Ancient Mysteries - The Companies That Went Too Far

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

How far can a company go in pursuit of profit?This documentary explores some of the most controversial corporate decisions in modern history. Using publicly documented investigations, court records, historical reporting, and official findings, we examine how major companies responded to scientific evidence, legal challenges, environmental disasters, public health crises, and growing public scrutiny.Rather than focusing on conspiracy theories, this video looks at documented events, asking the same three questions throughout every case: What did they know? What decisions did they make? And what happened afterward?From public health and environmental contamination to corporate accountability and global influence, these stories reveal patterns that continue to shape the modern world.💬 Which case surprised you the most?🔔 Subscribe for more documentaries exploring hidden history, corporate scandals, true investigations, and remarkable events from around the world.

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Oh, man. Shop back to school at IKEA. Hey there, truth seekers. Today we're pulling back the curtain on some of the biggest most beloved companies on the planet, the ones whose logos you see every single day, and exposing the horror shows hiding behind those friendly little mascots, baby formula that killed infants, painkillers that sparked an overdose epidemic, and a social media giant that helped fuel a genocide. And the best part, most of them are still around, still profitable, still smiling at you from your kitchen shelf right now. Here's the pattern you'll see on repeat. A company finds out its product is hurting people, buries the airing.

evidence, keeps cashing in, then pays a fine so tiny, it's basically a rounding error. Rinse, repeat, become a billionaire. It's not a bug, it's the whole business model. So the big question today, which of these corporate villains actually takes the crown for the most evil company in the world? You're the judge. Smash that like button and drop a comment telling me what city you're watching from. Let's get into it. So before we start naming and shaming, let's talk about the machine itself. Because here's the thing that trips most people up. They imagine corporate evil as some cartoon villain in a boardroom, stroking a cat, cackling about ruining lives. That's not how it works. The reality is way more boring and way more terrifying. Nobody in these companies wakes up and

decides to be a monster. They just wake up and decide to hit their quarterly numbers, and somewhere along that perfectly reasonable sounding path, a whole lot of people end up dead. Evil, it turns out, is rarely a decision. It's usually just a spreadsheet. The problem starts with size. A small business that poisons its customers gets sued, goes bankrupt and vanishes, and the owner spends the next decade explaining himself to a judge. Simple, justice, more or less. But scale that same business up by a factor of 10,000, and something bizarre happens to the physics of accountability. Suddenly the company is too big to punish, too rich to intimidate, and too tangled into the economy to actually shut down. It becomes a machine that will, and I mean this almost literally,

burn down half the world if it means the stock ticks up a single dollar. Not because anyone is cruel, but because the machine is built to do exactly one thing, and that thing is growth. And growth does not have a conscience module installed. Let's look at the actual mechanics, because this is where it gets genuinely wild. Take the legal department, when you or I get sued, we panic. We hire one nervous lawyer we found online, and we start mentally selling our car. When a mega corporation gets sued, it deploys a standing army of several hundred attorneys who do nothing all day but make lawsuits disappear. These people are not there to determine whether the company did something wrong. That question bores them. They are there to make sure that even if the company absolutely unquestionably did

something wrong, it costs as little as humanly possible and takes as long as legally achievable. Delay is a weapon. A lawsuit that takes 12 years to resolve is a lawsuit where half the plaintiffs have unfortunately died of the very thing they were suing about. The corporation naturally counts on this. Then there's lobbying, which is the polite suit and tie word for legally purchasing the referees before the game even starts. Instead of breaking the rules, a big enough company simply pays to help write them. Why cheat at a game when you can be on the committee that decides what counts as cheating? They fund the campaigns of the exact politicians who will later vote on whether their industry gets regulated and then act shocked, absolutely scandalised, when those regulations somehow come out toothless.

It's a beautiful little closed loop. The fox isn't guarding the henhouse. The fox designed the henhouse, got a tax break for building it, and named a wing of it after himself. But the real masterpiece, the thing you have to understand everything else in this video is the fine. We think of fines as punishment. For these companies, a fine is a receipt. It's the cost of doing business, a line item budgeted years in advance, filed somewhere between office supplies and the holiday party. Picture it this way. Imagine you could rob a bank of $100 million, and the only penalty was a guaranteed $5 million fee, paid quietly, with no jail time and no admission that you did anything wrong. You wouldn't call that a punishment. You'd call that the

greatest investment opportunity in human history, and you'd rob that bank every single day until you died of old age in a mansion. That is, functionally, the business model we're about to examine. The Crime pays. That's the whole point. The fine is just the tip you leave for the government. And this brings us to the concept that ties this entire video together. The one lens I want you to look through for every single company coming up, a symmetry. It's a fancy word for a very simple, very ugly idea. It means the fight was never fair to begin with. On one side, you have a regular human being, a mother in a village, a guy with back pain, a gardener, a parent buying baby shampoo, someone with one lawyer, if they're lucky, a limited lifespan, rent to pay and a very human need to sleep at night.

On the other side, you have an immortal entity with more money than most countries, a legal army that never tires, and nobody to throw in prison and no soul to keep it up at night. When those two sides collide in a courtroom, we like to pretend it's a battle. It isn't. It's a weather event. You don't fight a hurricane. You just try to survive it and hope your name isn't on the wrong list. So as we go through these companies, don't ask whether they broke the law. That's the amateur question. The professionals broke the law. law with the full knowledge that breaking it would be cheaper than following it. The real question, the one I want you keeping score on, is how many people had to lose so the machine could keep

growing? Keep that number in your head, it's going to get big. Now, with our villain profile fully assembled, let's meet our first contestant, and I promise you will never look at your kitchen same way again. Meet Nestle. If you live on planet Earth and eat food, you have almost certainly handed this company your money, probably today, possibly within the last hour. It sits behind more than 2,000 brands, a sprawling empire of chocolate, coffee, cereal, water, pet food, and roughly every snack you've ever grabbed at a gas station while making questionable life choices. The whole brand identity is cuddly and wholesome. All warm kitchens and happy families and a friendly little chocolate rabbit hopping across your screen. It is engineered from the

ground up to feel like a hug, which makes it genuinely spectacular that this same, warm, fuzzy, rabbit-endorsed corporation is responsible for what many people consider one of the most cold-blooded marketing campaigns of the 20th century. The bunny, it turns out, has a body count. Rewind to the 1970s. Nestle had a product to sell infant formula. Now, in the wealthy world, formula was doing fine, but there's a natural ceiling on how much baby formula you can sell in rich countries, because awkwardly for the sales team, mothers already come equipped with a free, superior, self-replenishing version of the product. Breast milk is, from a purely capitalist standpoint, an infuriating competitor. It costs nothing. It's always in stock. It even adapts its

nutritional content to the baby's needs, which no factory on earth can replicate. If breast milk were a startup, it would put every formula company out of business overnight. So Nestle looked at the developing world, at Africa, Asia and Latin America, saw millions of new mothers and made a decision that should keep several people awake for the rest of their natural lives. If the free competitor was the problem, they'd simply have to eliminate the free competitor. Here's how the plan worked, and I want you to hold on to something before you get sick to your stomach. Nestle hired saleswomen, dressed them in crisp white uniforms and sent them into maternity wards and clinics

across the developing world, where they were widely understood by new mothers to be nurses, medical professionals. People you trust with your newborn's life. These fake nurses, and I cannot stress enough that this was a marketing tactic wearing a stethoscope, would hand out free samples of formula to brand new mothers and gently encourage them to start their babies on it right away.

Free samples. What a generous company, right? Except this wasn't generosity. This was the most calculated free trial in corporate history, because it was engineered around one grim piece of biology. If a mother stops breastfeeding for long enough, her milk supply dries up. Permanently, use it or lose it, and the fake nurse made very sure you lost it. You see the trap now.

