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Charles R. Schwab started in 1963 with partners publishing the Investment Indicator, a newsletter that cost $84 a year and peaked at about 3,000 subscribers. The business incorporated as First Commander Corporation in 1971 and became Charles Schwab & Co. by 1973. On May 1, 1975, the SEC abolished fixed brokerage commissions, and Schwab opened a Sacramento branch as a discount broker. In 1979 he spent half a million dollars on BETA, an in-house back office computer system, and accounts grew from about 45,000 in 1978 to 374,000 by 1982 with 24-hour order entry and quotes. He sold the firm to Bank of America in 1983 for $55 million, then bought it back in 1987 for $280 million after launching a no-load mutual fund marketplace.

Schwab launched web trading in 1996 and shared the CEO job with David Pottruck from 1998 to 2003. Under Pottruck's sole control, fees rose, and in the second quarter of 2004 profit fell 10 percent to $113 million while trading revenue dropped 26 percent. The board fired Pottruck in July 2004 and Schwab returned, saying the firm had lost touch with its heritage; shares rose 151 percent by 2008. That year the Schwab YieldPlus Fund, heavy in mortgage-backed securities, returned negative 31.7 percent and cost investors $1.1 billion, and Schwab handed the CEO role to Walter Bettinger. Later deals included optionsXpress, Thomas Partners, TD Ameritrade and USAA's investment accounts, and client assets reached $10.10 trillion by late 2024.

• BETA stood for Brokerage Execution and Transaction Analysis.
• A 1984 program offered 140 mutual funds with no upfront sales charge, paid for by fund companies.
• Digital agency Razorfish built out the Schwab website.
• Schwab personally lost money in YieldPlus alongside his customers, and the fund closed in 2011.
• In 2022 the SEC fined Schwab $187 million for misleading robo-advisor clients about cash drag from 2015 to 2018.

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Cash App launched in October 2013 as Square Cash, created by Jack Dorsey and Brian Grassadonia at Square, now Block. It did one thing: let people send up to $2,500 a week to each other by email or text using a linked debit card, without routing numbers or three-day holds. In 2015 it opened to businesses and introduced the $cashtag, a public username for receiving money. From 2016 to 2021 it added a customizable Cash Card, Bitcoin trading in 2018, free fractional stock trading in 2019, tax filing after buying Credit Karma Tax for $50 million in 2020, and accounts for teens 13 and up in 2021. In 2024 it had 57 million monthly active users, over $280 billion in annual inflows and $16.25 billion in revenue.

Revenue comes from instant transfer fees of 0.5 to 1.75 percent, $2 ATM fees without direct deposit, a 2.75 percent business fee, Bitcoin spreads and interest on deposits, plus a 4.5 percent savings yield tied to $300 monthly direct deposits. Its four-week loans of $20 to $200 carry a flat 5 percent fee, over 65 percent annualized. A 2022 Pew Research Center report found 26 percent of U.S. adults had used it, and it became the preferred payment app for lower-income adults. Scams flourished because payments are hard to reverse. Block settled a $15 million class action over 2021 and 2023 data breaches in August 2024 and agreed in January 2025 to an $80 million fine to 48 state regulators over anti-money laundering policies, and it exited Europe, dropped Australia and left the UK in late 2024.

• Cash App has been mentioned in over 200 hip hop songs and partnered with Travis Scott, Megan Thee Stallion and Cardi B.
• Weekly Cash App Friday giveaways on Twitter pay out $10,000 to $50,000.
• By 2018 it had passed Venmo with 33.5 million cumulative downloads.
• One man lost $24,000 to scammers posing as Cash App support, and another used a viral Waffle House video to collect donations.
• A multi-day outage in September 2023 left users unable to pay or use their Cash Cards.

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Before 1987, credit card issuers charged nearly every customer the same interest rate and annual fee. Richard Fairbank and Nigel Morris set out to use demographic data and mathematical models to price each customer's risk, and consulted with Oracle on building the data systems before pitching banks, which mostly rejected them. In 1988 Signet Bank of Richmond, Virginia took them in. Their 1991 balance transfer campaign targeted reliable payers carrying debt at other banks with lower custom rates, and it worked so well that Signet spun the card unit off in 1994, briefly as OakStone Financial, then as Capital One, with Fairbank as CEO and Morris as COO.

