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Blackstone began in 1985 when Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman left Lehman Brothers with $400,000 in seed capital. The name is a bilingual pun: schwarz is German for black, and petros is Greek for stone. The firm started in mergers and acquisitions advisory, working on the 1987 merger of E.F. Hutton and Shearson Lehman, then pivoted after the Black Monday crash of October 1987 to raising private equity funds, with Prudential Insurance and the General Motors pension fund among the early investors. It also partnered with Larry Fink on the venture that became BlackRock, then sold that stake to PNC Financial Services in 1995 for $240 million, a decision Schwarzman has publicly regretted.

The 2000s brought club deals: the $11.3 billion SunGard buyout in 2005, then the largest tech buyout ever, required a consortium of seven private equity firms, followed by Equity Office for $37.7 billion in 2006 and Hilton Hotels for $26 billion in July 2007. Weeks earlier Blackstone had gone public, selling a 12.3% stake for $4.13 billion, and that permanent capital funded a post-2008 buying spree of physical assets, from SeaWorld parent Busch Entertainment to the Willis Tower and Motel 6. It formed Link Logistics and paid $18.7 billion for GLP's U.S. warehouse portfolio in 2019, then moved into Ancestry.com, Bumble, data centers and music rights. In late 2022 its $125 billion real estate trust BREIT restricted withdrawals, and in July 2025 a gunman killed four people at its Park Avenue headquarters, including senior managing director Wesley LePatner.

• Blackstone advised on the Shearson Lehman and E.F. Hutton merger before it ever bought a company.
• Early real estate deals included the Days Inn and Super 8 hotel chains.
• Hilton was bought at a 25% premium to its all-time high stock price, months before the 2008 crash.
• The Spanx deal was run by an all-female Blackstone team that installed an all-female board.
• A 7% stake in oat milk brand Oatly triggered customer backlash and boycotts.

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BlackRock manages $15.3 trillion as of 2026, and its story begins with a loss. In the 1980s Larry Fink ran the fixed income division at First Boston and helped pioneer the mortgage-backed security, until falling interest rates in 1986 set off a wave of refinancing his models had not accounted for and his desk lost $90 million. Pushed out, Fink built a firm around enterprise risk management. In 1988 he and colleagues including Robert Kapito and Susan Wagner pitched Peter Peterson and Stephen Schwarzman at Blackstone, which provided a $5 million credit line in exchange for a 50% stake in what began as Blackstone Financial Management. Assets reached $2.7 billion by 1989. When Schwarzman refused to dilute Blackstone's stake to fund equity for new hires, the unit, by then called BlackRock, was sold to PNC Financial Services for $240 million, a sale Schwarzman later called a heroic mistake.

BlackRock went public in 1999 at $14 a share and built Aladdin, a risk platform that runs thousands of Monte Carlo simulations across a portfolio and is rented to other institutions through BlackRock Solutions. In 2008 the Fed and Treasury turned to the firm to value toxic assets, and it oversaw a $130 billion debt settlement tied to Bear Stearns and AIG. The $13.5 billion purchase of Barclays Global Investors in 2010 brought iShares and made BlackRock one of the big three of passive investing alongside Vanguard and State Street, raising questions about common ownership of competing companies. Fink's push into ESG drew fire from both sides: Florida, Louisiana and West Virginia pulled over $13.3 billion in state funds, while groups such as GreenFaith and Extinction Rebellion protested its fossil fuel holdings. Fink later dropped the term ESG.

• Aladdin stands for Asset, Liability and Debt and Derivative Investment Network.
• BlackRock bought State Street Research in 2004 and merged with Merrill Lynch Investment Managers in 2006.
• The government hired BlackRock again in 2020 for corporate bond buying and in 2023 to sell $114 billion in assets seized from Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.
• Recent moves include the $12.5 billion purchase of Global Infrastructure Partners and a spot Bitcoin ETF that drew $20 billion.
• Its Voting Choice program lets institutional clients cast their own proxy votes, and it launched an iShares Texas Equity ETF.

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In 1992 Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts bought the Dunes Hotel for about $75 million, demolished it along with a corner Denny's, and cleared a 77-acre site on the Las Vegas Strip. The 1994 plan was a French-themed resort called Beau Rivage around a 50-acre lake. After 10 months of design work, designer Jon Jerde visited Lake Como, Wynn followed, and on a boat ride with Paul Anka he saw the village of Bellagio, walked its streets for half a day and scrapped the French concept. Construction began in November 1995 with Marnell Corrao Associates, and the resort cost $1.6 billion, then the most expensive hotel in the world. To build its 8.5-acre lake despite a 1990 Clark County water ordinance, engineers showed it would use less water than the old Dunes golf course, and the ordinance was modified in February 1994.

