- [Narrator] We all make mistakes. Some are small, some are big, and some are bigger, much, much bigger. And the bigger these mistakes are, the bigger the price tag that's
usually attached to them. From minor mistakes leading
to million-dollar losses, to corporate incompetence
that's bankrupted businesses, it's time to take a look at even more of the most
expensive mistakes in history. (soft music) Boe-no-ing. Minor cases of negligence
don't often have huge impacts, but as Montana Rail Link
learned back on July 3rd, 2014, sometimes they really do. On this day, a train running
from Wichita, Kansas, to Renton, Washington, a journey more than 1795 miles in length, was rolling along a section of its track through the Rocky Mountains. There was nothing out of
the ordinary about this day; the weather was fine, the sky was clear, but all of a sudden, the
train lurched horrendously, derailing and sending its cargo
down into the creek below. But it wasn't hauling just any cargo. It was transporting the
fuselages of six Boeing 737s. Three of these tumbled from
the train into the river below, which were all battered
and shredded as they fell, while the three other 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 assessed the scene, they discovered something shocking. The conductor and crew
who'd loaded the carts were clear of blame, but the inspectors tasked
with checking the tracks had failed to detect major
issues in the track alignment. While millions of dollars are invested into track maintenance
in the region annually, they'd still managed to miss this. But how much did it cost them? Well, it cost Boeing six aircraft, which, being conservative
with the pricing, cost roughly $90 million each. That's a minimum of $540
million paid back in insurance, all because of some
basic failed maintenance. Well, that's one way to throw
plane production off track. Crap Deal. If I'd spent my life growing a
multimillion dollar business, the last thing I'd do is say publicly that it's not very good. Who would buy anything
from me if I, the owner, said I hated my own products? But no one in their right
mind would do that, right? Well, English businessman
Gerald Ratner did. He inherited his father's small jewelry business back in 1984, and turned it into a
multimillion dollar empire in just six years. Every British high street had a Ratners, selling affordable jewelry en
masse to working-class folk. Gerald became incredibly rich, and enjoyed everything
that money brings with it. He got to meet influential people, frequented high society events, and was asked to be a guest speaker at important conferences, and it was that last one that undid him, because on April 23rd, 1991, he was invited to speak at
the Institute of Directors. In an attempt to impress the crowd, he boasted about how he was able to sell expensive-looking items
for pennies on the dollar. And then he said this. - People say to me, "How can you sell this
for such a low price?" I say, "Because it's total crap." - [Narrator] Yep, he called
everything he sold total crap for clout. But he wasn't done there, oh no. - We even sell a pair of
earrings for under a pound, gold earrings as well. And some people say, "Well, that's cheaper
than a prawn sandwich from Marks & Spencers." But I have to say, the sandwich will probably
last longer than the earrings. - [Narrator] Yeah, for a few jokes at his customers' expense, he publicly degraded his entire empire while being recorded
with the media present. And, oh, they had a field day. They put him on front pages and printed his gaffe word for word. People stopped buying the
self-proclaimed crap Ratners sold, and the company's share
price dropped steeply. In just 10 months from his speech, Ratner's stock price declined by 80%. Gerald himself had to sell what was left of his company shares to pay off the $1.3
billion he owed the bank after he was let go as
CEO from the company, and so walked away with
absolutely nothing. He became known in the UK as Mr. Crap, and as far as I'm aware,
still is to this day. Crash Landing. If I tell you to think of a Hoover, you know what I mean, don't you? No, not the president, the vacuum cleaner. In the 20th century, Hoover, a U.S. company
with a large UK presence, enjoyed a near monopoly of vacuum sales, to the point where their names became ubiquitous with the product. But from 1987 to 1992, as the recession hit and
competitors entered the scene, their profits fell, though they were still dominating
about 50% of the market. Hoover needed to boost sales, so they decided to create
