Author: Sam Allcock
A picture of Chuck Robbins at a press conference, calm and collected, the type of CEO who never seems shaken, has gone viral in the tech community. Beneath that calm, however, is one of the more subtly challenging tasks in American technology: persuading a business that made its fortune by selling physical hardware to sincerely believe it has a software future. Most people are unaware of how long Cisco has been in this business. Selling routers and switches, the physical infrastructure of the internet, helped the company establish its reputation and earn a $245 billion market capitalization. Data traveling over…
Watching a Formula E race has a subtly weird quality. Compared to those bulky, lumbering prototypes from 2014, the cars are now truly fast. The circuits pass through some of the most famous cities in the world, including Shanghai, São Paulo, and Monaco. The audience is youthful, attentive, and obviously not merely nostalgic for combustion engines. Despite all of that enthusiasm and aspirations, the show has spent more money than it has earned for the majority of its existence. That is the main conflict that no one wants to state clearly. Electric cars are no longer a specialty. They are…
The tale of Intel’s return literally involves a barge. A few years ago, a huge cold box that was too big to fit under highway overpasses close to Cincinnati was pushed up the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers by a tugboat. Eventually, workers loaded it onto a specialized trailer, and as the convoy crawled toward New Albany, Ohio, at eight miles per hour, cherry pickers moved traffic lights out of the way. A two-hour trip was extended to two weeks. That picture, which is laborious, costly, and slow, seems to be a true representation of everything Intel is currently attempting to…
One of the most significant technology companies in the world is located somewhere outside of Cambridge on a business park that would go unnoticed by a passing motorist. The offices don’t stand out. There are no billboards or TV commercials using the name ARM Holdings. However, ARM’s fingerprints can be found in almost every smartphone on the planet. Apple’s iPhones, Samsung’s Galaxy smartphones, and Google’s Pixel phones are all powered by processors derived from ARM-designed and licensed blueprints. Not a single chip is produced by the company. It has never done so. However, modern mobile computing most likely wouldn’t exist…
The fact that Chris Rock, a young man who once worked as a dishwasher at Red Lobster to make ends meet, is now thought to be worth $60 million has an almost poetic quality. He was bused to schools in mostly white neighborhoods while growing up in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, and experienced bullying, which he would later discuss on stage with unsettling clarity. He left high school early. He obtained a GED. He didn’t have a clear advantage. What he possessed was a keen sense of observation and an unwavering dedication to stand-up comedy that ultimately paid off in ways that…
There’s a particular kind of irony that Hollywood produces better than any other industry. A 25-year-old actress from Tucson, Arizona, walks onto a tiny horror set, gets paid somewhere around $20,000, and ends up anchoring a film that eventually grosses over $337 million worldwide. The math doesn’t feel real. But that appears to be where Inde Navarrette stands right now — critically celebrated, commercially proven, and sitting on an estimated net worth of roughly $500,000. That figure, at first glance, seems almost deliberately underwhelming. But it makes more sense when you consider the arc she’s actually on. Navarrette, born Danielle…
The fortune cookie, a treat based on the notion of hidden truths wrapped in a mystery of its own making, has an almost poetic quality. At the conclusion of a Chinese restaurant meal, the majority of Americans open one without much consideration for its origins. The presumption is clear: since the food is Chinese, the cookie must also be Chinese. As it happens, that assumption is nearly totally incorrect. It’s not a Chinese fortune cookie. In its original form, it hardly qualifies as a restaurant. The tsujiura senbei, a folded rice cracker with a slip of paper tucked inside its…
This story has a version that sounds almost too tidy. A young French man with Portuguese and Tunisian ancestry and probably some anime posters on the wall begins sharing fitness videos online and eventually accumulates a fortune that most salaried professionals will never see in their lifetimes. However, none of this happened by accident for Youssef Khelil, better known online as Gattouz0. When you look closely at his numbers, it seems more like intentional design than fortunate timing. Born April 23, 1998, in France, Gattouz0 built his initial following on YouTube and Instagram by doing something deceptively simple: being consistent…
Adobe’s stock dropped 17% on the day it revealed it was purchasing Figma for about $20 billion. Usually, victories don’t feel like that. Investors were making it very evident that the price was high, the reasoning was questionable, and the regulatory path ahead appeared difficult. They were correct on all three counts, looking back. Over the next fifteen months, one of the most closely examined transactions in recent tech history took place. Formal confirmation of the Adobe-Figma acquisition failure in December 2023 left Figma unexpectedly free, Adobe $1 billion poorer, and many people debating who was actually at fault. The…
In one version of this tale, Michael Jordan fails as an NBA owner. For thirteen years, the Charlotte Hornets’ lackluster record, one postseason trip, and an excruciating 23-game losing streak were cited by detractors as proof that the greatest player in basketball history was unable to convert his competitive brilliance into front-office success. After Jordan sold his majority stake for about $3 billion in June 2023, the dispute essentially came to an end. In 2010, Jordan paid $275 million to acquire the majority of what was then known as the Charlotte Bobcats. At the time, it felt historic in a…