Dead Companies

Overreach Florence's super-companies bankrolled a king of England, who defaulted and dragged them under.

Overreach The most powerful bank in 15th-century Europe. It financed the Renaissance and banked for the popes — then collapsed under its own bad loans.

Overreach John Law's monopoly on French Louisiana inflated a paper-money bubble that bankrupted the French crown.

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.

Overreach A trading monopoly that traded almost nothing but its own soaring shares, then burst and ruined Britain.

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

Disaster · Overreach New York's third-largest trust backed a failed scheme to corner copper, and the run on its doors one October morning in 1907 brought down the American banking system.

Overreach The trust so total it controlled 90% of American refining — until the Supreme Court split it into 34 pieces.

Replaced · Overreach It built the car presidents rode in and the 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 and Citizen Kane, dismantled after Howard Hughes bought it and ran it into the ground.

Replaced A wagon-maker that became a carmaker for a century, then couldn't outrun Detroit's Big Three.

Replaced It built the luxury sleeping car and a company town to match, then the automobile and the jet emptied its berths.

Overreach Formed by the biggest railroad merger in US history, it filed the biggest US corporate bankruptcy in history 871 days after the first trains ran under its name.

Overreach · Disaster It painted its planes in fourteen colours and had Halston dress the crew; 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 car he built to defy Detroit became immortal only in a film about time travel, three years after the company died.

Disaster · Overreach Atari invented home gaming and reached $2 billion in sales by 1982, then was broken into pieces two years later by a crash it had helped cause.

Replaced A patriotic merger of nearly every British carmaker that became a byword for strikes, bad cars, and nationalised decline.

Replaced · Conquest For 145 years Gimbels was Macy's great rival; 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 1985 and never recovered.

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

Overreach The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, shut down worldwide as one of history's largest financial frauds.

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

Overreach · Disaster It was the airline of the future — its logo flew on the spaceplane in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. The real 2001 came and Pan Am was already a decade dead.

Replaced · Overreach It owned office word processing in the 1970s, then watched a $3 billion empire collapse when the PC arrived and a son inherited what his father built.

Replaced Maker of the best-selling computer ever, mismanaged into bankruptcy at the dawn of the PC era.

Overreach Britain's oldest merchant bank, 233 years old, destroyed by one rogue trader's hidden losses in Singapore.

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

Conquest · Replaced It 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 dismissed the personal computer, then watched the PC make his machines obsolete.

Overreach A Korean conglomerate that borrowed its way to global reach, then became the largest bankruptcy in history at the time.

Overreach A hedge fund run by Nobel laureates whose models nearly took down the global financial system.

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 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.

Replaced · Overreach The man who invented the mail-order money-back guarantee built a retail empire that outlived him by 88 years, then sat 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; 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 It raised $1.2 billion to reinvent grocery delivery and burned through it in three years, building automated warehouses for demand that did not yet exist.

Overreach One of the world's five great accounting firms, destroyed by 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 died as an independent company when its cost structure could not survive Dell.

Forgotten · Overreach It designed the smartphone in 1994, shipped a device almost nobody could use, and dissolved in 2002 — leaving behind the people who later built the iPhone and Android.

Overreach Once nicknamed the Flying Bank for its stability, it collapsed when a debt-fueled buying spree ran out of cash.

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

Replaced It built the Golden Gate Bridge and armed two world wars, then rusted away as foreign steel undercut it.

Replaced The cathedral of the record store, killed by debt and the download in the same decade.

Assimilation An 85-year-old investment bank that ran on borrowed money and vanished in a single weekend of 2008.

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

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 — 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.

Overreach Once a third of the Toronto stock exchange's value, the telecom titan ended in liquidation and an accounting scandal.

Replaced It 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, the pick-and-mix counter vanished when the chain ran out of money in the 2008 crash.

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.

Replaced The bookseller that handed its online sales to Amazon and stocked up on CDs as the world went digital.

Replaced · Overreach 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 It promised hundreds of blood tests from a single finger-prick; the machines never worked.

Overreach · Replaced It raised $1.75 billion to sell ten-minute videos to commuters, launched the week the world went indoors, and was gone in eight months.

Overreach A German fintech darling whose €1.9 billion in cash turned out not to exist.

Overreach A crypto exchange that lent its customers' deposits to its founder's hedge fund, then ran out of money.

Replaced North America's oldest company ruled a fur empire for 354 years, then died a department-store death.