Author: Sam Allcock
The brown UPS truck outside your home seemed to be a constant in American business for many years. That may be shifting. Amazon has been developing something that resembles a full-fledged logistics company rather than a retail business, almost without making any announcements. This company is now available to anyone who is willing to pay for it. Amazon formally introduced Amazon Supply Chain Services in May 2026, making its freight, fulfillment, and last-mile delivery network available to companies of all sizes and sectors. healthcare organizations. automakers. apparel companies. The announcement was made using the kind of subtle corporate language that…
Neither a quarterly earnings call nor a boardroom announcement was the first indication that something was actually wrong. The comment sections are where it originated. By the end of 2024, replies to influencers who shared images of luxury purchases and far-off vacations on Instagram and TikTok were flattened, not because they were phony but rather because they were tone deaf. The audience was no longer the same. And slowly but clearly, the ad dollars started to come in. Social media advertising relied on a sort of shared faith for more than ten years. Brands thought that conversions would occur where…
As you watch LIV Golf or read another news story about a Premier League transfer paid for by Gulf money, you can’t help but ask yourself, “How did we get here?” The answer seems to be linked to Riyadh and the Public Investment Fund (PIF), which is one of the world’s most powerful money-making tools. Saudi Arabia is no longer just an oil exporter. Its sovereign wealth assets are now worth more than $5 trillion and are spread out among Gulf funds. PIF is at the center of it all. It is a buyer. A patient, aggressive buyer with a…
Watching a grown adult pay $2,000 for a tiny plastic figure the size of a thumb seems a little strange. On the secondary LEGO market, though, that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s been going on for so long that economists are now writing papers about it. From 1987 to 2015, a study from Russia’s Higher School of Economics looked at 2,322 LEGO sets. Researchers found something that most people wouldn’t have expected: investments in LEGO returned an average of 10 to 11 percent per year during that time, which was higher than investments in stocks, bonds, gold, and traditional collectibles like…
The thought of a 28-year-old selling the music he made as a teenager for $200 million is somewhat shocking. There are awkward YouTube videos, fans screaming, and the hair is swooped. A lot of people that age are still figuring out their 401(k). Justin Bieber was getting rid of a legacy. Bieber sold all of his music to Hipgnosis Songs Capital in December 2022. Blackstone, a big name in finance, backed the business. The deal included 290 songs that came out before December 31, 2021. These songs ranged from the catchy “Baby” to the more somber, adult contemporary “Justice.” Largest…
Hollywood got the message loud and clear when George Clooney and Rande Gerber sold Casamigos to Diageo for almost a billion dollars in 2017. Tequila was the new movie deal. Then came Dwayne Johnson, Kendall Jenner, Nick Jonas, LeBron James, Bryan Cranston, and Aaron Paul. It wasn’t really a business movement; it was more like a stampede. It seemed like every time someone walked the red carpet, a signature agave spirit was playing in the background for a while. It’s not their fault if they chase it. Clooney said the quiet part out loud: “You know, acting used to pay…
People in the Swiss financial world used to say that if UBS and Credit Suisse merged, it would be like the sun rising in the west. Not possible. Almost a funny line. After that, on a Sunday night in March 2023, hours before Asian markets opened, Swiss regulators turned that joke into law. It was moving very quickly. The bank was bought for three billion Swiss francs. Its shares used to be worth more than 82 francs each. 167 years of history were lost over the weekend. Both bank headquarters are very close to each other in Zurich’s Paradeplatz, which…
Many people tell the story of Tim Sweeney as the kid who taught himself to code, made a game at home with his parents, and then turned it into a billion-dollar business. That story is true. It’s also not finished. I was born in 1970 and grew up in Potomac, Maryland. My youngest brother is also named Sweeney. By the time he was five or six, he had already taken a lawnmower apart to see how it worked. After a few years, he built his own go-kart. In the late 1970s, when arcade games first came out, he didn’t just…
Evan Spiegel’s story about how he made money is a little strange. When he was 23, Mark Zuckerberg offered him $3 billion. He turned it down. That choice is probably the main reason his name is on all billionaire lists today. In some ways, though, that same choice has also meant years of seeing huge amounts of money disappear in real time. Forbes says that Evan Spiegel is worth about $2.1 billion right now. Like it sounds, it’s pretty cool. But it’s also important to remember that this number was close to $13 billion in September 2021, when Snap’s share…
There is a certain type of job that doesn’t make a lot of noise. It grows. It builds up. Furthermore, it gets tough to sum up in a single sentence after fifty years. That’s the kind of job Sylvia Rhone has. Her net worth is thought to be around $20 million, which is pretty impressive, but it’s almost not important when you look at what she did. Rhone was born in Philadelphia in 1952 and grew up in Harlem, New York. She learned a lot about music by watching performers like Aretha Franklin, Ella Fitzgerald, and Jimi Hendrix at the…