a one-of-a-kind offer, which is how their now-infamous two free flights deal was born. In 1992, they teamed up with a small travel
agency called JSI Travel who'd also struggled in the recession, and created a bargain deal. UK customers who spent more
than £100, about $250 today, on Hoover products, would get two free round
trip airline tickets to a destination in Europe
worth several hundred pounds, which they'd subsidized
through JSI Travel. It was a bargain, but
Hoover made the process of attaining the tickets
incredibly difficult, with plenty of different forms to fill out and mail off multiple times, tight deadlines, and limits
on destination choices. They did this hoping people
would buy their products and then give up on
redeeming the difficult deal. This way they wouldn't have to fulfill as many flights which had
been booked in bulk by JSI, leaving them in profit. And it worked. Products were flying off the shelves, and very few people actually persevered with the free flight faff. And that's when they made a fatal mistake. They doubled down, and
released a new offer promoting two free round trips to America for anyone who bought £100 of products. At the time, this was easily
more than £600 of free flights, roughly $1400 today. They assumed people would
buy more expensive products in tandem with the offer, and just as few people would jump through all the
hoops to get the tickets, leaving them in even more profit. And that's where they were horribly wrong. British customers ended up purchasing the cheapest products possible to qualify for the flights, and then en masse, persevered through all the
hassle to get their tickets. Hoover had anticipated about
50,000 people would apply, but more than 300,000 did, a 500% increase on their estimations. So, while Hoover had generated
£30 million in sales, about $65 million, from the promotion, the cost of the flights they'd promised was at least £100 million, that's $219 million. Unable to follow through on
their promotion promises, public backlash drove the
company's sales into the dirt. Essentially, Hoover
was ordered to cough up the equivalent of $72 million on flights for some 220,000 customers. And even then, at least 100,000 applicants never received their tickets. Public perceptions of
the brand were shattered. In the two years following
the marketing mishap, their posted losses were
in the tens of millions, and by 1995, they held a
mere 10% of the market, down from 50%. Hoover were eventually sold off to Italian competitor,
Candy, for $106 million, at a loss of $81 million. Wow, I bet they wish this
deal had never taken off. Bugatti Baddie. If I owned a sports car, I'd be very conscious of
everyone else staring at me. Okay, not me, the car. I mean, supercars stand out and they're usually pretty
loud and low to the ground, and just look out of place next to any other four-wheeled
vehicle on the road. And maybe if this next guy had been a bit more conscious
of how much he stood out, he wouldn't have made the mistake he did. Back in November, 2009, the
driver of a Bugatti Veyron, one of the most expensive
supercars in the world with a price tag of over $1 million and one of only 15 in
the U.S. at the time, crashed in an east Texas swamp. He completely ruined the
engine and totaled the car as it sank into three feet of salt water. Luckily, he had insurance, and when he made his claim, he stated he'd been driving along when all of a sudden a pelican
flew in front of his car, causing him to swerve into the swamp. I mean, it sounds legit, and his insurers definitely thought so as they were ready to pay
him the $2.2 million payout. However, forgetting he was in a supercar, and attracting a lot of attention, a passenger in another car
on the road at the time was actually filming him. Okay, not him, his car. Yep, that's the driver. Now, I can't show him
crashing into the lake, lest I tempt the YouTube
demonization hammer, but take my word for it, a few seconds after this,
he swerves into the lake. Did you notice anything missing here? Yeah, I didn't see no pelican, and when the clip inevitably went viral, neither did the insurers. In 2015, he was found guilty
of conspiring to commit fraud, and was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to pay back
$600,000 to his insurers. Well, if that doesn't teach you to always check your blind spot, I don't know what will. Supercar Stunts. While some mistakes are pretty
entertaining to learn about, there are some that
