Business History
It’s the history of business. How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the…
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About Business History
It’s the history of business. How did Hitler’s favorite car become synonymous with hippies? What got Thomas Edison tangled up with the electric chair? Did someone murder the guy who invented the movies? Former Planet Money hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith examine the surprising stories of…
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Episodes
New episodes usually drop on Wednesdays.51 episodes- Oct 28, 2026 · 41 min
The Pigeons That Built a Global News Empire
Before Reuters was a global news giant, it was a man and 45 homing pigeons. Julius Reuter saw that the telegraph would change how information moved, and he used that to his advantage. He didn’t have to get news out immediately — he just had to be first. Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith follow Reuter from Germany to England, where he scoops The Times of London with news that Europe was headed to…
- Oct 21, 2026 · 47 min
How the Company Conquered the World
Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith talk with Adrian Wooldridge, co-author of The Company: A Short History of a Revolutionary Idea . Companies are some of the most powerful institutions in the modern world – right up there with the nation-state. Where did the modern corporation come from? And what do AI and Chinese state-owned firms mean for the future of the company? Connect with us: Follow Business…
- Oct 14, 2026 · 56 min
Sam the Banana Man: Gunboats, Coups, and United Fruit
In the late 1800s, a Russian immigrant named Samuel Zemurray spent nearly everything he had on a load of bananas, and turned it into a fortune. But Sam the Banana Man wasn’t just a business titan. He was a puppeteer on the geopolitical stage, bankrolling a revolution in Honduras and pushing the CIA to overthrow Guatemala’s democratically elected leader. For decades, Zemurray battled the United…
- Oct 7, 2026 · 50 min
Blockers | A Preview of Michael Lewis's New Audiobook
We're here with a preview of Blockers, a new audiobook from Michael Lewis, the author of Liars Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and more. In Blockers, Lewis tells the story of a handful of people who dedicated their careers to public service—until the Department of Government Efficiency decided they were a problem. These were people who believed they had a calling—people who kept American's sensitive tax…
- Sep 30, 2026 · 34 min
Hitler's Gift to the Hippies: The VW Beetle Story Part I – Rerun
Business History is off this week, so we wanted to keep you entertained with a rerun, in case you missed our Beetle episode the first time around. (You can help us win a Signal Award for this episode by voting here .) The VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time - and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in Nazism. The…
Earlier episodes (46)
- Sep 23, 2026 King of the Roll-Ups: The Man Who Created a Trash Empire, Then Built Blockbuster VideoWayne Huizenga came from a long line of trash collectors. It was a rough, fragmented, mom-and-pops business which notoriously attracted mobsters. But Huizenga set out to buy his small competitors - to roll them up - to form the biggest waste management firm in the world. Huizenga bought up rival companies at a furious pace - several per week - and when he tired of the trash business he looked for something…
- Sep 18, 2026 How Warren Buffet Built His Legacy By Finding Value No One Else Could See – RerunWith the news of Warren Buffett stepping down as chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, we are revisiting an episode from our two-part series on Buffet. Warren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the richest person in the world - and he did it in a unique way. As a boy in Omaha he collected information obsessively - writing down car license numbers and hoarding bottle caps. As a young man, Buffett turned his focus on…
- Sep 16, 2026 Herman Petty's Dream: The Struggles of the First Black American to Own a McDonald'sHerman Petty was a Chicago barber and bus driver who dreamed of running his own business. When his local McDonald's restaurant was abandoned in 1968, Herman approached the company and said he should be the first black American to be given a hamburger franchise. Herman and other black pioneers faced unique problems running McDonald's in America's inner cities - but their businesses soon flourished and they…
- Sep 9, 2026 The Battle of Fort Frick and the Anarchist AssassinConcluding our story of Andrew Carnegie's effort to break the unions at his Homestead steel factory, we look at how the plant boss Henry Clay Frick enlisted a private army of Pinkerton detectives to confront the steel workers. Gunfire erupts and there are deaths on both sides. The so-called battle of "Fort Frick" seems to go the way of the unions - until a young anarchist comes to town hoping to…
