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By 1986 a workplace PC had better than a 90 percent chance of running Microsoft's operating system, and in 1995 Netscape Navigator threatened to make Windows irrelevant by becoming a platform of its own. The FTC opened an investigation in 1990, deadlocked, and passed it to the Department of Justice, whose 1994 settlement still let Microsoft integrate new features into Windows. Microsoft gave Internet Explorer away, wove it into Windows, argued it was a feature rather than a separate product, and barred PC makers such as Dell and Compaq from putting Netscape on the desktop. In 1998 the DOJ and 20 states sued under the Sherman Antitrust Act before Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson.

Bill Gates's videotaped deposition, in which he quarreled over the meaning of words like compete and ask, was undercut by his own emails, and an Intel executive testified to talk of cutting off Netscape's air supply. Microsoft withdrew a video meant to show that removing Internet Explorer broke Windows after it proved to be stitched together, then admitted a second video about installing Netscape had been edited. Jackson ruled Microsoft an illegal monopoly and ordered it split into an operating system company and an applications company, but in 2001 the D.C. Circuit threw out the breakup because he had given embargoed interviews comparing Gates to Napoleon, while keeping his findings of fact. A settlement requiring API sharing and a three-person oversight panel was approved in 2004.

• Told to offer Windows without the browser, Microsoft gave PC makers a choice of an obsolete version or one that would not boot properly.
• Gates and Steve Ballmer reportedly discussed leaving the company over the breakup order.
• The Supreme Court declined to fast-track the appeal, sending it to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
• Several states called the settlement far too weak, and its compliance obligations expired between 2007 and 2012.
• The government dropped its tying claim on appeal, which scholars read as conceding bundling had consumer benefits.

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Harry and Esther Snyder opened In-N-Out in Baldwin Park, California, in 1948, using a two-way speaker to create what the episode calls California's first true drive-through hamburger stand. They refused to franchise or take outside investors, and when Harry died in 1976 at 63 the chain had just 18 locations. Son Rich Snyder became president at 24, expanded to 93 restaurants as far as San Diego, Las Vegas and Northern California, and began printing Bible verses on cups and wrappers. In December 1993 he was killed in a plane crash on approach to John Wayne Airport, and his brother Guy took over, growing the chain to 140 locations before dying of a painkiller overdose in 1999.

Esther returned to run the company until her death in 2006 at 86, leaving Guy's daughter Lynsi, then 23, as the only remaining blood heir. That year vice president and co-trustee Richard Boyd sued, alleging a plot to push Esther out and fire him; the company accused him of construction fraud, suspended him as co-trustee, and after a settlement he was ousted. Former operations chief Mark Taylor served as the first non-family president until Lynsi took the post in 2010. She gained half control at 30 and nearly full control at 35, ruled out franchising and going public, and expanded only where company-owned facilities could supply stores, from Dallas to Colorado Springs to a $125 million hub in Franklin, Tennessee.

• The company owns its distribution chain, including a large facility in Lathrop serving Northern California.
• In 2021 health officials in San Francisco and Contra Costa County shut or restricted stores that would not check vaccination cards.
• In 2023 it barred employees in several states from wearing masks without a medical exemption.
• Hot chocolate, a 1950s item, returned in 2018 as one of the few menu changes in decades.
• Customers waited up to 14 hours in their cars when the first Colorado store opened in 2020.

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In 1954 Seagram CEO Samuel Bronfman set out to build a headquarters on Park Avenue and first asked for a 35-story tower topped by an imported English castle. Charles Luckman and William Pereira talked him into a conventional 34-story design with a $15 million budget, announced in July 1954, but his daughter Phyllis Lambert, then in her 20s and living in Paris, wrote a scathing letter and persuaded him to scrap it. She recruited Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, with Philip Johnson as co-architect, and set no budget. The finished tower at 375 Park Avenue cost about $43 million, roughly $50 a square foot and about twice comparable buildings, and Lewis Mumford called it the Rolls-Royce of buildings.

The money went into 1,600 tons of bronze, the first extruded bronze facade on an office building, Muntz metal spandrels, tinted plate glass and nonstructural bronze I-beam mullions added because codes required the real steel to be encased in concrete. Mies set the tower 90 feet back behind a pink granite plaza with fountains, which helped shape New York's 1961 zoning resolution. In 1963 the city honored the building's beauty, then assessed it at $21 million on replacement value instead of the roughly $17 million its rents supported. Seagram lost at the New York Court of Appeals, and Ada Louise Huxtable called it a method of taxing architectural excellence. Seagram sold to TIAA in 1979 for $85.5 million with preservation mandates, and in 2022 RFR spent $25 million turning the garage into the Seagram Playground.