The free samples last just long enough to shut down a mother's natural milk supply. Then the samples run out. And now this mother, who was doing perfectly fine a few weeks ago, is standing in a village with a hungry baby and a body that no longer produces food, holding an empty tin with only one option left in the entire world. Buy more formula from Nestle forever. The company had, in the most literal sense possible, created a captive market by breaking the biological function that made its own product unnecessary. It's the business equivalent of giving someone free crutches, then breaking both their legs, then charging them rent on the crutches.

Diabolical doesn't cover it. This required a strategy meeting. But here's where the tragedy compounds, because it turns out breaking a mother's ability to feed her child was only step one of the horror. Formula isn't like breast milk, it doesn't come ready to serve. you have to mix the powder with clean water and follow precise instructions. And this is a product that Nestle aggressively pushed into communities that often did not have clean water, reliable refrigeration, or the ability to read the instructions printed on the tin. So mothers, desperate and now dependent, mixed formula with contaminated water, exposing their babies to disease. And because formula is expensive and these were poor families, mothers stretched every tin to make it last,

watering the formula down until it barely contained any nutrition at all. The result was exactly what you'd fear. Babies drinking dirty water dressed up as milk, or drinking milk that was mostly just water, slowly starving on a diet marketed as the healthy modern choice. Infants died, not a handful. Estimates run into the many thousands. There's a bitter nickname historians gave these little ones, and I'll spare you the full weight of it, but they were babies who died for the crime of their mothers being sold a lie by a woman in a fake nurse costume.

Eventually the world noticed. In 1977, activists launched an international boycott of Nestle, one of the largest consumer boycotts in history, and it spread across countries and dragged on for years. The scandal got so enormous that the World Health Organization itself stepped in, eventually helping create an international code specifically to regulate how this kind of formula could be marketed, because apparently we needed formal global legislation to establish the wild concept that you shouldn't dress marketers as nurses to trick mothers into starving their babies. That is a real rule that real adults had to sit down and formally write.

Let that sink in, and the frame of it. friendly chocolate rabbit, still hopping, the warm kitchens, still on your screen. Because here's the punchline that isn't funny at all. None of it stopped Nestle from becoming one of the largest food companies on the planet. The boycott stung, the WHO scolded, and the machine, wounded, but very much alive, kept right on growing. Remember our framework. The scandal was just a fine, an expensive one, sure, but a receipt, not a punishment. And if you're thinking, surely that was a one-time disaster. Surely a company can't just keep doing this. Oh, my sweet summer viewer, buckle back up because Nestle was just warming up, and the next chapter of their story swaps out one nightmare

for two brand new ones. Fast forward a few decades, and we land in 2021 in the Supreme Court of the United States, where Nestle found itself defending against an accusation that sounds like it belongs in a history book, and not a modern courtroom, child slavery. The case centered on the cocoa plantations of Ivory Coast in West Africa, where a staggering amount of the world's chocolate begins, and the people harvesting those cocoa beans, the ones making the sweet treats that fund the friendly rabbit included children, not teenagers with summer jobs, children as young as 11, in some cases trafficked across borders from neighbouring countries, working under conditions that a normal person would describe using words like, enslaved, because there isn't a gentler word that's also accurate.

The lawsuit was brought by former child labourers who alleged they'd been trafficked and forced to work harvesting cocoa that fed into these massive supply chains. Now here's where you need to pay very close attention, because this is corporate evil showing off its footwork, and it's genuinely impressive in the way a great white shark is impressive. The Supreme Court threw the case out, and the natural assumption the one Nestle would absolutely love you to make is that the court threw it out because there was no slavery. That is not what happened. The court did not rule that the children weren't enslaved. It didn't investigate the plantations and issue a heartwarming report declaring everyone was actually thriving. The case was dismissed on jurisdiction, which is a technical

legal question about whether an American court is even the right venue to hear a lawsuit about harm that happened on the other side of the world. In plain English, the court essentially said, this might be horrific, but it's not clear we're the right people to rule on it. The horror was never disproven. The plaintiffs just got shown the door on a technicality before anyone had to look at the evidence, and Nesley, ever the master of spin, took this jurisdictional shrug and paraded it around like a full acquittal. Case dismissed, they said, as if a referee calling a game on account of rain is the same as winning the championship. Then, to soothe the public conscience, The company started slapping fair trade and ethical sourcing labels on select products here and there,

a little sprinkle of moral seasoning to make you feel good about your chocolate bar. It's the corporate version of doing one nice thing on camera to distract from everything happening off it. Look over here at this reassuring green label. Please don't ask too many questions about the other 90% of the supply chain. And it works because we want it to work. We want our chocolate to be innocent. The company is simply monetising our desire not to think about it. But cocoa and formula, believe it or not, aren't even the final.

Nali of the Nestle Horror Show, because the company developed a new obsession, one so on-the-nose villainous that if you put it in a movie script, an editor would tell you to tone it down for being unrealistic. Nestle got obsessed with water, specifically with owning it. The company built a colossal bottled water business, and to feed it, it went around pumping enormous quantities of groundwater out of the ground, frequently for a shockingly tiny fee, and selling it back to the public in plastic bottles at a markup that would make a diamond dealer blush. One of the most notorious examples played out in Osceola, Michigan, where Nestle pumped out vast amounts of groundwater while paying almost nothing for the privilege in a state that, and here's the part that really

seasons the irony, was simultaneously dealing with communities that couldn't get clean, safe water out of their own taps, extracting water for pennies to sell for dollars, in a region where clean water was a genuine crisis. You could not write a more cartoonish premise, and just when you think a company can't tell on itself any harder, we arrive at the quote. A Nestle chief executive once weighed in on the idea that access to water is a basic human right, a notion that most people consider so obvious it barely needs stating. Water being the substance were literally made of and die within days without. And his position, roughly, was that calling water a human right was an extreme view. Extreme. The radical, fringe, out-there position in this executive's framing was the wild suggestion

that people should be entitled to the thing that keeps them alive. In his worldview, water was a product, a commodity like any other, to be priced and sold, and the extreme. were the people who thought, maybe you shouldn't have to pay a corporation to not die of thirst. There it is. That's the whole philosophy, said out loud, into a microphone. The mask didn't slip. There was never a mask.

There was just a very friendly rabbit standing in front of it the whole time. So that's contestant number one, and we've barely scratched the surface of this list. A company that broke mothers to sell formula, lawyered its way past child slavery, and declared water for humans an extremist position, all while a chocolate bunny waves at your kids from a cereal box. Keep that body count running in your head,

because we're only getting started, and the next companies on this list looked at Nestle's playbook and thought, cute, but we can do worse. Now, Nestle sold you a lie about milk. Our next contestant sold America a lie about pain, and that lie went on to kill more people than most wars. If you want to see corporate evil evolve from broken mothers to broken nations, meet Purdue Farmer and the family that ran it, the Sacklers. For most of the 20th century, the Sacklers were a family of doctors who'd built up a quiet, unremarkable little pharmaceutical company. Nothing dramatic. The kind of a kind of business that makes cough syrup and laxatives and slowly, boringly, makes money. Then, in 1996,

they released a product that would change everything, and not in the fun way that phrase usually implies. The product was called Oxycontin, a powerful opioid painkiller, and it turned that sleepy family firm into a billion-dollar empire practically overnight. We're talking about a fortune so vast it would eventually rival the wealth of families that had been rich for centuries, all built on a single pill. The sacklers went from comfortable to obscenely, catastrophically wealthily. in what felt like a heartbeat. And the secret to that overnight fortune wasn't a medical breakthrough. It was a marketing campaign built on a foundation of pure weapons-grade dishonesty. Here's the central lie, and it's a masterpiece of its craft. Purdue told doctors that OxyContin was safe, that the risk of