Bellagio opened October 15, 1998, drew 80,000 visitors on day one, and charged about $200 a night against a Strip average near $81. Its $260 million cash flow in 1999 fell short of Wynn's $300 million forecast, and in May 2000 MGM Grand, run by Kirk Kerkorian, acquired Mirage Resorts as Wynn stepped away. By 2003 less than half of revenue came from the casino, and by 2004 Bellagio was the most profitable hotel casino in Las Vegas. In 2019 MGM sold the property to Blackstone for $4.25 billion and leased it back for $245 million a year.

• Developers paid nearly $10,000 each for mature Japanese privets from Ventura County, California, and reused about 300 pines from the Dunes golf course.
• Elaine Wynn chose Dale Chihuly's 2,000-square-foot Fiori di Como glass ceiling after seeing his glass art at the bottom of his lap pool.
• The fountains shoot water 460 feet high and had performed over 240,000 shows by 2018.
• Cirque du Soleil's O plays in a $100 million theater built around a 1.5 million gallon pool with hydraulic lifts.
• A power line failure in April 2004 blacked out the resort for three days, and Bobby's Room, with a $20,000 minimum buy-in, became the Legends Room in 2020.

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Lawrence Dale Bell founded Bell Aircraft Corporation in Buffalo, New York in July 1935, building the XFM-1 Airacuda, the P-39 Airacobra, the P-59 Airacomet, America's first jet fighter, and the X-1 that Chuck Yeager flew past the sound barrier. To escape the feast or famine cycle of military contracts, Bell in 1941 hired inventor Arthur M. Young, who had built tethered helicopter models in a Pennsylvania barn, to lead a helicopter division aimed at civilian buyers. Young's stabilizer bar tamed rotor vibration, the Bell 30 first flew in December 1942, and the Bell 47 became the first helicopter certified by a civil aviation authority. Its bubble-canopy design is in the Museum of Modern Art.

The helicopter division moved to Hurst, Texas in 1951, and after Textron bought Bell Aerospace in 1960 it became Bell Helicopter Company. Vietnam-era demand for the UH-1 Iroquois, or Huey, and the AH-1 Cobra made it Textron's largest division, and that military money also funded commercial work. A Mirabel, Quebec plant opened in 1983 and delivered its 5,000th commercial helicopter in December 2017. To beat retreating blade stall, which caps helicopter speed, Bell developed tiltrotors from the XV-3 and XV-15 to the V-22 Osprey with Boeing and the V-280 Valor. In February 2018 it dropped Helicopter from its name and became simply Bell.

• Fort Worth and Amarillo, Texas handle military programs, while Mirabel builds the 407, 412 and 505.
• Bell worked with AgustaWestland on commercial models including the AW139 and AW609.
• The Bell 47 weighed about 2,950 pounds at takeoff, while the Bell 525 Relentless reaches 20,500 pounds.
• The X-Works rapid prototyping center cuts tooling work that once took years down to weeks.
• The Bell Nexus hybrid electric air taxi uses six tilting ducted fans, and Bell is working on DARPA's X-76 SPRINT.

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BAE Systems descends from A.V. Roe, de Havilland, Supermarine, maker of the Spitfire, and Vickers, which built the Royal Navy's first submarines. After the Cold War, US mergers such as Boeing and McDonnell Douglas in 1997 left European firms outmatched, and British Aerospace held talks with Germany's DASA. In November 1999 it walked away and instead bought Marconi Electronic Systems, GEC's defense electronics arm, for 7.7 billion pounds, combining aircraft with the radars and avionics inside them and creating BAE Systems. DASA went on to merge with Aerospatiale to form EADS, later Airbus. BAE then bought United Defense, maker of the M2 Bradley, in 2005, Armor Holdings in 2007 and Ball Aerospace for $5.6 billion in 2024.

BAE Systems Inc. now sells more to the US Department of Defense than the parent sells to the UK Ministry of Defence, operating under Special Security Arrangements with a board of cleared US citizens. The UK Serious Fraud Office investigated alleged bribery in several countries, but in December 2006 dropped the Al-Yamamah inquiry, citing national security after reported Saudi pressure. The US Justice Department pursued the case, and in 2010 BAE pleaded guilty to felony conspiracy to defraud the US government, paying a $400 million fine plus 30 million pounds in the UK. During the Yemen war it sold Saudi Arabia weapons worth 17.6 billion pounds, with about 6,300 British contractors at Saudi bases.