- Sep 2, 2026 Andrew Carnegie's War with his WorkersIn the first of two shows about the fight between the richest man and the unions at his Homestead steel plant - we look at why Andrew Carnegie decided that his workforce deserved a smaller share of his profits and the lengths he went to to cut their wages. Carnegie grew up in poverty and publicly proclaimed that rich moguls such as he had a duty to aid the poor - but that didn't stop him using…
- Aug 26, 2026 George Washington’s Trusted Tavern Guide: The Birth of the User ReviewWhen America’s first president set off to tour his new country, he had no idea where to stay. George Washington slept in some taverns he described as dirty and grim, but also stayed at some delightful inns. In the 1790s, there was no way for travellers to share tips on the nice places to sleep and those to avoid. Fast forward to today and the rise of peer-to-peer services where we book a car ride, rent…
- Aug 19, 2026 The DeLorean Saga: Fraud, Drug Deals and Marty McFly's CarThis is a special crossover episode with Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford . John DeLorean was a top car executive - but he was too maverick to fit into the oppressive corporate culture of GM. He wanted to make a new and exciting sports car - a futuristic stainless steel marvel with distinctive gull-wing doors (which found fame in Back to the Future) . He just needed someone to give him millions of…
- Aug 12, 2026 The Tangled Story of Instant RamenMomofuku Ando told the world he invented instant ramen noodles in a shed in his backyard. In Japan, there's not one, but two museums celebrating this breakthrough. Only Ando wasn't the first person to flash-fry noodles to preserve them - but he was willing to sue any rival ramen maker. Ando had suffered repeated business failures and even been jailed for tax fraud - but he created an origin story for…
- Aug 5, 2026 Billy Beer: When American Beer Hit Bottom, Then Bounced BackPresident Jimmy Carter had a brother, and this brother LOVED beer. Billy Carter was a big 1970s celebrity and a struggling brewery decided to bet on him to revive its fortunes. Together they created Billy Beer and launched a huge ad campaign. The beverage was a global sensation... except nobody including Billy liked the taste. Billy Beer was a flop. Billy Beer was emblematic of American brewing at…
- Jul 29, 2026 The Printing Press: The Invention Built on Debt and SinBefore 1450, books were written out by hand. It was slow and expensive. But Johannes Gutenberg borrowed a ton of money to create a printing press that could crank out Bibles and pamphlets and documents in huge numbers. Science, politics and philosophy were all up-ended. For example, the Catholic Church seized on the invention to sell special certificates absolving people of their sins - a move that made…
- Jul 22, 2026 The Robberiest Robber Baron: The Villainy of Jay GouldJay Gould became hugely rich without ever really making a product or offering a service to benefit his customers. Other "Robber Barons" in the 19th century forged steel or pumped oil to make money - but Gould preferred to manipulate the stock market or bribe judges and politicians to generate a profit. Even when he was fired from the railway company he mismanaged, he used this inside information to profit…
- Jul 8, 2026 The Factory That Was Wiped Off The Map (From Cautionary Tales)Business History will be back on July 22nd - but here's an episode from another Pushkin Industries show we're sure you''ll enjoy, Cautionary Tales. A giant chemical plant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material used in everything from stockings to toothbrushes to electronics. When a reactor vessel fails, the engineers improvise a quick-fix…
- Jul 1, 2026 The Nobel Winners Who Almost Crashed the EconomyJohn Meriwether assembled the smartest team on Wall Street. In the 1980s, he combed Harvard and MIT for geniuses to join him at Salomon Brothers and make the investment bank a fortune with arbitrage - the trick of buying an asset cheap in one place and quickly selling it for a profit in another. When he parted ways with Salomon Brothers, Meriwether took his "nerds" to set up a hedge fund. They prospered -…
- Jun 24, 2026 A Store Owner You Can Trust: John Wanamaker, Returns and the Price TagShopping used to be adversarial. Shoppers and store owners would bargain and haggle over prices. What one person got for $1, the next guy bought for £1.25. And there were no returns. It was unfair and stressful - and made shoppers distrustful that they were getting a good deal. John Wanamaker changed all that. Wanamaker thought about being a preacher before setting up as a clothes merchant. So he built…
- Jun 17, 2026 The Boy Scout Who Brought us the Age of DisruptionWhy have so many tiny start-ups come from nowhere to take down huge established corporations? Is it because the incumbents were dumb? Harvard Business School professor Clayton M Christensen decided to explore these David versus Goliath battles - and came up with a theory to explain why seemingly solid businesses suddenly lose market share... disruptive innovation. In his hit book, The Innovator's…
