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On Christmas Eve 1858, former Navy surgeon Edward Robinson Squibb watched his new Brooklyn laboratory burn, and local doctors raised $2,100 to rebuild it. Obsessed with purity, Squibb published his own standards manual when the American Medical Association moved slowly, and supplied the Union Army with morphine, anesthetics and quinine. In 1887, Hamilton College graduates William McLaren Bristol and John Ripley Myers bought a struggling firm in Clinton, New York, and sold Sal Hepatica laxative and Ipana toothpaste. World War II made them penicillin rivals: Bristol-Myers converted an acidophilus milk plant in East Syracuse in 1943, and Squibb opened the world's largest penicillin plant in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1944.

The companies merged in 1989, and in 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded Bristol-Myers Squibb the National Medal of Technology. Then came a 2002 channel stuffing scandal, restated results for 1999 to 2001 and a $150 million settlement, plus $670 million to settle state antitrust suits over Taxol and BuSpar. In July 2006, while under a federal monitor, the company's offices were raided by the FBI over the Plavix dispute, and CEO Peter Dolan stepped down. BMS then sold consumer brands like Excedrin and spun off Mead Johnson to fund acquisitions, including Medarex in 2009 and Celgene for $74 billion in 2019.

• Wellington Management and Starboard Value opposed the Celgene deal, but 75 percent of shareholders approved it.
• Opdivo, a PD-1 inhibitor, blocks the signal cancer cells use to hide from T cells.
• BMS bought Karuna Therapeutics for $14 billion in March 2024, and its schizophrenia drug Cobenfy won FDA approval that September.
• Cobenfy targets M1 and M4 muscarinic receptors instead of dopamine, the first new type of schizophrenia treatment in 70 years.
• In 2025, Eliquis made up 30 percent of global revenue and Opdivo another 21 percent.

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Jay S. Walker founded Priceline.com in 1996 in Stamford, Connecticut, around its trademarked name-your-own-price model: customers entered a destination, dates and a price, handed over a credit card and waited to see if an airline or hotel accepted. Suppliers could unload perishable seats and rooms without publicly cutting rates. The March 31, 1999 IPO jumped 331 percent on day one, making Walker, who held 35 percent, a multi-billionaire. Priceline then applied bidding to mortgages, cars, groceries and gasoline, and by 2000 all of those experiments were discontinued.

The turn came in Europe: Priceline bought ActiveHotels.com for $161 million in September 2004 and Booking.com for about $133 to $135 million in July 2005, merging them and moving to an agency model that takes a commission without holding rooms. Agoda followed in 2007, then TravelJigsaw (renamed Rentalcars.com) in 2010, Kayak for $1.8 billion in 2013, OpenTable for $2.6 billion in 2014 and Momondo and Cheapflights for $550 million in 2017. The parent became Booking Holdings in February 2018, ticker BKNG. CEO Darren Huston resigned in April 2016 over an undisclosed relationship with an employee, and Glenn D. Fogel took over in January 2017.

• Revenue fell from $15 billion in 2019 to $6.7 billion in 2020, with only $60 million in profit, as marketing costs dropped with demand.
• By 2025 the Norwalk, Connecticut, company reported $26.9 billion in revenue and $5.4 billion in net income.
• Its 2025 bookings included 68 million airline tickets, 88 million rental car days and 1.235 billion room nights.
• European regulators blocked its 2021 bid for flight booking company Gotogate in 2023.
• It bought Getaroom for $1.2 billion in 2022, and in 2026 OpenTable acquired the Canadian platform Libro.

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Bell Labs traces back to the Volta Prize of 50,000 francs that France awarded Alexander Graham Bell in 1880, which funded his Volta Laboratory in Washington, D.C. In 1925, AT&T and Western Electric formed Bell Telephone Laboratories at 463 West Street in New York City with 3,600 staff. AT&T's government-sanctioned monopoly paid for long-range research. In the 1930s Karl Jansky, chasing static on transatlantic radio, traced a hiss to the center of the Milky Way and founded radio astronomy. In 1947 John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley built the point-contact transistor from germanium, replacing hot, fragile vacuum tubes.

