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In 1987 Michael Riordan, a 29-year-old venture capitalist with a Johns Hopkins medical degree and a Harvard MBA, caught dengue fever overseas and came home determined to fight viruses. With $2 million from his firm he started a company called Oligogen, then paid a California nonprofit $1,000 for the name Gilead, from the play Balm in Gilead. Early antisense DNA research brought the company near bankruptcy several times, though it drew board members including Donald Rumsfeld, George Shultz and Harold Varmus. In the early 1990s it licensed nucleotide analogs from chemist Antonín Holý and virologist Erik De Clercq, compounds that jam viral replication. Gilead discovered the compound behind Tamiflu but, with about 350 employees, had to license it to Roche. Buying NeXstar Pharmaceuticals in 1999 gave it a European sales force, and HIV drugs followed: Viread in 2001, the one-pill Atripla in 2006, and Truvada approved for prevention in 2012.

In 2011 Gilead paid $10.4 billion for Pharmasset to get sofosbuvir, approved in 2013 as Sovaldi, which cures hepatitis C in up to 99 percent of cases. It cost $1,000 a pill, $84,000 for a 12-week course. An 18-month Senate Finance Committee investigation concluded the price was set to maximize revenue. Oregon identified 10,000 Medicaid patients who qualified but limited treatment to 500 of the sickest a year, while licensed generics in India sold for as little as $4.29 a pill. Truvada reached $2,000 a month in the U.S. by 2018 though early prevention research was done and patented by the CDC. Net income fell from over $18 billion in 2015 to about $5.3 billion in 2019 as cured patients left the market, and COVID-19 antiviral remdesivir, sold as Veklury, brought in over $4.5 billion in 2021.

• Lawsuits allege Gilead held back its safer TAF formula until 2015 to keep earning on the older TDF drug, linked to kidney and bone side effects.
• A 2016 report estimated the "double Irish" tax structure let Gilead avoid about $10 billion in U.S. taxes.
• Gilead received orphan drug status for remdesivir in March 2020, then asked the FDA to rescind it after public backlash.
• It bought CAR T cell therapy maker Kite Pharma for $11.9 billion in 2017 and Immunomedics for $21 billion in 2020.
• Warren Buffett turned down Riordan's pitch in the company's early years.

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Pfizer was founded in 1849 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, whose first hit was santonin, a bitter treatment for intestinal worms flavored with almond toffee and shaped into a candy cone. By the 1880s its main business was citric acid for soft drinks, made from Italian calcium citrate. When World War I blockades cut that supply, its chemists turned to a mold that fermented sugar into citric acid, and by 1919 Pfizer had pioneered deep tank fermentation in 10,000-gallon vats. That know-how let it mass produce penicillin in World War II, and it made most of the penicillin that went ashore at Normandy. When prices collapsed after the war, a global soil sampling program yielded oxytetracycline in 1950 and turned Pfizer into a drug discovery company.

Sildenafil, created in 1989 to treat angina, failed for the heart but produced a side effect in trial volunteers; it was approved in 1998 as Viagra. Zoloft launched in 1991, and Lipitor, co-marketed from 1997, made about $125 billion over 14 and a half years. Pfizer bought Warner-Lambert for $116 billion in 2000, Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth for $68 billion in 2009, but a 2016 $160 billion merger with Allergan, designed to move its tax home to Ireland, was dropped after the Obama administration changed inversion rules. In 2009 it paid a $2.3 billion settlement over illegal promotion of the painkiller Bextra. For COVID-19 it declined initial U.S. research funding, spent about $2 billion of its own with BioNTech, and announced a 95 percent effective mRNA vaccine in November 2020.

• Defective Shiley mechanical heart valves fractured in patients, about 500 died, and Pfizer paid $10.75 million in 1994 over allegations it misled regulators.
• In a 1996 meningitis outbreak in Kano, Nigeria, a trial of the antibiotic Trovan on children was followed by deaths and disabilities and allegations of missing consent.
• Leaked U.S. diplomatic cables said Pfizer investigators sought corruption evidence against Nigeria's attorney general to pressure him over the lawsuits.
• Pfizer bought cancer drug maker Seagen for $43 billion in December 2023.
• In October 2025 Pfizer pledged $70 billion in U.S. investment to the Trump administration in exchange for a three-year exemption from pharmaceutical tariffs.

