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Alipay began in 2004 as a payment tool for Taobao, the e-commerce site Jack Ma's Alibaba Group launched while fighting eBay for the Chinese market. Without widespread credit card protections, buyers did not trust strangers online, so Alipay held each payment in escrow until the buyer confirmed receipt, a step that helped Taobao outcompete eBay in China. When the People's Bank of China issued payme...

Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, but its tight bond with oxygen in bauxite resisted fire smelting, and in the 19th century Napoleon III served honored guests with aluminum utensils while others got gold. In 1886 Oberlin College graduate Charles Martin Hall, and independently Frenchman Paul Héroult, found that running electric current through alumina dissolved in molten cryolit...

Affirm was founded in 2012 out of the HVF startup studio, led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who became CEO, with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz and Alex Rampel. Its premise was an anti-credit card: unsecured installment loans at checkout with no late fees and no compound interest, so the interest agreed at purchase is the most a customer will owe. To make that work, Affirm used machine learni...

ASML was born in 1984 when Philips, under financial pressure, spun its lithography research into a joint venture with ASM International called Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography. Its first product, the PAS 2000, used oil pressure to move wafers and leaked hydraulic fluid, a serious flaw in clean rooms engineered to hold fewer than 10 particles per cubic meter. Without the money of vertic...

Advanced Micro Devices was founded in 1969 when marketing executive Jerry Sanders and colleagues left Fairchild Semiconductor and rented a Sunnyvale headquarters. AMD began as a second-source supplier, building chips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and set itself apart by guaranteeing every chip met US Military Standard 883. Profits funded its own designs, including a 1970 logic...

American International Group began on December 19, 1919, when American Cornelius Vander Starr opened American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai. By the late 1920s it had branches across the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and as war loomed in Asia Starr moved into Latin America, opening offices in places like Havana. He moved headquarters to New York in 1939, insured American militar...

An automated clearing house, or ACH, is a computer-based electronic network that processes domestic, low-value payments between participating financial institutions. It replaced a paper system that by the 1960s moved millions of checks a day by armored car, with bank staff sorting paper late into the night. The first ACH was BACS in the United Kingdom, which began processing payments in April 1968...

In 1880 mining entrepreneur and future US senator George Hearst bought the San Francisco Daily Examiner, and in 1887 he handed it to his 23-year-old son, William Randolph Hearst. The younger Hearst became editor and publisher and championed yellow journalism: giant headlines, sensational scandals, exaggerated crime stories and lavish illustrations. He bought papers in Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Los...

General Dynamics traces its lineage to 1899, when businessman Isaac Leopold Rice bought John Philip Holland's struggling torpedo boat company and renamed it the Electric Boat Company. Its first sale, the USS Holland of 1900, cost about $150,000 and became the US Navy's first submarine. Electric Boat built 85 submarines in World War I and 74 submarines plus 398 PT boats in World War II, growing to...

GEICO, the Government Employees Insurance Company, has never been a government agency. Leo Goodwin Sr. had worked at USAA since 1925 but hit a ceiling as a civilian, so in 1936 in San Antonio he and his wife Lillian put up $25,000 and Fort Worth banker Cleaves Rhea added $75,000. They sold auto insurance by mail directly to federal employees, a stable, low-risk group, cutting out agent commissions...

Block began with a lost sale in 2009, when St. Louis glass artist Jim McKelvey could not take a credit card for a $2,000 set of glass faucets. He and Jack Dorsey, then also building Twitter, created Square, a small reader that plugged into a phone's headphone jack. The real innovation was the software behind it: Square acted as merchant of record, absorbing risk, compliance and fraud detection so...

Hughes Aircraft Company was founded in 1934 in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company so Howard Hughes could build his H-1 racer and set speed records. In World War II it grew from four full-time employees to 80,000 in Culver City, making B-25 struts and machine gun feed chutes, but Hughes's own prototypes, the D-2, the XF-11 and the H-4 Hercules mocked as the Spruce Goose,...

This episode starts from an unusual source: a Wikipedia disambiguation page for the name Admiral Kuznetsov, a short list of four links. The first is the man behind the name, Nikolai Kuznetsov, a military officer who lived from 1904 to 1974 and rose to Commander in Chief of the Soviet Navy. His lifespan covered a shift from coal-fired engines and early dreadnoughts to nuclear submarines, ballistic...

