Finance Stories

A 20-story collection on private equity's landmark deals (KKR's RJR Nabisco, Blackstone's Hilton, Silver Lake's Skype), the firms behind them (KKR, Blackstone, TPG, Thoma Bravo, CVC, Carlyle), and the mechanics that shape modern PE: the Two and Twenty fee model, continuation funds, and retail access.

A 20-story collection on M&A: landmark deals (Vodafone-Mannesmann, Microsoft-Activision, LVMH-Tiffany, AB InBev-SABMiller), the banks and law firms behind them (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Lazard, Wachtell Lipton), and the dealmaking playbooks, from antitrust reviews to hostile takeovers to spin-offs.

A 20-story collection on public equity markets: the indices and exchanges that define them (Dow, Nikkei, MSCI World, NYSE, Shanghai), landmark moments (Aramco's IPO, Enron's fraud, Tesla's splits), and the investing styles behind them, from value investing to dividend aristocrats and retail day trading.

A 20-story collection on hedge funds: the legendary managers (A.W. Jones, Dalio, Simons, Griffin, Englander, Robertson, Ackman), the strategies behind them (long/short equity, global macro, quant, activist), and the landmark trades that defined the industry, from Burry's housing short to Einhorn's Lehman warning.

A 30-story chronological tour of how modern stock markets were built: the 1602 Dutch East India IPO, the 1720 South Sea and Mississippi bubbles, the 1929 crash and the SEC's founding, Black Monday 1987, the 2008 crisis, and the recent push toward 24/7 tokenized trading.

Seven case studies on how private equity bought into global sport: CVC's Formula 1 and LaLiga deals, Silver Lake's UFC and Manchester City stakes, Bridgepoint's MotoGP exit to Liberty Media, and Elliott Management's distressed takeover of AC Milan.

Twenty stories on the investors who built modern shareholder activism: Bill Ackman at Canadian Pacific and Herbalife, Paul Singer's Elliott at AT&T and Twitter, Carl Icahn at Apple, Peltz's 0.0016% win at P&G, Engine No. 1 toppling the ExxonMobil board, and Carson Block and Jim Chanos on the short side.

Ten stories on the biggest leveraged buyouts in private equity history: KKR and TPG's $45 billion TXU bankruptcy, the canonical $31 billion RJR Nabisco deal behind Barbarians at the Gate, Blackstone's $14 billion Hilton win, Michael Dell's $24.4 billion take-private, and the Refinitiv carve-out Blackstone exited in two years.

Twenty stories on the biggest mergers ever closed: Vodafone's $183 billion hostile win over Mannesmann, the AOL-Time Warner hubris, ExxonMobil's Standard Oil reunion, Pfizer's capture of Lipitor via Warner-Lambert, Microsoft's $69 billion Activision deal, and Bayer's costly embrace of Monsanto.

Ten stories on the biggest IPOs in history: Saudi Aramco's record $29.4 billion Tadawul listing, Alibaba's NYSE debut, ICBC's dual Shanghai and Hong Kong offering, Visa's print during the 2008 crisis, GM's post-bankruptcy return, and Facebook's botched first day on NASDAQ.

Twenty-five stories on how private equity conquered software and tech: Silver Lake taking Dell private with Michael Dell, Thoma Bravo's cybersecurity wave (Proofpoint, SailPoint, Darktrace), Hellman & Friedman's Ultimate Software and Zendesk take-privates, Vista's Citrix-TIBCO combination, and the pandemic-era Airbnb lifeline.

Twenty stories on the biggest tech mergers and acquisitions: Google-YouTube and Google-DeepMind, Facebook-Instagram and WhatsApp, Microsoft-LinkedIn and Activision, IBM-Red Hat, Broadcom-VMware, Salesforce-Slack, Apple-Beats, Amazon-MGM, and the canonical AOL-Time Warner disaster.

Twenty of the most famous hedge fund trades in history: Soros breaking the Bank of England, Paulson's $15 billion subprime short, Tepper's 2009 bank bet, Chanos exposing Enron, Tudor Jones's Black Monday call, Burry's Big Short, Klarman's Lehman claims, and the COVID-era wins by Saba and Brevan Howard.

Twenty stories on how retail investors went from sideshow to majority: post-war mutual funds, the 1980s and 1990s online broker wave, Robinhood and the commission-free revolution, the GameStop short squeeze, COVID-era day trading, ETFs and passive investing, and the 2026 tokenization approval that is reshaping market hours.

Ten stories of mega-mergers that collapsed under regulatory pressure, from Broadcom-Qualcomm ($117B, 2018) and Nvidia-Arm ($40B, 2022) to Adobe-Figma ($20B, 2023) and AT&T-T-Mobile ($39B, 2011). Each one explains the antitrust, national security, or political logic that killed the deal, the breakup or reverse termination fee that changed hands, and how the industry reshaped in the aftermath.

Ten stories of hedge funds and alternative asset managers that collapsed under leverage, fraud, or a single catastrophic trade. Long-Term Capital Management ($4B in weeks, 1998), Madoff ($65B Ponzi, 2008), SAC Capital ($1.8B insider trading plea, 2013), Archegos ($10B in bank losses, 2021), Melvin Capital (GameStop, 2022), and the personal verdicts that followed, including Bill Hwang's 18-year 2024 sentence.