Bygone Companies

Overreach · Replaced The 'Great Table' of Siena was the largest bank in 13th-century Europe and treasurer to the Pope. When Philip IV of France seized its assets and Boniface VIII moved the papacy's business to Florence, it went bankrupt in 1298 — and took Siena's place in finance with it.

Overreach · Disaster Bankers to Edward I of England for twenty-two years, financing his wars on the back of England's wool trade. When war with France came in 1294 and the king demanded funds they could not produce, he seized everything they had — and the firm that financed a kingdom was gone.

Overreach · Disaster A Florentine bank that ran England's mint, customs and wool revenues for Edward I and II — until Parliament's Lords Ordainers expelled all foreign financiers in 1311 and left £150,000 in loans unpaid.

Overreach · Disaster The third of Florence's great 'super-companies', founded 1282, banker to the kings of Naples. It failed in 1343 — not from England's royal defaults, like the Bardi and Peruzzi, but from financing Florence's war against Lucca.

Overreach Florence's super-companies lent Edward III of England some 900,000 and 600,000 gold florins for the Hundred Years' War; his default in the 1340s dragged them under.

Overreach The most powerful bank in 15th-century Europe. Founded in Florence in 1397, it financed the Renaissance and banked for the popes — then collapsed under its own bad loans when the Medici were expelled in 1494.

Overreach · Disaster The Augsburg house that once owned Venezuela — the colony contemporaries called Klein-Venedig. It financed the Holy Roman Emperor so heavily that when Spain went bankrupt in July 1614, the Welsers followed within a week.

Overreach · Disaster It founded Jamestown and sent some 6,000 colonists to Virginia. Roughly 4,800 of them died — 347 in Opechancanough's attack of 1622 alone — it never turned a profit, and in 1624 the king revoked its charter and took the colony for the Crown.

Overreach · Replaced Jakob 'the Rich' Fugger bought Charles V the imperial crown in 1519 and held assets equal to perhaps 2% of Europe's economy. The house was destroyed by the one thing it trusted most — loans to sovereigns like the Spanish crown, which never paid them back.

Disaster · Overreach Scotland bet roughly a quarter of its liquid wealth on William Paterson's Darien colony in Panama. The colony lasted less than a year, the money was gone, and the ruin helped force the 1707 Union with England — which dissolved the company.

Overreach John Law's monopoly on French Louisiana inflated the Mississippi Bubble — a paper-money mania that collapsed in 1720 and bankrupted the French crown.

Replaced · Overreach An East India company so profitable that Britain and the Dutch demanded its abolition as the price of recognising the Habsburg succession. Emperor Charles VI traded a thriving company for the Pragmatic Sanction — the price of putting his daughter Maria Theresa on the Habsburg throne.

Replaced · Overreach The English slave-trading monopoly that shipped more enslaved Africans than any other single institution — roughly 186,748 people across 652 voyages. Chartered under the Duke of York in 1672, it lost its monopoly in 1698 and was dissolved by Parliament in 1752.

Assimilation · Forgotten A Basque company held a royal monopoly on Venezuela's cacao for half a century, ran its own coast guard against smugglers, and fixed prices low enough that in 1749 the planter Juan Francisco de León marched on Caracas to demand its expulsion. Bourbon free-trade reform dissolved it into the Royal Company of the Philippines, and it was forgotten.

Overreach · Replaced It founded New Amsterdam — the Manhattan settlement that became New York — and in 1628 Piet Hein captured Spain's entire silver fleet for it. It went bankrupt once in 1674, was rebuilt, and was finally dissolved by the Dutch state in 1792.

Replaced · Overreach Colbert's 1664 answer to the Dutch and English in Asia, it reached its height in India under Dupleix. After 130 years of bankruptcies and revivals, its final act was a Revolutionary scandal — and the deputies who rigged its liquidation went to the guillotine.

Overreach The most valuable company that has ever existed — worth roughly $7.9 trillion in today's money. It died not in battle but of debt and corruption: the ruinous Fourth Anglo-Dutch War and some 219 million guilders of debt finished it.

