# Most Expensive Mistakes In History - Part 5

An episode of [Be Amazed](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1687637469), 23 Jun 2026, 24 min.

Audio: https://audio4.redcircle.com/episodes/b94b8ac0-61dd-4d82-9da9-747758ea3f51/stream.mp3

We all make mistakes: some are small, some are big, and some are bigger… much, much bigger. And the bigger these mistakes are, the bigger the price tag that’s usually attached to them. From minor mistakes leading to million dollar losses, to corporate incompetence that’s bankrupted businesses, it’s time to explore more of the most expensive mistakes in history! Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

## Transcript

[0:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We all make mistakes, some are small, some are big and some are bigger, much, much bigger.
[0:07] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And the bigger these mistakes are the bigger the price tag that you usually attach to them.
[0:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: From minor mistakes leading to a million dollar losses to corporate incompetence that's bankrupted businesses, it's time to explore more of the most expensive mistakes in history.
[0:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Remember 2020?
[0:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yeah, the COVID-19 pandemic put a lot of livelihoods at risk.
[0:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Bills rose grocery skyrocketed rents with them, getting by was hard.
[0:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The rich folks had it fairly easy though, which is what makes this story from 2020 kind of satisfying.
[0:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In March of that year, a gargantuan, 230-foot super yacht called the Nora of Riyadh was docked in a harbor in Greece.
[1:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: With 11 luxury cabins, a cinema, a jacuzzi and room enough for up to 18 guests and 16 staff, this boat is a real beast.
[1:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But like all big boats, it needed some routine maintenance and so it was hauled out of the water.
[1:21] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, the crew in charge of mounting the boat properly failed to secure it as they were hauling it out of the water it began listing Storbert.
[1:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That means right in Boatspeak and capsized.
[1:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now, if you're anything like me about being tipped on the side, might not look that bad, but when you learned that this boat was worth some $70 million you might begin to feel as seasick as I do.
[1:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The boat was eventually refloaded and towed to another dock for inspection, but all of the manpower involved most certainly didn't come cheap.
[1:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Minor cases of negligence don't often have huge impacts, but has Montana real link learned back on July 3rd, 2014 sometimes.
[2:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They really do.
[2:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On this day, a train running from Wichita, Kansas, to Ritten, Washington, at Journeymore than 1,795 miles in length, was rolling along a section of his tracks set through the Rocky Mountains.
[2:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: There was nothing out of the ordinary about this day, the weather was fine, the sky was clear, but all of a sudden the train had lurched horrendously derailing and sending its cargo down into the creek below.
[2:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But it wasn't hauling just any cargo, it was transporting the fuselages of 6 Boeing 737's.
[2:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Three of these tumbled from the train into the river below which were all battered and shredded as they fell, while the other three on the train were crushed so badly that all 6 were written off as total losses and scrapped.
[2:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was a devastating bloat of Boeing and they demanded a full investigation.
[2:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: After the federal railroad administration assessed the scene they discovered something shocking.
[3:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The conductor and the crew who'd loaded the cards were clear of blame, but the inspectors tasked with checking the tracks that failed to detect major issues in the track alignment.
[3:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And while millions of dollars are invested in the track maintenance in the region annually, they'd still managed to miss it.
[3:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But how much did it cost them?
[3:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, it caused Boeing 6 aircraft, which being conservative with the price in cost roughly $90 million each.
[3:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's a minimum of $540 million paid back in insurance, all because of some basic failed maintenance.
[3:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, that's one way to throw plain production off track.
[3:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If I'd spent my life growing a multi-million dollar business, the last
[3:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: who would buy anything for me if I the owner said I hated my own products.
[3:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But no one in their right mind would do that, right?
[4:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well English businessman Gerald Radner did.
[4:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He inherited his father's small jewelry business back in 1984 and turned it into a multi-million-dollar empire in just six years.
[4:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Every British high street had a ratner selling affordable jewelry in Mastow working class folk.
[4:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Gerald became incredibly rich and enjoyed everything that money brings with it.
[4:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He got to meet influential people, frequented high-sacety events and was asked to be guest speaker at important conferences.
[4:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And it was that last one that I did it.
[4:32] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Because on April 20, 1991, he was invited to speak at the Institute of Directors and in an attempt to impress the crowd, he boasted about how he was able to sell expensive looking items for pennies on the dollar.
[4:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And then he said this.
[4:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: People say, I mean, how can you sell this for such a low price?
[4:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I say, because it's total crap.