just make you feel sad, and if you're a supercar lover, this next one is one of them. Back in August 2023, drivers
in Farningham, in the UK, witnessed a scene on the road that was as devastating
as it was expensive. A truck, or lorry as the Brits call them, had jackknifed on the
road, flipping its trailer, which was loaded with not one,
not two, but 10 supercars. On their side, you can see
a Lamborghini Aventador, a Jaguar F-Type convertible,
two Ferrari F430s, an Audi R8, a BMW 318i Sport Plus, an AMG GT Black Series,
an Aston Martin DB11, a Nissan GT-R 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 had happened here? Well, the driver had been
transporting the cars on a steep downhill section of road at just 35 miles per hour when crosswinds began to sway the vehicle. He was gradually trying to slow down, which is when he saw a group
of slow-moving cyclists in front of him. He didn't have time to stop
the now heavily swaying truck, so he made the heroic decision to jackknife the truck
and save the cyclists. Phew. He 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, with the total coming
in at some $2.5 million, all of which had to be written off. Okay, I don't think it's fair
to class this as a mistake. He saved lives instead of cars, but oof, it still hurts to look at. Emission Issues. Do you remember the
Volkswagen emission scandal that rocked the car industry? Well, as you can see, the giant Volkswagen storage facility of Victorville,
California, certainly does. This 134-acre patch of land
in the California desert once held a staggering 21,000 cars, all of which were in working condition, but had been left to rot. Wh-why? That's such an insane waste. Well, way back in early 1963, the U.S. introduced the Clean Air Act, a law designed to reduce air pollution. Just about all vehicles had hard limits on the emissions they could produce, but in the 2000s, Volkswagen realized its newer diesel model cars couldn't pass the updated
U.S. emission tests. Instead of working to reduce them, though, they designed a defeat device that could cheat these emission tests and installed them in all
their new diesel vehicles. But their mistake was thinking companies wouldn't test
their emission claims, which the Environmental
Protection Agency, or EPA, did. When major discrepancies showed up between what their cars were reporting and what they were actually emitting, Volkswagen claimed it must be a mistake and offered to recall the cars. But the EPA wasn't
satisfied, and dug deeper. Only then did Volkswagen admit they'd designed the cheat software. It was a disaster. The revelation forced Volkswagen to buy back almost
350,000 vehicles worldwide and store them across sites
like those at Victorville, along with fines, penalties,
and financial settlements, which ended up costing it
how much, do you reckon? $10 million? $100 million? $1 billion? Try $33.3 billion. That's over 10% of Volkswagen's average
annual worldwide revenue. Wow. Well, if you're dumb enough to make the mistake of
cheating on something that can easily be checked, be smart enough to fess up immediately. Prestigious Problems. Now, I'm not ageist. I don't discriminate against people based on how old or young they are. I know they can make
idiotic mistakes at any age, much like this next old timer. Back in 2002 off the coast of Spain, the oil tanker Prestige, which was being captained
by a 77-year-old man, was carrying some 77,000 tons of oil when it was caught in a storm. A huge 50-foot hole was bust
into one of its fuel tanks, so it sent out a distress call for help. But Spain refused to
allow the ship to dock, not wanting the hassle of
clearing up a contained oil spill, and ordered it to be towed out of the sea away from the Spanish coast. France also denied it docking
rights, as did Portugal. No one wanted this inevitable
mess on their hands. Then, six days later, the
ship broke apart and sank. As it did, it spilled
50,000 tons of crude oil into the water, polluted thousands of miles of coastline, and resulted in one of the
worst environmental disasters in Spain's history. It was so extensive, the
cleanup operation took years, required tens of thousands of volunteers, and cost over $600 million. But how did this happen
in the first place? Well, for a start, the
ship's tanks were defective, but the 77-year-old captain
apparently wasn't aware of this. Not because no-one told him, but because he'd refused to take part in any of the inspections, or read the log of the previous captain, which listed extensive