Conquest · Replaced One of the world's first public banks, founded in Genoa in 1407 to consolidate the republic's war debt into tradeable shares — among the earliest government bonds. It governed colonies from Corsica to the Crimea and banked for Columbus and Charles V, until Napoleon dissolved it in 1805, after 398 years.

Replaced · Overreach For 82 years from 1731, Gothenburg sent ships like the Götheborg to Canton and grew rich on Chinese tea. When Sweden's neutral advantage faded, the company simply voted itself out of existence in 1813 — eight years before its charter even expired.

Replaced · Assimilation Chartered by Elizabeth I in 1592, for 233 years it ran England's trade — and its diplomacy — inside the Ottoman Empire, paying its own ambassadors. Free trade made its monopoly pointless, and Parliament dissolved it in 1825.

Replaced · Assimilation Denmark's third and last attempt at the Asia trade, run from Copenhagen for a century around its Tranquebar colony in India. It lost its monopoly in 1772, faded as British power rose, and was wound up in 1843.

Overreach A trading monopoly that traded almost nothing but its own soaring shares, until the 1720 South Sea Bubble burst and ruined Britain.

Overreach · Disaster 'The bankers' banker' — the firm that rescued others in the panic of 1825. Forty years later it begged the Bank of England for the same help, was refused as 'rotten', and its collapse on Black Friday, 10 May 1866 — owing about £11 million — set off the wider crisis.

Overreach · Disaster The 'Financier of the Civil War' invented the mass bond market, then bet the firm on the Northern Pacific, a railroad through empty country. When it suspended payments on 18 September 1873, it triggered the Panic of 1873 and dragged the United States into a six-year depression.

Assimilation · Overreach Chartered in 1600, this private corporation ruled some 200 million people and fielded an army of 260,000 — twice the size of Britain's. Then in 1874 the government it served took it over.

Disaster · Overreach A construction company the Union Pacific's own bosses owned, so they could pay themselves to build their own railroad at double the cost. The 1872 bribery scandal it spawned — Congressman Oakes Ames buying votes with discounted shares, even Vice President Schuyler Colfax implicated — became the byword for Gilded Age corruption.

Disaster · Overreach A Scottish bank that hid losses above £6 million for years behind falsified accounts. When it failed in 1878, unlimited liability fell on its 1,200 shareholders — ruining all but 254 of them.

Overreach · Disaster Ferdinand de Lesseps, the conqueror of Suez, raised a billion and a half francs from 800,000 small French investors to dig Panama at sea level. Twenty-two thousand workers died of fever, the money vanished, and the bankruptcy became the Panama Scandal that reached deep into the Republic.

Overreach · Replaced A private company meant to govern an empire on the cheap. It administered the ~246,800 square miles that became Kenya and Uganda for seven years, ran out of money, and handed the territory to the British government in 1895 — which paid its shareholders £250,000 in compensation.

Disaster · Overreach New York's third-largest trust backed a failed scheme to corner United Copper, and the run on its doors one October morning set off the Panic of 1907 that brought down the American banking system.

Overreach John D. Rockefeller's trust grew so total it controlled 90% of American refining — until the Supreme Court, under the Sherman Antitrust Act, split it into 34 pieces.

Conquest The British-built oil company — El Águila — that pumped most of Mexico's petroleum when Mexico was the world's number-two producer. On 18 March 1938 President Lázaro Cárdenas expropriated it, handed the wells to a new state company, Pemex, and made the date a national holiday.

Assimilation · Conquest A company with its own flag, police, stamps, and money that governed Manica and Sofala — a slab of central Mozambique the size of a small country — on behalf of mostly foreign shareholders. Its fifty-year lease ran out in 1942, when Salazar's government declined to renew it and simply handed the territory back to Portugal.

Conquest A railway company that was secretly an empire — 340,000 employees, seventy-one subsidiaries, coal and steel and airlines and spies across a territory two and a half times the size of Japan, its Asia Express the fastest train in Asia. When Japan lost the war, the Soviets carried it away as scrap, and it simply ceased to be.

