Technology

A much slower pace, but Jack Welch immediately comes to mind. Tons of short-term decisions that made the numbers go up but had disastrous long-term consequences not just for GE, but all of America. Lawsuits for everything from illegally dumping chemicals into rivers to discriminatory lending. GE used to be a shining pinnacle of manufacturing and innovation: now it's a weird scribbly logo on the cheapest appliances you can find. He championed outsourcing and intra-company competition, practices that spread and went on to destroy other companies.

Or you could point to Ed Lambert buying and merging Sears and KMart in 2005. Sears especially was egregious. It started as a mail-order catalog designed to make high-end goods affordable to the middle class. It provided good wages and benefits, good quality products, and innovated the retail environment. The idea was that by paying gold wages he would end up creating more customers, and there are tons of examples of Sears employees in the 50's who had Searss-mad houses filled with Sears-made products. It wasn't all great (kind of getting close to a company town, also heavily reliant on cars and suburban sprawl). But a lot of what we think of as the sterotypicall "American Dream" was driven by Sears.

By the early 2000's when Lambert bought it, it definitely wasn't as dominant as it used to be- it had lost some market share to Wal-Mart and other competitors, and the mail-order catalog business was waning and kind of replaced by TV shopping channels. But it still had a sound logistical network. Online shopping was just getting off the ground, Amazon was still just for books, eBay was incredibly sketchy. There were people at the time who wondered if Sears could just transition their catalog business model to he Internet and become dominant again. Instead, Lampert cut costs. Closed stores, outsourced what he could, cut wages and benefits, reduced quality, sold off brands. Old Craftsman tools are still covered today for their quality and durability, while the modern tools are rusting in landfills. They were in prime position to be what Amazon is today, but chose to squander it instead.

Musk might be setting a speed running record with Twitter though.