Marvel was $700M in debt and bankrupt in 1996.

By 2005, they were so desperate that they offered their characters as collateral for a $525M loan.

If their first movies failed, they'd lose everything.

A thread 🧵 Marvel was selling film rights to survive.

They offered Sony the rights to EVERY Marvel character for just $25M, but Sony only bought Spider-Man.

X-Men went to Fox, and Hulk to Universal.

The Avengers were literally the heroes nobody wanted.

No one is going to believe this, but FedEx:

• Knew Tesla would succeed years before the Wall Street
• Spotted Nvidia's rise before any analyst
• Delivers 15 Million packages every day
• And employs 5,30,000+ people

Why FedEx is sitting on the world's most valuable data: 🧵 Fred Smith saw the revolution coming while still in college.

Flying computer parts as a Yale student, he noticed companies paying for entire planes to transport tiny components.

But he only started FedEx after serving in the Vietnam War.

Why is no one talking about Marc Andreessen?

• Was worth $100M at 24
• Once owned 5% of Nvidia (Worth $125B today)
• Built the first user-friendly browser (Mosaic)
• Invested $400M in Elon Musk's Twitter
• Told Microsoft to go to hell

The man who makes the future 🧵
Everyone’s online because of this guy.

At 21, Marc Andreessen built Mosaic—the first browser that didn’t suck.

Mosaic displayed images alongside text - something impossible before.

Within months, 2 million people downloaded it.

In 1985, Reebok dethroned Nike to become America's No. 1 shoe brand.

Reebok's sales exploded from $12.8M to $310M in just two years.

Phil Knight was watching his company get crushed by a British upstart...

But then Nike pulled out a $2.5M weapon to crush its rivals: 🧵 Nike's downfall began with pure arrogance.

When America was obsessed with aerobics, Nike execs dismissed it as "nothing more than fat ladies dancing to music."

Meanwhile, Reebok created the Freestyle - the first shoe designed for women.

This oversight cost Nike BILLIONS.

Andrew Carnegie went from $1.20 a week to $309 Billion.

When he retired, he gave away 90% of his wealth to build 2,509 libraries and funded multiple universities.

But he barely spent 2 hours every day to build this fortune.

Here's the entire story: 🧵 Carnegie wasn't always wealthy -- or even American.

His parents sold their belongings in Scotland to come to America when he was 13.

So Carnegie started working as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill where he earned $1.20 per week.

BYD isn't just beating Tesla - it's humiliating them:

• Sold 4 Million EVs in 2024 (Twice that of Tesla)
• Tesla, Ford, and Toyota fight over its batteries
• Warren Buffett invested $232M for a 10% stake

How China quietly built BYD into the world's biggest EV empire 🧵 Elon Musk once laughed at BYD for competing with Tesla.

But the same company forced Tesla to sell their cars at dirt cheap prices and is now ambushing Elon to back out of China.

How a "man you've never heard of" pressured Elon to rethink everything 👇

Steve Ballmer tripled Microsoft's revenue to $78B in 14 years.

Yet when he announced his retirement, Microsoft's stock jumped 7.5% in a single day, adding $20B in value.

Investors were literally celebrating his departure.

The evil truth of how Ballmer destroyed Microsoft 🧵
When Ballmer took over, Microsoft was worth $642 Billion.

So how did they miss the 5 biggest and most obvious tech shifts?

• Search (lost to Google)
• Smartphones (lost to Apple)
• Mobile OS (lost to iOS/Android)
• Media (lost to Netflix)
• Cloud (lost to Amazon)

Jensen Huang once said, "My will to survive exceeds everyone else's will to kill me."

In 1996, Intel was worth $100B whereas Nvidia was 30 days away from bankruptcy.

How Jensen Huang beat Intel at a game he didn't even stand a chance at.

Thread 🧵 Intel's playbook was ruthless in the 90s. They would:

1. Wait for new PC tech to emerge
2. Integrate everything into the motherboard
3. And kill the entire industry

Intel had destroyed sound card and network card companies already. And now they were coming for graphic cards...

