The Most Disastrous Business Partnership Breakups

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A business partnership has to be mutually beneficial, amicable, and legally sound. Unfortunately, a great many business partnerships end in disaster, litigation, and a complete split. Business partners typically end up feuding over financial inequality or perceived undermining of company values. Here is a guide to some of the most disastrous business partnership breakups in history. Some you may recognize from publicity.

Facebook

One of the most famous business partnership breakups in living memory involves the two founders of the social media giant Facebook – which now trades under the name Meta. The whole thing played out like the perfect dream of a partnership dispute lawyer. Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg founded the company together while still at college but fell out during the early days of the company’s success. Zuckerberg claimed that Saverin stopped putting effort into the company and questioned the justification for his partner’s 34 percent ownership and founder accreditation. Saverin was removed – beginning a lengthy and costly series of lawsuits and public spats over the ownership of the company.

Saverin won back around 5 percent of his ownership in Facebook. Despite his now small stake in the company, he still earns the majority of his money from it. He is currently worth almost 6 billion dollars.

Reliance Industries

Brothers Mukesh and Anil Ambani inherited Reliance industries from their father when he passed away at the turn of the new millennium. At the time, the company was the largest private sector business in India. Instead of cooperating to run the company together, the brothers immediately began bickering. Eventually, after a series of relatively embarrassing lawsuits, the brothers split the company in half and ran them individually. Anil famously sued his brother’s company after a natural gas sales deal fell through due to new government regulations. The brothers’ rivalry has captivated the Indian population since it first started to rage.

Standard Oil

John D Rockefeller founded Standard Oil alongside his business partners Henry Flagler and Samuel Andrews in 1870. This was the ‘gilded age’ of American monopoly, and the partners immediately began to use a number of morally dubious strategies in order to dominate the market. They were in part inspired by the then-new concept of natural selection, which gave some businesspeople the impression that only the most ruthless organizations would survive – and that they were justified in doing so by natural order. The partners undercut competitor prices, purchased resources just to deny them to others, purchased competitors with false promises, and sent gangs of thugs to intimidate competitor workers. They pioneered horizontal integration – hilariously parodied in the Simpsons when Mr. Burns destroys the School oil reserves using ‘slant drilling’. They created a ‘trust’ – a powerful consolidating leadership group that enabled decisions to be made without full transparency.

As you might expect, elements of the American public started to get a little sick of Standard Oil’s domination of the market. Various articles and books began to be published by people sick of Standard Oil’s control of the market and its price setting. The period 1902 to 1912 is known as the ‘muckraking decade’ because of the amount of negative press these destructive monopolies generated.

The Sherman Antitrust act was finally passed in 1899, but it took until 1911 for the US government to get its act together and win a case against Standard Oil, forcing it to break up its trust of founders and form separate competing companies. These companies still exist today as Texaco, Shell, and Gulf.

News Corp

News Corp has never been far from the headlines. The gargantuan media empire has been accused of stoking hate, controlling electorates, and a whole host of other shady practices. Their ownership of Fox News, The Sun, and The Wall Street Journal has made them an extremely powerful and staggeringly rich organization. Internally, News Corp has been racked with extreme drama more than a few times.

One of the most dramatic News Corp sagas involved the 1-billion-dollar purchase of Star TV from Hong Kong-based mogul Richard Li. Star TV is one of Asia’s biggest satellite TV brands and would have expanded Rupert Murdoch’s empire deep into the biggest market in the world. Murdoch and Li schemed to create a series of powerful companies within the People’s Republic of China, but their plans were cut short by interference from the Chinese Government, which has historically been very tough on any independent media. Li and Murdoch were forced to abandon their partnership – losing millions of dollars in the process.