All These People Made Much Worse Decisions Than You Today

Excite Passing on Google for Under seven figures. Yes my friends you are reading correctly…… under a million dollars for the now multi-billion dollar company.

Many are called….few are chosen. Larry Page is a chosen one and for his company Google not to be snapped up by the investor at Excite !  Originally Larry asked Excite to purchase Google for $1 million but then reduced his asking price to $250,000…but still they were turned down.

Google currently has a market cap of over $360 Billion dollars…….

Tiger Woods sleeps with multiple women who aren’t  his wife Elin Nordegren and he pays for it!

Divorce settlement in 2010: $110 million

Total cost of this mistake was even higher if you include stock losses for all the companies that are affiliated with Tiger and it could be a total impact of billions.

Rupert Murdoch caught cheating and his divorce in 1999 cost him $1.7 billion.

The Murdochs called it off after 32 years of marriage in 1999. A couple weeks later Rupert went on to marry a much younger women named Wendi Deng (hopefully he got a prenup). But, Wendi was probably in it for love though……right?

Yasuo Hamanaka aka, Mr. Copper….aka Mr Unauthorized Trades

His cowboy moves on the stock market lost his company more than $2.6 billion in 1996

He was the chief copper at Sumitomo Corporation, but that all changed quickly after his non approved trades. Though previous positive cash flow did save his ass and he managed to only spend 8 years in jail for his wild moves that probably bankrupted many lives and several attributed companies. For more thinking errors, click here. 

Safety inspectors forget to replace a valve at the Piper Alpha Oil Rig
Money lost in 1994: $3.4 billion in repairs
Inflation adjusted price: $5.1 billion
In May of 1994, oil workers were evacuated from the Piper Alpha Oil Rig after an explosion that ended up killing 167 people, the majority of the crew on board the rig.

During a routine check, the employees replaced all safety valves, except for one tiny valve, which was never replaced.

NASA uses the metric system while Lockheed Martin uses the English system when building a satellite…oopsie daisys
Cost of the lost orbiter: $125 million

Lockheed Martin engineers used the English system of measurement, the other half of the project team metric system for a Mars orbiter. The satellite ended up getting the wrong coordinates from the mix-matched measurements and was then lost in space in 1999.

One man was hunting out in the bush but got lost. He then decided to launched a flare to help get noticed but instead of being found the flare started the biggest fire in California history in 2003, for a loss over a billion dollars.

 The fire spread to over 300,000 acres,  burnt up 2,322 homes, and 14 people died. Talk about a stressful day!

Henry Ford decides the Edsel will be a hit…….bad call Henry!

Sales were embarrassing low and production was halted immediately after the negative public reception.

In 1959 they spent over $250 million in development costs for the car.

Inflation-adjusted: $1.85 billion

Capitain Joe Hazelwood made a boo-boo and crashed the Exxon-Valdez in 1989 this cost the company $4.4 billion in clean up and restitution costs.

The oil tanker was on its way to California when it hit the Prince William Sound off the coast of Alaska. The wrecked oil tanker spilled over 750,000 barrels of oil into Alaska coastline. He was accused of being drunk while sailing the boat on that tragic day.

[source]