You know, Adam did build something, so let's not lose sight of that. Uh, and there is demand for the Wei work space. >> Welcome to Watch Mojo, and today we're counting down our picks for the business leaders whose ill-advised decisions, dubious ethics, or sheer incompetence didn't just rattle their companies, they actively steered them onto the rocks. >> Congressman, I I can just say it again. On the date I left, I absolutely unequivocally thought the company was in good shape. Number 10, Carly Fiorina, Huelet Packard. >> I led Hulet Packard through a very difficult time, the worst technology recession in 25 years. >> Good morning, everybody. >> Then she launched a single massive deal and she's been playing defense ever since. >> It was a terrible deal and it really led to the destruction of the company. >> So, what was this deal? >> Fiorina's aggressive pursuit of a bold vision arguably eroded the very foundations of a tech giant. Her tenure at IT Behemoth Hulet Packard from 1999 to 2005 was defined by her controversial acquisition of Compact, a move she championed as essential for HP's future relevance. Despite fierce internal and external opposition, the deal went through, but the promised synergies and market dominance largely failed to materialize. Profits plummeted, and even when they started rising again, they lagged well behind competitors. HP's stock value dropped by half. 30,000 workers were laid off and less than six years after she took control, Fiorina was fired. Wall Street had so little faith in her that on news of her dismissal, HP's stock jumped up 7%. Instead, the merger proved deeply unpopular, led to widespread layoffs, and created significant cultural friction, ultimately diluting HP's competitive edge, and resulting in a period of underperformance that culminated in her forest resignation. >> Two facts here. Why did HP's board fire you and why on the day that you they did the stock went up nearly 7%. >> Well, they did fire me. I've been very open about that. I was fired in a boardroom brawl. We had board members who were leaking information out of the boardroom. You know, the truth is this. It is a leader's job to challenge the status quo. >> Number nine, Fred Goodwin, Royal Bank of Scotland. >> He was known as Fred the Shred as he led the Royal Bank of Scotland through acquisitions and job cuts to the brink of disaster. This evening, the nighthood he was awarded for services to banking was unceremoniously withdrawn by a previously obscure body known as the forfeite committee. Across the pond in the world of high finance, Fred Goodwin took the Royal Bank of Scotland on what could only be described as a ride off a cliff. Goodwin's aggressive expansion spree, especially during his disastrous acquisition of ABN AMRO at the peak of the 2008 bubble, left RBS reeling with debt and overexposure right as the global financial crisis hit. >> Fred Goodwin compounded his sins in the public eye by fighting for a time to hold on to 8 million pounds in pension payouts. >> My pension is the same as everyone else in the bank. Losing his knighthood is the final insult for a man who used to have the ear of prime ministers and for years basked in the praise of politicians, even royalty. >> The fallout was so devastating it required a government bailout and saw RBS post the largest loss in UK corporate history. He was even stripped of his nighthood, a rare and public shaming for a failed banking boss. Well, this has been an independent decision by an important committee of civil servants and obviously signed off by the Queen, but RBS came to symbolize everything that went wrong in the British economy over the last decade and under Fred Goo uh that's when it happened and I think it's appropriate therefore that he loses his knighthood. >> Number eight, Marissa Meyer, Yahoo. >> Big news in the tech world today. Google's Marissa Meyer defecting to take the top spot at Yahoo, a CEO job. It surprised a lot of people, pretty much everybody. Because Meer was very big at Google. She was the 20th employee there, and she was its first female engineer. >> When it comes to tech icons, Yahoo was once a titan until Marissa Meyer hopped into the driver's seat. Hired as a turnaround CEO, Meyer's tenure was marked by expensive acquisitions like the $ 1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr, which failed to deliver anything close to the expected return. She also invested heavily in redesigns and new features that failed to recapture the magic of Yahoo's glory days. >> I think that, you know, it's very important for us to look at what generates the most value and the most opportunity for the company. And when you look at uh the this this transaction that Verizon's proposed uh it recognizes a huge amount of value and that's what our process was really designed to recognize. >> The company struggled to innovate couldn't adapt quickly enough to the mobile revolution and continued to see its core advertising business erode eventually leading to the sale of its core internet operations to Verizon for a fraction of its former valuation. Yahoo announcing CEO Marissa Meyer will step down from the board once the Verizon deal is completed. Five other directors including co-founder David Fileo will also step down following the nearly 5 billion dollar sale of its core internet business. Yahoo will change its name to Alaba which is a combination of the words alternate and Alibaba. >> Number seven, Eddie Lampert Sears Holdings. >> Big bankruptcy news of the morning. Sears Holdings, parent company of Sears and Kmart, filing for Chapter 11 early this morning, succumbing to a mountain of debt and failure to adapt to a changing retail landscape. Sears faced a $134 million debt payment that was supposed to be due today. The company reached a deal with its creditors to keep most of