Every now and then, a company makes a decision so spectacularly, confidently wrong that you have to stop and appreciate it the way you’d appreciate a very large car crash.
Not illegal. Not technically fraudulent. Just… a choice. Made by adults. In a boardroom. With a PowerPoint.
Today we are honoring those choices.
(This is a love letter to corporate hubris. It is also a warning. It is mostly entertainment.)
1. Kodak Invented the Digital Camera and Then Put It in a Drawer
In 1975, a Kodak engineer named Steve Sasson built the world’s first digital camera. It was the size of a toaster, it took 23 seconds to capture a single black-and-white image, and it was, without question, the future of photography.
Kodak’s response: interesting, please never speak of this again.
Management looked at the digital camera, looked at their extremely profitable film business, and decided that the correct move was to shelve the invention and continue selling film. Which worked brilliantly — right up until it didn’t, which was when every other company built digital cameras and Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
The thing that makes this genuinely fascinating is that Kodak didn’t fail because they missed the future. They invented the future. They held it in their hands, took one look at their quarterly earnings, and put it back down.
This is called the Innovator’s Dilemma — the phenomenon where successful companies are so committed to protecting what works that they cannot adopt what’s coming. Clayton Christensen wrote an entire book about it. He could have just said “Kodak” and left it there.
2. Blockbuster Had Three Chances to Buy Netflix and Said No All Three Times
In the year 2000, Netflix was a small DVD-by-mail company that was losing money and actively looking for someone to acquire it. They approached Blockbuster and offered to sell for $50 million.
Blockbuster said no.
This would be a perfectly normal business decision if Netflix had stayed a DVD-by-mail company that lost money. It did not do that.
What makes this story richer is that it happened not once but essentially three times — Blockbuster had multiple opportunities across several years to either buy, partner with, or simply take seriously the idea that people might one day want to watch things without leaving their houses. Each time, the answer was some variation of no.
The last Blockbuster on earth is in Bend, Oregon. It is now a tourist attraction. People visit it the way people visit ruins.
Netflix is worth approximately $280 billion.
There is nothing more to say about this. The numbers have already said it.
3. New Coke: The Time Coca-Cola Decided to Fix What Was Not Broken
In 1985, Coca-Cola — one of the most successful consumer brands in human history, with a product people had been happily drinking for nearly a hundred years — decided the formula needed changing.
They reformulated the drink, called it New Coke, discontinued the original, and launched it with enormous confidence.
The public reacted as though a close personal relative had died.
People called the Coca-Cola hotline in tears. Actual tears. About a soft drink. There were protests. Stockpiling of original Coke cans. A man in Seattle formed a society dedicated to bringing back the old formula. The company received 400,000 letters of complaint — handwritten, posted, envelope-and-stamp complaint letters — in the weeks after the launch.
Seventy-nine days after New Coke launched, Coca-Cola brought back the original formula, rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic. Sales went through the roof. Some people speculated it had been a deliberate marketing stunt all along.
It was not. Coca-Cola’s then-CEO described it as “the biggest marketing mistake in history.” He was not wrong, but he was also not entirely right, because it accidentally became a masterclass in brand loyalty — just not on purpose, and not in a way anyone would recommend recreating.
The lesson here is technically about consumer psychology and brand identity. But the more honest lesson is: do not touch things that are working. This should not require a case study. And yet.
4. Yahoo Turned Down $44 Billion and Then Sold for $4.8 Billion
In 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for $44.6 billion.
Yahoo said no. The price wasn’t high enough.
Yahoo then proceeded to have one of the most prolonged and spectacular corporate declines in tech history — missed the social media wave, missed the mobile wave, had a data breach that affected three billion accounts (which is more accounts than there were internet users at the time, somehow), cycled through multiple CEOs, and in 2017 sold its core internet business to Verizon for $4.8 billion.
That is a $40 billion gap between the offer they rejected and the price they eventually got. In nine years.
There is a genre of corporate tragedy that is about companies being destroyed by external forces — a competitor they couldn’t beat, a technology they couldn’t predict. Yahoo is not that genre. Yahoo is the genre where the company had every opportunity and made, with great deliberateness, the wrong call at every single juncture.
It is almost impressive. As a feat of consistent misjudgment, it is nearly without parallel.
5. Excite Passed on Buying Google for $750,000
In 1999, Larry Page and Sergey Brin — who at the time were Stanford PhD students who had built a search engine and were not particularly interested in running a company — tried to sell Google to a search portal called Excite for one million dollars.
They negotiated themselves down to $750,000.
Excite’s CEO said no.
There are varying accounts of exactly why — some say the CEO was worried Google’s search was too good and would send users away from Excite too quickly, which is a sentence that contains several things to unpack. Others say he simply didn’t see the value.
Google is currently worth approximately $2 trillion.
Excite no longer exists in any meaningful form.
The $750,000 that Excite declined to pay is now, in retrospect, the most expensive $750,000 in the history of commerce. It is a number so astronomically wrong that it has passed through tragedy and come out the other side as something almost philosophical. A monument to the specific blindness that comes from being inside a moment that history will later call obvious.
The Common Thread
Every single one of these decisions was made by intelligent people. People with MBAs, with data, with entire teams of analysts whose job it was to tell them what was happening in the world.
They were not stupid. They were certain.
And that is the thing about corporate hubris — it doesn’t look like arrogance from the inside. It looks like confidence. It looks like protecting what works. It looks like a reasonable risk assessment made by reasonable people in a reasonable room.
It only looks like hubris from the outside, ten years later, when the outcome is already known.
Which is why the most dangerous sentence in any boardroom is not “this is a bad idea.”
It’s “we know what we’re doing.”
They always think they know what they’re doing.
They always have a PowerPoint.
(My financial advisor (me) says: the real lesson is humility. My actual lesson is: the Blockbuster story will never stop being funny.)
Tags: corporate disasters, business history, Kodak, Blockbuster, New Coke, Yahoo, Google, bad decisions, humanity was a mistake, corporate hubris, business fails, dark history lite, fun history
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