"Like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys, the Kochs are one of the most influential dynasties of the modern age, but they have never been the subject of a major biography... until now. Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch, then in his early 30s, discovered a letter the family patriarch had written to his sons. 'You will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money,' Fred Koch cautioned. 'It may either be a blessing or a curse.'...

"The rags-to-riches story of one of America's wealthiest and least-known financial giants, self-made billionaire Kirk Kerkorian-the daring aviator, movie mogul, risk-taker, and business tycoon who transformed Las Vegas and Hollywood to become one of the leading financiers in American business."--Jacket flap.

The first major biography of the glamorous and scandalous Miriam Leslie, titan of publishing and an unsung hero of women's suffrage Among the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age-Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt-is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For twenty years she ran the country's largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Publishing, which chronicled postbellum America in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry,...

Randolph's account of Bloomberg's life and time reads almost like a novel, a quintessentially American story. She explains the "machine" he invented that gave and continues to give instant access to an infinite amount of information to bankers and investors on how, what, and where to invest, and how it changed the financial universe. Randolph recounts one day not long ago when the Bloomberg machine briefly blipped and the whole world's financial marketplace...

"There's no doubt that our world has gotten more extreme. Pandemics, climate change, superpower rivalries, cyberattacks, political radicalization--virtually, everywhere we look there is mayhem bearing down on us, putting trillions of assets at risk. And at least two factions have formed around how to respond. In Chaos Kings, Scott Patterson depicts how one faction, led by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan, believes humans...

Howard Hughes was a rich young man from Texas, heir to his father's fortune, when he decided he wanted to make movies. Age 21, he made the most expensive Hollywood film ever (at the time); and went on to break air-speed records, make another fortune in aircraft design, smash Charles Lindbergh's round-the-world flight record, and be romantically linked with almost all of Hollywood's famous beauties. Nevertheless, he died alone, sealed into a room he...

"Moving from coin flipping to real world investing, there's a large body of evidence suggesting that investors also do a poor job when it comes to sizing major financial decisions. One example is that in aggregate, individual investors severely under-perform market returns. Some of this underperformance comes from paying high fees, but much also arises from having too much or too little at risk, usually at just the wrong times. As Victor suggested...