Business History
Business History explores the surprising and often dark stories behind well-known companies and products. Hosted by former Planet Money journalists Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith, the podcast examines how businesses like Volkswagen and Thomas Edison's electric chair came to be. Each episode uncovers the unexpected lessons from the founders and failures that shaped modern commerce.
Episodes
The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the Economy
John Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage - the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a profit in another. When he parted ways with Salomon Brothers, Meriwether took his "nerds" to set up a hedge fund. Th
A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price Tag
Shopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfair and stressful - and made shoppers distrustful that they were getting a good deal. John Wanamaker changed all that. Wanamaker thought about being a preacher before setting up as a clothes merc
The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of Disruption
Why have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to explore these David versus Goliath battles - and came up with a theory to explain why seemingly solid businesses suddenly lose market share... disruptive innovation. In his hit book, The
Ida Tarbell: The "Muckraker" Who Beat John D Rockefeller and Big Oil
At a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how John D Rockefeller and his company Standard Oil bought or bullied independent firms. Ida's neighbors and even her own father were in Rockefeller's sights. In adulthood, Ida joined a n
"Time is Money": How Ben Franklin's Sayings Created American Capitalism and Grind Culture
Benjamin Franklin had a full life - he was a scientist, statesman, and a Founding Father. But we're looking at the huge impact he had as a writer of best-selling business books. Franklin first picked up the pen as a poor, downtrodden teenager to write satire, but as he became richer and more successful he instead shared his entrepreneurial insights with the public. His sayings about t
The Founding Father Who Got Rich in the Revolution
Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago George Washington was fighting the Revolutionary War against the British, but Robert Morris doing something just as vital. He was raising money for the fighting and buying the gunpowder, tents, food and uniforms Washington's army needed. Morris had been a merchant before the revolution, so didn't see why he shouldn't personally profit from his work supplying t
The Dumbest Business Ever... Shipping Melting Ice to Calcutta.
Frederic Tudor could get ice any time he wanted. He lived in chilly Boston and his family had a lake that froze over in the winter. Harvesting ice and storing it was a normal thing in New England in the 1800s, but Frederic decided he'd make a fortune if he could ship ice to the warmest places on earth. And everyone thought this was the dumbest business idea of all time! No one would back Fred
The Match Maker Who Nearly Burned Down Wall Street
Swedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger built a fortune selling matches. He used this money to build a world famous financial empire that bankrolled whole countries. France borrowed from Kreuger. Germany borrowed from Krueger. He was crowned "The Match King" and ruled Wall Street in the 1920s. But Kreuger's business was about to burn to the ground. The Swede had been using shady - even criminal -
Did "Neutron" Jack Welch Nuke GE?
In 1999, Jack Welch was named "Manager of the Century". As CEO of General Electric for 20 years, Welch transformed the conglomerate and made it the biggest company in the world. Nicknamed "Neutron Jack", he closed down big chunks of old GE and set up new ventures... including GE Capital - which operated more like a bank than the wing of a manufacturing giant. Under the leadershi
The Widow Who Ruled the Champagne World
Running a wine business in Napoleonic France wasn't easy. Constant wars meant naval blockades stopped you exporting your wares and invading armies might loot your cellars. But it was even harder for women - who were forbidden to run companies. None of this stopped Barbe-Nicole Clicquot. When her husband died, she used a loophole that allowed widows to be entrepreneurs. Naming her Cham
The Business of Staying Young and Living Forever (with Kara Swisher)
Kings and emperors spent fortunes pursuing the secret of eternal youth - but now it's tech billionaires who want to live forever and are funding research into scientific (and not-so-scientific) ways to beat aging and death. Kara Swisher (host of CNN's new series Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever) joins Jacob and Robert to discuss the longevity business - from ancient China, via yoghurt enem
Sinking the Global Economy: The Lloyds of London Story Part II
