MonyPulseBusiness history, sourced

Image credits

Who took each photograph, where it came from and the license it is used under.

Last updated November 11, 2026

Every photograph in our stories is either in the public domain or published under a free license that allows reuse, and every one is hosted on this site. Each picture was resized and converted to the WebP format; nothing else was changed. Where a license is a Creative Commons ShareAlike license, our resized copy is available under the same license.

If you are the author of an image here and the credit is wrong, please tell us and we will fix it.

The $30,000 of Cereal That Kept Airbnb Alive

Apple in 1997: About 90 Days From Running Out of Cash

Blockbuster Could Have Bought Netflix for $50 Million

How Asa Candler Bought Coca-Cola for About $2,300

Colonel Sanders at 65: A $105 Check, Then a $2 Million Sale

Fred Smith's $27,000 Blackjack Win That Kept FedEx Flying

Henry Ford Failed Twice Before Ford Motor Company

Instagram Sold for $1 Billion With Almost No Revenue

James Dyson's 5,127 Vacuum Prototypes

Kodak Invented the Digital Camera, Then Went Bankrupt

How Lego Nearly Went Bankrupt, and Came Back

Marvel Went Bankrupt in 1996. Disney Paid $4 Billion in 2009.

  • Main gate of the Walt Disney Studios, Burbank (HABS CA-2639-C-32)

    Main gate of the Walt Disney Studios, Burbank (HABS CA-2639-C-32)

    Tavo Olmos, Historic American Buildings Survey. Public domain. Source file on Wikimedia Commons

How Microsoft Bought DOS for $75,000

Milton Hershey Failed Twice, Then Sold Caramel for $1 Million

Steve Jobs Paid $10 Million for Pixar. Disney Paid $7.4 Billion.

The Apple Cofounder Who Sold His 10% for $800

Sam Walton Lost His First Store. Then He Built Walmart.

Facebook Paid $19 Billion for WhatsApp

Yahoo Could Have Bought Google for $1 Million

YouTube's $1.65 Billion Sale to Google

Jeff Bezos's Parents Put $245,573 Into Amazon

10,000 Bitcoin for Two Pizzas

Chobani Began in a Yogurt Plant Kraft Threw Away

How Crocs Nearly Went Broke in 2008

McDonald's: The Burger Chain That Is Really a Landlord

Michael Bloomberg Was Fired With $10 Million. Then Came the Terminal.

Nike Was Always Broke: The Blue Ribbon Sports Years

Play-Doh Started as a Wallpaper Cleaner

Sara Blakely Started Spanx With $5,000

Howard Schultz Bought Starbucks for $3.8 Million

Warren Buffett's $200 Billion Berkshire Hathaway Mistake

Liquid Paper: From a Kitchen Bottle to a $47.5 Million Sale

Sriracha: The Hot Sauce That Never Bought an Ad

Amancio Ortega: The Zara Founder Who Avoided the Camera

Tetra Pak: The Paper Pyramid That Built a Fortune

How Acorn and Apple Created Arm in a Turkey Barn

Gorilla Glass Waited 40 Years for the iPhone

Bubble Wrap Was Supposed to Be Wallpaper

Trader Joe's Began With a Store That Lost to 7-Eleven

Brownie Wise: The Woman Tupperware Tried to Erase

Stewart Butterfield's Two Failed Games Became Flickr and Slack

Financial Tools & Calculators

The explainer pictures on our calculator pages are original MonyPulse illustrations, drawn from each page’s own worked example. The photographs on the section’s home and category pages are licensed for commercial use without attribution; we cropped and resized them and converted them to WebP.

Some illustrations include emoji artwork from Microsoft’s Fluent Emoji, used under the MIT License:

MIT License, Fluent Emoji

Copyright (c) Microsoft Corporation.

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The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.