a patient becoming addicted was, and I want you to appreciate this number, less than 1%, less than 1%, as in, don't worry about it, prescribe freely, your patients basically won't get hooked. That's an incredibly reassuring statistic. It's also, unfortunately, built on absolutely nothing resembling real science. Where did this magic number come from? It was extracted, and I use that word carefully from a brief letter to the editor of a medical journal, not a study, not a clinical trial, a letter. A short, informal note about a very narrow set of hospital patients in tightly controlled conditions, which Purdue then inflated, stretched and repackaged as ironclad proof that their new opioid was safe for basically everyone with a sore back. It's like reading a single positive Yelp

review and using it to claim your restaurant has never given anyone food poisoning in the history of dining. The evidence was a footnote. The lie built on it was a billion dollar industry, and then came the sales machine, which Purdue ran with a level of enthusiasm you normally only see in cult recruitment. The company built an aggressive army of sales representatives and unleashed them on doctors across the country, armed with charm, free stuff and that beautiful, fictional 1% number. And Purdue understood something crucial about human nature. Doctors are people, and people respond to being made to feel special. So Purdue made them feel very special indeed. Doctors who prescribed a lot of Oxycontin found themselves invited to lovely all-expenses paid conferences at sunny resorts,

showered with bonuses, meals, speaking fees, and the general warm glow of being treated like a VIP. The message was subtle but unmistakable. The more of this you prescribe, the more we love you. It was a loyalty program, except instead of earning a free coffee, you earned a weekend in a nice hotel, and instead of buying coffee, your customers were becoming addicted to opioids, naturally prescription soared. Turns out if you pay people to recommend your product and tell them it's perfectly safe, they recommend a lot of your product. Who could have possibly predicted this? But here's the detail that turns this from garden variety corporate greed into something genuinely sinister, and it's the part that should make your blood run cold. Oxycontin was supposedly special because it was time

release. The whole selling point was that the pill dissolved slowly, releasing its dose gradually over many hours, which was meant to make it safer. Except there was a tiny problem with that design. A loophole so obvious it barely deserves the name. If you crush the pill, all that slow-release protection vanished instantly, and the entire massive dose hit at once. Crush it, and a pill designed to last 12 hours became an immediate overwhelming flood of opioids, perfect for snorting, perfect for a powerful high, perfect for addiction. And here's the thing you need to sit with. Purdue knew this. The company was aware early on that people were crushing the pills to abuse them. They had the information, and they said nothing, changed nothing, and kept the sales machine running at full speed,

because the pills were flying off the shelves and the resorts weren't going to pay for themselves. Knowing your product is being weaponised against the very people you swore it would help, and choosing the resort weekends anyway, that's not a mistake. That's a decision made repeatedly in rooms full of adults who could do math, and the math got horrifying. Because here's the natural, grimly predictable arc of an opioid addiction. A patient gets prescribed oxycontin for a real injury, a bad back, a surgery, a car accident. They take it as directed.

Their body, being a body, becomes dependent. They need more, but eventually the prescription runs out, or a doctor gets nervous, or the pills simply become too expensive to keep buying. And now you have a person who is physically addicted to opioids and suddenly cut off from the legal supply. So they do what addicted, desperate people do. They find a cheaper, stronger, illegal alternative on the street. They move to heroin. And then, as the street supply got deadlier, to fentanyl, which is so potent that a dose smaller than a few grains of salt can kill you. A prescription for back pain, sold with a smile and a resort brochure, became a pipeline that,

fed hundreds of thousands of ordinary people straight into the deadliest drug epidemic in modern history. Since 1999, more than half a million people have died from opioid overdoses in the United States. Half a million. That's not a statistic. That's a city. Wiped off the map, one funeral at a time, all downstream of a pill sold on the strength of a letter to the editor. So that's the crime. Now let's talk about how the family behind it pulled off what might be the single most audacious escape act in the history of corporate accountability. Because the Sackler story doesn't end with the bodies. It ends with a magic trick. The most convenient defence for any family caught at the centre of a catastrophe like this is simple.

We didn't know. We just made a legal product. Doctors prescribed it. We're as shocked and saddened as anyone. It's a nice defence. There's just one problem with it in the Sackler's case, and that problem is paper, mountains of it. Because as lawsuits piled up and investigators started prying open the company's internal files, they found the receipts, and the receipts were damning.

Internal documents, emails and memos showed that the family wasn't sitting obliviously in a mansion somewhere. Members of the family were deeply involved in the business, reading the reports, seeing the numbers, tracking the sales, and in some cases pushing for even more aggressive marketing, even as the death toll became impossible to ignore. The we didn't know defence requires that you didn't know. The documents suggested they knew, watched, and calculated. It's hard to claim you were blindsided when your own emails read like a play-by-play commentary on the disaster you're profiting from. So the family did what our very first chapter told you the powerful always do when the reckoning approaches. They didn't panic. They planned, as the wave of lawsuits swelled toward a tsunami, over $10 billion was moved out of the company and into the hands of the family itself in the years leading up to the company's 2019 bankruptcy.

Think about the choreography here. You take a company that's about to be buried under an avalanche of lawsuits from grieving families, and before the avalanche hits, you quietly carry the treasure out the back door and stash it in personal accounts, trusts, and offshore havens where the lawsuits can't reach. Then you let the now-hollowed-out company file for bankruptcy. And here's the genius, evil part. A bankrupt company can't pay much because, well, it's bankrupt. All the money already left the building, safely tucked into the pockets of the very people who ran the show. The company takes the fall, the family keeps the fortune. It's the corporate equivalent of setting your house on fire for the insurance money after you've already moved all the furniture into a storage unit across town. And then they tried for the true masterstroke, the thing that made even hardened lawyers raise their eyebrows. As part of the bankruptcy deal, the family attempted to use the company's bankruptcy as a person.

The plan was essentially this. In exchange for a payment, the individual family members, who themselves had not filed for bankruptcy and were sitting on billions, would receive legal immunity from all current and future opioid lawsuits. In other words, they'd use their broke company's bankruptcy to permanently bulletproof their own very much not broke selves. Pay a fee and by a lifetime guarantee that no victim could ever sue you again, personally, for anything, ever. It's a stunningly bold move, using the legal system's mercy for the genuinely bankrupt as a designer force field for the enormously rich. For a while, it looked like it might actually work, which tells you everything about the asymmetry we talked about at the start.

But in 2024, the Supreme Court finally stepped in and blocked that particular immunity arrangement, ruling that you can't just staple sweeping legal protection for non-bankrupt billionaires onto a company's bankruptcy like a bonus feature. It was on paper a win for accountability, So let's tally up what actually happened to the Sacklers, and I want you to hold this next part against that half-million death toll. The family name, once plastered proudly across the wings of the world's great museums, got quietly scrubbed away, as institutions like the Met in New York and the Louvre in Paris removed the Sackler name from their walls, deciding the prestige of the donation was no longer worth the smell of it. Settlement figures climbed into the billions, with agreements calling for the family to pay out sums reaching around $6 billion over time.

That sounds like a lot, and it is a lot. But here's the number that should stick with you. Not a single member of the family went to prison, not one. For a disaster linked to hundreds of thousands of deaths, the personal criminal consequence for the people at the top was, effectively, zero jail time and the deep indignity of having to find a new place to put their name. And the money? After the settlements, after the payouts, after all of it,

the family remains extraordinarily generationally wealthy. They engineered a situation where the punishment for allegedly fueling the deadliest drug epidemic in modern history was writing a check they could comfort. afford and losing some naming rights on a few museum walls. Go back to our framework from the very beginning, the one about fines being receipts rather than punishments. The sacklers didn't just pay a fine. They prepaid it, laundered it through a bankruptcy, tried to buy permanent immunity with it, and walked away with billions still in hand and their freedom fully intact. It is, in the darkest possible sense, a genuine work of art. A perfect demonstration of the thesis of this entire video.

