General
History teaches us plenty of important lessons on a wide variety of subjects. According to Web.com Reviews, we should all take those lessons and learn from the mistakes of our past to avoid repeating it in the future. Here are some mistakes which had grave financial consequences for individuals, corporations, and nations.
The Mistakes
- Bitcoin Fortune lost – If you were optimistic about cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin in its early days you would have been absolutely right and could have cashed in on millions. James Howells, a Welsh IT worker didn’t just know it but also had a massive collection of 7500 bitcoins.
Maybe, that’s why he has toughed out some sleepless nights after he came to know that his collection was worth around 7.3 million USD in 2020, but he had lost the private key with his discarded hard drive.
- The third founder of Apple – Since the rise of MAC, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak have become household names in America. However, much less is talked about the third founder of the company, Ron Wayne. Ron Wayne sold his 10 percent share of the company back in 1976. However, the market cap of Apple has crossed well over the $1 trillion dollar mark. That means Ron Wayne could have cashed in over $100 billion today.
- The Alaska sale – When Russia sold the territory of Alaska back in 1867, to its future World War ally and Cold War rival for a measly sum of $7.2 million, the country didn’t know that they were conducting the worst trade deal in history.
When it comes down to cost per acre, Russia sold 1.5 million hectares of land to the US for just 2 cents an acre. Just half a century later, Americans hit gold in the icy land and the Klondike Gold Rush took place. The price of the territory ballooned to 100 times its purchase price.
- Fat Trains of France – SNCF, a French train company realized that they have made a massive error in calculation back in 2014. The company had purchased around 2000 trains for a sum of $20 billion. However, the trains were a bit too wide for most of the stations. This mistake cost the company $68 million to widen out the platforms on the narrow stations.
- Excite missed out on Google – When you want to search about something on the Internet, you open the Excite search engine. That could have been a possibility if Excite CEO didn’t pass up to buy out Google for just $750,000. An expensive mistake that could have made Excite a dominant tech giant today with a market cap of a trillion dollars.
Conclusion
Web.com Reviews suggests that you assess your decisions carefully and learn from these expensive mistakes. When you compare mistakes worth millions, billions, and trillions of dollars, a few lost dollars at the ATM machine seem like a blessing.
