The Aldebert Autopsies

For 52 years Bed Bath & Beyond was the biggest specialty home retailer in America. Then it spent $11.7 billion buying its own stock back from Wall Street instead of putting the money into the business. When the business needed cash for a rainy day, the rainy day fund was gone. Not stolen. Handed out. The doctrine calls it an owner draw dressed up as a smart use of company money.

For 60 years Target was the store that beat the system. A $100 billion empire with a bullseye on the wall. Then sales fell, foot traffic dropped, the CEO got pushed out, and $12 billion in market value vanished in weeks. The written companion to Jay's Target documentary. Canada, the pandemic inventory bet, the DEI reversal. Three failures. One pattern. Profit as an afterthought.

For 78 years Tupperware was the brand that invented in-home direct selling. An inventor with a plastic burp seal. A single mother who figured out how to sell it at kitchen tables. Then the parties stopped. And the factories kept running. Bankruptcy filed September 2024 with $811.8 million in debt and a distribution channel that had been dying in slow motion for 25 years.

In 2009 a Nortel engineer named Robert Wang invented the Instant Pot in his Ottawa garage. Ten years later, a Wall Street firm bought his company for $615 million. Two years after that, the same Wall Street firm made the business borrow $450 million more, then paid out $345 million of it to itself and its co-investors. Two more years and the company filed bankruptcy. The people who lent the money got back about seven cents for every dollar they were owed.

At 3:00 AM Eastern Time on May 2, 2026, Spirit Airlines ceased all operations after 34 years. The final flight touched down in Dallas past midnight. The last dispatch message read UNOFFICIALLY WE STOP FLYING AT 0300 EST. GODSPEED MY FRIEND. Seventeen thousand jobs. Two bankruptcies in twelve months. A blocked merger. A vendor's engine defect that grounded 20 percent of the fleet. And a low-cost business model with no profit floor built in.

In January 2019, WeWork was valued at $47 billion. Six weeks after filing the paperwork to go public in August 2019, the deal was pulled, the founder was pushed out, and the value had crashed to under $10 billion. Four years later, bankruptcy with $18.6 billion in debt. Every building WeWork rented was locked in for a decade. Every customer of WeWork could leave in a month. And $47 billion in future rent came due on a business built to sell month-to-month memberships.

A 132-year-old retailer took 25 years to die. In 1886 a Minnesota station agent bought a shipment of unwanted watches. By 1920 Sears was the largest retailer in America. Then Eddie Lampert took over in 2005. In 2015 he transferred 235 of the best Sears buildings into a separate real estate company he also controlled, then made Sears rent those same buildings back at market prices. Sears own creditors later alleged the real estate was sold for hundreds of millions less than it was worth. Same doctrine failure as Red Lobster. Bigger scale. Longer death.

On March 14, 2018, Toys R Us announced it would liquidate 735 stores. 33,000 jobs. Eight days later, founder Charles Lazarus died at 94, having watched his company liquidate for eight days. KKR, Bain, and Vornado had bought Toys R Us in 2005 for $6.6 billion, put up only $1.3 billion of their own money, and made Toys R Us borrow the other $5.3 billion. From day one, the interest on that debt was bigger than the toy business made in a year. Amazon got blamed. The 2005 deal killed it.

On March 28, 2007, Circuit City fired 3,400 of its most experienced store employees in one day. Not for poor performance. For being paid too much. The company called it wage management. The severance line hit the P&L that quarter for $9.9 million. Twenty months later Circuit City filed for bankruptcy. Six months after that, all 567 stores were closed and 34,000 workers were out of a job. Between 2003 and 2007, the same company had spent nearly $1 billion buying its own stock back from Wall Street at an average price the market would later mark down by 80 percent. Best Buy watched the whole thing from across the parking lot and grew to $45 billion in revenue.

In September 2000, Reed Hastings flew from Silicon Valley to Blockbuster's headquarters in Dallas and offered to sell Netflix for $50 million. CEO John Antioco called Netflix a very small niche business and declined. Ten years later Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy owing $1.46 billion. But the Netflix meeting was not what killed the company. What killed the company was 9,094 store leases signed at the peak of the physical rental era, most of them 5 to 10 year commitments backed by corporate guarantees. When streaming arrived, the customers stopped walking in. The leases did not care. The rent was due either way. Today there is one Blockbuster left on Earth, in Bend, Oregon. Netflix is worth $250 billion.

On Sunday, July 30, 2023 at noon, Yellow Corporation ceased operations. 30,000 employees, 22,000 of them Teamsters, learned by text message that they no longer had jobs. Seven days later Yellow filed Chapter 11 in Delaware. The federal government held $729 million in debt and a 29.6 percent equity stake from a $700 million CARES Act pandemic loan Congress had already concluded should never have been made. Everyone blamed the union. The doctrine says the union did not kill Yellow. What killed Yellow was a $1.05 billion acquisition in December 2003 followed by a $1.5 billion acquisition in 2005, promised synergies that could not be executed against Teamsters workforce agreements, and eighteen years of Fixed Cost Capacity breach that nobody with authority ever named. Old Dominion, Estes, and XPO absorbed Yellow's freight within ninety days. The competitor Yellow was trying to defend against collected the business Yellow left behind.

Three private-equity operators in Menlo Park, backed by more than $2 billion from SoftBank, spent six years trying to build the Flextronics of construction. They opened factories in Tracy and Spokane. They acquired 20+ subsidiaries. They won a contract to build 14,000 housing units in Saudi Arabia. And they lost $2.78 billion across three years without ever posting a profitable operating quarter. On June 6, 2021 Katerra filed Chapter 11 in Southern Texas. Contractors were owed $1.29 billion. 82 projects had already been shut down. Michael Marks, the former Flextronics CEO whose reputation for scaling manufacturing was the founding thesis, watched from the founder's chair. What killed Katerra was not the Greensill collapse in March 2021. It was the assumption that construction was electronics manufacturing at a different scale.

Dale Hill founded Proterra in Golden, Colorado in 2004 to build electric transit buses before the market was ready. Nineteen years later, in January 2021, Proterra went public through an ArcLight SPAC merger at a $1.6 billion valuation and netted $640 million in cash. Two and a half years after that, on August 7, 2023, Proterra filed Chapter 11 in the District of Delaware. 2022 revenue was $309.4 million against a $238 million net loss. Losing 77 cents on every revenue dollar. Three business units, one cash pool, no path to close the Working Capital Gap when public markets tightened. The buses were viable. The batteries were viable. The charging was viable. The combination of all three funded from one balance sheet was not. Volvo bought the powertrain business. Phoenix Motor bought the bus business. Marmon Holdings bought the charging assets. The doctrine question of which line to protect was answered by the bankruptcy court instead of the board.

Founded in Santa Clara in 1983 over a poker game. Spent forty years becoming the primary bank for the US tech and venture capital industry. Deposits nearly tripled from $62 billion in March 2020 to $175.5 billion by December 2022. The bank invested a huge portion of that inflow into long-duration government bonds when rates were near zero. When the Fed raised rates 500 basis points across 2022, the $91.3 billion held-to-maturity portfolio developed more than $15 billion in unrealized losses. Ninety-four percent of the deposits were uninsured. On March 8, 2023, SVB announced it had sold $21 billion of bonds at a $1.8 billion loss and needed to raise $2.25 billion. On March 9, depositors pulled $42 billion in a single trading session. On March 10, the FDIC seized the bank. Third-largest bank failure in United States history. Forty years of franchise value collapsed in 48 hours because the maturity mismatch between the liabilities and the assets became visible at the same moment the depositor base had the network coordination to act on it.