When you're big enough and rich enough, the law stops being a wall and becomes a toll booth. You don't obey it. pay to drive around it. So keep that image in your head, the check writing, museum un-naming, prison-avoiding magic act, because our next contestant looked at the pharmaceutical business and decided that pills were far too small a canvas. Why poison people one prescription at a time when you can do it with baby powder? And, as we're about to find out, help supply the raw material for the very opioid crisis we just watched unfold. And that brings us to a company you probably trust more than almost any other on this entire list, which is exactly what makes it so unsettling. Johnson and Johnson. This is one of the biggest pharmaceutical and biotech

companies on the planet, sitting behind a wall of names you've had in your medicine cabinet since birth, Tylenol when you've got a headache, Benadryl when your allergies revolt, and the crown jewel of the whole warm and fuzzy operation, the baby shampoo with the famous promise of no more tears. This is a company that built its entire identity around gentleness, around babies, around trust. It is, in the public imagination, the corporate equivalent of a grandmother, and I regret to inform you that has been keeping a rather dark secret in the medicine cabinet for over a century. That secret is baby powder, specifically talcum powder, which J&J has been selling since the 1890s. Talc is a soft mineral, and when ground into a fine powder, it's wonderful at keeping babies dry and rash free. Sounds

harmless, right? Sweet even. Here's the catch, and it's a big one. Talk, as it occurs naturally in the earth, is very frequently found sitting right next to another mineral, and that neighbour is asbestos. Yes, that asbestos. The one we spent the entire 20th, century learning causes cancer, the one we now pay specialists in hazmat suits enormous sums to carefully remove from old buildings. Because the two minerals form under similar geological conditions, mining talc without dragging up some asbestos along with it is genuinely difficult. So for decades, there was a real and persistent risk that the soft, gentle, sprinkle on your newborn baby powder could be contaminated with one of the most notorious cancer-causing substances known to science.

Not exactly the wholesome nursery image the marketing was going for, and this isn't some wild, modern conspiracy theory cooked up by people who distrust corporations, which granted this video may be encouraging. The concern goes back a long way. As far back as 1982, a study out of Harvard drew a link between talc use in the genital area and ovarian cancer. The powder was also connected to mesothelioma, a rare and brutal cancer that is essentially the signature disease of asbestos exposure. So the dots were there to be connected, and increasingly people connected them, a product marketed for the most intimate, everyday use on the most vulnerable people imaginable, potentially laced with a mineral we know causes exactly these kinds of cancers.

The really damning question, the one that turns concern into scandal, is a simple one. How much did the company know and when did it know it? And the mounting evidence over the years suggested that awareness of possible asbestos contamination inside the company went back far, far earlier than the public was ever told, which, if you've been paying attention to this video, is starting to feel like the house style. Find out your product might be hurting people, keep the receipts in a drawer, keep selling. For a long time, this all stayed quiet, buried under confidential settlements. And this is where one person cracks the whole thing open,

because the corporate playbook has a favorite move we haven't fully spotlighted yet. The hush settlement. When someone sues and the company would rather not have the world find out why, it offers a pile of money on one condition. You take the cash and you shut up forever. No talking to the press. No telling your story. The details sealed away where no future victim will ever find them. It's how a company can lose case after case and still keep its reputation spotless, because every loss comes wrapped in a legally enforced silence. The public never hears about it. Problem, quietly, expensively, solved.

Then came a woman named Diane Berg, and in 2009 she did something the machine simply wasn't built to handle. She got sick, she sued. And the company, following the standard script, offered her a settlement to make it disappear quietly. And Diane Berg looked at that offer, that pile of money with a gag order stapled to it, and said no.

She refused to be silenced. She wanted the truth out in the open more than she wanted the quiet payout, and by turning down the hush money she blew a hole in the wall. Because once one person refuses to stay quiet, the secret is out, and everyone else who'd been suffering in silence suddenly realizes they're not alone and not crazy. The floodgates didn't just crack. They came off the hinges.

What followed was an absolute avalanche of lawsuits. Tens of thousands of people who believed the baby powder had given them cancer, all stepping forward. By the end of 2025, the company was facing well over 90,000 lawsuits related to its talc products. 90,000. That's not a very much. a legal problem anymore, that's a small nation of plaintiffs. So how do you handle 90,000 lawsuits? If you paid attention to the Sackler chapter, you already know the move, because J&J reached for the

exact same tool. It tried to use bankruptcy as a shield. And here's the truly cheeky part. Johnson and Johnson is one of the wealthiest, most profitable companies on earth. It is not remotely bankrupt. So it pulled a maneuver that lawyers have nicknamed with a fittingly cartoonish name, essentially creating a brand new little company, dumping all the talc lawsuits into it like sweeping dirt under a rug and then having that tiny purpose-built company declare bankruptcy, while the actual enormous parent company sailed on rich as ever. The idea was to trap all those 90,000 claims inside a bankrupt shell and cap the payouts, while the mothership kept its billions safely out of reach. It's the corporate version of putting all your debts in your imaginary

friend's name, and then having your imaginary friend file for bankruptcy. Clever. Deeply, unsettlingly clever. Fortunately, the courts weren't amused, and these bankruptcy attempts were repeatedly rejected, with judges essentially pointing out that a company drowning in cash doesn't get to cosplay as broke to dodge its victims. The estimated cost to actually resolve all of this? Projections have run north of $11 billion, which is a staggering sum, right up until you remember it's being paid by a company that earns that back with room to spare, and you recognise it once again, for what it is, an expensive receipt. But here is the twist that elevates Johnson and Johnson from ordinary corporate villain to something far more interesting.

The plot development that ties this whole video together into one, grand, grimy web. Because it turns out J&J wasn't just off in its own lane, quietly selling questionable powder. This company had its hands directly inside the opioid catastrophe we spent the last two chapters unpacking, and not as a bystander, as a supplier. Here's how the strands connect. Back in the 1980s, Johnson and Johnson wanted a reliable supply of the raw ingredients for its own painkillers, things like Tylenol with codeine, codeine being an opioid derived, like all opioids, from the opium poppy. So the company did something that sounds absolutely bananas when you say it out loud, it went out and bought up poppy farms. Specifically, vast poppy growing operations in Tasmania,

that island off the southern coast of Australia, turning J&J into one of the largest legal players in the global opium supply chain. Let that image settle for a second. The same company that sells you No More Tears baby shampoo was quietly running poppy plantations on the other side of the world. The grandmother of the medicine cabinet was also, it turns out, a poppy baron. Now, if J&J had grown exactly enough poppy for its own products, that would just be a weird bit of trivia. But that's not what happened. The operation grew enormous, and it produced far more raw opioid material than J&J needed for its own Tylenol. So what do you do with a massive surplus of the world's most profitable and most dangerous plant extract? You do the capitalist thing, you sell it. J&J became a major

supplier of raw opioid ingredients to other pharmaceutical companies. And among the companies buying that raw material to manufacture their own opioid products was, you guessed it, our old friend from the last two chapters, the very company that lit the match on the whole crisis with its little time release pill. Johnson and Johnson was supplying the raw fuel that helped make the entire opioid epidemic physically possible. Think about what that actually means because it reframes everything. In our earlier chapters, we watched one company light the fire, selling a lie about a pill and pulling desperate patients toward heroin and fentanyl. But a fire needs fuel.