J. Willard Marriott first felt Washington, D.C.'s summer heat while serving a mission for the LDS Church in the 1920s. After earning his degree at the University of Utah, he returned in 1927 and bought the franchise rights to an A&W root beer stand in Columbia Heights, run with his wife Alice and a business partner. Winter killed root beer sales, so they added hot food and renamed it the Hot S...

In 1542 Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo sailed into a shallow inlet in Southern California and named it the Bay of Smokes. San Pedro Bay was a soft mudflat, and in 1834 Richard Henry Dana Jr. described ships anchoring miles out or running aground on purpose. Phineas Banning built the area's first railroad to Los Angeles in 1868 and in 1871 dredged a 10-foot channel to Wilmington. In the 1890s Free Harbor...

In 1929, when Keystone Aircraft bought Loening Aircraft and moved operations to Bristol, Pennsylvania, Leroy Grumman and colleagues including William Schwendler stayed in New York and started their own company. In January 1930 they opened in an abandoned factory in Baldwin, Long Island, welding aluminum tubing to repair truck frames while pitching designs to the Navy. Their retractable landing gea...

The Carlyle Group was founded in 1987 by five partners including David Rubenstein, William E. Conway Jr. and Daniel A. D'Aniello, named for the Carlyle Hotel in New York but run from Washington, D.C., with $5 million from backers such as T. Rowe Price and the Richard King Mellon family. Rubenstein, a former Carter administration lawyer, understood federal procurement, and the firm bought defense b...

RTX began in 1922 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Vannevar Bush, Laurence K. Marshall and Charles G. Smith founded the American Appliance Company. Smith's study of the star Zeta Puppis led to a gaseous helium rectifier that let radios run from wall current instead of leaky acid batteries. The tube was called the Raytheon, and in 1925 the business became the Raytheon Manufacturing Company. In Wor...

Nvidia was sketched out in late 1992 in a Denny's on Berryessa Road in East San Jose by Jensen Huang, a director at LSI Logic who had designed microprocessors at AMD, and two frustrated Sun Microsystems engineers, Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem. Their spouses wanted all three to commit, so Priem resigned on New Year's Eve 1992 and Huang quit on February 17, 1993, his 30th birthday. They starte...

Northrop Grumman is the fifth largest contractor to the U.S. federal government, which supplied 87 percent of its 2024 revenue. It joins two very different companies. Grumman, founded in New York in 1929 by Leroy Grumman, built rugged Navy fighters such as the Wildcat, Hellcat and Avenger, later the F-14 Tomcat and the Apollo lunar module, and made aluminum canoes after World War II. Northrop, fou...

Liaoning, China's southernmost northeastern province, wraps around the Yellow and Bohai Seas and borders North Korea across the Yalu River. Its name means the pacified Liao River, though the fertile Liao basin was fought over from the fourth century BC onward. In the 1440s the Ming built the Liaodong Wall, mostly dirt dikes and moats meant to stop cavalry rather than withstand sieges. The Jurchens...

Walt Disney World began as a fix for Disneyland's limits. Seventy-five percent of Americans lived east of the Mississippi, yet only 5 percent of Disneyland's guests came from there, and cheap motels and neon signs crowded the Anaheim park's edges. In 1963 the company chose Orlando, near the planned Interstate 4, and from 1964 bought land through shell companies such as the M.T. Lot Company and the...

Discover was born inside Sears, Roebuck and Company. In 1981 Sears bought the brokerage Dean Witter Reynolds and the real estate firm Coldwell Banker, aiming to become a one-stop financial supermarket, and in 1985 it quietly acquired the Greenwood Trust Company, a small bank founded in Greenwood, Delaware, in 1911, whose charter became the legal vehicle for the Discover card. Customers did not wan...

Broadcom Inc. traces its roots to 1961, when it began as HP Associates, a semiconductor division inside Hewlett-Packard making LED displays and optical sensors. The unit went with Agilent Technologies in HP's 1999 spinoff, and in 2005 KKR and Silver Lake Partners bought it for $2.6 billion and renamed it Avago Technologies. Avago went public in 2009, bought LSI Corporation for $6.6 billion in 2013...

The FV4034 Challenger 2, a 64-ton British main battle tank, grew out of embarrassment. In 1987 the Challenger 1 finished dead last at the Canadian Army Trophy, NATO's most prestigious tank gunnery competition, and the UK studied buying the American M1 Abrams or the German Leopard 2 instead. To keep a domestic tank industry alive, the Thatcher government gave Vickers a £90 million development contr...