These Could Be The Most Expensive Mistakes In History

In 2009 a tower block at Shanghai’s Lotus Riverside complex crumbled to the ground, largely because of its shaky foundations. That meant dozens of apartments — some costing as much as $264 per square foot — were lost. And the property’s developer may have taken a further — and hugely expensive — financial hit after several investors in the project asked for their money back. We really don’t blame them...

Remember when Bitcoin first took off? Well, some of those wise enough to get in on the ground floor are now millionaires. One man who isn’t enjoying the fruits of his labor, though, is James Howells. Although the Welsh IT worker mined 7,500 bitcoins back in 2009, he later threw the hard drive he had stored them on in the trash. And in 2013, those bitcoins had reached a value of $7.5 million. Ouch!

You may not recognize Ron Wayne’s name, as he’s often glossed over when folks are telling Apple’s story. Wayne — along with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak — was actually one of the original three founders of the tech giant. Unfortunately for him, though, one of Jobs’ decisions rubbed him up the wrong way, and so he quit Apple and sold his 10 percent stake in the company back in 1976. At that time, the transaction netted Wayne just $800. If he had held onto the shares until 2013? They would have grown to become worth $35 billion.

In what may be the most calamitous mathematical mix-up of all time, NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter was lost in 1999. But that wasn’t down to any mechanical failure. Instead, the two teams working on navigating the craft used two different measurement systems during their calculations. One had gone imperial, the other metric. And the price of such an error? $327.6 million, all wasted. Oops.

To mark the new millennium in London, a brand new bridge was erected over the River Thames — the first of its kind to be opened in over a hundred years. Three days after the ribbon was cut, however, the Millennium Bridge closed again. The engineers hadn’t accounted for all the people who’d be traveling over the walkway, and the bridge had started swaying as they passed. The cost to fix this was $6.6 million — over a third of the eye-watering $24.1 million already spent to create the bridge and put it in place.

If you’ve seen Quentin Tarantino’s movie The Hateful Eight, you may remember the scene where Kurt Russell’s character destroys a guitar. But that wasn’t just any old guitar. It was a priceless model from the 19th century, on loan from a museum in Pennsylvania. Nobody told Russell it was the real deal, and so he went ahead and smashed it to pieces. And we’ll say it again: a priceless model. Yikes!

In 2013 Spanish officials realized that there was a problem with their new $2.3 billion submarine. In a nutshell, it was too heavy. More than 77 tons too heavy, in fact — all thanks to a rogue decimal point from an engineer. And that tiny mistake was projected to cost around $11.9 million and take three years to put right. Oh dear.

Imagine being singlehandedly responsible for losing a company’s entire annual profit. That’s the nightmare that presented itself to one broker in Japan in 2005. They accidentally set J-Com’s share price to one yen for 610,000 shares, rather than 610,000 yen for one share. This fateful typo cost the company at least 27 billion yen, or approximately $236 million. That was almost equal to the previous financial year’s net profit of 28.1 billion yen!

Ever spent $20.5 billion on 2,000 trains, only to realize that they were all too wide? Probably not, as it’s quite a specific problem to have. But in 2014 that’s exactly what happened to the French train company SNCF, which discovered too late that its new vehicles were too big for some stations around the country. The error cost over $68 million to fix, and platforms were widened in their hundreds as a consequence.

As trade deals go, Russia’s sale of Alaska is surely up there with the worst. Back in 1867, however, it may have seemed like a good idea. At that time, naval bureaucrats had destroyed the Alaskan economy. Russia was desperate to be free of its obligations there, and so a sale was made for a mere $7.2 million. Then the Klondike Gold Rush began in earnest. By the 1910s, the U.S. had made back 100 times its original purchasing price. We almost feel sorry for the Russians...

Thanks to an errant comma, a Canadian telecommunications contract ended somewhat prematurely — to the tune of one million Canadian dollars (USD $888,000). Phone company Bell Aliant managed to escape its deal with cable provider Rogers Communications 12 months earlier than planned because a clause about renewals was ruled to also apply to the initial agreement. Grammar matters, folks.

