Resources · The Backstory
The Backstory
A weekend narrative podcast about market history, business history, and the investor letters that shaped how we think about money and decisions. One story. 20-25 minutes. Every Saturday and Sunday.
Day 1: Jeff Bezos's 1997 Letter and the Mental Model That Built Amazon
In May 1997, Jeff Bezos sent a four-page letter to Amazon shareholders that basically said: 'We're going to lose money on purpose for years. You're going to hate this. Here's why it's genius.' Wall Street yawned. Twenty years later, that letter was worth trillions.
The Algorithm in Kansas That Crashed the Market in 20 Minutes
On May 6, 2010, the stock market lost a trillion dollars in the time it takes to microwave popcorn—and for years, nobody knew why. The answer, when it finally came, was somehow both mundane and terrifying.
The Doctor Who Called 2008 Three Years Early
In 2005, a one-eyed physician who'd never taken a finance class started buying insurance against the US housing market—and his own investors tried to have him removed for losing money on a trade that would eventually make them $725 million. The question isn't how he saw the crash coming. It's why everyone else was so committed to not looking.
Reddit vs Wall Street: What Actually Happened with GameStop
In January 2021, a subreddit of amateur traders discovered a flaw in the options market so elegant, so devastating, that they accidentally weaponized it against some of the world's smartest hedge funds — and the hedge funds never saw it coming.
The Crash That Portfolio Insurance Caused
On October 19th, 1987, the stock market fell 22% in a single day—the worst day in history. And the system designed to prevent exactly that was the thing pulling the trigger.
The Man Who Broke the Bank of England
On September 16th, 1992, George Soros made a single bet that would net him over a billion dollars by lunchtime — by betting against the entire British government, which was willing to burn through billions of pounds to prove him wrong.
The Nobel Prize Winners Who Nearly Broke the World
Two men won the Nobel Prize for inventing the formula that prices risk in financial markets. Then they used that exact formula to build a hedge fund and nearly collapsed the global financial system in under four years. The irony isn't subtle: they were so confident in their ability to measure risk that they became the biggest risk.