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Aluminum is the most abundant metal in Earth's crust, but its tight bond with oxygen in bauxite resisted fire smelting, and in the 19th century Napoleon III served honored guests with aluminum utensils while others got gold. In 1886 Oberlin College graduate Charles Martin Hall, and independently Frenchman Paul Héroult, found that running electric current through alumina dissolved in molten cryolite released pure aluminum. In 1888 Hall joined metallurgist Alfred E. Hunt and Arthur Vining Davis to form the Pittsburgh Reduction Company, made its first commercial pour on Thanksgiving Day 1888, and opened a hydropower site at Niagara Falls in 1895. Hunt died after contracting malaria in the Spanish-American War, and Davis led the company, renamed the Aluminum Company of America in 1907.

After World War I Alcoa acquired the duralumin patent, supplying the Navy dirigible Shenandoah, and in both World Wars 90 percent of US aluminum went to the military. The Justice Department filed a monopolization suit in 1938. Alcoa sponsored The Alcoa Hour, Alcoa Premiere with Fred Astaire and Edward R. Murrow's See It Now, bought Reynolds Metals, and split in 2016 into Alcoa Corporation and Arconic. It has faced the York Oil Superfund cleanup order, a Rockdale, Texas settlement of about $330 million in pollution controls, and an early 2026 fine of about $39 million for clearing Western Australia's jarrah forests without approvals.

• Aluminum's price fell from nearly $5 a pound to pennies once the Hall-Héroult process scaled up.
• In 1942 a German U-boat sank the SS Alcoa Puritan while it carried bauxite from the Caribbean.
• Every ton of alumina produced leaves roughly a ton and a half of caustic red mud.
• In 2014 Alcoa paid $384 million to settle SEC and Justice Department charges tied to bribing officials in Bahrain.
• An October 2025 deal with the US and Australian governments and Japan's Sojitz targets gallium at the Wagerup refinery, up to 10 percent of world supply.

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Affirm was founded in 2012 out of the HVF startup studio, led by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, who became CEO, with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz and Alex Rampel. Its premise was an anti-credit card: unsecured installment loans at checkout with no late fees and no compound interest, so the interest agreed at purchase is the most a customer will owe. To make that work, Affirm used machine learning on real-time context, such as the time of day of a purchase, to judge risk and fraud, and reported higher approval rates than legacy lenders. By 2016 merchants on Shopify, Magento and BigCommerce could switch on Affirm at checkout, followed by deals with Walmart in 2019, Amazon, Target and Apple.

Affirm earns consumer APRs from zero to 36 percent and merchant commissions of up to 12.5 percent, which retailers pay because installment options cut cart abandonment and raise order values. Its January 2021 IPO raised $1.2 billion. Rising rates from 2022 made its securitized loan bundles costlier to sell, and in early 2023 it cut 19 percent of staff and closed its crypto unit. The CFPB opened inquiries into buy now, pay later lending and in May 2024 applied Truth in Lending Act rules to the sector. In 2026 Levchin applied in Nevada for an industrial loan company charter to form Affirm Bank.

• In 2023 Affirm partnered with FICO on a credit scoring model built for installment loans.
• Apple shut down its own pay-later service after about a year and embedded Affirm in Apple Pay.
• In early 2025 Affirm lost its exclusive Walmart checkout spot to Klarna.
• The Affirm Card lets users convert purchases between $100 and $1,000 into installment loans within 24 hours.
• By 2026 Affirm had nearly 28 million active consumers, over $50 billion in annual payments, and a pilot to split rent into two interest-free payments.

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ASML was born in 1984 when Philips, under financial pressure, spun its lithography research into a joint venture with ASM International called Advanced Semiconductor Materials Lithography. Its first product, the PAS 2000, used oil pressure to move wafers and leaked hydraulic fluid, a serious flaw in clean rooms engineered to hold fewer than 10 particles per cubic meter. Without the money of vertically integrated rivals Nikon and Canon, ASML outsourced major components, including lenses from Carl Zeiss. Its modular PAS 5500 of 1991 could be serviced and upgraded on the fab floor, winning IBM and Micron Technology, which became its largest customer.

Working with TSMC in the early 2000s, ASML used immersion lithography, placing purified water between lens and wafer, to reach about 32 nanometers. It began studying extreme ultraviolet light in 1997, and in 2012, with R&D costing a billion dollars a year, sold a 23 percent stake to Intel, TSMC and Samsung, with Intel paying $4.1 billion for 15 percent. Production EUV machines finally shipped in 2018, giving ASML a 100 percent monopoly. From 2018 the US pushed to block EUV sales to China, and by 2023 and 2024 the Dutch government restricted EUV and some DUV exports.

