Jacob Wallenberg is used to fighting against misapprehensions. Perhaps the biggest is that Sweden’s leading industrialist and his family personally own their stakes in the likes of telecoms group Ericsson , home appliance maker Electrolux and drugs multinational AstraZeneca . Instead the shares are…

The house’s owners have built a vast basement that amounts to an underground village. Illustration by Michael Kirkham Witanhurst, London’s largest private house, was built between 1913 and 1920 on an eleven-acre plot in Highgate, a wealthy hilltop neighborhood north of the city center. First owned…

After about an hour of weaving up and down the winding, mountainous, two-lane highway that is route 58 , eastbound from San Luis Obispo, I honestly started to wonder where 9 million solar panels — one of the world’s largest operating solar panel farms that was built in this region — could be hiding.…

May 1st 2015 BOTH financiers and economists still get the blame for the 2007-2009 financial crisis: the first group for causing it and the second for not predicting it. As it turns out, the two issues are connected. The economists failed to understand the importance of finance and financiers put too…

I turned 30 last week and a friend asked me if I'd figured out any life advice in the past decade worth passing on. I'm somewhat hesitant to publish this because I think these lists usually seem hollow, but here is a cleaned up version of my answer: 1) Never put your family, friends, or significant…

Dubbed the “king of cashmere” by The New Yorker , Brunello Cucinelli is the founder of the eponymously named fashion house that is well-known for making luxury cashmere sweaters (and more than $450 million a year in revenues). He started his company in 1978, and, now 61, he lives in Solemeo, Italy,…

Axel Dumas, the 44-year-old chief executive of Hermès and a sixth-generation member of the family who founded the house in 1837, wants to have lunch in the private dining room of the company’s Paris headquarters and shop at 24 Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. And so I arrive, via the shop’s main…

Astro Teller says that at Google[x], failure is indeed an option. So is changing the world. Astro Teller Mar 17, 2015 · Unlisted Google has long declared itself an unconventional company. But its division that takes on long-term, risky projects, Google[x], makes the rest of the company look pretty…

Ali Mese Sep 10, 2014 · 8 min read Finally the SMS arrived: “Tomorrow morning 5am, flight number AZ610 from Rome to NewYork.” An SMS hitting my BlackBerry on Sunday evenings used to decide my destination and client for the coming week. I was working for one of the top three global strategy…

At the height of the financial crisis in October 2008, HSBC executives were worried that queues were forming outside their UK branches. Unlike Northern Rock, which had suffered a run on deposits the previous year, this international banking giant was not running out of money. It had run out of…

She smiled. “Like school… but sex… sex school.” Jason Smith Jan 23, 2015 · 18 min read By Jason Smith As I reached my hand between her thighs, she pushed me away the way you would a dog who’s not allowed on the couch. “No today, Jay-zone,” she said, matter-of-factly, looking slightly annoyed. “La…

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Dan Shipper Jan 19, 2015 · 19 min read Imagine it’s January of 1884 in Atlanta, Georgia. Glotz, an affluent fellow citizen, has invited you to participate in a peculiar competition: You and twenty others are invited to present a plan to start a business that will turn a $2 million investment into a…

Pipino also started scaling the front of his family’s apartment building so as to avoid the haunted stairwell. He learned the delicate art of ascending decrepit facades with his fingertips, developing an instinctive sense for which bricks crumble and which would hold. By the time he was fifteen, he…

Four years ago I temporarily moved to Puerto Rico. I went to PR to seek the New American Dream, a dream that had swept through American business culture, launched a billion dollar self-help industry, alienated my generation, and killed uncounted people through its wild pursuit. I went to escape the…

Get it on Amazon → The Big Short, by Michael Lewis The Big Short, by Michael Lewis, is an amazing book about the banking crisis of 2008. Having watched the events unfold over the course of about a year, and not really understanding everything involved, the tragedy of situation wasn’t quite as…

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The federal investigation echoed tactics used for the Mob: get low-level workers to inform on those farther up the hierarchy. Illustration by Concepción Studios. Clockwise from Top: Louis Lanzano / Bloomberg via Getty; Shannon Stapleton / Reuters / Corbis; Louis Lanzano/Bloomberg via Getty; Brendan…

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(Originally published on Dan Wang’s blog .) J. Pierpont Morgan died in 1913 with a fortune of about $1.5 billion in today’s dollars. For his sway over Wall Street he was nicknamed “Jupiter,” after the Roman king of the gods. In 2013, four hedge fund managers took home over $2 billion as income each,…

August 22, 2013 at 11:28pm Home Expected read time: 8-12 minutes This was by far one of the most inspiring episodes of Princeton Startup TV . Sometimes you have high profile entrepreneurs or professors as your guests, and you, as an interviewer , get nervous, look up at the authority too much and do…

