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McDonnell Douglas joined two empires built by men with parallel lives. James Smith McDonnell and Donald Wills Douglas shared Scottish ancestry, both graduated from MIT and both worked for the Glenn L. Martin Company. Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles built roughly 10,000 C-47s in World War II with a peak workforce of 160,000, then the DC-6, DC-7 and DC-8. McDonnell Aircraft outside St. Louis built military jets such as the F-4 Phantom II and the Mercury and Gemini capsules. By the 1960s Douglas was drowning in late-delivery penalties while McDonnell depended on a single customer, the U.S. government, so in 1967 McDonnell bought 1.5 million Douglas shares and the companies merged. In the 1970s David S. Lewis revived the Douglas division, the DC-10 beat Lockheed's L-1011, and the F-15 Eagle and F-18 Hornet followed. Engineers drew up a twin-engine DC-10 Twin, but no prototype was built, and Airbus launched the A300.

In 1989 a reorganization called TQMS cut 5,000 supervisory and managerial jobs and made leaders re-interview for 2,800 new posts; workers said the acronym meant "time to quit and move to Seattle." In January 1991 Defense Secretary Dick Cheney canceled the $4.8 billion A-12 Avenger II stealth program, triggering 5,600 layoffs, and the company lost the Joint Strike Fighter and Advanced Tactical Fighter competitions. The MD-11, a stretched DC-10, could not fly Singapore to Paris fully loaded against winter headwinds, and Singapore Airlines canceled 20 jets in 1991. In August 1997 the company agreed to a $13 billion stock swap with Boeing, which later closed the Long Beach airliner lines and kept the McDonnell Douglas globe in its logo.

• The defense-minded St. Louis leadership was unwilling to risk company money on a new twinjet while military contracts were profitable.
• The company had acquired Hughes Helicopters in the 1980s, bringing in the AH-64 Apache.
• The 1992 MD-12, a double-decker jumbo announced at a press conference, never had a prototype built.
• McDonnell Automation Company, or McAuto, ran mainframes for aircraft design and grew to 3,500 employees.
• A McAuto venture into medical claims led to a pharmacy benefits partnership in St. Louis that became Express Scripts.

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Martin Marietta was born in 1961 from the merger of the Glenn L. Martin Company of Baltimore, builder of the Titan ICBM for the Air Force, and the American Marietta Corporation of Chicago, which made paints, dyes, cement and driveway sealant. The pairing was a hedge: construction materials sold steadily while defense contracts rose and fell with Pentagon budgets. The engineering output was wide. In 1963 the company built the MH-1A, a floating nuclear power plant on the barge Sturgis for the Army Nuclear Power Program. It developed the Titan I through IV rockets, built the Mark IV monorail commissioned in 1969 for Walt Disney World, which ran from 1971 to 1989, and produced the Viking 1 and 2 landers that sent back images from Mars. In 1971 it lost Phillips v. Martin Marietta Corp., in which the Supreme Court unanimously struck down its policy of refusing to hire women, but not men, with preschool-age children.

In 1982 Bendix, led by William Agee, bought a majority of Martin Marietta's shares through a tender offer. During the waiting period before Bendix could replace the board, CEO Thomas G. Pownall sold assets, borrowed billions and launched a counter tender offer for Bendix itself, the Pac-Man defense. The standoff ended when Allied Corporation bought Bendix, leaving Martin Marietta independent but heavily indebted. After the Cold War, Norman Augustine and other defense chiefs attended a July 1993 dinner with Les Aspin and William Perry, who told them to consolidate. Martin Marietta bought GE Aerospace for $3 billion and General Dynamics' space systems division, spun off Martin Marietta Materials, and in 1995 merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin.

• The Disney monorail was approached as an aerospace systems project, using aircraft-grade aluminum and fail-safe redundancy.
• Holding Bendix shares meant Pownall could, in theory, vote to remove Agee while Agee tried to remove him.
• Augustine named the 1993 meeting with Pentagon leaders the Last Supper.
• Buying GE Aerospace let the company offer the Pentagon both the Titan launch vehicle and the satellite on top of it.
• The company also took over the management contract for Sandia National Laboratories during its 1990s buying spree.

