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Alex Mashinsky founded Celsius Network in 2017 with Daniel Leon and Nuke Goldstein, pitching it as a populist alternative to legacy banks: deposit Bitcoin or Ethereum and earn interest. A March 2018 coin offering raised $50 million through the company's CEL token, investors valued Celsius at $3 billion by late 2021, and by May 2022 it held almost $12 billion in assets for 1.7 million users. Yields...

For most of the 20th century the Bell System was the American telephone network, from the research labs to the phone you were required to rent. In 1899 its Boston parent, American Bell, was absorbed by its own New York long distance subsidiary, AT&T, to take advantage of friendlier corporate and tax law. When the founding patent expired in 1894, roughly 6,000 independent phone companies sprang...

The word stagflation was popularized by British Conservative politician Iain Macleod in a 1965 speech to the House of Commons warning of rising prices and slowing growth together. Postwar Keynesian policy relied on the Phillips curve, a trade-off in which lower unemployment meant higher inflation, so governments believed they could steer between the two. The 1970s broke that model. Egypt's Gamal A...

Redlining was the systemic withholding of home loans and insurance from certain neighborhoods. Economists such as Richard T. Ely theorized about race and property values in the 1920s, and the 1934 National Housing Act created the Federal Housing Administration, whose chief land economist Homer Hoyt wrote the first underwriting criteria. From 1935 the Home Owners' Loan Corporation drew residential...

Henry Clay Frick was born in 1849 in western Pennsylvania, grandson of Old Overholt whiskey founder Abraham Overholt and son of a father with a string of failed businesses. He left Otterbein College after about a year and vowed at 21 to be a millionaire by 30. In 1871 he formed the Frick Coke Company to make coke, the purified fuel steel mills need, with loans from the family of Andrew Mellon. By...

In 1967 a 28-year-old designer was working for the tie maker Beau Brummell, selling wide neckties out of a single drawer in a showroom in the Empire State Building and delivering them to stores himself. He persuaded the company's president to let him launch his own menswear line, named it Polo in 1968, and in 1969 won an exclusive deal with Bloomingdale's in Manhattan, which gave him his own in-st...

The Cayman Islands are the coral-capped peaks of the submerged Cayman Ridge, beside the Cayman Trough, which drops to about 20,000 feet. The highest point, The Bluff on Cayman Brac, is 43 meters above sea level. Columbus named them Las Tortugas in 1503 for their sea turtles, which sailors later hunted to near extinction, and the name that stuck comes from the crocodiles in the mangroves. With no r...

In 1948 Glen Bell was running Bell's Drive-In, a hot dog stand in San Bernardino, California, while lines wrapped around the Mitla Cafe across the street for its dorado tacos, corn tortillas folded around meat and fried whole. After struggling to copy them, he was invited into the cafe's kitchen and taught the technique by its head chef, and the Mitla Cafe still operates today. From 1951 he tested...

Thierry Hermès, born in 1801 in Krefeld to a French father and German mother, trained as a saddler and harness maker in Pont-Audemer and opened a Paris workshop near La Madeleine in 1837. He made carriage harnesses, not fashion, using the saddle stitch, in which two needles cross a single linen thread through each hole so the seam holds even if one stitch breaks. His harnesses won a first-class me...

In 1938, under Japanese rule, Lee Byung-chul opened Samsung Sanghoe in Daegu with 40 employees, trading dried fish and noodles. The name means three stars, chosen to signal something big and eternal. The Korean War wiped out his Seoul business, and he rebuilt with a sugar refinery in Busan and, by 1954, the country's largest woolen mill, helped by state-backed loans to favored industrialists. In 1...

In October 2007 San Francisco roommates Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia could not make rent while a design conference had filled every hotel, so they rented air mattresses on their living room floor and served breakfast. In 2008 they added former roommate Nathan Blecharczyk as CTO and launched Airbed and Breakfast that August. With no investors interested, they sold Obama O's and Cap'n McCain's cereal...

The Ford Motor Company was Henry Ford's third try. His first venture failed, and its leftover equipment became the Cadillac Motor Company. In June 1903 Ford launched with $28,000 from 12 investors, including John and Horace Dodge, and the investors installed Detroit banker John S. Gray as president. In 1913 the Highland Park plant's moving assembly line broke the Model T into 84 steps and cut buil...

Hui Ka Yan, also known as Xu Jiayin, founded the Hengda Group in Guangzhou in 1996, the company that became China Evergrande Group. Riding the mass migration from countryside to cities, he sold upgraded apartments to upper and middle income buyers. Evergrande's October 2009 Hong Kong IPO raised $722 million and the shares jumped 34 percent on debut. He then spread into unrelated businesses: the Gu...

