"You may think you don't knowAudrey Gelman, but if you are oneof the millions who watch the hit television series Girls, you do,"says Barbara McMahon in TheTimes. That's because the29-year-old is the inspirationfor one of the show's most"controversial characters":Marnie Michaels.
In Girls, created by Gelman'sbest friend, Lena Dunham, Michaels is "smart, intenseand focused on her career" in other words, just like Gelman,who last October, co-founded awomen-only social club in New York called The Wing. "Themission," says Gelman, "wasto create a destination wherewomen can build relationships,hatch plans and, you know, runthe world."
The Wing features a "pastel-and-gold-tinted communal workspaceand a library with books (yes, there'sa copy of Virginia Woolf's A Roomof One's Own) arranged by colour",says Ariana Igneri in BloombergBusinessweek, as well as providingits 400 members with "on-demandblowouts, a lactation room, andvanities stocked with trendy beautyproducts". It's gone down a hit with 20and 30-somethings, who look like they"stepped out of an Urban Outfittersad". Membership has doubled sinceopening, despite the annual $1,950 membership fee and a one-offregistration charge of $100.
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The man who made billions from patience
Luiz Alves Paes de Barros is called the "anonymous billionaire" in his native Brazil for "quietly amassing a fortune by wagering on stocks almost no one else seemed to want", say Paula Sambo and Jessica Brice in Bloomberg Markets. His biggest haul came in late 2015 when he snaffled up shares in Magazine Luiza, a struggling household goods and electronics retailer. It was a "brazen move", but one that paid off after the shares surged 1,000% over the past year, to become "the top stock in one of the world's top-performing markets".
The media-shy 69-year-old started out trading commodities, before teaming up with star fund manager Luis Stuhlberger at what is now Credit Suisse Hedging-Griffo, say Sambo and Brice. Then followed a half-century of investing his own cash in mostly Brazilian equities, which are today worth some £308m. Barros denies there is any great secret to his success. "Perfecting patience is all I've done over the past 50 years," he says. "I love when things get bad. When it's bad, I buy."
A fortune founded on second-hand car sales
John Madejski (pictured below) had his "eureka moment" when he came across a crudely put-together car magazine while on holiday in Florida in the 1970s, he tells Lorraine McBride in The Sunday Telegraph. When he got back home to Britain, he invested £1,100 in creating Auto Trader, a magazine for advertising new and second-hand cars. He later sold his 67% stake in the business to a venture capital firm for £174m in 1998, after realising the magazine would need £1bn in investment to transfer it from print to digital.
Now, aged 75, Madejski is trying to "shed" his businesses, which span publishing, radio, restaurants, radio, property and Reading football club, where he is the chairman. "I've grown up a bit", he says, "so I'm now down to two Rolls-Royces, one Bentley and two Jaguars, including a 1957 Jaguar XK140, a fabulous car that reeks of the Fifties."
Fortune has played its part in his success. "When Robert Maxwell was alive, I offered him £5 a share [for Reading FC] which he refused. When he fell off his boat, I got them for 10p each, which was good business." But luck goes both ways and the last recession "decimated" his fortune, he says. "I lost hundreds of millions. Nevertheless, I'm still here and reasonably happy. I'm pretty philosophical and understand that the life and times of an entrepreneur are cyclical."
Can music streaming sites make money?
Music streaming sites such as Apple Music, Deezer, Pandora, SoundCloud and Spotify hope that they will replace downloads and CD sales as the way that the vast majority of people listen to music. However, persuading people to pay to listen to music online isn't easy, as shown by recent reports that SoundCloud could run out of money later this year.
The Berlin-based music-streaming platform, co-founded in 2008 by chief executive Alexander Ljung (pictured) and chief technology officer Eric Wahlforss, has more than 175 million users, but has largely been a free service, on which users could listen to music online, and musicians could upload and share their songs. The extent to which this is not a sustainable business model was made all too apparent when the company filed its accounts last week with Companies House in the UK, where one of the service's companies is legally based, notes John Murray Brown in the Financial Times.
For that year, despite turnover rising from €17.4m to €21.1m, SoundCloud's post-tax losses widened from €39.1m to €51.2m, giving "rise to a material uncertainty about the group's ability to continue as a going concern".
In March, the site launched a premium service called SoundCloud Go, priced at $9.99 a month. If this paid service isn't successful, SoundCloud is likely to need fresh funding to keep operating. That funding might have come from Spotify, which entered talks last September to buy its rival for $1bn, but Spotify backed away: the firm is pursuing an initial public offering (IPO) later this year and "doesn't need an additional licensing headache in a potential IPO year", says Techcrunch. (Spotify is the market leader with more than 100 million users, of which around 40 million are paid users but it also remains unprofitable, losing €173m on revenues on €1.95bn last year.)
Google is now said to be considering making an offer of $500m "just half of the price that SoundCloud had been looking for", says tech website The Verge. But whether SoundCloud and other streaming services can persuade enough free users to sign up premium services to ever turn profitable is unclear.