- Jun 10, 2026 The Reporter Who Took Down John D. RockefellerAt a time when women couldn't vote or freely enter the workplace, Ida Tarbell took on the richest man in America and triumphed. Ida grew up in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1870s, and saw how John D Rockefeller and his company Standard Oil bought or bullied independent firms. Ida's neighbors and even her own father were in Rockefeller's sights. In adulthood, Ida joined a new movement in…
- Jun 3, 2026 "Time is Money": How Ben Franklin's Sayings Created American Capitalism and Grind CultureBenjamin Franklin had a full life - he was a scientist, statesman, and a Founding Father. But we're looking at the huge impact he had as a writer of best-selling business books. Franklin first picked up the pen as a poor, downtrodden teenager to write satire, but as he became richer and more successful he instead shared his entrepreneurial insights with the public. His sayings about time-wasting,…
- May 27, 2026 The Founding Father Who Got Rich in the RevolutionTwo-hundred-and-fifty years ago George Washington was fighting the Revolutionary War against the British, but Robert Morris doing something just as vital. He was raising money for the fighting and buying the gunpowder, tents, food and uniforms Washington's army needed. Morris had been a merchant before the revolution, so didn't see why he shouldn't personally profit from his work supplying the colonists'…
- May 20, 2026 The Ice King: How Frederic Tudor Got Rich Shipping Ice to IndiaFrederic Tudor could get ice any time he wanted. He lived in chilly Boston and his family had a lake that froze over in the winter. Harvesting ice and storing it was a normal thing in New England in the 1800s, but Frederic decided he'd make a fortune if he could ship ice to the warmest places on earth. And everyone thought this was the dumbest business idea of all time! No one would back Frederic's plan - no…
- May 13, 2026 Ivar Kreuger: The Match King Behind the Biggest Fraud You’ve Never Heard OfSwedish entrepreneur Ivar Kreuger built a fortune selling matches. He used this money to build a world famous financial empire that bankrolled whole countries. France borrowed from Kreuger. Germany borrowed from Krueger. He was crowned "The Match King" and ruled Wall Street in the 1920s. But Kreuger's business was about to burn to the ground. The Swede had been using shady - even criminal - methods to move…
- May 6, 2026 Did "Neutron" Jack Welch Nuke GE?In 1999, Jack Welch was named "Manager of the Century". As CEO of General Electric for 20 years, Welch transformed the conglomerate and made it the biggest company in the world. Nicknamed "Neutron Jack", he closed down big chunks of old GE and set up new ventures... including GE Capital - which operated more like a bank than the wing of a manufacturing giant. Under the leadership of "Neutron…
- Apr 29, 2026 Veuve Clicquot: The Widow Who Built a Champagne EmpireRunning a wine business in Napoleonic France wasn't easy. Constant wars meant naval blockades stopped you exporting your wares and invading armies might loot your cellars. But it was even harder for women - who were forbidden to run companies. None of this stopped Barbe-Nicole Clicquot. When her husband died, she used a loophole that allowed widows to be entrepreneurs. Naming her Champagne brand after…
- Apr 22, 2026 Silicon Valley’s Obsession with Living Forever (with Kara Swisher)Kings and emperors spent fortunes pursuing the secret of eternal youth - but now it's tech billionaires who want to live forever and are funding research into scientific (and not-so-scientific) ways to beat aging and death. Kara Swisher (host of CNN's new series Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever ) joins Jacob and Robert to discuss the longevity business - from ancient China, via yoghurt enemas and blood…
- Apr 15, 2026 How Lloyd’s of London Nearly Sank the Global Economy (Lloyd’s, Pt. 2)In the 1980s, Lloyds of London insured satellites, rock singers' voices and the legs of sports stars. Everyone was having fun and making money - but disaster was just around the corner. Lloyds had always operated on the principle of unlimited liability - so the people backing up the insurance policies were expected to pay over all their assets if required. That hardly ever happened - until a series of huge…
- Apr 8, 2026 The Insurers Who ALWAYS Paid Out: The Lloyds of London Story (Lloyd’s, Pt. 1)Edward Lloyd opened a coffee shop near the River Thames in the 1680s - it became a place where ship owners and money men rubbed shoulders and a trade in marine insurance sprang up. The coffee-drinking insurers eventually decided to form an association and agree on a set of rules - and so Lloyd's of London was born. It became a key factor in keeping the global sea trade going, but soon branched out into…
