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879 cards. Each one is a 40-second story with a five-minute read behind it. Page 9 of 15.

  1. ASAP Rocky turned a leaked Harlem single into a rap and fashion empireIn August 2011 a track called Peso leaked online, and within weeks New York's Hot 97 was playing it. By October its creator, a Harlem rapper who had spent his teens moving between…
  2. Ashley Olsen's quest for a perfect T-shirt grew into the luxury label The RowIn 2005 Ashley Olsen, once half of television's baby Michelle Tanner, set herself a small challenge: design the perfect T-shirt. She tested it on women of every shape and age. A y…
  3. Andrew Yang, the test-prep chief who ran for president on $1,000 a monthAndrew Yang lasted five months as a corporate lawyer before quitting a job he likened to a pie-eating contest where the prize was more pie. A decade later he was a millionaire fro…
  4. Andrus Ansip, the chemist and banker who became the EU's longest-serving premierFor a few months in late 2013 and early 2014, no head of government in the European Union had been in office longer than Estonia's Andrus Ansip. He had started out as a university…
  5. Anna Chapman, the Russian spy who kept her real name and became a celebrityWhen the FBI rounded up ten Russian sleeper agents in June 2010, most turned out to be living under invented identities. Anna Chapman was one of only two using a real name. She ra…
  6. Anousheh Ansari, the telecom founder who became the first woman to buy an orbital tripAs a six-year-old in Iran, Anousheh Ansari slept on her grandparents' balcony because the house had no air conditioning, staring up at the stars. In September 2006 she looked back…
  7. Anthony Fokker, the Dutch dropout who built Germany's First World War fightersAnthony Fokker never finished high school and distrusted trained engineers, yet his factory supplied the German air force with about 700 warplanes, including the triplane flown by…
  8. Aristotle Onassis, the refugee with $250 who built the largest private fleetIn 1923 a teenage refugee named Aristotle Onassis landed in Buenos Aires with about $250 and took a job as a telephone operator. Within a few decades he owned more than seventy fr…
  9. Zara's founder built a fashion empire yet refuses to wear its clothesAmancio Ortega, who started Zara, turns up in a plain blue blazer, white shirt and grey trousers, and none of them come from his own shops. He declines to wear a tie, has spoken t…
  10. Amr Diab blended East and West into what fans call Mediterranean musicIn 1996 an Egyptian singer from Port Said released Nour El Ain, a song that mixed Middle Eastern rhythms with Western pop. It won him his first World Music Award and an audience f…
  11. The Citroën double chevron may trace back to a Polish carpenter's gearsAround 1900, a young French engineer visiting his late mother's homeland of Poland watched a carpenter shaping gears with teeth arranged like a fishbone. They ran quieter and more…
  12. Prince Al Waleed staked half his fortune on a struggling CiticorpIn January 1991 Citicorp, battered by property losses and Latin American debt, needed fresh capital. A Saudi prince agreed to put in 590 million dollars, roughly half of everythin…
  13. Ali Daei, the Iranian striker who first reached 100 international goalsLong before Cristiano Ronaldo chased the mark, the first man to score 100 goals for his country was a tall metallurgy graduate from Ardabil in Iran. Ali Daei got there on 17 Novem…
  14. Alice Walton's art habit began with a Picasso print at age tenAt ten years old, Alice Walton spent five weeks of pocket money on a print of Picasso's Blue Nude. Decades later the Walmart heiress, ranked by Bloomberg in July 2025 as the riche…
  15. Aliko Dangote went from schoolyard sweets to Africa's largest oil refineryAt eight, Aliko Dangote bought boiled sweets and resold them to classmates, keeping the profit. He later started trading with a 3,000-dollar loan from an uncle. Today his cement, …
  16. Alla Pugacheva, the Soviet pop queen who outsold almost everyoneBillboard in 1988 placed her alongside Bing Crosby, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson. Most Westerners had never heard of her, yet Alla Pugacheva is credited with more than 250 mi…
  17. Alfred Hugenberg, the media baron who thought he could steer HitlerBy the 1920s Alfred Hugenberg owned more of Germany's press than anyone, plus a controlling stake in the film giant Ufa. He used that reach to help bring Hitler to power in 1933, …
  18. Adi Dassler's first shoe machine was powered by an employee pedalling a bicycleStarting out in post-First World War Germany with no electricity, credit or reliable supplies, Adi Dassler scavenged army helmets and bread pouches for sole leather and parachutes…
  19. Before running the Fed, Alan Greenspan played saxophone in a touring swing bandLong before he steered American interest rates, Alan Greenspan played clarinet and saxophone alongside Stan Getz, studied clarinet at Juilliard and toured with Woody Herman's band…