And the fuel here was the raw opioid material itself, grown, refined, and sold at industrial scale. Without a steady, gigantic supply of that raw ingredient, the epidemic simply could not have reached the monstrous size that it did. You cannot flood a country with pills if nobody is growing and processing the mountains of poppy those pills are made from. And there was J&J, quietly farming and refining and selling that supply, becoming an essential link in the chain that pulled hundreds of thousands of people toward the grave. It's the difference between the person who lights the arson and the person who spent months conveniently stacking dry firewood around the building and pouring the gasoline. One of them strikes the match, but the other made absolutely sure that when the match dropped,

the whole thing would go up. And this is the part I really want you to hold on to as we move deeper into this video, because it changes how you should look at every remaining contestant. We tend to think of these companies as separate villains, each running its own individual scam in its own corner of the world. Nestle over here with the formula, Purdue over there with the pills, J&J with the powder, neat little boxes.

But they're not in separate boxes. They're in a network. They buy from each other, supply each other, cover for each other, and profit off each other's disasters. The baby powder company and the Opioid Empire Company weren't rivals in different industries. They were business partners in the same catastrophe, one growing the poppies, the other pressing the pills, and both counting the money while the body's stacked up. The evil isn't a collection of isolated

bad apples. It's an orchard, and the trees have their roots tangled together underground where nobody thinks to look. So the next time you reach for a bottle of baby shampoo, with that gentle, tear-drop-free promise on the label, just remember that the same trusted hands that made it were, for years, tending poppy fields and selling the raw ingredients of an epidemic to the very company that used them to kill half a million people. Not exactly the wholesome grandmother the branding promised. More like grandmother running a global cartel out of the same drawer where she keeps the cough drops. And our next contestant doesn't deal in powder or pills at all. It deals in something far more addictive, something you're quite possibly using to watch this very video, and it once helped

turn a nation's news feed into a weapon. That something is meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and it is the largest social media empire the world has ever seen. And right away, this one is different from everyone else. on our list because Nestle sold you formula, Purdue sold you pills, and J&J sold you powder, but META doesn't sell you anything at all. You are not META's customer. You are META's product. The thing META sells is you, or more precisely, your attention, packaged up and auctioned off to advertisers, and it turns out that the single most effective way to harvest human attention on an industrial scale is not to make people happy. Happy people log off and go outside and touch grass.

No, the most reliable fuel for the attention machine is a much darker, stickier emotion. It's rage. Meta figured out whether it fully intended to or not that anger is the most engaging feeling on earth, and it built a business worth hundreds of billions of dollars on that discovery. Let's start with a scandal that first ripped the friendly blue mask off, the one you've probably heard the name of, even if you've forgotten the details. Cambridge Analytica. In this whole affair, the personal data of around 87 million Facebook users was harvested and handed to a political consulting firm. Largely without those users having any real idea it was happening, 87 million people, their likes, their interests. The intimate map of their personalities

quietly scraped up and packaged to be used for targeted political persuasion. People thought they were just poking friends and sharing baby photos. In reality, they were unknowingly filling out the most detailed psychological profile of their lives, and that profile was being sold to people who wanted to influence how they voted. It was a spectacular breach of trust. The moment a whole lot of people realised the free, friendly service they'd been using was quietly turning them inside out and selling the contents. So the regulators came knocking, and eventually the Federal Trade Commission dropped what was, at the time, a genuinely record-shattering penalty on the company.

$5 billion. $5 billion, with a B, the largest privacy fine in the agency's history by an enormous margin. A number so big it was clearly meant to send a message. And here is where you get the single, most perfect, crystalline illustration of everything this video has been trying to tell you. When that record-breaking, history-making $5 billion hammer came down on meta, the company's stocked. price went up. Up. The value of the company rose after it was hit with the biggest privacy fine in the history of the country. Why on earth would that happen? Because investors had been bracing for something even worse, and when the punishment turned out to be merely $5 billion,

as some meta could shrug off without breaking a sweat. The market breathed a sigh of relief and celebrated. The fine wasn't just survivable. It was good news. Go back to our very first chapter, the one about fines being a cost of doing business rather than a punishment. This is that idea reaching its final absurd form where the punishment is so trivial to the offender that the market throws a small party. The regulators tried to swing a sledgehammer and Meta caught it, said thanks, and its stock went up. That is what accountability looks like when you're big enough. It looks like a rounding error that makes your shareholders happy, but the fine was about privacy. The deeper rot is in the machine itself, in the algorithm, that invisible piece of software deciding what

billions of people see every time they open the app. The algorithm has exactly one job. Keep you scrolling because every extra second you stay is another sliver of attention to sell. And in pursuit of that goal, it learned, coldly and mathematically, that the posts which keep you glued to the screen are the ones that make you feel something intense, and intense usually means angry, content that outrages you, that makes you furious, that confirms your team is right and the other team is evil, that stuff spreads faster and holds you longer than anything gentle or reasonable or true. So the algorithm, doing its job perfectly quietly crank the dial toward the content most likely to make everyone furious at everyone else, rewarding the most divisive, most enraging, most polarising

material, because that material was, from a pure engagement standpoint, absolutely delicious. It didn't set out to tear societies apart. It just noticed that a society tearing itself apart produces incredible engagement numbers, and engagement was the only thing it was ever told to care about, and they knew what it was doing to people, especially the youngest and most vulnerable ones. Thanks to internal documents leaked by people inside the company, we learned that Meta's own researchers had studied the effect of Instagram on teenage girls and found the results genuinely alarming. Their own internal research indicated that a significant share of teenage girls who already struggled with body image, roughly a third of them, felt worse about their bodies

because of Instagram. Meta had the data in-house, showing that its own platform was making vulnerable teenagers feel worse about themselves, and it sat on that data while continuing to chase those exact young users. And the most damning detail, the one that tells you everything about the mindset inside those walls, was an internal. comparison so blunt it barely needs commentary. Employees reportedly described the product in the language of addiction, likening Instagram to a drug and chillingly casting the company in the role of the dealer. They understood their own products not as a fun photo app, but as something habit-forming and potentially harmful, and they understood their own position as the ones profiting from that dependency. When your own

staff are describing you as the drug dealer, the branding department has unfortunately lost the plot. This all came pouring into public view thanks to a whistleblower named Francis Howgan, a former employee who walked out the door with a mountain of internal documents and told the world what she'd seen. And her testimony boiled down to one devastatingly simple accusation, one that could honestly serve as the tagline for this entire video. She said the company, over and over, when faced with a choice between the safety of its users and the growth of its profits, chose the profits. Every single time there was a conflict between what was good for people and what was good for the bottom line, the bottom line won. Not occasionally, systematically. That's not a company that

stumbled into harm by accident. That's a company that saw the harm clearly, measured it precisely, and decided the money was worth it, which by now should sound extremely familiar, because it's the exact same calculation the fake nurse is made, the exact same one behind the crushable pill and the asbestos powder. Same math, different product. But making teenagers insecure and societies angry, as grim as that is, still lives in the realm of harm rather than outright horror. And I wish I could tell you that's where the meta story ends. It isn't, because there is a place where all of this, The rage-optimizing algorithm, the hunger for engagement, the refusal to spend money on safety, stopped being a matter of hurt feelings and became a matter of mass graves.

And that place is Myanmar. To understand what happened, you first have to understand what Facebook was in Myanmar in the 2000s, because it was not what it is where you live. In much of the country, as it came online, Facebook wasn't just a popular website. It was, for all practical purposes, the entire internet. Through deals and preloaded phones, Facebook came baked into people's devices and data plans in a way that made it synonymous with going online at all. For millions of people, the internet was Facebook, and Facebook was the internet,

the single place you went for news, for messages, for information about the world. There was no diverse media diet, no scrolling past to a dozen other sources. If it was on Facebook, for a huge portion of the population, it simply was the news. Now imagine handing that kind of total informational monopoly to the rage-optimizing machine we just described in a country with deep, dangerous, ethnic tensions already simmering. What could possibly go wrong? What went wrong was a genocide. Myanmar has a Muslim minority group called the Rohingya, and they had long faced discrimination in the majority Buddhist country.

