Most Expensive Mistakes In All History – Part 5

We all make

mistakes

, some are small, some are big and some are bigger, much, much bigger and the bigger these

mistakes

are, the higher the price that is usually attached to them, from minor errors that lead to million-dollar losses to incompetence. Take a look at even more of the costliest mistakes in

history

knowing that minor cases of negligence don't usually have big impacts, but as Montana Rail Link learned on July 3 of 2014, sometimes they really have it on this day. A train leaving Witchita Kansas for Renton Washington a trip of more than 1,795 miles passed along a stretch of its track through the Rocky Mountains there was nothing out of the ordinary on this day the weather was fine the sky was clear but suddenly the train lurched horrendously, derailing and sending its load into the stream below, but it was not carrying just any load: it was transporting the fuselages of six Boeing 737s, three of them fell from the train into the river, all hit and destroyed as they fell while The other three on the train were crushed so badly that all six were written off as total losses and scrapped.

It was a devastating blow to Boeing and they demanded a full investigation. After the Federal Railroad Administration evaluated the scene, they discovered something that surprised the driver and crew: Those who had loaded the cars were blameless, but the inspectors in charge of checking the tracks had been unable to detect any major problems in the alignment of the cars. the roads, while millions of dollars are invested annually in road maintenance in the region, they would still manage to overlook this, but how much did it cost them? Well, it cost Boeing six planes which, being conservative with the price, cost approximately $90 million each, meaning a minimum of $540 million reimbursed in insurance, all due to some basic maintenance failures.

Well, that's one way to divert aircraft production. Shit if I had spent my life growing a multi-million dollar doll business, the last thing I would do is publicly say that it's not very cool who would buy something from me if the owner said he hated my own products, but no. Someone in their right mind would do that right. English businessman Gerald Ratner inherited his father's small jewelry business in 1984 and turned it into a multimillion-dollar doll empire in just 6 years. Every British high street had appraisers selling affordable jewelery and masks to working class people Gerald became incredibly wealthy and enjoyed everything that money brings, meeting influential people, frequenting high society events and being asked to go guest speaker at major conferences and it was that last one that broke him because on April 23, 1991 he was invited to speak at the Institute of Directors in an attempt to impress the crowd.

He bragged about how he could sell

expensive

looking items for pennies on the dollar and then said, "People say to me, how can you sell this?" for such a low price I say because it's total rubbish, yes he called everything he sold total rubbish for clout but he wasn't done there yet, oh no we even sell a pair of earrings for under a pound, stud earrings gold too and some people say good. that's cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencers, but I have to say that the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings, but yes, for some jokes at the expense of his customers, he publicly degraded his entire Empire while being filmed with the media present and, oh, them.

I had a field day, they put him on the covers and printed his Gaff word for word. People stopped buying the self-proclaimed garbage Ratner was selling, and the company's stock price fell sharply in just 10 months since his speech. Ratner's stock fell by 80%. Gerald himself had to sell what was left of his company's shares to pay off the $1.3 billion he owed the bank after he was fired as the company's CEO and thus left with absolutely nothing, he became known in the UK as Mr Crap and as far as I know I'm aware that to this day it's still Crash Landing if I tell you to think of a Hoover, you know what I mean right?

No, no, the president, the vacuum cleaner in the 20th century, Hoover, an American company with a great president in the United Kingdom, enjoyed a near monopoly on vacuum cleaner sales to the point where their names became ubiquitous with the product, but from 1987 to 1992, when the recession hit and competitors entered the scene, their profits fell, although they still dominated about 50% of the market. Hoover needed to boost sales so they decided to create a unique offer, thus their now inFAMOUS offer of two free flights was born. In 1992 they

part

nered with a small travel agency called JSI Travel, which had also struggled during the recession, and created an offering. offer UK customers who spent more than 100 or around $250 today on Hoover products would get two free return air tickets to a destination in Europe worth several hundred pounds they had subsidized through JSI Travel.

It was a bargain, but Hoover made the process of getting the tickets incredibly difficult, with many different forms to fill out and mail multiple times, tight deadlines, and limits on destination options. They did it in the hope that people would buy their products and then give up redeeming the hard deal this way, they wouldn't have to. fulfill as many flights as JSI had booked en masse, leaving them in profit and it worked, the products were flying off the shelves and very few people actually persevered with the free flight and that's when they made a fatal mistake, they doubled down and They launched a new offer promoting two free round trips to the United States for anyone who bought 00 pounds of product at the time, this was easily over 600 pounds of free flights, about $1,400 today, they assumed people I would buy more

expensive

products along with the offer and in the same way.