• The EUV light source fires a laser twice at falling molten tin droplets, flattening then vaporizing them, 50,000 times a second.
• ASML spent over $2.5 billion in 2012 and 2013 to acquire Cymer, the American maker of that laser light source.
• A flagship machine weighs 180 tons and needs three Boeing 747s to ship, and High-NA EUV units cost about $370 million.
• The Netherlands Institute for Human Rights ruled ASML may reject applicants from US-sanctioned countries to comply with US export rules.
• Reuters reported in December 2025 that China had built a prototype EUV machine in Shenzhen, allegedly with former ASML engineers.

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Advanced Micro Devices was founded in 1969 when marketing executive Jerry Sanders and colleagues left Fairchild Semiconductor and rented a Sunnyvale headquarters. AMD began as a second-source supplier, building chips designed by Fairchild and National Semiconductor, and set itself apart by guaranteeing every chip met US Military Standard 883. Profits funded its own designs, including a 1970 logic counter and the 1971 Am2505 binary multiplier, and a 1977 joint venture with Siemens brought capital. When IBM chose Intel's x86 architecture for the IBM PC but demanded a second source, Intel and AMD signed a 10-year technology exchange agreement in 1982.

By 1984 Intel refused to share details of the 386, starting a seven-year legal fight that ended in 1994 when the Supreme Court of California ruled Intel had breached the contract. AMD built the Am386 through clean room reverse engineering and in 1996 released its first in-house x86 chip, the K5, with K for kryptonite. After buying ATI for $5.4 billion in 2006, AMD bled cash, spun off its factories as GlobalFoundries in 2008, and cut staff 10 percent in 2011 and 15 percent in 2012. Lisa Su became CEO in 2014, Zen and Ryzen arrived in 2017, and in early 2022 AMD's market value passed Intel's for the first time.

• Athlon and Opteron chips threatened Intel, and AMD broke the 1 gigahertz barrier first.
• Chips for Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One, launched in late 2013, gave AMD steady revenue while it struggled.
• Zen used small chiplets joined together, cutting waste and allowing aggressive pricing against Intel.
• AMD closed a $50 billion acquisition of Xilinx, adding field programmable gate arrays, and held 36.5 percent of the server CPU market by July 2025.
• In late 2025 AMD agreed to supply six gigawatts of AI processors to OpenAI, which can buy up to 160 million AMD shares at one cent each if targets are met.

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American International Group began on December 19, 1919, when American Cornelius Vander Starr opened American Asiatic Underwriters in Shanghai. By the late 1920s it had branches across the Philippines, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, and as war loomed in Asia Starr moved into Latin America, opening offices in places like Havana. He moved headquarters to New York in 1939, insured American military personnel in Japan and Germany after the war, and by the end of the 1950s operated in more than 75 countries. Hank Greenberg, hired in 1960, switched the US business from salaried agents to independent brokers, and AIG took on political risk, pollution liability, shipping and offshore energy coverage.

In the early 2000s AIG faced investigations by the SEC, the Justice Department and the New York Attorney General, Greenberg was forced out in 2005, and the company paid a $1.6 billion fine. Meanwhile AIG Financial Products in London, led by Joseph Cassano, sold credit default swaps on $441 billion of securities, over $57 billion tied to subprime mortgages, without hedging. After a credit downgrade in September 2008 triggered collateral calls, the New York Fed under Timothy Geithner extended $85 billion on September 16, growing past $180 billion, for a 79.9 percent stake. AIG repaid $205 billion against $182.3 billion provided, a $22.7 billion gain for taxpayers.

• AIG bought aircraft lessor ILFC and SunAmerica, and in 1992 became the first foreign insurer licensed in China in over 40 years.
• Revelations in March 2009 of more than $165 million in executive bonuses set off public outrage.
• To repay the government, AIG sold ALICO to MetLife for $15.5 billion and 21st Century Insurance to Farmers for $1.9 billion.
• In Starr International Co. v. United States, Judge Thomas Wheeler found the equity demand an illegal exaction but awarded zero damages.
• AIG was removed from the systemically important list in 2017, and its 2022 Corebridge Financial spinoff was the year's largest US IPO at $1.68 billion.

