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eToys launched on November 3, 1997 out of the incubator Idealab at the height of the dot-com boom. Its IPO on January 4, 1999 priced shares at $20, and the stock closed its first day at $76; eMarketer called it the benchmark for all toy sites. The valuation rested on growth rather than profits, and the business had to warehouse and ship bulky, irregular items like doll houses and race tracks. The...

Roy Raymond opened the first Victoria's Secret in Palo Alto, California, in 1977 after an awkward attempt to buy lingerie for his wife in a department store. He borrowed $40,000 from a bank and $40,000 from family, styled the shop for male shoppers, grossed half a million dollars in year one and started a mail order catalog. In 1982 Les Wexner bought the five-store chain for $1 million and refocus...

Before 2017, U.S. companies faced a 35% corporate tax rate on worldwide income, while most developed countries taxed only profits earned inside their borders. A tax inversion let a company make a foreign entity its legal parent without moving offices or workers. The first, in 1983, took the Texas drilling firm McDermott International to Panama. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, naked inversions m...

Sun Microsystems took its name from the Stanford University Network. Graduate student Andy Bechtolsheim built the first workstation from spare parts and a Motorola 68000, with a memory management unit that let Unix run virtual memory on a desktop. With Scott McNealy, Vinod Khosla and Berkeley Unix pioneer Bill Joy, he launched Sun in February 1982, and it was profitable by July. Sun went public in...

Silvergate began in 1988 as a Southern California savings and loan and became a bank in 1996, operating three branches with car loans and commercial real estate lending. In 2013 CEO Alan Lane personally invested in Bitcoin, and in 2016 the bank began serving crypto firms that larger banks refused to touch. It built the Silvergate Exchange Network, a 24/7 internal ledger that let exchanges and inst...

Walter P. Chrysler launched Plymouth at Madison Square Garden in 1928 to challenge Ford and Chevrolet. The name, pitched by executive Joe Frazer, came from a binder twine brand trusted by farmers, although the Mayflower badge suggested the Pilgrims. The Model Q cost slightly more than rivals but had hydraulic brakes while Ford and Chevy still used mechanical ones, and the 1931 Floating Power rubbe...

Erling Persson opened Hennes, Swedish for "hers," in Västerås in 1947, selling only women's clothing for over 20 years. In 1968 he bought the Stockholm hunting apparel retailer Mauritz Widforss, added menswear and renamed the company Hennes & Mauritz. H&M reached London in 1976, sold online in 1998 and opened on Fifth Avenue in 2000, and it now runs over 4,000 stores as the world's second...

General Motors unveiled the Pontiac Aztek concept in 1999 to win Generation X buyers, with designer Tom Peters, later of the C7 Corvette, told to make it extreme. The 2001 production model had to sit on GM's U-body minivan platform shared with the Pontiac Montana, whose tall cowl forced a steep hood and awkward proportions. Built at Ramos Arizpe in Mexico, it was mocked as a gargoyle on launch in...

John Stith Pemberton, a Confederate colonel with a medical degree, took a saber wound to the chest at the Battle of Columbus in April 1865 and came home addicted to morphine. Working from his Eagle Drug and Chemical House in Columbus, Georgia, he set out to formulate a substitute. In 1885 he registered Pemberton's French Wine Coca, modeled on the French coca wine Vin Mariani but with the caffeine-...

After the September 11, 2001 attacks killed 2,996 people and destroyed the twin towers, whose framed tube design had freed up open office floors, the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation ran a master plan competition in 2002. Daniel Libeskind's asymmetrical design won in February 2003, but David Childs of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill took over the tower and pushed for a symmetrical, tapering...

George Soros was born Georgi Schwartz in Budapest in 1930. His father, Tivadar, a lawyer and former World War I prisoner of war active in the Esperanto movement, changed the family name to Soros in 1936. In 1944, after the Nazi occupation, the Jewish Council had 14-year-old George deliver slips that his father recognized as deportation notices, and Tivadar told him to warn each recipient. The fami...

Bruce McLaren was born in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1937 and grew up in his family's service station. At 15 he won his first hill climb in an Austin 7 Ulster he had helped restore. The Driver to Europe scheme brought him to Britain in 1958, where Jack Brabham introduced him to the Cooper Car Company, and in 1959 he won the U.S. Grand Prix at 22, then the youngest Grand Prix winner. He stayed with...

