThe youngest grandson of Standard Oil's founder could have had a Senate seat or the Treasury; he turned both down. David Rockefeller preferred banking, and as head of Chase Manhat…
456. Two studios flipped a coin to decide who got Debbie ReynoldsIn 1948 a sixteen-year-old tomboy from Burbank won a local beauty contest, and scouts from both Warner Bros. and MGM wanted to sign her on the spot. Unable to settle it any other …
457. Reliance began in one small Mumbai room with three chairsIndia's Reliance empire started in a 350 square foot office in Mumbai equipped with a telephone, a single table and three chairs. Its founder, Dhirubhai Ambani, was a village scho…
458. Red Bull began with a jet-lagged toothpaste salesman in BangkokDietrich Mateschitz was marketing toothpaste for a German cosmetics firm when, riding from Bangkok airport into the city, he bought a bottle of a Thai tonic called Krating Daeng. …
459. Dana White turned a $2 million fighting brand into a $4 billion saleWhen Dana White's friends bought the UFC in 2001, they got little more than a name and a battered octagon; even the web address had gone to a firm called User Friendly Computers. …
460. Christina Aguilera, once too young for the Mickey Mouse Club, sold over 100 million recordsAt ten, Christina Aguilera beat about 400 hopefuls onto the Mickey Mouse Club shortlist, only to be turned away for being under the age limit. A year later the producers called ba…
461. Christopher Lambert's short-sightedness helped him win the role of TarzanCasting a new Tarzan in the early 1980s, director Hugh Hudson wanted an unknown. Christopher Lambert beat Viggo Mortensen partly because, without his glasses, his myopic gaze seem…
462. Clancy Brown plays Hollywood's scariest villains and also voices Mr. KrabsThe same deep voice that barked at inmates as the brutal guard captain in The Shawshank Redemption has, since 1999, belonged to SpongeBob's penny-pinching boss Mr. Krabs. Clancy B…
463. Harry Webb from Lucknow became Cliff Richard, Britain's answer to ElvisBritain's first homegrown rock and roll record, according to John Lennon, was sung by a teenager born in India as Harry Webb. A manager wanted a punchier name, so Cliff was chosen…
464. Colonel Sanders started franchising fried chicken in his sixties, living on Social SecurityHarland Sanders was 65 when a new interstate highway drained the traffic from his Kentucky roadside restaurant. Left with savings and a monthly Social Security cheque of $105, he …
465. Charles Rolls sold the cars, then gave his life to flyingThe Rolls in Rolls-Royce was an aristocrat's son whose Eton classmates called him dirty Rolls for his love of engines. He was the salesman to Henry Royce's engineer. Within a few …
466. Chelsea Clinton was named after a Joni Mitchell song and a London neighbourhoodBill and Hillary Clinton, on a Christmas trip to London in 1978, wandered through Chelsea. Hearing Judy Collins sing Joni Mitchell's Chelsea Morning, Bill declared any future daug…
467. Cheryl went from a Newcastle council estate to five UK number onesCheryl Tweedy nearly went out twice in the 2002 talent show that formed Girls Aloud. Instead she became the first member voted into the group, which reached number one in record t…
468. A fisherman's son who failed to qualify at Monaco ended up owning Formula OneIn 1958 Bernie Ecclestone climbed into one of his own cars at Monaco and lapped nearly a minute slower than the drivers he had hired. His talent lay elsewhere. By selling televisi…
469. An Albanian pop star who topped a Billboard dance chart after moving to CaliforniaAt 15, Bleona Qereti became a household name in Albania after one festival performance. Two decades, eight Albanian albums and a move to Los Angeles later, she reached the top spo…
470. The Beatles' manager wanted to be a dress designer and briefly studied actingBrian Epstein had never managed a band when he wandered into Liverpool's Cavern Club for a lunchtime show in 1961. Within months he had signed the Beatles, swapped their scruffy l…
471. Iron Maiden's singer also flies the band's jet and fences internationallyOn Iron Maiden's world tours, the man belting out the choruses has often been the same man who flew everyone there. Bruce Dickinson, the band's operatic frontman, trained as a com…
472. Captain Tom aimed to raise 1,000 pounds with garden laps and raised 32 millionIn April 2020, at 99 and leaning on a walking frame, Tom Moore set out to walk 100 lengths of his garden before his 100th birthday, hoping to raise 1,000 pounds for NHS charities.…
473. A hernia steered Carl Zeiss away from scholarship and toward the microscopeHis two older brothers became academics, but Carl Zeiss had a hernia that forced him to wear a truss, and a desk-bound scholar's life seemed a poor fit. So he trained as a precisi…
474. Bernard Arnault bought the company that owned Dior for one symbolic francIn 1984 a young property developer from Roubaix won control of a struggling textile empire for a ceremonial single franc. Inside it sat Christian Dior. Bernard Arnault kept Dior, …
475. Bernard Baruch smelled the 1929 crash coming and told Will Rogers to sellBy 1927 Bernard Baruch, already rich twice over from Wall Street, suspected the boom could not last. He quietly moved into bonds, cash and gold, refused to help prop up falling pr…
476. Avery Brundage policed Olympic amateurism while getting rich from constructionFor twenty years Avery Brundage ran the International Olympic Committee as the fiercest defender of the unpaid amateur athlete. He never took a cent from sport himself; his fortun…
477. Ayumi Hamasaki turned down a record deal as fishy and became Japan's top-selling solo actWhen a producer approached a teenage dropout at a Tokyo nightclub and offered her a singing career, she said no way; the whole thing sounded fishy. Max Matsuura kept asking. Ayumi…
478. Azim Premji took a cooking-oil firm into software, then gave most of it awayIn 1966 a 21-year-old Stanford engineering student flew home to India after his father died and took over a small company making cooking oil and laundry soap. Azim Premji turned i…
479. A. R. Rahman went from backyard studio to two Oscars for Slumdog MillionaireAt nine, Dileep Kumar lost his father, and his family survived by renting out the dead man's music gear. The boy played keyboards for other composers, skipped classes and eventual…
480. Armenia's fourth president once helped create a best-selling Tetris spin-offBefore he led Armenia, Armen Sarkissian was a theoretical physicist who worked at Cambridge alongside Stephen Hawking. In 1991 he co-created Wordtris, a word-building twist on Tet…

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