Few people would jump through all the hoops to get the tickets, which would leave them with even more profits and that's where they went horribly wrong. British customers ended up buying the cheapest products possible to qualify for the flights and then Mass persevered through all the hassle to get them. its tickets Hoover had anticipated that approximately 50,000 people would apply, but more than 300,000 made a 500% increase in their estimates, so while Hoover had generated 30 million in sales, approximately $65 million from the promotion, the costs of the flights that They promised it was at least 100 million, that is. 219 million dollars unable to fulfill its promotional promises The public reaction caused the company's sales to ruin;

In essence, Hoover was ordered to shell out the equivalent of $72 million on flights for some 220,000 customers, and yet at least 100,000 applicants never received their tickets. Public perceptions of the brand were shattered in the two years following the marketing mistake, their recorded losses ran into tens of millions and in 1995 they owned just 10% of the market, down from 50%. Hoover was eventually sold to Italian candy competition for $16 million. with an $81 million loss, I bet they wish this deal had never taken away from Bugatti. If I had a sports car, I would be very aware that everyone else would be looking at me, okay, not me, the car, I mean, supercars stand out and they.

They are usually quite loud low off the ground and look out of place next to any other four wheeled vehicle on the road and maybe if the next guy had been a little more aware of how much he stood out he wouldn't have achieved the objective. mistake he made in November 2009, the driver of a Bugatti Veyon, one of the

most

expensive supercars in the world, with a price of more than 1 million dollars and one of only 15 in the United States at that time, crashed in an East Texas swamp that he completely ruined. the engine and totaled the car when it sank in 3 feet of salt water luckily he had insurance and when he made his claim he said he had been driving when suddenly a pelican flew in front of his car causing him to spin into the swamp I mean , sounds legit and his insurers definitely thought about it as they were ready to give him the $2.2 million settlement, however, forgetting that he was in a overdrive and attracting a lot of attention, he was a passenger in another car on the road at the time.

I actually filmed it, okay, not him, his car, yeah, that's the driver now. I can't show him crashing into the lake unless he tries to demonetize YouTube. Hammer, but trust me, a few seconds after this, he veers off towards the lake. Did you notice anything? missing here, yes, I didn't see any Pelican and when the clip inevitably went viral, neither did the insurers in 2015, he was convicted of conspiring to commit fraud and was sentenced to 3 years in prison and ordered to repay $600,000 to their insurers. If that doesn't teach you to always check your blind spot, I don't know what Supercar stunts are, although it is quite entertaining to learn about some mistakes, there are some that just make you feel sad and if you are a Supercar lover, this is the next.

One of them in August 2023, drivers in Farningham, in the United Kingdom, witnessed a scene on the road that was as devastating as it was costly: a truck or Lori, as the British called it, stabbed Jack on the road by flipping his trailer that was loaded. With not one, not two, but 10 supercars at his side, you can see a Lamborghini Aventador, a Jaguar ftype convertible, two Ferrari F 430, an Audi R8, a BMW 318i Sport Plus, an AMG GT Black Series, an Aston Martin db11 , a Nissan GTR R35 and a Bentley. Continental GT, all of which were badly damaged, luckily no one was hurt and the driver escaped with minimal injuries, but what happened here was good: the driver had been hauling the cars on a downhill section of road at just 35 mph when the crosswinds began to sway.

The vehicle was trying to gradually slow down when it saw a group of cyclists moving slowly in front of it. He didn't have time to stop the truck which was now swaying heavily, so he made the heroic decision to lift the truck with a knife and they saved the cyclists, they made the right decision, but at what cost? Well, the value of each of these cars at the time was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands, totaling about $2.5 million, all of which had to be written off. Okay, I don't think it's fair to classify this as a bug.

It saved lives instead of cars, but it still hurts to look at the emissions problems. Remember the Volkswagen emissions scandal that rocked the auto industry? As you can see, the giant Volkswagen. Victor Ville California storage facilities certainly do. This 134-acre parcel of land in the California desert once housed a staggering 21,000 cars, all of which were in running condition but had been left to rot, so why is it such a crazy waste? The US introduced the Clean Air Act, a law designed to reduce air pollution. Al

most

all vehicles had strict limits on the emissions they could produce, but in the 2000s Volkswagen realized that its newer diesel models couldn't pass the updated US emissions test instead of working to reduce them. , although they designed a defeat device that could circumvent these emissions tests and installed them in all their new diesel vehicles, their mistake was thinking that companies would not test their emissions claims, which the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA did when large discrepancies appeared between what their cars reported and what they actually emitted.

