The Hall of Famefor Epic Disasters

42 people, $658M profit — the most profitable company per employee in tech history. Leadership spent five years too embarrassed to say what it sells, tried to ban 98% of its own revenue, and got overruled by its own creators in six days.

A landlord in a barefoot costume called itself a tech company. He sold the firm its own name for $5.9M, took $1.7B to leave while 2,400 staff held expiring options, then collected a $350M do-over from a16z. Never charged — it was all on page 199.

Meta fired 3,600 by email for "efficiency," then Zuck flew to Seattle to pay a 24-year-old PhD dropout $250M. Six weeks later, 600 more got called "load-bearing" on the way out. Alphabet's headcount went up 8,949 in the same year. The billion is real. The job isn't.

A 77-year-old dropout who'd never made vodka sent his people to France with one instruction, priced it at double Absolut, bought a 96/100 from an institute nobody knew, and "indoctrinated" 20,000 bartenders. Sold to Bacardi in seven years. Then gave most of it away.

Google paid Reddit $60M/yr for AI training data. Reddit blocked every other search engine, framed it as user protection, and sold the same data to OpenAI too. The users who wrote it all got $0.

Told men their masculinity was toxic. Dollar Shave Club replied "Welcome to the Club" in 3 words. P&G wrote off $8 billion and blamed currencies. The CEO retired with honors. The director won an Emmy. The customer got homework.