Money management, Silicon Valley-style

With a successful hedge fund and a top-secret security firm under his belt, Joe Lonsdale is trying something new.

FORTUNE -- Joe Lonsdale is what an earlier generation would have called a young man in a hurry. A protégé of investor Peter Thiel, Lonsdale helped him build Clarium Capital into a multibillion-dollar hedge fund. Then, again with Thiel, Lonsdale co-founded Palantir Technologies, a security analytics software firm.

Having made a small fortune MORE

Amazon ups the ante in war against Apple

Amazon has established itself as a credible alternative to Apple in the tablet market in so many ways.

FORTUNE -- The business-focused battle-of-the-titans storyline of late has been 'Apple versus Samsung,' widely understood as a proxy for 'Apple versus Google.' If Jeff Bezos accomplished one thing in his clear, solid, and meticulously articulated Kindle presentation in Santa Monica, Calif., Thursday morning, it was to make the case to a consumer-focused audience MORE

Why Facebook didn't have to go public

Never mind the $16 billion in the bank, the poster child for botched IPOs could have saved itself all sorts of grief by staying private.

FORTUNE -- It's a strange world we live in when a financing event that raised $16 billion for an eight-year-old company is widely panned as a failure. It's even odder when tongues wag that the young CEO of that same company, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, should MORE

Apple: One year under Tim Cook

It's business as usual -- and some $270 billion more in value -- on the anniversary of Tim Cook's promotion.

FORTUNE -- It shouldn't have felt like a surprise, but it did, when the news broke a year ago today that Steve Jobs was stepping down as CEO of Apple. He was becoming chairman of the board, a previously unfilled position, Apple announced. Jobs would remain involved with the company, a MORE

Will the world's greatest startup machine ever stall?

Not likely. Through boom and bust alike, Stanford University has nurtured some of the most disruptive innovations in business and technology. President John Hennessy told Fortune why -- and how.

FORTUNE -- When John Hennessy became the tenth president of Stanford University in 2000, Silicon Valley was at the height of the dot-com bubble. More than a decade later, the Internet has matured and a new crop of companies built on MORE

Where LinkedIn is headed next

CEO Jeff Weiner discussed the volatility of the stock's first year, as well as the company's plans for future growth.

FORTUNE -- On May 19, 2011, LinkedIn (LNKD) went public. The online professional network's stock soared to more than double its offering price on its opening day, and then teetered up and down in the months to come. A little over a year later, on May 25, CEO Jeff Weiner discussed MORE

How Tim Cook is changing Apple

Steve Jobs' successor is making his mark and trying to keep the Apple magic going.

FORTUNE -- In February of this year, a group of investors visited Apple as part of a "bus tour" led by a research analyst for Citibank. The session started with a 45-minute presentation by Peter Oppenheimer, Apple's chief financial officer, and the 15 or so investors who attended the session were treated to Apple's unique brand MORE

How Amazon learned to love veterans

Won over by their logistical know-how and "bias for action," the online retailer is on a military hiring spree.

FORTUNE -- In a world where the typical preparation for becoming a junior executive at a Fortune 500 company is to go to college, sign on to some big corporation's management-training program, and perhaps pick up an MBA, Dennis Clancey stands out. The fresh-faced 29-year-old is an operations manager at an Amazon.com warehouse in MORE

Green policy gloom? Not in the states

Hope may be lost on the national stage for the moment. But, in the states, there's plenty of action.

FORTUNE -- If there's one political consensus about climate change, renewable fuels, and alternative energy policy right now, it's that the action isn't in Washington. What's more, don't expect an intelligent debate about energy policy in the presidential campaign. Mitt Romney, while not a climate-change denier, believes the U.S. shouldn't take unilateral MORE

Utility exec to feds: Save our tax break, or else

Cheap and plentiful natural gas makes it difficult to pursue exotic alternative and renewable energy sources, including wind.

FORTUNE -- If federal tax breaks for wind farms go away, wind-farm operators will stop building them, says Lewis Hay III, chairman and CEO of NextEra Energy (NEE), the goofily named holding company for utility operator Florida Power & Light.

"Wind power will go to virtually zero next year," says Hay, if Congress allows MORE