As a monoline card issuer, Capital One diversified into secured cards and auto loans, expanded to Canada and the UK, and bought deposit-rich banks: Hibernia National Bank in 2005 for nearly $5 billion and North Fork Bank in 2006 for over $13 billion. North Fork's GreenPoint Mortgage unit was shut in August 2007 with almost 2,000 jobs lost, and the company took $3.56 billion in TARP funds, repaying them by the following June. Later deals included Chevy Chase Bank, ING Direct for $9 billion, HSBC's U.S. card business, Discover in May 2025 and Brex in 2026. The 2019 breach exposed data on 106 million people, and in April 2026 a judge approved a $425 million settlement over legacy 360 savings rates.

• The 2012 $210 million penalty was the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's first public enforcement action.
• 2014 terms of use claimed the right to modify caller ID and to visit customers' homes and workplaces.
• The breach came through a misconfigured Capital One web application exploited with server-side request forgery, and disclosure was delayed 12 days.
• Marketing totaling $13 billion featured Alec Baldwin, Jennifer Garner and DragonForce, and the Capital One Arena naming rights.
• In March 2021 the bank closed about 300 accounts tied to Donald Trump, and a judge dismissed the resulting suit in March 2026.

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When Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld launched the Cable News Network on June 1, 1980, it was the first 24-hour all-news channel in the U.S., and broadcast executives mocked the idea. The first broadcast was anchored by husband and wife David Walker and Lois Hart, and Bernard Shaw was among the first anchors hired. Time Warner acquired CNN in 1996, and as of 2026 it is owned by Skydance. Running around the clock meant paying for producers, satellite trucks and correspondents on days when little happened, so the schedule settled into rolling daytime news blocks and cheaper personality-driven evening shows such as Anderson Cooper 360. Under Jeff Zucker it added Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown and Tom Hanks-produced decade series.

CNN.com launched in 1995 and CNN Digital became the most viewed U.S. digital news outlet in 2021 with 144 million unique visitors, but experiments came and went, including CNN Pipeline, the Beam app bought from Casey Neistat for a reported $25 million, a VR unit, Great Big Story and CNN+. U.S. subscribers fell from about 80 million in March 2021 to 68.9 million by December 2023, and the network slid from seventh among basic cable channels in 2019 to 21st by 2022. A study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of guest airtime from 2010 to 2021 found a liberal bias that grew during the Trump administration. CNN settled with Nick Sandmann in 2020, fired Chris Cuomo and let Don Lemon go, and faced staff complaints over its Gaza war coverage.

• A 2008 redesign introduced dark flat graphics and a static flipper in place of a scrolling ticker.
• CNN introduced its own typeface, CNN Sans, in 2016.
• Rounded on-screen graphics tried for the 43rd anniversary in 2023 drew backlash and were largely reversed.
• Chris Cuomo reportedly sought $125 million after his firing.
• CNN teams uncovered modern-day slave auctions in Libya and reported from Wuhan at the onset of the pandemic.

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CMA CGM, headquartered in Marseille, is the world's third largest container shipping company, with $55.48 billion in 2024 revenue, 160,000 employees and 593 vessels that call at 420 of the world's 521 commercial ports. One half of its history begins in the 1850s with two state-backed French lines built on government mail contracts, Messageries Maritimes and Compagnie Generale Maritime, merged in the 1970s under President Valery Giscard d'Estaing into the state-owned CGM. The other half begins in 1978, when Jacques Saade founded CMA as a small Mediterranean liner service that embraced containerization. In 1996 the French government privatized CGM and the startup CMA bought it.

Acquisitions followed: Australian National Line in 1998, Delmas in 2005 for 600 million euros, Singapore's NOL and its APL line in 2016 for $2.4 billion, and CEVA Logistics in 2019 for $1.65 billion, plus an air cargo arm in 2021 and a $10 billion venture with Stonepeak for U.S. port terminals. The CMA CGM Benjamin Franklin was the largest ship to call at a U.S. port when it reached Los Angeles in late 2015, and the flagship Jacques Saade carries over 23,000 TEUs, with new ships built for LNG, biogas and methanol. Between 2009 and 2011 its vessels were repeatedly caught carrying hidden weapons, and the company said it was the victim of fraudulent cargo declarations before suspending Iranian export operations in November 2011. The Saade family owns 73 percent, and Rodolphe Saade, chairman and CEO, has bought media outlets including La Provence and La Tribune.

• In November 2009 South Africa found T-54 and T-55 tank parts under rice sacks in containers from North Korea declared as bulldozer parts.
• In October 2010 Nigeria seized 13 containers from Bandar Abbas, labeled glass wool and stone, holding 107 mm rockets and ammunition.
• In 2018 the CMA CGM Washington lost 137 containers overboard in a North Pacific storm.
• Somali pirates hijacked the company's luxury ship Le Ponant in 2008.
• CMA CGM is the main sponsor of Olympique de Marseille and co-title sponsor of the Decathlon cycling team.