- Mar 25, 2026 Prediction Markets: The Wild History of Betting on Taylor Swift and PopesA live mash-up between Business History and Bloomberg's Everybody's Business . On platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket you can bet on just about anything - from Taylor Swift's album sales to whether President Trump will say a certain word in a speech. Many people worry about these new prediction markets, but the concept is far older than some critics might think. We go back centuries to Papal conclaves;…
- Mar 18, 2026 Who Owns a Song? Bowie, McCartney, Michael Jackson and the Royalty WarsOnce if you wrote a hit song there was no guarantee it would make you rich. So songwriters formed a cartel - the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers. ASCAP started suing concert halls, cafes and nightclubs to claim back royalties. Seemed fair... except ASCAP started a war when it demanded radio stations turn over 10% of their revenues. ASCAP's monopoly on music rights was…
- Mar 11, 2026 How GM Beat Ford: The Character Flaw That Cost Henry Ford His CrownFord was the pre-eminent American car maker and Henry Ford was the king of modern manufacturing, until a Michigan cigar salesman decided to consolidate a bunch of small auto companies into a single firm to defeat the Colossus of Detroit. General Motors united the likes of Oldsmobile, Buick, Cadillac and decided to live by "the laws of Paris dressmakers" to make cars that were more stylish and fashionable than…
- Mar 4, 2026 Henry Ford Invented the Modern World... Then Got Left BehindFarm boy Henry Ford hated toil. If only someone could invent ways to work more efficiently, as well as cheap, reliable machines to take some of the strain. Ford was a tinkerer and a lover of the newly invented automobile - so he started building cars in a new, streamlined way that made them affordable to many more Americans. Thanks to Ford’s production line techniques, the Model T…
- Feb 25, 2026 War, Exploration and Beer: How the Tin Can Changed the WorldOld-fashioned ways of preserving food made for salty, vinegary or chewy meals - but it was often a choice between that or starving. Soldiers, explorers and ordinary people alike faced malnutrition and food poisoning - but then came a French revolution... in a can! First invented in Napoleonic France, the humble can would feed armies; sustain bold exploration; and give poor people access to wholesome food all…
- Feb 18, 2026 A&P: How America’s Biggest Grocery Chain Became Public Enemy No. 1Mom and Pops grocery stores were charming, but inefficient. They contributed to Americans either spending a lot on their food or having to go hungry. The Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company changed the entire model. The A&P established a chain of stores selling branded goods at the lowest prices. The A&P kept its profit margins slim and allowed Americans to buy more food for less - but this wasn't…
- Feb 11, 2026 The Rise and Fall of Atari (and the E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial Game That Sank It)Nolan Bushnell loved weed, hot tubs and games... especially games. He took computer games out of the laboratory and put them in bars. His arcade game Pong was a monster hit, so he set up Atari to build a home games console which became the must-have Christmas present of 1975. Atari was the name on every kid's lips... but then investors came onboard to help the company expand. Bushnell and his engineers were…
- Feb 4, 2026 How a Bad Boss Kickstarted Silicon ValleyWilliam Shockley was an electronics genius - he even won a Nobel Prize - but he was an awful boss. Shockley was a cruel, paranoid micromanager. And this annoyed the staff of brilliant young engineers he'd assembled in a quiet town in Northern California. In fact, they quit and set up a company of their own inventing silicon chips. Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the rest of "The Traitorous Eight"…
- Jan 28, 2026 Sears: Cocaine Wine, Shotguns, and the World’s Tallest TowerRichard Warren Sears started off selling pocket watches - then published a catalog full of hundreds and hundreds of products from shotguns to cocaine wine. Sears & Roebuck offered even Americans living on remote farms the chance to shop like city dwellers. The catalog became an American institution - the Amazon of the 1890s - but as the nation changed, Sears adapted too and built a vast chain of physical…
- Jan 21, 2026 De-Nazifying the Love Bug: The VW Beetle Story Part IIIt's 1945. The Volkswagen factory has been bombed and members of the staff have been arrested as war criminals. So how did the company turn around in just a few years and begin making Beetle cars that became a global sensation? Big political and economic moves helped - but a British Army officer, Walt Disney and a New York ad agency also played pivotal roles in turning a car that Hitler had championed into the…
- Jan 14, 2026 Hitler's Gift to the Hippies: The VW Beetle Story Part IThe VW Beetle was the biggest selling car of all time - and it found particular favor with people like hippies and surfers. But this icon of the 60s counterculture had its roots in Nazism. The Volkswagen - the People's Car - was an obsession of Adolf Hitler. He wanted to transform Germany into a land of drivers - and needed an affordable, but reliable automobile. Germany's private auto manufacturers…
