These 7 companies have survived EVERY major crisis since 1900:

- The Great Depression
- Two World Wars
- Dot-com Crash
- 2008 Financial Crisis
- COVID-19

While 90% of businesses fail within 10 years…

Here’s what 120+ years of data reveals about why they’re unstoppable:🧵


The "cockroach companies" earned their nickname for a simple reason:

Just like the insects, these businesses can survive everything.

Out of the Fortune 500 companies from 1955, only 52 remain on the list today.

But these 7 have been thriving for much longer.

70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the second generation…

And 90% lose it by the third.

Meanwhile, the Rockefellers have preserved their wealth across 7 generations.

The difference? A pioneering system that would've saved others billions:🧵 When John D. Rockefeller became America's first billionaire in 1916 (worth $400B in today's dollars), he faced a crucial challenge:

How to preserve this fortune across generations?

His answer wasn't just smart investing.

It was creating something revolutionary:

This software controls $21 TRILLION in assets.

That’s 10% of all stocks and bonds on Earth.

Yet most people have no idea how it shapes market decisions daily...

Here’s the untold story of the most powerful software in financial history:🧵 When Larry Fink co-founded BlackRock in 1988, he was haunted by a $100M trading loss at First Boston—a failure he blamed on poor risk assessment.

That painful lesson sparked a radical idea:

Build a system that could see risk across every investment position simultaneously.

When Target expanded to Canada in 2013, they invested $7 billion.

But by 2015, they’d shut down ALL 133 stores and written off $5.4 billion.

The reason?

A mistake that even modern businesses—big or small—still make today...

Here’s how one error cost Target billions:🧵 Target's Canadian expansion looked perfect on paper:

- 124 Zellers store leases acquired for $1.8B
- $3.5B allocated to renovations & supply chain
- 27,000 employees hired in 12 months
- Projected revenue: $6B annually by 2017

But internally, a nightmare was brewing…

The Vanderbilts were once worth $200 billion.

But by 1970, not a single heir was even a millionaire.

It wasn’t market crashes or bad investments that ruined them…

It was ONE invisible mistake, repeated for generations.

Here’s the untold story behind their downfall:🧵 The Vanderbilt story began in the 1820s with “Commodore” Cornelius Vanderbilt.

He quit school at 11, borrowed $100, and bought a small sailboat…

That became the U.S.’s largest shipping empire—before he pivoted to railroads.

A legacy of spotting opportunities early.

In 2008, Lehman Brothers collapsed with $600 billion in assets.

But what most people don’t know?

Their risk system couldn’t even access 80% of their own trading data...

And that turned out to be fatal.

Here’s the truth behind the ‘silent killer’ of the 2008 crisis: March 2008:

A Lehman risk analyst discovers a disturbing pattern.

Their centralized risk system can only see 20% of their trading positions.

The remaining 80%? Scattered across 30+ siloed systems.

By the time they realized the full exposure, it was too late.