In the 2000s, hardline Buddhist nationalists and figures connected to the military, flooded Facebook with a torrent of horrifying anti-Rohingia propaganda, dehumanizing posts, vicious rumors, calls to violence, describing an entire ethnic group as vermin, as invaders, as a threat to be eliminated. And the platform's engagement-hungry algorithm did what it was built to do with inflammatory hateful, enraging content. It spread it far and wide because hatred as we established performs beautifully. This poison pumped through the veins of a country where Facebook was the primary source of information for millions, priming a population for slaughter, one viral, hateful post at a time.

And where were Meta's safety systems? The content moderators, who are supposed to catch this exact kind of thing, almost entirely absent because they didn't speak the language. The company had expanded into Myanmar and profited from its users there, while investing almost nothing in people who could actually read Burmese and understand the local context. For years, the number of moderators who could review content in the country's language was catastrophically, negligently tiny, relative to the scale of what was happening. So the hate speech didn't just slip through the cracks. It flowed through a wide open gate that had no guard posted at all, because the guard was too expensive to hire. The company was happy to enter the market and collect the users, but not to pay

for the safety infrastructure that market desperately needed. The result of that flood of dehumanizing propaganda, that priming of a nation, was a wave of ethnic cleansing. Thousands of Rohingya were killed, villages were burned, enormous numbers of people were driven from the country entirely in a mass exodus, fleeing violence that had been marinated and amplified in a news feed. And here's the part that lifts this from tragedy to genuine indictment. Meta was not blindsided. The Human Rights Group Amnesty International, along with numerous other researchers and activists, has documented that the company was warned, repeatedly, for years, but its platform was being used to incite. violence against the Rohingya. The alarms were raised over and over by people on the ground

who could see the catastrophe building in real time. And the warnings were, for the most part, met with the corporate equivalent of a shrug until the killing was already underway. This wasn't a case of nobody could have seen it coming. Plenty of people saw it coming and said so, loudly, and were ignored because fixing it would have cost money and slowing the machine was never on the table. Same calculation as always. Safety on one side of the scale, growth on the other, and we already know which way that scale tips. So let's be clear, about where meta lands on our list. This is a company whose product got tens of millions of people's data harvested,

whose algorithm learned to profit from human rage, whose own research showed it was hurting children while it kept chasing them, and whose platform, left dangerously unguarded to save a few dollars on moderators, became an accelerant for the ethnic cleansing of thousands of people. That's the arc, from harvesting your attention to helping fuel a genocide, and it's all driven by the same relentless engine. Keep them scrolling, keep the numbers up, and never, ever spend money on safety if you can avoid it.

Our next contestant, though, didn't need an algorithm or a news feed to rack up a body count on the scale of an entire war. It managed that the old-fashioned way, with chemistry, and it made enemies out of an entire nation before it ever touched your food supply. That contestant is Monsanto. For a long time, the biggest name in American agricultural chemistry, and a company that pulled off the genuinely rare feat of making an enemy out of an entire country. Most companies on this list hurt individuals, communities, may be a vulnerable population. Monsanto managed to become permanently associated with the chemical devastation of a whole nation, and that's before we even get to the weed killer. If you want a company whose villain resume stretches from the jungles of a war zone to the flower

bed in your neighbour's backyard, this is the one. Let's start with the entry on that resume that earned Monsanto the hatred of a nation, Agent Orange. During the Vietnam War, the American military wanted to strip away the dense jungle that enemy forces were using for cover, so it turned to a powerful herbicide, and Monsanto was one of the primary manufacturers of it. Millions of gallons of this chemical were sprayed across Vietnam, defoliating enormous swaths of the country, and it did indeed kill the plants. Unfortunately, it also happened to be contaminated

with dioxin, one of the most toxic substances ever produced. A compound so nasty it causes cancers, devastating birth defects, and a horrifying list of chronic illnesses. The consequences didn't end when the war did. They echoed down through generations with children born long afterwards suffering severe birth defects, and they hit not only the Vietnamese population, but the very soldiers who handled and sprayed the stuff. It's a special kind of chemical that manages to poison the enemy, your own troops, and children who wouldn't be born for decades, all at once. Monsanto helped make its name synonymous with one of the most infamous chemical weapons of the

20th century, which is not the kind of brand recognition most companies are chasing, but you might be thinking, that was war. Awful as it was, that's a different context. Fine. Let's come home to your garden for the most mundane, harmless-looking product imaginable, and watch Monsanto find the villainy there too. The product is round up. the wildly popular weed killer you've probably seen on the shelf of every hardware store on earth.

Sitting right there next to the potting soil like the friendliest thing in the world, its active ingredient is a chemical called glyphosate, and Roundup became one of the most widely used weed killers on the planet, sprayed across farms and gardens and parks in staggering quantities. For years, Monsanto's message was simple and reassuring. It's safe, don't worry about it, spray away. And then, in 2015, the Cancer Research Arm of the World Health Organization, an agency called the IARC, looked at the evidence and classified glyphosate as probably carcinogenic to humans,

probably cancer-causing, which is a rather significant asterist to slap on the thing you've been merrily spraying around your vegetable patch with your bare hands for years. Now, a normal company confronted with that kind of finding might, you'd hope, pump the brakes and take a hard look. Monsanto's approach was a bit different, and this is where the lawsuits start, and where the truly ugly internal picture began to emerge. Starting around 2018, a wave of lawsuits crashed over the company from people who developed cancer, specifically a blood cancer, after years of using Roundup. The very first of these to go to trial belonged to a school groundskeeper named Dwayne Johnson. No relation to the wrestler, a man who had sprayed enormous quantities of the weed killer as part of his job, and then developed a terminal cancer.

A jury heard his case and awarded him a staggering sum, initially around $289 million. That verdict was like the first crack in a dam, right behind him, came a man named Hardeman, awarded around 80 million, and then a married couple, the Piliads, who had both developed cancer and were initially awarded a jaw-dropping sum in the neighbourhood of $2 billion. The floodgates, as they say, were open, and tens of thousands more claims lined up behind them. But the money isn't even the most damning part. The most damning part is what spilled out of the company's own files during these trials, because the discovery process is where corporate secrets go to die in public. Internal documents suggested that Monsanto had engaged in a practice

with a wonderfully sinister name, ghostwriting. This is where the company would essentially write scientific studies and analyses favourable to its product, and then arrange for seemingly independent scientists to put their names on the work and publish it as if it were their own objective research. So the reassuring science telling everyone glyphosate was perfectly safe was, in some cases, science the company had quietly authored itself and dressed up in a lab coat borrowed from someone else. It's the academic equivalent of writing your own glowing performance review and getting your friend to sign it as your boss. And on top of the ghost writing, the documents pointed to efforts to influence and pressure, the regulators who were supposed to be independently evaluating the product's safety.

When the referees are being lobbied and the scientific literature is being secretly authored by the very company under scrutiny, the whole idea of an objective safety assessment starts to look like theatre. And if you think Roundup and Agent Orange were isolated bad chapters, Monsanto's history has more where that came from. There's the town of Anniston in Alabama, where a Monsanto facility manufactured chemicals called PCBs for decades. These industrial chemicals ended up contaminating the town, its soil, its water, its people, in what became one of the more notorious cases of corporate pollution in the country, with the community left carrying the toxic burden.