• The bronze was cleaned twice a year with soap, water and lemon oil from a custom scaffold with a 27-foot deck.
• Window blinds locked in only three positions: fully open, halfway or fully closed.
• Each of the plaza's two pools held 60,000 gallons, and a heating system under the granite kept snow and ice away.
• Mark Rothko later said he painted his Four Seasons murals to make wealthy diners nauseous.
• Aby Rosen's RFR Holding bought a majority stake in 2000 for $375 million.

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Guccio Gucci was born in Florence in 1881 and by 1897 was carrying luggage at London's Savoy Hotel, studying how wealthy guests dressed and traveled. He later spent four years with the Wagons-Lits sleeper train company and worked for Milan luggage maker Franzi before opening his own shop on Via della Vigna Nuova in Florence in 1921, soon employing 60 artisans. When League of Nations sanctions after Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia cut off leather imports, he turned to hemp, linen, jute and raffia woven in a diamond pattern, and wartime shortages led to canvas marked with the double G and red and green bands. In 1947 came the bamboo handle bag, its Japanese cane bent by hand with a blowtorch and scorched over a flame.

Guccio died in 1953, weeks after a New York store opened, leaving the company to sons Aldo, Vasco and Rodolfo. Aldo expanded to London, Paris, Tokyo and Beverly Hills, but licensing deals put the logo on everything from keychains to an AMC Hornet station wagon. After Rodolfo died in 1983, his son Maurizio fought Aldo for control, and Aldo, at 81, was sentenced in 1986 to a year in US federal prison for tax evasion in a case led by Rudy Giuliani. Maurizio cut licensing but overspent, sold his remaining stake to Bahrain's Investcorp in 1993, and in March 1995 was shot dead in Milan by a hitman hired by his ex-wife Patrizia Reggiani, who served 16 years. Dawn Mello and Tom Ford then revived the brand, which ended up with François Pinault's group, now Kering.

• A floral silk scarf was designed for Grace Kelly, and a hobo bag was renamed the Jackie after Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis.
• John F. Kennedy reportedly called Aldo the first Italian ambassador to the United States.
• Aldo's son Paolo tried to launch a rival offshoot brand, setting off a family legal battle.
• Dawn Mello cut the product range from more than 20,000 items to about 7,000 to restore scarcity.
• After fending off LVMH, the brand moved through designers Frida Giannini, Alessandro Michele and Sabato De Sarno.

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Charles Thomas Munger was born in Omaha on January 1, 1924, and as a teenager worked at Buffett & Son, the grocery owned by Warren Buffett's grandfather Ernest. He left the University of Michigan's math program to join the Army Air Corps, which sent him to Caltech to study meteorology, and with help from former dean Roscoe Pound he entered Harvard Law School without an undergraduate degree, graduating magna cum laude in 1948. Card games taught him to fold often and bet heavily only with a clear edge. After his divorce from Nancy Huggins, his nine-year-old son Teddy died of leukemia. His partnership Wheeler, Munger and Company returned 19.8 percent a year from 1962 to 1975, against about 5 percent for the Dow.

Losses of more than 32 percent in 1973 and 31 percent in 1974 led him to close the firm in 1976, and he turned to studying human misjudgment, building a latticework of mental models and coining the Lollapalooza effect, in which several biases push in the same direction at once. He called Bitcoin a noxious poison, criticized commission-free trading apps such as Robinhood, and as a registered Republican backed single-payer health care. His university gifts came with his own dorm designs, and UC Santa Barbara abandoned the largely windowless Munger Hall in 2023. He died in Santa Barbara on November 28, 2023, at 99, and Buffett credited him as the true architect of Berkshire Hathaway.

• During the 1970s slump he took a brokerage firm private at about $3 a share and later liquidated it at $180.
• He used a Tupperware party to show how reciprocation, commitment and social proof combine to drive purchases.
• He advised never attending open outcry auctions because of what he called deprivation super-reaction syndrome.
• A consulting architect resigned from UC Santa Barbara's design committee, calling Munger Hall a psychological experiment.
• A failed cataract surgery cost him his left eye, and facing possible blindness in the other, he began learning Braille.