The lab invented the practical solar cell in 1954 to power remote relay stations, operated the first continuous gas laser in 1960 and launched Telstar, the first active communications satellite, in 1962. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson found the cosmic microwave background, earning a Nobel Prize. Claude Shannon's 1948 paper founded information theory and coined the term bit. Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix in 1969, Ritchie wrote C in 1972, and Bjarne Stroustrup later developed C++. After the 1984 AT&T breakup, the lab passed to Lucent in 1996, Alcatel-Lucent in 2006 and Nokia in 2016.

• The Holmdel complex in New Jersey, designed by Eero Saarinen, had a water tower shaped like a three-legged transistor.
• In 2008 Bell Labs announced it was leaving fundamental physics and basic science for applied research.
• Its honors include 11 Nobel Prizes, five Turing Awards, a Grammy and a 1937 Academy Award for a cinema sound horn.
• Emmy Awards recognized its work on digital television, fiber optic cables and the CCD image sensor.
• Nokia Bell Labs now focuses on AI, 6G and applied quantum physics and plans a new headquarters in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

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GSK's family tree starts with Joseph Nathan, who founded a trading company in Wellington, New Zealand, in 1873 and by 1904 was drying surplus milk from Bunnythorpe dairy farms into baby food sold as Glaxo, with the slogan "Glaxo builds bonny babies." John K. Smith opened a Philadelphia pharmacy in 1830, and Thomas Beecham launched Beecham's Pills, a laxative, in England in 1848. Consumer products like Macleans toothpaste and Lucozade funded the move into drugs, starting with Glaxo's vitamin D in 1924. At Burroughs Wellcome, founded in London in 1880, Gertrude B. Elion and George H. Hitchings designed fake purines to jam cell replication and won the 1988 Nobel Prize in Medicine.

SmithKline merged with Beecham in 1989, Glaxo with Wellcome in 1995, cutting about 10,000 jobs, and the two combined as GlaxoSmithKline in December 2000. In 2012 GSK pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $3 billion, then the largest health care fraud case in U.S. history, over off-label promotion of Paxil and Wellbutrin and failure to report safety data on Avandia. In 2013 Chinese authorities found nearly $500 million in kickbacks since 2007, routed through over 700 travel agencies and consulting firms. A Chinese court fined GSK $490 million, and its British head of China operations got a suspended sentence and was deported.

• Elion and Hitchings developed mercaptopurine and thioguanine for leukemia, pyrimethamine for malaria and acyclovir for herpes.
• Under a five-year corporate integrity agreement, GSK stopped paying health professionals to promote products and decoupled sales pay from prescription volume.
• RTS,S, the first malaria vaccine, was developed with PATH and the Gates Foundation and priced at 5 percent above cost in developing nations.
• In 2022 GSK spun off its consumer health business as Haleon, after buying Tesaro and Sierra Oncology.
• After the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, GSK halted trials and advertising in Russia but kept supplying medicines and vaccines.

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Avis Budget Group was spun out of the Cendant conglomerate in 2006 and grew into one of the big three U.S. car rental companies, with a 26 percent market share by 2021 behind Hertz and Enterprise. From Parsippany, New Jersey, it runs about 600,000 vehicles at 10,000 locations with roughly 25,000 employees. It reunited the brands by buying Avis Europe in 2011, added Apex Car Rentals in New Zealand in 2012 and Italy's Maggiore Group in 2015, and also runs Payless. In 2013 it paid $500 million for car-sharing pioneer Zipcar, a hedge against app-based mobility.

In 2018 the company was among more than 90 Fortune 500 firms with an effective federal tax rate of zero or less, using depreciation deductions and carry-forwards under the 2017 tax law. When COVID-19 hit, rental companies sold off fleets, then demand surged during a semiconductor shortage and rates soared. In November 2021, a short squeeze driven by retail traders made Avis Budget a meme stock, and its shares doubled in a day. By 2025 the hangover arrived: $11.652 billion in revenue, a net loss of $995 million, an operating loss of $1.32 billion and total equity of negative $3.1 billion.

• Avis serves corporate travelers, Budget serves families and Payless targets deep-discount renters, all under one parent.
• Zipcar rented cars by the hour from city street corners, unlocked with a smartphone app.
• Retail traders on forums like Reddit bought heavily shorted shares, forcing hedge funds to buy back at rising prices.
• The used car bubble burst as supply chains normalized, cutting the resale value of the fleet.
• Rising interest rates raised the cost of the debt used to finance hundreds of thousands of rental cars.

