Great Business Stories

I've wanted to cover Milner ever since I first came across him in Sebastian Mallaby's excellent book, The Power Law, where Mallaby introduces Milner with the following:
"At the start of 2009, the CFO at Facebook took a call from Moscow. A soft Russian voice announced that he wanted to invest in Facebook. The caller had a gentle but insistent style. He had a slight build, a nose bent to his right, and an oval face crowned by a smooth dome. He wanted to meet in person. Facebook did not accept capital from just anyone." The CFO told Milner bluntly: "Don't come all the way here just to see me." Milner booked a plane ticket, flew to San Francisco, and more or less doorstepped the CFO.
This is the story of how this small, quietly spoken Russian goes from earning just $5 a month to reaching the very peak of Silicon Valley, investing in Facebook at a valuation that US investors thought was crazy, becoming one of Mark Zuckerberg's most trusted friends and advisors, and then going on to make huge and very successful investments in Spotify, Zynga, and Revolut, to name just a few. Along the way, Milner navigates his way through the oligarch-infested pools of Russian business, survives all of the political and media backlash that comes from the revelation that much of his early money came from entities closely linked to the Kremlin, and has come out the other side still riding high with a personal fortune of $8.7 billion. It's a cracking story—enjoy.

And let me start with a quote: "I didn't pull you out of Stanford Business School to bankrupt the company" — that's Bill Gates, early on, arguing with the man he'd just hired as Microsoft's first ever business manager. That man of course was Steve Ballmer, and the two of them would go on to build one of the most valuable companies in history together, through huge arguments, a legendary contract with IBM, and a decade of ruthless sales tactics that got Windows onto practically every computer on the planet. This episode takes Ballmer from his childhood right up to becoming Microsoft's CEO in 2000. It's a cracker — enjoy.

There are so many great characters in this story — I dig into the founder, David Cook, a guy who sold the business for $12 million but could have made $300 million if he'd stayed on for just a few more years. And then Wayne Huizenga, the guy who turbo-charged the business, after building his first fortune in the rough and tumble of the waste management business in the 70s and 80s. There's the now legendary meeting where Blockbuster's executives had the chance to buy a fledgling company called Netflix for $50 million but more or less laughed the Netflix founders out of the room. And then, as I've come to expect, Carl Icahn makes an appearance and bullies his way into the business, but makes a complete mess of it. It's a cracking story — enjoy.

This is a guy whose father fled Lebanon with almost nothing and today is worth $120 billion. I examine how he built his fortune buying up distressed businesses during Mexico's economic collapse of the 1980s, and how a controversial privatisation deal for the national phone company turned him into the richest man in the world. I also look at the huge criticism he's faced for monopolistic practices that cost ordinary Mexicans billions and also held back the development of an entire country, and how he's used that fortune combined with this intrinsic and intangible gift for numbers to make savvy investments in everything from Apple to the New York Times. It's a cracking story — enjoy.

This is a guy who grew up in a village in rural China with no running water and today is now worth $110 billion. I examine his relationship with Sam Bankman Fried- and his subsequent involvement in the multi billion dollar collapse of Bankman Fried’s company FTX. I also look at how he tried to keep Binance away from any type of regulation, and this ultimately led him to serve time in jail but then very controversially get a presidential pardon. It's a cracking story — enjoy.