[4:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yep, he called everything he sold total crap for cloud.
[4:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But he wasn't on there,
[5:00] \[SPEAKER_00\]: We even sell a pair of earrings for under-appound, gold earrings as well, and some people say, well, that's cheaper than a prawn sandwich from Mark's and Spencer's, but I have to say the sandwich will probably last longer than the earrings.
[5:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yeah, for a few jokes and his customers' expense, he publicly degraded his entire empire, while being recorded, with the media present.
[5:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And oh, they had a field day.
[5:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They put him on front pages and printed his gaff word for word.
[5:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: People stopped buying the self-proclaimed crap ratner sold and the company share prices dropped steeply, and in just 10 months from a speech ratner stock price declined by 80%.
[5:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Gerald himself had to sell what was left of his company shares to pay off the $1.3 billion he owed the bank after he was let go as CEO from the company, and so walked away with absolutely nothing.
[5:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It became known in the UK as Mr. Crap, and as far as I'm aware, still is to this day.
[6:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If I tell you to think of a Hoover, you know what I mean, don't you?
[6:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Known at the president, the vacuum cleaner.
[6:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In the 20th century Hoover, US company with a large UK presence enjoyed a near monopoly of vacuum sales to the point where their name became ubiquitous with the product.
[6:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But from 1987 to 1992, as the recession hit and competitors entered the scene, their profits fell, though they were still dominating about 50% of the market.
[6:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hoover needed to boost sales so they decided to create a one-of-a-kind offer which is how they're now infamous two free flights deal was born.
[6:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 1992, they teamed up with a small travel agency called JSI Travel, who'd also struggled in the recession and created a bargain deal.
[6:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: UK customers who spent more than £100, about $250 today, on Hoover products would get two free, round trip airlines tickets to a destination in Europe worth several hundred pounds, which they'd subsidize through JSI Travel.
[7:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was a bargain, but Hoover made the process of attaining the tickets incredibly difficult with plenty of different forms to fill out on mail-off multiple times, tight deadlines, and limits on destination choices.
[7:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They did this hoping people would buy their products and then give up on redeeming the difficult deal, this way they wouldn't have to fulfill as many flights, which would have been booked in bulk by JSI, leaving them in private, and it worked.
[7:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Products were flying off the shelves and very few people actually persevered with the free flight fath.
[7:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And that's when they made a fatal mistake.
[7:38] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They doubled down and released a new offer for promoting two free roundtrips to America for anyone who bought a hundred pounds of products.
[7:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: At the time, this was easily more than 600 pounds of free flights, roughly $1,400 today.
[7:53] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They assume people would buy more expensive products in tandem with the offer in just as few people would jump through all the hoops to get the tickets, leaving them and even more profit.
[8:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And that's where they were horribly wrong.
[8:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: British customers ended up purchasing the cheapest products possible to qualify for the flights and then in mass, persevered through all the hassle to get their tickets.
[8:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hoover anticipated about 50,000 people would apply but more than 300,000 did, a 500% increase on their estimations.
[8:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So well Hoover had generated 30 million pounds in sales about 65 million from the promotion because that the flights they promised was at least 100 million pounds.
[8:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's $219 million.
[8:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Unable to follow through on their promotion promises, public backlash drove the company's sales into the dirt.
[8:45] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Eventually, Hoover was ordered to cough up the equivalent of $72 million on flights for some $220,000 customers, and even then at least $100,000 applicants never received their tickets.
[8:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Public perceptions of the brand were shattered and in the two years following the marketing mishabbed, their posts did losses were in the tens of millions, and by 1995 they held a mere 10% of the market down from 50%.
[9:12] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hoover were eventually sold off to a tie in competitor candy for $106 million and a loss of $81 million.
[9:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, I bet they wish this deal had it never taken off.
[9:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If I owned a super car, I'd be very conscious of everyone else staring at me.
[9:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Okay, not me, but the car, I mean super cars stand out.
[9:33] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And they're usually pretty loud, loaded to the ground and just look out of place next to any other four-wheeled vehicle on the road.
[9:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And maybe if this next guy had been a bit more conscious of how much he stood out, he wouldn't have made the mistake he did.
[9:47] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Back in November 2009, the driver of a Bugatti Veyron, one of the most expensive superguards in the world with a price tag of over $1 million and one of only 15 in the US at the time, crashed in an East Texas swamp.
[10:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He completely ruined the engine and totaled the car as it sank into three feet of saltwater.
