pplpod

MySpace began in August 2003 as a pragmatic copy of Friendster, built in just 10 days by employees of an internet marketing company called eUniverse. Written in ColdFusion instead of Java, it could add features at a blistering pace, and a mailing list of 20 million subscribers solved the empty room problem overnight. Its real hook was freedom: users could edit their pages with raw HTML, and teenag...

In late 1967 the New York Stock Exchange had 1,365 members, and exactly one of them was a woman. Muriel Siebert, known as Mickey, was born in Cleveland, Ohio in September 1928 and left Western Reserve University without a degree to care for her ill father. She moved to New York, learned the market from the ground up as an analyst of aviation and aerospace stocks, and founded Muriel Siebert and Com...

A drop-proof phone case can make you more careless with your phone, and that small shift in behavior is the seed of one of the most debated ideas in economics. Moral hazard arises when someone takes on more risk because another party will bear the cost. This episode traces the term from 17th century insurance ledgers, where it meant outright fraud by a policyholder of bad character, to the 1960s,...

In May 1984 a CBS control room descended into panic as a man in a thrift store shirt drained Press Your Luck of more than $100,000 without breaking a rule. This episode tells the story of Michael Larson, born in 1949 in Lebanon, Ohio, an air conditioning repairman and ice cream truck driver who spent his days watching a wall of 12 televisions for ways to get rich. Recording the show on a VCR and s...

In 1987 an advertising executive named Bob Bernstein was handed a solid gold replica of a cardboard box. The reason says everything about the Happy Meal: its real value was never the food. This episode begins in Guatemala in the mid 1970s, where franchise operator Yolanda Fernández de Cofiño bundled a hamburger, small fries, and a small sundae into the Menu Ronald to spare parents the chaos of fee...

In the early 1960s a mathematician sat at Nevada blackjack tables in wraparound sunglasses and a fake beard, quietly proving that the house could be beaten. This episode follows Edward O. Thorp from a tinkering childhood, when he became a certified ham radio operator at 12, through a physics degree and a 1958 PhD in mathematics at UCLA. As a professor he taught himself Fortran to run blackjack sim...

In 53 BC, at a royal wedding feast in Armenia, an actor performing the Bacchae carried onto the stage the real severed head of Marcus Licinius Crassus, until recently the richest man in Rome. This episode traces how he got there. As a young noble he saw his father and brother destroyed in the purges of Gaius Marius, fled to Spain, raised a private force of about 2,500 men, and joined Sulla. At the...

In 1958 Bank of America mailed 60,000 active, unrequested credit cards to residents of Fresno, California. The gamble caused financial chaos and created the modern credit card. This episode starts earlier, with metal charge coins on key rings, the Charga-Plate of 1928, the airlines' Air Travel Card, and the Diners Club card of 1950, which still had to be paid in full each month. What blocked a uni...

In August 1929, brokers had lent investors more than $8.5 billion to buy stocks, a sum greater than all the physical currency circulating in the United States. This episode examines the machinery behind the Wall Street crash rather than just its timeline. Beneath the boom of the 1920s, farmers were drowning in surpluses, factory wages had stagnated, and warehouses were filling with unsold goods. Y...

Rich as Croesus is a phrase that has outlived its subject by more than two thousand years, yet the real king destroyed his own empire by misreading an oracle. This episode reconstructs the life of the last king of Lydia, born around 620 BC in what is now Turkey. He won the throne from his half-brother Pantaleon in a bitter succession fight, forced his own nephew out of Ephesus, and conquered the w...

Kickstarter turned ordinary fans into venture capitalists who want a fantasy novel or a board game instead of equity. Launched in April 2009 by Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, and Charles Adler, the site rested on a simple psychological device, the assurance contract: a creator sets a goal and a deadline, and if pledges fall even a dollar short, nobody is charged. This episode explains how that all...

It began with a message from a source known only as John Doe: my life is in danger. Attached were 2.6 terabytes of data, 11.5 million documents from the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca, some dating back to the 1970s. This episode follows how Bastian Obermayer of the Süddeutsche Zeitung brought in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and how 107 media organizations in 80 c...

