pplpod

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...

In the 1870s, taking a photograph meant hauling glass plates, toxic chemicals, and a dark tent into the field. George Eastman, a bank clerk from Rochester, found the equipment unbearable and began experimenting with dry plates in his mother's kitchen in 1880. This episode follows his progress from the Eastman Dry Plate Company to a roll holder, a paper film, and finally the transparent nitrocellul...

By January 2021, hedge funds had sold short roughly 140 percent of GameStop's public float, a number made possible because the same shares were lent out again and again. This episode explains how that structural trap was sprung. Michael Burry and Chewy co-founder Ryan Cohen took stakes in the struggling retailer, and Keith Gill, posting as Roaring Kitty, argued for months on Reddit's WallStreetBet...

The legend says that in 1949 Frank X. McNamara finished a meal at Major's Cabin Grill in New York City, reached for his wallet, and found his pocket empty. Mortified, he dreamed up a multipurpose charge card and pitched it the next day to his lawyer, Ralph Schneider, and his friend Alfred Bloomingdale. This episode examines that origin story, including the conflicting accounts of what happened and...

In 2017 the fidget spinner was sold to millions of parents as a tool that could ease anxiety, help with ADHD, and sharpen focus. This episode takes the toy apart, starting with the physics. A ball bearing at the center removes nearly all friction, while weighted lobes push mass outward, raising the moment of inertia and turning the spinner into a small handheld gyroscope. The result is a smooth gl...

Arthur E. Andersen was orphaned at 16, worked as a mail boy in Chicago, studied at night, and in 1908 became the youngest certified public accountant in Illinois. The firm he co-founded in 1913 rested on a motto inherited from his mother: think straight, talk straight. He insisted that an auditor's real boss is the public investor, not the company paying the fee, and he built the profession's firs...

Edwin H. Land left Harvard after his freshman year to chase one problem: how to control the direction of light. He solved it by embedding microscopic iodine crystals in stretched plastic, creating a polarizing sheet that cut glare. The company he founded in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1937 sold that material as sunglasses, 3D movie glasses, goggles for military working dogs, and night viewing devi...

In December 2013, IBM software engineer Billy Markus and Adobe marketer Jackson Palmer built a cryptocurrency in a few hours to mock the speculation swirling around Bitcoin. They put a Shiba Inu meme and Comic Sans on a coin forked from Luckycoin, itself a fork of Litecoin. Because it could be mined on ordinary computers and confirmed transactions every minute, Dogecoin drew a million visitors to...

In 1827, Swiss Italian brothers Giovanni and Pietro Delmonico ran a modest pastry shop at 23 William Street in New York. This episode follows the 200 year life of what it became. Their nephew Lorenzo arrived in 1831 and transformed the business, scouring the markets at four in the morning and building a serious wine list. After the Great Fire of 1835 wiped out the family's properties, they opened...

Counterfeiting is often called the world's second oldest profession, and this episode traces it from Lydia around 600 BC, where plated fakes appeared almost as soon as coins did, to the security features in a modern wallet. Early forgers clipped the edges of coins or shook them in leather bags to collect gold dust. Rulers answered with savage penalties: decapitation in China, burning at the stake...

The popular story says Black Friday is the day retailers finally move from red ink to black. This episode shows that tale was invented in the early 1980s. The name actually came from police in Philadelphia and Rochester in the 1950s and 60s, who used it for the gridlock, smog, and crowds that hit downtown after Thanksgiving, made worse by the Army-Navy football game. Before that, the phrase marked...

The first great silver strike in American history was found by men who thought it was trash. Gold miners in the Virginia Range of present-day Nevada kept clogging their equipment with a heavy, sticky material they called the blue stuff. It was silver sulfide. This episode tells who really found it: the Grosh brothers, trained mineralogists who both died in 1857 before they could stake a claim, and...

In 1965, as the United States raced toward the moon, Martin Luther King Jr. met plantation workers in the Deep South who had never seen or held a piece of official American currency. They were paid in scrip, private money issued by an employer and good only at the employer's own store. This episode explains how a practical fix for remote logging and mining camps, where shipping cash was dangerous,...