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Curtiss-Wright formed on July 5, 1929, when the Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor Company of Buffalo and Wright Aeronautical of Dayton consolidated 12 companies with $75 million in capital, becoming the largest aviation company in the United States. Its airplane, engine and propeller divisions carried it through the Depression on military engine contracts, and under president Guy Vaughan the P-36 fighte...

A credit default swap is a contract in which a buyer pays regular premiums, called the spread, to a seller who promises a payout if a reference entity defaults on its debt. The modern version took shape at J.P. Morgan in 1994 under Blythe Masters. Exxon, facing a possible $5 billion in punitive damages over the Exxon Valdez spill, asked for a $4.8 billion credit line, and Basel I rules would have...

Countrywide Financial was founded in 1969 by David S. Loeb and Angelo Mozilo and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1985. Over two decades its stock returned 23,000 percent, and by 2006 it financed 20 percent of all U.S. mortgages, worth about 3.5 percent of U.S. GDP. It originated loans, packaged and traded mortgage-backed securities through its own capital markets arm, ran Countrywide Bank...

Convair, formally Consolidated Vultee Aircraft Corporation, was formed in 1943 when Consolidated Aircraft and Vultee Aircraft merged to meet wartime demand. It ranked fourth among U.S. corporations in wartime production contracts, ahead of Douglas, Boeing and Lockheed. With its contractors it built about 18,500 B-24 Liberators, still the most produced bomber and the most produced American military...

Conrail was the federal answer to the collapse of Northeastern railroading. The 1968 merger of the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central formed Penn Central, which went bankrupt in 1970 amid clashing cultures and lost trains. Hurricane Agnes in 1972 washed out track and pushed lines such as the Erie Lackawanna into ruin, and by late 1973 Penn Central threatened to stop running trains. Pre...

Coinbase began in 2012 when Brian Armstrong, a software engineer at Airbnb, received $150,000 from Y Combinator and recruited former Goldman Sachs trader Fred Ehrsam after spotting him on Reddit. A third founder, British programmer Ben Reeves, split with Armstrong over custody: Reeves wanted users to hold their own keys, while Armstrong wanted Coinbase to hold them like a bank. The company reached...

Charles R. Schwab started in 1963 with partners publishing the Investment Indicator, a newsletter that cost $84 a year and peaked at about 3,000 subscribers. The business incorporated as First Commander Corporation in 1971 and became Charles Schwab & Co. by 1973. On May 1, 1975, the SEC abolished fixed brokerage commissions, and Schwab opened a Sacramento branch as a discount broker. In 1979 h...

Cash App launched in October 2013 as Square Cash, created by Jack Dorsey and Brian Grassadonia at Square, now Block. It did one thing: let people send up to $2,500 a week to each other by email or text using a linked debit card, without routing numbers or three-day holds. In 2015 it opened to businesses and introduced the $cashtag, a public username for receiving money. From 2016 to 2021 it added...

Before 1987, credit card issuers charged nearly every customer the same interest rate and annual fee. Richard Fairbank and Nigel Morris set out to use demographic data and mathematical models to price each customer's risk, and consulted with Oracle on building the data systems before pitching banks, which mostly rejected them. In 1988 Signet Bank of Richmond, Virginia took them in. Their 1991 bala...

When Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld launched the Cable News Network on June 1, 1980, it was the first 24-hour all-news channel in the U.S., and broadcast executives mocked the idea. The first broadcast was anchored by husband and wife David Walker and Lois Hart, and Bernard Shaw was among the first anchors hired. Time Warner acquired CNN in 1996, and as of 2026 it is owned by Skydance. Running aro...

CMA CGM, headquartered in Marseille, is the world's third largest container shipping company, with $55.48 billion in 2024 revenue, 160,000 employees and 593 vessels that call at 420 of the world's 521 commercial ports. One half of its history begins in the 1850s with two state-backed French lines built on government mail contracts, Messageries Maritimes and Compagnie Generale Maritime, merged in t...

A collateralized debt obligation is a special purpose vehicle that buys a pool of loans and sells the cash flows in tranches, from senior AAA slices that are paid first down to an equity tranche that absorbs the first losses. Its roots run to 1970, when Ginnie Mae created the first mortgage-backed security, and to 1977, when Lewis Ranieri and Larry Fink at Salomon Brothers began pooling private mo...

CBS began in Chicago in January 1927, when talent agent Arthur Judson founded United Independent Broadcasters. Short of cash by April, it took an investment from the Columbia Phonograph Company and became the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. In 1928 investors installed William S. Paley as president, and he shortened the name to the Columbia Broadcasting System. Paramount Pictures bought...

