Died of Overreach

The largest empire the world had yet seen. Its enemies erased its capital so thoroughly that for centuries people doubted it had existed.

The world's first superpower — ruled from a palace its conqueror torched in a single night.

It did not fall in a day. The last western emperor was a teenager named after the city's founder, deposed without a battle in 476.

Florence's super-companies bankrolled a king of England, who defaulted and dragged them under.

The largest contiguous empire that has ever existed. It grew faster than it could be governed, and that is what killed it.

The most powerful bank in 15th-century Europe. It financed the Renaissance and banked for the popes — then collapsed under its own bad loans.

An empire larger than Western Europe, broken in a single afternoon by a few thousand men carrying a weapon it had never seen: the gun.

John Law's monopoly on French Louisiana inflated a paper-money bubble that bankrupted the French crown.

The most valuable company that has ever existed — worth roughly $7.9 trillion in today's money. It died not in battle but of debt and corruption.

A trading monopoly that traded almost nothing but its own soaring shares, then burst and ruined Britain.

A private corporation ruled some 200 million people and fielded an army of 260,000 — twice the size of Britain's. Then the government it served took it over.

New York's third-largest trust backed a failed scheme to corner copper, and the run on its doors one October morning in 1907 brought down the American banking system.

The trust so total it controlled 90% of American refining — until the Supreme Court split it into 34 pieces.

China's last imperial dynasty, founded by Manchu conquerors and ended by a child emperor's abdication and a republic.

The largest contiguous land empire of its age, stretched across eleven time zones, undone by war, hunger, and revolution.

It built the car presidents rode in and the Merlin engines that flew over Britain, then merged with a failing partner and spent its last years as a rebadged Studebaker.

AT&T spent $500 million over 15 years to prove that people do not want to be seen while they talk — the commercial service launched in 1970, peaked at 453 subscribers, and was quietly shut down by 1974.

Formed by the biggest railroad merger in US history, it filed the biggest US corporate bankruptcy in history 871 days after the first trains ran under its name.

It painted its planes in fourteen colours and had Halston dress the crew; then airline deregulation stripped its routes and doubling fuel prices grounded it for good.

John DeLorean was arrested in an FBI drug sting the same week his factory closed; the car he built to defy Detroit became immortal only in a film about time travel, three years after the company died.

Atari invented home gaming and reached $2 billion in sales by 1982, then was broken into pieces two years later by a crash it had helped cause.

The junk-bond house that ruled 1980s Wall Street, felled by insider-trading charges and its own leverage.

The Bank of Crooks and Criminals International, shut down worldwide as one of history's largest financial frauds.

A founding giant of American aviation, ground down by deregulation, labor war, and a corporate raider.

It was the airline of the future — its logo flew on the spaceplane in '2001: A Space Odyssey'. The real 2001 came and Pan Am was already a decade dead.

The world's first communist superpower, dissolved by a stroke of the pen after 69 years and a failed coup.

It owned office word processing in the 1970s, then watched a $3 billion empire collapse when the PC arrived and a son inherited what his father built.

Britain's oldest merchant bank, 233 years old, destroyed by one rogue trader's hidden losses in Singapore.

A Calgary penny-stock company claimed 200 million ounces of gold in the jungle of Borneo; the samples had been salted with shaved jewellery, and the chief geologist fell from a helicopter before the truth came out.

A Korean conglomerate that borrowed its way to global reach, then became the largest bankruptcy in history at the time.

A hedge fund run by Nobel laureates whose models nearly took down the global financial system.

It spent $11.8 million on advertising in its first year against $619,000 of revenue, floated a sock puppet over the Macy's parade, and dissolved nine months after going public.

Fortune named it America's Most Innovative Company six years running. The innovation, it turned out, was the accounting.

The man who invented the mail-order money-back guarantee built a retail empire that outlived him by 88 years, then sat on its cash while Sears took the suburbs.

Once it carried more than half of all transatlantic passengers; it went bankrupt three times, and its final flight landed just before midnight on 1 December 2001 — by midnight it was an American Airlines flight.

It raised $1.2 billion to reinvent grocery delivery and burned through it in three years, building automated warehouses for demand that did not yet exist.

One of the world's five great accounting firms, destroyed by shredding documents for a single client named Enron.

It designed the smartphone in 1994, shipped a device almost nobody could use, and dissolved in 2002 — leaving behind the people who later built the iPhone and Android.

Once nicknamed the Flying Bank for its stability, it collapsed when a debt-fueled buying spree ran out of cash.

A telecom giant built by acquisitions that booked $11 billion in fake profits and filed the largest bankruptcy of its day.

It survived the Civil War, two world wars and the Great Depression. A bet on mortgages ended it in a weekend — the largest bankruptcy in US history.

Founded to help rebuild Seattle after the great fire of 1889, it was seized by federal regulators 119 years to the day later — the largest bank failure in American history.

Once a third of the Toronto stock exchange's value, the telecom titan ended in liquidation and an accounting scandal.

It put turbochargers in family cars and made safety a selling point, then spent two decades dying quietly inside General Motors before the bankruptcy of 2011.

For 50 years Monarch flew British families to the Mediterranean sun; on 2 October 2017 it stranded 110,000 of them abroad in the largest UK airline collapse on record.

It promised hundreds of blood tests from a single finger-prick; the machines never worked.

It raised $1.75 billion to sell ten-minute videos to commuters, launched the week the world went indoors, and was gone in eight months.

A German fintech darling whose €1.9 billion in cash turned out not to exist.

A crypto exchange that lent its customers' deposits to its founder's hedge fund, then ran out of money.