[10:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Luckily, he had insurance and when he made his claim he stated that he'd been driving along when all of a sudden a pelican flew in front of his car causing him to swarve into this valve.
[10:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I mean, it sounds legit, and his insurers definitely thought so as they were ready to pay him the $2.2 million payout,
[10:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: However, forgetting he was in a supercar and attracting a line of attention, a passenger and another car on the road at the time was actually filming him.
[10:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Okay, not him, but this car.
[10:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The video shows him crashing into the lake and there's something revealing about it.
[10:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When I watched it, that incident opelican, and when the clip inevitably went viral neither did the insurers.
[10:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 2015, he was found guilty of conspiring to commit fraud and was sentenced to three years in prison in order to pay back $600,000 to his insurers.
[10:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I'll if that doesn't teach it always check your blind spot, I don't know what will.
[11:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While some mistakes are pretty entertaining to learn about there or some that just make you feel sad, and if you're a super car lover, this next one has got to be one of them.
[11:14] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Back in August, 2023, drivers infirming him and the UK witnessed a scene on the road that was as devastating as it was expensive.
[11:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: A truck or lorry is the Britskallum had jackknifeed on the road flipping its trailer, which was loaded with not one, not two, but nine super cars.
[11:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: On their side, there were a Lamborghini Aventador, a Jaguar F-type convertible 2 Ferrari F-430s, and Audi A8, a BMW 318i Sport Plus, and AMG GT Black Series and S-Mern DB-11 and Nissan GT-R35, and a Bentley Cotton NL GT, on which were badly damaged.
[11:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Luckily, no one was hurt and the driver escaped with minimal injuries, but what had happened here.
[12:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, the driver had been transporting the cars on a steep downhill section of road at just 35 miles per hour when crosswinds began to sway the vehicle.
[12:12] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He was gradually trying to slow down which is when he saw a group of slow-moving cyclists in front of him.
[12:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He didn't have time to stop the now heavily swaying truck, and so he made the heroic decision to jackknife that truck and save
[12:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Pew, you made the right decision, but, at what cost?
[12:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, the value of each of these cars at the time was estimated to be in the hundreds of thousands with the total coming in at some 2.5 million dollars all of which had to be rid of.
[12:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Okay, I don't think it's fair to class this as a mistake, he saved lives instead of cars, but oh, if it still hurts to think about.
[12:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: From a heroic Laurie Driver to a corporate scandal that left 21,000 cars rotting in a desert and cost $1,33 billion.
[12:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Do you remember the Volkswagen emissions scandal that rocked the car industry?
[13:03] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, the giant Volkswagen storage facility at Victorville, California certainly does.
[13:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This 134 acre patch of land in the California Desert once held a staggering 21,000 cars all of which were in working condition but had been left to rot.
[13:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Why?
[13:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's such an insane waste.
[13:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, way back in early 1963, the US introduced the Clean Air Act, a law designed to reduce air pollution.
[13:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Just about all vehicles had hard limits set on the emissions they could produce, but in the 2000s Volkswagen realized its newer diesel model cars couldn't pass the updated US emission test.
[13:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Instead of working to reduce them, though, they designed a defeat device that could cheat these emission tests and install them in other new diesel vehicles.
[13:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But their mistake was thinking companies wouldn't test their emission claims, which the Environmental Protection Agency or EPA
[13:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: did.
[13:56] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When major discrepancies showed up between what the cars were reporting and what they were actually admitting Volkswagen claimed it must be a mistake and offered to recall the cars.
[14:06] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But the EPA wasn't satisfied and dug deeper.
[14:09] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Only then did Volkswagen admit they designed the cheat software.
[14:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was a disaster.
[14:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The revelation forced Volkswagen to buy back almost 350,000 vehicles worldwide, and store them across sites like those at Victorville along with finds, penalties, and financial settlements which ended up causing it, how much do you reckon, $10 million, $100 million, $1 billion?
[14:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Try 30, $3 billion.
[14:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That's over 10% of Volkswagen's average annual worldwide revenue.
[14:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Wow!
[14:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, if you're dumb enough to make the mistake of cheating on something that can be easily checked, be smart enough to fish up immediately.
[14:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Now I'm not ages, I don't discriminate against people based on how old or young they are.
[14:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I know they can make idiotic mistakes at any age, much like this next old timer.
[14:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Back in 2002 off the coast of Spain, the oil taker prestige, which was being kept in by a 77-year-old man was carrying some 77,000 tons of oil when it was caught in a storm.
