The Profile: The trillion-dollar company that rules the world & the YouTuber taking on MrBeast

This edition of The Profile features Beyoncé, Robert Caro, Takaya Awata, and others.

Good morning, friends!

I love stories of coincidence — particularly the ones that make you shake your head in disbelief, and say, “No way. What are the chances?”

You probably fall into one of two camps of people. If you’re in the first, you attribute the coincidence to statistical probability and math. If you’re in the second, you credit a greater power and call it serendipity.

Coincidences break the monotony of everyday life, and because they’re typically unusual, they stand out in our minds. And then, we assign meaning to them and boom, we’ve got a fascinating story to tell generations to come.

I really enjoy a This American Life podcast episode called, “No Coincidence, No Story,” on exactly this phenomenon. The show asked listeners to send their best coincidence stories, and they received more than 1,300 submissions. From a chance encounter at a bus station to a romantic dollar bill, host Sarah Koenig speaks with people about their mind-boggling coincidences.

Check out this crazy story:

A few years ago, after Stephen Lee proposed to his girlfriend Helen, they brought their families together for the first time to celebrate the engagement.

Stephen Lee: My mom and my stepdad came to New York to meet with Helen's parents. And basically, over the course of dinner and coffee afterwards, we discovered that my father had dated my wife's mother back in Korea in the 1960s and he had proposed to her--

Sarah Koenig: I'm going to slow this down a sec, just to let it sink in. Helen's mother had almost married Stephen's father — his late father, actually. He died when Stephen was 17. And how this all came out was that after they had dinner, they went back to Stephen's apartment and they were looking at Stephen's family photographs.

Stephen Lee: So my future mother-in-law's flipping through the album and she sees my dad. And so she asks, ‘Oh, oh, what was his name?’ And my mom tells the name. And my future mother-in-law just nods and moves on and keeps on flipping through the book — doesn't even say anything.

So Helen's mother says nothing, goes home. But later that night, she tells her daughter, this was The One. This was the man who might have been. She explained that the reason they hadn't married was because her father — Helen's grandfather — had chosen a different husband for her — the man who became Helen's father. All of them ended up living in the US, but they quickly lost touch. And Stephen didn't find out about any of this until a couple of days later.

I’m sure you can mathematically figure out the odds of this happening, but Stephen chose to assign meaning to it: “My dad is somehow behind all this — that somehow he's helped make all this happen.”

And it makes for an insane, amazing story, right? As Sarah Koeing says near the end, “A good coincidence is like a good magic trick. When you see one, a struggle ensues instantaneously between the thrill of the apparent miracle and the urge to debunk it.”

👉  Reply to this email with your best coincidence stories, and if I get enough, I’ll share a compilation in a future newsletter. 🙏

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PROFILES.

— The global superstar talking business
— The YouTuber taking on MrBeast
— The legendary author on his final book
— The Japanese noodle billionaire
— The trillion-dollar company that rules the world [**HIGHLY RECOMMEND**]

PEOPLE TO KNOW.

The global superstar talking business: It’s been years since there was a longform Beyoncé Knowles-Carter interview, and GQ just published one. At 43, Beyoncé has shown, time and again, the ability to exert a rare kind of control—over her image, her likeness, her music and business worlds. She has become adept at breaking rules and entering new spaces, in business and in art, creating new norms and new opportunities for others as she goes. “It’s not about being perfect. It’s about being revolutionary,” she says. (GQ)

“I have made an extreme effort to stay true to my boundaries and protect myself and my family. No amount of money is worth my peace.”

The YouTuber taking on MrBeast: Rosanna Pansino, one of YouTube’s earliest influencers, has emerged as the only major creator who’s vocally criticizing MrBeast online. Over the past month or so, Pansino has aggregated various allegations she says she received about unsafe work conditions during the filming of MrBeast’s upcoming Amazon Prime Video reality show “Beast Games,” which promises an expected 1,000 contestants the chance to win a $5 million cash prize. More recently, she added to her investigation a flurry of other accusations made by others both online and offline. Here’s why she’s on a crusade against the internet’s most popular creator. (NBC)

“It’s really scary putting yourself out there and standing up for what you think is right.”

The legendary author on his final book: Author Robert Caro’s influential book, The Power Broker, turns 50 this year. It’s the book that teaches New Yorkers how their city got this way and makes visible to everyone else how accumulated power, whether elected or not, warps and reveals character. Its sales, all these years later, are rising rather than falling. If you add up hardcovers and paperbacks, it’s in its 74th printing. Caro, now 89, is now almost done with the fourth and final book in the Lyndon Johnson series. (New York Magazine; alternate link) (For more, check out this Profile Dossier on Robert Caro here.)

“I can’t lose the days.”

The Japanese noodle billionaire: Takaya Awata’s Toridoll Holdings has a network of nearly 2,000 quick-service restaurants across 28 countries and regions covering 21 brands. The flagship is Marugame Seimen, Japan’s largest udon noodle chain by both revenue and store count. The entrepreneur’s fast-food success has made him a billionaire and honed his ambitions. Here’s how he’s taking on the global quick-service restaurant industry. (Forbes; alternate link)

“The most important thing is selling the value of the experience.”

COMPANIES TO WATCH.

The trillion-dollar company that rules the world: Apple is worth $3.4 trillion, more than any other company in the world. Its 2023 revenue (almost $400 billion) makes it about as big as the entire economy of Denmark or the Philippines. And though most of the business, as you’d expect, revolves around selling iPhones, it’s also grown far broader. Through its App Store, Apple tightly controls enormous platforms for digital communication, mobile finance, social networks, music, movies, transportation, news, sports and pretty much anything else that happens in 1s and 0s, which is to say, everything. This is a fascinating profile of a fascinating company. (Bloomberg; alternate link)

“People choose Apple products because they love them, they trust them, and they use them every day.”

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