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Maersk's seven-pointed white star dates to 1886, when Danish captain Peter Mærsk Møller, aboard the steamship SS Laura with his gravely ill wife Anna, saw a single star break through an overcast sky and painted it on the ship's funnel. The family business founded in 1904 now operates in about 130 countries with more than 100,000 employees, and its 2025 revenue topped $53 billion. In 2021 it held about 17 percent of global container capacity, and its Triple E class ships each carry 18,000 containers. In the late 2010s Maersk shed Maersk Oil, offshore drilling rigs and stakes in Danish supermarket chains such as Netto to focus on moving goods end to end, through APM Terminals ports, the tug operator Svitzer until its demerger in early 2024, inland rail and an air cargo wing.

That reach exposed the company to shocks. In 2017 the NotPetya malware, which started in compromised Ukrainian tax software, wiped Maersk's domain controllers, froze terminals and cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Somali piracy cost an estimated $100 million a year, and Houthi attacks in the Red Sea forced the fleet around the Cape of Good Hope. Maersk emitted 37 million tons of CO2 in 2021, and DTU Aqua researchers found that its scrubbers moved heavy metals from the air into the sea. In 2023 it launched the Laura Maersk, the world's first methanol-powered container ship, with a goal of CO2 neutrality by 2040. Under Denmark's tonnage tax it paid about 0.6 percent on a 2021 profit of roughly $16 billion, and it lobbied successfully to keep shipping out of the OECD's 15 percent global minimum tax.

• In 2008 one Maersk ship was calculated to emit as much sulfur dioxide in a year as 50 million cars.
• Maersk signed a deal with China's Goldwind for half a million tons of wind-produced green methanol a year by 2026.
• It was the first shipping company to have its emissions targets validated by the Science Based Targets initiative.
• U.S. Merchant Marine Academy students known as Midshipmen X and Midshipmen Y sued over sexual abuse at sea, and Maersk suspended personnel and pledged policy changes.
• Mask Off Maersk protesters in Spain, Denmark and Morocco targeted military cargo to Israel; Maersk stopped shipping to Israeli settlements but, as of 2025, still carried F-35 parts.

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MTV went on the air on August 1, 1981, cutting from Apollo 11 moon landing footage to a mutating spray-painted logo and The Buggles singing "Video Killed the Radio Star." Warner Amex Satellite Entertainment hired the collective Manhattan Design, which built a heavy block letter M with graffiti TV letters and refused to fix any brand colors. To pressure cable operators into carrying the channel, adman George Lois adapted the 1950s "I want my Maypo" cereal slogan, and Mick Jagger, David Bowie, Pat Benatar and later Madonna looked into the camera and told fans to demand their MTV. The early album-oriented rock format nearly shut out Black artists: Rick James was furious when "Super Freak" was rejected, and in 1983 Bowie confronted VJ Mark Goodman on air about it. According to multiple accounts, CBS Records president Walter Yetnikoff threatened to pull his labels' music unless Michael Jackson was played, and "Billie Jean," "Beat It" and the 14-minute "Thriller" followed.

MTV then began making its own events: the first Video Music Awards in 1984 with Madonna in a wedding dress, 16 hours of live Live Aid coverage in 1985, Spring Break broadcasts from Daytona Beach starting in 1986, and the 1992 Choose or Lose campaign, which helped register a reported 20 million people and hosted a forum with Bill Clinton. Because record labels owned the videos, the network moved toward shows it owned. Beavis and Butt-Head was pushed to a later slot after a fire incident, MTV produced the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show for CBS that triggered FCC investigations, and Jersey Shore in 2009 drew cancellation demands from UNICO National while Dell and Domino's pulled ads. The logo dropped "Music Television" in 2010, and on December 31, 2025, Paramount ended MTV's dedicated music channels across Europe, Africa and Australia.

• The logo's fill changed constantly, from a brick wall to an apple with a snake wrapped around the letters TV.
• Carolyn B. Baker, MTV's original head of talent and acquisition, said the market research behind the rock format was rooted in ignorance.
• ABC aired only selected Live Aid highlights in prime time, while MTV cleared its whole schedule for the concerts.
• MTV later backed Rock the Vote and in 2020 was a principal founder of Vote Early Day.
• The last song played on the UK music feed before shutdown was the same Buggles video that launched the network 44 years earlier.

