Corporate History

'The Singularity' is what Silicon Valley calls the idea that, eventually, we will be overrun by machines that are able to take decisions and act for themselves. What no one says is that it happened before. A few hundred years ago, humans started building the robots that now rule our world. They are called states and corporations: immensely powerful artificial entities, with capacities that go far beyond what any individual can do, and which, unlike us, need never die. The Handover distils over three hundred years of thinking about how to live with artificial agency.

With unparalleled access, and having interviewed hundreds of people – from Amazon executives to competitors to small businesses who rely on its marketplace to survive – Dana Mattioli exposes how Amazon was driven by a competitive edge to dominate every industry it entered, bulldozed all who stood in its way, reshaped the retail landscape, transformed how Wall Street evaluates companies, and altered the very nature of the global economy.

It began with a smoke break. James Monsees and Adam Bowen were two ambitious graduate students at Stanford, and in between puffs after class they dreamed of a way to quit smoking. Their solution became the Juul, a sleek, modern device that could vaporize nicotine into a conveniently potent dosage. Time magazine reporter Jamie Ducharme follows Monsees and Bowen as they create Juul and, in the process, go from public health visionaries and Silicon Valley wunderkinds to two of the most controversial businessmen in the country.

It may be hard to believe in an era of Walmart, Citizens United, and the Koch brothers, but corporations are on the decline. The number of American companies listed on the stock market dropped by half between 1996 and 2012. In recent years we've seen some of the most storied corporations go bankrupt (General Motors, Chrysler, Eastman Kodak) or disappear entirely (Bethlehem Steel, Lehman Brothers, Borders).

In Circle of Friends, award-winning journalist Charles Gasparino chronicles the massive federal crackdown that has already put some of the biggest names on Wall Street behind bars. Circle of Friends is not a defense of insider trading, but it does offer an account of the politics of Wall Street crime fighting, revealing the behind-the-scenes ambitions that motivate headlines and burnish political careers. A riveting work of narrative nonfiction, as engrossing and explosive as fictional thrillers of the finest magnitude.

Control of the country is up for grabs - and Republicans have been rigging the game in their favor. Twenty-two states have passed restrictions on voting. Ruthless gerrymandering has given the GOP a long-term grip on Congress. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has eviscerated campaign finance laws, boosting candidates backed by big money. It would be worrying enough if these were just schemes for partisan advantage. But the reality is even more disturbing.

In this vivid, deeply-reported book, Matt Stroud shows that our new policing tools are overhyped and ineffective. Instead of wrestling with tough fundamental questions about their work, police leaders have looked to technology as a silver bullet, and stood by as corporate interests have insinuated themselves ever deeper into the public institution of law enforcement. With a sweeping history of these changes, Thin Blue Lie is a must-listen for anyone seeking to understand how policing became what it is today.

Martin T. Manton was a corrupt federal appeals court judge in New York who was convicted in 1939 and sent to prison. At the time, this was a hugely important story: Manton was considered the highest-ranking judge in the United States after the nine Justices of the Supreme Court, and was nearly appointed to that august body in 1922. Yet his story has never been told in book-length form before, and never with the benefit of such exhaustive research.

Donald Trump may be the last of a breed - the businessman as brand. When Warren Buffett formed his investing company he did not follow the lead of E.F. Hutton or Merrill Lynch and name the enterprise after himself. Bill Gates did not name his software publishing business after himself like Little, Brown or Simon and Shuster. Sergey Brin and Larry Page did not become Hewlett-Packard. Elon Musk named his car company after a real person, but it was not himself. It has not always been that way. In fact, the business history of America has been mostly that of people who became brands. We all ...

Employers are increasingly recruiting their workers into politics to change elections and public policy - sometimes in coercive ways. Using a diverse array of evidence, including national surveys of workers and employers, as well as in-depth interviews with top corporate managers, Alexander Hertel-Fernandez's Politics at Work explains why mobilization of workers has become an appealing corporate political strategy in recent decades.