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Uber's origin story begins with an $800 ride on a snowy New Year's Eve in Paris in 2009. Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick launched UberCab in San Francisco in 2011 as a luxury black car service costing about 50 percent more than a taxi, and even hired a nuclear physicist and a computational neuroscientist to sharpen arrival predictions. Kalanick had dismissed peer-to-peer ridesharing as illegal and doomed, but as Lyft, Sidecar and Wingz gained ground the company launched UberX in 2012 and 2013 and opened the platform to everyday drivers. It then entered cities without permission and counted on rider demand to make shutting it down politically costly.

The episode details Greyball, software that showed ghost cars or denied rides to suspected regulators and police, and Ripley, a tool used more than 20 times in 2015 and 2016 to lock and power off office computers during raids. Susan Fowler's 2017 blog post on harassment set off executive departures, and a 2016 breach of data on 57 million riders and about 600,000 drivers was covered up with a $100,000 payment booked as a bug bounty, leading to obstruction charges against former security chief Joe Sullivan. Kalanick resigned in 2017 and Dara Khosrowshahi of Expedia took over. Fights over driver classification followed, from California's AB5 and Proposition 22 to a UK Supreme Court ruling, before the company posted its first operating profit in 2023 and reached $52 billion in revenue by 2025.

• The company hired the security firm Ergo to secretly investigate a class action plaintiff, and the judge threw out the evidence gathered.
• Executive Emil Michael had suggested spending $1 million on opposition research into critical journalists, including Sarah Lacy.
• Dutch regulators fined it over 800 million euros over automated driver deactivations, plus 290 million euros for moving driver data to US servers.
• In 2025 the Federal Trade Commission sued over Uber One sign-ups and cancellation practices.
• In March 2026 it agreed to invest up to $1.25 billion in Rivian for up to 50,000 robotaxis, and in September 2026 it cut 10 percent of its corporate staff.

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theGlobe.com began in 1994 when Cornell University undergraduates Stephan Paternot and Todd Krizelman became fascinated by a chat room on the school's network. Over Christmas break they raised $15,000, bought an Apple internet server and started a programming company called Web Genesis, then launched theGlobe.com on April 1, 1995. The site drew more than 44,000 visits in its first month as users built personal homepages and joined forums, and by its first anniversary it had 17 staff. In 1997 it raised $20 million from Dancing Bear Investments, and on November 13, 1998 it listed on Nasdaq as TGLO. Priced at $9, the stock opened at $87, peaked at $97 and closed at $63.50, a 606 percent first-day gain that was then the largest in IPO history.

In 1999 CNN aired footage of Paternot in shiny vinyl pants at a Manhattan nightclub declaring himself ready for a disgusting, frivolous life, and the press dubbed him the CEO in the plastic pants. As the bubble burst the stock fell below 10 cents, the founders were forced out, half the staff was cut and the original community site was shut down. Under a CEO who had been a vice president of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants, the company tried an internet phone service, print magazines and spam sent to MySpace users, and lost a California anti-spam case. By 2011 it reported about $6,000 in assets against $3.2 million in liabilities, yet the ticker kept trading as a shell, and in 2017 liquefied natural gas exporter Delfin Midstream bought nearly 71 percent of the shares.

• Each founder received a $500,000 payout from selling preferred shares in 1997, on top of salaries over $100,000.
• IPO cash went into gaming websites and print titles including Computer Games Magazine, later joined by Now Playing and MMO Games Magazine.
• Sprint Nextel sued the company for patent infringement over its voice over internet protocol technology.
• Legal estimates put potential liability from the spam suits as high as $120 million, and all magazines and gaming sites closed by March 2007.
• In 2008 it sold Tralliance, operator of the .travel domain registry, while keeping earn-out rights that became its only income.

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eToys launched on November 3, 1997 out of the incubator Idealab at the height of the dot-com boom. Its IPO on January 4, 1999 priced shares at $20, and the stock closed its first day at $76; eMarketer called it the benchmark for all toy sites. The valuation rested on growth rather than profits, and the business had to warehouse and ship bulky, irregular items like doll houses and race tracks. The company subsidized shipping and ran heavy TV advertising to buy market share. In 1999 it went after the Swiss art collective etoy and its etoy.com domain, claiming trademark confusion, and online activists answered with the Toy War, including denial of service protests during the holiday season, until eToys dropped the case.