- Jan 7, 2026 How Jim Simons Built a Machine That Beat the MarketJim Simons loved cigarettes and math. He started out as an academic mathematician and a Cold War code breaker - but decided to use his skills to write computer programs to spot investment opportunities in the financial markets. Simons and his fierce nerds bought up all the data sets they could find - reports, books, magnetic tapes - and built machine learning algorithms to hunt for tiny market discrepancies…
- Dec 24, 2025 Warren Buffett vs. Tech: The Investing Rule That Made Him a LegendYoung Warren Buffett became rich in anonymity - but in the 1980s he became a global star. During the excesses of 1980s Wall Street the middle-aged investor was reluctantly drawn into the spotlight to save troubled companies. And then came tech - which suited Buffett's style even less. Warren Buffett couldn't even use a computer - but everyone was telling him to buy tech stocks. How did Buffett…
- Dec 17, 2025 How Warren Buffett Found Value No One Else SawWarren Buffett rose from obscurity to become the richest person in the world - and he did it in a unique way. As a boy in Omaha he collected information obsessively - writing down car license numbers and hoarding bottle caps. As a young man, Buffett turned his focus on scouring business accounts to find companies that had hidden value no one else could spot. We tell the story of young Warren Buffett as he quietly…
- Dec 10, 2025 Jesse Livermore: The Trader Who Saw the 1929 Crash ComingThe stock market was once a Wild West free-for-all. There were few rules or regulations. Investors were more or less gambling, or manipulating stocks to make a profit. This is the world Jesse Livermore came to dominate. He would often bet against the market, making money when businesses failed. By 1929, Livermore was rich and famous. And then the Wall Street stock bubble burst. Share prices went through the…
- Dec 3, 2025 How a Labor Rights Lawsuit Rocked Major League BaseballCurt Flood was the best center fielder in baseball and one of the game's highest payed players. He helped the St Louis Cardinals reach the 1968 World Series... but then got traded. The rules said he had no say in the decision. He either could go to Philly, or quit the sport. So Curt decided to sue. Curt argued that Major League Baseball should act like any other business and let workers…
- Nov 26, 2025 Did Thomas Edison Eliminate His Biggest Rival? (Thomas Edison, Pt. 3)The man who invented the movie camera got on a train in France in 1890 and was never seen again. The wife of Louis Le Prince thought she knew who’d ordered her husband’s disappearance and presumed murder - Thomas Alva Edison. Many people were simultaneously racing to develop moving pictures - so had Edison decided to bump off his closest rival so he could win? The story of who deserves the credit for…
- Nov 19, 2025 Edison vs. Tesla: The Power War That Gave Us the Electric Chair (Thomas Edison, Pt. 2)Thomas Edison didn’t invent the lightbulb, but he created something more important: the grid. Edison's system of power plants and wires brought lightbulbs to homes and offices and revolutionized modern life. Edison was adamant that direct current (DC) should power America, and attacked competitors who said that alternating current (AC) was better. This sparked a bitter war between Edison and his rivals - and…
- Nov 12, 2025 The Edison Invention People Don't Talk About (Thomas Edison, Pt. 1)Thomas Alva Edison helped transform America and the world. He registered over one thousand patents before he died in 1931 - and we can thank him for advances in electric power, communications technology, music recording and even the movies. But his biggest breakthrough doesn't get nearly enough attention. In many ways, Edison invented modern inventing. Join Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert…
- Nov 5, 2025 The Secret of Southwest's Success: Free Whisky, Hot Pants and Low, Low FaresIt's hard to make money running an airline - but Southwest was profitable every year for nearly five decades. How did it manage it? Business History hosts Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith explore how a carrier with just four airplanes shuttling across Texas revolutionized flying by offering free whisky, cheap late-night tickets and free-for-all seating allocation. Southwest developed a winning formula that…
- Oct 29, 2025 Coming Soon: Business History with Robert Smith and Jacob GoldsteinWas the world's most lovable car originally made just to please Hitler? And what links Thomas Edison and the electric chair? From Jacob Goldstein and Robert Smith of Planet Money fame comes Business History, a new show uncovering amazing stories from the history of business. From sandals to suits, Business History brings to life the greatest innovations, the boldest entrepreneurs and the craziest mavericks in…
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Page updated October 30, 2026.