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MGM Resorts traces back to a regret. In 1970 Kirk Kerkorian, who had just bought the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film studio and an airline, was forced by debt to sell much of his first big casino to Hilton at a discount, and it became the Las Vegas Hilton, the city's most profitable hotel. Kerkorian used the studio's name to open the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas in 1973 and another in Reno in 1978; by 1979 they out-earned the studio, and in 1980 the casinos were split off. In 1986 he sold the buildings to Bally Manufacturing but kept the MGM Grand name in a new entity, Grand Name Co., later MGM Grand Inc., which tried MGM Grand Air, bid for Pan Am and flipped the Desert Inn and the Sands. The new MGM Grand Las Vegas opened in 1993 at a cost of $1 billion with a theme park that closed by 2002, and New York-New York followed in 1997 with Gary Primm.

MGM bought Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts in 2000 for $6.4 billion at $21 a share, adding the Bellagio, Mirage and Treasure Island, and Mandalay Resort Group for $7.9 billion in a deal closed in 2005, giving it over half the rooms on the Strip. Its Macau partnership with Pansy Ho led New Jersey regulators to force its 50 percent Borgata stake into a trust. The $8 billion CityCenter, backed by Dubai World's $2.4 billion stake and $2.7 billion in funding, met the 2008 crash, costing over $1 billion in write-offs and cutting Kerkorian's Tracinda from over 53 to 39 percent. Renamed MGM Resorts International in 2010, it spun its real estate into MGM Growth Properties in 2015 and 2016, leased back properties sold to firms like Blackstone, and launched BetMGM.

• MGM refused to pay hackers after a fall 2023 cyberattack disabled slot machines and room keys, and settled class actions for $45 million in June 2025.
• In April 2025 Nevada regulators fined MGM $8.5 million after former executive Scott Sibella let illegal bookmakers gamble at the MGM Grand and the Cosmopolitan.
• A 2023 Marriott deal plugged MGM properties into the Bonvoy loyalty program.
• MGM broke ground on MGM Osaka in 2025, aiming to open Japan's first integrated resort by 2030.
• In June 2026 Barry Diller's People Inc., which owned about 26 percent, offered to buy the rest, valuing MGM at over $18 billion.

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Allan Loughead and his brother Malcolm founded the Loughead Aircraft Manufacturing Company in 1912, flying sightseeing passengers in wooden seaplanes in California. After World War I the military dumped thousands of surplus planes for pennies, demand for new aircraft vanished, and by 1920 Allan was selling real estate and Malcolm hydraulic brakes. In 1926 they restarted with partners including Jack Northrop, spelling the name phonetically as Lockheed, and the Vega pushed sales past $1 million by 1928 at five planes a week. In 1929 majority shareholder Fred Keeler sold 87 percent to the Detroit Aircraft Corporation, Allan resigned, and when Detroit Aircraft went bankrupt in the Depression, Robert and Courtlandt Gross bought Lockheed out of receivership in 1932 for $40,000. Allan had raised $50,000 but never bid. Amelia Earhart flew a Lockheed Electra on her 1937 attempt to circle the globe.

In World War II Kelly Johnson's P-38 Lightning stayed in production from Pearl Harbor to VJ Day and was used to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto, while Lockheed and its subsidiaries built over 19,000 aircraft. Johnson's Skunk Works, named after the smelly former distillery where it started, produced the P-80, U-2, F-104, SR-71 and F-117. The C-5 Galaxy and the L-1011 TriStar, stalled by Rolls-Royce engine delays, drove Lockheed to seek a $250 million federal loan guarantee in 1971, approved after Vice President Spiro Agnew broke a Senate tie; Lockheed repaid it by 1977. Investigations then found $22 million in bribes paid in West Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan, chairman Daniel Haughton resigned, and Congress passed the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta in 1995.