defects in the ship. The ship was also in such poor condition, it was barred from entering ports in the U.S., Cuba, Lebanon,
Finland, and Denmark. That is a lot of red flags. But the captain claimed, I almost can't believe he said this, "That didn't seem to have
anything to do with me." I'm sorry, you're the captain? The structural integrity of your ship has everything to do with you. He was eventually sentenced
to two years in prison, and the Prestige's insurers were hit with a $1 billion
fine over the spill. But while this happened over 20 years ago, no payout has been made yet, with the legal battle for that billion dollars still ongoing. Man, that's enough to
make you feel sea sick. Lake Peigneur. Back in 1980, Lake Peigneur was a pretty
normal body of freshwater located in the U.S. state of Louisiana. Notice how I said "was" there? Yeah, that was subtle foreshadowing. At an average of over 10 feet deep, stretching over 1,300 acres, this lake was home to huge
deposits of tarry oil beneath it, along with cavernous salt domes and mines that tunneled through the region. It was these deposits that Texaco Oil Company was mining for, using a floating platform positioned in the middle of the lake. But on the morning of November 20th, 1980, the crew on the platform reported that the tip of their 14-inch drill shaft was stuck 1228 feet down. As they hauled the drill up, strange noises began
emanating from the water, and they decided to
abandoned the platform. And a good thing too, because all of a sudden,
a giant mud crater opened up below the platform, creating a whirlpool that
grew to a quarter mile wide, sucking down the entire
platform, several lakeside homes, and 11 barges. Over 65 acres of the
lake was swallowed up, and so much water drained into the caverns that the flow of the Delcambre Canal, which usually emptied the
lake into Vermilion Bay, was reversed, temporarily creating the
biggest waterfall in Louisiana. This caused salt water
from the Gulf of Mexico to flow into the newly dry lake bed. In just three days, the lake was filled with water once more, but instead of a 10-foot-deep
freshwater haven, it was now a 200-foot-deep
saltwater sinkhole. But what had happened? An investigation revealed that Texaco were conducting exploratory
drilling in the lake, and after miscalculating their position, had drilled down into
one of the salt mines. The freshwater began to dissolve the salt, enlarging the hole, and draining all the
water into the cave below. Texaco was ultimately ordered
to pay some $44.8 million, about $150 million adjusted for inflation, for the damaged they caused. If I'd been in charge of that rig, I think I'd have been so embarrassed I'd have let the sinkhole swallow me up. A Missed Opportunity. A lot of big companies are
always looking to expand by acquiring new companies. Meta bought WhatsApp, Apple bought Beats, Microsoft bought Activision
Blizzard, the list goes on. These companies bring in millions, often billions of dollars
to their parent companies, though it's sometimes a gamble, with some acquisitions not paying off. It was this kind of
risk that was presented to Excite.com's CEO
George Bell back in 1999. Excite was one of the leading
search engines at the time, second only to Yahoo. Things were looking good for the company, when two young men approached the CEO with their own search engine, looking to sell it to them for $1 million. It looked functionally similar to Excite, but had technology that
would allow the engine to grow much faster. Bell initially offered the pair
$750,000 to buy the engine, and have them both come work for Excite, but then it all fell apart. One of them men said that if they did come work for Excite, they'd need to scrap all
of Excite's current tech, and replace it with their
own search engine's. The deal fell apart. Fast forward to today, and Excite no longer even cracks
the top 20 search engines, unable to keep up their functionality with the demand of the
rapidly changing world. But can you guess where the search engine
they turned down now places? Currently, it's number one. Yep, those two men Bell was approached by were none other than Larry
Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. In 2020, Google's parent
company, Alphabet, hit a market value of $1 trillion. Yeah, that's trillion, with a T. I don't reckon Bell was
excited when he heard that. Another Missed Opportunity. Hang on, back up. Before, do you remember when I said Meta, Facebook's parent company,
acquired WhatsApp? Well, that story also
