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BlackBerry began in 1984 in Waterloo, Ontario, as Research in Motion, a company building data products for packet switched wireless networks such as Mobitex. Its 1999 BlackBerry 850 pager, named because its keys resembled the drupelets of a blackberry, brought push email routed through the BlackBerry Enterprise Server, with encryption strong enough to win banks, corporations and governments. Consumer lines like the Pearl, Curve and Bold followed, and by 2010 the company was worth more than brands such as Adidas, MTV and Ben & Jerry's.

The 2007 iPhone changed the market, and the 2008 Storm, with a touchscreen that physically clicked, was a flop. Subscribers still peaked at almost 22 million in the U.S. in late 2010 and 80 million worldwide in 2012, even as developers moved to iOS and Android. Co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie struggled to agree, the PlayBook tablet shipped without native email, and the stock fell 87 percent from 2010 to 2013. A Fairfax buyout was dropped for a $1 billion investment, and CEO John S. Chen moved to Android with the Priv, ended in-house phone making in 2016, and rebuilt the company around security software.

• Late 2013 brought a roughly $1 billion quarterly operating loss and 4,500 layoffs, about 40 percent of the staff.
• Phone production went to TCL and an Indonesian venture, BB Merah Putih.
• Acquisitions included WatchDox for file security, AtHoc for crisis alerts and Good Technology for device management.
• QNX, bought in 2010, now runs in hundreds of millions of vehicles, and BlackBerry IVY was built with Amazon Web Services.
• In January 2022 BlackBerry shut down the services behind its classic phones, and Chen stepped down in late 2023.

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Bill Ackman grew up in Chappaqua, New York, in a real estate finance family, graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1988 with a thesis on Harvard admissions, and earned a Harvard MBA in 1992 before founding Gotham Partners. In 2002 he bet against bond insurer MBIA, arguing its AAA rating hid exposure to risky debt; his law firm copied 725,000 pages of financial statements, and he endured regulatory scrutiny until the 2008 crash proved him right. He launched Pershing Square Capital Management in 2004 with about $54 million and in 2011 won a proxy fight at Canadian Pacific Railway that replaced the CEO and board.

Losses followed at J.C. Penney and Valeant, where he lost nearly $4 billion. In 2012 he announced a $1 billion short against Herbalife, calling it a pyramid scheme, and Carl Icahn, his rival since a 2003 lawsuit, took the other side; Ackman exited at a loss in 2018. In March 2020 he warned on television that "hell is coming" while a $27 million credit hedge grew to $2.6 billion in under a month. After October 7, 2023 he demanded the names of Harvard students who signed a letter blaming Israel, campaigned against president Claudine Gay until she resigned in January 2024, and endorsed Donald Trump that year.

• Pershing Square runs about $35 billion with 48 employees, all given stock, and reportedly zero turnover.
• In 2021 Pershing Square took 10 percent of Universal Music Group, which owns a 1926 song written by his grandfather Herman Ackman.
• Lawrence Summers compared the demand to publish students' names to McCarthyism.
• After plagiarism claims about his wife Neri Oxman's dissertation, he vowed an AI review of MIT faculty.
• At 59 he played doubles at the 2025 Hall of Fame Open in Newport on a wild card, and the Hall declined his $10 million endowment offer.

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Bear Stearns was founded in 1923 by Joseph Ainslie Bear, Robert B. Stearns and Harold C. Mayer with $500,000, and survived the 1929 crash without laying off a single employee. It went public in 1985 and, under Alan "Ace" Greenberg and later James Cayne, grew to more than 15,000 staff at 383 Madison Avenue. By late 2006 it held over $350 billion in assets and about $13.4 trillion in notional derivatives, and by 2007 it was borrowing at 35.6 to 1, with $28 billion of hard to value Level 3 assets against $11.1 billion in equity.

In June 2007 it pledged up to $3.2 billion to rescue its High-Grade Structured Credit fund, in which it had invested only $25 million; Merrill Lynch seized $850 million of collateral and found buyers for about $100 million. The firm posted its first quarterly loss in 83 years. Between March 10 and 13, 2008, its cash pool fell from $18.1 billion to $2 billion. A $25 billion Fed loan was withdrawn, and over one weekend JPMorgan Chase agreed to buy the bank for $2 a share, a stock that had traded at $172 in January 2007. The Fed created Maiden Lane LLC to take $30 billion of its assets, funded by a $29 billion Fed loan and a $1 billion JPMorgan loan that would absorb losses first.

• Fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin were arrested by the FBI and later acquitted of criminal charges.
• Barclays sued, saying it was told its sister enhanced fund was up 6 percent through June 2007 as it collapsed.
• The weekend contract, drafted by Wachtell Lipton, guaranteed Bear's trades without tying the guarantee to the merger closing.
• That gap gave shareholders bargaining power, and JPMorgan raised its offer to $10 a share on March 24, 2008.
• Time later named Cayne among the CEOs most responsible for the crisis, and JPMorgan retired the Bear Stearns name in January 2010.

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Subprime, also called near prime, non prime or second chance lending, is a lender's price for a higher statistical chance of default: steeper rates, weaker collateral and harsher terms. The label can attach to the product rather than the person, so a borrower with a perfect score taking an interest only or low documentation loan can still pay the subprime premium, and an 18 year old with no history looks as risky as someone drowning in debt. Princeton economist Harvey S. Rosen argued that letting in the excluded was the great achievement of mortgage innovation; critics see a costly trap.

Before 2008, U.S. lenders graded borrowers from A paper down through Alt-A to D paper, with subprime typically meaning a FICO score below 600, and by March 2007 there were $1.3 trillion in subprime mortgages across more than 7.5 million first lien loans. The originate to distribute model let lenders sell loans on to Wall Street, which bundled them into securities rated as safe. U.S. student debt passed credit card debt at $1 trillion in 2012 and reached $1.5 trillion by 2018. In the UK, the Financial Conduct Authority capped short term credit at 0.8 percent a day from January 2015 and limited total repayment to double the amount borrowed.

• On a $500,000 loan, a teaser rate of 5.5 percent meant about $2,839 a month; resetting to 8.5 percent pushed it past $4,079.
• Over 30 years that reset raises the lifetime cost from about $1.01 million to over $1.36 million.
• Canada largely avoided the subprime mortgage boom through tighter lending standards.
• Between 2019 and 2024 the UK high cost credit sector shrank by almost £3 billion as Wonga, BrightHouse, Amigo and Provident's doorstep arm exited.
• A 2024 ClearScore and EY report estimated three million UK adults had used an illegal lender in the previous three years, a tenfold rise.

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Cristóbal Balenciaga opened his first boutique in San Sebastián in 1917 and later dressed the Spanish royal family from shops in Madrid and Barcelona. The Spanish Civil War closed his stores in 1936, and in August 1937 he opened a couture house on Avenue George V in Paris with a debut inspired by the Spanish Renaissance. Under German occupation his was one of about 60 houses allowed to operate; his ties to Francisco Franco's Spain gave him fabric other houses could not get, and he testified that he refused a request from Hitler to move his operation to Berlin. Coco Chanel called him the only true couturier.

Against Christian Dior's cinched New Look, he dropped the waist entirely: the balloon jacket in 1953, the tunic dress in 1955, the sack dress and cocoon coat in 1957, and kimono cut Empire line pieces in 1959, later built in stiff duchess satin. From 1957 to 1967, joined only by Hubert de Givenchy, he barred the press until the day before clothes shipped and refused to join the Chambre Syndicale. He closed his house in 1968 and died in 1972. The name passed through Hoechst, Jacques Bogart and, in 2001, the Gucci Group, with Nicolas Ghesquière, Alexander Wang and, from 2015, Demna as creative directors.

• Harper's Bazaar editor Carmel Snow became an early champion and effectively crowned him the new king of couture.
• He designed Queen Fabiola of Belgium's 1960 wedding dress in ivory duchess satin trimmed with white mink.
• Joseph Kennedy quietly paid Jackie Kennedy's Balenciaga bills so the spending would not become a political issue.
• A 2022 campaign showing children holding teddy bears in bondage gear drew global backlash and apologies from the brand.
• The brand's trompe l'oeil sweatpants printed to look like jeans over boxer shorts sell for $1,190.