• To hide the Burbank plant, Hollywood set designers stretched a painted tarp over it with fake streets, rubber cars and chicken-wire trees with feathers glued on.
• The P-38 shot down more Japanese aircraft than any other Army Air Forces type.
• Opponents of the bailout included Senator William Proxmire and Admiral Hyman Rickover, while Treasury Secretary John Connally testified that free enterprise is not all that free.
• Raider Harold Simmons bought nearly 20 percent of Lockheed, eyeing a pension surplus of more than $1.4 billion, and lost the proxy fight.
• Martin Marietta CEO Norman Augustine received an $8.2 million merger bonus partly subsidized by the government.

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Klarna started in 2005 as Kreditor, founded by Stockholm School of Economics students Sebastian Siemiatkowski, Niklas Adalberth and Victor Jacobsson in the school's incubator. Online shoppers then distrusted handing card numbers to unknown sites, and merchants feared stolen cards, so Kreditor let buyers receive goods first and pay later by invoice while it took on the fraud and credit risk. Angel investor Jane Walerud put in 600,000 Swedish kronor for 10 percent and connected the founders with developers who built the system in Erlang, a language Ericsson created for telephone switches and known for near-perfect uptime. The company renamed itself Klarna in 2009 and expanded to Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany and the Netherlands, buying Sofort for direct bank payments and Israel's Analyzd for passive behavioral biometrics, then entered the U.S. around 2015 with backing from Sequoia and General Atlantic.

A June 2021 round led by SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 valued Klarna at $46 billion, but as interest rates rose, a July 2022 raise valued it at $6.7 billion, an 85 percent drop. Klarna cut about 700 jobs in 2022, with the CEO publishing a list of affected staff on LinkedIn, and in 2024 an OpenAI-powered assistant handled two-thirds of customer chats in its first month, the work of 700 agents. Headcount fell from over 5,500 to about 2,900 by 2025. Klarna listed on the New York Stock Exchange as KLAR at $40 a share in September 2025, reporting $127.9 billion in gross merchandise volume and $3.5 billion in revenue, and has since applied for a Utah bank and announced the Klarna USD stablecoin.

• In December 2024 Sweden's Financial Supervisory Authority fined Klarna 500 million kronor over anti-money laundering deficiencies.
• A 2020 autofill bug and a 2021 app glitch exposed customer data, leading to a 7.5 million kronor privacy fine.
• The UK Advertising Standards Authority banned an Instagram influencer campaign linking deferred payments to lifting moods during COVID-19 lockdowns.
• The UK's Financial Conduct Authority will bring deferred payment credit under regulation by July 2026.
• Klarna sold its original checkout business in 2024 and partnered with Stripe, JP Morgan Payments and Apple device leasing.

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KKR began at Bear Stearns in the 1960s and 1970s, where senior corporate finance banker Jerome Kohlberg Jr. and his younger colleagues, cousins Henry Kravis and George Roberts, saw that postwar family businesses had founders nearing retirement, no successors, no path to an IPO and no wish to sell to rivals. Their answer was the bootstrap investment, now called the leveraged buyout: put down perhaps 10 percent in cash, borrow the rest against the target's own assets and cash flow, then pay down the debt from its earnings. When Bear Stearns chief Cy Lewis refused to back an in-house fund, the three left in 1976. They planned to call the firm Kohlberg Roberts Kravis, but a PR adviser said KRK sounded bad, so it became KKR.

The 1979 public-to-private buyout of Houdaille Industries failed in a downturn, and the company was broken apart while secured lenders were largely protected. In 1981 KKR persuaded the Oregon State Treasury's pension fund to invest in its Fred Meyer buyout, opening institutional capital that funded Wometco, its first billion-dollar deal, Beatrice Foods for over $6 billion and Safeway for $5.5 billion. Kohlberg, who preferred friendly mid-market deals, resigned in 1987 at 61. In 1988 KKR won RJR Nabisco with $109 a share against Shearson Lehman's $112, helped by a reset provision guaranteeing its bonds and by board anger at CEO F. Ross Johnson's management package. At over $31 billion it was the largest buyout for 17 years, and the debt kept KKR busy until 2004.

• KKR closed no major new investment in 1990 and injected almost $2 billion of fresh equity into RJR.
• After RJR, KKR shifted to roll-ups and club deals, buying Toys "R" Us with Bain Capital and Vornado and SunGard with six other firms.
• For the $44 billion TXU takeover in 2007, KKR worked with environmental groups and canceled planned coal plants.
• KKR listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010.
• Kravis and Roberts stepped down as co-CEOs in 2021.

