15 of the Worst CEOs and Executives of All Time
After a year defined by flying door plugs, falling equipment, and so many missing bolts that nearly half of Gen Z is now afraid of air travel, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun announced that he — unlike a whole lot of his poorly-manufactured aircratfts — would be departing the company by the end of the year.
“The eyes of the world are on us,” the embroiled exec wrote in a letter shared with Boeing employees on Monday. “We are going to fix what isn’t working, and we are going to get our company back on the track towards recovery and stability.”
But Calhoun is far from alone in leaving a less-than-stellar mark on a company he was hired to lead. From ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay to Bed Bath & Beyond’s former overlord, here are 20 of the worst CEOs and company executives of all time, as told by business-savvy Redditors.
1. Mark J. Tritton — Bed Bath & Beyond
“Mark Tritton, of BBBY. You have to be a certain level of bad to have your CFO climb up to the top of a building and jump to his own death abandoning his wife and three daughters because the books were that horrible. Then to have the audacity to sue the company after bankruptcy for not honoring the golden parachute after the way you left the company.” —12whistle
2. Gerald Ratner — Signet Jewelers (née Ratners Group)
“Possibly Gerald Ratner. He tanked a very successful jewelry company with one misjudged joke about their products being total c—p. Shares dropped by around $1.3 billion within a few days.” —Correct-Fun-516
3. Richard S. Fuld Jr. — Lehman Brothers
"’It's one thing to oversee the collapse of one of Wall Street's most esteemed firms, Lehman Brothers, but when you're hubris triggers a national financial panic as well, you're a shoo-in for top prize. Fuld's reckless risk taking may have been typical for Wall Street, but his refusal to acknowledge that his firm was in trouble, and take steps to save it, was beyond the pale. Since filing the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history ($613 billion in debts outstanding), Fuld has been belligerent and unrepentant.’" —nomoremammoths
4. Ken Lay — Enron
“Ken Lay has to be mentioned. As the CEO of Enron, he could have simply sat in a chair and made millions of dollars. Instead, he decided to defraud investors so he could have a few more million dollars. He got caught and caused the biggest fraud-related bankruptcy in history. You might be looking for incompetence rather than malice, and if so, ignore me. But I don’t want people to forget about Ken Lay. He was a bad man.” —apollo_reactor_001
5. Bob Nardelli — Home Depot
“Bob Nardelli. Was CEO of The Home Depot in the early 2000’s. Reversed the core company beliefs, and decided that he wanted to compete with Walmart. Made the stock tank. Lost my 401k entirely. Then resigned with a huge amount of money and I had to change jobs. Almost 20 years ago, and HD is still recovering.” —Npatrick93
6. Dave Calhoun — Boeing and GE
Long before he — pun avoidable — crashed and burned Boeing, Calhoun garnered a less-than-stellar reputation for his work as higher-up at GE, where he worked for 26 years on various transportation initiatives. As Redditor u/Good-Gold-6515 so aptly put it, “wow this dude got a lot of practice helping run a brand into the ground way before Boeing!”
7. Ben Kohn — Playboy
“Ben Kohn, CEO of Playboy. How does one fail so poorly to license one of the brands with greatest global recognition, while also failing to sell p—n and liquor to the American people? Not to mention continuously diluting shareholder value to the point of almost delisting the stock. Its market cap is just $90 million now, a billionaire could buy the entire company as a joke. Though Suhail Rizvi has been around for about as long/chairman of the board, so perhaps he is the one to blame.” —DrS–tpostMDJDPhDMBA
8. Chris C. — Hasbro
“Chris C., CEO of Hasbro Comes in to a money printing organization. Describes in his opening speeches about how no one at his cocktail parties knew was magic the gathering was, nor did he. Printing a collectable card game is a simple business model; wait for card values to go up, reprint them, and sell boxes due to value of staple cards inside. He immediately prints everything into the ground. Then, he goes back and even reprints cards the company had promised for 25+ years to never reprint. Alienating all of the companies whale spenders. Whale mtg collectors and finance nerds share space in a Venn diagram. They begin writing articles in finance news that hasbron is killing its golden goose. The stock has plummeted.” — JohnLaw1717
9. Stockton Rush — OceanGate
“It’s gotta be Stockton Rush. Not only did he make terrible decision after terrible decision when it came to designing their “innovative” submersibles, but then he was dumb enough to take a one way trip to the bottom of the ocean in his accumulation of bad decisions.” —Pfolty
