Tidbits

In 2019, a blog called EcommerceBytes, run by Ina and David Steiner, published critical articles about eBay. eBay’s top leadership and the CEO grew furious. This led to the company’s own security team headed by Jim Baugh being mobilized to intimidate the bloggers, dubbed as the “White Knight’s Strategy”.

The Steiners were subjected to terrifying harassment campaigns. There house was spray painted , received anonymous deliveries like live cockroaches, spiders, pig fetus, funeral wreath & bloody pig mask. Their neighbors got porn magazines in David’s name. eBay employees even flew from California to Massachusetts and planned to plant a GPS tracker on their car.

After the couple reported the incidents, federal investigation traced it all back to eBay’s corporate team. 6 former eBay employees were convicted on charges like cyberstalking and witness tampering. In 2024, eBay paid a $3 million criminal fine and was placed under a 3-year federal compliance monitor. The Steiners are now pursuing a civil case.

In the 1900s, the Allied powers used fossil fuel to manufacture oil products through distillation which unfortunately had low octane rating and high “knocking” of fuels. Next, General Motors in collaboration with Thomas Midgley secretively found that adding Tertraethyl Lead massively reduced knocking and improved octane rating.

But its usage had side effects with workers hallucinating, & choking with deaths. Upon statewide bans, Thomas did a demonstration in a press conference by washing his hands in a solution of Tetraethyl Lead and also inhaling the fumes to prove it was safe. Unbeknownst to all, Thomas was himself recuperating from acute lead poisoning in Florida, US.

GM next even argued through its lawyers that its workers had duly inhaled something else. This eventually led to removal of bans and use of leaded petrol flourished!

In comes the 1948, US vs Paramount that cracked down on the relationship of Movie Studos with Theatres and the ensuing Monopoly. This led to MGM losing direct channel to theatres and the profits as well. The dent came in when Kirk Krekorian became the owner of MGM. Kirk was into real estate, went about revamping MGM and even built the famous MGM Grand Casino in Las Vegas.

MGM started seeing losses as Kirk even sidestepped movie production to a great extent. MGM reported the first ever loss in 1957. It later went on to be bought by TBS in 1986. TBS went about selling the MGM holdings as it were making losses. TBS gained controlling rights to MGM archive of more than 1000+ movies which at the time became important as TV channels started showing the same to viewers. MGM lost a goldmine to this.

Fact: MGM filed for bankruptcy in 2010!

It took months of planning with more than 13000 man-hours with a team of 16 spent in constructing - right from the hood to the rear wings to the engine and taillights - all without glue by hand. The total weight came out to be 3300 pounds.

To power this car, it took 2304 power functional motors, 4032 gears and 2000 axles with 1 million LEGO elements. The team hired Andy Wallace, the official Bugatti testing driver to drive it at the official 462 km test track at Germany.

The 5m by 2.5 m long car was eventually a success and it drove at a top speed of 20km/hr! Even Andy himself was astonished with the team in the end of being able to make it.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engles, the fathers of Communism and who co-wrote “The Communist Manifesto” were a bunch of secret stock market traders - completely weird for them who actually preached the opposite.

Unknown to wide eyes, both of them were trading at London Stock Exchange. Marx had been given some money via donations and used this to begin speculation - he was mainly a day trader. He profited about £400 - enough to pay out his salary for months.

Friedrich had a seat at the stock exchange and was also an owner of a cotton mill. He died with more than £2.2 million of stock assets in today’s value - quite a sum that paid all of his expenses at that time! Also, both of them were serious readers of business magazines including the Economist.

One Piece, the best selling manga/anime series was created by Eiichiro Oda, a manga artist. But it was not an easy sell.

It was continuously rejected by Oda’s bosses/editors including Kazuhiko Torishima, the legendary editor of Dragon Ball series. He was frustrated and asked why the story concept was discarded. He even dreamed at night of beating up his bosses for this!

Oda challenged Torishima that if One Piece succeeds, he will have to admit defeat. When Volume 1 was released, Oda hid inside a bookshop. He leapt out of joy when he saw a small boy purchasing the first volume of the manga. He used to closely watch people reading his manga to see their reaction and help devise further story.

Today, it is one of the best fiction series till date by selling more than 500 million copies - a Guinness World Record. And indeed, Oda made Torishima admit defeat.