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Intuit was founded in 1983 by Scott Cook, a former Procter & Gamble product analyst, and Tom Proulx, a Stanford programmer who coded the first Quicken in Microsoft BASIC for the IBM PC and UCSD Pascal for the Apple II. When Microsoft launched Microsoft Money in 1991, Cook used a packaged-goods tactic: a $15 rebate that brought shoppers into stores like Egghead and CompUSA and won Quicken front-of-store placement. Intuit went public on NASDAQ in 1993 and bought ChipSoft, maker of TurboTax. In 1994 Microsoft tried to buy Intuit for $2 billion, but the Justice Department sued to block it and Microsoft dropped the deal. Intuit then built out QuickBooks and TurboTax, bought Lacerte for $400 million in 1998 to reach large accounting firms, and later acquired Credit Karma for $7.1 billion in 2020 and Mailchimp for $12 billion in 2021.

Intuit joined the Free File Alliance, in which tax software firms offered free filing to lower-income taxpayers in exchange for an IRS promise not to build its own free pre-filled system. In 2019 ProPublica reported that Intuit had placed a noindex tag on the government-mandated TurboTax Free File page while steering users to the paid-upgrade TurboTax Free Edition. In 2022 Intuit agreed to a $141 million settlement with state attorneys general, and it left the alliance after the 2021 season. An FTC administrative judge ordered Intuit to stop its free advertising claims, but in March 2026 the Fifth Circuit vacated the order, ruling the FTC's in-house judge system unconstitutional for those penalties and requiring a federal jury trial.

• From 2009 to 2014 Intuit spent nearly $13 million on lobbying, matching Apple, and fought California's ReadyReturn pre-filled system.
• Intuit settled the high-tech employee no-poach antitrust case alongside Apple and Google.
• Intuit laid off 1,800 workers in July 2024 and 3,000 more, 17 percent, in May 2026 to focus on generative AI.
• It announced a $100 million partnership with OpenAI in 2025 and a multi-year deal with Anthropic in early 2026.
• In 2026 it opened 600 offices and 20 TurboTax storefronts pairing AI with human tax experts.

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Intel was incorporated in Mountain View, California, in 1968 by chemist Gordon Moore and physicist Robert Noyce, two of the Traitorous Eight who had left Fairchild Semiconductor, with investor Arthur Rock. They passed on the name Moore Noyce, which sounded like more noise, chose Integrated Electronics, and bought the Intel trademark from a hotel chain. Their target was memory: in 1970 the 1103 DRAM began replacing magnetic core memory, and by 1972 it was the world's best-selling semiconductor memory chip. Memory profits funded the 4004 microprocessor in 1971. When Japanese makers flooded the market with cheap memory in the early 1980s, Moore and Andy Grove, Intel's third employee, abandoned memory for microprocessors and ended second-sourcing, making Intel the sole source and backing that with multiple fabs.

IBM's 1981 PC used an Intel chip, and the clones from Compaq and others had to pay Intel's prices. The 1991 Intel Inside campaign paid PC makers' ad costs to carry the logo, and the 1994 Pentium FDIV division bug, after a slow initial response and then a no-questions replacement, made Pentium a household name. The hot NetBurst design let AMD gain share until the 2006 Core architecture and Apple's switch to Intel. But Intel passed on the original iPhone, ceded mobile to ARM, missed the GPU shift behind AI and delayed EUV lithography while TSMC went all in. Pat Gelsinger's 2021 IDM 2.0 plan for fabs in Ohio and Germany failed, and in 2024 Intel lost $16.6 billion and cut 15,000 jobs.

• Grove's book was titled Only the Paranoid Survive.
• Intel's chips paired with Microsoft Windows formed the Wintel alliance.
• In November 2024 Nvidia replaced Intel in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and weeks later Gelsinger was ousted.
• By early 2025 CEO Lip-Bu Tan began 24,000 more layoffs and the Ohio and Germany megafab projects were canceled.
• Intel now relies on a $3.5 billion military chip deal and a federal stake of nearly 10 percent.