  20. Grounded by an ear disorder, Alan Shepard came back to golf on the MoonIn 1961 Alan Shepard became the first American in space. Two years later an inner-ear disorder causing violent dizziness grounded him. Surgery fixed it in 1968, and in 1971, at 47…
  21. Alan Sugar launched Amstrad with £100 of savings and a £50 vanIn 1968, at 21, Alan Sugar took £100 out of his Post Office savings, bought a van for £50, insured it for £8 and started selling car radio aerials and other electrical goods from …
  22. Alexander De Croo led a Belgian party with almost no political experienceIn December 2009, Alexander De Croo, a business engineer who had run his own intellectual property services company, was elected leader of Belgium's Flemish liberal party after en…
  23. Canada's second prime minister started out cutting stone and building jailsAlexander Mackenzie left school at 13 when his father died, trained as a stonemason in Scotland and crossed to Canada at 19. His first Kingston wages came as a promissory note tha…
  24. Zomato ditched its first name, FoodieBay, partly to avoid a fight with eBayIn 2008 two Bain & Company consultants, Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah, launched a restaurant-listing site called FoodieBay. Two years later they renamed it Zomato, partly bec…
  25. At 15, Zlatan Ibrahimović nearly quit football for a job at Malmö's portAs a teenager Zlatan Ibrahimović came close to abandoning football to work at the Port of Malmö, until his coach talked him out of it. He went on to win 34 trophies, score more th…
  26. Germany's last crown prince waited 30 years for a throne that vanishedWilhelm became heir to the German and Prussian crowns at six, in 1888, the Year of the Three Emperors. He remained crown prince for three decades, only to see his father abdicate …
  27. Yoko Ono made a painting that visitors finished with their feetAt a Manhattan loft in 1960 and 1961, Yoko Ono laid a scrap of canvas on the floor and called it Painting to Be Stepped On. It became complete only as people walked across it, lea…
  28. Why KFC and Taco Bell are locked into pouring Pepsi foreverWhen PepsiCo spun off its fast food chains in 1997, it attached a permanent string: the new company must serve Pepsi rather than Coca-Cola in its restaurants, with a few exception…
  29. Zara Larsson went from child talent-show winner to owning her catalogueIn 2022 Zara Larsson left the Swedish label that had signed her at 15 and acquired her own music catalogue. Her next album, Venus, came out in 2024 on her own imprint, Sommer Hous…
  30. A pediatrician rebuilt young Pete Sampras's backhand with Wimbledon in mindPeter Fischer was a children's doctor and tennis enthusiast who coached the teenage Sampras until 1989. He had the boy abandon his two-handed backhand for a one-handed stroke, rea…
  31. The Petronas Towers were shifted 61 metres off a buried cliffTest boreholes under the old Kuala Lumpur racecourse revealed an unpleasant surprise: the planned footprint straddled the edge of an underground cliff, half decayed limestone and …
  32. Phil Knight sketched Nike's business plan in a Stanford class paperFor a small-business course at Stanford, Phil Knight wrote a paper asking whether Japanese sports shoes could do to German brands what Japanese cameras had done to German cameras.…
  33. Yahoo passed on buying Google for one million dollarsIn 1998 Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered their young search engine to Yahoo for $1 million, and Yahoo said no. Four years later it tried again, negotiating for weeks before sett…
  34. Yao Ming's rookie season ended with Charles Barkley kissing a donkeyBefore Yao Ming's first NBA season, Charles Barkley promised on air to kiss his colleague Kenny Smith's backside if the Chinese rookie ever scored more than 19 points in a game. Y…
  35. Coca-Cola had three chances to buy Pepsi and turned down every oneBetween 1922 and 1933, while Pepsi lurched through bankruptcy and changes of owner, Coca-Cola was offered the company three separate times. It said no each time. Within a few deca…
  36. Will.i.am's band nearly vanished when its first record label collapsedIn 1992 Eazy-E signed a teenage rap duo called Atban Klann to Ruthless Records. They recorded an album, but when Eazy-E died in 1995 it never came out. The group regrouped, rename…
  37. A tax debt pushed Will Smith from rap stardom into actingBy his early twenties Will Smith had a Grammy and a hit rap career, and he spent freely. He also underpaid his taxes. The IRS assessed a 2.8 million dollar debt, seized many of hi…
  38. Bill Anders flew as lunar module pilot on a mission with no lunar moduleApollo 8 was supposed to test the lunar lander close to Earth. The lander arrived with more than a hundred serious defects, so NASA sent the crew around the Moon without it. That …
  39. William Boeing built his first plane because spare parts were months awayA timber baron named William Boeing bought a seaplane from Glenn Martin, and his test pilot soon damaged it. Martin said replacement parts would take months. Boeing told his frien…
  40. Pennsylvania was handed to William Penn to settle a king's debtCharles II owed money to Admiral Sir William Penn. In 1681, rather than pay it, the king granted the admiral's son a vast stretch of North America covering what is now Pennsylvani…
