pplpod

MTV went on the air on August 1, 1981, cutting from Apollo 11 moon landing footage to a mutating spray-painted logo and The Buggles singing "Video Killed the Radio Star." Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment hired the collective Manhattan Design, which built a heavy block letter M with graffiti TV letters and refused to fix any brand colors. To pressure cable operators into carrying the channel, ad...

MGM Resorts traces back to a regret. In 1970 Kirk Kerkorian, who had just bought the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio and an airline, was forced by debt to sell much of his first big casino to Hilton at a discount, and it became the Las Vegas Hilton, the city's most profitable hotel. Kerkorian used the studio's name to open the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas in 1973 and another in Reno in 1978; by 19...

Allan Loughead and his brother Malcolm founded the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company in 1912, flying sightseeing passengers in wooden seaplanes in California. After World War I the military dumped thousands of surplus planes for pennies, demand for new aircraft vanished, and by 1920 Allan was selling real estate and Malcolm hydraulic brakes. In 1926 they restarted with partners including Jac...

Klarna started in 2005 as Kreditor, founded by Stockholm School of Economics students Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson in the school's incubator. Online shoppers then distrusted handing card numbers to unknown sites, and merchants feared stolen cards, so Kreditor let buyers receive goods first and pay later by invoice while it took on the fraud and credit risk. Angel...

KKR began at Bear Stearns in the 1960s and 1970s, where senior corporate finance banker Jerome Kohlberg Jr. and his younger colleagues, cousins Henry Kravis and George Roberts, saw that postwar family businesses had founders nearing retirement, no successors, no path to an IPO and no wish to sell to rivals. Their answer was the bootstrap investment, now called the leveraged buyout: put down perhap...

Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook, a former Procter & Gamble product analyst, and Tom Proulx, a Stanford programmer who coded the first Quicken in Microsoft BASIC for the IBM PC and UCSD Pascal for the Apple II. When Microsoft launched Microsoft Money in 1991, Cook used a packaged-goods tactic: a $15 rebate that brought shoppers into stores like Egghead and CompUSA and won Quicken front...

Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, in 1968 by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, two of the Traitorous Eight who had left Fairchild Semiconductor, with investor Arthur Rock. They passed on the name Moore Noyce, which sounded like more noise, chose Integrated Electronics, and bought the Intel trademark from a hotel chain. Their target was memory: in 1970 the 1103 DRA...

The Intel 4004 began in April 1969, when Japanese calculator maker Busicom asked Intel, then a small memory-chip startup, to build chips for a programmable desktop calculator to compete with the Olivetti Programma 101, which stored data as acoustic pulses in magnetostriction wire. Busicom's engineers wanted seven custom chips. Marcian Ted Hoff, Intel employee number 12, saw that Intel lacked the s...

Igor Sikorsky was born in Kiev in the Russian Empire, where he designed aircraft from the S-1 through the S-27 before the Russian Revolution drove him to the United States. On March 5, 1923 he founded the Sikorsky Aero Engineering Corporation near Roosevelt Field in New York. His projected S-28, a four-engine, 32-passenger biplane, never left the drawing board, so his first American aircraft was t...

Micron Technology started in Boise, Idaho, in 1978, founded by Ward Parkinson, Joe Parkinson, Dennis Wilson and Doug Pitman as a semiconductor design consultancy. In 1981 they decided to make chips themselves, building a plant called Fab One to produce 64K DRAM, the short-term working memory of a computer. Because a fab needs clean rooms, atomic-scale machinery and vibration-proof buildings, the m...

Hilton began in 1919 when Conrad Hilton bought the 40-room Mobley Hotel in Cisco, Texas, to house workers in the oil boom. He bought more Texas hotels, opened a Waco property in 1927 with air-conditioned public areas and cold running water, and in 1943 took over the Roosevelt and bought the Plaza in Manhattan, making Hilton the first hospitality company to span the contiguous U.S. The Roosevelt be...

Hasbro began in late 1923 in Providence, Rhode Island, when brothers Herman, Hillel and Henry Hassenfeld, Polish Jewish immigrants from Ulanów, founded Hassenfeld Brothers to sell textile remnants. They used the scraps to line pencil cases, and when their pencil supplier started competing with them, they began making pencils themselves. During World War II they rescued Jewish refugees from their h...

