The end of the year is a time for pausing, reflection and exhaustion. But before throwing ourselves into 2025, it’s worth sifting through the remnants of 2024 to see who in the business world has done something worth remembering.

So, once more with gusto, the Observer Agenda page brings you its awards for the brightest – or perhaps most glaring – lights in the business world this year.

Best family drama

TV show Succession lives rent-free in the heads of the Murdoch family. Last year Vanity Fair reported that Lachlan Murdoch had told his billionaire patriarch father, Rupert, that his brother, James, was leaking stories to the writers of the series. But this year it is life imitating art.

Spoiler alert: as the show’s title makes pretty clear, it involves a big death. It was the culminating episode that, according to the New York Times, reminded his offspring that even a man with billions of dollars and the keys to the Fox News bile factory cannot put off the inevitable forever (even if Rupert’s fifth – yes, fifth – marriage in June suggests there is something left in the tank). Jostling for position ended up with Rupert trying – and failing – to install Lachlan as the sole inheritor of the media empire, instead of his more liberal siblings.

Thatcher memorial award

Rachel Reeves does not exactly have many female exemplars. She is the most powerful woman in the Labour party’s excruciatingly masculine history, and Winston Churchill’s old – and apparently unremovable – urinal in her private toilet stands as a particularly pungent sign that she is the first female chancellor in 800 years.

So, instead, she has turned to a former Tory prime minister: Margaret Thatcher. Reeves talked about having “no alternative” at her first budget and vowed to take an “iron fist” against wasteful spending. She even let City fatcats off lightly – less iron than ironic.

Upstanding billionaire award

The re-election of Donald Trump meant a series of bosses genuflecting in front of the throne: Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, Apple’s Tim Cook, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have all paid court at Mar-a-Lago or pledged donations. But there is something particularly impressive about the way the ones who owned newspapers bent over backwards: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and medical billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong prevented their publications, the Washington Post and the LA Times respectively, from endorsing Kamala Harris’s rival campaign.

Highly commended: James Dyson, the maker of vacuum cleaners and hair straighteners, who railed against UK inheritance tax increases on farmland in a Times opinion piece that did not mention his estate could be heavily affected.

Annual Elon Musk interlude

You just cannot ignore the world’s richest man – not least because Musk seems to have tweaked the algorithm on his social network to boost his own insomniac ravings. But even by his standards, casually using his wealth to help swing the US election and win himself a quasi-cabinet role is fairly notable.

Musk used to bang on about saving the world, but that has been replaced with anti-immigration disinformation and alt-right Maga memes. The latest big move from the man who two short years ago said he wanted Twitter, now X, to be politically neutral? Explicitly backing the far-right (and anti-electric-car) Alternative for Germany (AfD) and Nigel Farage’s Reform in the UK. It turns out a billionaire with a messiah complex was preferable to Citizen Kane with a phone and a side order of ketamine.

Northern Rock bank of the year award

Can you really call yourself a proper bank if you haven’t had a major scandal? If Starling Bank, founded in 2014 by Anne Boden, felt that something was missing in its first decade, the British app-only lender certainly filled in the gap in 2024 with a £29m fine from the City regulator over “shockingly lax” financial crime controls.

Boden had already stepped down as chief executive in 2023, citing a confusing “conflict of interest” between being boss and a large shareholder. Her replacement, Raman Bhatia, has already endeared himself to staff by ordering them to spend more time in the office, despite not having space for them all.

Entrepreneurial spirit award

Sometimes we need to honour the risk-embracing entrepreneurs inspired to take on the world. Step up UK businessman Sanjay Shah, who represented plucky Britain on the world stage with a fraud in Denmark that managed to hit the £1bn mark. In the US, Bill Hwang got 18 years in prison for fraud and a $12.4bn forfeiture order after the collapse of his Archegos hedge fund, which threatened to trigger a financial crisis.

But the winner is Evergrande founder Hui Ka Yan, who was fined and banned from China’s markets for life in March. The Chinese property developer built up an incredible $300bn (£239bn) in liabilities by the time it defaulted in 2021, triggering a property crisis that has rocked the world’s second-largest economy. Impressive stuff.

Golden Monopoly board

This award goes to the most efficient extractor of value from the luckless public. There was a strong entry this year for crypto, with the “value” of memecoins surging into the billions, thanks to Trump’s election. Asking for the president-elect’s understanding of blockchains would probably not be very fruitful, but the president-elect’s vague assertions that he will be pro-crypto made the price of bitcoin, the sector’s biggest virtual currency, soar above $100,000 for the first time.

But for sheer monopolistic chutzpah it’s hard to beat some of England’s water companies. The only fully privatised water industry in the world has been showing everybody else what it means to be free of the dead hand of the state: Southern Water tried to raise bills by 83% this year; the regulator allowed it a mere 53% instead as an early Christmas present.