RIP Corp

Jun 26 2024 16 ep. 33 mins 344

RIP Corp Podcast artwork

On each episode of RIP Corp, we tell the story of one failed business, or a business failure. Join us in the dead mall of business history. RIP Corp is a Charts & Leisure production, written and hosted by Ingrid Burrington. Produced by Meghal Janardan and Mike Rugnetta. Associate producer, Taylor Behnke. Original music and sound design from Andrew Atkin and Michael Simonelli. Fact-checking from Matt Giles. Logo design by Beatriz Lozano and illustrations by Megan Mulholland. Executive produced by Jason Oberholtzer.

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Walk On The Blade: The Marc Rich & Co Commodities Story

Jun 26 2024 43 mins

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 tha

Capitalism Quest: The Sierra Online Story

Mar 20 2024 41 mins

This episode of RIP Corp is about the gap between the nostalgic personal memory of Sierra On-Line and the labor and financial calculations that ultimately shaped the company’s rise and fall. What can the Sierra story tell us, if anything, about how the game industry works today?

2023 Corporate In Memoriam

Dec 28 2023 22 mins

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

$2500 and a Dream: Fansteel and the History of Tantalum

Dec 13 2023 50 mins

The history of the commercial application of tantalum is a story of labor exploitation, suppressing militant organizing, state-backed development of global supply chains, the ups and downs of corporate raider capitalism, environmental damage and legal chicanery. It’s a story of technological development deeply bound up with, and used to perpetuate colonial violence. And it might

RIP Docs: The Vice Bankruptcy

Sep 13 2023 22 mins

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.

Little Paper Guys: An Overview of Corporate Personhood

Aug 16 2023 27 mins

For this episode of RIP Corp, we’re looking at corporate personhood as a concept. How did corporations become people? How did this weird legal fiction become such a powerful defining force in the world? And what would it really mean for a corporation to subvert its Prime Directive ... if that’s even possible.

The Story of This Town is Failure: Fairchild Semiconductor and Its Children

Jun 08 2023 46 mins

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 und

Why Do We Keep Dead Company Merch?

Oct 12 2022 20 mins

This episode of RIP Corp is about the afterlives of corporate merch—as a collector's item, as nostalgia play, as irony-laden artifact representing the hubris of capitalism—and the ways people live with these artifacts and the legacies attached to them. It's also about RIP Corp having merch now! Sorry. Please check out the wonderful designs by Beatriz Lozano and Megan Mulholla

Cosplay Cops and Special Ops: Baldwin-Felts and the West Virginia Mine War

Mar 15 2022 49 mins

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 d

Sex, Lies and Classifieds: The Fall of Backpage

Oct 07 2021 49 mins

Years before QAnon, myths and distortions about children being sold for sex fueled a politically-motivated moral panic in the name of protecting kids, yet largely targeting sex workers, not sex traffickers. This episode of RIP Corp is about Backpage — the classified advertising website founded in 2004 — and the path that led to its dramatic closure in 2018. The fall of Backpage