pplpod

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Louis Brandt opened a workshop in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, in 1848, assembling key-wound pocket watches. In 1892 he produced the first minute repeating wristwatch with a movement from Audemars Piguet, and in 1894 his sons Louis-Paul and César introduced the Omega caliber, built on interchangeable parts. It sold so well that in 1903 the firm renamed itself Omega, the same year both brothers died and left 800 employees to relatives led by Paul-Emile Brandt, not yet 24. A 1925 union with Tissot became the SSIH group in 1930, and by the 1970s it was the top Swiss producer of finished watches and outselling Rolex.

Japanese quartz watches from Seiko and Citizen changed that. Omega tried to compete on price and utility, SSIH went bankrupt in 1981 and needed a Swiss bank bailout, and Seiko explored buying it. A 1983 merger with ASUAG and Nicolas Hayek's 1985 takeover led to the Swatch Group, which raised prices and won James Bond for 1995's GoldenEye. The Speedmaster went to the Moon in 1969, a Seamaster reached the Mariana Trench in 2019, and the co-axial escapement, 15,000 gauss resistance and Master Chronometer tests followed.

• Neil Armstrong left his Speedmaster in the lunar module, so Buzz Aldrin wore the first watch on the Moon; it was later stolen in transit to the Smithsonian.
• Costume designer Lindy Hemming put Pierce Brosnan's Bond in a Seamaster Diver 300M, replacing the Rolex of earlier films.
• Elvis Presley's white gold Omega sold for $1.812 million in Geneva in 2018, bought by the Omega Museum.
• The WWF gave Omega its lowest environmental rating in 2018, and the brand faced pressure over sponsoring the 2022 Beijing Olympics.
• The $260 MoonSwatch, made with Swatch in 2022, had buyers camping outside stores for days.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

On April 29, 2004, a dark cherry metallic Alero rolled off the line in Lansing, Michigan, as workers signed the underside of its hood, ending Oldsmobile after 107 years. Ransom E. Olds founded the company in Lansing in 1897, and when its Detroit factory burned in March 1901, two workers wheeled out the only surviving prototype, the Curved Dash. With no way to make parts, Oldsmobile outsourced engines to Henry Leland and transmissions to John and Horace Dodge, helping seed Detroit's supplier network. It also ran a progressive assembly line before Henry Ford added the conveyor. A quarrel with sales manager Frederick Smith drove Olds out in 1904, and William C. Durant folded the brand into General Motors in 1908.

As GM's testing ground, Oldsmobile introduced the Hydra-Matic automatic transmission in 1940, the overhead valve Rocket V8 in 1949, the turbocharged Jetfire in 1962 and the front-wheel drive Toronado in 1966, and the Cutlass became North America's best seller in 1976. Then GM quietly put Chevrolet V8s into Oldsmobiles in 1977, triggering class action suits, and the rushed 350 diesel, converted from a gasoline engine, snapped head bolts. The "Not Your Father's Oldsmobile" campaign alienated loyal buyers, and in December 2000 GM announced the brand's end.

• The 1910 Limited cost $4,600, rode on 42-inch wheels and raced the 20th Century Limited passenger train.
• The Rocket V8 inspired the song Rocket 88, widely considered the first rock and roll record.
• Owners discovered the 1977 engine swap when parts bought for their Oldsmobile V8 would not fit.
• The diesel's fuel lines clogged with wax in cold weather because the cars lacked proper fuel heating and water separators.
• Guidestar on the 1995 Olds 88 was the first onboard satellite navigation in a U.S. production car.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Myspace was launched in August 2003 by marketers at eUniverse, including Brad Greenspan, Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson, who cloned the best of Friendster and built the first version in ten days on ColdFusion. That fast, flexible code let users inject their own HTML into profiles, and eUniverse's existing list of about 20 million users and subscribers gave the site an instant audience. Greenspan overruled DeWolfe's idea of charging a fee. In July 2005 News Corporation bought Myspace for $580 million, beating Viacom, and by 2007 the site was adding 320,000 users a day and had passed Yahoo as the most visited website in the United States, launching artists like Lily Allen, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga.

