Rivian Corporation began as a scrappy startup in 2009. Volkswagen has spent decades failing to understand American car buyers. Now they’re betting $5.86 billion that Rocky Road and Licorice actually do mix. The electric vehicle maker, started as an enthusiast-run firm by an entrepreneur, R.J. Scaringe, with money from family and friends plus angel investors. This backing allowed him to pivot from small sports cars to adventure-oriented EVs. He attracted serious money in 2017–2018 including Sumitomo Corporation and a Saudi auto distributor. Then Amazon led a $700 million round of funding in 2020, with Rivian promising to produce 100,000 electric…
Author: Lloyd Graff
Labor Day 2025. A perfect day to float along with my thoughts on a gorgeous late summer beauty. The honeybees are at work amidst the blue sage in front of our house in a suburb of Chicago where we have lived for 47 years. Our son Ari and his son Judah have been staying with us this weekend. My wife Risa is baking brownies and they smell fabulous. She is explaining to Judah how she knows they are ready by sticking a toothpick in them. If she withdraws it and it has no residue from the brownies, they are ready.…
We all have unexpected moments which change our lives. They rarely happen while sitting at a computer. I was on vacation last week with children and grandchildren in South Haven, Michigan, and one of my granddaughters wanted to see the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. She asked me to come along, not just to get insights into my Alma Mater, but also to see the place where my wife Risa and I met. We all went to the Michigan Union ballroom and were able to walk right into the giant room where the mixer was held on January 11th,…
Rich Hill was the starting pitcher for Kansas City Tuesday night, pitching against the Chicago Cubs, the team that drafted him out of the University of Michigan in 2002. His first Major League start was in 2005. This was the first game of his 21st season, with his 14th Major League team. When he went to the mound, I bet he had the nerves of a rookie. Hill is a serious guy. Baseball is his life, pitching is his passion. He had 11 starts for the Omaha Storm Chasers this season before joining the Royals, riding the bus like the…
Matt Boyd is a nice guy who pitches for the Chicago Cubs. At 34, after multiple arm surgeries, a baseball career that was almost over before it got started, he is near the top ten in the National League in strikeouts and just made the All Star Team for the first time. Before this season he signed a two-year free agent contract for $29 million — which looks like maybe the biggest bargain of the winter. He is 9-3 right now. *** Boyd was drafted by Toronto in 2013 after pitching at Oregon State. He had an 88 mile per…
Israel is my team. I follow it daily. I pray for it. My commitment is total—unfettered. I also consider myself a red-blooded American devoted to my country, where I was born. I can be both without hesitation. My love of Israel began as a child. My family was not particularly religious but clearly identified as Jewish. My parents did not know anybody that died in the German concentration camps, but I became almost obsessed with the Nazis’ evil in grade school. I was born in 1944, so they weren’t just a distant history book tale. The number 6,000,000 became an…
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity.” This was the famous opening line of Charles Dickens’ novel, A Tale of Two Cities, but it could be said of America and the world 175 years after being published. In a parochial way, it applies to the machining world I have inhabited for so many years. Every week I talk to somebody who is frustrated, fraught with defeat, and ready to “hang it…
He has one arm being pulled by Donald Trump and the other by Xi Jinping, with his back pressed against a brick wall. Tim Cook, the head of Apple Corporation, is in a pickle of his own making, despite having pulled in trillions of dollars as head of one of the richest iconic companies in the world. Strangely, Jensen Huang, the founder of Nvidia, seems to want to do the same thing as Tim Cook. Patrick McGee just published a book, Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company, which tells the story of Apple investing in China…
This is a blog I hate to write, but I’m doing it anyway. Joe Biden has prostate cancer. It has metastasized and could end his life. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer 16 years ago, but I have struggled with prostate miseries for over 30 years. I’ve had several procedures to ease my woes along the way, and I almost died during one of them when my heart stopped beating while they were working on the nasty gland. I’ve had more biopsies than I choose to remember. The sad fact is that probably at least half the men in America…
Would you like to live in the Arctic? Frankly, it isn’t for me, yet I am fascinated by the TV shows that are popping up like baby penguins–though they thrive in Antarctica, not the Arctic. The brutal lifestyle of the guys who harvest King crabs in the Bering Sea off Alaska has always fascinated me. I also loved a short series on the boys on the basketball team in a little town called Hooper Bay in the Aleutian Islands, where harvesting sea cucumbers in scuba equipment and playing high school basketball are both rites of passage which can conflict. The…