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Ray Dalio was born in 1949 in Jackson Heights, Queens, to homemaker Anne and jazz musician Marino, and grew up on Long Island. After a finance degree from C.W. Post College and a clerk job on the New York Stock Exchange floor, he earned a Harvard MBA in 1973. At Shearson Hayden Stone he advised cattle ranchers and grain producers on hedging with futures, until he was fired for punching his boss at...

Jordan Belfort reached Wall Street in 1987 at L.F. Rothschild, only to lose his job after the Black Monday crash that October. He moved to a Long Island strip mall boiler room, learned the commissions in penny stocks, and in 1989 launched Stratton Oakmont, staffed with childhood friends reading hard-sell scripts. The firm ran pump and dump schemes on thinly traded stocks. A 1991 Forbes exposé that...

John Paulson was born in Queens in 1955 to Jacqueline, the daughter of Jewish immigrants, and Alfredo Paulson, an Ecuadorian orphan who served and was wounded in Italy in World War II. After dropping out of college for sales, he returned to NYU, graduated valedictorian in 1978, and became a Baker Scholar at Harvard Business School in 1980. He worked at Boston Consulting Group, with Leon Levy at Od...

Between 2004 and 2018, U.S. multinationals used the double Irish arrangement to build roughly $1 trillion in untaxed offshore reserves. The method: sell intellectual property at cost to a Bermuda subsidiary, license it to an Irish subsidiary that books foreign sales, then drain those profits back to Bermuda as royalties. Ireland judged tax residency by where a company was managed, so the Bermuda-r...

In 2021 the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists published the Pandora Papers: 11.9 million documents, 2.9 terabytes, from 14 offshore service providers, with files dating from the 1970s to 2020. The leak exposed the offshore dealings of 35 current and former world leaders, more than 400 public officials from nearly 100 countries and over 100 billionaires, against an estimated $5....

In Colorado's coal fields, the Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, managed by John D. Rockefeller Jr., ran company towns where miners were paid by the ton, often a 2,200-pound long ton, earned nothing for "dead work" such as timbering, and were paid in scrip. The 1912 fatality rate of 7.06 per 1,000 workers was more than double the national average. In September 1913 the United Mine Workers of America...

The Hummer began as the M998 Humvee, built by AM General after the U.S. military issued specs in 1979 for a tactical vehicle that could climb 60-degree slopes and follow tank tracks. It was more than seven feet wide, with 16 inches of ground clearance and the drivetrain pushed up into a tunnel splitting the cabin. In 1990, while filming Kindergarten Cop in Oregon, Arnold Schwarzenegger saw an Army...

In 1886 Chicago, the push for an eight-hour workday brought more than 300,000 workers nationwide off the job on May 1. Two days later, police fired into strikers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Company plant, killing at least two. Anarchists led by August Spies, editor of the Arbeiter-Zeitung, called a rally at Haymarket Square for May 4; Spies had a call to arms struck from the flyers, and 20...

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Thailand, Malaysia, South Korea and Indonesia posted growth of 8% to 12% a year, drawing a flood of short-term "hot money" from foreign investors. Their currencies were pegged to the U.S. dollar, so local companies borrowed heavily in dollars without hedging. Then China and Japan devalued, semiconductor prices fell, and Alan Greenspan's Federal Reserve raised rat...

When NAFTA took effect on January 1, 1994, Mexico was a favorite of foreign investors, but outgoing president Carlos Salinas de Gortari's government spent heavily to help his chosen successor, Luis Donaldo Colosio, and the current account deficit reached about 7% of GDP. To keep capital flowing, the Treasury shifted from peso-denominated Cetes to tesobonos, short-term bonds repayable in US dollars...

Ettore Bugatti was born in Milan in 1881 to art nouveau furniture and jewelry designer Carlo Bugatti; his brother Rembrandt was a sculptor. In 1909 he founded his car company in Molsheim, in Alsace, then part of the German Empire, and treated engines as fine objects: mechanics hand-scraped mating surfaces so blocks sealed metal to metal without gaskets, exposed parts got guilloché finishes, and fr...

Toyota's roots lie in Sakichi Toyoda's 1924 Model G automatic loom, which halted itself whenever a thread broke, a principle called jidoka. In 1929 the British firm Platt Brothers bought the patent rights, and Sakichi gave the money to his son Kiichiro Toyoda to build a car. Kiichiro set up an automobile division inside the loom works in 1933, built the Type A engine in 1934, launched the G1 truck...