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Arby's stands for the initials of Forrest and Leroy Raffel, restaurant equipment suppliers who saw the burger market saturating and opened a roast beef restaurant in Boardman, Ohio, in July 1964. They wanted the name Big Tex, but an Akron businessman held it. With upscale interiors and a neon cowboy hat sign by the Peskin Sign Company, they charged 69 cents a sandwich when burgers cost 15 cents. By the 1970s they were opening 50 stores a year on borrowed money, and when the 1971 recession hit they filed for Chapter 11.

The family sold to RC Cola in 1976 for $18 million, and in 1984 corporate raider Victor Posner took control through DWG. Under Triarc, former Pepsi executive Don Pierce got $100 million and launched Roasttown, a Boston Market imitation that failed in testing. A 1995 pairing with ZuZu Handmade Mexican Grill ended in lawsuits, and all 13 Daddy-O's Express burger units closed. By 2011, under the Wendy's/Arby's Group, the chain lost $35 million. Roark Capital took a majority stake, cut weak stores, added brisket, gyros and sliders, and within four years paid out $300 million in dividends.

• A 2016 venison sandwich test in 17 locations in deer hunting states sold out on day one and went national the next year.
• Elk sandwiches sold in Colorado, Montana and Wyoming in 2017 used farm-raised elk from New Zealand because of game meat laws.
• Ads voiced by Ving Rhames announced the new slogan: "We have the meats."
• To mark a 2018 switch from Pepsi to Coca-Cola, Arby's printed an ad on a sesame seed with Georgia Tech and laid a five-acre poster in Monowi, Nebraska.
• In November 2017 the parent bought Buffalo Wild Wings for $2.4 billion and became Inspire Brands.

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Amgen started in 1980 in Thousand Oaks, California, as Applied Molecular Genetics, backed by venture capitalists betting on recombinant DNA, with George Rathmann as CEO. In 1983 a team led by Fu-Kuen Lin cloned the erythropoietin gene by hand, without automated sequencers, work that became the anemia drug Epogen. FDA approval did not come until 1989, so Amgen went public in 1983, raising nearly $40 million, and in 1984 formed a joint venture with Japan's Kirin Brewery, whose fermentation expertise carried over to growing drugs in living cells, in exchange for Japanese rights.

Larry Souza cloned G-CSF, leading to the 1991 approval of Neupogen, which helps restore white blood cells after chemotherapy, and Steve Elliott's added sugar molecules made the longer-lasting Aranesp. Later, under Kevin Sharer and Robert Bradway, Amgen bought Otezla, Five Prime Therapeutics, ChemoCentryx and, for $27.8 billion in 2023, Horizon Therapeutics. Revenue reached almost $37 billion by 2025. In 2012 Amgen pleaded guilty and paid $762 million over off-label marketing of Aranesp, and in 2025 a jury ordered it to pay Regeneron $406 million over anticompetitive practices tied to Repatha.

• Amgen opened a manufacturing plant in Puerto Rico in 1993 and received the National Medal of Technology in 1994.
• Lumakras, approved in 2021, targets the KRAS mutation in lung cancer through a hidden groove that opens only in a specific state.
• In late 2023 Amgen partnered with Amazon Web Services to apply generative AI to drug discovery and manufacturing.
• Trial doses of MariTide, a monthly obesity injection, were lowered in 2025 over vomiting, though patients who stayed on it lost about 20 percent of body weight.
• Amgen announced a $900 million facility expansion in Ohio and a $600 million research center in California.

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In 1956, MIT engineer Amar Bose bought the audio system with the best published specifications and hated how it sounded. He concluded that frequency response and distortion figures ignored the room and the human ear, since most of what a concert audience hears is reflected sound. With backing from his MIT thesis advisor Y.W. Lee, he founded his company in Massachusetts in 1964. Its first product, the 1966 corner-mounted 2201 with 22 speakers, was discontinued the same year. His 1968 paper rejected numerical test data for judging sound, and that year's 901, with eight of nine drivers facing the wall, stayed in production until 2016.