And then, for a change of pace from the poisoning, there's the bizarre case of Percy Schmeiser, a Canadian farmer, which shows off a completely different flavour of corporate aggression. Monsanto, you see, sells genetically modified seeds and holds patents on them, and it guards those patents with the ferocity of a dragon sitting on gold. when some of its patented crops turned up growing in Schmeese's fields, the company came after him with a lawsuit for patent infringement, essentially accusing the farmer of stealing its genetic property,

even though pollen and seeds have an inconvenient habit of blowing around in the wind and cross-pollinating wherever they please, which is, and I cannot stress this enough, the entire job description of pollen. It's the sort of legal position that boils down to suing your neighbour, because the wind carried your leaves into their yard, and it revealed a company willing to crush an individual farmer to protect its grip on the very building blocks of the food supply. So that's Monsanto.

A company that helped chemically devastate a nation, sold a probably carcinogenic weed killer while ghostwriting its own safety science, poisoned an American town and sued a farmer over windblown seeds, a truly comprehensive portfolio of harm, and you would think a company carrying that much toxic baggage would be radioactive, a thing no one in their right mind would want to touch.

And yet, in 2018, another company looked at Monsanto, at all of it, the Agent Orange Legacy, round-up lawsuits, the ghostwriting, the whole flaming dumpster, and thought, yes, let's buy that. That company was buyer, and it thereby made what many people consider one of the worst business decisions in corporate history. Buyer is a giant German pharmaceutical and chemical company, and when it acquired Monsanto, it didn't just get the seeds and the weed killer. It inherited the entire mountain of lawsuits along with it, buying itself into the very legal catastrophe we just described. The market's verdict was swift

and brutal. Bayer's stock price cratered, losing a huge chunk of its value, the share price falling by well over half in the aftermath as the scale of the round-up liability sank in. Baer paid a fortune to acquire a company and in doing so essentially strapped a legal time bomb to its own chest. It's the corporate equivalent of buying your dream house and then discovering after signing, that it comes with a full-time poltergeist, structural rot and 90,000 angry ghosts who all want compensation. A truly historic act of due diligence gone wrong. But here's the thing that keeps buyer from being a mere victim of a bad purchase, and it's the reason it earns its own place on this list rather than just our sympathy, because Bayer, long before it ever heard of Monsanto, had a history of

its own that is, frankly, staggering. And it stretches back well over a century. The company started out in 1863, believe it or not, as a dye factory, making colours for the textile industry. From those humble, colourful beginnings, it moved into pharmaceuticals, and here's a piece of trivia that reframes everything. Bire is the company that gave the world aspirin, which had introduced in 1897 and which became one of the most successful and genuinely beneficial medicines in history. Good for them, right? A real win. Except. And you knew there was an accept coming. Right around the very same time in 1898, Bayer introduced another product it was extremely proud of. One it marketed as a wholesome, non-addictive cough remedy suitable for the whole family, including children.

That product was heroin. Yes. Buy a commercialised heroin and sold it, over the counter, as a gentle cough medicine, right alongside the aspirin. The same company gave the world that harmless painkiller in your medicine cabinet and one of the most destructive addictive drugs in human history in back-to-back years, and marketed the second one as safe for your kids' coughs. The branding department was, let's say, having an ambitious decade, and unfortunately, the heroin cough syrup is not even close to the darkest entry in Bayer's history, because the company's story runs straight through the worst chapters of the 20th century. During the First World War, Bayer was involved in the development of chemical weapons,

contributing to the poison gas, including chlorine gas, that turned the trenches into a nightmare. Then, in the decades that followed, Baye emerged with other German chemical companies to form an enormous conglomerate called IG Farben, and this is where the history becomes genuinely monstrous. Under the Nazi regime, IG Farben became deeply, horrifyingly complicit in the crimes of that era. The conglomerate manufactured Zyclon B, the poison used to murder people in the gas chambers of the death camps. It exploited slave labour, working prisoners to death at facilities attached to the camps. It was, in the most literal sense, an industrial engine of the Holocaust. cost, and after the war, when the executives responsible were finally put on trial at Nuremberg,

the reckoning was, who put it gently, disappointing. Many received sentences that were shockingly light given the scale of what they'd participated in, and a number of them were released and went right back into comfortable careers in industry. Once again, the asymmetry we've talked about the whole way through, the machine and the men who ran it walked away, while the victims were beyond counting. And then, chillingly, the pattern we've traced across this entire video, find out your product is killing people and keep selling it anyway, shows up in buyer's more recent history in one of its most heartbreaking forms. In the 1980s, Bayer produced a blood-clotting product called Factor 8, used to treat hemophiliacs, people whose blood doesn't clot properly.

The problem was that this product, made from human blood plasma, could be contaminated with viruses, including HIV. As the AIDS crisis unfolded and it became clear that older, untreated product was dangerous, a safer, heat-treated version was developed. But there was a supply of the old, risky, potentially contaminated products still sitting in inventory, and rather than destroy it and eat the loss, the company continued to sell that older, more dangerous stock in overseas markets, including in poorer countries across Asia and Latin America. In other words, having a product they knew could carry a deadly virus and having a safer alternative available, they chose to offload the dangerous version onto vulnerable populations elsewhere rather than take

the financial hit. The result was that thousands of hemophiliacs were infected with HIV through a medical product that was supposed to help them. A product the company had reason to know was dangerous. It is the coldest possible expression of the calculation we've seen again and again, safety on one side of the scale, money on the other, and the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth, ending up on the losing side of that math. So Bayer gives us the whole grim sweep of it in a single company,

from dye to aspirin to heroin to poison gas, to the machinery of genocide, to contaminated blood products. And then, as if to top it all off, it went out in 2018 and bought Monsanto's entire toxic lake, legacy to bolt onto its own. Two companies, each with a history dark enough to headline this video fused into one, and believe it or not, our next contestants managed a similar trick. Two separate chemical giants, each a record holder for environmental catastrophe in its own right, deciding that the only thing better than one company poisoning the world was two of them doing it together.

Those two contestants are Dow and DuPont, two of the most storied chemical companies in American history, and in 2015 they did the thing that keeps happening on this list. They merged, briefly combining into a single mega entity. And the reason this pairing is so remarkable is that each of them, entirely on their own, had already earned a spot in the Hall of Fame of Environmental Catastrophe. This wasn't two mediocre companies teeming up. This was two heavyweight champions of chemical harm shaking hands and agreeing to pool their considerable talents. Let's take them one at a time, because each deserves the spotlight. Start with Dow. If the name rings a faint bell from an earlier chapter, that's because Dow was one of the co-producers of that infamous defoliant we discussed,

standing right there alongside the other manufacturers spraying the jungles of a war zone. So it enters this chapter already carrying that legacy. But Dow's home turf has its own dark story. In Midland, Michigan, the town built around Dow's operations, the company's manufacturing left behind serious dioxin contamination, seeping into the local river system and floodplains, the same brutally toxic family of compounds we've already met, quietly settling into the soil and water of the community

that hosted the company for generations. It's a familiar shape by now. A company thrives in a town, and the town ends up carrying the toxic residue as a parting gift. But Dow's single, most notorious association came through an acquisition, and it involves one of the worst industrial disasters in human history. Dow eventually purchased a company called Union Carbide, and Union Carbide's name is forever bound to a single horrifying word, Bhopal. In 1984, a Union Carbide pesticide plant in Bhopal, India,

leaked a massive cloud of lethal gas into the surrounding city in the dead of night. We're talking about tens of tons of toxic. gas rolling silently through densely packed neighbourhoods while people slept. With no warning and nowhere to run, thousands of people died almost immediately, choking to death in the streets, and the death toll continued to climb for years afterward as the injuries and illnesses took their toll. Estimates of those affected run into the hundreds of thousands. People left with lifelong lung damage, blindness, and a host of chronic conditions in what remains one of the deadliest industrial accidents ever, and the compensation. When the dust settled and the legal wrangling was done, the payouts that

reached many of the victims worked out to some so small, they were genuinely insulting. Figures in the ballpark of a few hundred dollars for a life shattered or ended. A few hundred dollars for losing your family, your health, your future. It is the asymmetry we've traced through this whole video rendered in its most obscene form, a catastrophe that killed thousands, settled for the price of a used appliance per victim. Now let's meet the other half of this merger, DuPont, and I promise you, the DuPont story takes a turn into the genuinely surreal before it gets to the poison. Because the DuPont family, the dynasty behind the company, has a history so bizarre and dramatic it reads like a soap opera, written by someone who was told to make it as unhinged as possible.