By March 2001 the Wall Street Journal reported KB Toys was buying most of eToys' remaining assets for $5 million, and the company went bankrupt on April 1, 2001. In the Chapter 11 case, creditors' attorney Paul Traub had formed Asset Disposition Advisors with Barry Gold, who was then named eToys' CEO to run the liquidation. Creditors complained about the undisclosed tie, but a judge found no legal fault. The brand later passed from KB Toys to the hedge fund D.E. Shaw, whose eToys Direct reopened the site and mailed paper catalogs. Its parent filed for Chapter 11 in December 2008, and Toys "R" Us bought the eToys.com domain in February 2009.

• The stock nearly quadrupled in its first day of trading.
• Activists also bought ad space and pushed down eToys' ratings on consumer review sites during the Toy War.
• The dot-com crash turned eToys' warehouses of unsold inventory into liabilities.
• Chapter 11 rules require parties to disclose conflicts, and the Traub and Gold link ran through a separate LLC.
• The episode argues buyers kept paying for the domain for its built-in traffic and search value.

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Roy Raymond opened the first Victoria's Secret in Palo Alto, California, in 1977 after an awkward attempt to buy lingerie for his wife in a department store. He borrowed $40,000 from a bank and $40,000 from family, styled the shop for male shoppers, grossed half a million dollars in year one and started a mail order catalog. In 1982 Les Wexner bought the five-store chain for $1 million and refocused it on women, remaking stores as a Victorian boudoir and printing a London address on catalogs run from Columbus, Ohio. The 1993 Miracle Bra sold two million units in its first year, and the fashion show began in 1995 at the Plaza Hotel.

A 1997 Angels commercial with Tom Jones turned models into the brand, a 1999 Super Bowl ad sent about 1.5 million viewers to a webcast and crashed the servers, and by 2013 the company held a third of the U.S. intimates market. As shoppers moved to athleisure and inclusive rivals, marketing chief Ed Razek's 2018 Vogue remarks on transgender and plus-size models led to his 2019 resignation and the show's cancellation. A 2020 New York Times report described a culture of misogyny and harassment, and reporting detailed Wexner's ties to Jeffrey Epstein, who had posed as a company recruiter. In 2021 L Brands spun off Victoria's Secret, retired the Angels and launched the VS Collective.

• A 2004 Victoria's Secret commercial featured Bob Dylan.
• Wexner reportedly gave Epstein power of attorney over his finances, a New York townhouse and use of a Boeing 727.
• Shareholders filed a 2021 complaint alleging Wexner and other executives breached fiduciary duties.
• In 2021 the brand fronted an $8.3 million settlement for more than 1,000 unpaid Thai garment workers.
• The VS Collective included Megan Rapinoe, Priyanka Chopra and Naomi Osaka, and the company bought Adore Me for $400 million in 2022.

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Before 2017, U.S. companies faced a 35% corporate tax rate on worldwide income, while most developed countries taxed only profits earned inside their borders. A tax inversion let a company make a foreign entity its legal parent without moving offices or workers. The first, in 1983, took the Texas drilling firm McDermott International to Panama. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, naked inversions moved companies to Bermuda and the Cayman Islands with little more than a mailing address. The 2004 American Jobs Creation Act responded with a substantial business presence test, later set at 25% of employees, assets and income in the new country.

Companies then bought real foreign partners. Between 2012 and 2016 Burger King merged with Tim Hortons in a $12 billion deal, and Medtronic moved to Ireland through a $48 billion merger with Covidien while still earning over 60% of revenue in the U.S. Earnings stripping through intercompany loans and royalties drained U.S. taxable profit, and the CBO projected about $12 billion a year in lost revenue by 2027. The U.K. halted its own 2007 to 2010 exodus by cutting rates to 19% and going territorial. The U.S. Treasury blocked the $160 billion Pfizer and Allergan merger, and the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act cut the rate to 21%, after which the inversion wave collapsed.

• Inversions forced long-term U.S. shareholders to recognize capital gains on shares they never sold.
• Apple moved $300 billion of intellectual property into Ireland in 2015, lifting Irish GDP by double digits.
• From 2014 to 2016 the Treasury issued targeted rules to break the structures behind pending deals.
• The 2017 law limited deductions on intercompany interest and taxed outbound royalty transfers.
• In 2019 AbbVie bought Allergan and kept the combined company based in the United States.