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An automated clearing house, or ACH, is a computer-based electronic network that processes domestic, low-value payments between participating financial institutions. It replaced a paper system that by the 1960s moved millions of checks a day by armored car, with bank staff sorting paper late into the night. The first ACH was BACS in the United Kingdom, which began processing payments in April 1968. In the United States, California banks frustrated by the time it took to move checks from branches like San Diego to clearing centers in San Francisco built the first American ACH in 1972, operated by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

The core idea was net settlement: if Bank A owes Bank B $1 million and Bank B owes Bank A $900,000, only the $100,000 difference moves, freeing capital banks would otherwise hold. Banks gather customer requests through the day, send them as a combined file to the ACH operator, and the operator groups files into cycles, calculates each bank's net position and confirms funds before crediting accounts. Settlement can take days, creating settlement risk if a bank defaults mid-cycle. Real-time gross settlement systems avoid that risk but require full liquidity for every payment, which is why wires cost more and ACH payments cost pennies.

• Credit transfers are pushes started by the payer, such as direct deposit payroll and vendor payments.
• Direct debits are pulls started by the payee with prior authorization, covering utilities, insurance, mortgages and subscriptions.
• World Bank surveys counted 87 ACH systems worldwide in 2010 and 98 by 2012.
• National systems include NACHA and FedACH in the US, STEP2 for the euro area, Zengin in Japan, COELSA in Argentina and EGACH in Egypt.
• Because national ACH systems were built in silos, international transfers usually route through correspondent banks, adding days and fees.

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In 1880 mining entrepreneur and future US senator George Hearst bought the San Francisco Daily Examiner, and in 1887 he handed it to his 23-year-old son, William Randolph Hearst. The younger Hearst became editor and publisher and championed yellow journalism: giant headlines, sensational scandals, exaggerated crime stories and lavish illustrations. He bought papers in Detroit, Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Washington, Baltimore, San Antonio, Albany and Milwaukee to syndicate content, launched the New York Daily Mirror in 1924 against the Daily News, founded Cosmopolitan Pictures, and partnered with MGM on Hearst Metrotone newsreels by 1929.

Spending on Hearst Castle in San Simeon and on film production left the company exposed when the Great Depression hit, and by 1937 it faced liquidation, with creditors effectively controlling the newspaper chain. In the 1930s Hearst instructed his reporters in Germany to write positive coverage of Hitler, fired journalists who refused, and gave column space to Hermann Göring and Alfred Rosenberg. He bought WBAL-TV in Baltimore in 1948 and died in August 1951 at 88, leaving a trust with 13 trustees, five from the family and eight from outside. In 1990 the trust paid between $165 and $175 million for 20 percent of ESPN, a stake now valued at over $13 billion.

• Hearst merged Hearst's International with Cosmopolitan in 1925 to free up cash as personal spending strained the business.
• World War II briefly revived his afternoon papers because European battle news reached the US in the afternoon.
• In 1947 he produced a television newscast for the DuMont Television Network.
• A 10-year newspaper strike in Los Angeles ended with the Herald Examiner closing in 1989.
• The trust dissolves only when every family member alive at Hearst's death in August 1951 has died, while the ESPN stake supplies about half of company profits.

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General Dynamics traces its lineage to 1899, when businessman Isaac Leopold Rice bought John Philip Holland's struggling torpedo boat company and renamed it the Electric Boat Company. Its first sale, the USS Holland of 1900, cost about $150,000 and became the US Navy's first submarine. Electric Boat built 85 submarines in World War I and 74 submarines plus 398 PT boats in World War II, growing to 13,000 workers before cutting to 4,000 when the war ended. CEO John J. Hopkins bought Canadair for $10 million in 1946, created the General Dynamics holding company in 1952, added Convair and the Atlas missile, and launched the nuclear-powered USS Nautilus in 1954.

Convair's X-6 nuclear bomber program foundered on radiation shielding weight, while the F-16 line at Air Force Plant 4 in Fort Worth reached one jet a day and more than 4,600 orders. After the Pentagon's 1993 "Last Supper" dinner with 51 contractor CEOs, CEO William Anders sold Cessna, the missile business and the F-16 line, then bought Bath Iron Works and NASSCO, kept the M1 Abrams, and added Gulfstream in 1999. The 2018 purchase of CSRA for $9.7 billion created GDIT, which Reuters reported ran a covert Pentagon social media campaign in the Philippines against the Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine.