A 2006 Google deal guaranteed $900 million over three years but required traffic targets that filled the site with ads and froze redesigns. Open HTML invited malware and spam, the Connecticut attorney general investigated, and Facebook passed Myspace in the Alexa rankings in April 2008. News Corp sold it in 2011 to Specific Media, with Justin Timberlake as a partner, for $35 million. Later owners included Time Inc., Meredith and Viant, and a 2019 server migration permanently erased all content uploaded before 2016.

• In February 2005 Mark Zuckerberg offered to sell Facebook to Myspace for $75 million and was turned down.
• At its 2008 peak Myspace earned $800 million in annual revenue and was valued at $12 billion.
• Rupert Murdoch later called the original purchase a "huge mistake."
• A breach of about 360 million accounts came to light in 2016, with data sold on the dark web.
• An Internet Archive group rescued about 490,000 MP3s, called the Dragon Hoard, before the old servers were wiped.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 2015 Ireland recorded 26 percent economic growth in a single year, not from new industry but because Apple moved about $300 billion of intellectual property onto Irish books, prompting Paul Krugman's phrase "leprechaun economics." This episode traces how the modern tax haven came to be, starting with New Jersey in the 1880s, which, short of revenue, created permissive corporate laws and the holding company, a model Delaware copied in 1898. In the 1920s the Zurich, Zug and Liechtenstein triangle offered brass plate companies, and Switzerland made bank secrecy a crime in 1934 as a defensive response to the Great Depression.

A 1929 British ruling in the Egyptian Delta Land and Investment case let companies registered in Britain but managed elsewhere escape British tax, spreading the model to Bermuda, the Bahamas and the Cayman Islands, and a 1957 Bank of England decision gave rise to the eurodollar market. After FATCA and the Common Reporting Standard ended old style secrecy, havens shifted from individual evasion to corporate avoidance through base erosion and profit shifting, including the double Irish. Leaks from Offshore Leaks in 2013 to the Panama and Paradise Papers then exposed the plumbing.

• Under the double Irish, an Irish subsidiary holding patents was managed from Bermuda, where the corporate tax rate is zero.
• A University of Amsterdam CORPNET study sorted havens into conduits such as the Netherlands and Singapore and sinks such as the Cayman Islands.
• An estimated $100 billion to $250 billion in global taxes is lost each year to these practices.
• Between $7 trillion and $10 trillion is estimated to sit in tax havens, up to 10 percent of global assets.
• The 2016 Panama Papers comprised 11.5 million documents from the law firm Mossack Fonseca.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

In 1913 a strict patriarch opened a luxury travel goods shop in Milan's Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and barred the women of his family from the business. When his son refused to take over, his daughter Luisa ran the shop for about two decades as a caretaker. By 1978, when her daughter Miuccia took the helm, sales were around $450,000. Miuccia had spent her early adulthood in left-wing politics and studying mime, not leatherwork. In 1977 she met Patrizio, a leather entrepreneur since his teens, who told her to stop importing from England and produce at home. In 1979 she released backpacks and totes in waterproof military nylon, the same material her grandfather used to wrap his trunks for shipping.

A 1985 nylon handbag became a global hit, the couple married in 1987, and womenswear arrived in 1988, followed by a younger line named for Miuccia's nickname. Her deliberately unsexy designs challenged conventional beauty, while Patrizio's 1990s buying spree piled up debt that forced sales of acquired labels. The 2000s and 2010s brought a runway where models fell, a Japanese labor case that reached the United Nations, a 2018 New York display condemned as racist, and a 2025 sandal backlash in India. In 2025 the company bought a rival Italian house for over a billion euros.