• As of 2017, 98 percent of BAE's sales were military, including the Eurofighter Typhoon and about 15 percent of each F-35's value.
• It builds Astute and Dreadnought class submarines and Type 45 destroyers, and partners with Italy and Japan on the GCAP Tempest fighter.
• A 2020 munitions deal worth 2.4 billion pounds over 20 years and a 2023 order of 280 million pounds followed ammunition demand tied to Ukraine.
• Lord Woolf's independent review found BAE had not paid sufficient attention to ethical standards and made 23 recommendations.
• BAE stopped making cluster bombs after the 2008 Oslo Convention, and in 2019 NGOs asked the International Criminal Court to examine arms executives over Yemen.

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Arm was founded in 1990 as a joint venture of Acorn Computers, VLSI Technology and Apple. Apple needed a low-power processor for its Newton handheld and invested $3 million, with executive Larry Tesler helping recruit CEO Robin Saxby. Acorn contributed 12 engineers and its Acorn RISC Machine design, and VLSI supplied chip design tools. Apple refused to have a competitor's name on its processor, so Acorn RISC Machine became Advanced RISC Machines. Arm makes no chips: it designs architectures and instruction sets and licenses them, from Cortex-A for phones and Cortex-M for microcontrollers to Neoverse for cloud servers, offering either core licenses or architectural licenses like Apple's.

The reduced instruction set approach uses simpler circuits that draw less power and make less heat, which carried Arm into PDAs, iPods, iPads, nearly all smartphones, Apple's M-series Macs and supercomputers such as Japan's Fugaku and Europe's JUPITER. SoftBank bought Arm in 2016 for 24.3 billion pounds and in 2020 agreed to sell it to Nvidia for $40 billion, but opposition from Google, Microsoft, Qualcomm and regulators in the UK, EU and US ended the deal in February 2022. SoftBank then listed Arm on the Nasdaq in September 2023 at a $54.5 billion valuation.

• Around 2023 Arm moved toward charging royalties on the value of the whole device rather than the chip.
• In 2018 SoftBank sold a majority of Arm China to a consortium of Chinese investors.
• When the board voted to fire Arm China CEO Allen Wu in 2020, he kept control because he held the physical company seal.
• Filings ousted Wu in April 2022, and in 2023 former Arm China staff formed rival startup Borui Jingxin.
• Cadence bought Arm's Artisan physical IP unit in 2025, and 2026 reports said Arm sought to acquire Cerebras.

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Work on Apple Pay began in January 2013, when Apple brought Visa, Mastercard and American Express into a joint effort under heavy secrecy. JPMorgan set up a windowless war room where only about 100 of 300 staff knew the partner was Apple, and Visa had 750 people working on anonymized tokens for a year. Tim Cook unveiled Apple Pay on September 9, 2014 at the iPhone 6 event, calling the magnetic stripe broken. The system replaces the card's Funding Primary Account Number with a Device Primary Account Number stored in the phone's Embedded Secure Element, generates a one-time cryptogram for each payment over short-range NFC, and keeps Apple out of the transaction data.

Biometric verification through Touch ID, Face ID or a passcode lets Apple Pay bypass contactless limits such as 100 pounds in the UK. Consumers registered one million cards in three days, but Rite Aid and CVS disabled their NFC readers to back CurrentC, a QR code system from the Merchant Customer Exchange, whose members included Walmart and Best Buy, built to avoid card swipe fees. Rite Aid reversed course in August 2015 and Walmart began rolling out Apple Pay in August 2026. Apple takes 0.15 percent of US purchases, and in 2024 the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit while the European Commission probed Apple's control of the iPhone's NFC chip.

• Transport for London became the UK's most used Apple Pay merchant.
• Apple adapted its hardware for Japan's Suica cards on FeliCa, which completes a tap in about 0.1 seconds.
• Apple's cut in Europe is smaller because EU rules cap credit card interchange fees at 0.3 percent, and Swiss banks pay a quarterly fee per card.
• Apple Cash, which offers peer-to-peer payments in iMessage, has been moving from Discover to Visa.
• Affinity Credit Union filed a class action arguing Apple limits users' choice of non-Apple payment options.

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Apollo Global Management was founded in 1990 after the collapse of Drexel Burnham Lambert by Drexel's former head of mergers and acquisitions, Leon Black, with Josh Harris, Marc Rowan and Tony Ressler. With buyout financing frozen, they raised about $400 million and pioneered a distressed-to-control strategy: buying the cheap debt of struggling companies and converting it into controlling equity during bankruptcy or restructuring. An early win was the bond portfolio of failed insurer Executive Life, which drew scrutiny from California regulators. In the 2005 to 2007 boom Apollo bought real estate franchisor Realogy for $8.5 billion and, with TPG, Harrah's Entertainment for $27.4 billion.

