The worst business decisions in history: These are the people who clearly weren’t cut out for the world of business. Some of these may have seemed like a good idea at the time while some were born of stubbornness. Others were made by people whose synapses just weren’t firing correctly.

Edwin Drake: The inventor who most people have never heard of but who should be standing at the summit of the oil industry. Drake was the brains behind one of the most revolutionary technologies in history, drilling the first ever oil well in 1859 and birthing the multi-tn USD industry we know today. His drill-pipe enabled companies to drill into the ground for the first time instead of gathering oil from surface seeps. Unfortunately, Drake was never to realize his fortune: he failed to patent the drill and spent a decade in poverty before being awarded a state pension.

Patents don’t always save you from disaster, as Kodak learned the hard way. The US camera giant patented the first digital camera back in 1975, but in what Forbes terms a “staggering corporate blunder”, they twice refused to mass produce the new product, blinded by its film sales. “They were convinced that no one would ever want to look at their pictures on a television set,” the inventor of the revolutionary technology said at the time. When the digital age caught up with the photography industry, it was too late for Kodak. The company failed to keep up with the revolution and filed for bankruptcy in 2012.

Others can’t see a good idea when it hits them in the face: If it wasn’t so enamored with the telegraph, Western Union could have had a monopoly on the defining technology of the early 20th century: the telephone. Instead, they rejected Alexander Graham Bell’s offer of USD 100k for the patent, calling it an “idiotic” invention. According to them, Bell’s idea to install a telephone in every city was “based on wild-eyed imagination and lack of understanding of the technical and economic facts of the situation, and a posture of ignoring the obvious limitations of his device, which is hardly more than a toy.” Smfh.

One internet company passed on Google acquisition for under USD 1 mn: At the turn of the millenium, Excite was one of the biggest things on the web. They had the opportunity to become something a whole lot bigger when it met with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1999. Astonishingly, they turned down the chance of purchasing the young search startup for just USD 750k. Google has since risen in value to over USD 1 tn, while Excite became an internet nobody just a few years into the new millennium.

Netflix had a similar encounter when Blockbuster passed on an offer to buy the new on-demand service for only USD 50 mn back in 2000. Blockbuster general counsel Ed Stead said at the time that Netflix’s business model wasn’t sustainable and would never make money. Little did he know that Blockbuster would later fit that descriptor to a tee when it filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2010.

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