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When Vickers sold the Rolls-Royce car division in 1998, Volkswagen outbid BMW, £430 million to £340 million, and got the factory, designs, grille and the Spirit of Ecstasy mascot. But the Rolls-Royce name and logo belonged to the separate aero engine company, which licensed them to BMW for £40 million. BMW also supplied the engines for the existing cars under a contract it could end on 12 months' notice. The two sides settled: Volkswagen handed over the grille and mascot trademarks and could keep building Rolls-Royce badged cars until 2003, giving BMW five years to create a new car company from nothing.

BMW built a headquarters and plant on a 42 acre site on the Goodwood estate in West Sussex and launched the Phantom VII in 2003 with a 6.75 liter V12. Under CEO Torsten Müller-Ötvös from 2010 to late 2023, the range grew with the Ghost, the 623 brake horsepower Wraith coupe, the Dawn convertible, the Cullinan SUV on an all aluminum "Architecture of Luxury" spaceframe, and the electric Spectre revealed in October 2022. Sales rose from 796 cars in 2005 to over 6,000 in 2023 before Chris Brownridge took over.

• The extended wheelbase Phantom added 200 millimeters, all given to rear passenger space.
• For the Spectre the Spirit of Ecstasy was lowered and reshaped to help reach a drag coefficient of 0.25.
• The coachbuilt Sweptail took four years to make with one client and sold for a reported $12.8 million in 2017.
• Boat Tail in 2021 and Droptail in 2023 followed as near one off commissions.
• In 2014 the company made a silver Rolls-Royce themed Paddington Bear statue and auctioned it for the NSPCC.

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Lionel Martin and Robert Bamford founded Aston Martin in 1913, naming it after Martin's races at the Aston Clinton Hill Climb. Their first car put a Coventry Simplex engine in a 1908 Isotta Fraschini chassis. Bamford left in 1920, the company went bankrupt in 1924, and Martin was forced out in 1925. Augustus Bertelli's cars raced at Le Mans, yet only about 700 road cars were built before World War II. In 1947 tractor and gear maker David Brown bought the firm, then bought Lagonda mainly for its 2.6 liter engine designed by W.O. Bentley, launching the DB series that led to the DB5 in Goldfinger in 1964.

Hand building meant the cars cost more to make than they sold for, and California emission rules cut off U.S. sales. In 1972 Brown paid off £5 million of debt and sold the company for £101; it was in receivership by 1974, down to 100 staff by 1975. Victor Gauntlett lent his own Vantage to The Living Daylights, and the Tickford engineering arm took outside work. Ford took a 75 percent stake in 1987, opened Bloxham and Gaydon, and the DB7 sold over 6,000 units. Ford sold the company in 2007 to a consortium led by David Richards for £475 million, followed by a 2018 London listing, the DBX SUV and a 2020 rescue led by Lawrence Stroll.

• William Towns designed the wedge shaped Lagonda saloon, and the Bulldog was a gull winged one off concept.
• Tickford engineers designed train interiors and tuned Ford Capris to raise working capital.
• CEO Andy Palmer publicly vowed the company would avoid an eighth bankruptcy.
• Mercedes-AMG now supplies engines and electronics, and a $232 million deal brings Lucid electric motors and batteries.
• In February 2026 the company sold the naming rights to its Formula One team back to Stroll for £50 million.

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Andrew Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1855 to Judge Thomas Mellon, who schooled his children privately at home. At 19, during the Panic of 1873, Andrew called in loans and calmly paid out depositors, restoring T. Mellon and Sons, which his father handed him outright in 1882. He then turned banker into industrial investor: a $25,000 loan in 1889 to a struggling aluminum venture grew into Alcoa, and with his brother Richard and Henry Clay Frick he moved into Gulf Oil, shipbuilding and coal companies that at one point supplied 11 percent of America's coal. When the club dam above Johnstown failed in 1889, killing about 2,000 people, lawyer Philander Knox argued an act of God and the corporate veil shielded the members.

After his marriage to Nora McMullen collapsed, Mellon's allies pushed through a Pennsylvania law allowing divorce hearings in private. As Treasury Secretary from 1921 under three presidents, his "scientific taxation" cut the top rate from about 73 percent to 25 percent by 1926 while revenue rose and the national debt fell from $24 billion to $19.6 billion. After the 1929 crash he urged Herbert Hoover to liquidate labor, stocks, farmers and real estate. Facing an impeachment push from Congressman Wright Patman, he was moved to London as ambassador in 1932, then prosecuted for tax fraud under Franklin D. Roosevelt.