10. Steve Ballmer — Microsoft
“Steve Ballmer belongs somewhere on the list. That meathead was CEO for ~15 years and managed a -30% return on MSFT. Dude was the luckiest m'fer on the planet to cross paths with Gates early on in life.” —blazing_straddles
11. Gary Forsee — Sprint
“Gary Forsee, Sprint CEO before Dan Hesse. Responsible for the Sprint/Nextel trainwreck, responsible for the sorry state of Sprint's network when Hesse came along. Famously, Forsee believed that all anyone would ever need was a 3G network. No one would need anything faster. So network upgrades never happened. But a whole bunch of screwing the customer and Sprint corporate partners did happen. Customers don't like Sprint, call too much? Terminate them. Sprint violated a corporate contract with its partner? Ah, buy them out and fire all the employees! His golden parachute gave him his full salary up until the Marcelo Claure era”. — eyoungren_2
12. Travis Kalanick — Uber
“The CEO of Uber - Travis Kalanick. He was a huge d—bag in the past few years and he continues to be really terrible in 2017. His company is in a PR nightmare right now. In 2014, when the announcement came through that he would be on the board for Donald Trump's economic advisory team, Kalanick responded with a message to staff in which he said he would ‘join the advisory board of President Trump’s economic council’ adding: ‘We’ve taken the view that in order for discourse to be honest and authentic, there have to be changes on both sides.’ This was a huge mistake and a slap in the face to his staff and all of his employees. They were already in a big mess with sexist allegations against them from female drivers making them look bad, but this just made things worse. In 2017, after being pressured from many of his employees, Kalanick stepped down from Trump's advisory council. I don't think I've ever been so happy to see a CEO do something decent.” —stupid_man_costume
13. Bobby Kotick — Activision
“Activision CEO Bobby Kotick knew for years about s—l-misconduct allegations at video game giant.”
14. J.P. Morgan – Drexel, Morgan & Co. (later known as JPMorgan Chase & Co)
“If you go back to 1900 or so, you find guys like J.P. Morgan who used some pretty sleazy tactics. Morgan rigged the 1897 election and essentially stole inventions away from Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison. Several other CEOs in those days essentially made their workers into slaves. Henry Clay Frick actually used the Pinkertons to break up a labor dispute and some people got shot.” — red_duke117
15. Ray Kroc — McDonald's
“Ray Kroc was sort of a jerk as he reneged on a deal to give the McDonald brothers a permanent cut of McDonald's profits. With that said, both of the McDonald brothers still wound up very wealthy. He wasn't really as big of a jerk to the brothers as The Founder depicts, though. There have been a whole lot of CEOs that were arrested for things like fraud and such.” — red_duke117
16. Jamie Dimon — JPMorgan Chase & Co
“Jamie Dimon. About to be head of big bailout bank financial crisis number two. 2008 and 2022…DRS YOUR GAMESTOP NOW!!”
17. Elon Musk — Tesla, Twitter, The Boring Company, SpaceX, etc.
“Elon Musk. He bought his way into Tesla, has contributed a single patent (1) which is a slightly larger charging tip IIRC. The amount of credit he claims for so many engineers hard work is obscene, especially while he goes on to promote hustle culture saying he's the CEO of four companies... While in actuality having limited contributions in work, and generally considers talking about Tesla et al during meals ‘work.’” — Show_me_ur_butt_plz
18. Kay Whitmore — Kodak
“For failing to capitalize on one of its own inventions and have that invention, in the hands of others, obliterate its core business model, Kay Whitmore of Eastman Kodak.” — Mm_Donut
19. Hector Ruiz – Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.
“Hector Ruiz was the CEO from 2002 to 2008, which is the time frame where AMD was ‘mysteriously’ losing hardware contracts while having superior/competitive chips, followed by the Core 2 launch. Whatever else you think of his decision making, it can't be easy to lay down a plan for your company when the market isn't behaving in any predictable way.” —OftenSarcastic
20. Jeff Bezos — Amazon
“Have people forgotten that Jeff Bezoz runs warehouses with so bad work conditions that youd be better off homeless? Basically exploiting the lack of workers rights in the US. The warehouses he tried to run in other first world countries couldnt even function because he was forced to actually pay workers and give them better hours/conditions.” —bumpmoon
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