In the 1830s roughly one of every hundred dollars in the United States belonged to John Jacob Astor. This episode traces how a butcher's son born in Waldorf, Germany in 1763 became America's first multimillionaire. At 16 he left for London and his uncle's musical instrument business, where he absorbed the workings of global trade. On the voyage to Baltimore he spent weeks talking with a fur trader...

John C. Bogle built a firm that handles trillions of dollars and died in 2019 with about $80 million, a rounding error by the standards of finance. That gap was by design. This episode follows Bogle from a family ruined by the 1929 crash, through work scholarships at Blair Academy and a 130 page Princeton thesis on mutual funds that got him hired at the Wellington Fund. He rose to chairman by 1970...

Jim Simons refused to wear socks, chain-smoked through meetings, and answered questions about publicity by quoting Benjamin the donkey from Animal Farm. He also died in May 2024 with a fortune of more than $31 billion. This episode maps the logic of his life: a bachelor's degree from MIT in three years, a PhD from Berkeley at 23, a motor scooter ride from Boston to Bogota, and work in geometry and...

While fortunes evaporated in October 1929, Jesse Livermore walked away with roughly $100 million. This episode follows the man often credited with inventing day trading, from a poor Massachusetts farm, where he was born in 1877, to a Boston brokerage where he chalked up stock prices for $5 a week. Watching the numbers all day, he began to see patterns, and at 15 he tested them in the bucket shops,...

Jay Gould arrived at a rural school with 50 cents and a sack of clothes. He died with a $72 million fortune, a private steam yacht, and armed guards patrolling his estate around the clock. This episode follows the dairy farmer's son from Roxbury, New York, who taught himself surveying and mathematics, then learned in the Panic of 1857 that a crash is a clearance sale for anyone willing to be unsen...

At the 1989 peak of Japan's asset price bubble, the grounds of the Tokyo Imperial Palace were estimated to be worth more than all the real estate in California. This episode follows the chain of unintended consequences that led there, beginning with the 1985 Plaza Accord. The deal to weaken the dollar sent the yen from about 238 to 165 per dollar in a year, made Japanese exports painfully expensiv...

In January 1872, tens of thousands of working-class New Yorkers wept in the streets for James Fisk Jr., a man who had bribed judges, manipulated a president, and helped crash the gold market. This episode traces how a boy born in Vermont in 1835 ran away to join a circus, learned how to sell a spectacle, and carried that showmanship into peddling dry goods, Civil War army contracts, cotton smuggli...

Jakob Fugger, born in Augsburg in 1459, amassed a fortune equal to about 2 percent of the European economy. This episode traces how he did it. Sent to Venice at 14, he learned double entry bookkeeping and the mechanics of metal trading at the headquarters of the German merchants. Back north, he lent to silver mine owners in exchange for shares rather than interest, which gave him the metal itself....

In October 1907, Otto Heinze tried to corner the stock of United Copper and failed within hours. Because his family was tied to several banks, the collapse set off runs that reached the Knickerbocker Trust Company, the third largest trust in New York, which lost roughly 8 million dollars in under three hours and suspended operations on October 22. This episode explains why trust companies were so...

Ivan Boesky told graduating business students at UC Berkeley that the desire for wealth was healthy. Months later he was on the cover of Time under the headline Ivan the Terrible, headed for federal prison. This episode follows the Detroit deli owner's son who earned a law degree without finishing college, married Seema Silverstein, the daughter of a wealthy real estate magnate, and used 700,000 d...

Ida Tarbell grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s, surrounded by gushing wells, deadly explosions, and the wreckage left by the South Improvement Company, a secret alliance of railroads and oil interests that crushed independent refiners like her father in 1872. This episode follows how that childhood, a biology education at Allegheny College, and archival training in Paris produced...

Johann August Sutter was a failed Swiss shopkeeper facing debtor's prison when he abandoned his wife and five children in 1834 and sailed for New York. By the time he reached America he was calling himself Captain John Augustus Sutter and claiming a military past he never had. This episode follows his roundabout journey through Oregon, Hawaii, and Russian Alaska to Mexican California, where he tal...

On the Yap Islands of Micronesia, wealth once took the form of limestone disks with a hole in the center, some as small as a saucer and one 12 feet across and roughly 8,800 pounds. This episode explains how rai stones worked as money without ever needing to move. Ownership lived in a shared oral ledger: when a stone changed hands for a marriage, an inheritance, or a political alliance, the communi...