The financial crisis of the late 2000s wasn’t a great time to be a bond trader. But arguably, nobody in the field ended up having it worse than Howie Hubler. The Morgan Stanley employee was responsible for history’s biggest ever trading loss — an astonishing $9 billion. He had sold insurance on AAA-rated mortgages that, in the end, were deemed as having no value.

You know an oil spill’s bad when Hollywood makes a movie about it. And that was the case with the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which was given the dubious honor of being immortalized on film in 2016. The spill itself remains the largest of its kind on record, with around 4.9 million barrels of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico over several months in 2010. It also ended up costing BP over $60.9 billion — all thanks to cost-cutting measures and subpar cement.

Remember, people: always triple-check your forms. We bet that New Jersey officials were wishing they’d done just that after having lost out on $400 million of education reform cash in 2010. This cruel blow was caused by an error in the state’s application form for “Race to the Top” funding, meaning 4.8 points were docked during the federal competition. And to rub further salt into the wound, New Jersey ended up just three points away from winning the money.

On August 10, 1628, Sweden launched its glamorous, costly new warship, the Vasa. On that very same day, though, the Vasa sank to the sea bed, having traveled just 4,000 feet or so from the shore. The top-heavy vessel had ultimately fallen foul of a gust of wind, and her demise was witnessed by many of those who had seen her set sail. Today, she’s the centerpiece of Stockholm’s Vasa Museum after having been salvaged back in 1961.

Did you know that Louisiana’s Lake Peigneur was once just six feet deep? These days, however, it’s closer to 1,300 feet. It’s all because of an accident in 1980, when an oil rig working for Texaco mistakenly drilled too far down into an underwater mine. The salt pillars holding up the mine then collapsed, and a sinkhole started to form. As a result of the mishap, the local ecosystem was forever changed, and Texaco and the drilling company ended up paying out $44.8 million in compensation.

Space shuttle launches are very, very expensive. And when they don’t go to plan, the consequences can be dire. Famously, the 1986 launch of the Space Shuttle Challenger was one such failure. On its tenth flight, the craft was fractured just 73 seconds after launch, leading to the tragic loss of all seven people on board. The financial implications of the disaster were almost as devastating. NASA had to create a replacement shuttle, the Endeavour, which ended up costing around $1.7 billion.

In 1962 British record company Decca had been in business for nearly 35 years. You would have thought its talent-spotters would have known what they were doing, then! But when The Beatles came to the Decca studios to audition for a possible contract, something went badly wrong. After listening to the band’s demo tape, head of A&R Dick Rowe, who wasn’t actually at the audition, decided that the Fab Four were already passé. This fatal mistake cost Decca a whole lot of money...

In March 2021 the world watched in wonder — and bemusement — as one unfortunate ship brought worldwide trade to its knees. Whether it was down to weather conditions or just plain old human error, Ever Given found herself stuck in the Suez Canal for nearly a week. And this led to quite the maritime traffic jam, Apparently, nearly 370 ships lined up behind the craft, ready to pass through the canal when she was finally dislodged. The financial fallout? Approximately $9.6 billion worth of trade was lost. Oof!

Before the Star Wars franchise was a worldwide phenomenon, movie studios didn’t have much faith in George Lucas. Even 20th Century Fox, the studio funding A New Hope, thought that the first film of the original trilogy would be a bust. Overall, it was happy to agree to sign over its merchandising rights to Lucas in exchange for a pay cut. Big mistake! In 1978 alone, Star Wars action figure sales came to $100 million. By 2011 that total had grown to $3 billion, despite no movies in the sci-fi series being released that year.

Remember the internet company Excite? Probably not. After all, the firm was bought out by Ask Jeeves in 2004. Things could have been a lot different, however, if Excite’s then-CEO George Bell had not passed on acquiring Google for a measly $750,000. For some perspective, Google was valued at an incredible $498 billion in 2016.

One-time Yahoo! CEO Scott Thompson probably isn’t remembered very fondly by the company’s shareholders. Why? Well, in 2012 he decided to sell 20 percent of Yahoo!’s shares in Alibaba — an e-commerce business then valued at $30 billion. Unfortunately, Alibaba’s market cap grew to $264.9 billion as of May 2017. Thompson’s ill-fated decision is thought to have lost Yahoo! a whopping $54 billion, according to a 2014 estimate.