In the 1980s, Lloyds of London insured satellites, rock singers' voices and the legs of sports stars. Everyone was having fun and making money - but disaster was just around the corner. Lloyds had always operated on the principle of unlimited liability - so the people backing up the insurance policies were expected to pay over all their assets if required. That hardly ever happened - until a
The Insurers Who ALWAYS Paid Out: The Lloyds of London Story Part I
Edward Lloyd opened a coffee shop near the River Thames in the 1680s - it became a place where ship owners and money men rubbed shoulders and a trade in marine insurance sprang up. The coffee-drinking insurers eventually decided to form an association and agree on a set of rules - and so Lloyd's of London was born. It became a key factor in keeping the global sea trade going, but soon branch
Betting on Taylor Swift or Who'll Be Made Pope: The Past and Present of Prediction Markets
A live mash-up between Business History and Bloomberg's Everybody's Business. On platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket you can bet on just about anything - from Taylor Swift's album sales to whether President Trump will say a certain word in a speech. Many people worry about these new prediction markets, but the concept is far older than some critics might think. We go back centuries to
Bowie, McCartney & Michael Jackson: How Songwriters Learned to Play Hardball
Once if you wrote a hit song there was no guarantee it would make you rich. So songwriters formed a cartel - the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP started suing concert halls, cafes and nightclubs to claim back royalties. Seemed fair... except ASCAP started a war when it demanded radio stations turn over 10% of their revenues. ASCAP's monopoly on music
How GM Beat Ford
Ford was the pre-eminent American car maker and Henry Ford was the king of modern manufacturing, until a Michigan cigar salesman decided to consolidate a bunch of small auto companies into a single firm to defeat the Colossus of Detroit. General Motors united the likes of Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac and decided to live by "the laws of Paris dressmakers" to make cars that were more stylish an
Henry Ford Invented the Modern World... Then Got Left Behind
Farm boy Henry Ford hated toil. If only someone could invent ways to work more efficiently, as well as cheap, reliable machines to take some of the strain. Ford was a tinkerer and a lover of the newly invented automobile - so he started building cars in a new, streamlined way that made them affordable to many more Americans. Thanks to Ford’s production line techniq
War, Exploration and Beer: How the Tin Can Changed the World
Old-fashioned ways of preserving food made for salty, vinegary or chewy meals - but it was often a choice between that or starving. Soldiers, explorers and ordinary people alike faced malnutrition and food poisoning - but then came a French revolution... in a can! First invented in Napoleonic France, the humble can would feed armies; sustain bold exploration; and give poor people access to w
The War on The A&P: When America Decided Cheap Groceries Were "Evil"
Mom and Pops grocery stores were charming, but inefficient. They contributed to Americans either spending a lot on their food or having to go hungry. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company changed the entire model. The A&P established a chain of stores selling branded goods at the lowest prices. The A&P kept its profit margins slim and allowed Americans to buy more food for
When E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Tanked Atari
Nolan Bushnell loved weed, hot tubs and games... especially games. He took computer games out of the laboratory and put them in bars. His arcade game Pong was a monster hit, so he set up Atari to build a home games console which became the must-have Christmas present of 1975. Atari was the name on every kid's lips... but then investors came onboard to help the company expand. Bushnell and hi
How a Bad Boss Kickstarted Silicon Valley
William Shockley was an electronics genius - he even won a Nobel Prize - but he was an awful boss. Shockley was a cruel, paranoid micromanager. And this annoyed the staff of brilliant young engineers he'd assembled in a quiet town in Northern California. In fact, they quit and set up a company of their own inventing silicon chips. Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the rest of "The T
Sears: Cocaine Wine, Shotguns, and the World’s Tallest Tower
Richard Warren Sears started off selling pocket watches - then published a catalog full of hundreds and hundreds of products from shotguns to cocaine wine. Sears & Roebuck offered even Americans living on remote farms the chance to shop like city dwellers. The catalog became an American institution - the Amazon of the 1890s - but as the nation changed, Sears adapted too and built a vast chain
De-Nazifying the Love Bug: The VW Beetle Story Part II
It's 1945. The Volkswagen factory has been bombed and members of the staff have been arrested as war criminals. So how did the company turn around in just a few years and begin making Beetle cars that became a global sensation? Big political and economic moves helped - but a British Army officer, Walt Disney and a New York ad agency also played pivotal roles in turning a car that Hitler had champi
