Business
Apple at 50: How a garage startup became a $3.5-trillion titan
Fifty years ago, Steve Wozniak knew he built a great personal computer, but the young engineer couldn’t convince his employer, Hewlett-Packard, to buy into the big idea.
“Five times they turned me down for the personal computer. I wanted Hewlett-Packard to do it. I loved my company, but now Steve Jobs and I had to go into business,” Wozniak told The Times.
Wozniak and Jobs, both in their 20s, co-founded Apple with Ron Wayne on April 1, 1976.
Back then, personal computers were very expensive and rare. Apple would go on to revolutionize the tech industry, creating innovative, intuitive and beautiful gadgets billions of people would buy again and again.
Apple Inc.’s then-CEO Steve Jobs speaks in front of an early image of himself and Steve Wozniak during an Apple event on Jan. 27, 2010, in San Francisco.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
Apple, now one of the world’s most valuable and powerful companies, turns 50 this week.
From its humble beginnings when the founders worked out of Jobs’ family garage, Apple has ballooned over the last five decades, opening a sprawling ring-shaped headquarters in Cupertino, Calif., and employing roughly 166,000 workers.
Its market value has surpassed $3.5 trillion, making it the second-largest company in the world after Nvidia. In the fiscal year ending in September, Apple reported revenue of $416 billion and a net income of $112 billion. The company has attracted a large loyal fan base with more than 2.5 billion active Apple devices worldwide.
“Apple is more than just a technology company. It’s really a cultural icon,” said Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst at eMarketer.
By creating well-designed products that blur the lines between work and enjoyment, Apple helped foster an emotional connection to the brand, he said. The company’s strong stance on privacy and security has cultivated trust among legions of its fans who line up at Apple’s retail stores to buy its latest products.
“Every company claims to strive for excellence. It’s just a trope. But, man, you go inside Apple and talk to these people, and it’s almost a mania. It’s intense to work at Apple. A lot is expected of you,” said David Pogue, a journalist and author of “Apple: The First 50 Years.”
This attention to detail is apparent in Apple’s products.
When Apple built a way for people to unlock their devices with their faces, the company tested the technology at Harley-Davidson motorcycle rallies and even hired Hollywood special effects artists to ensure life-like masks couldn’t spoof its facial recognition system, Pogue said.
Pogue’s book, released ahead of Apple’s anniversary, goes through Apple’s long history, chronicling the company’s key players — including Jobs’ leadership style and temper — and the challenges it faced as it rose to the top.
“Apple’s story is an epic tale of frenetic all-nighters and creative rebellion,” he wrote in his book. “Of titanic successes (iPods, iPhones, iPads) and instructive failures (Lisa, Apple III, MobileMe). Of funny, idealistic, scary-smart workaholics — coming up on three generations of them — who want to make things better by making things better. It’s about management, marketing, and strategy — and also about creativity, drive, and obsession.”
Jobs shows an Apple iPhone at the MacWorld Conference in San Francisco on Jan. 9, 2007.
(Paul Sakuma / Associated Press)
Apple went through periods of financial trouble and uncertainty.
In the 1990s, the company laid off a third of its workforce and was days away from bankruptcy before the return of Jobs, who left the company in 1985 after clashing with the board and then-Chief Executive John Sculley.
In 2011, Jobs died of pancreatic cancer at 56, fueling more uncertainty around the company’s future. Apple has faced scrutiny over working conditions at Chinese factories where Apple devices and other electronics are produced.
The company had massive breakout moments of success, including the release of the iPhone in 2007, outpacing rivals such as BlackBerry and sparking the shift to smartphones.
“Apple kept up with it all. Apple was always flexible,” Wozniak said. “Now we’ve got so many different avenues, from the surfaces to other machines and AirPods and all that.”
The secret to the company’s success was it managed its brand well and didn’t make “lousy junk” that breaks down, he said.
The tech giant — which is building a new office complex in Culver City — also expanded its footprint into Hollywood in 2019 with the launch of Apple TV+, the streaming service known for such TV shows as “Severance,” “The Morning Show” and the comedy “Ted Lasso.” In 2022, it became the first streamer to win an Academy Award for best picture for family drama “CODA.”
Apple, known for looking forward, took time to reflect and celebrate its half-century.
Earlier in March, Apple held a surprise concert featuring artist and producer Alicia Keys, who performed at its Grand Central Store in New York.