The M26 Pershing grew out of T20 series prototypes begun in 1942 to fix the Sherman's tall layout, which came from a radial aircraft engine in the rear driving a front sprocket through a shaft under the turret. Engineers adopted the Ford GAN V8, cut down from a failed V12 aircraft engine, and moved the transmission to the rear. A General Electric diesel-electric version, the T23, ran to more than...

The Chieftain was Britain's main battle tank from the 1960s into the 1990s, built to replace both the Centurion and the heavy Conqueror after the Soviet IS-3 and T-54 showed that Centurions could not reliably penetrate new Soviet armor. Designers angled a 195 mm glacis plate at 72 degrees for an effective thickness of about 388 mm, laid the driver in a reclining position to lower the hull, and cas...

In late 1996 former Navy SEAL Erik Prince and co-founder Al Clark started Blackwater, inspired by the way FedEx had disrupted the postal service. Prince bought about 7,000 acres in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, enough to keep stray bullets on the property, and named the company for the peat-colored water. The $6.5 million training facility opened in 1998 with artificial lakes, driving...

Blackstone began in 1985 when Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman left Lehman Brothers with $400,000 in seed capital. The name is a bilingual pun: schwarz is German for black, and petros is Greek for stone. The firm started in mergers and acquisitions advisory, working on the 1987 merger of E.F. Hutton and Shearson Lehman, then pivoted after the Black Monday crash of October 1987 to raising priv...

BlackRock manages $15.3 trillion as of 2026, and its story begins with a loss. In the 1980s Larry Fink ran the fixed income division at First Boston and helped pioneer the mortgage-backed security, until falling interest rates in 1986 set off a wave of refinancing his models had not accounted for and his desk lost $90 million. Pushed out, Fink built a firm around enterprise risk management. In 198...

In 1992 Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts bought the Dunes Hotel for about $75 million, demolished it along with a corner Denny's, and cleared a 77-acre site on the Las Vegas Strip. The 1994 plan was a French-themed resort called Beau Rivage around a 50-acre lake. After 10 months of design work, designer Jon Jerde visited Lake Como, Wynn followed, and on a boat ride with Paul Anka he saw the village of...

Lawrence Dale Bell founded Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York in July 1935, building the XFM-1 Airacuda, the P-39 Airacobra, the P-59 Airacomet, America's first jet fighter, and the X-1 that Chuck Yeager flew past the sound barrier. To escape the feast or famine cycle of military contracts, Bell in 1941 hired inventor Arthur M. Young, who had built tethered helicopter models in a Penns...

BAE Systems descends from A.V. Roe, de Havilland, Supermarine, maker of the Spitfire, and Vickers, which built the Royal Navy's first submarines. After the Cold War, US mergers such as Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in 1997 left European firms outmatched, and British Aerospace held talks with Germany's DASA. In November 1999 it walked away and instead bought Marconi Electronic Systems, GEC's defense...

Arm was founded in 1990 as a joint venture of Acorn Computers, VLSI Technology and Apple. Apple needed a low-power processor for its Newton handheld and invested $3 million, with executive Larry Tesler helping recruit CEO Robin Saxby. Acorn contributed 12 engineers and its Acorn RISC Machine design, and VLSI supplied chip design tools. Apple refused to have a competitor's name on its processor, so...

Work on Apple Pay began in January 2013, when Apple brought Visa, Mastercard and American Express into a joint effort under heavy secrecy. JPMorgan set up a windowless war room where only about 100 of 300 staff knew the partner was Apple, and Visa had 750 people working on anonymized tokens for a year. Tim Cook unveiled Apple Pay on September 9, 2014 at the iPhone 6 event, calling the magnetic str...

Apollo Global Management was founded in 1990 after the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert by Drexel's former head of mergers and acquisitions, Leon Black, with Josh Harris, Marc Rowan and Tony Ressler. With buyout financing frozen, they raised about $400 million and pioneered a distressed-to-control strategy: buying the cheap debt of struggling companies and converting it into controlling equity d...

Allstate began as a name for Sears car tires. A 1925 contest drew over 2.2 million entries from nearly a million people, and Hans Simonsen of Bismarck, North Dakota won $5,000 for suggesting Allstate, which appeared on tires in 1927. In 1931 insurance broker Carl L. Odell pitched his neighbor, Sears executive Robert E. Wood, on selling auto insurance by mail, and Allstate Insurance Company opened...