Août 2007, dans les médias apparaît un mot nouveau : "subprimes".

Empires of Steam and Rust marks a new series with the short novel First Passage: Gateway to Rust and Ruin. Sir Francis Barstow has unlimited funds from the alchemist's dream--he can transmute lead into gold with a special ray confined to a Cornish coal mine. To exhaust generated fumes from the electrical equipment, he uses a strange black portal only a foot in diameter--the portal opens onto an entire new dimesnion, the World of Rust. Other, larger holes have appeared across the world. The Kaiser uses one to smuggle contraband from the United States into Switzerland in preparation for ...

Un nuevo audiolibro de la serie "Los pecados capitales de la historia de España", con la que Juan Eslava Galán nos ofrece anécdotas y curiosidades, en esta ocasión, relacionadas con los episodios de codicia más bochornosos de nuestra historia reciente.

Der Financial-Times-Journalist Dan McCrum hat getan, wofür eigentlich Wirtschaftsprüfer und Finanzaufsicht zuständig sind: Er hat den größten Betrug der DAX-Geschichte aufgedeckt. Die Geschichte klingt filmreif: Wirecard, neben SAP das einzige deutsche Tech-Vorzeigeunternehmen, wird gehypt und übertrifft sogar den Börsenwert der Deutschen Bank. Der bargeldlose Zahlungsverkehr von Onlinegeschäften und Kreditkarten scheint ein überzeugendes Geschäftsmodell, eine Banklizenz eröffnet weitere Möglichkeiten.

Die Geschichte liest sich wie ein Hollywood-Thriller, ist aber wahr: Am 7. April 2018 verschwindet der deutsch-amerikanische Milliardär Karl-Erivan Haub im Gletschergebiet am Matterhorn. Der bestens trainierte Extremsportler hinterlässt keine einzige Spur, keinen Hilferuf, kein Zeichen eines Überlebenskampfes. Im Oktober 2018 wird die Suche nach ihm offiziell eingestellt, seine Leiche wird nie gefunden. Ein Bruder Haubs lässt den Unternehmer für tot erklären, was seine Macht in einem Firmenimperium sichert, zu dem unter anderem OBI, KiK und Teile von Zalando gehören.

Dr. Hiram Drache and Bruce Gjovig, two experts on agriculture history and innovation and entrepreneurs, have published a book about the impact of innovative entrepreneurs in North Dakota and Northwest Minnesota during the past 150 years. This book profiles 76 successful regional entrepreneurs in 65 chapters covering the Dalrymple Bonanza farm of the 1870s to today’s technology innovators.

You’ve probably heard that famous 'Well may we say' speech made by Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam on the day he was sacked by the queen’s representative, or seen the grainy footage from the steps of old parliament house. But do you properly understand the extraordinary events leading up to the most dramatic day in Australian political history? How did The Dismissal actually happen? This audio series takes you inside the highest circles of power to uncover pieces of this story that have never been told before.

In October 2022, Elon Musk marched through Twitter’s front doors carrying a kitchen sink, tweeting a message to his millions of followers: ‘let that sink in’. His takeover came with the promise of fundamental changes, but nothing could prepare the company for the chaos to come – brutal, sometimes arbitrary mass firings, an exodus of advertisers and ‘blue-tick’ celebrities, and a vicious Shakespearean battle for control.

You can’t escape the corporation! In the year 2028, a massive online corporation called Everest.Com will control everything we buy, including books, food, medical care, police protection, religion, political affiliations...Everything! Tanya Teal, is fired from the last remaining NYC publishing house due to overwhelming competition from Everest.com. After rekindling her love affair with an old boyfriend, Tony Smart, they drink a few too many and decide to visit one of their old haunts, Gus's Hotdog Shack. They know it's illegal, but what can one hotdog hurt?

Erskine’s book is a history of the Studebaker Corporation’s early years, the wagon and carriage businesses, the transition to the automotive business, plus selected corporate financial information.