Somebody, or several people, had to invent modern computing. And the team that did this worked at Xerox. But the bosses at the company didn’t fully appreciate the potential of what their developers had created. According to legend, Steve Jobs visited the Xerox headquarters in the late 1970s and did see the possibilities of these innovations. He went on to steer Apple to a leading position in the industry. That meant Xerox, which had not patented its inventions, missed out big-time.

Gerald Ratner was lucky enough to inherit a chain of jewelry shops from his father. He capitalized on this, too, expanding the company to more than 2,500 stores by the 1980s. Then things came to a crashing halt in 1991 when Ratner addressed a prestigious gathering of Britain’s Institute of Directors. He candidly told the audience that his products were bad and low-quality, and the reaction was immediate. Angry customers deserted the shops and even demanded refunds. The share price bombed. Basically, Ratner torpedoed his own business. Yup, he made a history-changing mistake — but at least he wasn’t the first to do so.

The first digital camera was invented as long ago as 1975. The company that came up with the new gizmo was the leading photographic outfit of the day, Eastman Kodak. But the company’s bosses decided that digital photography was a dead end. Talking to The New York Times in 2015, Steven Sasson remembered the reaction of Kodak seniors, explaining, “Print had been with us for over 100 years, no one was complaining about prints, they were very inexpensive, and so why would anyone want to look at their picture on a television set?” Dear, oh dear.

As the Civil War raged in the fall of 1862, Confederate forces were in Maryland and plotting to move north. Confederate General Robert E. Lee was in charge of the operation and formed a plan of action that he hoped would mean defeat for the Union. Unfortunately, a Confederate officer was sent a copy of this plan in error. Worse, it was then discovered in a field by two Union soldiers who passed the details on to the authorities. Helped by this intelligence, the Union forces stopped the Confederates in their tracks at the bloody Battle of Antietam.

The year 1989 was a momentous one for Europe and indeed the world, as that was when the Berlin Wall came down. But it seems that the actual moment that the wall was breached by citizens from East Germany came about because of an error by a Communist official. He was Guenther Schabowski, and his bumbling gaffe came during a press conference. Seemingly by mistake, Schabowski announced that his fellow East German citizens had the right to travel to the West with immediate effect. It later emerged that Schabowski was supposed to say East Germans could apply for travel visas.

Back in 1348 Scots chieftains were delighted to hear that the “auld enemy” — England — was in the grip of a devastating plague outbreak. A Scots army duly marched across the border into England in 1349. But the invaders had failed to spot one serious weakness in their plans. If you trample into another nation where plague is raging, there’s every chance you’ll be infected. And surprise, surprise, it seems that’s precisely what happened. Even worse, they apparently took the plague back to Scotland when they retreated, sparking a major epidemic there.

In 1958 Mao Zedong focused his ire on the so-called four pests. The less-than-fab four were identified as rats, flies, mosquitoes — and the humble house sparrow. All of those creatures were to be killed on sight. One expert estimated that during the period of the campaign, as many as 1 billion sparrows were exterminated, pushing them close to local extinction. But Mao had overlooked one key impact of the sparrow massacre: sparrows ate locusts. And lo and behold, China was soon engulfed in a catastrophic plague of the voracious insects, gobbling down food crops at a terrifying rate.

In 1912 RMS Titanic sank beneath the icy waters of the Atlantic, and more than 1,500 souls perished. Of course, the cause of the accident was an iceberg that wasn’t spotted until it was too late to take evasive action. And if the lookout on duty, Fred Fleet, had been equipped with binoculars, perhaps catastrophe might have been averted. Yet there was a pair of binoculars on board the ship that should have been available to lookouts. These had been locked in a cabinet, and only Second Officer David Blair had the key. He’d been due to sail aboard the luxury liner but was pulled just before she left.

All too often the human race has, with good intentions, messed with the natural world only to cause calamity. And there can be few better examples of that than what happened in the African nation of Zimbabwe back in the 1960s. An ecologist called Allan Savory was appalled by the increasing desertification of parts of southern Africa, including Zimbabwe. He concluded that the blame for this lay with elephants, which he believed were devastating the landscape. So Savory decided the only answer was to cull the huge beasts. Based on his theory, some 40,000 were slaughtered — with absolutely no discernible effect on desertification.