Volks Wagon claimed it must be a mistake and offered to recall the cars, but the EPA was not satisfied and dug deeper only then did Volkswagen admit that they designed the cheating software. It was a disaster. The revelation forced Volkswagen to buy back nearly 350,000 vehicles worldwide and store them at sites like those in Victorville, along with fines, penalties and financial settlements that ended up costing it dearly. How much do you calculate? 10 million dollars. One billion dollars. Try $33.3 billion. That's more than 10%. of Volkswagen's average annual global income, well, if you are dumb enough to make the mistake of cheating on something that can be easily verified, be smart enough to immediately confess to prestigious problems.

Now I'm not an assistant. I don't discriminate against people based on reasons. Depending on how old or young they are, I know that they can make idiotic identification errors at any age, like this next Oldtimer back in 2002 off the coast of Spain, the oil tanker Prestige, captained by a 77-year-old man, had some 77,000 tons of oil when it became trapped in astorm, a massive 50-ton hole opened in one of her fuel tanks, so she sent out a distress call for help, but Spain refused to allow the ship to dock because it did not want the hassle of clearing out some of its contents.

SP oil and ordered that she be towed out of the sea away from the Spanish coast. France also denied him docking rights as did Portugal. No one wanted this inevitable disaster on their hands. Then 6 days later the boat broke up and sank while she spilled. 50,000 tons of crude oil dumped into the water contaminated thousands of kilometers of coastline and caused one of the worst environmental disasters in the

history

of Spain. It was so extensive that the cleanup operation took years, required tens of thousands of volunteers and cost more than $600 million, but how was this done? Well, for starters, the ship's tanks were defective, but the 77-year-old captain was apparently unaware of this, not because anyone told him, but because he had refused to

part

icipate in any of the inspections or read the ship's log. previous captain listing major flaws in the ship.

The ship was also in such poor condition that it was banned from entering ports in the US, Cuba, Lebanon, pH, land and Denmark, that's a lot of red flags, but the captain claimed that I almost can't believe he said this. which didn't seem to have anything to do with me. Sorry, you're the captain. The structural integrity of your boat has a lot to do with you. He was finally sentenced to 2 years in prison and the prestigious insurers were fined one billion dollars for the spill, but although this happened more than 20 years ago, no payment has yet been made and the legal battle for those billion dollars is still ongoing.

Man, that's enough to make you dizzy. Lake Pure back in 1980. Lake Pure was a fairly normal body of fresh water located in the US State of Louisiana, notice how I said it was there, yes that was subtle foreshadowing, with an average of more 10 feet deep and spanning over 1,300 acres. This lake housed huge Terry oil deposits below, along with cavernous salt domes and mines that ran through the region, it was these deposits that the Texico oil company was extracting using a floating platform located in the middle of the lake, but in On the morning of November 20, 1980, the crew on the rig reported that the tip of their 14-inch drill hole was stuck 1,228 Feet down.

While raising the drill, strange noises began emanating from the water and they decided to abandon the rig and a good thing too because suddenly a giant mud crater opened up beneath the platform creating a whirlpool that grew to an A4 mile. wide, absorbing the entire shelf, several lakeside homes and 11 barges on more than 65 acres of the lake were swallowed up and so much water drained into the caverns that the flow of the delcam canal that usually emptied into the lake at Vermilion Bay was temporarily reversed creating the largest waterfall in Louisiana, this caused salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to flow into the newly dried lake bed.

In just 3 days, the lake filled with water once again, but instead of a freshwater refuge of 10 tons deep, it was now a 200-ton deep saltwater sinkhole, but What had happened, an investigation revealed that Texico was conducting exploratory drilling in the lake and after miscalculating their position, they had drilled into one of the mines of salt, the fresh water began to dissolve the salt, enlarging the hole and draining all the water into the cave below Texico. In the end they ordered me to pay about $4.8 million, about $150 million adjusted for inflation, for the damage they caused. If I had been in charge of that platform, I think I would have been so embarrassed that I would have let the sinkhole swallow me up for a wasted moment. opportunity, many large companies always look to expand by acquiring new companies metabought WhatsApp Apple bought beats Microsoft bot Activision Blizzard the list goes on these companies contribute millions, often billions of dollars to their parent companies, although sometimes it is a gamble with some acquisitions did not pay off, it was this type of risk that was presented to excite.com CEO George Bell back in 1999. excite was one of the leading search engines at the time, second only to Yahoo.