[15:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: A huge 50-foot hole was bust into one of its fuel tanks, so it sent out a distress call for help.
[15:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But Spain refused to allow the ship to dock, not wanting the hassle of clearing up a contained oil spill in order to be towed out to see away from the Spanish coast.
[15:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: France also denied a docking right as did Portugal, no-one wanted this inevitable mess on their hands, and six days later the ship broke apart in sank.
[15:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As it did, it spilled 50,000 tons of crude oil into the water polluted thousands of miles of coastline and resulted in one of the worst environmental disasters in Spain's history.
[15:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was so extensive the cleanup operation took years required tens of thousands of volunteers and cost over $600 million.
[15:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But how did this happen in the first place?
[15:57] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, for a start, the ship's tanks were defective, but the 77-year-old captain apparently doesn't aware of this.
[16:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Not because no one told him, but because he'd refused to take part in any of the inspections or read the log of the previous Captain, which listed extensive defects in the ship.
[16:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The ship was also in such poor condition, it was barred from entering ports in the U.S. Cuba, Lebanon, Finland, and Denmark.
[16:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: That is a lot of red flags, but the Captain claimed, I almost can't believe he said this.
[16:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I didn't have anything to do with me.
[16:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: I'm sorry, you know, the Captain, right?
[16:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The structural integrity of your ship has everything to do with you.
[16:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: He was eventually sentenced to two years in prison and the prestigious insurers were hit with a $1 billion fine over the spill.
[16:41] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But while this happened over 20 years ago, no payout has been made yet with the legal battle for that billion dollar still ongoing.
[16:48] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Man, that's enough to make your feel seasick.
[16:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Back in 1980 Lake Penn Ure was a pretty normal body of freshwater located in the U.S. state of Louisiana.
[16:59] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Notice how I said it was there?
[17:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yeah, that was subtle for shadowing.
[17:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: At an average of 10 feet deep stretching over 1300 acres, this lake was home to a huge deposits of tarry oil beneath it, along with cavernous salt domes and mines that tunneled through the region.
[17:16] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was these deposits that Texico oil company was mining for using a floating platform position in the middle of the lake.
[17:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But on the morning of November 20, 1980, the crew on the platform reported that the tip of their 14-inch drill shaft was stuck.
[17:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: 1,228 feet down.
[17:34] \[SPEAKER_00\]: As they hauled the drill upstream, noises began emanating from the water, and they decided to abandon the platform.
[17:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And a good thing too, because all of a sudden a giant mud crater opened up below the platform, creating a whirlpool that grew to a quarter mile wide, sucking down the entire platform several lakeside homes, and 11 barges.
[17:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Over 65 acres of the lake was swallowed up and so much water drained into the caverns that the flow of the del Camp can now, which usually emptied the lake into Vermillion Bay was for first temporarily creating the biggest waterfall in Louisiana.
[18:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: This called salt water from the Gulf of Mexico to flow into the newly dry lake bed, and just three days the lake was filled with water once more, but instead of a 10-foot deep fresh water haven, it was now a 200 feet deep salt water sinkhole.
[18:24] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But what had happened?
[18:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: An investigation revealed that Mexico were conducting exploratory drilling in the lake, and after miscalculating their position, had drilled down into one of the salt mines.
[18:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The fresh water began to dissolve the salt and larding the whole and draining all the water into the cave below.
[18:40] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Texico was ultimately ordered to base some $44.8 million, about $150 million adjusted for inflation for the damage they caused.
[18:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If I'd been in charge of that rig, I think I'd have been so embarrassed that I'd have just let the sinko swell on me up.
[18:54] \[SPEAKER_00\]: A lot of big companies are always looking to expand by acquiring new companies, Metabot WhatsApp, Applebot Beats, Microsoft Bot Activision Blizzard,
[19:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: These companies bring in millions of billions of dollars to their parent companies, though it's sometimes a gamble with some acquisitions not paying off.
[19:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was this kind of risk that was presented to excite.com CEO George Bellback in 1999.
[19:19] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Excite was one of the leading search engines at the time, second only to Yahoo.
[19:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Things were looking good for the company when too young men approached the CEO with their own search engine looking to sell it to them for $1 million.
[19:31] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It looked functionally similar to Exite but had technology that would allow the engine to grow much faster.
[19:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Bell initially offered the pair $750,000 to buy the engine and then have them both come work for Exite, but it all fell apart.
