RIP Corp

This episode of RIP Corp is about what happens when billionaires die—well, what happens and doesn’t happen to their money when they die, most importantly how that money isn’t meaningfully taxed, and how their successors can perpetuate the wealth-inequality machine for generations upon generations through labyrinthine legal structures. We’ll also hear from people intimately familiar with these systems who are trying to fight them.

This episode of RIP Corp is about the gap between (women-focused co-working space slash hospitality service provider) The Wing as a subject of pop media coverage—as a celebrity—and The Wing as an actual business. Hopefully somewhere along the way we get to the bottom of the timeless question of celebrity: why are people so obsessed with this?

This episode of RIP Corp is a look at the commodity trading industry through the history of Marc Rich, the company, and about the tension of telling an industry’s history through its most infamous guy. Was Marc Rich the exception that makes the rest of the industry look bad or the rule who just happened to get caught? How does his style of trading live on today, and what does that legacy tell us about commodity trading more broadly? And how on earth does a guy—how on earth does an industry—intersect with so many major geopolitical events and still insist that the work is “not political”?

Corporate researcher, and proprietor of The Trade Journal Cooperative, Tim Hwang joins Ingrid for a nostalgic look back at 2023's notable corporate losses.

We invited Katie Way, a former Vice reporter and current writer-editor at Hell Gate, a worker-owned news site in New York City, to help us through a deep dive into Vice's bankruptcy documents.

For this episode of RIP Corp, we take a closer look at Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and integrated circuits. After its well-documented breakthroughs, the company that helped invent an entire industry, and arguably the single most technologically significant one in the 20th century, failed to remain competitive. We explore how the way we understand Fairchild’s story (or don’t) matters for how we think about the past, present, and future of chip manufacturing.

The Battle of Matewan, also known as the Matewan Massacre, took place on May 19, 1920. It’s a significant part of the history of the West Virginia Mine Wars. The shootout claimed ten lives: three residents of Matewan and seven employees of the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, a private security firm that among other things worked for coal operators throughout West Virginia. That day lives in infamy in both Appalachian and American labor history. But Baldwin-Felts doesn’t really live on in the public record. Which is weird, because for miners and organizers trying to build union power in the West Virginia coal fields, Baldwin-Felts was synonymous with the enemy.

On this RIP Corp minisode, we spoke with journalist Dave McKenna to help us chart the upward-failing trajectory of Washington Football Team owner Daniel Snyder, how his earlier failure as Chairman of Six Flags led to opportunities to fail in different arenas, and what he now represents (vis-à-vis failure).

While bankruptcies of familiar retail brands made headlines this past year, you can actually still shop at some of them–JC Penney, Nieman Marcus, Guitar Center. So that’s what this episode of RIP Corp is about: Claire’s, and the wild world of modern retail bankruptcy which kind of exists to help distressed companies avoid total collapse, but is also an increasingly gamed system to help a handful of people stay hella rich.

In March of 2001, Blockbuster and Enron abruptly terminated an exclusive 20-year agreement to deliver video-on-demand to consumers' homes, just eight months after the deal's announcement. By the end of that year Enron would enter what, at that time, was the biggest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Meanwhile, Blockbuster would spend the next decade trying, and failing, to compete with Netflix before filing for bankruptcy in 2010. Today both companies are cautionary tales, relics, punchlines in business case studies. But the thing is, the tech worked.