An unforgivable act of cultural vandalism — It’s pretty much impossible to overstate how much of an icon the Seagram Building is. Suffice to say that the Times’s then architecture critic, Herbert Muschamp, deemed it in 1999 to be “the millennium’s most important building”. …

Can companies be paid to borrow money? It’s theoretically possible — but it hasn’t happened yet. And the example of Apple in Switzerland suggests that it’s not likely to happen any time soon. A couple of weeks ago, I got into a couple of Twitter fights about a meme which…

Davos is the spiritual home of homo economicus, where human behavior can generally be explained in terms of the perpetual war between greed and fear. That’s one reason why the World Economic Forum is such a hot ticket. …

Can she turn YouTube into an ad platform as indispensable as Facebook? Jonathan Mahler has a big profile of YouTube’s Susan Wojcicki, wherein he makes one particular point with great vehemence. Just count the occurrences! 1. “Above all, the quality of most YouTube programming is too unpolished to draw big investments from many blue-chip advertisers.” 2. “Companies expect their ads to be…

Here’s one way that capitalism works: you find a special idea, something truly innovative. Impressed by its genius, you invest, and magic is made. By which I mean, you make lots of money. That description applies to all manner of stock picking, including venture capital. …

An IM conversation with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson I got a fair amount of pushback from small publishers after I declared that “if you’re not getting 20–30 million unique visitors every month, and don’t aspire to such heights, then you’re basically an economic irrelevance”. Rafat Ali and Ben Thompson led the charge. (That’s Thompson’s image, above, from his…

The value of Uber lies increasingly in the global ubiquity of its service It’s crazy-prices season in the markets right now! Apple is worth more than $700 billion, Vice is worth $2.5 billion, and Uber, we’re told, is worth somewhere in $40 billion range. Which is double what it was worth six months ago. Meanwhile, the price of oil continues to plunge, along…

Barry Ritholtz has a blockbuster of a story today, with detailed 2013 pay figures for senior Pimco employees. The top of the food chain, that year, looked something like this*: Bill Gross: $290 million Mohamed El-Erian: $230 million Daniel Ivascyn: $70 million Wendy Cupps: $50 million Douglas Hodge: $45 million Jay Jacobs: $22 million…

(Hint: It’s not only shareholders.) Andrew Ross Sorkin recently discovered the secret to how companies like IBM keep their per-share earnings rising steadily upwards: share buybacks. …