• Old Overholt, the distillery Mellon co-owned with Frick, received a rare medicinal permit to keep selling whiskey during Prohibition.
• A journalist dubbed the boom years "the Reign of Coolidge and Mellon."
• Through intermediaries he paid the Soviet government over $6 million for 21 Hermitage paintings, including the Alba Madonna at over $1.1 million.
• In 1936, mid trial, he offered Roosevelt his collection and the money to build the National Gallery of Art.
• Mellon died in August 1937 and was posthumously cleared of the tax fraud charges months later.

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American Motors Corporation was born in 1954 when Nash-Kelvinator and Hudson merged, then the largest corporate merger in U.S. history, to survive a price war between Ford and GM. CEO George W. Romney refused to fight Detroit on its terms and bet on the compact Rambler, traveling some 70,000 miles in a year to call the Big Three's cars gas guzzling dinosaurs. Shared parts and no annual restyling made AMC profitable by 1958, when the Rambler was the third best selling car in America. AMC also adopted the P R N D S L shift pattern, made tandem brake master cylinders standard in 1962, and fitted reclining front seats.

After Romney left to run for governor of Michigan, Roy Abernethy pushed into bigger cars like the Ambassador and Marlin and drained the company. Roy D. Chapin Jr. made air conditioning standard on the 1968 Ambassador and paid $70 million for Kaiser Jeep in 1970. The Pacer was designed around a GM rotary engine that GM canceled, forcing AMC to cram in its heavy inline six. Facing Japanese imports and an aging Kenosha plant, AMC took money from Renault, which gained a 49 percent stake, and built the 4x4 Eagle, often called the first crossover. Chrysler bought AMC for $1.5 billion in 1987.

• Romney's "dinosaur fighter" pitch for fuel economy came about 20 years before the oil crises of the 1970s.
• The Gremlin, the first North American built subcompact, was made by chopping the back off an existing sedan.
• The Hornet offered a Levi's interior in blue denim with orange stitching and copper rivets.
• Unfinished bodies at Kenosha had to be trucked across city streets between buildings.
• AMC engineers, nicknamed the Wake Island Marines, brought the platform team approach to Chrysler under François Castaing.

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Alex Mashinsky founded Celsius Network in 2017 with Daniel Leon and Nuke Goldstein, pitching it as a populist alternative to legacy banks: deposit Bitcoin or Ethereum and earn interest. A March 2018 coin offering raised $50 million through the company's CEL token, investors valued Celsius at $3 billion by late 2021, and by May 2022 it held almost $12 billion in assets for 1.7 million users. Yields reached as high as 17 percent, funded by lending customer crypto to hedge funds, pledging the same collateral repeatedly through rehypothecation, and buying its own CEL token to prop up its balance sheet.

Custodian Prime Trust walked away in June 2021 over the reuse of collateral, and regulators in New Jersey, Texas and Kentucky called the accounts unregistered securities. Blockchain analysis later showed Mashinsky sold about $44 million of CEL while saying founders were not selling. After Terra Luna collapsed in May 2022, taking Celsius funds parked in the Anchor Protocol with it, Mashinsky denied withdrawal problems on a June 10 livestream; on June 13 Celsius froze all withdrawals. It filed for Chapter 11 in July 2022 with a $1.2 billion hole, and a judge ruled depositors had transferred ownership of their coins under the terms of use, leaving them as unsecured creditors.

• On June 7, 2022, Celsius published a blog post titled "Damn the Torpedoes, Full Speed Ahead" dismissing insolvency rumors.
• The freeze helped push the total value of all cryptocurrencies below $1 trillion for the first time in over a year.
• At bankruptcy Celsius owed about $4.7 billion to its users, and the FTC later issued a $4.7 billion judgment and banned it from handling consumer assets.
• Mashinsky resigned as CEO in September 2022 and pleaded guilty to two counts of fraud in December 2024, agreeing to forfeit $48 million.
• In May 2025 a federal judge sentenced him to 12 years in prison.