The power plant in Port Jefferson, N.Y. When demand outstrips supply, as it did on one day in May 2013, the grid strains to deliver power from elsewhere. Credit... Kathy Kmonicek for The New York Times PORT JEFFERSON, N.Y. — By 10 a.m. the heat was closing in on the North Shore of Long Island. But…

On a Friday morning in April, I strapped on a headset, leaned into a microphone, and experienced what had been described to me as a type of time travel to the future of higher education. I was on the ninth floor of a building in downtown San Francisco, in a neighborhood whose streets are heavily…

You can read a version of this story in Spanish here. Pueden leer una versión de esta historia en español aquí. José Urbina López Primary School sits next to a dump just across the US border in Mexico. The school serves residents of Matamoros, a dusty, sunbaked city of 489,000 that is a flash point…

When coconut water hit the market, it was billed as a miracle drink able to fight viruses and other ailments. The drink’s marketers have since been legally forced to sharply scale back their claims. Like kale salads and Robin Thicke, coconut water seems to have jumped from invisible to unavoidable…

I just met Greg Brockman a few minutes ago, but I'm already showing him my credit card number. Brockman is the chief technology officer at Stripe, the billion-dollar online payments startup backed by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and he wants to show how easy it is to use the…

In the murky world of unpaid-bills, a banker and an ex-con can make a fortune — if they don’t run into too many crooks. Illustration by Francesco Francavilla One afternoon in October 2009, a former banking executive named Aaron Siegel waited impatiently in the master bedroom of a house in Buffalo…

Last week, I read a biography that left an impression on me. No Better Time: The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet by Molly Knight Raskin documents the 31-year life of Danny Lewin, the Founder of Akamai Technologies . What Danny accomplished between the…

Remember you will die. Maybe even today. Don’t forget that. Don’t forget to be thankful for your health. For the ability to walk. For the time you get to spend with the person you love. For your siblings. For whatever it is that you have today. It’s not yours, it can be stolen away at any moment. So…

Leonardo Notarbartolo strolls into the prison visiting room trailing a guard as if the guy were his personal assistant. The other convicts in this eastern Belgian prison turn to look. Notarbartolo nods and smiles faintly, the laugh lines crinkling around his blue eyes. Though he's an inmate and…

Many people have remarked that Bitcoin resembles the internet in the early 90s: we haven’t yet built the Googles that will make it accessible or the Facebooks and Netflixes that will make it broadly useful. So it’s an open question: what might a Bitcoin that’s useful for the mainstream look like?…

Adam London Feb 15, 2013 · 5 min read This is the time for small paychecks and big memories. This is the time for travel. We are about as attached to one location as we are to our favorite Chinese take-out place. We know what we like about it, and we take comfort in the familiarity, but that’s about…

Stuart Cheshire, May 1996. (Revised periodically) Years ago David Cheriton at Stanford taught me something thatseemed very obvious at the time -- that if you have a network linkwith low bandwidth then it's an easy matter of putting several inparallel to make a combined link with higher bandwidth,…

Have the courage to face your reality and alter it I think it's immensely important for everyone to be able to face the harsh realities of their lives. @"thebrofessor"'s thread ( Who made you you? ) was a remarkable platform wherein I found it heartening that many people came forward with stories…

1 :: Because You Have Not Failed Enough Because you are comfortable in your mediocrity; because you choose not to try. Because it is easier to talk about learning that new (programming?) language as opposed to actually learning it. Because you think everything is too hard or too complicated so you…

One day in July 2001, Larry Page decided to fire Google’s project managers. All of them. It was just five years since Page, then a 22-year-old graduate student at Stanford, was struck in the middle of the night with a vision. In it, he somehow managed to download the entire Web and by examining the…

Photo: Richard Barnes It was an unseasonably warm December, and somewhere nearby a rising tide in the San Francisco Bay was lifting all kite-surfers, but Nick Edwards and Chris Monberg were crouched at opposite rented desks in a shared coworking space near the Caltrain station in SoMa wondering if,…

It’s the Economy Credit... Illustration by Grant Snider Every month, some young bureaucrat in the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange (known, slightly menacingly, as SAFE) reaches out to a trader in London and buys or sells billions of dollars’ worth of U.S. Treasury bonds. You’ve heard…

A new book by author Michael Lewis describes how trading algorithms that detect and exploit tiny, fleeting profit opportunities, called high-frequency traders, have transformed the stock market. And not by ripping off middle class investors. But that doesn't mean there are no problems. Read on to…

August 9, 2012 The Best Advice My Dad Ever Gave Me (for Demo Day) TL;DR1: I believe you can raise a $200M hedge fun, why not a seed round? TL;DR2: You have the rest of your life to be a “fat and happy” finance guy on the fringes of the financial industry (or run any lifestyle business, like our…