What do entrepreneur Elon Musk, assassinated President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, golfer Tiger Woods, former UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and actress Sigourney Weaver have in common? Oddly enough, they all share the common thread of having studied at Stanford University in California, one of the most prestigious universities in the world. It has produced 58 Nobel laureates, in addition to a vast number of high-ranking officials in both the business world and the US public administration. This highly successful university was founded in 1885 as a result of a personal tragedy. Its founder, Leland Stanford, suffered the death of his teenage son from typhus and decided to create the university in his memory. At the time, Stanford had already amassed a considerable fortune, largely through his railroad business.

In the 1950s and 60s, the competition among shipowners to possess the largest tanker in the world's oil fleet intensely shook the oil market. The main protagonists of this battle were the Greeks Stavros Niarchos and Aristotle Onassis, and the American Daniel Keith Ludwig, who would eventually become one of the richest men in the world.

When discussing powerful families that have amassed fortunes and influenced the governments of their time, the first name that undoubtedly comes to mind is Rothschild, the Central European family that, during the Napoleonic Wars, achieved a position of dominance among major European corporations. But their power required allies to manage their businesses in the various territories where they held interests, and one such partner was the Bauer family, who represented them in the Iberian Peninsula.

When talking about great magnates in Spanish history, the figure of Juan March Ordinas inevitably comes to mind, the Mallorcan who was described as the last pirate of the Mediterranean and who was a key figure in the victory of Franco's army during the Civil War. It is said that, at his peak, he was one of the richest men in the world, so much so that the fortune he bequeathed to future generations remains one of Spain's greatest assets. But when he was trying to become a millionaire businessman through a pig farm and tobacco smuggling, both activities undertaken by his father, the Salas family was already a well-established fortune that had dominated Mallorca for generations. The Salas son, who, curiously, was born the same year as March, would be the main enemy of this rising magnate, and the clashes between the two would often be public and notorious. Our protagonist was part of that local aristocracy that March considered lazy.

At the end of 1921, the leader of the Soviet revolution, Vladimir Lenin, wrote a very affectionate letter to a young American he had recently met in Moscow. In the letter, he wished him great success with the concession and gave his regards to his father. The young man in question was named Armand Hammer. He had just graduated in medicine, and the purpose of the concession in the letter was to exploit some of the Soviet Union's natural resources. Half a century later, Hammer was one of the world's great oil magnates through his company, Occidental Petroleum.

No one can doubt Santiago Rusiñol's talent as a painter and writer, but what is certain is that his bohemian lifestyle, his constant travels, his life in Sitges and Paris, and, in general, all his adventures, would not have been possible without his family's fortune. His grandfather had developed a cotton industry in Manlleu (Osona), which, over the years, was inherited by his brothers Santiago and Albert. But Santiago, the eldest, decided that factory life held no interest for him and handed over management of the family business to Albert, his younger brother, who would go on to become a great businessman and a very active politician.

What do companies such as robotics leader ABB, pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, technology company Ericsson, stock market operator Nasdaq, former car manufacturer Saab, and iconic appliance supplier Electrolux have in common? Although it may be surprising, all of them and many more are controlled by more or less the same Swedish family, the Wallenbergs.

In 1968 the film was released 2001: A Space Odyssey, a futuristic film full of very strange details. This Stanley Kubrick work soon became a cult film with varied interpretations. Without a doubt, one of the central elements of the plot was a computer with very human reactions called HAL 9000. Official sources related to the film have always insisted that the device's name comes from the expression heuristically programmed algorithmic computer, what does it mean algorithmic computer programmed with heuristics. But there's a long-standing urban legend that claims the name HAL is actually an alphabetical transposition of another name: what you get if you take the letter that follows the originals in alphabetical order, that is, IBM. The computer manufacturer IBM has been firmly embedded in popular culture around the world for many years.