The 2008 crisis wiped out Apollo's $365 million investment in Linens 'n Things, and Realogy's debt restructuring drew lawsuits from Carl Icahn. Apollo went public in 2011, bought Chuck E. Cheese, ADT for $6.9 billion and Rackspace, and merged with annuity provider Athene in an $11 billion deal that gave it permanent capital. In 2021 Black stepped down after revelations that he had paid Jeffrey Epstein $158 million, and Marc Rowan became CEO. A late 2025 Senate Finance Committee inquiry led by Ron Wyden and a 2026 DOJ Epstein files repository naming Rowan and Scott Kleinman kept scrutiny on the firm.

• At Claire's Stores, Apollo used a PIK toggle that let it pay bondholders in more debt instead of cash.
• Apollo bid on Hostess and bought media assets from Cox Enterprises and textbook publisher McGraw-Hill.
• Teachers' unions called for an SEC investigation as the Epstein-related scrutiny continued.
• Under Rowan, Apollo bought 90 percent of Yahoo and took a 49 percent stake in a $14.2 billion Intel factory venture.
• It took over easyJet for 5.7 billion pounds and bought 55 percent of football club Atlético Madrid.

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Allstate began as a name for Sears car tires. A 1925 contest drew over 2.2 million entries from nearly a million people, and Hans Simonsen of Bismarck, North Dakota won $5,000 for suggesting Allstate, which appeared on tires in 1927. In 1931 insurance broker Carl L. Odell pitched his neighbor, Sears executive Robert E. Wood, on selling auto insurance by mail, and Allstate Insurance Company opened that year. In 1941 only about a quarter of US drivers carried liability insurance, but after New York passed a financial responsibility law, nearly every state had one by the mid-1950s. In 1950 sales manager Davis W. Ellis reassured his anxious wife about their sick child with words that became the slogan You're in good hands with Allstate.

Allstate went public in 1993 in what was then the largest IPO in history, and Sears spun off the rest in 1995. It bought CNA's personal lines, renamed Encompass, Esurance, SquareTrade and National General. Trailing GEICO, State Farm and Progressive in ad spending, it added Dennis Haysbert in 2003 and Leo Burnett's Mayhem, played by Dean Winters, in 2010. In 2008 the American Association for Justice ranked Allstate the worst insurer, citing a McKinsey-era boxing gloves strategy, which Allstate called recycled, meritless allegations. In 2010 it agreed to a $10 million multistate settlement over its Colossus claims software, and New York's superintendent said regulators found no systemic underpayment.

• In the early 1950s Sears sold a rebranded Kaiser Henry J compact car through the catalog, pulling it by 1953.
• Theodore Conterio won $50 in an employee contest for designing the cupped hands logo.
• A 2000 Northwestern University study ranked the good hands slogan the most recognizable in America.
• After a run of hurricanes in 2006, Allstate moved to not renew 120,000 Florida policies.
• In 2025 its chief information officer said generative AI wrote more empathetic claims emails than staff, and the PR team asked Futurism to remove its post.

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Alipay began in 2004 as a payment tool for Taobao, the e-commerce site Jack Ma's Alibaba Group launched while fighting eBay for the Chinese market. Without widespread credit card protections, buyers did not trust strangers online, so Alipay held each payment in escrow until the buyer confirmed receipt, a step that helped Taobao outcompete eBay in China. When the People's Bank of China issued payment licensing rules around 2010 with stricter terms for foreign-funded firms, Ma moved Alipay out of Alibaba, which was partly owned by Yahoo and SoftBank, into a domestic company under his control. A 2011 settlement gave Alibaba royalties and a payout capped at $6 billion if Alipay went public.

In 2013 Alipay launched Yu'e Bao, or leftover treasure, a money market fund for idle balances that by mid-2016 had 152 million users and $117 billion. The parent became Ant Financial Services Group in 2015, and Alipay grew into a super app for bills, transit, meals and ride-hailing, past 1.3 billion users and over 55 percent of China's mobile payments by 2020. Regulators then required an anti-monopoly review above 50 percent share, routed clearing through the state-overseen NetsUnion, forced Ant in 2021 to separate its Huabei and Jiebei lending businesses, and made its QR codes work with WeChat Pay and UnionPay.

• A 2019 face-scanning payment feature applied a beauty filter to the customer's image on screen.
• During COVID-19 in 2020, Alipay assigned red, yellow or green health codes that controlled entry to places like grocery stores.
• Partnerships reached First Data's four million US merchants, 3,000 Walgreens stores, Seoul taxis and Air Canada bookings.
• Ant took stakes in bKash in Bangladesh, GCash in the Philippines and 2C2P in Singapore, and launched Tour Pass for foreign visitors in 2019.
• India banned the app in 2020 amid border skirmishes, and China's Personal Information Protection Law led to new data-tracking features.