its operations running. That's for now. >> Sears was once America's go-to department store. So, its slow motion collapse is nothing short of tragic. Largely thanks to the leadership philosophy of Eddie Lampert. Lampert's control of Sears and Kmart from 2005 onward saw him prioritize cost cutting and asset sales over investment in the stores themselves. Instead of modernizing aging infrastructure or adapting to the rise of e-commerce, Lampard treated the companies as a portfolio of assets to be stripped, selling off valuable real estate and brands like Craftsman. This systematic underinvestment alienated customers, demoralized employees, and left the stores increasingly irrelevant, leading to decades of decline, and ultimately the bankruptcy and near total disappearance of both once-beloved brands. >> I remember when Eddie Lampert was a on the cover of Business Week magazine as the next Warren Buffett. I remember going to meet with him when Sears merged with Kmart, the morning that Sears merged with Kmart. And we all thought this was or that he was a genius. He had some plan. No, but this is what at the time, you should go back and look at the stories, the headlines. It was it was extraordinary. >> Number six, Bernard Ebers Worldcom. >> Hi, David. As you well know, in his prime, Bernie Ebers was known as the telecom cowboy, a former high school basketball coach who cobbled together a company that ultimately helped lay the foundation for the internet as we know it. But it was all built on a massive, brazen fraud. Ever presided over one of the most jaw-dropping downfalls in corporate history. The charismatic CEO of WorldCom spearheaded the rapid expansion of the telecommunications giant through aggressive acquisitions throughout the 1990s. However, when the tech bubble burst and growth stalled, Ebers and his executives resorted to a massive scheme to falsely inflate company assets by nearly 11 billion. This elaborate deception masked the company's financial struggles, artificially boosting its stock price and deceiving investors, >> misleading uh regulators as well as investors on the health of of the company uh and overinflated a lot of the company's uh numbers and profits and that sort of thing and he was caught. >> Despite being only halfway through his sentence, Eber's family and their attorneys argued now at age 78, being in prison had taken major tolls on the man's health. When the fraud was uncovered in 2002, WorldCom promptly collapsed into bankruptcy, costing shareholders billions and thousands of employees their jobs and pensions. The scandal cemented Evers' legacy as a CEO who played fast and loose with the truth. >> More on that breaking news we first reported at 10:00 tonight. Former Woolcom CEO Bernie Evers has died. A family attorney confirmed that with 16 WAPPT tonight. his family releasing a statement detailing his passing and thanking supporters. He was released from prison last year in December, having served 13 years of a 25-year sentence. >> Number five, John Scully, Apple, Inc. >> He's the man who was supposed to be better than Steve Jobs. Now, more than 25 years after taking the helm at Apple, John Scully is saying it was all a big mistake that Jobs would have saved Apple from a near-death experience. Scully's case is perhaps one of the most infamous examples of a CEO leading the company astray immediately after its visionary founders's departure. Scully, brought in from PepsiCo by Steve Jobs himself, famously ousted Jobs from Apple in 1985. >> They said, "Steve, we want your assurance that you're not going to leave Apple and take other people with us. We've heard rumors of that." And he said, "No, absolutely not." And then the next day, Steve took five key managers and the board fired him. What followed was a decade where Apple, despite some innovative products, lost its way. The company suffered from bloated product lines, high prices, a confusing brand identity, and a failure to license its operating system effectively, allowing Microsoft to dominate the burgeoning PC market. By the 1990s, Apple was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, bleeding market share and relevance until Jobs' triumphant return in 1997 pulled it back from the abyss. >> I think they made the wrong choice. You know, they they they should have chosen Steve. The talent that Steve has is so extraordinary. We should have figured out how to how to work with it. >> If Jobs had come back even 6 months later, Scully says Apple would have been gone. Quote, "Absolutely gone." He also says Jobs won't talk to him anymore. >> Number four, Martin Winterorn, Volkswagen. >> Please welcome chairman of the board, Volkswagen Group, Professor Dr. Martin Winterorn. Not any longer. Martin Vinttororn has quit as CEO of German car maker Volkswagen amid the spiraling scandal over its rigging of diesel car emissions tests in the United States. Few corporate scandals have shifted global conversations like the Volkswagen emissions scandal and much of the fallout falls at the feet of Martin Wintercorn. Winterorn, the long-erving chairman of Volkswagen, was at the helm when the dieselgate scandal erupted in 2015. The supervisory board said, "We'd like to clearly state that Mr. Vinttororn was not aware of the manipulation of emissions and that we have the greatest respect for his willingness to send a very clear signal and take responsibility in this difficult situation for Volkswagen." It was revealed that VW had deliberately installed defeat devices in millions of its diesel vehicles to cheat on emissions tests, making them appear far cleaner than they actually were. This systemic deception driven by a corporate culture that prioritized market dominance above all else led to Wintercorn's resignation, massive fines exceeding tens of billions of dollars, and a profound erosion of trust in the brand that continues to reverberate across the automotive industry. >> He denied any involvement in decisions to install the so-called defeat devices that made harmful diesel emissions seem cleaner than they were. Winterorn faces a fine or a custodial sentence if found guilty. Number three, Adam Newman, Wei Work. >> Even though We Work is 50 square foot per person, a third of all we work spaces are actually open in open common spaces that give access to everybody that we don't measure as seats. So there's a lot more room there. So the way we do it is people think that we work is all open. It's not true. 90% of we work space is actually office. 