[19:46] \[SPEAKER_00\]: One of the men said that if they did come to work for Excite, they'd need to scrap all of Excite's current tech and replace it with their own search engines.
[19:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: A deal fell apart, Password and an A and Excite no longer even cracks the tap 20 search engines unable to keep up their functionality with the demand of the rapidly changing world.
[20:04] \[SPEAKER_00\]: But can you guess where the search engine they turned down now places?
[20:08] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Clearly, it's number one.
[20:10] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yep, those two men Bell was approached by were none other than Larry Page and Sergey Brad.
[20:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The founders of Google.
[20:17] \[SPEAKER_00\]: In 2020 Google's parent company Alphabet had a market value of one trillion dollars.
[20:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yep, that's trillion with a T. And I don't reckon Bell was excited when he heard that.
[20:29] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Hang on, Becca.
[20:30] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Before, do you remember when I said meta, Facebook's parent company acquired What's App?
[20:35] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, that story also belongs on this list, because back around 2007, Jan Coorn, and Brian act and applied for jobs at Facebook.
[20:43] \[SPEAKER_00\]: They've been working at Yahoo for several years and while they had plenty of tech experience to work for the social media giant, both were turned down.
[20:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Not long after Jan began tinkering with a new iPhone app he'd created that would allow people to set stannuses on their phones.
[20:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Contacts would be able to see what their friends were up to at any given moment, for instance I'm Bizzyart, at the gym, please don't call.
[21:05] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was buggy, but Brian encouraged him to perfect it in a few months later he switched to focus on instant messaging.
[21:11] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was much smoother than traditional SMS messaging, it didn't store users messages for privacy and it was free.
[21:18] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Enterly people flock to it.
[21:20] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Can you guess what it's called?
[21:22] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yeah, that's it.
[21:23] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What's app?
[21:25] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Currently around 2.7 billion people use it worldwide, and then 2014 it was purchased by Facebook for an Unreal 19.6 billion dollars, adding an extra 3.6 billion to keep all what's apps and employees.
[21:39] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And to think if they just hired Jan and Sergey before, they could have made it for them for free.
[21:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And I wish I could have seen Zuck's face when he realized who he was buying what's that from.
[21:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When things go wrong on land, it's pretty bad, but out in the open ocean it can get much worse.
[21:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And much, much more expensive as proven back on January 7th, 2005.
[22:01] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was on this day the USS San Francisco a nuclear submarine with a full compliment of 12 officers and 125 men was on a high speed port run from Guamdo, Australia when disaster struck.
[22:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: While 525 feet under the waves, the 7,000 tons of traveling at roughly 40 miles per hour suddenly slammed to a stop, and it hit something rupturing the ballast tanks and threatened to strand the ship where it was.
[22:27] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Luckily, the whole hadn't ruptured in the crew in the 88 of which were injured one fatally, managed to navigate the sub back to base after a grueling 52 hours.
[22:37] \[SPEAKER_00\]: When it surfaced the true extent of the damage was revealed and it was bad.
[22:42] \[SPEAKER_00\]: The forward sonar dome had been all but destroyed, most of the front section had just buckled and what was left was barely enough to recover.
[22:50] \[SPEAKER_00\]: What could have caused this?
[22:52] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Had it hit another vessel, an animal, a mine?
[22:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Nope, it was a mound.
[22:58] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Yep, the subit hit part of the ocean floor, but subsite this have entire navigational cruise multiple maps, charts, and swaths of protocols and procedures to help them navigate silently without a use of sonar which would give away their location.
[23:13] \[SPEAKER_00\]: So how had this happened?
[23:15] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Well, after an investigation it was revealed that navigation team were using a chart that didn't have the seamount mat on it, and the captain hadn't put any standard navigational practices and safety procedures in place.
[23:26] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Plenty of other available charts did show a hazard in the area but the commander in charge until chose to operate the sub at maximum speed with no navigation risk mitigation measures in effect.
[23:36] \[SPEAKER_00\]: It was a huge mistake the cost of repair of which were initially estimated to be some $88 million.
[23:44] \[SPEAKER_00\]: but they actually came in at an eye-watering 135 million in total.
[23:49] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Sheesh!
[23:51] \[SPEAKER_00\]: And that number is big enough to get anyone a sinking feeling.
[23:55] \[SPEAKER_00\]: If all these massive mistakes dropped your jaw to the floor, you might want to check out the previous episodes of this series.
[24:02] \[SPEAKER_00\]: Thanks for listening!

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