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John Deere was born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1804 and built a reputation as a skilled blacksmith before debt drove him west in 1836 to Grand Detour, Illinois. Settlers there were stopping every few yards to scrape sticky prairie soil off cast iron plows. In 1837 Deere polished a broken steel saw blade from Scotland into a self-scouring plow that let the soil slide off. A partnership with Leonard Andrus in 1843 reached about 400 plows a year, and in 1848 Deere moved to Moline, Illinois, on the Mississippi, and production rose to 200 a month. The Panic of 1857 and a failed steam-powered plow nearly sank the firm, so Deere handed management to his 21-year-old son Charles Deere and son-in-law Christopher Webber. Charles built the branch house distribution system in 1869, and later leaders bought the Waterloo Gasoline Engine Company in 1918, launched the Model D tractor in 1923 and added combines in 1927.

During World War II, great-grandson Charles Deere Wiman left to serve as an Army colonel and direct farm machinery for the War Production Board, while Deere factories built M3 tank transmissions, aircraft parts, ammunition and mobile laundry units. By 2022 the company was showing fully autonomous tractors at the Consumer Electronics Show. Software locks on its machines meant a farmer who replaced a part needed an authorized technician to clear the code, and Deere defended this under Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Farmers turned to Ukrainian software from online forums to get around the locks. Deere signed a 2023 memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation, and Federal Trade Commission antitrust action led to 2026 settlements.

• After Russian troops looted Deere equipment from dealerships in Melitopol in 2022 and shipped it to Chechnya, the machines were disabled remotely.
• Company lore says Deere refused to repossess equipment from struggling farmers during the Great Depression.
• Without admitting wrongdoing, Deere agreed to pay $99 million to customers overcharged for repairs and to open diagnostic tools to independent shops for ten years.
• About 10,000 UAW workers went on strike in 2021, followed by layoffs in 2024 and 2025 and production shifts to Mexico.
• Deere's 1960s 4020 tractor dominated its market as the company expanded from Germany to Argentina.

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Civil aviation in Dubai began in 1937, when Imperial Airways rented a base for its Empire flying boats on the Horseshoe Route between Britain, Karachi, South Africa and Australia, for about 440 rupees a month including guards' wages. In 1959 Sheikh Rashid ordered a land airport, which opened in 1960 with an 1,800-meter runway of compacted sand that received Douglas DC-3s. An asphalt runway followed in May 1965, letting jets land. Through the 1970s and 1980s Dubai International (DXB) thrived as a refueling stop because airliners lacked the range to fly Europe to Southeast Asia nonstop and Soviet airspace was largely closed to Western carriers. Then the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, and long-range aircraft like the Boeing 747-400, Airbus A340 and Boeing 777 could fly London to Singapore without stopping.

Dubai answered by building its own airlines, Emirates and later flydubai, to route traffic through the city. Terminal 2 opened in 1998 and Terminal 3, built exclusively for Emirates, fully opened in 2008 as the world's largest airport terminal and the fourth largest building on Earth by floor space. By 2014 the airport supported over 400,000 jobs and $26.7 billion, about 27 percent of Dubai's GDP. Traffic reached 92.3 million passengers in 2024 and 95.2 million in 2025. April 2024 floods submerged taxiways, and in late February 2026 Iranian airstrikes and drone attacks targeted Dubai, damaging the airport, injuring four people there, and suspending operations into March.

• Emirates handles about 51 percent of DXB passengers and 42 percent of aircraft movements.
• Dedicated A380 concourses let passengers board both decks at once, and baggage carousels run 90 meters long.
• Passenger traffic fell 31 percent in the second quarter of 2026 as the conflict disrupted Middle East air travel.
• DXB is hemmed in by the city and capped at about 115 million passengers a year.
• Dubai plans to close DXB and move operations to Al Maktoum International at Jebel Ali, open for cargo since 2010 and planned for 160 million passengers.

