I think it was supposed to be a figurative overstatement. It was trading at $40 in 2007.
That is correct. It’s just that until 1995 (before the DHL purchase), the Deutsche Bundespost was a national company and responsible for both postal and telephone service.
It then got privatized and split up into three companies.
Off the top of my head from old clients of mine: Campbell’s Soup owns Godiva and some of the world’s largest mushroom farms, and Novartis (a company made up of clashing companies) owns some oddities such as Gerber.
Disney owns ABC and ESPN.
CBS (Viacom) owns USA Network (I think.)
Proctor and Gamble owns Pur water filters and Duracell batteries.
No, USA Network is owned by NBC Universal. And ESPN was actually one of the biggest reasons why Disney bought ABC and it’s still one of the biggest profit centers.
Woolworths and Wesfarmers both have a lot of fingers in a lot of pies, and whilst the list of companies covered under their respective corporate umbrellas isn’t by any means a secret, Woolworths don’t exactly go out of their way to tell people that they own both Dick Smith Electronics and Tandy (who were, until recently, competing businesses) and Wesfarmers/Coles’ ownership of First Choice Liquor and Liquorland is largely unremarked upon for the most part.
Woolworth’s in the US still exists although there are no Woolworth Stores around anymore. Now the firm is called Foot Locker.
They’re completely unrelated; Woolworths in Australia simply nicked the name back in the 1920s and ran with it.
Most of this is sooooo easy to check before posting about. :smack:
General Tire and Rubber (“sooner or later, you’ll own Generals”) was one of the smaller tire companies in Akron, Ohio, but it didn’t stop them from buying Aerojet, maker of rocket engines. For a long time it also owned the RKO Pictures movie production house and a whole bunch of other weird stuff. The poop is here. It spun off the tire and showbiz divisions and now just oversees Aerojet; it’s now called GenCorp.
Every so often I’ll run across an old technical report on some esoteric aspect of rocket propulsion that has the old General Tire “big G” logo on it, except inside the G it says “Aerojet-General” It’s kind of jarring if you’re old enough to remember what the sign at General Tire franchises looked like.
If you have access to a piano, play a G then the next highest E and then the C in the middle and see what you associate with that particular trio of notes. Don’t be surprised if you get a hankerin’ for must-see TV afterward.
That is frickin amazing. I will now be repeating that to everyone I know.
It made more sense back in the day. Companies and universities who used computers early on found themselves with huge, expensive machines that were usually running 24 hours a day yet used for their primary business only a few hours a day; to offset the cost of the machines and the cost of running them continuously, they often started side-businesses to use up that expensive, idle computer time-- time-sharing services, BBSes, online services. GE, Dun & Bradstreet, Dow Jones, IBM, Bolt Baranek & Newman, and H&R Block all had nationally-available side businesses like this. While online-service-only companies existed even then, it wasn’t until the mid-1980s that it made financial sense to have mainframes dedicated just to them.
Kind of reminds me of that waste-not-want-not ethic that kunilou mentioned regarding Henry Ford, using the leftovers from building car chassis to make charcoal.
How about a translation for the non-musically inclined? 
Here is a YouTube link to a playlist showcasing the NBC logos over the years, often playing the notes G, E, C. And a Wikipedia article on the chimes. (The article notes that the G-E-C sequence precedes ownership by GE Corp., but GE was one of the original partners of RCA, the founding company of NBC.)
Basics: G, E, C, The NBC Chimes, are the first American sound trademark, and have been in use to identify NBC since the days of the Red and Blue radio networks.
Thanks for that! Not being an American the chimes don’t mean anything special to me, but at least now I know what Inner Stickler was talking about. 