Episode 643: The Taxi King
Published:
Publisher: NPR Planet Money
Duration: 20:29
Summary from website: The most valuable thing about a yellow taxicab in New York isn’t the car. It’s actually this little metal shield bolted to the hood. It’s called a taxi medallion. There are only about 13,000 taxi medallions in existence. And Gene Freidman owns over a thousand of them.
Not too long ago, these medallions were selling for $1.2 million each. Gene Freidman liked to boast about how much he paid for them, often with borrowed money.
Today on the show: the story of what happens when something you own is suddenly worth a lot less. We follow the rise and fall of the taxi king.
Link: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/05/23/613776997/episode-643-the-taxi-king