The 51st Congress, led by Senator John Sherman of Ohio, passed the Sherman Antitrust Act and President Benjamin Harrison signed it in 1890. Its brief text bans anticompetitive agreements and attempts to monopolize, while Senator George Hoar argued that winning business through superior skill was an innocent monopoly. Section 1 covers conspiracies in restraint of trade and Section 2 covers acquirin...

Levi Strauss, a German Jewish immigrant, went to San Francisco in 1853 to run a West Coast branch of his brother's dry goods business. A customer, the Reno tailor Jacob Davis, solved miners' torn pockets by hammering in copper rivets but lacked the roughly $68 to file a patent. Strauss fronted it, and on May 20, 1873 the two received U.S. patent 139,121. Lot number 501 arrived in 1890, the year th...

Adolf "Adi" Dassler began making sports shoes in his mother's scullery in Herzogenaurach, Germany, after World War I, scavenging tent canvas and rubber. His older brother Rudolf joined in 1924 to form the Dassler Brothers Shoe Factory, where a stationary bicycle powered the leather mill when electricity failed. Adi swapped heavy leather and metal spikes for light canvas and thin rubber, and at the...

Do Kwon and co-founder Daniel Shin started Terraform Labs in Seoul in 2018 to build TerraUSD, an algorithmic stablecoin meant to hold $1 through code alone rather than dollars in a bank. A burn and mint mechanism tied it to a second token, Luna, with arbitrage traders paid to keep the two in balance. Backers including Coinbase Ventures, Galaxy Digital and Lightspeed put in over $200 million, and t...

In 1931 Ferdinand Porsche founded an engineering consultancy in Stuttgart with Anton Piëch and Adolf Rosenberger. A German government contract produced the Volkswagen Beetle, and during World War II the firm built the Kübelwagen and the Schwimmwagen and designed the Elefant tank destroyer and the Maus super-heavy tank. Ferdinand was a member of the Nazi party and the SS, his son Ferry was an SS vo...

Washington Mutual was founded in 1889 after the Great Seattle Fire as the Washington National Building Loan and Investment Association, and it issued the first home mortgage on the West Coast in 1890. For nearly a century it was a conservative mutual savings bank, "the friend of the family." After demutualizing in 1983, it went on an acquisition spree: Pioneer Savings, Great Northwest and Pacific...

Malcolm Bricklin, who first brought Subaru to the United States in 1968, set out in the early 1970s to build an affordable two-seat gullwing sports car focused on safety. The December 1972 prototype, the Grey Ghost, used a Chrysler Slant Six with Datsun 510 rear suspension and brakes from Opel, Datsun and Toyota. Herb Grasse, who helped George Barris turn the Lincoln Futura into the TV Batmobile,...

George Pullman built the town of Pullman, Illinois, outside Chicago, where his company owned every house, store, library, church, theater and utility, with brick homes, paved streets and indoor plumbing but no elected government. When the Panic of 1893 cut orders for sleeping cars, he slashed wages 20% to 30% without lowering rents or store prices, and rent was deducted before pay, leaving some wo...

Through the 1880s Carnegie Steel installed open hearth furnaces and continuous production at its Homestead, Pennsylvania plant to fill U.S. Navy armor plate contracts, eroding the bargaining power of skilled workers. After an 1889 strike win, the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers ran the floor under a 58-page rulebook. With the contract expiring June 30, 1892, Andrew Carnegie, who...

Insider trading is buying or selling a public company's securities on material, non-public information, and in the United States the core violation is a breach of fiduciary duty by officers, directors or owners of more than 10% of a company. The SEC uses trading surveillance, requires insiders to file a Form 4 within days of a trade, and forces violators to disgorge profits on top of fines or pris...

Newly independent Latvia introduced the lats on August 3, 1922, replacing the Latvian ruble at 50 rubles per lats and dividing it into 100 santimi. It was tied to the gold standard and from 1936 pegged to the British pound at about 25.2 lats per pound, then floated in 1939 as sterling fell. The one, two and five lats coins were struck in 83.5% silver, and the five lats coin introduced around Chris...

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...