Gap Inc.
Don Fisher and Doris Fisher · 1969
Gap Inc. was a logistics play disguised as youth culture — and its early success came from solving stockouts, not selling identity.
Generations
A crude unit of analysis that keeps being useful anyway.
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Airbus
The European airliner maker as it stood in 1998: a consortium of national aerospace firms, bound by treaty and paid by airliner sales.
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Philip Morris International
PMI didn’t pivot to smoke-free—it built a regulatory firewall around Iqos while keeping cigarettes profitable.
Anglo American plc
A century-old mining giant that cut 138,000 jobs in two years while rebranding as a green critical-minerals champion — with no evidence its new identity changes who pays or who bears the cost.
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ArcelorMittal
Lakshmi Mittal · 2006
ArcelorMittal is the world’s second-largest steelmaker — a $33 billion hostile merger of Mittal Steel and Arcelor in 2007. It operates across mining, smelting, and recycling in 14 countries. In 2025, it produced 55.6 million tons of steel against 74.6 million tons of capacity — 53% in Europe, 40% in the Americas. It sources 72% of its iron ore and 91% of its coke internally. The Mittal family surrendered control to close the deal. It is not a technology company. It is not growing. It is a vertically integrated commodity producer whose scale is structural, not strategic.