• At a 2008 Milan show, silk socks inside towering heels sent several models stumbling, and the shoes were never sold.
• A Tokyo court sided with the brand in a 2010 appearance discrimination case, but the UN later urged Japan to tighten harassment laws.
• After the 2018 controversy the company formed a diversity and inclusion advisory council.
• The 2025 sandal dispute was resolved through a collaborative collection with Indian artisan groups.
• An art installation in the Texas desert recreates one of its boutiques and is meant to decay slowly.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Michael Milken was born in 1946 in Encino, California, led the cheerleading squad at Birmingham High School, graduated from UC Berkeley with highest honors in 1968 and earned an MBA at Wharton. At Berkeley he absorbed W. Braddock Hickman's research showing that diversified portfolios of low-rated bonds outperformed safe ones even after defaults. He joined Drexel in 1969, built its high-yield department, and in 1978 moved the operation to Century City in Los Angeles, far from New York oversight. His network of buyers, including Executive Life and Columbia Savings, financed the 1980s leveraged buyout boom, and a Drexel "highly confident" letter, though legally non-binding, was treated as money in the bank.

The fall began in 1986 when Ivan Boesky pleaded guilty and implicated Milken in insider trading and stock parking. Rudy Giuliani threatened Drexel with RICO, and the discovery of MacPherson Partners, which received Storer Broadcasting warrants and included Milken, his children and outside money managers, ended Drexel's support. Indicted on 98 counts in 1989, Milken pleaded guilty in April 1990 to six securities and tax counts, paid over $1 billion and was barred from the industry. Released in 1993, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer that month and founded the Prostate Cancer Foundation, later FasterCures, before a 2020 pardon.

• Over a 17-year stretch, his operation reportedly had only four down months.
• He earned over $1 billion in personal compensation in a four-year period in the late 1980s.
• Prosecutors also indicted his brother Lowell, a tactic legal scholars criticized.
• Judge Kimba Wood sentenced him to 10 years; he served 22 months.
• Rudy Giuliani, who had prosecuted him, was among those urging President Trump to grant the February 2020 pardon.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Michael Burry was born in San Jose in 1971 and lost his left eye to retinoblastoma at age two. He studied economics and pre-med at UCLA, earned his medical degree at Vanderbilt in 1997 and began residencies at Stanford, but never practiced, though he still keeps his California license active. During late hospital shifts he posted stock analysis on the Silicon Investor message board, applying Benjamin Graham and David Dodd's margin of safety. He shorted Amazon in early 2000 before it lost about 80 percent, drew attention from Vanguard, White Mountains and Joel Greenblatt, and launched Scion Capital, named after Terry Brooks's The Scions of Shannara.

In 2005 Burry read mortgage bond prospectuses from the 2003 and 2004 vintages, saw teaser rates set to reset around 2007, and had Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank write him credit default swaps. As premiums bled his fund, he gated angry investors, then made about $100 million personally and over $700 million for clients before closing Scion in 2008. After his son's Asperger's diagnosis he said he believes he has it too. He returned in 2013, bought GameStop long before the 2021 squeeze, and by 2025 and 2026 held put options on Nvidia, Palantir, Micron and Nebius while writing a Substack called Cassandra Unchained.

• He left medicine in late 2000 using trading profits, an inheritance and family loans.
• His first investments after reopening in 2013 focused on water, farmland and gold.
• He sold GameStop before the meme stock squeeze and bought back in by early 2026 on valuation grounds.
• In late 2025 he deregistered his hedge fund and returned outside capital, charging $439 a year for his newsletter.
• He backed a critique calling SpaceX's addition to the Nasdaq 100 a way to make retirement funds supply exit liquidity.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Maserati's Trident logo was drawn by Mario Maserati, the one brother who became an artist, after the Fountain of Neptune in Bologna. His brothers Alfieri, Bindo, Carlo, Ettore and Ernesto began by building two-liter Grand Prix cars for Diatto, and when Diatto quit racing in 1926 they built their own Tipo 26, which Alfieri drove to a class win at that year's Targa Florio. Alfieri died in 1932, and in 1937 the remaining brothers sold to industrialist Adolfo Orsi, who moved the company to Modena. Maserati won the Indianapolis 500 in 1939 and 1940, attempted a V16 town car for Mussolini during the war, and won the 1957 Formula One title with Juan Manuel Fangio.