Conquest The largest company in Europe and the chemical engine of the Third Reich — it made the synthetic fuel, the synthetic rubber, and the Zyklon B, and ran a slave-labour plant at Auschwitz. Its directors stood trial at Nuremberg, and the Allies did not let it survive the war they had built it to fight — they took it apart on purpose.

Replaced · Overreach It built the car presidents rode in and the Rolls-Royce Merlin engines that flew over Britain, then merged with a failing partner and spent its last years as a rebadged Studebaker.

Replaced The studio behind King Kong, Citizen Kane, and the Fred Astaire–Ginger Rogers musicals, dismantled after Howard Hughes bought it and ran it into the ground.

Assimilation Cecil Rhodes's company conquered a territory larger than France in the Matabele Wars, named it Rhodesia after him, and governed it with its own army and flag. It lost the right to rule in 1923, lived on as a holder of mineral royalties, and was finally merged out of existence in 1965.

Replaced A South Bend wagon-maker that became a carmaker for a century, then — even after merging with Packard — couldn't outrun Detroit's Big Three.

Replaced It built the luxury sleeping car and a company town whose 1894 Pullman Strike reshaped US labor law, then the automobile and the jet emptied its berths.

Conquest Founded in 1898 by Alfredo da Silva around the chemical works at Barreiro, it became the largest industrial group in Portuguese history — banks, shipyards, tobacco, insurance, around a twentieth of the national economy in one family's hands. The 1974 revolution nationalised the lot and broke it up. The CUF name survives only on unrelated successors.

Overreach Formed in 1968 by the biggest railroad merger in US history — the Pennsylvania Railroad joined to the New York Central — it filed the biggest US corporate bankruptcy in history 871 days after the first trains ran under its name.

Conquest One of the largest mining companies on earth, owner of the world's biggest copper pit and master of the state of Montana. Allende's Chile nationalised its copper mines in a single unanimous vote in 1971, and ARCO swallowed the gutted remnant six years later.

Conquest From 1917, for sixty years, one company owned every diamond in Angola and ran its corner of the country as a private state, on the forced African labour the Portuguese called xibalo. When Angola won independence, the new state took the diamonds back through its own company, Endiama, and dissolved the firm that had been the colony's richest export.

Overreach · Disaster Its 'End of the Plain Plane' campaign painted the fleet in fourteen colours, had Halston dress the crew, and flew Concorde on US domestic routes; then airline deregulation stripped its routes and doubling fuel prices grounded it for good.

Overreach John DeLorean was arrested in an FBI drug sting the same week his factory closed; the gull-winged DMC-12 he built to defy Detroit became immortal only in Back to the Future, three years after the company died.

Disaster · Overreach Atari invented home gaming — Pong, then the Atari 2600 — and reached $2 billion in sales by 1982, before the 1983 video-game crash it helped cause broke the company apart in 1984.

Replaced A patriotic 1968 merger of nearly every British carmaker — Austin, Morris, Jaguar, Triumph, and Mini — nationalised in 1975 and a byword for strikes, bad cars, and decline.

Replaced · Conquest Founded by Adam Gimbel in 1842, for 145 years Gimbels was Macy's great rival — a feud immortalised in Miracle on 34th Street — until in 1986-87 its British tobacco-company owner decided it wasn't worth saving and closed every store.

Disaster · Conquest "When E.F. Hutton talks, people listen" — until America's second-largest brokerage pleaded guilty to 2,000 counts of fraud in a 1985 check-kiting scandal and never recovered.

Overreach The junk-bond house that ruled 1980s Wall Street under Michael Milken, felled by insider-trading charges and its own leverage.

Overreach The Bank of Credit and Commerce International — the 'Bank of Crooks and Criminals' — founded by Agha Hasan Abedi in 1972 and shut down across 78 countries in 1991 as one of history's largest financial frauds.

Overreach A founding giant of American aviation, ground down by 1978 deregulation, labor war, and corporate raider Frank Lorenzo.

