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I saw a tweet about how some guy bought the Enron trademark for $275 and relaunched it as a satirical company with a full staff and ads in the New York Times. That reminded me of a podcast episode about how some other guy bought the trademark for Hydrox, the cookie that Oreo ripped off and then killed. And I got to thinking.

Fascinating, the things you see versus the things you do not.

Companies die all the time. Some of them you remember. Some of them you don't. Some of them you think are dead but are actually shambling around with someone else wearing their skin. Some of them were dead and came back. And in every case, there's a story about how it happened that's more interesting than you'd expect.

So here's this website. 35 companies, cataloged by whether they're dead, zombie, or resurrected. The fraud, the hubris, the bad luck, the disruption, the leveraged buyouts. The ones that got murdered by their parent company. The ones that invented their own replacement and buried it. The ones that were 90 days from bankruptcy and are now worth three trillion dollars.

The name works two ways. Dead corp: the companies. Dead corpus: a body of work about things that are finished. Both readings point at the same thing.

Enjoy, or don't. I really don't give a shit. But if you've read this far, you'll probably find the content to be interesting.

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A ksmith project. Part of an ongoing interest in what endures and what doesn't.

Independence

No ads. No sponsored content. No affiliate links. No corporate partnerships. Just an archive.