Hitler's Gift to the Hippies: The VW Beetle Story Part I
The VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time - and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in Nazism. The Volkswagen - the People's Car - was an obsession of Adolf Hitler. He wanted to transform Germany into a land of drivers - and needed an affordable, but reliable automobile. Germany's private aut
How Jim Simons Built a Machine That Beat the Market
Jim Simons loved cigarettes and math. He started out as an academic mathematician and a Cold War code breaker - but decided to use his skills to write computer programs to spot investment opportunities in the financial markets. Simons and his fierce nerds bought up all the data sets they could find - reports, books, magnetic tapes - and built machine learning algorithms to hunt for tiny mark
Old Warren Buffett: "Never Invest in a Business You Cannot Understand"
Young Warren Buffett became rich in anonymity - but in the 1980s he became a global star. During the excesses of 1980s Wall Street the middle-aged investor was reluctantly drawn into the spotlight to save troubled companies. And then came tech - which suited Buffett's style even less. Warren Buffett couldn't even use a computer - but everyone was telling him to buy tech stocks. Ho
Young Warren Buffett: How to Find Value No One Else Can See
Warren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the richest person in the world - and he did it in a unique way. As a boy in Omaha he collected information obsessively - writing down car license numbers and hoarding bottle caps. As a young man, Buffett turned his focus on scouring business accounts to find companies that had hidden value no one else could spot. We tell the story of young Warren Buffe
How to Make Billions When the Bubble Bursts: Lessons from 1929
The stock market was once a Wild West free-for-all. There were few rules or regulations. Investors were more or less gambling, or manipulating stocks to make a profit. This is the world Jesse Livermore came to dominate. He would often bet against the market, making money when businesses failed. By 1929, Livermore was rich and famous. And then the Wall Street stock bubble burst. Share prices
The Man who Sued Major League Baseball (Rather than go to Philly)
Curt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game's highest payed players. He helped the St Louis Cardinals reach the 1968 World Series... but then got traded. The rules said he had no say in the decision. He either could go to Philly, or quit the sport. So Curt decided to sue. Curt argued that Major League Baseball should act like any other business
Edison and the Movie Murder Mystery (The Edison Story Part 3)
The man who invented the movie camera got on a train in France in 1890 and was never seen again. The wife of Louis Le Prince thought she knew who’d ordered her husband’s disappearance and presumed murder - Thomas Alva Edison. Many people were simultaneously racing to develop moving pictures - so had Edison decided to bump off his closest rival so he could win? The story of who deserves
Edison, Tesla and the Electric Chair (The Edison Story Part 2)
Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, but he created something more important: the grid. Edison's system of power plants and wires brought lightbulbs to homes and offices and revolutionized modern life. Edison was adamant that direct current (DC) should power America, and attacked competitors who said that alternating current (AC) was better. This sparked a bitter war between Edison and
The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About (The Edison Story Part 1)
Thomas Alva Edison helped transform America and the world. He registered over one thousand patents before he died in 1931 - and we can thank him for advances in electric power, communications technology, music recording and even the movies. But his biggest breakthrough doesn't get nearly enough attention. In many ways, Edison invented modern inventing. Join Business History hosts Jacob Golds
The Secret of Southwest's Success: Free Whisky, Hot Pants and Low, Low Fares
It's hard to make money running an airline - but Southwest was profitable every year for nearly five decades. How did it manage it? Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith explore how a carrier with just four airplanes shuttling across Texas revolutionized flying by offering free whisky, cheap late-night tickets and free-for-all seating allocation. Southwest developed a winni
Coming Soon: Business History with Robert Smith and Jacob Goldstein
Was the world's most lovable car originally made just to please Hitler? And what links Thomas Edison and the electric chair? From Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith of Planet Money fame comes Business History, a new show uncovering amazing stories from the history of business. From sandals to suits, Business History brings to life the greatest innovations, the boldest entrepreneurs and the cra
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