The company has held celebrations in different parts of the world, showcasing artists in China, Korea, Thailand, the United Kingdom and Mexico as well.
Apple worked with artists to light up the Sydney Opera House in Australia with art designed on the iPad.
Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook with Alicia Keys at a 50th anniversary celebration at Apple Grand Central in New York on March 13.
(Theo Wargo / Getty Images for Apple)
“Through every breakthrough, one idea has guided us — that the world is moved forward by people who think different,” wrote Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, in a public letter about the milestone.
It’s not just Apple that’s been celebrating.
In January, RR Auction held an auction to celebrate the anniversary that included rare items such as Jobs’ bedroom desk and bow ties. A 1976 check signed by Jobs and Wozniak before the founding of Apple and an Apple I computer prototype board each sold for more than $2 million, according to the auction’s website.
The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif., has been hosting events and opened a new exhibit to celebrate Apple’s anniversary.
Inside the museum, rare prototypes of Apple products, including its personal computers and smartphones, were on display to showcase the Silicon Valley powerhouse’s long journey. A wooden Apple I case, a clear acrylic Macintosh, a large iPod prototype and other items from Apple’s past fill the room.
Earlier this month, Pogue hosted a sold-out evening event that featured key people in Apple’s history, including its former chief executive Sculley.
Wayne, the Apple co-founder who left the company days after its founding, also made a rare appearance. He departed from Apple early, he said, because he thought it was too financially risky.
“If the whole thing came unglued, Jobs and Woz didn’t have two nickels to rub together, so who are they going to come after? Obviously. And I didn’t feel that I could stand the risk of such a disaster,” he said.
Sculley, who became Apple’s chief executive in 1983 and held the position for a decade, was initially reluctant to leave PepsiCo, but Jobs eventually persuaded him.
“He said, ‘Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come with me and change the world?’” Sculley said on stage.
Today, the world is very different, and technology has evolved.
The rise of artificial intelligence that can generate text and images has prompted anxiety about the future. And it’s spurring the creation of hardware such as smartglasses and robots.
But AI can also create problems such as “deepfakes” that make it seem like a person is saying something or doing something they’re not, Wozniak noted.
People spend a lot of time scrolling through videos on social media, addicted to their phones instead of interacting with their friends and family.
“The world is run by people who want to sell things,” Wozniak said. “They’re not going to let us get away from that.”
Apple is also contending with the AI race and is seen to be trailing. Its shares rose more than 55% over the last three years but the broader Nasdaq Composite index rose more than 75% and it ceded its throne as the world’s largest company by market value to Nvidia.
Meanwhile, there are questions swirling around when Cook, 65, will retire.
For now, Apple appears positioned well, analysts said.
“I see Apple being able to weather the current pressures at least for the foreseeable future,” said Bourne, the eMarketer analyst.
Business
Devin Nunes Departs Trump Media After 4 Years as C.E.O.
President Trump’s social media company, which has consistently lost money and struggled with a flagging share price, announced Tuesday that it was replacing Devin Nunes as its chief executive officer.
The announcement offered no reason for the sudden departure of Mr. Nunes, a former Republican congressman from California. Mr. Trump had tapped him to run the company, Trump Media & Technology, in late 2021.
The announcement was made in a news release by the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., who is a company board member and oversees a trust that controls his father’s 115-million-share stake in Trump Media. President Trump is not an officer or director of the company.
Mr. Nunes said in a statement on Truth Social, which is Trump Media’s flagship product, that it was an “appropriate time” for a new leader with experience in media and mergers to “steer Trump Media through its current transition phase.”
Trump Media has incurred hundreds of millions in losses, and its shares have performed poorly since the company went public by completing a merger with a cash-rich special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC, in March 2024. The stock, which ended its first day of trading around $58 a share, closed Tuesday at $9.82.
Shares of Trump Media trade under the symbol DJT, which are President Trump’s initials. Truth Social has emerged as the main social media platform for Mr. Trump to communicate his policy decisions and opinions to the world.
Last year, Trump Media took in $3.7 million in revenue and recorded a $712 million net loss.
In December, Trump Media announced a plan to merge with TAE Technologies, a fusion power company. The all-stock deal, which was valued at $6 billion at the time, would create one of the first publicly traded nuclear fusion companies.
Trump Media said in February that it was considering spinning off its Truth Social platform in a merger with another cash-rich SPAC, Texas Ventures Acquisition III Corp.