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Los Angeles International Airport began in 1928, when the city leased 640 acres of wheat, barley and lima bean fields in Westchester known as Mines Field. Dirt strips opened that October, Hangar No. 1 went up in 1929 and still stands on the National Register of Historic Places, and the field was dedicated as Los Angeles Municipal Airport in 1930. The airlines stayed at Burbank and Grand Central in Glendale until World War II, when the military took over the field in 1942 and aircraft factories ringed it. A $12.5 million bond passed in 1943, and in 1946 American, TWA and United moved in. The X in LAX means nothing: when airport codes went from two letters to three in 1947, LA simply got an X. The 1958 plan arranged terminals in a U-shape, and the Googie-style Theme Building, dedicated in 1961 with Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson present, replaced a planned glass dome.

Since 1972 LAX has managed noise with a preferential runway policy. From 6:30 a.m. to midnight, departures use the inboard runways near the terminals and arrivals use the outboard runways; from midnight to 6:30 a.m., arrivals and departures both run over the ocean, unless Santa Ana winds force easterly operations over Inglewood and South LA. In 2019, 88 percent of passengers started or ended their trips in Los Angeles, which jams the terminal horseshoe. A $30 billion modernization adds the SkyLink people mover, scheduled for 2026, a Metro transit center, a consolidated rental car facility, and an increase from 146 to 182 gates. Facility fees near $50 per departing passenger led Allegiant to announce it would close its LAX crew base.

• The Theme Building's interior was redone by Walt Disney Imagineering in 1997.
• The 1984 Olympics brought the upper-level roadway and the Tom Bradley International Terminal.
• In 1986 Aeroméxico Flight 498 collided with a private Piper over Cerritos, killing all 67 people aboard both planes and 15 on the ground, and leading the FAA to require TCAS collision avoidance.
• In 1999 Ahmed Ressam was caught at the Canadian border with explosives meant for an LAX passenger area on New Year's Eve.
• In 2013 two employees removed dry ice from a cargo hold to protect a dog, sealed it in plastic bottles, and set off two blasts that shut terminals.

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Robert Tappan Morris was born in 1965 and grew up in Millington, New Jersey, the son of Robert Morris Sr., a Bell Labs researcher who helped design Multics and Unix and later became chief scientist of the National Computer Security Center, part of the NSA. As a high schooler at the Delbarton School he was already cracking passwords. In 1988, as a first-year graduate student at Cornell, he released a self-spreading program from MIT's network to hide its origin. The worm used three weaknesses: the debug mode of Sendmail, a buffer overflow in the fingerd service, and trusted remote execution through rexec and rsh. Morris said he only wanted to measure the internet, but he coded the worm to copy itself 14 percent of the time even onto machines that reported being infected, and repeated infections froze systems across academic, military and research networks. Damage estimates ran as high as $10 million.

In 1989 Morris became the first person indicted under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His 1990 sentence was three years of probation, 400 hours of community service and a $10,050 fine, and the conviction was upheld on appeal. He earned a Harvard PhD in 1999 under H.T. Kung with a thesis on scalable TCP congestion control. In 1995 he and Paul Graham founded Viaweb, which generated online storefronts on the server using software written in Lisp; Yahoo bought it for $49 million in 1998 and renamed it Yahoo Store. Morris joined MIT's faculty in 1999 and received tenure in 2006. In 2005 he co-founded Y Combinator with Graham, Jessica Livingston and Trevor Blackwell, which backed companies including Airbnb, Stripe and Dropbox.

• Y Combinator's batch model gave groups of startups about $20,000 each, three months of advice and a demo day.
• At MIT Morris co-authored Chord, a distributed hash table protocol that reroutes around failed nodes.
• Morris and Graham released Arc, a dialect of Lisp, in 2008, and Graham named the markup language RTML after Morris.
• Graham has called Morris a personal hero who is "never wrong."
• Morris won the Mark Weiser Award in 2010, became an ACM Fellow in 2014 and was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2019.