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A collateralized debt obligation is a special purpose vehicle that buys a pool of loans and sells the cash flows in tranches, from senior AAA slices that are paid first down to an equity tranche that absorbs the first losses. Its roots run to 1970, when Ginnie Mae created the first mortgage-backed security, and to 1977, when Lewis Ranieri and Larry Fink at Salomon Brothers began pooling private mortgages without a government guarantee. Drexel Burnham Lambert issued the first CDOs from a private bank in 1987, and through the 1990s they were multi-sector products mixing aircraft leases, manufactured housing, student loans and credit card debt. In the early 2000s about $70 trillion in global savings went hunting for yield, and in 2001 statistician David Li introduced the Gaussian copula model, which reduced the default correlation of thousands of loans to a single number.

By 2004 more than half of CDO collateral was mortgage-backed securities, much of it subprime. Banks bundled hard-to-sell BBB mezzanine slices into new CDOs, and rating agencies stamped 70 to 80 percent of them AAA on the assumption that regional housing markets would not fall together. Synthetic CDOs, built from credit default swaps rather than actual mortgages, let many bets reference the same pool and multiplied losses. Housing peaked in summer 2006, teaser rates reset, mass downgrades came in July 2007, two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed, and the chief executives of Merrill Lynch and Citigroup resigned. By late 2008, 91 percent of CDO securities had been downgraded, and CDOs accounted for over half of nearly $1 trillion in financial institution losses from 2007 to early 2009.

• Warren Buffett called these instruments financial weapons of mass destruction.
• A rating agency could earn up to $250,000 to rate a CDO pool versus about $50,000 for a municipal bond, and Moody's operating margins topped 50 percent.
• A Bakersfield strawberry picker earning $14,000 a year who spoke no English received a $724,000 home loan.
• Laws such as the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and Community Reinvestment Act formed part of the backdrop of 1970s mortgage securitization.
• A newer structure, the collateralized compute obligation, is backed by AI data center securities.

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CBS began in Chicago in January 1927, when talent agent Arthur Judson founded United Independent Broadcasters. Short of cash by April, it took an investment from the Columbia Phonograph Company and became the Columbia Phonographic Broadcasting System. In 1928 investors installed William S. Paley as president, and he shortened the name to the Columbia Broadcasting System. Paramount Pictures bought 49% in 1929, but Depression losses forced it to sell the shares back in 1932, leaving CBS largely independent for 63 years and free to move into television. The Tiffany Network nickname is literal: early color demonstrations in 1950 were held in the former Tiffany & Company building in New York.

CBS built the longest daytime schedule of the major networks and kept game shows alive, with The Price Is Right passing from Bob Barker to Drew Carey in 2007. Its 1957 live Cinderella with Julie Andrews drew over 100 million viewers. The Eye logo, designed by William Golden with George Olden and inspired by Pennsylvania Dutch hex signs and Shaker art, debuted October 20, 1951, and Frank Stanton refused to replace it. Ownership passed through Westinghouse in 1994, Viacom, Paramount Global and Skydance. CBS All Access, launched in October 2014, was the first streaming service from a U.S. broadcast network and became Paramount+ in 2021. The timeline also includes the 2004 Super Bowl halftime fines, the Killian documents controversy and Dan Rather's exit, and Les Moonves's 2018 resignation amid harassment allegations.

• Bob Barker quit hosting Miss USA in 1987 because the pageant would not stop giving fur coats as prizes.
• Captain Kangaroo ran every weekday morning from 1955 to 1982.
• CBS later outsourced Saturday mornings to Nelvana, Nickelodeon, DIC and Litton Entertainment.
• Converting the network to high definition took 14 years, from a 1998 NFL game to Big Brother in 2014.
• CBS dropped the slogan America's Most Watched Network and added a five-note sonic logo.

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The M26 Pershing grew out of T20 series prototypes begun in 1942 to fix the Sherman's tall layout, which came from a radial aircraft engine in the rear driving a front sprocket through a shaft under the turret. Engineers adopted the Ford GAN V8, cut down from a failed V12 aircraft engine, and moved the transmission to the rear. A General Electric diesel-electric version, the T23, ran to more than 250 prototypes but never saw combat. The bigger obstacle was General Lesley McNair of Army Ground Forces, whose tank destroyer doctrine held that tanks should not fight tanks. General Jacob Devers went around him to George Marshall to authorize 250 T26 tanks in late 1943, but deployment waited until the Battle of the Bulge, when Panthers and Tiger IIs devastated American armor.

