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Business History

Business History

By: Pushkin Industries
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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 businesses big and small and find out what you can learn from those who founded them.

2026 Pushkin Industries 2025
Economics World
Episodes
  • Bowie, McCartney & Michael Jackson: How Songwriters Learned to Play Hardball
    Mar 18 2026

    Once 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 broken, but they'd made songs into valuable financial assets. This set the scene for an epic copyright beef between Paul McCartney and Michael Jackson, and for David Bowie to turn his pop hits into a complex special purpose vehicle... a securitization pool!

    Write to us at businesshistory@pushkin.fm

    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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    45 mins
  • How GM Beat Ford
    Mar 11 2026

    Ford 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 the austere, black-painted Model T that was coming out of the Ford plant.

    Write to us at businesshistory@pushkin.fm

    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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    36 mins
  • Henry Ford Invented the Modern World... Then Got Left Behind
    Mar 4 2026

    Farm 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 became the biggest selling car in the world. And other factories copied his system to manufacture the radios and vacuum cleaners that kickstarted the modern boom in consumerism. But then Henry Ford stopped listening to what car buyers wanted.

    Write to us at businesshistory@pushkin.fm

    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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    50 mins
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