Posted on 11/06/2025 6:59:12 AM PST by dennisw
240,241 views
Oct 18, 2025
#WeWork #Scandal #CEO
From fraudulent blood testing to diesel emissions cheating, these business leaders drove their empires straight into the ground! Join us as we examine the executives whose poor decisions, ethical lapses, and outright fraud transformed thriving companies into cautionary tales. Which corporate collapse shocked you the most?
Our countdown includes Elizabeth Holmes' non-existent blood testing technology at Theranos, Adam Neumann's lavish spending at WeWork, Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay's accounting fraud at Enron, Martin Winterkorn's emissions scandal at Volkswagen, and John Sculley's disastrous tenure after ousting Steve Jobs from Apple.
Did we miss any other corporate captains who sank their own ships? Let us know in the comments below!
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Green eyeshade/pocket protector/pencil neck gadfly CEO’s instead of aeronautical engineers hasn’t helped Boeing.
10?? Most have.
Blockbuster...
The Denny Dimwit character was created by cartoonist Martin Branner as a supporting character in his long-running comic strip Winnie Winkle. Word on the street is that Branner failed to recognize the impact the Denny Dimwit has on the American public, but thanks to Jon and his fellow stalwart posters, they have brought Dimwit back to the fore. He can currently be found on the Ghetto Thread slumming with his fellow warpigs
When Ross Perot ran EDS, he made every employee learn programming, as it was the core of their business.
She us now the head of Colonial Williamsburg and is mucking that up.
I forget his name, but that kid at the carpet cleaning company who went to prison for wildly over-inflating sales, financial fraud, etc.
Hundreds of S&L CEO’s put their banks out of business when banking rules changed in the 80’s.
Never mind. He was Barry Minkow, founder of ZZZZ Best, a carpet cleaning and restoration service which was a giant Ponzi scheme.
Later went to prison again for fraud.
John DeLorean.
-PJ
DeLorean was found not guilty, but it was too late for the company.
I nominate Jim Farley of Ford Motor Company. I think Ford would have bettter off to have named his distant cousin, Chris Farley. I know he passed away several years earlier, but he has experience in the auto industry. Remember “Tommy Boy “ ??
We are watching the destruction of Jaguar in real time (Pathamadai Balachandran Balaji)
Eddie Lampert of Sears Roebuck, imho
LOL!
“Last I checked Apple is still riding high”
Only because Steve Jobs returned in 1997 AND somehow got Bill Gates to loan/invest 150 million of his own money. This bridge loan came when Apple was near bankruptcy. This was a bridge to becoming a monster on phones and M5 chips. The M4 mini is the only thing Apple I was tempted to buy. Last Christmas it was $500 at Amazon, for weeks!
The real near-death experience happened after Sculley. Amelio (French guy) and Spindlet (Kraut) took a shrinking position and made it much worse.
In Sculley’s defense, some of Jobs’ early demands of high quality software companies resulted in awful products (Lotus Jazz, Ashton-Tate dbase:Mac), that stifled growth outside of graphics/publishing in the business sector. The 1997 version of Jobs was more able to run apple than the 1985 version.
Sculley was at the helm for the ENTIRE Mac intro and growth during the early growth period of the Mac and Jobs was gone before the Mac SE and Mac II were released.
On the bad side, he licensed TrueType to Microsoft, wheich made Windows 95 a much stronger product than it might have been. The QuickDraw GX debacle came under his watch as well, and the disappointing Newton PDA. Sculley was there for the original lead-acid non-backlit Apple laptop, but also for the recovery MacBooks later.
It was Spindler who licensed the OS to 3rd parties (though he also helped with a fairly smooth transition to PowerPC). Splindler was also the genius who came up with the idea of badge marketing models on the desktops that had maybe 3% market share at the time (e.g. Centrex).
Amelio mainly managed the Decline and bought NeXT.
Sculley’s reign was mixed, but Spindler’s was catastrophic.
He was one of the 10 in the video.
-PJ
Texas instruments, RadioShack, circuit city, Firestone, the one major bookstore that went out of business, Bed Bath and Beyond, Craker Barrel, AOL, Best Buy, Jack-in-the-Box,
Radio Shack:
Six CEOs in the period 2005 to 2015, most notably David Edmondson who lied about having two college degrees, and had multiple drunk driving charges against him, one of which got him 30 days in jail.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.