In 1998, Sony had the chance to buy the rights to almost every Marvel character for $25 million. They chose to only buy the rights to Spider-Man for just 7 million. Sony said “Nobody gives a damn about the other Marvel characters.” Avengers End Game changed the history of money making in movie industry.
2.Netflix
In 2000, Reed Hashtings, the founder of Netflix, approached the CEO of Blockbuster , John Antioco to sell Netflix for $50 million dollars. However, Antioco refused the offer, claiming that it was a “very small niche business.” and that it wasn’t going to be profitable in the future. 2018, Blockbuster went bankrupt with 1,000 of its stores being closed down while Netflix has generated a revenue of $8.83 billion dollars with 220.6 millions subscribers.
3. Apple
Ronald Wayne, the 3rd founding member of Apple, met Steve at Atari, and co-founded the company, owning a 10% stake. Unfortunately, his prior experiences served him wrong, and he got spooked about the prospects of starting a business. He sold his 10% shares for $800.
4. Laszlo Henyecz
On May 22nd, 2010 a programmer on a Bitcoin Talk forum by the name of Laszlo Hanyecz paid another user 10,000 bitcoin to buy two Papa John’s pizzas. When Laszlo purchased the pizzas, his 10,000 BTC were quoted at roughly $41 US dollars. At the current price of Bitcoin, Laszlo’s 10,000 BTC would be worth $212.4 million.
5. Alaska
Alexander II of the Russian Empire thought Alaska is useless with a lot of ice, so he sold it to the USA for $7.2 Million, approximately 1 billion Dollars in today’s money but now Alaska one of the most important areas in the world with price above $50 billion.
6. Victoria’s Secret
Roy Raymond wanted to buy his wife some lingerie but he was too embarrassed to shop for it at a department store. He then comes up with an idea. He gets a $40,000 bank loan, borrows another $40,000 from his in-laws, opens a store, and calls it Victoria’s Secret. Makes $500,000 his first year. He starts a catalog, opens three more stores, and after five years he sells the company for $4 million. Except two years later, the company’s worth skyrocketed to $500 million and Roy Raymond jumps off the Golden Gate Bridge.
7. Chernobyl Disaster
The Chernobyl disaster is the worst, most deadly nuclear accident of all time. The worst part is, it occurred due to some totally preventable mistakes. On April 25, 1986, a drill simulating a power outage at Chernobyl led to uncontrolled reactions and a steam fire that burned for nine days. 134 workers were hospitalized due to radiation exposure, and 31 of them died in the following few weeks.
8. Wide Trains
A French company, SNCF flubbed the purchase of 2,000 trains in 2014. Many of their platforms were too narrow to fit the new trains they ordered. The mistake cost around €50 million, a cost to incur on top of the €15 billion they had just paid to purchase the trains. The error occurred due to a neglect in measurements. The process of expanding the 1,300 platforms to accommodate their corresponding trains took two years, in a process that was equally expensive and time-consuming as it was embarrassing.
9. Yahoo!
In 1998 Yahoo refused to buy Google for $1 million. in 2002 yahoo tries to buy google for $3 billion, google wants $5 billion, yahoo refused. From 2006 to 2008 Microsoft negotiates with Yahoo to buy it for $44 billion, Yahoo refused. Also, In 2005, Yahoo! owned 30 percent of Alibaba, a profitable Chinese multinational e-commerce, technology, and retail platform. Seven years later, they decided to sell half their stake to Alibaba at $13 a share. At the time it seemed like a good deal, Yahoo! made $7.6 billion. Fast-forward to 2014. Alibaba goes public and breaks records when their stocks rose to $68 a share. Today shares in Alibaba are worth $150 (the company is valued at around $84 billion) and Yahoo! sold its internet business to Verizon in 2017 for $4.8 billion.
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10. Lockheads
In 1999, NASA’s Mars orbiter was literally lost in space after a metric miscalculation sent it on a course towards oblivion. The mistake was the result of Lockheed Martin engineers using English measurements like inches and feet to program the orbiter’s course instead of NASA’s metric calculations like centimeters and meters. As a result, the navigational computer was confused by the mishap and the $125 million orbiter ended up heading into the deepest regions of unknown space instead of Mars, which was its intended destination.
11. PayPal
PayPal once accidentally credited a man $92 quadrillion! $92,233,720,368,547,800. Chris Reynolds from Pennsylvania once checked his email statement and found that he has been credited an amount that would make him the richest man in the world. So he logged online and reality bit back. His account balance read $0. The correct amount. PayPal admitted the error and offered to donate an unspecified amount of money to a cause of Reynolds’ choice.
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12. Soda Clash
Ronaldo de Assis Moreira, better known as Ronaldinho, cost himself a Coke sponsorship worth $750,000 for drinking a can of Pepsi at a press conference. Ronaldinho stunned Coke chiefs by turning up at a press conference and sipping nonchalantly from a can of their arch-rivals’ fizzy pop. Furious bosses at the Coca-Cola Firm immediately demanded that the plug be pulled on his huge endorsement deal.
13. Mercedes-Benz buys Chrysler
In 1998, Daimler-Benz (maker of the Mercedes-Benz line of luxury vehicles) acquired Chrysler for $37 billion. Nine years later, they sold the company for only $7 billion. Though it was sold to investors as an equal merger, it became clear that Daimler-Benz was calling the shots. For a while, everything seemed to be going right, stocks rose to $108.62 a share in 2001. But rocky times were ahead.
In 2006, Chrysler reported a loss of $1.5 billion despite launching 10 new vehicles that year. The instability and loss of profits proved to be too much for Daimler-Benz who sold off 80 percent of its shares in the company the following year. In 2008, Chrysler filed for bankruptcy and was famously bailed out by the Treasury Department in 2009.