• Electric Boat's Quonset Point, Rhode Island facility pioneered modular submarine construction, which became the worldwide industry standard.
• Designer Erik Nitsche created mid-century modern posters for the Atoms for Peace conference in Geneva for the company.
• In 2008 General Dynamics agreed to a $4 million settlement over allegations a subsidiary made defective or untested parts for aircraft and submarines.
• Protesters targeted its IT contracts with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, and the company said it had no role building or running detention centers.
• It is the sole US maker of the steel bodies for the MK-80 bomb series, and Norway's KLP fund divested over nuclear and depleted uranium work.

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GEICO, the Government Employees Insurance Company, has never been a government agency. Leo Goodwin Sr. had worked at USAA since 1925 but hit a ceiling as a civilian, so in 1936 in San Antonio he and his wife Lillian put up $25,000 and Fort Worth banker Cleaves Rhea added $75,000. They sold auto insurance by mail directly to federal employees, a stable, low-risk group, cutting out agent commissions, and moved to Washington, D.C., in 1937. In 1948 Rhea sold his stake, and half the company went to Benjamin Graham's Graham-Newman partnership. The purchase broke an SEC limit on investment firms owning insurers, so in 1949 the partnership distributed shares to its own investors, making GEICO public at around $27 a share. By 1972 Graham's stake was worth $400 million. In 1951 a young Warren Buffett visited headquarters on a Saturday and learned the business from vice president Lorimer Davidson, who later ran the company from 1958.

In 1974, under David Lloyd Kreeger, GEICO used newly available computerized driving records to open its policies to the general public, just as the 1973 to 1975 recession pushed up repair and medical costs. It lost over $126 million in 1975, its stock fell from $42 to $5, and a consortium of 45 insurers absorbed a quarter of its policies to stabilize the market. John J. Byrne and underwriting veteran Alvin E. Krauss rebuilt it over five years with Buffett's backing. Without local agents, GEICO turned to advertising, spending over $1.1 billion in 2012, about 7 percent of revenue, on the gecko, the cavemen and a stack of money with eyes. It became the second or third largest private U.S. auto insurer, now a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary.

• The episode explains auto insurance as a grudge purchase, with humorous mascots replacing the friendly local agent.
• GEICO sponsored racing teams and stock car series through 2024, plus professional tractor pulling.
• A 2015 lawsuit over pricing by education and occupation ended in a $6 million settlement.
• A $5.2 million Missouri judgment over a disease contracted in an insured car was unanimously overturned by the state Supreme Court.
• In late 2023 GEICO ordered staff back to the office and laid off 2,000 employees, about 6 percent of its workforce.

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Block began with a lost sale in 2009, when St. Louis glass artist Jim McKelvey could not take a credit card for a $2,000 set of glass faucets. He and Jack Dorsey, then also building Twitter, created Square, a small reader that plugged into a phone's headphone jack. The real innovation was the software behind it: Square acted as merchant of record, absorbing risk, compliance and fraud detection so small sellers could skip bank merchant accounts. By summer 2010 it served 50,000 merchants with chargeback rates under 0.05 percent. Visa invested in 2011, and in 2012 Starbucks invested $25 million and had Square process its coffee sales. Square Cash launched in 2013 and grew into Cash App, with debit cards, direct deposit, stock and Bitcoin trading and tax filing, reaching 57 million active users by 2024, especially among lower-income and underbanked adults.

A buying spree followed: Weebly for $365 million in 2018, a majority of Jay-Z's Tidal for nearly $300 million in 2021 and Afterpay for $29 billion in 2022. Square renamed itself Block in late 2021, drawing an H&R Block trademark suit settled in 2023. In March 2023 Hindenburg Research alleged inflated user counts and fraud on Cash App, claims Block denied, and in May 2024 reports said federal prosecutors were examining anti-money laundering and sanctions compliance. Block then narrowed its focus to Bitcoin and AI, launching the Bitkey self-custody wallet in 95 countries and designing its own 3-nanometer Proto mining chips. Its ticker changed from SQ to XYZ in January 2025, it joined the S&P 500 in July 2025, and in February 2026 it cut over 4,000 jobs, about 40 percent of staff, explicitly citing AI.

• Dorsey justified the Tidal deal by arguing that musicians are small businesses that need better financial tools.
• A DNS outage in September 2023 knocked out both Square merchant terminals and Cash App.
• Time named Bitkey one of the best inventions of 2024.
• Block's shares jumped 24 percent after the February 2026 layoffs were announced.
• In July 2026 Block launched Buzz, a platform for AI agents to work alongside human employees.