Showing titles in Business

John Paulson, a softly spoken hedge-fund manager who still took the bus to work, seemed unlikely to stake his career on one big gamble. But he did - and The Greatest Trade Ever is the story of how he realised that the sub-prime housing bubble was going to burst, making $15 billion for his fund and more than $4 billion for himself in a single year. It's a tale of folly and wizardry, individual brilliance versus institutional stupidity.

In The World’s Biggest Cash Machine, informed by interviews with key figures behind the scenes, award-winning journalist and commentator Chris Blackhurst charts the gripping story of the world’s biggest football club - as well as exploring the wider transformation of the Premier League into a playground for billionaire owners.

"Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Korem, it lights up a biblical famine, now, in the twentieth century." Those words opened Michael Buerk's first report on the Ethiopian famine for the 6 o'clock news on October 24th, 1984. His reports sent shock waves round the world. The Live Aid concert, a direct consequence of Bob Geldof watching that broadcast, was watched by half the planet.

Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to produce the most notoriously successful game franchises in history - Doom and Quake - until the games they made tore them apart. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry.

From 1783, when German immigrant John Jacob Astor first arrived in the United States, until 2009, when Brooke Astor’s son, Anthony Marshall, was convicted of defrauding his elderly mother, the Astor name occupied a unique place in American society. The family fortune, first made by a beaver trapping business that grew into an empire, was then amplified by holdings in Manhattan real estate. Over the ensuing generations, Astors ruled Gilded Age New York society and inserted themselves into political and cultural life, but also suffered the most famous loss on the Titanic.

In 2015, Arlan Hamilton was on food stamps and sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco airport, with nothing but an old laptop and a dream of breaking into the venture capital business. She couldn't understand why people starting companies all looked the same (white and male) and she wanted the chance to invest in the ideas and people who didn't conform to this image of how a founder is supposed to look. Hamilton had no contacts or network in Silicon Valley, no background in finance - not even a college degree. What she did have was fierce determination and the will to succeed.

By the time of his tragically early death at 57 in August 1922, Northcliffe had founded the Daily Mail and Daily Mirror, and had also owned The Times and the Observer. He laid down the essential features of British popular journalism that we see now. He was a tough and uncompromising businessman, but in The Chief, Andrew Roberts puts his ruthlessness and wilfulness in the overall context of a life of visionary business skill, journalistic brilliance, distinguished wartime public service and heartfelt patriotism.

What happens when a young Wall Street investment banker spends a small fortune to have lunch with Warren Buffett? He becomes a real value investor. In this fascinating inside story, Guy Spier details his career from Harvard MBA to hedge fund manager. But the path was not so straightforward. Spier reveals his transformation from a Gordon Gekko wannabe, driven by greed, to a sophisticated investor who enjoys success without selling his soul to the highest bidder.

Discretion, secrecy, and subtle strategy were the weapons of choice at Wall Street investment bank Lazard Frères & Co. For more than a century, the mystique and reputation of the "Great Men" who worked there allowed the firm to garner unimaginable profits, social cachet, and outsized influence in the halls of power. But in the mid-1980s, their titanic egos started getting in the way, and the Great Men of Lazard jeopardized all they had built.

Listen to what happened next in the follow-up to the best-selling The Wolf of Wall Street, now a major motion picture directed by Martin Scorsese. In the 1990s Jordan Belfort became one of the most infamous names in American finance: a brilliant, conniving stock chopper. He was the Wolf of Wall Street, whose life of greed, power and excess was so outrageous it could only be true; no-one could make this up! But the day Jordan was arrested and taken away in handcuffs was not the end of the madness. Catching the Wolf of Wall Street tells of what happened next.

In My Life as a Quant, Emanuel Derman relives his exciting journey as one of the first high-energy particle physicists to migrate to Wall Street. Derman details his adventures in this field - analyzing the incompatible personas of traders and quants, and discussing the dissimilar nature of knowledge in physics and finance. Throughout this tale, he also reflects on the appropriate way to apply the refined methods of physics to the hurly-burly world of markets.

Peter Lynch, one of the most successful investors of all time, shows you how to use what you already know to make money in the market. You'll discover why smart money is not so smart - and why you may be a better stock picker than the pros, how to follow your hunches and back them up with facts, how to disregard reports on the economy and pick your own time to buy and sell, and how to determine which types of stocks are right for you. Lynch is the former manager of the $9 billion Fidelity Magellan Fund, where he earned investors a $190,000 return on a $10,000 investment.

In Tod is God—so named for a chant the ECW fans created to honor the founder—Gordon chronicles each step of the company's meteoric rise to prominence, as well as the elements that led to his removing himself from the company before its demise. Gordon's former partnership with ECW booker Paul Heyman made for magical TV and in-ring moments. The friendship between Gordon and Heyman, both a blessing and curse, was the once-in-a-lifetime bond responsible for so many of history's greatest teams, bands, and partners.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of #Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso, read by Sarah Jes Austell. The first thing Sophia Amoruso sold online wasn't fashion. It was a stolen book. At age 17 she was a dumpster-diving, shoplifting anarchist. By 29 she was the founder and CEO of Nasty Gal, a $100 million-plus fashion empire. Filled with brazen wake-up calls ("You are not a special snowflake"), frank observations ("Failure is your invention"), and behind-the-scenes stories....

The Dealmaker is a frank and honest account of how a severely dyslexic child who struggled at school went on to graduate from Oxford and become a serial entrepreneur. It describes Guy Hand's career in private equity, first at Nomura and then as head of his own company, Terra Firma. It looks in detail at the huge deals that Terra Firma has done over the years, involving everything from cinema chains and pubs to waste management, aircraft leasing and green energy.

She was a successful ad sales rep in Manhattan. He was a homeless 11-year-old panhandler on the street. He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But then something stopped her in her tracks, and she went back. And she continued to go back, again and again. They met up nearly every week for years and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.

Riveting, character-driven, and filled with jaw-dropping revelations, Extremely Hardcore is the definitive, fly-on-the-wall story of how Elon Musk lit $44 billion on fire and burned down Twitter. It’s the next best thing to being there, and you won’t have to sleep in the Twitter office to get the scoop.

For nearly forty years he has ruthlessly exploited and dominated Formula One motor racing, and now he is setting his sights further afield...This is the true story of Bernie Ecclestone, the street-smart, working-class kid who masterminded the transformation of Formula One from an amateur sport of the fifties into a global billion dollar industry of the 21st century.

Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems - one crazy idea at a time.

In the streaming reality series Selling Sunset, Mary Fitzgerald Bonnet is the charismatic, calm, and level-headed agent who effortlessly lands multi-million-dollar homes while sidestepping the drama of a cutthroat business in one of the wealthiest and most glamorous places in the world. Often thought of as the “big sister” of her co-stars for her compassionate advice and uplifting attitude, Mary is admired for her unwavering kindness. But behind her sunny personality is a remarkable story of resilience, forged by a life filled with profound challenges.