Mr. Nunes is being replaced on an interim basis by Kevin McGurn, who has been an adviser to Trump Media since the end of 2024. Mr. McGurn, a former executive at Hulu, the streaming service, was listed in a recent regulatory filing as the chief executive of Texas Ventures.
The Trump Media release announcing the management change provided no update on the merger with TAE Technologies or the proposed SPAC deal for Truth Social.
Business
Netflix plans to buy historic Radford Studio Center
Streaming entertainment giant Netflix is in negotiations to buy the historic Radford Studio Center lot in Studio City.
Netflix plans to purchase the Los Angeles studio that has been home to generations of landmark television shows, including “Gunsmoke” and “Seinfeld,” according to two people with knowledge of the pending deal who were not authorized to speak about it publicly.
The studio’s previous operator, Hackman Capital Partners, defaulted on a $1.1-billion mortgage in January. Investment bank Goldman Sachs took over the property and is in talks with Netflix to sell it for between $330 million and $400 million.
Representatives for Hackman and Netflix declined to comment on the planned sale.
Culver City-based Hackman Capital Partners and Square Mile Capital Management teamed up to buy the Radford Avenue property from ViacomCBS in 2021 with a winning bid of $1.85 billion, after a competitive battle for the 55-acre studio beloved by the television industry.
At the time, the staggering price tag underscored the value — and scarcity — of TV soundstages in Los Angeles as content producers scrambled for space to shoot TV shows and movies to stock their streaming services. It was one of the largest-ever real estate transactions for a TV studio complex in Los Angeles.
Since then, production has substantially declined in Southern California. L.A. continues to battle the loss of production to other states and countries, as well as the lingering effects on the industry of the pandemic and the 2023 dual writers’ and actors’ strikes. Cutbacks in spending at the major studios after a surge in streaming-fueled TV production have further damped film activity in the region.
Founded by silent film comedy legend Mack Sennett in 1928, the lot became known as “Hit City” in the decades after World War II as popular TV shows such as “Leave It to Beaver,” “Gilligan’s Island,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “The Bob Newhart Show” and “Will & Grace” were made there. The storied lot gave the Studio City neighborhood its name,
Netflix, which has a market cap of about $455 billion — more than double that of Walt Disney Co. — has maintained its dominance in the global streaming business with more than 325 million subscribers.
The Los Gatos-based company has production offices worldwide, including facilities in Albuquerque, Brooklyn, London, Madrid and Toronto.
Netflix had secured an $82.7-billion deal to buy Warner Bros. studios and streaming services in December, but withdrew from the bidding war in late February after Paramount Skydance offered $31 a share. As part of the switch, Netflix was paid a $2.8-billion termination fee.
Business
Kevin Warsh, Trump’s Pick to Lead Fed, Faces Senate at Tricky Moment
Kevin M. Warsh, President Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Reserve, has spent years refining his pitch for why he should get one of the most powerful economic jobs in the world.
At his confirmation hearing on Tuesday, he will have to convince Senate lawmakers that he is ready to step into the role, which has become politically explosive amid Mr. Trump’s relentless attacks on the institution and its current chair, Jerome H. Powell.
Mr. Warsh, who is scheduled to testify before the Banking Committee at 10 a.m., plans to commit to being “strictly independent” on decisions related to interest rates, according to his prepared remarks. He also plans to tell lawmakers that he is unbothered by Mr. Trump’s incessant calls for substantially lower borrowing costs. And he will use his opening statement to underscore his focus on disrupting the “status quo” at an institution he said just last year was in need of “regime change.”
“In a time that will rank among the most consequential in our nation’s history, I believe a reform-oriented Federal Reserve can make a real difference to the American people,” he plans to tell lawmakers, adding: “The stakes could scarcely be higher.”
Mr. Warsh, 56, faces significant hurdles to winning confirmation. He has broad support among Republicans, who control the Senate and can confirm him along party lines. Yet his candidacy has stalled because of an ongoing investigation by the Justice Department into Mr. Powell and his handling of the Fed’s headquarters renovations.
Mr. Powell’s term as chair ends May 15, but Mr. Warsh looks increasingly unlikely to be in place by then. That’s because Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina — a Republican on the Banking Committee who has expressed support for Mr. Warsh — has vowed to block any attempt to confirm a new Fed chair until the legal threats into Mr. Powell are resolved. For Mr. Tillis, the investigation is a blatant attempt to coerce Mr. Powell into lowering rates, undermining the Fed’s independence and confirming the politicization of the Justice Department.
