Top 10 Most Epic Business Failures

Once named "America's Most Innovative Company" six years running by Fortune, Enron's house of cards collapsed in 2001 when off-balance-sheet fraud was exposed, destroying 20,000 jobs and $60 billion in shareholder value overnight.

Nokia commanded 50% of the global smartphone market in 2007 but dismissed the iPhone as a niche product, then fumbled its software strategy so badly that CEO Stephen Elop's "burning platform" memo became a eulogy for an empire.

Blockbuster CEO John Antioco reportedly laughed Netflix founders out of the room when they offered to sell for $50 million in 2000, then watched from 9,000 stores as Netflix grew into a $150 billion streaming giant.

Adam Neumann's coworking startup vaporized $40 billion in valuation within six weeks of filing its S-1, eventually going public at $9 billion before filing for bankruptcy in 2023, making it the defining cautionary tale of startup excess.

The beloved toy retailer was profitable until private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR loaded it with $5 billion in leveraged buyout debt in 2005, leaving zero cash for the e-commerce investments needed to compete with Amazon.

Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the first digital camera in 1975 and management buried it to protect film margins, making Kodak the ultimate case study of a company that had the future in its hands and chose to kill it.

Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange collapsed in November 2022 after a CoinDesk report revealed Alameda Research's balance sheet was built on FTT tokens, exposing $8 billion in misappropriated customer funds and ending in a fraud conviction.

The British travel company that literally invented the package holiday in 1841 collapsed in September 2019, stranding 600,000 tourists worldwide and requiring the UK's largest peacetime repatriation effort to bring them home.

The Munich-based fintech was a DAX 30 darling valued at $28 billion until auditors discovered €1.9 billion in cash that simply did not exist, exposing a massive fraud that BaFin regulators ignored for years despite Financial Times warnings.

Once named "America's Most Innovative Company" six years running by Fortune, Enron's house of cards collapsed in 2001 when off-balance-sheet fraud was exposed, destroying 20,000 jobs and $60 billion in shareholder value overnight.

Nokia commanded 50% of the global smartphone market in 2007 but dismissed the iPhone as a niche product, then fumbled its software strategy so badly that CEO Stephen Elop's "burning platform" memo became a eulogy for an empire.

Blockbuster CEO John Antioco reportedly laughed Netflix founders out of the room when they offered to sell for $50 million in 2000, then watched from 9,000 stores as Netflix grew into a $150 billion streaming giant.

Adam Neumann's coworking startup vaporized $40 billion in valuation within six weeks of filing its S-1, eventually going public at $9 billion before filing for bankruptcy in 2023, making it the defining cautionary tale of startup excess.

The beloved toy retailer was profitable until private equity firms Bain Capital and KKR loaded it with $5 billion in leveraged buyout debt in 2005, leaving zero cash for the e-commerce investments needed to compete with Amazon.

Kodak engineer Steve Sasson built the first digital camera in 1975 and management buried it to protect film margins, making Kodak the ultimate case study of a company that had the future in its hands and chose to kill it.

Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange collapsed in November 2022 after a CoinDesk report revealed Alameda Research's balance sheet was built on FTT tokens, exposing $8 billion in misappropriated customer funds and ending in a fraud conviction.

The British travel company that literally invented the package holiday in 1841 collapsed in September 2019, stranding 600,000 tourists worldwide and requiring the UK's largest peacetime repatriation effort to bring them home.

The Munich-based fintech was a DAX 30 darling valued at $28 billion until auditors discovered €1.9 billion in cash that simply did not exist, exposing a massive fraud that BaFin regulators ignored for years despite Financial Times warnings.