SoftBank's founder and CEO had a volatile relationship with WeWork's Adam Neumann

SoftBank acquired a majority stake in WeWork in October 2019

SoftBank is widely considered the biggest victim in the WeWork story, losing billions of dollars that it invested in the company while WeWork’s CEO walked away a billionaire himself.

SoftBank lost billions of dollars on WeWork. Meanwhile, WeWork’s founder walked away a billionaire

In the years leading up to WeWork’s bankruptcy, the tech holding company SoftBank invested roughly $16B into the company.

Adam Neumann started another real estate company after WeWork

Former WeWork CEO Adam Neumann has attempted to purchase WeWork before, although, thus far, he hasn’t been successful. Since leaving the company, he has founded a residential real estate firm, among other projects.

See the small apartment WeWork founder Adam Neumann lived in before he was a billionaire

WeWork CEO Adam Neumann used to share a relatively small apartment in New York City with his wife before he became a billionaire off of WeWork. At one point, the apartment rented for $3K per month.

‘I realized after I got there it was a cult,’ one former WeWork executive said

WeWork isn’t only known for how it revolutionized modern work, or its spectacular financial rise and fall. It’s also known for its former cultlike company culture under former CEO Adam Neumann, complete with a charismatic leader and “summer camp” company retreats that blurred the lines between work and personal life.

Elon Musk once tried to make himself CEO of OpenAI

After three years of funding the company since its 2015 launch, Musk believed OpenAI had fallen too far behind Google and proposed taking the helm. Rejected by OpenAI's other founders, Musk walked away and reneged on a $1B donation. (Some users may experience a paywall.)

WeWork’s competitors in the coworking space include Industrious and The Malin

WeWork’s story is colored by the times it just couldn’t make its numbers work. Its competitors in the coworking industry, such as Industrious and Convene, seem to be prioritizing slow and stable financial growth instead.

X's quirky culture clashed hard with Elon Musk's extreme leadership style

Investigative journalists have written that social platform X's open, sometimes chaotic workplace stopped when control shifted irreversibly from Jack Dorsey to Elon Musk. They claim the stark contrast in personalities left little protection for existing employees, culture, or users.

An interview with WeBank’s CFO

Leveraging Tencent's massive WeChat network, WeBank started as China's first digital bank and now serves 340 million users and 2.8 million businesses (as of 2024). Chief Financial Officer Arthur Wang discusses how the company is using AI and continuous innovation to stay ahead of the technological curve.

The CEOs of the two top prediction markets have a fierce rivalry

Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour and Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan are both billionaire CEOs of the top two prediction markets—but they don't exactly get along. For instance, Mansour reportedly does not say the word "Polymarket" out loud, referring to it as the "non-American, unregulated platform."

Cyan Banister, once homeless, was an angel investor in Uber, SpaceX, and DeepMind

Cyan Banister has invested in more than 100 companies, building a reputation in the angel-investing world for her unorthodox approach.

Warren Buffett was famously anti-tech stock during the 1990s dot-com boom

Buffett said that tech is something that Berkshire Hathaway doesn't "understand, so we don't invest in it." This philosophy led him not to invest in Yahoo or Microsoft during this time. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

A star investment banker was fired, launching a decade-long court fight

Star bankers are the core of an investment banking firm's business, so when Perella Weinberg let their restructuring guru Mike Kramer go in 2015, he sued, launching a ten-year legal fight.

Peter Thiel and Elon Musk formed PayPal after merging two dot-com companies

Elon Musk cofounded "X.com," an online banking service, in 1999 with the idea that the web would become a financial repository as internet access expanded and became ingrained in daily life. Peter Thiel cofounded "Confinity" as a digital security service that morphed into a payments system. In 2000, the two merged to form PayPal, and in 2002, they sold PayPal to eBay for $1.5B.

Should companies be owned by their workers?

In the last half-century, so-called private equity has transformed industries by purchasing private companies, cutting costs, loading up debt, and then selling the business at a premium—all at a huge profit to the investors. Workers, on the other hand, are often left with nothing. Listen to how both pro-worker economists and a private equity stalwart are trying to shift ownership to workers—a growing tactic proven to improve worker satisfaction and company value.

Sheryl Sandberg's 'Lean In' book championed similar philosophies as the '#Girlboss' book

Sheryl Sandberg left her top executive position at Facebook around the same time that other girlboss-era founders stepped down from their companies or faced backlash about how they treated their employees. An article explores the part Sandberg played in the girlboss movement, and why her Facebook exit was significant.

'My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each others' negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts.'

-Apple co-founder Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

A reclusive billionaire ran Sears before its bankruptcy

Former Sears CEO and hedge fund manager Eddie Lampert was once kidnapped from his home in Greenwich, Connecticut by criminals looking to get rich. Some argue that the incident colored Sears’ history.

Visa Founder Dee Hock abruptly left the company in 1984.