Hapag-Lloyd grew from two bitter German rivals: HAPAG, the Hamburg-America Line founded in Hamburg in 1847, and Norddeutscher Lloyd, founded in Bremen in 1857. HAPAG went for scale and luxury, starting the Imperator, Vaterland and Bismarck in 1912, the first liners above 50,000 gross register tons, a measure of enclosed volume rather than weight. NDL chased volume and speed, carrying about 218,000...

HMS Dreadnought, launched in 1906, made every other battleship obsolete. Pre-dreadnoughts carried mixed batteries, but as torpedoes pushed engagements out to 6,000 yards, gunners could not tell the splashes of heavy shells from those of the smaller guns. British observers including Captain William Pakenham saw in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905 that 12-inch guns did the decisive damage at...

In the summer of 1971, cable executive Charles Dolan was aboard the Queen Elizabeth II on a family vacation, trying to save his money-losing company. Sterling Manhattan Cable was building the first urban underground cable system in the U.S., trenching wire past water mains, subway lines and gas pipes beneath New York. His idea, first called the Green Channel, was unedited Hollywood movies and live...

George Lucas founded Lucasfilm in December 1971 in Marin County, Northern California, deliberately far from the Los Angeles studio system. After THX 1138 and the 1973 hit American Graffiti, Universal rejected his space fantasy script, but 20th Century Fox took Star Wars. In 1977 he set up a subsidiary, the Star Wars Corporation, to hold the copyrights, sequel rights and merchandising rights, accep...

The company most recently known as WarnerMedia began far from Hollywood. In the 1960s Kinney National Services ran parking lots, office cleaning and funeral homes, a conglomerate built on countercyclical cash flow. Steve Ross used that money to buy the struggling Warner Bros.-Seven Arts studio in 1969, and by 1972 the company spun off its service businesses and renamed itself Warner Communications...

The Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation, Freddie Mac, was created by the Emergency Home Finance Act of 1970 to compete with Fannie Mae, which had been privatized in 1968 and was the only big buyer of mortgages. Freddie Mac does not lend to homebuyers. It buys loans from banks, bundles them into mortgage-backed securities for global investors and charges a guarantee fee to promise timely payment...

John C. Bogle's 1951 Princeton thesis found that mutual fund managers rarely beat market indexes over time and that fees ate any edge. He joined Wellington Management that year, became president in 1967 and CEO in 1970, but a 1966 merger with a Boston fund group went badly and he was fired in 1974, later calling his conduct inexcusable. He negotiated a separate administrative unit named Vanguard a...

Fidelity Investments is privately owned: parent FMR LLC is about 40 percent held by CEO Abigail Johnson and her family and 60 percent by current and former employees. In mid-2026 it had $7.8 trillion in assets under management and $19.9 trillion under administration, and 2025 revenue reached $37.7 billion with 80,000 employees and retirement plans for over 28,800 businesses. Founded in 1930 as the...

In 1955 physicist William Shockley founded Shockley Semiconductor in Mountain View, California, to build a hard-to-manufacture four-layer diode. His erratic management drove eight researchers, including Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Jean Hoerni, to leave. Noyce pitched Sherman Fairchild of Fairchild Camera and Instrument on silicon over germanium, and in 1957 Fairchild Semiconductor was born in a...

Experian is an Irish multinational credit bureau and data broker based in Dublin and listed in the FTSE 100, with almost $8.5 billion in fiscal 2026 revenue and nearly 22,000 employees. It traces to Credit Data Corporation, bought in 1968 by aerospace and automotive firm TRW. In November 1996 TRW sold the unit to Bain Capital and Thomas H. Lee Partners, who sold it a month later to Great Universal...

Evergreen Marine Corporation was founded in Taiwan on September 1, 1968, by Chang Yung-fa with a single cargo ship, the Central Trust, offering a go-anywhere service. A second ship joined in 1969 for Middle East routes, and a U.S. office opened in 1974. The parent rebranded as Evergreen International SA in 1981, and in 1984 the company launched a round-the-world service in both directions. Acquisi...

Equifax began in Atlanta in 1899 as the Retail Credit Company, founded by brothers Cator and Guy Woolford to provide risk reports for insurers and employers. By the 1960s its local inspectors were interviewing landlords, grocers and employers and filing rumors about people's marriages, sex lives and politics, with negative findings rewarded. When the files were computerized around 1970, public out...

In 1994 Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen founded DreamWorks SKG, the first new major Hollywood studio since 1928. Their pact promised fewer than nine films a year, freedom to work elsewhere and being home for dinner. Each put in $33 million, Paul Allen added $500 million and Miky Lee of South Korea's CJ Group $300 million. Based on the Universal lot, they launched television w...