Wimbledon is quite famous for tennis. But it is also famous for strawberries - almost 50% of the Brits identify strawberries with Wimbledon and apparently it’s a money maker.

Hugh Lowe Farms is the official supplier for 30 years. It is estimated that 38 tons (1.94 million strawberries) along with 10000 litres of cream are consumed annually in the tournament - netting a cool £480,000 in the revenues. During Covid-19, 25 tons of strawberries were diverted to supermarkets, shops, etc. by encouraging people to “save the strawberry” by consuming them at home.

The strawberries are hand-picked and delivered each morning of the Championship, the berries are timed to ripe perfection, so they can be enjoyed at their absolute best during the two weeks of Wimbledon.

In 1960s, Paul McCartney, famed Beatle member, urged Michael Jackson to invest in music publishing. Paul was having royalty issues & sold his songs to ATV. MJ bought the ATV publishing house for $47.5 million that held more than 4000 songs including Beatle’s songs.

This allowed MJ to have a massive influx of royalties and licensing fees. In late 1980s, Paul tried to wrestle back the ownership since he wasn’t getting anything from it. In fact, in 1990s, MJ sold half of ATV shares to Sony to form Sony/ATV venture that today holds rights to songs for the likes of Taylor Swift & Lady Gaga.

After MJ’s death, in 2016, Sony finally bought the remaining ATV shares along with Beatle songs for $750 million. Today, the total worth of those songs is above $1 billion!

In the early 2000s, a Canadian entrepreneur Rob McEwen had a gold mining company, GoldCorp. It acquired a 55000 acre mining spot in Red Lake area but was unable to move ahead due to business losses and expenses.

To find the place to begin from, he took inspiration of Linus Trovald’s Linux Open Source project & shared his trove of spatial and mining data of 50 years as an open challenge worth $500,000.

More than 1400 groups of researchers and experts drilled down on it. In the end, the winning teams submitted a 3-D map of the mine that helped Goldcorp identify 110 deposit sites in the Red Lake, some which were previously unknown to the company.

These unearthed deposits were worth more than $6 billion, and shaved 3 years off the company's exploration time. This quest turned GoldCorp into one of the largest gold mining companies in world!

The name Rolex was chosen since it remains same in any language. It was started by Hans Wildorf in UK and left his business to the non-profit organisation- Hans Wildorf Foundation.

Rolex has its own foundry with world class researchers and manufacturers of three kinds of Gold and a special grade stainless steel. Rolex also develops its own machinery. Some of the alloys used cannot be found anyowhere on planet except Rolex.

In fact, they have suppliers for gemstones used in watches. Rolex built a machine that can detect fakes - that even broke the Six Sigma quality perfection by having only 1 fake per 10 million gems!

Finally, Rolex takes great pains to hide their business by even building full underground centres to shield it from public eyes like their assembly unit in Geneva.

Sony was offered a deal to buy out all Marvel characters for $25 million. Sony only bought the rights to “Spider-Man” for $10 million.

There was a clause inserted stating that it could keep the rights for Spider-Man if it “commence production on a new 'SM’ film within three years and nine months and release it within five years and nine months after the release of preceding picture”.

And since then, Sony, jealous and embarrassed, has been looking to do crossovers by collaborating with Marvel.

PB was started by three people who wanted freedom of sharing info. The site acted like a Google of links that allowed one to download content from anywhere.

Yet, companies started suing and taking their servers down for IP infringement. PB was initially hosted on a server by PQR, a Swedish firm. After backlash, they shifted and hosted on a banking data server which was untouchable by police. After more issues, they added a load balancer with multiple server copies around the globe for added security.

One such company that loathed them was MediaDefender which was a spin-off from Universal Group. The company used to upload fake torrents on PB, lure users and their IP address, sue them and demand $500 in payment. It was a media protection group, offered millions by clients to stop piracy.

A friend of PB founders hacked their systems and even uploaded copies/phone transcripts of data on PB for everyone to see the nasty game they were playing!

In 1976, Jobs and Wozniak were desperately looking for investors. And the story is wild..

The duo started with HP, Xerox and even Intel but were swiftly rejected. They approached Noland Bushnell, founder of Atari, and even Regis McKenna, the Marketing Guru, who softly denied but referred them to another investor - Don Valentine.

Don, founder of Sequoia Capitals got in touch with Mike Markkula. Mike, ex-HP & Fairchild, was impressed and funded $90,000 for Apple and became an advisor. And so Jobs finally had the capital Apple wanted to start its journey.