Overreach · Disaster It was the airline of the future — its logo flew on the spaceplane in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. Then deregulation and the 1988 Lockerbie bombing of Flight 103 grounded it, and the real 2001 came with Pan Am already a decade dead.

Overreach The largest property developer on earth — builders of Canary Wharf, the World Financial Center, and much of the Toronto skyline. It borrowed against towers no one had yet rented, and when the early-nineties slump came it fell into the biggest bankruptcy in Canadian history — US$18.5 billion in debts.

Replaced · Overreach An Wang's word-processing machines owned the 1970s office, but the $3 billion empire collapsed when the IBM PC arrived and a son inherited what his father built.

Replaced Maker of the Commodore 64 — the best-selling computer ever — and the Amiga, mismanaged into bankruptcy at the dawn of the PC era.

Overreach Britain's oldest merchant bank, founded 1762, destroyed in 1995 by rogue trader Nick Leeson's hidden losses in Singapore.

Overreach A Calgary penny-stock company claimed 200 million ounces of gold at Busang in the jungle of Borneo; the samples had been salted with shaved jewellery, and chief geologist Michael de Guzman fell from a helicopter before the truth came out.

Conquest · Replaced It introduced the GIF format and connected millions to the online world a decade before the web — then lost the consumer market to AOL and was quietly absorbed in 1998.

Replaced The minicomputer king whose founder Ken Olsen dismissed the personal computer, then watched the PC make his VAX machines obsolete; Compaq bought the wreckage in 1998.

Overreach Kim Woo-choong's Korean conglomerate borrowed its way to global reach, then collapsed on 1 November 1999 under ~$50 billion in debt — the largest bankruptcy in history at the time.

Overreach A hedge fund run by Nobel laureates Scholes and Merton, whose models cratered in the 1998 Russian debt default and forced a $3.6 billion Federal Reserve bailout.

Overreach It spent $11.8 million on advertising in its first year against $619,000 of revenue, floated a sock puppet over the Macy's parade, and dissolved in 2000, nine months after going public.

Overreach Fortune named it America's Most Innovative Company six years running. The innovation, it turned out, was the accounting — and when the Houston energy trader collapsed in 2001 it took its auditor, Arthur Andersen, down with it.

Replaced · Overreach The man who invented the mail-order money-back guarantee built a retail empire that outlived him by 88 years, then let CEO Sewell Avery sit on its cash while Sears took the suburbs.

Replaced Edwin Land built a camera that developed its own photographs in a minute, then a company so wedded to that miracle it could not survive cameras that needed no film at all.

Overreach Once it carried more than half of all transatlantic passengers; Carl Icahn's 1985 buyout loaded it with debt, it went bankrupt three times, and its final flight landed just before midnight on 1 December 2001 — by midnight it was an American Airlines flight.

Overreach Louis Borders raised $1.2 billion to reinvent grocery delivery — a near $4.8 billion IPO in 1999 — and burned through it in three years, building automated warehouses for demand that did not yet exist.

Overreach · Replaced For most of the twentieth century, half of Australia flew the airline Reginald Ansett built. Its New Zealand owner bled it — an NZ$1.425 billion loss, the largest in that country's corporate history — a low-cost rival undercut it, and the week of September 2001 finished it: grounded overnight, 16,500 jobs gone, creditors paid nothing on three billion dollars.

Overreach One of the world's five great accounting firms, convicted of obstruction of justice in 2002 for shredding documents for a single client named Enron.

Conquest · Replaced It out-IBM'd IBM in its first year and became the world's biggest PC maker, then — unable to survive Dell on cost — was swallowed by Hewlett-Packard in 2002 and ceased to exist.

Forgotten · Overreach Its Magic Cap devices — the Sony Magic Link and Motorola Envoy — were the smartphone in 1994, shipped to almost nobody, before the company dissolved in 2002 and its alumni went on to build the iPhone and Android.