Bose refused to publish traditional specifications, and his company grew litigious. In 1981 he sued Consumer Reports for libel over a review saying the sound tended to wander about the room. The case lasted 14 years and reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which found no proof of actual malice. His researchers built aviation noise cancellation in 1989, debunked cold fusion claims in 1991 by recreating the experiment, and spent more than 20 years and $100 million on an electromagnetic car suspension whose prototype could leap obstacles. In 2011 he gave most of the company's non-voting shares to MIT, and he died in 2013 at 83.

• Noise-canceling headphones for airline passengers followed by 2000, using destructive interference to cancel engine noise.
• The suspension work became the Bose Ride truck seat in 2010, built to spare long-haul drivers from road vibration.
• Over a trademark on ".2," Thiel Audio had to rename its CS2.2 speaker CS2 2, then released a 2.3 model.
• Bose also sued Harman International over speaker port shapes and Beats Electronics over noise-cancellation patents.
• MIT can never sell the donated shares and has no role in running the company, which keeps it privately held.

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Wally Byam started out building heavy masonite trailers in his Los Angeles backyard in the late 1920s. In 1936 he introduced the aluminum Airstream Clipper, largely a rebadged Bowlus Road Chief, with one key change: he moved the door from the front to the side, smoothing the nose and cutting drag. It slept four, carried its own water and cost $1,200, about $30,000 today, in the depths of the Great Depression. Its fuel savings made the case, and of more than 400 U.S. trailer builders in 1936, Airstream was the only one to survive.

World War II aluminum shortages halted production, which resumed in 1948, and a plant opened in Jackson Center, Ohio, in 1952. During the 1970s fuel crisis, the budget Argosy line used galvanized steel end caps that had to be painted, hid its link to Airstream until 1973 and introduced the panoramic front window. Boxy SquareStreams in the 1980s were banned, along with painted Argosys, from Wally Byam Caravan Club rallies. After Apollo 11 in July 1969, NASA kept Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins aboard the USS Hornet in a modified Airstream, chosen because its riveted aluminum shell could be sealed airtight.

• In 1981, Airstream's commercial division built a Class A motorhome to serve as a funeral coach.
• The space shuttle Astrovan was a modified 1983 Airstream motorhome, and in 2019 Boeing and Airstream built a new Astrovan for Starliner crews.
• The U.S. Air Force loads Silver Bullet Modules, luxury Airstream trailers, into C-17 cargo planes to carry VIPs.
• Narrower 534 and 604 models for the UK and Ireland are still built in Ohio and often become takeaway food stands in Europe.
• The fiberglass Nest, from a 2016 acquisition, was withdrawn in September 2020, and a 2022 electric concept uses regenerative braking.

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Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone in 1876, but businessman Theodore Vail built the empire, creating the long-distance subsidiary American Telephone and Telegraph in 1885 and buying up local operators. Facing antitrust action in 1913, AT&T accepted the Kingsbury Commitment, letting independents connect to its network in exchange for a regulated monopoly. By the 1930s, Ma Bell held over 80 percent of the U.S. phone market. A 1974 Justice Department suit led to the settlement that took effect in 1984: AT&T kept long distance and Bell Labs, and its local networks became seven Baby Bells.

The smallest, Southwestern Bell Corporation, used the Telecommunications Act of 1996 to rebuild. Under Edward Whitacre, SBC bought Pacific Telesis in 1997 and Ameritech in 1999, then paid $16 billion in 2005 for the struggling original AT&T and took its name and ticker. BellSouth followed a year later, reuniting four of the seven Baby Bells. The new AT&T then paid $48.5 billion for DirecTV in 2015 and over $108 billion for Time Warner in 2018, surviving a Justice Department suit, before about $200 billion in debt forced it to spin both off by 2021 under CEO John Stankey.

• WarnerMedia was spun off to merge with Discovery, and AT&T returned to 5G and fiber, including Lumen Technologies' mass market fiber business.
• A 2024 breach of AT&T's Snowflake workspace exposed call and text logs for nearly all of its cellular customers over six months.
• The China-linked Salt Typhoon campaign targeted the wiretap systems broadband providers keep for law enforcement.
• After the 2016 election, AT&T paid $600,000 to Michael Cohen through a shell company for insight on the Time Warner merger and other policy issues.
• Court records show AT&T gave One America News Network early financial backing and distribution on DirecTV.