Slowly, Mike with his contacts lured Regis (who developed the first rainbow logo of Apple), Mike Scott along with Arthur Rock, the legendary investor behind Intel and “Moore’s Second Law”. VC firms like Venrock began to take notice. The party of VCs helped recruit numerous executives who helped streamline Apple’s marketing & product development.

Finally, through Arthur Rock, the investment giant, Morgan Stanley, got in touch who helped Apple launch one of the biggest IPO of 1980s valued at $1.8 billion at the time!

In 2014, FIFA funded the development of a film - United Passions - a French film on the history of FIFA. With a budget of $32 million with 90% funded by FIFA, it only managed to gross a meagre $160,000 in box office, getting recognised for one of the worst films of the year.

Why? Because, the film’s launch coincided with the 2014-15 FIFA Corruption Scandal of worth more than $150 million over a period of several years. The film was boycotted and given a 0 rating for its portrayal.

With only $40,000 in the bank, the company was founded with no name as such. The founders named their files as NV as in next version. During incorporation, they settled on the word - Nvidia from the Latin word Invidia meaning “envy”.

Christopher Nolan is perhaps the only director who loves crashing planes rather than CGI effects.

For the movie, “The Dark Knight Returns”, Nolan bought an old plane from an airline company - Highland Airways. It bankrupted after failing to pay debts of £4.5 million. The plane crash in the film was filmed in Scotland which generated more than £1.1 million in revenues for the local economy!

In the movie “Tenet”, Nolan scouted Victorville, California and discovered a hangar of old planes. He found that it was much easier to crash a real plane than using VFX which was expensive. In fact, one can buy a decommissioned Boeing 747 for $100,000.

When asked why he prefers real props, he explained - “It’s fun for me!”

Bette Graham was a typist in a bank who wrote documents from scratch. As she was getting frequent errors during typing, rather than rewriting the document again, she created a whitening liquid using a dye and white paint.

It slowly became popular within the company and used by every typist. She later founded the “Mistake Out” company in 1956 and became an entrepreneur. She filed a patent, changed the name to “Liquid Paper” and eventually sold it to Gillette in 1979.

Her son, Michael became a pop star with a band called “Monkees”. He released songs that were a huge hit and also started a new label for recordings and albums. He started a music program - PopClips - whose success and format led to the creation of the now famous MTV program (1981).

Activision was started by four ex-Atari employees - Alan Miller, Bob Whitehead, David Crane & Larry Kaplan. The “Gang of Four” were frustrated with CEO who once told them that “they were nothing more than a person making gaming cartridges..”

The name Activision was chosen so that it came above Atari in alphabetical ranking. Funnily, Alan and Bob left Activision to find another gaming company - Accolade which was named so that it came above “Activision” in alphabetical order.

Later another Activision employee - Greg founded another gaming company “Acclaim” which came ahead in alphabetical order from both “Activision” and “Accolade”.

So much for names!

Way back in 2003, an American court in a case, Toy Biz vs US, ruled that X-Men were not humans but mutants, like robots and monsters.

Here’s what happened. Marvel was looking to globally sell toy figures of its famous characters which were classified as “Dolls” by US Customs Office. This led to high import duties of 12% as against non-humans with 6.8% tax.

Over the course of few years, the ruling went in Marvel’s favor to classify them as non-humans. In fact, in response to fans’ negative reception to the case, Marvel issued a statement saying that the X-Men were living, breathing human beings with special powers making them extraordinary men!

Yet, currently, dolls and toys now carry the same tariff rate. So, for a short stint, Marvel heroes were deprived of their humanity..!

Owen Finlay Maclaren was an aeronautical designer and a test pilot who created the landing gears for British fighter aircrafts. He was also involved in creating ABS system for an aircraft manufacturing company.

In 1960s, his daughter visited him from Moscow & found her having struggle of strolling their baby in a clumsy pushchair. So he had an idea from his designer days to make it better.

He formed a prototype pram made of lightweight collapsible structure from aluminium rods that worked just like a retractable landing gears of an aircraft. It was patented in 1964 (UK), 1966 (US) & sold via his own Maclaren Company.

Today, foldable baby buggies are sold in more than 50 countries under the Maclaren brand and which in turn have also inspired the creation of Strida bicycles!