In early 1993, Pedro Masaveu Peterson died. He was the man who had amassed the largest fortune in the history of Spain: some 350 billion pesetas, which, converted to euros and without adjusting for inflation, would have been more than 2.1 billion. His name was (and still is) unknown to most people, and his image is even more so, as no one would have recognized him on the street (he was known to be a heavily built man with a 19th-century beard). To get an idea of the size of his estate, it's worth knowing that a few months after his death, another major financier of the time, Emilio Botín-Sanz de Sautuola y López, president of Banco Santander between 1950 and 1986, died. His heirs had to pay half of what they had earned in inheritance tax. A tax bill of that amount could not go unnoticed by the public administrations, so the autonomous communities of Madrid and Asturias spent more than a decade litigating to keep the loot, in a fight that the Asturians ultimately won.

Nearly a hundred years ago, an article was published in the United States entitled Everybody ought to be rich [Everyone Should Be Rich], in which the author paid a series of compliments to capitalism, to the savings of the masses, and, above all, to the stock market, which in his view was the mechanism for fulfilling the purpose of the article's title, namely, that any citizen could be a potentate. A debatable worldview, but with an almost insurmountable problem: the text was published only a couple of months before the famous Crash of '29, the stock market collapse that plunged the American economy into a decade of darkness, the well-known Great Depression of the 1930s, a long period of hunger and unemployment.

Throughout this series, we've often highlighted entrepreneurs who managed to leave a profound mark on popular culture, whether through a product that became generic (such as Bimbo, used as a synonym for sliced bread) or through the implementation of a slogan that became a natural fit. Ugène Schueller has one that's a good example. In this sense, it's no secret that today, and for many decades now, the name Michelin has been an unequivocal part of the language to refer to certain layers of fat that form in specific areas of the human body. We won't go into details, but we will make it clear that this expression derives from a doll that was the mascot of this French tire manufacturer for many years.

Last January we dedicated this space to praising the figure of the founder of one of the best-known mattress brands in the entire State, the famous Pikolin, born in Zaragoza. At the time, we noted the fact that the other major Spanish mattress brand, Flex, also originated in the capital of the Ebro River, something truly remarkable. Today we're talking about the person who laid the foundation stone for that other brand, Antonio Beteré Salvador.

You may have often wondered about the origin of the name of the Can Vidalet neighbourhood in Esplugues de Llobregat. In fact, in the same neighbourhood there is a park of the same name, the Can Vidalet Park, a green lung of almost four hectares. The answer to all this can be found in a family estate that had been in the area since 1863: Josep Vidal Ribas, a key businessman in 19th century Catalonia active in various sectors, especially the chemical sector.

Throughout this series we have frequently talked about figures linked to the oil industry, one of the most influential of the 20th and 21st centuries. Figures such as Eduard Recasens, Marc Rich, Calouste Gulbekian, Henri Deterding, Evarist Fàbregas and Josep Maluquer have all paraded through it, all of them linked in some way to black gold. And today's character, Domènec Palet, also set foot in the oil world, but in this case in a rather bizarre way and completely different from those mentioned above. We will find out why later.

In May 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and the beginning of the de-escalation of confinement, a historic news item occurred in the world of Spanish construction: the firm Agromán, which had almost a century of history behind it, disappeared forever after its owner, the still former lasis, decided to form the former Ferrovial nation. Thus, Ferrovial Agromán was renamed Ferrovial Construcción and, suddenly, ninety-three years of history were wiped out. By the way, there will probably be people who think that the name of the extinct construction company had some relation to the agricultural world, but nothing could be further from the truth, as we will see later.

On February 4, media around the world reported the death of the Aga Khan, the leader of the Nizari sect of Shiites. Today, the figure of the Aga Khan is surely no longer glamorous. The Aga Khan V is a title of the past, but a few decades ago this religious leader was a character who frequently appeared in the society pages of the written press, which gave him great popularity. In Karim's case, he had held the title since 1957, after the death of his grandfather, Sultan Mahommed Shah. Curiously, his father never held the title of Aga Khan, but there was a generational leap, very similar to that of the Spanish monarchy. Now, with Karim's death, the brand new Aga Khan V is his son Rahim al-Hussaini.