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Curated playlist

20th-century American philanthropists

  • Michael JacksonMichael Jackson bought a music catalog with most of the Beatles's material in 1985. He paid 47.5 million dollars.
  • Elvis PresleyA teacher told young Elvis Presley he had no aptitude for singing. He later sold an estimated 500 million records.
  • Frank SinatraFrank Sinatra was dropped by his record label in 1952. A movie role then brought him back to the top.
  • Whitney HoustonWhitney Houston sold more than 220 million records and carried a nickname that needed no first name: "the Voice". She was born in 1963 and died in 2012. In between, she became one of the most awarded performers in history. In 2023, Rolling…
  • Denzel WashingtonIn 2025, on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the actor Denzel Washington said that the emphasis in his first name belongs on the first syllable. His mother had moved it to the second syllable so that young Denzel would answer to her call and not his…
  • Muhammad AliMuhammad Ali refused three times to step forward for his Army induction in 1967. He lost his boxing title that same day.
  • Bill GatesBill Gates and Paul Allen wrote software for a computer they did not have. Their Altair demo worked the first time.
  • Fred TrumpFrederick Christ Trump was an American real estate developer who built more than 27,000 apartments in New York. He was born in the Bronx on the 11th of October 1905 to German immigrant parents, and he died in 1999. One of his five children…
  • Robert RedfordRobert Redford died in his sleep at his home in Sundance, Utah, on the 16th of September 2025. He was 89 years old. After a private funeral, he was buried on his own property there. The man who ended his days in a place that carried his…
  • SelenaSelena Quintanilla-Pérez was 23 years old when she died on the 31st of March 1995, and major television networks interrupted their regular programming to announce it. She was a singer from Texas who performed Tejano music, a…
  • Andrew CarnegieAndrew Carnegie sat down in 1868, at the age of 33, and wrote himself a memo that read like a vow. He called the piling up of wealth one of the worst forms of idolatry. He planned to cap his income at $50,000 a year and retire from…
  • Warren BuffettWarren Buffett's yearbook photo called him a future stockbroker. He was seventeen and liked math.
  • Barbra StreisandBarbra Streisand once filed a lawsuit that sent a crowd of strangers to look at a single photograph. In 2003 she claimed that a website documenting coastal erosion had invaded her privacy. Among its more than 12,000 images, one happened to…
  • Ray KrocRay Kroc took the public address microphone in San Diego on the 9th of April 1974 and criticized his own baseball team. The Padres were about to lose their season opener to the Houston Astros, 9-5, and 39,083 fans were watching. Kroc told…
  • Scott BessentScott Bessent won Senate confirmation as United States secretary of the treasury on the 27th of January 2025, by a vote of 68-29. On that same day, a man carrying several Molotov cocktails and a knife, who intended to murder him, was…
  • Saul ZaentzSaul Zaentz won three Best Picture Oscars, a feat almost no one else in Hollywood has matched.

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