In early 1945 Major General Gladeon Barnes led the Zebra Mission, taking 20 T26E3s to Europe. At Elsdorf a Tiger ambushed the Pershing Fireball from 100 yards, killing its gunner and loader, yet it was repaired within days. On March 6, 1945, near Cologne Cathedral, the Pershing Eagle 7 with gunner Corporal Clarence Smoyer knocked out a Panther in a duel filmed by a Signal Corps cameraman. Five years later, Pershings pulled from storage and display stands overmatched North Korean T-34-85s, but their engines overheated on Korean hills, and the tank was rebuilt into the M46 Patton.

• Torsion bar suspension kept the hull steady enough for Smoyer to fire on the move.
• The single T26E4 Super Pershing carried a 90 mm gun 73 calibers long, more than 21 feet.
• Crews welded plate from a destroyed Panther onto its turret, adding about five tons.
• At Remagen the 42-ton tanks were too heavy for the Ludendorff Bridge and waited five days for barges.
• At Chinju a platoon of three overheated Pershings had to be destroyed by their crews with thermite grenades.

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The Chieftain was Britain's main battle tank from the 1960s into the 1990s, built to replace both the Centurion and the heavy Conqueror after the Soviet IS-3 and T-54 showed that Centurions could not reliably penetrate new Soviet armor. Designers angled a 195 mm glacis plate at 72 degrees for an effective thickness of about 388 mm, laid the driver in a reclining position to lower the hull, and cast a mantletless turret up to 280 mm thick for hull-down fighting. The 120 mm L11 rifled gun used bagged charges stored in water-glycol wet stowage bins. At 55 tons, though, the tank depended on the Leyland L60, an opposed-piston two-stroke engine chosen to meet a 1957 NATO mandate that new tanks run on multiple fuels.

Early L60s in West Germany suffered an estimated 90% breakdown rate, with cylinder liners shaking loose and coolant leaking into combustion chambers, and early marks produced barely 450 horsepower. Winston Churchill, grandson of the wartime prime minister, told the Commons that most Chieftains failed before 1,000 miles. Iran under the Shah bought hundreds, and at Dezful in 1981 they bogged down in mud while Iraqi sabot rounds punched through their front armor. In August 1990 Kuwait's 35th Armored Brigade, with 37 Chieftains in hull-down positions, stalled two Iraqi divisions at the Battle of the Bridges until its ammunition ran out.

• Crews joked the Chieftain was highly effective, provided it broke down in a useful location.
• Modification programs, including one code-named Sundance, tried to push L60 output closer to 750 horsepower.
• Two prototypes went to Israel for desert trials in the late 1960s, and the experience shaped the later Merkava.
• An Iraqi general offered more Chieftains by a British contractor called them stupid tanks.
• Kuwaiti crews spiked their guns and walked into Saudi Arabia after firing their last rounds.

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In late 1996 former Navy SEAL Erik Prince and co-founder Al Clark started Blackwater, inspired by the way FedEx had disrupted the postal service. Prince bought about 7,000 acres in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, enough to keep stray bullets on the property, and named the company for the peat-colored water. The $6.5 million training facility opened in 1998 with artificial lakes, driving tracks and shooting ranges, but police departments had little budget to travel there, and a sister company selling shooting targets kept it afloat. After 2001 the market arrived: a CIA contract in 2002 to secure its Kabul station, then a $21 million contract in 2003 to guard Paul Bremer, head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. By 2004 Blackwater was handling diplomatic security for the State Department and eventually passed a billion dollars in government contracts.

In March 2004 four Blackwater contractors were killed in Fallujah, triggering a major U.S. offensive, and a month later in Najaf its helicopters flew in under fire to resupply a besieged compound and rescue a wounded Marine. Bremer's Order 17 had granted contractors immunity from Iraqi law. In September 2007 Blackwater guards escorting a State Department convoy opened fire in Baghdad's Nisour Square, killing 17 Iraqi civilians and injuring 20. Prince defended his men before Congress, and the company hired public relations firms. It became Xe Services in 2009, was sold to investors in 2010, renamed Academi in 2011 and merged into Constellis in 2014. The convicted guards received a presidential pardon in 2020.

• Blackwater was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per day to protect facilities in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
• In 2006 a drunk off-duty contractor killed a guard for the Iraqi vice president and was fired and flown home.
• In 2007 a Blackwater manager threatened the life of a State Department investigator reviewing the company.
• The Iraqi government moved to revoke Blackwater's license after Nisour Square.
• Anger over the shooting contributed to Iraq's refusal to let U.S. troops stay beyond 2011.