No one is talking about how Palantir bypasses military bureaucracy, embeds engineers inside agencies, and forces the government to depend on it.

Peter Thiel calls the CIA a front for Palantir.

How Palantir took over the Pentagon and why no politician can kill it today:🧵 But what does Palantir even do?

Palantir builds data platforms that turn disconnected information into actionable intelligence.

Think phone records, bank data, social media, travel history - their software merges it all and predicts what you might do next.

Why Elon Musk wins every single time is because he operates in "wartime mode"

Keeps absurd timelines, screams & fires people, accepts collateral damage, sleeps in the factory to ship fast.

If you want to scale your business at 10X speed, you need to learn Elon's algorithm: 🧵 To beat OpenAI, Musk built xAI (Grok) at a mindboggling speed:

- Poached talent from everywhere
- Diverted 12,000 GPUs taken from Nvidia to xAI
- Pressured Oracle to get access to their GPUs

And built Colossus - a 100,000 GPU supercomputer within 122 days. The progress shows:

Richard Branson is the craziest CEO alive:

• Started an airline because his flight got canceled
• Built 400 companies just for fun
• Sued British Airways & distributed all the money
• Kitesurfs with naked models on his back

The person you know, the story you don't 🧵
While Steve Jobs was preaching about focusing on a single thing, Branson was running 400 companies.

Branson literally started an airline because his flight got canceled and he wanted to meet his girlfriend.

Let's dive in 👇

When Steve Jobs handed over the baton to Tim Cook, everyone thought Apple wouldn’t survive.

Cook was neither a product guy nor a marketing guy.

But within a decade, Cook tripled Apple's profit by doing exactly the opposite of what Steve Jobs did.

How Tim Cook grew Apple 🧵 Jobs' obsession took Apple to a billion, but Cook's strategy grew it to a $3.5 trillion market cap.

Jobs ran Apple in the classic founder mode: Controlled every detail and made every decision.

But Cook found his superpower and delegated everything else.

Let's dive in 👇

The way Warren runs Berkshire Hathaway is insane.

Only 26 people in the middle of nowhere (Omaha) manage almost 400,000 employees.

But to get here, Buffett had to self-manufacture and scale a very unconventional model.

Here's the full story: 🧵 In 1972, Berkshire made a purchase for $25M that changed everything: See's Candies.

Over the subsequent couple of decades, See's paid BRK over $2 billion in dividends.

It gave Berkshire enough cash to re-deploy and the snowball to begin rolling.

No one is talking about how a random startup (140 employees) created the first American supersonic jet that broke the sound barrier.

They took Formula 1's secret and built an aircraft that flies faster than sound.

How Boom will fly you to London from New York in 3.5 hours 🧵 4 breakthrough techs that changed everything for Boom:

• AR Vision System replacing Concorde's heavy-moving nose
• Carbon fiber making planes 70% lighter
• Digital aerodynamics-optimized design
• Revolutionary engine converting supersonic air to subsonic

Let's dive in 👇

Masayoshi Son is built different:

• Lost $70 Billion overnight & made it all back
• Raised $45B in 45 mins
• Owned 5% of Nvidia ($200B today)
• Acquired ARM (powers 99% of smartphones)
• Will raise & invest $100B in Stargate

The billionaire who bets bigger than Vegas 🧵
The entire world laughed at Masa when he lost $14 Billion on WeWork.

But Masayoshi Son is the only entrepreneur who has selected the winner in every generation of the computing industry:

• PCs - Microsoft
• Internet - Yahoo
• Cloud - Alibaba
• Mobile - Apple
• AI - NVIDIA

In the 1950s, "Made in Japan" meant cheap and unreliable.

But then Akio Morita's dedication to quality led Sony to produce revolutionary products like the Walkman and PlayStation.

Steve Jobs studied Sony so obsessively, he wanted to be the Akio of the West.

A thread 🧵 Steve built Apple on the same principles that Morita built Sony on:

1. Don't ship until it's perfect
2. People don't know what they want until you give it to them
3. Recruit people who teach you what you don't already know

Let's understand how Morita changed Sony forever 👇