10% is only open space. But we create a lot of common space for everybody. A flamboyant founder whose unchecked ambition and chaotic leadership style nearly imploded on multi-billion dollar startup, Newman co-founded Weiwork with a vision to revolutionize office spaces. However, his tenure became synonymous with extravagant spending, questionable selfdeings, and a cult-like corporate culture. >> There was an interesting piece in the New York Times over the weekend titled Adam Newman and the art of failing up. The report detailed how Adam Newman was able to create and build we work fail spectacularly at an attempt to go public and still walk away with a potential billion-dollar payday. It cites his ability to read people, his persuasive charisma and his taste for risk. >> From lavish parties to personal use of company jets and selling trademark rights to Weiwork itself, Newman's financial impropriy and erratic management were legendary. The culmination was a disastrous attempt at an IPO in 2019, which exposed the company's massive losses and unsustainable business model, sending its valuation plummeting from $47 billion to under 10 billion in weeks and nearly bankrupting the entire enterprise. >> What would it take for Mark to buy this IPO? >> I'm not buying it. No way. So, I've got an issue with the business model in general, right? So, you've got a company that's signing all these long-term leases and then they're subleasasing to little, you know, small businesses, maybe one employee kind of companies on very short-term leases. >> Number two, Jeffrey Skielling, Enron. >> Developing right now, the former CEO of Enron has just been released from federal custody. Jeff Skielling, now 65 years old, was released after spending 12 years in prison for his role in one of the most high-profile corporate and financial fraud cases in American history. >> While Skilling was the CEO in charge, the most infamous corporate scandal of the early 21st century was engineered by two men at the pinnacle of power. Skielling and Kenneth Lei, the founder and chairman, spearheaded Enron's transformation into a massive energy trading and services company. However, beneath the veneer of innovation lay a complex web of elaborate accounting fraud, including the use of special purpose entities to hide massive debts and inflate earnings. >> You're the only financial institution that can't produce a balance sheet or a cash flow statement with their earnings. >> Well, you you you um thank you very much. We appreciate it. >> Appreciate it. >> Their deceptive practices created a false perception of profitability, attracting vast investments. When the House of Cards inevitably collapsed in late 2001, Enron filed for bankruptcy, erasing billions in shareholder value, destroying thousands of jobs, and sparking a national crisis of corporate governance. >> Jeff Skielling was the poster boy for all that was wrong with big corporations and corporate greed. >> Brian Weiss is channel 2's legal analyst and covered skilling's trial. Putting Jeff Skielling in the penitentiary for as long as we did didn't bring back any of the funds that these people lost and they were never really made whole. Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to our channel and ring the bell to get notified about our latest videos. You have the option to be notified for occasional videos or all of them. If you're on your phone, make sure you go into your settings and switch on notifications. >> Number one, Elizabeth Holmes Theronos. This Theronos blood test put my cholesterol at 170. My own doctor found it to be 169 just the week before. Holmes says she wants to make this sort of testing available anywhere anytime. >> There's no reason why these can't be distributed in uh in very very decentralized locations. >> Your home. >> Yeah. >> The story of this health tech corporation is one of audacious fraud built on the promise of revolutionary technology that never existed. Elizabeth Holmes, the company's charismatic founder, captivated investors and the public with claims that her company could perform hundreds of medical tests from just a few drops of blood using a proprietary device called the Edison. She amassed billions in funding, built a powerful board, and was hailed as a Silicon Valley prodigy. There's this um man who goes by the initials RC right now in Arizona >> who is suggesting that the lab results that he got from Theronos were not accurate and it led to him having a heart attack. >> Her elaborate deception unraveled spectacularly leading to the complete dissolution of Theronos and her subsequent conviction for criminal fraud, marking one of the most stunning corporate downfalls in modern history. Well, she is one of 655 inmates at this so-called clubfed about a 100 miles outside of Houston where she grew up. She'll have absolutely no privacy. She'll be wearing a khaki uniform. She will spend her first 90 days working in the kitchen, as we mentioned, making 12 to 40 cents an hour. After that, she will work as a groundskeeper or a janitor at the facility. >> Did we miss any other corporate captains who sank their own ships? Let us know in the comments below.