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Winnebago Industries grew out of a 1958 rescue effort in Forest City, Iowa, in a county named for the Ho-Chunk people, where businessman John K. Hanson and civic leaders persuaded California's Modernistic Industries to open a travel trailer factory. Five local investors including Hanson bought it, and in 1960 it became Winnebago Industries. The company made its own furniture, cabinets and metal stampings and invented the Thermo-Panel, a wall of styrofoam bonded between aluminum and wood paneling. When its first motor homes appeared in 1966, they cost about half of what competitors charged, opening RV ownership to middle-class families and retirees. Professor James B. Twitchell compared a circle of Winnebagos to the covered wagons of the Old West, and the name became a generic word for any motorhome.

The 1970s energy crisis pushed Winnebago toward smaller vehicles: the 1973 Minnie Winnie on a Dodge van chassis, the pop-top Winnie Wagon, the Renault-based LeSharo, the Volkswagen-based Rialta, and an aluminum delivery van with a Cummins diesel. Around 1982 an Australian businessman began building RVs under the Winnebago name and a near-identical logo; he ignored a 1992 settlement and registered the trademark himself in 1997. Australia's Federal Court canceled that registration, but in 2013 ruled he could keep using the name with a disclaimer because he had sold the vehicles for 32 years and the U.S. company had known for 25. Under CEO Michael Happe, who took over in 2016, Winnebago moved its headquarters to Eden Prairie, Minnesota, and bought Chris-Craft boats in 2018, Newmar in 2019 and Barletta pontoon boats for over $300 million in 2021.

• The Heli-Home, built with Orlando Helicopter Airways from surplus Sikorsky S-55 and S-58 helicopters, slept up to six; only six or seven were produced.
• German politician Guido Westerwelle campaigned in 2002 in a yellow and blue Winnebago nicknamed the Guidomobile.
• The character Gonzo lived in a Winnebago called the Titanic in the hospital lot on Trapper John, M.D.
• In 2014 the Australian company put the Winnebago name on premium models one month before the real Winnebago announced it was entering Australia.
• Winnebago opened a production center in Waverly, Iowa, in 2015 because of labor shortages in Forest City.

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Tripadvisor began in 2000 when Stephen Kaufer, frustrated while planning a family vacation, raised $2 million to build a site where travelers could review hotels for each other. By 2004 it drew 5 million unique visitors a month, was bought by IAC, spun off under Expedia, and later went public. It then bought its way into every part of a trip, including Cruise Critic, the vacation rental site FlipKey, the European restaurant booking system TheFork and the tour software company Bokun. The platform grew to roughly a billion reviews on about 8 million establishments, far beyond what human moderators could check. In 2017 journalist Oobah Butler registered his backyard shed as The Shed at Dulwich, had friends post timed glowing reviews, and pushed it to the top-ranked restaurant in London.

Moderation failures went beyond fake ratings. Women who posted warnings about sexual assaults at a Mexican resort had their reviews deleted, and an antisemitic review of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum was approved until public outcry. Italy's antitrust authority fined the company half a million euros, and UK advertising regulators made it drop the slogan "reviews you can trust." British tourist Craig Barrett posted a warning after his wife was harassed at a Doha hotel; the hotel filed a criminal defamation complaint under Qatari cybercrime law, he was tried in absentia, and he was detained at an airport months later and deported. China banned the app in 2020. Then generative AI arrived, and Tripadvisor lost a third of its web traffic between 2024 and 2025.

• A user on its Chinese platform reviewed 51 Paris restaurants in one month while also reviewing 50 hotels in other countries.
• Australian hotel chain Meriton was fined $3 million for manipulating guest email lists to skew its ratings.
• A consumer survey of about a quarter million reviews found one in seven showed signs of being fabricated.
• CEO Matt Goldberg merged the main platform with subsidiary Viator to sell experiences, and the company made a $430 million acquisition of its own holding company.
• In late 2025 Tripadvisor launched a native app inside ChatGPT for planning trips through conversation.

