RIP Corp

This episode of RIP Corp is about what happens when billionaires die—well, what happens and doesn’t happen to their money when they die, most importantly how that money isn’t meaningfully taxed, and how their successors can perpetuate the wealth-inequality machine for generations upon generations through labyrinthine legal structures. We’ll also hear from people intimately familiar with these systems who are trying to fight them.

Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns, Washington Mutual, Wachovia Corporation, Merrill Lynch, Circuit City, Borders Bookstore, Sharper Image, and some 150,000 small businesses across the United States — the 2008 global financial crisis killed them all. Turns out, looking at that crisis explains a lot about where we are right now in 2025.

This episode of RIP Corp is about the gap between (women-focused co-working space slash hospitality service provider) The Wing as a subject of pop media coverage—as a celebrity—and The Wing as an actual business. Hopefully somewhere along the way we get to the bottom of the timeless question of celebrity: why are people so obsessed with this?

Corporate researcher and morbid friend of the show Tim Hwang rejoins Ingrid for our traditional look back at 2024's notable corporate losses.

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 that legacy tell us about commodity trading more broadly? And how on earth does a guy—how on earth does an industry—intersect with so many major geopolitical events and still insist that the work is “not political”?