Sony began in 1946 in the damaged Shirokiya department store in Tokyo's Nihonbashi, where former Imperial Navy research engineer Masaru Ibuka repaired radios and restored the shortwave reception wartime authorities had disabled. Akio Morita read about the shop in the Asahi Shimbun, rejoined his wartime colleague, and with about 190,000 yen from Morita's family they founded Tokyo Telecommunications...

Nike began in 1964 as Blue Ribbon Sports, founded by University of Oregon middle-distance runner Phil Knight and his track coach Bill Bowerman to distribute Japan's Onitsuka Tiger shoes, which Knight sold from the trunk of his green Plymouth Valiant; the first year brought about 1,300 pairs and $8,000. When the supplier relationship broke down in 1971, Bowerman poured liquid urethane rubber into h...

Rudolf Dassler was born in 1898 in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, the son of a shoe factory worker and a mother who ran a laundry. After service in World War I and sales jobs at a porcelain factory and a Nuremberg leather trader, in 1924 he and younger brother Adi started the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory in their mother's laundry room, pedaling a stationary bicycle for power when the town's electricity...

The Panic of 1857 followed a boom fueled by California gold, which let Eastern banks issue large amounts of paper credit until easy surface deposits thinned in the mid-1850s. Investors poured money into paper railroads, companies that sold stock and bonds on land grants before laying any track, while Samuel Morse's telegraph linked the financial centers and removed the old delay in bad news. In Ma...

The Panic of 1893 grew out of a strained Gilded Age economy: the McKinley Tariff of 1890 raised import taxes to as much as 50%, and the 1890 Barings crisis, set off by Argentine defaults after a wheat failure and the Revolution of the Park, pushed British investors to sell American railroad securities and ship the gold home. Railroads added 100,000 miles of track between 1878 and 1896 on borrowed...

The Shard began in 1998, when developer Irvine Sellar eyed Southwark Towers, a 1970s office block beside London Bridge Station, after a government white paper encouraged tall buildings near transport hubs. In spring 2000 he met architect Renzo Piano for lunch in Berlin, where Piano, who disliked conventional skyscrapers, sketched a spire rising from the Thames on the back of the menu, drawing on r...

Sotirios Voulgaris was born in March 1857 in Paramythia, in Ottoman-ruled Epirus, one of 11 children in an Aromanian family rooted in Kalarites, the largest silversmithing center in the Balkans. Family lore traced the line to royal Balkan figures who took refuge in Venetian Corfu in the 16th century, a claim Count Stefanos Voulgaris disputed. In 1881 the family left for Italy, where his first jewe...

Australia's Woolworths began in Sydney in 1924, when founders Percy Christmas, Stanley Chatterton, Cecil Scott Waine, George Creed and Ernest Williams set aside a proposed Wallworths Bazaar after Christmas dared Williams to use the Woolworths name, which was available in New South Wales and had no link to the American F.W. Woolworth chain. Its Stupendous Bargain Basement was the first variety stor...

In 1900 William C. Durant ran the largest US maker of horse-drawn vehicles and openly disliked automobiles, but after buying into Buick around 1904 he formed General Motors in 1908 as a holding company and quickly added Oldsmobile, Cadillac and Oakland. In 1909 he nearly bought Ford for $8 million, but banks refused the $2 million down payment, and by 1910 the bankers had ousted him. He came back...

In 1975 in A Coruña, Spain, Amancio Ortega and Rosalía Mera planned to call their shop Zorba, after the 1964 film, until they learned a bar two blocks away already used the name; they rearranged the sign letters with a spare A and became Zara. Starting with low-priced lookalikes of high fashion, the company borrowed just-in-time methods from carmakers around 1990 and cut design-to-shelf time from...

Yves Saint Laurent founded his house in 1962 with his partner in life and business, Pierre Bergé, and in 1963 commissioned the designer Cassandre to create the interlocking YSL monogram. Drawing on Left Bank counterculture, he brought safari jackets, thigh-high boots and leather trousers into couture, and his 1965 Mondrian dresses used near-invisible seams in heavy wool jersey to build the paintin...

Yahoo began in 1994 as Jerry and David's Guide to the World Wide Web, a human-edited directory built by Stanford electrical engineering graduate students Jerry Yang and David Filo. The founders linked the name to the Yahoos of Gulliver's Travels, though it also stood for Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle. After an April 1996 IPO, Yahoo bought RocketMail, GeoCities for $3.6 billion and Br...

The Studebaker story begins in 1736, when Peter Studebaker, a master of the German cutlers' guild from Solingen, arrived in Philadelphia and by 1740 built a home and wagon works on a Maryland tract he called Baker's Lookout, with his own timber, iron ore and water power. In 1852 his great-grandsons Henry and Clement opened a blacksmith business in South Bend, Indiana, while their brother John M. S...