Tesla was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. In February 2004 Elon Musk, fresh from about $176 million in PayPal proceeds, put in $6.5 million to lead the Series A and became chairman and largest shareholder. He led the Series B and co-led a $40 million Series C that brought in Larry Page and Sergey Brin. In 2007 the board ousted Eberhard, and in October 2008 Musk became...

Yang Guoqiang hauled bricks and farmed barefoot before founding Country Garden in 1992 in Shunde, Guangdong. He treated property like manufacturing under the "456" model: launch a project four months after buying land, collect buyers' payments within five, break even within six. The company targeted tier three and four cities, pre-sold flats before the concrete was poured and used that cash to buy...

In 1909 Gabrielle "Coco" Chanel was selling simple hats from the Paris apartment of the textile heir Etienne Balsan, testing her designs on the women in his social circle. In 1910 the English polo player Arthur "Boy" Capel funded her shop at 31 Rue Cambon, though its lease barred her from selling clothes. The First World War gave her an opening: with silk scarce and women working, she made fluid g...

Hudson Yards, on Manhattan's far West Side between 30th and 41st Streets, is described as the largest private real estate development in United States history. For decades the area defeated planners: William Zeckendorf's 1950s expansion, a U.S. Steel housing scheme, Mayor Robert F. Wagner's 1963 plan and a young Donald Trump's convention center pitch for the Penn Central yard all failed, and the J...

Abercrombie & Fitch was founded in Manhattan in 1892 by David T. Abercrombie and Ezra Fitch as an elite outfitter for explorers and the wealthy. It supplied Theodore Roosevelt's safaris and Admiral Richard E. Byrd's Antarctic expedition, and it sold Ernest Hemingway the shotgun he used to end his life. As cheaper outdoor competitors appeared, the company clung to its upper crust image, stockin...

On March 25, 1900, British governor Frederick Hodgson stood before Asante leaders in Kumasi and demanded the Golden Stool so he could sit on it. The British had occupied Asante since 1896 and exiled King Prempeh I, and Hodgson also claimed debts dating from the 1874 war. To the Asante, the stool, said to have descended from the sky in the late 17th century, held the sunsum, the soul of the nation'...

The idea of honoring an unidentified fighter predates the First World War. After the defense of Jinju during the 1592 Japanese invasion of Korea, locals built a shrine to all who died on the walls, soldiers and civilians alike, and rites were held every spring and autumn from 1593 until a Japanese edict ended them in 1908. In 1849, after the First Schleswig War, Fredericia in Denmark raised what i...

By April 1746, Charles Edward Stuart's Jacobite army, back from Derby and based around Inverness, was cut off by a Royal Navy blockade, unpaid and starving. Adjutant General John O'Sullivan chose flat, boggy Drummossie Moor to cover the Inverness road, overruling Lord George Murray. On the night of April 15, the Duke of Cumberland's 25th birthday, when each government regiment was issued two gallo...

In January 1879, British High Commissioner Sir Henry Bartle Frere, acting without London's approval, sent King Cetshwayo an ultimatum to disband the Zulu military system, knowing it would be refused. Lord Chelmsford invaded with Martini-Henry rifles, seven-pounder guns and rockets, crawling about 10 miles in 10 days behind wagons loaded with officers' luxuries. He timed the invasion for the harves...

Digging in is far older than 1914: Julius Caesar described flooded trenches at Alesia, and Thucydides recorded trench building in the fifth century BC. In the 17th century the French engineer Vauban turned siege trenches into a system of parallels linked by zigzag saps that blocked enfilade fire. Rifled muskets and better artillery at Vicksburg and Petersburg made trenches a defensive necessity, y...

Publius Cornelius Scipio, born around 236 BC into the Cornelii Scipiones, reportedly saved his consul father at the Ticinus at 18, then survived Cannae in 216 BC and rallied survivors at Canusium. Livy claims he forced nobles planning to flee Italy to swear at sword point never to abandon Rome. Elected curule aedile at 24, well under the usual age, he was given proconsular command in Spain in 210...

Centurions wore their helmet crests turned sideways so their own men could find them in the chaos of battle, making themselves deliberate targets. Despite the name, a centuria rarely held 100 men: early Republican units ran 30 to 60, and after the Marian reforms a standard century held about 80, with six per cohort and ten cohorts per legion. That gave each legion 60 centurions in a strict ladder,...