Ceased Trading

Every company dies. Most get a paragraph in the trade press and one line in a registry somewhere: ceased trading. I've always thought they deserved autopsies.

This channel opens the file on the giants that felt untouchable — the auditors the whole market trusted, the agencies that invented modern advertising, the data firms that swore they could read your mind — and finds the actual mechanism of death. Not "they failed to innovate." The real cause: the incentive that rotted, the merger that never digested, the pitch that became the indictment. Everything is built from court records, regulator findings, and primary reporting. No jargon, no textbook lecture vibes — just the file, opened.

Commentary is provided, uninvited, by Al Budinski: a strategist from Chicago who is currently between things.

New files weekly. The next one is already open.