belongs on this list. Back around 2007, Jan Koum and Brian Acton applied for jobs at Facebook. They'd been working at
Yahoo for several years, and while they had
plenty of tech experience to work for the social media giant, both were turned down. Not long after, Jan began tinkering with a new iPhone app he'd created, that would allow people to
set statuses on their phones. Contacts would be able to see what their friends were
up to at any given moment. For instance, "I'm busy" or "At
the gym, please don't call". It was buggy, but Brian
encouraged Jan to perfect it, and a few months later, he switched it to focus
on instant messaging. It was much smoother than
traditional SMS messaging, and it didn't store users'
messages for privacy, and it was free. Naturally, people flocked to it. Can you guess what it was
called? Yeah, WhatsApp. Currently, around 2.7 billion
people use it worldwide. In 2014, it was purchased by Facebook for an unreal $19.6 billion, adding an extra $3.6 billion to keep all WhatsApp's employees. And to think, if they'd just
hired Jan and Sergey before, they could have made it for them for free. Man, I wish I could have seen Zuck's face when he realized who he
was buying WhatsApp from. Going Under. Remember 2020? Yeah, the COVID-19 pandemic put a lot of livelihoods at risk. Bills rose, groceries
skyrocketed, rents with them. Getting by was hard. The rich folks had it fairly easy though, which is what makes this story
from 2020 kinda satisfying. In March of that year, a
gargantuan 230-foot superyacht, called the Nourah of Riyad, was docked in a harbor in Greece. With 11 luxury cabins,
a cinema, a jacuzzi, and room enough for up to
18 guests and 16 staff, this boat is a real beast. But like all big boats, it
needed some routine maintenance, and so it was hauled out of the water. However, the crew in charge
of mounting the boat properly failed to secure it, and as they were hauling
it out of the water, it began listing starboard, that means right in boat
speak, and capsized. Now, if you're anything like me, a boat being tipped on its side like this might not look that bad. But when you learn that this boat was worth some $70 million, you might begin to feel
as sea sick as I do. The boat was eventually refloated and towed to another dock for inspection, but all of the manpower involved most certainly didn't come cheap. USS San Francisco...no. When things go wrong on
land, it's pretty bad, but out in the open ocean,
it can get much worse, and much, much more expensive, as proven back on January 7th, 2005. It was on this day the USS San Francisco, a nuclear submarine with a full complement of
12 officers and 125 men, was on a high-speed port
run from Guam to Australia, when disaster struck. While 525 feet under the waves, the 7000-ton sub, traveling
at roughly 40 miles per hour, suddenly slammed to a stop. It had hit something,
rupturing the ballast tanks and threatening to strand
the ship where it was. Luckily, the hull hadn't ruptured, and the crew, 98 of which
were injured, one fatally, managed to navigate the sub back to base after a grueling 52 hours. When it surfaced, the true
extent of the damage was revealed and it was bad. The forward sonar dome had
been all but destroyed, most of the front
section had just buckled, and what was left was
barely enough to recover. What could have caused this? Had it hit another vessel? An animal? A mine? Nope. It was a mound. Yep, the sub had hit
part of the ocean floor. But subs like this have
navigational crews, multiple map charts, and swathes of protocols and procedures to help them navigate silently
without the use of sonar, which would give away their location. So how had this happened? Well, after an investigation, it was revealed the navigation
team were using a chart that didn't have the
seamount mapped on it, and the captain hadn't put any standard navigational practices and safety procedures in place. Plenty of other available charts did show a hazard in the area, but the commander in charge still chose to operate
the sub at maximum speed with no navigation risk
mitigation measures in effect. It was a huge mistake, the
costs to repair of which were initially estimated
to be some $88 million. Sheesh. But they actually came in at an eye watering $135 million in total. Sheesh! Man, that number is big enough to give anyone a sinking feeling. Which of these massive mistakes dropped your jaw to the floor, and which do you reckon would
have been most easily avoided? Let me know down in the comments below, and thanks for watching. (mellow music)