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DuPont began in 1802 when French chemist Éleuthère Irénée du Pont, fleeing the French Revolution, built a gunpowder mill on Brandywine Creek near Wilmington, Delaware, with imported French machinery. It supplied between a third and half of the Union Army's gunpowder in the Civil War, added dynamite and smokeless powder, and controlled nearly two-thirds of the U.S. explosives market until a 1912 Sherman Antitrust Act ruling spun off Hercules and Atlas Powder. The company then founded the DuPont Experimental Station, where chemist Wallace Carothers, hired in 1928, developed neoprene and in 1935 nylon. In World War II DuPont employed 37,000 workers, made 4.5 billion pounds of explosives, sent nylon to parachutes, and built and ran the Hanford plutonium site for the Manhattan Project, later building the Savannah River plant. Mylar, Lycra and Kevlar followed the war.

In 1930 DuPont and General Motors formed Kinetic Chemicals to make Freon, a chlorofluorocarbon refrigerant, and by the 1980s DuPont was the largest CFC maker, with $600 million in annual sales. Despite a 1974 pledge to stop if CFCs proved harmful, in 1988 it called proposed regulations unwarranted, then, ten days after a March 1988 NASA study showed a 2.3 percent ozone decline, announced a phase-out and backed the Montreal Protocol. Teflon, invented in 1938, relied on PFOA, or C8. In 1999 lawyer Rob Bilott sued on behalf of a Parkersburg, West Virginia, cattle rancher, a case that grew into a class action over drinking water in West Virginia and Ohio, and internal documents showed DuPont scientists had known for decades of links to serious health effects. In 2015 DuPont spun off Chemours with liabilities for 171 sites, then merged with Dow and split into Corteva, Dow and a new DuPont.

• Before the U.S. entered World War II, company president Irénée du Pont was a financial supporter of Adolf Hitler; the Nazi government seized DuPont's German assets in 1943.
• DuPont won a 2003 National Medal of Technology for developing CFC replacements.
• A court-appointed C8 science panel found probable links to six conditions, including kidney cancer, testicular cancer, thyroid disease and ulcerative colitis.
• Settlements included $671 million for over 3,000 Parkersburg claims in 2017, $1.2 billion over PFAS in drinking water, and $2 billion for New Jersey sites.
• A 2014 methyl mercaptan leak in Texas killed four workers, and DuPont pleaded guilty to criminal negligence.

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Cracker Barrel started in 1969 in Lebanon, Tennessee, where Shell Oil representative Dan Evans designed a country store with gas pumps to sell more gasoline to highway travelers. The 1970s oil crisis forced the company to drop the pumps and live entirely on food and retail. Its decor is run from a 90,000-item archive of genuine antiques at its Tennessee headquarters, built up for decades by the Singleton family: designers mock up each new dining room inside the warehouse, arrange real artifacts, photograph the layout and ship the pieces with a map. The chain went public in 1981, grew about 20 percent a year, and reached a $1 billion valuation by 1992. Fans Ray and Wilma Yoder drove over 5 million miles between 1977 and 2017 to visit 644 locations, but 1990s suburban carryout spots called Corner Market failed.

A 1991 internal memo told managers to fire employees who lacked "normal heterosexual values"; Evans called it a mistake and it was ended within months, but the New York City employees' retirement system pressed shareholder votes until 58 percent backed adding sexual orientation to the nondiscrimination policy in 2002. In 2004 the company settled NAACP-backed racial discrimination suits and a Justice Department case requiring an outside auditor. The pandemic brought DoorDash delivery and, in September 2020, alcohol. Kraft, which has sold Cracker Barrel cheese since the 1950s, won a trademark case that forced grocery products under the name CB Old Country Store. By May 2024, 16 percent of pre-2020 customers had not returned. An August 2025 logo that dropped Uncle Herschel lasted one week before the company scrapped it.

• Every location displays the same five items: a shotgun, a cast iron cook stove, a deer head, an antique telephone and a vintage traffic light.
• Activist investor Sardar Biglari tried five times over a decade to win board seats before a 2022 truce.
• After the logo reversal the company halted remodels tested in four locations and removed diversity and Pride pages from its website.
• In 2026 it cut its traditional New Year's Day black-eyed pea special.
• A January 2026 memo told corporate staff traveling for work to eat at Cracker Barrel whenever practical.