Kim Kardashian launched Skims, her shapewear brand, in 2019 after spending years dabbing other undergarments with teabags to “nail the perfect nude shade”. “It’s deeply personal to me,” says the reality-television star. It has also been tremendously lucrative. Skims now makes some $1bn in sales a year. More
SIX LARGE strawberries are neatly wrapped in what looks like a fancy chocolate box. The Omakase berries—a Japanese variety, grown by a company called Oishii in New Jersey—are softer and sweeter than those found in most supermarkets. You would hope so: they cost around $14 a box, roughly three times the price of a punnet at Walmart. More
JEFF BEZOS lives by a simple precept: limit the number of things you would wish you had done differently when you are 80. He calls it, with habitual nerdiness, the “regret-minimisation framework”. In 1994 it led him to forsake cushy work at a hedge fund to start Amazon. It is behind the big bets, from the Prime subscription service to AWS cloud computing, that have made the company into a technology titan valued at $2.3trn—and himself into one of the world’s richest people. It also explains why six years ago Mr Bezos left his first wife of 25 years for a former TV presenter, Lauren Sánchez. And why he blew, on some estimates, $50m to rent out Venice for three days for their opulent nuptials starting on June 26th—the predictable antiplutocrat pushback be damned. More
THE SPecial-purpose acquisition company (SPAC) was Wall Street’s favourite get-richer-quicker scheme during the pandemic. First, some big-shot investor raises capital by listing a shell company on the stockmarket. The big shot then calls around other big shots, looking for a moonshot. When a captivating private company is found, it merges with the shell, whose investors choose to redeem their shares or own part of the resulting business. SPACs can be a wheeze for those who set them up (in return for a cut) and the investment bankers who advise them, but have tended to be less good for investors who pay these costs. More
The workaday town of Maranello, near such architectural jewels as Bologna and Modena, shares little of their charm. Nevertheless, its main attraction is a centrepiece of Italian culture. A statue of a prancing horse on a roundabout reminds visitors that this is the home of Ferrari. Italian design, exclusivity and racing heritage have made the company both a champion of the car industry and something altogether different. More
Lucas Beyer is not a celebrity. But in Silicon Valley’s rarefied world of machine-learning talent, he is seen as one. A former researcher at OpenAI, Mr Beyer announced last month that he was leaving the artificial-intelligence (AI) lab behind ChatGPT to join Meta, a social-media giant with big AI ambitions of its own. With rumours swirling that Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s boss, was offering packages worth $100m to poach AI whizzes, Mr Beyer clarified that he had not secured a nine-figure deal. That he needed to say so at all reflects the extent of the frenzy. More
when you think about your next career move, you may well have your sights set on a higher salary, a new skill or just a shorter commute. When Salar al Khafaji, a Dutch entrepreneur, was thinking about his next venture, he had slightly different criteria. More
AUTO Suppliers have never been as flashy as carmakers. The dashboards, suspension assemblies and other components they sell are hidden beneath shiny bodywork. Even so, the likes of Bosch, Continental and Denso regularly outshone their carmaking customers financially. Now, however, the steady rise of electric vehicles (EVs), the growing importance of software and the emergence of new rivals are upending their businesses. More