It was 1959, and rock ‘n’ roll legend Buddy Holly was on the road with his band The Crickets. But Holly decided he had taken as much as he could stomach aboard the ramshackle buses in which they’d been traveling. On top of that, he really needed to do some laundry, as did his band. So, he came up with a solution. He would charter a plane and fly to the next gig 400 miles away in Fargo, North Dakota. Arriving ahead of time, he’d be able to arrange for the band’s clothes to be laundered. It seemed like a plan. But, of course, the result of taking this flight was a disaster for 22-year-old Holly and those who accompanied him. The plane crashed near Clear Lake with no survivors.

In the 13th century, a man called Inalchuq was the governor of a city called Otrar. This was the era when Genghis Khan was building his own empire, and he sent a trading delegation to Otrar in 1218. Inalchuq apparently didn’t like the look of these visitors, however, and executed the lot of them, including Genghis’ personal representative. By his own standards, Genghis’ response was moderate. He sent a small party to Inalchuq’s boss and uncle, Sultan Muhammad II, to seek justice. But the Sultan seems to have been no smarter than his nephew. Muhammad killed one of the messengers and shaved the beards of the other two, a gross insult. The Great Khan’s patience now evaporated. He besieged Otrar and slaughtered its citizens, including Inalchuq.

After a successful coup, Napoleon Bonaparte became ruler of France in 1799. But he had his eyes on another prize to the East; the Russian Empire. Napoleon assembled his Grande Armée, which may have included as many as 650,000 soldiers. The first troops marched onto Russian soil in late June 1812. The Russians had only 200,000 men in their army. But they had clever tactics. Instead of confronting Napoleon, they retreated. They even allowed the French to take their capital, Moscow, in September after the savage but indecisive Battle of Borodino 75 miles from the city. The Russians abandoned the city, and soon Napoleon realized his soldiers could not survive the winter there. Some 300,000 of Napoleon’s troops died during the campaign and the disorderly retreat.

The name Chernobyl will be forever associated with nuclear disaster. It was in 1986 that something went badly wrong at the Soviet Union’s nuclear power station in Ukraine. A devastating steam explosion wrecked the facility and set it on fire. But this horrible accident can actually be traced to operator error. On the April night when it happened, technicians had been running a turbine-testing procedure. On its own, that was fine. But the engineers also decided to switch off the emergency system that would cool the reactor core in the event of a mishap. Well, there was a mishap and there was no emergency cooling system to counter it. The result was disaster. 

Many historians take the view that the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the spark that set off the human disaster that was World War I. Of course, the blame for the outrage must truly fall on the assassins. But it turns out that the Archduke’s driver made a mistake with fatal consequences. Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie were on an official visit to the Bosnian city of Sarajevo in Bosnia. One would-be killer hurled a bomb at the couple’s car but missed the target. After this failed attempt, the tour descended into confusion, and Ferdinand’s driver turned up the wrong street. While he tried to turn around, Gavrilo Princip took his chance and shot the royal couple dead.

By 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was more or less lord of all he surveyed. Dictator of Rome, his string of military successes across Europe had made him highly popular with the citizenry. Not everyone, though. There were those in the Roman Senate, the governing body, who resented their leader’s fame and position. These dissenters hatched a plot to assassinate Caesar. And in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, his wife Calpurnia had a nightmare in which her husband’s statue appeared covered in blood. She warned him not to go to the Senate the next day. That may or may not be derived from fiction, but what happened when Caesar did go to the Senate is cold, hard historical fact. Some 40 senators attacked him, stabbing him to death.  

A devastating plague, known as the Black Death, hit London in 1665. By the middle of the summer, roughly 1,000 of the British capital’s unfortunate citizens were dying every day. We now know that bubonic plague is spread by the fleas that live on rats. And when infected insects bite humans, they are in turn infected with the disease. Yet some people at the time, including the Lord Mayor of London, believed that the disease was spread by cats and dogs. The obvious answer? Kill all the felines and canines in town. So, the animals that could potentially have controlled the rat population were slaughtered in their thousands. That, to say the least, was not a smart move...