Overreach Once nicknamed the Flying Bank for its stability, Switzerland's flag carrier collapsed on 2 October 2001 when its debt-fueled Hunter Strategy ran out of cash.

Overreach A telecom giant built by Bernard Ebbers' acquisitions that booked $11 billion in fake profits and filed the largest U.S. bankruptcy of its day.

Replaced America's second-largest steelmaker: it built the Golden Gate Bridge and armed two world wars with 1,121 warships, then went bankrupt in 2001 as foreign steel undercut it.

Assimilation For most of two centuries this holding company controlled around a third of the Belgian economy and much of the Congo's wealth — 'a state within the state.' Carlo De Benedetti's 1988 raid handed control to the French group Suez, which sold it off in pieces, and in 2003 the name was switched off.

Replaced Russ Solomon's cathedral of the record store, born in 1960s Sacramento and killed by debt and the download in the same decade.

Conquest Russia's largest oil company and its most valuable firm, built cheaply out of the post-Soviet fire sale. When its owner Mikhail Khodorkovsky crossed the Kremlin, the state used back-tax claims to break it, seized its core unit Yuganskneftegaz for the state oil company Rosneft, and liquidated what was left.

Assimilation An 85-year-old investment bank that ran on borrowed money and subprime mortgages, sold to JPMorgan Chase for $2 a share with Federal Reserve backing in a single weekend of March 2008.

Overreach It survived the Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression. A bet on mortgages ended it in a weekend in September 2008 — the largest bankruptcy in US history, $639 billion in assets gone.

Overreach · Disaster Founded to help rebuild Seattle after the great fire of 1889, it was seized by federal regulators 119 years to the day later and sold overnight to JPMorgan Chase — the largest bank failure in American history.

Replaced The electronics giant fired its highest-paid sales staff to cut costs, then lost the customers they served, and liquidated all 567 stores in 2009.

Overreach Once worth more than C$1,100 a share and a third of the Toronto Stock Exchange's value, the telecom titan filed for bankruptcy in 2009 and was liquidated in an accounting scandal, its 6,000 patents sold for $4.5 billion.

Replaced Jim Clark's company rendered Jurassic Park's dinosaurs on $100,000 workstations, then commodity PCs did the same for a fraction of the price.

Replaced A high-street fixture for 99 years, its pick-and-mix counter vanished when Woolworths Group fell into administration in the 2008 crash and shut all 807 UK stores, ending about 27,000 jobs.

Replaced In 2000 it was offered the chance to buy Netflix for $50 million. It laughed the founders out of the room. Ten years later Blockbuster was bankrupt.

Replaced It put a computer in your pocket years before the iPhone, then the iPhone made the PalmPilot a museum piece — Hewlett-Packard bought the remains for $1.2 billion in 2010.

Replaced The second-largest U.S. bookstore chain handed its online sales to Amazon and stocked up on CDs as the world went digital, liquidating its stores in 2011.

Replaced · Overreach From Trollhattan, Sweden it put turbochargers in family cars and made safety a selling point, then spent two decades dying quietly inside General Motors before the bankruptcy of 2011.

Replaced America's first grocery giant and the country's largest retailer for decades, outpaced by the supermarkets it once inspired.

Overreach · Replaced For 50 years Monarch flew British families to the Mediterranean sun; on 2 October 2017 it stranded 110,000 of them abroad in the largest UK airline collapse on record.

Overreach Elizabeth Holmes promised hundreds of blood tests from a single finger-prick; the Edison machines never worked, and the $9 billion startup collapsed in fraud.

Overreach · Replaced Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman raised $1.75 billion to sell ten-minute videos to commuters, launched the week the world went indoors, and were gone in eight months.

Overreach A German fintech darling whose €1.9 billion in cash turned out not to exist; it collapsed in 2020, and COO Jan Marsalek vanished.

Overreach Sam Bankman-Fried's crypto exchange, which lent customer deposits to his trading firm Alameda Research, then ran out of money in November 2022.

Replaced North America's oldest company ruled a fur empire across Rupert's Land for 354 years, then died a department-store death as the Bay and Saks.