After a Ferrari crash at the 1957 Mille Miglia killed the driver, co-driver and 10 spectators, Maserati quit factory racing and built the 3500 GT road car. Citroën bought the company in 1968, then went bankrupt, and in May 1975 its new French management announced Maserati's liquidation. The Italian government and Alejandro de Tomaso saved it, and the Biturbo sold about 40,000 units. Fiat took control in 1993 and handed half to Ferrari in 1997, leading to the 3200 GT and MC12. Sales topped 51,000 in 2017 but were projected at about 7,900 in 2025 during the shift to electric cars.

• The founding family owned the company for only its first 11 years, though the brothers stayed on as engineers for a decade.
• Maserati remains the only Italian brand to win the Indianapolis 500 back to back.
• The Shah of Persia had Maserati fit a racing V8 into a bespoke road car, the 5000 GT.
• Workers picketed the Modena factory in 1975 to stop the assembly lines from being dismantled.
• The Biturbo was the world's first production car with a twin-turbocharged V6.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

By the fall of 1929, brokers had lent more than $8.5 billion to ordinary investors buying stocks on margin, more than all the physical currency circulating in the United States. The Dow had risen tenfold over nine years and peaked in early September, as economist Irving Fisher spoke of a permanently high plateau and Roger Babson warned of a terrific crash. Beneath the boom, farmers sat on huge wheat surpluses, goods piled up unsold, and brokers were lending two thirds of a stock's price. The slide began on the afternoon of October 23 with a 4.5 percent drop, and on Black Thursday the market lost 11 percent at the opening bell as ticker tapes fell hours behind.

Thomas Lamont, Albert Wiggin and Charles Mitchell pooled money and sent Richard Whitney onto the floor to buy U.S. Steel above market, which steadied prices only briefly. Margin calls on Black Monday produced a 12.82 percent drop, and on Black Tuesday, October 29, more than 16.4 million shares traded and $14 billion vanished. The market fell nearly 90 percent by July 1932, banks that had lent deposits to brokers failed by the thousands, and the Fed raised rates to stop a run on gold. The aftermath produced the SEC, Glass-Steagall, circuit breakers and the uptick rule.

• Nearly three million shares changed hands in the first three minutes of Black Thursday.
• Some stocks on Black Tuesday had no buyers at any price, and the ticker ran until almost 8 p.m.
• The Dow did not regain its 1929 peak until November 1954.
• More than 2,000 U.S. banks failed in 1931 alone.
• In Britain, inspectors under the Means Test assessed families' furniture before granting unemployment aid, sparking strikes.

Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode!

Lyft began with Logan Green's long drives between UC Santa Barbara and his girlfriend in Los Angeles. In 2007 he and John Zimmer launched Zimride, an intercity carpooling board for college students. In the summer of 2012 they tested an on-demand offshoot called Lyft, and it took over: the company renamed itself in May 2013 and sold Zimride to Enterprise Rent-A-Car that July. Early rides came with giant fuzzy pink mustaches on car grilles, front seat riding and fist bumps, until late 2014 when the mustache shrank to a small glowing dashboard version. Shared rides, Toronto and Ottawa, and a 2018 Allscripts partnership for patient transport followed, leading to a March 2019 IPO at a $24.3 billion valuation.

The pandemic forced nearly 1,000 layoffs in April 2020, and in April 2021 Lyft sold its self-driving division to Toyota for $550 million, later plugging Waymo and May Mobility vehicles into its network instead. CEO David Risher, hired in March 2023, cut deeply and shut Lyft Rentals, and in the second quarter of 2024 the company posted its first GAAP profit. It then bought Free Now for 175 million euros, TBR Global and bike share operators. In October 2026 Lyft agreed to pay California $237 million over driver classification from 2016 to 2020.

• Lyft coordinates about nine million rides a day for 25 million active riders.
• In 2018 it spent $72 million on London's Blue Vision Labs to build robotaxi technology it later sold.
• A late 2018 class action over unwanted automated text messages cost $4 million plus legal fees.
• A Detroit rapper's weight discrimination lawsuit, filed after a driver refused her ride, was settled out of court.
• The California payment was recorded as the largest wage theft settlement in the state's history.