This is a family saga featuring among other things, family members meeting spectacularly violent and strange ends, and one of the most infamous true crime stories in American history, in which are paranoid, unstable heir to the fortune shot and killed an Olympic gold medal wrestler he'd taken under his wing on the family estate. When your family history includes murdering an Olympic champion in cold blood, you have officially graduated from wealthy eccentricity into something a lot darker. But as entertaining as the family drama is, it's not why DuPont is on this list. DuPont is here because of what it put in your blood. Yes, yours, personally. The culprit is a class of chemicals now widely known as P-F-A-S, sometimes nicknamed Forever chemicals, and that nickname is the whole problem in two words. DuPont used these chemicals in the manufacture of one of its most famous products, the non-stick coating that, made pots and pans wonderfully easy to clean. The miracle of modern cookware, the catch is that

these forever chemicals earn their name because they essentially never break down. Once they're out in the environment, they stay there and stay there and stay there, accumulating in water, in soil and in living bodies, including yours, with no natural process to flush them out. And DuPont, according to a mountain of evidence that later came out, knew for a very long time that these chemicals were dangerous and were escaping into the environment around its plants. and, following the House Rulebook we've seen at every single stop on this tour, kept the information quiet and kept manufacturing. The place where this cracked open was around a DuPont facility in West Virginia,

and the first witnesses to sound the alarm were, of all things, cows. A local farmer began watching his cattle sicken and die in disturbing numbers, animals wasting away with strange symptoms, and he became convinced the water flowing from near the DuPont plant was poisoning them. This caught the attention of a lawyer named Rob Billot, who took on the case and then spent years, an almost absurdly long stretch of his life, digging through a staggering volume of company documents to prove what was happening. What he uncovered was that these Forever chemicals hadn't just poisoned

one farmer's cattle. They had leached into the water supply of the whole area, exposing the local community, and the company had long understood the risks. And here's the truly staggering part, the detail that makes this the perfect closing act for the chemical companies on our list. These Forever chemicals didn't stay in West Virginia. They spread so thoroughly through the environment and the water and the food chain that they are now found in the blood of nearly everyone. Testing has found these chemicals in the blood of the overwhelming majority of the population, something like 97% of Americans and people all over the world. Let that land for a second. The odds are overwhelming that right now, as you watch this video, there are traces of DuPont's forever chemicals circulating in your own bloodstream.

This company didn't poison a town or a nation. It quietly, permanently contaminated essentially the entire human species and got non-stick pans out of the deal. That's a level of reach the other villains on this list can only dream about. So there's the full picture of that merger, a co-maker of a wartime chemical weapon that also gave the world Bhopal, joining forces with a murder-tinged dynasty that put indestructible chemicals into the blood of all humanity. Truly a match made somewhere considerably warmer than heaven. But as monstrous as all of this has been, we've been climbing a ladder this whole video, and now we've reached the very top, the vantage point from which the whole rotten system finally becomes visible. Because our final chapter isn't

really about a single company at all. It's about who sits at the top of the entire food chain, and the answer might unsettle you more than anything we've covered so far. Let's start our ascent with Exxon Mobile, the oil giant, a direct descendant of the legendary standard oil empire that was so powerful it had to be broken up over a century ago. Exxon carries a very special distinction in the annals of corporate villainy, one that sets it apart even here. The receipts on this one go back decades. As far back as the early 1980s, Exxon's own scientists, its own in-house researchers, understood with startling accuracy that burning fossil fuels was warming the planet and that the consequences would be severe.

The company's own experts told it, essentially, this is real, this is us, and this is going to be a serious problem. And what did Exxon do with that early prescient internal knowledge? It buried it, and then spent years and enormous sums funding public doubt and confusion about the very science its own scientists had confirmed. It's the ultimate expression of our whole theme. Know the truth, hide the truth, sell the product anyway, and pay to make sure the public stays confused long enough to keep the money flowing. On top of that, Exxon carries the environmental scars you'd expect, most famously the catastrophic oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989, which coated a pristine coastline in crude and devastated the wildlife and communities that depended

on it, along with a long trail of other pollution, and, in various corners of the globe, some deeply troubling conduct involving securing and protecting its operations in unstable regions, up to, and including associations with armed security, in places where that muscle was accused of serious abuses. A company, in short, that has spent a very long time putting its bottom line ahead of the planet everyone happens to live on. But here's the thing, and this is where the whole video finally clicks into place. Even Exxon, giant as it is, is not the top of the pyramid, because sitting above nearly all of these companies quietly is something most people have never even heard of. Its name is BlackRock. BlackRock is an asset management

firm, and it manages an almost incomprehensible amount of money on behalf of others. A sum measured in the tens of trillions of dollars, more than the economic output of most nations on earth. And what does it do with all that money? It buys ownership stakes in companies, lots and lots of companies. In fact, if you go back through this entire video and look at the villains we've paraded past you, the formula giant, the pill makers, the powder sellers, the social network, the chemical poisoners, the oil company, you will find that a firm like BlackRock holds significant ownership stakes in a huge number of them. It is, in a very real sense, a part owner of the entire Rogues Gallery we just spent this whole video examining, the individual companies are the players on the field. BlackRock is

quietly holding shares in most of the teams at once. And to manage this staggering web of ownership, BlackRock runs a legendary, almost mythical piece of technology, a risk analysis supercomputer system named Aladdin, which crunches unfathomable quantities of financial data to monitor and manage trillions of dollars in assets across the globe. It's an oracle of sorts. Watching over an empire of ownership so vast, it's genuinely difficult for a human brain to picture. There's something almost fitting about it, after a whole video full of villains with logos and mascots and CEOs saying appalling things into microphones. The true summit of the pyramid turns out to be a quiet financial firm and a supercomputer named after a genie, silently holding a piece of nearly everything.

And that's what brings us to the real question. This whole video has been building toward, the one I want to leave you sitting with. All the way through, we've been playing a game of Pick the Villain, ranking these companies trying to crown the single most evil one, and that's a fun game. But by now you might be starting to suspect that we've been asked, the wrong question the entire time, because notice the pattern that connected every single one of them. It was never really about one uniquely wicked company or one uniquely evil person twirling a mustache in a boardroom. It was the same machine over and over in different costumes. Find out your product hurts people, hide it, keep selling, treat the fine as a receipt,

and let the asymmetry between a giant corporation and an ordinary human do the rest. Every one of these companies was, in a sense, just following the incentives of the system they operate in, a system that reliably, predictably rewards exactly this behaviour, where the crime pays and the punishment is a line item. When the same horror keeps emerging from company after company, across industries, across decades, across continents, at some point you have to stop blaming the individual apples and start looking hard at the orchard. So maybe the most evil thing on this list isn't Nestle, or the sacklers or meta, or any of the chemical giants, or even the quiet trillion dollar owner at the top. Maybe the most evil thing is the system itself, a system where all of

this isn't a malfunction, but the machine working exactly as designed, producing profit at one end and bodies at the other, precisely as intended. That's the genuinely unsettling possibility that nothing here was broken. It all worked perfectly. Which brings us right back to the question we started with, and now it's finally yours to answer. Out of everything you've just seen, all these companies, all these choices, all these bodies, which one do you think earns the crown for the most evil of them all? Or do you think the crown belongs to the system that made every last one of them possible? Drop your verdict in the comment. I genuinely want to know who or what.

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You'd convict.