Things were going well for the company when two young men approached the CEO with his own search engine look looking to sell it to him for $1 million. It seemed functionally similar to Excite, but had technology that would allow the engine to grow much faster. Bell initially offered the couple $750,000 to purchase the engine and for them both to come to work. to excite, but then it all fell apart, one of the men said that if they came to work to excite, they would have to scrap all the current arousal technology and replace it with their own search engines.

The deal fell apart quickly until today and enthuse. It doesn't even crack the top 20 search engines anymore unable to keep up with the demands of a rapidly changing world, but can you guess where the search engine they rejected currently ranks? It's number one, yes, those two men Belle approached were neither. Aside from Larry Pagee and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google in 2020, Google's parent company Alphabet reached a market value of $1 trillion, yes that's a trillion with a t, I don't think Bell was thrilled when heard that another missed opportunity waits, waits before. Remember when I said that Facebook's parent company acquired WhatsApp.

That story is also from this list around 2007. Johnc and Brian Acton applied for jobs at Facebook, have been working at Yahoo for several years and although they had a lot of tech experience to work with. They were both rejected shortly after Jan began experimenting with a new iPhone app she had created that would allow people to set statuses on their phones. Contacts could see what their friends were doing at any given time. For example, I'm busy or at the gym please don't call, it was buggy but Brian encouraged Jan to refine it and a few months later he changed it to focus on instant messaging, it was much smoother than traditional SMS messages and didn't it worked. store users' messages for privacy and it was free, naturally people flocked to it, can you guess what it was called?

Yes, WhatsApp currently, around 2.7 billion people use it worldwide in 2014, was bought by Facebook for a whopping $1,19.6 billion, adding an additional 3.6 billion to keep to all WhatsApp employees and to think that if they just hired Jan and Sergey earlier, they could have done it for free for them. I wish I could have seen Zuck's face when he realized who he was buying WhatsApp from. Remember 2020, yes, the covid. The '19 pandemic put many livelihoods at risk, Rose's grocery bills skyrocketed, rents skyrocketed, and surviving was tough, but the rich had it pretty easy, which makes this 2020 story somewhat satisfying. in March of that year, a gigantic 230-foot superyacht. called Nora of Riad was docked in a port in Greece with 11 luxury cabins, a cinema, a Suzi jacuzzi and enough space for up to 18 guests and 16 employees, this ship is a real beast, but like all large ships it needed maintenance routine, so it was pulled out of the water, however, the crew in charge of setting up the boat properly failed to secure it and as they were pulling it out of the water it began to list to starboard, which means right in boat parlance and capsized now If you mean To me, a ship turned on its side like this may not seem so bad, but when you find out that this ship was worth about 70 million dollars, you might start to feel as dizzy as I do.

In the end, the ship was refloated and towed to another dock for inspection, but all the labor involved certainly wasn't cheap. USS San Francisco wasn't, when things go wrong on land it's bad enough, but on the open sea it can be a lot. worse and much more expensive, as demonstrated on January 7, 2005. That day, the USS San Francisco, a nuclear submarine with a full complement of 12 officers and 125 men, was on a high-speed port voyage from Guam to Australia when disaster struck while, 525 feet below the waves, the 7,000-ton submarine was traveling at approximately 40 mph. suddenly stopped dead, it had hit something which broke the ballast tanks and threatened to beach the ship where it was, fortunately the hole had not broken and the crew, 98 of whom were injured, one of them managed to drive the submarine Back at base after a grueling 52 hours when he surfaced the true extent of the damage was revealed and it was bad, the forward sonar dome had been nearly destroyed, most of the forward section had simply buckled and what was left was barely enough to recover what could have caused this if it had been so. hit another ship, an animal, a mine, no it was a mound, yes the submarine had hit part of the ocean floor, but submarines like this have navigation crews with multiple maps and SS of protocols and procedures to help them navigate silently without the use of sonar to reveal their location, so how had this happened?

After an investigation, it was revealed that the navigation team was using a chart that did not have the Mound seam mapped and the captain had not implemented many standard navigation practices and safety procedures. from other available charts showed a danger in the area, but the commander in charge still chose to operate the submarine at maximum speed without navigation risk mitigation measures in place, it was a big mistake whose repair costs were initially estimated at some $88 million, but they actually came to a staggering $135 million total, man, that number is big enough to give anyone a sinking feeling.

Which of these massive mistakes blew your mind and which one do you think would have been the most? It's easily avoided, let me know in the comments below and thanks for watching.