Hock was arguably an unlikely candidate for the founder of one of the most successful banking organizations of all time. He grew up extremely poor in rural Utah without indoor plumbing, but would go on to create one of the most innovative financial technologies of the 20th century.

Taylor Swift's feud with executive Scooter Braun

Braun, whom Swift said had a personal vendetta against her, purchased the rights to Swift's early music throguh his company.

Listen to a former Palantir employee's take on the company

Among other former Palantir employees who have spoken out against the company's role in aiding surveillance and in the American government, former content strategist Juan Sebastían Pinto is concerned that Palantir is creating a monopoly over artificial intelligence.

Spellcaster: the rise and fall of Sam Bankman-Fried

The rapid collapse of FTX, one of the world's largest cryptocurrency exchanges, in late 2022 shocked the world. At the center of the fiasco was Sam Bankman-Fried, a 29-year-old wunderkind who had entranced politicians, journalists, financiers, and others with his melding of altruism and digital currency. The sordid details revealed as the empire fell captured public attention—venture into the death spiral with this in-depth podcast from Bloomberg.

The collapse of Archegos Capital Management drew scrutiny to family offices

Archegos, which managed the assets of Bill Hwang, wasn’t subject to the same oversight as traditional investment firms when it collapsed.

The company's success is often credited to cofounder Reed Hastings

Hastings advocates management philosophies like radical candor, agility, and a hands-off approach to high-performing employees. He stepped down as CEO in 2023 but remains Netflix’s chairman.

Walmart has historically been one of Amazon's largest competitors

While Walmart has been America’s largest retailer by revenue for over three decades, Amazon is now fighting for the title, seeking retail supremacy. In this podcast episode from the Wall Street Journal, Sarah Nassauer explores the efforts Walmart has taken to keep its crown.

SpaceX's S-1 or 'prospectus' revealed many previously unknown details about the company, including its unprofitability despite doing $18.7B in revenue in 2025, exactly how many voting shares Elon Musk will have in the company (roughly 85%), and more.

In 2025, four executives from large tech companies were given positions in the US Army Reserves—including Palantir Chief Technology Officer Shyam Sankar, which reinforced Palantir's ties with the US military and its role as a leading defense partner.

Legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright designed the SC Johnson headquarters in Wisconsin, aiming to make a cathedral-like workplace

The name 'Silicon Valley' arose from the founding of Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in Fairchild Semiconductor in 1956-57, founded near Stanford University in Palo Alto

The Nasdaq's 'Magnificent 7' companies are responsible for roughly 40% of the Nasdaq 100 index's gains, while the remaining 93 companies account for the other 60%.

See a ranking of the best (and worst) Federal Reserve Chairs since 1914 out of the 16 men and women who have held the office since.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Warren Buffett's former professor Benjamin Graham is known as the 'father of value investing,' a strategy in which investors seek to buy stocks trading below their intrinsic worth.

In 2019, a laptop loaded with six of the worst malware in history and described as 'an exhibit of historical weaponry' sold for $1.3M.

A Yale student wrote a profound essay about the consulting industry's influence on elite college students that was published in a book of her writing after she died in a post-graduation car accident.

The identity of the Tank Man in the iconic photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests remains unknown and was possibly killed.

Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency—a form of digital currency with a wide variety of uses—created around popular 'memes,' or viral internet jokes.

US consumers collectively owe more than $1T to credit card companies—almost as much as they owe in auto loans.

The rivalry between Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson centered on federalism—the question of how much power the federal government should hold relative to the states.

Famed poet TS Eliot rejected the manuscript for George Orwell's political fable 'Animal Farm,' writing that its criticism of authoritarianism was not 'the right point of view.'

NBA superstar Victor Wembanyama spent the 2025 summer training with monks in central China to enhance his body and mind.

The United States has had a tumultuous relationship with Cuba since its 1959 revolution, highlighted by a nuclear crisis and a decades-long trade embargo.

Brian Wilson wrote the Beach Boys' 'Don't Worry Baby' for the Ronettes, but the legendary girl group rejected it.

The animatronic shark from Steven Spielberg's 'Jaws,' the first modern blockbuster, was a complex underwater apparatus called 'Bruce.'

In 2018, 26-year-old missionary John Allen Chau was killed by tribesmen after attempting to reach and evangelize on India's isolated North Sentinel Island

Budweiser stores yeast derived from the original 1800s strain in a secret bunker, which only the Head of Yeast Management can access—not even the CEO

Sunflowers have long been a symbol of nuclear disarmament because they can extract large amounts of radioactive cesium from soil.

Some researchers have labeled nomophobia, the fear of being without your phone, as 'the phobia of the 21st century.'

The syncytiotrophoblast is the outer layer of the placenta and the largest human cell, spanning an area about twice that of a king-sized bedsheet.

Firework or sparkler burns, even if they cover a relatively small area of skin, can significantly affect our range of motion.