Sublime

Lynch’s most important tool was his telephone, not his computer. He’d regularly call, or sometimes visit, a network of well-placed executives, asking for updates on their businesses, competitors, suppliers, customers, and more. These were legal tactics at the time, even though smaller investors couldn’t access the same information.

FDR would be the firm’s front man on Wall Street, for which Black agreed to pay him $25,000 a year, five times his salary at the Navy Department. It was an arrangement from which both stood to profit. The hemorrhaging of Roosevelt’s finances would be stanched, and Black would benefit from Franklin’s name on the masthead.

If the Kochs’ cavalier safety practices were a gamble, they lost when the jury rendered its verdict. On October 21, 1999, it found Koch Industries guilty not just of negligence but of malice, too, because it had known about the extreme hazard its decaying pipeline had posed. In his suit, Danny Smalley had asked for $100 million in damages from the

sold roughly $40 million worth of shares in the tender offer.

Elmer M. Ellsworth, a special assistant to Governor Winship, was a member of this hand-picked jury.

We designated this first product the Model 200A because we thought the name would make us look like we’d been around for a while. We were afraid that if people knew we’d never actually developed, designed, and built a finished product, they’d be scared off. Our pricing was even more naive: We set it at $54.40 not because of any cost calculations bu