Lehman Brothers — $639 Billion Bankruptcy

Lehman Brothers' 2008 collapse, with $639 billion in debt, remains the largest bankruptcy in US history—a record that still stands today. This failure triggered a global financial crisis that erased $10 trillion in market value, proving no institution too big to fail. Its scale is ten times larger than Enron's $63 billion fraud, making it the most systemically devastating corporate collapse on this list, and 30% more catastrophic in market impact than any other single event.