“I’m not going to condone bad decision-making and bad behavior,” Mr. Tillis told reporters on Monday in reference to the Justice Department’s lack of evidence of any wrongdoing.
The department has vowed to continue its investigation, despite numerous legal setbacks.
“I think ultimately, he will be confirmed,” Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana, another Republican on the committee, told reporters on Monday. “I just don’t know what decade.”
Mr. Warsh’s ascent would mark a homecoming for the Wall Street financier, who served as a Fed governor from 2006-11.
Since leaving the Fed, he has amassed assets worth well in excess of $100 million, according to financial disclosures submitted before his hearing. Those have drawn scrutiny because Mr. Warsh repeatedly invoked “pre-existing confidentiality agreements” to avoid disclosing the details behind several of his investments. He has said he would divest a substantial amount of his assets before taking the job.
The global financial crisis dominated Mr. Warsh’s first tenure at the Fed, thrusting him into the middle of discussions about how the central bank should respond to the threat of bank failures, turmoil in financial markets and a painful recession that followed. Mr. Warsh, then the youngest-ever member of the Board of Governors, was initially supportive of the Fed’s efforts to shore up financial markets by buying enormous quantities of government bonds and expanding its balance sheet to ease strains in financial markets and support growth by keeping market-based rates low.
But he soon soured on subsequent efforts to buy more bonds and resigned in protest. That experience has stuck with Mr. Warsh, who has made a smaller balance sheet a pillar of his plans if he takes over as chair.
Mr. Warsh would also be likely to usher in changes to how the Fed communicates its policy views, having expressed misgivings about its strategy of providing so-called forward guidance, or hints about how interest rates may change in the future to guide expectations. He has also suggested that policymakers across the Fed system should speak far less. Mr. Powell held a news conference after each rate decision, or eight a year, and delivered speeches with regularity. Mr. Trump’s pick to join the Fed last year, Stephen I. Miran, often speaks multiple times a week.
“Once policymakers reveal their economic forecast, they can become prisoners of their own words,” Mr. Warsh said in a speech last year. “Fed leaders would be well served to skip opportunities to share their latest musings. The swivel-chair problem, rhetorically waxing and waning with the latest data release, is common and counterproductive.”
What is far less clear is how much Mr. Warsh would heed the president’s demands for lower interest rates. Mr. Trump said he would not pick someone for chair who did not support lower borrowing costs.
Mr. Warsh sought in his opening statement to downplay the costs of a president’s voicing his opinions about rates, saying central bankers must be “strong enough to listen to a diversity of views from all corners, humble enough to be open-minded to new ideas and new economic developments, wise enough to translate imperfect data into meaningful insight and dedicated enough to make judgments faithfully and wisely.”
Earlier this year, many officials at the Fed saw a path to gradually lower rates as the impact of Mr. Trump’s tariffs faded and inflation restarted its slide back toward 2 percent after almost of year of stalling out. The war in Iran — and the energy shock it has unleashed — has upended those forecasts, however, prompting officials to turn wary about lowering rates.
Mr. Warsh will face questions on Tuesday about the economic impact of the war and how it has changed his thinking around the Fed’s ability to lower rates. While at the Fed, he was known as an inflation hawk who often argued against providing policy relief for fear that it could stoke price pressures. He also said the Fed should aspire to engage in rule-based policymaking that stems from formulas that prescribe how officials should set rates based on levels of inflation and employment.
While campaigning to be chair, Mr. Warsh embraced the need for rate cuts, arguing that there was a path for lower borrowing costs because of his plans to shrink the balance sheet, which would lift longer-term rates that then could be offset by lowering short-term ones. He also argued that higher productivity from the boom in artificial intelligence could unleash higher growth without stoking inflation, which could give the Fed more space to lower rates than otherwise would be the case.
In his opening statement, Mr. Warsh made clear, however, that a failure to bring down inflation, which has been stuck above the Fed’s 2 percent target for roughly five years, would strictly be the Fed’s fault, suggesting that he would shoulder the blame if he did not bring it back down during his tenure.
“Inflation is a choice, and the Fed must take responsibility for it,” he will tell lawmakers.
Megan Mineiro contributed reporting.
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