  41. Willie Nelson recorded an album to pay off the taxmanIn 1990 the Internal Revenue Service seized Willie Nelson's assets, claiming he owed 32 million dollars in back taxes, a hole deepened by poor investments in the 1980s. His answer…
  42. Wiz Khalifa paid for studio time as a teenage internAt 15, Cameron Thomaz was recording regularly at a small Pittsburgh studio called I.D. Labs. Its owner, a local hip-hop veteran known as E. Dan, was so impressed that he offered t…
  43. Walter Chrysler made Durant repeat his salary offer out loudIn 1916 Walter Chrysler told General Motors founder William Durant he was quitting Buick. Durant rushed to Flint by train and offered $10,000 a month plus a $500,000 bonus each ye…
  44. Walther Rathenau organised Germany's wartime raw materials, then nationalists killed himWhen the British blockade began choking Germany's supplies in 1914, the industrialist Walther Rathenau persuaded the War Ministry to create a department to manage scarce raw mater…
  45. A wrecked knee at 27 turned Uli Hoeneß into Bayern's business architectWhen Uli Hoeneß took over Bayern Munich's commercial side in May 1979, the club had twelve employees, 12 million marks in revenue and 8 million marks of debt. He had been forced t…
  46. A chemistry lecturer who became Nigeria's president, then set out to fix its electionsUmaru Musa Yar'Adua trained as a chemist and taught in classrooms before entering politics. As governor of Katsina State he became the first Nigerian governor to publicly declare …
  47. Venus Williams was unbeaten in juniors when her father pulled her outAt eleven, Venus Williams had a 63-0 record on the American junior circuit and was the top under-12 player in Southern California. Her father then stopped entering her in junior e…
  48. Victoria Beckham's pop flop cleared the way for her fashion labelVictoria Beckham's first solo album reportedly cost around £5 million to make and sold roughly 50,000 copies. When her next record company went bankrupt in 2004 and two unfinished…
  49. Viktor Zubkov went from collective farms to prime minister and then GazpromIn September 2007 Vladimir Putin surprised Russia by naming a little-known financial crimes investigator, Viktor Zubkov, as prime minister. The Duma confirmed him two days later. …
  50. Admitting wrestling was scripted freed Vince McMahon from sports regulatorsIn February 1989 Vince McMahon told New Jersey lawmakers something wrestling promoters had always denied: the outcomes were predetermined. Fans called it the death of kayfabe, the…
  51. Moldova's former prime minister was handcuffed inside its own parliamentOn October 15, 2015, Moldovan lawmakers stripped Vlad Filat of his immunity and he was led away in handcuffs from the parliament chamber. Two years earlier he had been prime minis…
  52. The Xbox 360 sold out despite starting production 69 days before launchMicrosoft began building the Xbox 360 only 69 days before its November 2005 debut. Stock vanished at once everywhere except Japan, and 40,000 units, a tenth of the supply, turned …
  53. Microsoft built the first Xbox from PC parts and lost billionsBill Gates feared Sony's PlayStation 2 might replace the home computer. His response was the Xbox, a console assembled largely from ordinary PC components, with a built-in hard dr…
  54. How Microsoft's game studio bought Halo, Minecraft and moreHalo was originally planned as a computer game. Then in June 2000 Microsoft bought its developer, Bungie, and turned it into the flagship launch title for the first Xbox. That pur…
  55. The Xbox One reversed so many plans it was nicknamed the Xbox 180Microsoft unveiled the Xbox One in May 2013 and spent over 30 minutes on television features before showing a single game. Worse news followed: plans for daily online check-ins an…
  56. The Xbox Series X was shaped by heat, Tetris-style packing and a fanMicrosoft wanted its 2020 flagship console to have twice the graphics power and four times the processor speed of the Xbox One X while staying just as quiet. The parts would draw …
  57. Windows 10 was called the last Windows, then came Windows 11In 2015 a Microsoft employee told a conference audience that no Windows would follow Windows 10. Six years later Microsoft unveiled Windows 11, ending the longest gap ever between…
  58. Windows 7 won back the users that Vista had driven awayWindows Vista launched to complaints about sluggish performance, hardware that would not work and endless security prompts. Microsoft's answer was not a radical reinvention but a …
  59. Windows XP was born when two failed projects mergedBy early 2000 Microsoft had two operating systems in the works, one for homes and one for offices, and both had grown too ambitious. It scrapped them for a single project called W…
  60. The Houston Comets won the first four WNBA titles in a rowWhen the WNBA tipped off in June 1997, its marketing leaned on Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes. Yet the first real star was Cynthia Cooper of the Houston Comets. With…

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