8 Tech Companies That Are In Deep, Deep Trouble in 2026

[00:00:00]In the neverending economic bad news of 2026, tech was supposed to be the safe bet. The sector you hold in your retirement account and sleep at night.

[00:00:09]The companies behind the devices in your house, the apps your grandkids use, the platforms your bank runs on, solid, essential, untouchable. Eight of those companies are quietly coming apart, and the people running them have made sure that when it lands, it lands on you, not them. One burned past $80 billion on a product almost nobody uses, still burning. Another just told its auditors it might not survive the next 12 months.

[00:00:36]Another paid its CEO 51 million the same year it handed its brands a pile of debt and walked away. If you hold an S&P 500 index fund, 60 million Americans do, you already own pieces of this. By the end, you'll know what to look for before one of these implodes, before the news tells you to panic. But here's the one that should stop you cold. One of these eight has a product that still works perfectly. The company is nearly gone, and the reason has nothing to do with the product. One, Intel Corporation.

[00:01:08]Flip your laptop over. That Intel sticker, it's on a company that's currently dismantling itself. For 50 years, Intel was the chip. Your first PC ran on it. your parents' first PC, the one you're watching this on right now.

[00:01:23]Intel owned that. It wasn't even close.

[00:01:26]Then somebody at Intel looked at TSMC, the Taiwanese company that manufactures chips for Apple and Nvidia, and said, "We could do that. They could not do that." TSMC has spent 30 years doing nothing but building chips for other companies. Intel had never done it once, but what they had was confidence and a checkbook and a story to tell Wall Street. So they built the factories, hired the engineers, made the promises, and in the second quarter of 2025, the whole dream posted just over 3.1 billion in losses on $4.4 billion in revenue.

[00:02:02]They spent more than they made by 3 billion in one quarter in the division that was supposed to save the company.

[00:02:10]If that's what saving looks like, the patient did not survive. The board pushed CEO Pat Gellzinger out in December 2024. Bloomberg reported he was given a simple choice. Retire or be removed. He retired, collected at least $7 million in severance while the foundry was still hemorrhaging cash. 7 million to walk away from a $3 billion loss. That math works out well for exactly one person. And here's what nobody wants to say out loud. This is not a new story. IBM sold its semiconductor manufacturing in 2014.

[00:02:44]Global foundaries gave up on advanced nodes in 2018. Intel wasn't a pioneer here. It was just the most expensive failure in the category's history. The new CEO arrived and started cutting immediately. Tens of thousands of jobs.

[00:02:58]Engineers who spent entire careers designing the chips and everything you own now clearing out their desks while the company calls it right sizing. AMD is eating the consumer business. Nvidia owns the data center. The stock is down well over half from its 2021 high. Same logo, very different company. Intel tried to become something it had never been and burned 50 years of reputation doing it. David Zazlov had the opposite problem. He walked into one of the most valuable content libraries ever built and still found a way to blow it up.

[00:03:32]Two, Warner Brothers Discovery. Picture your parents living room on a Saturday afternoon. CNN on in the background, a Warner Brothers movie, TNT running a Law and Order marathon nobody asked for but everybody watched. That's the world David Zazlov bought. Bugs Bunny, HBO, Casablanca, one of the greatest content libraries ever assembled. And the first thing he did was strap $50 billion of debt to its back. That wasn't a side effect. That was the deal. 50 billion on the balance sheet from day one. Debt doesn't care about your library. It makes demands and when the money runs short, the content pays. Go find a movie on Max you used to watch. There's a decent chance it's gone. Not because it flopped, because deleting it saves on residuals. You paid for the subscription. The content was the collateral. Batgirl was a finished film.

[00:04:25]$90 million. Cast, shot, scored, ready.

[00:04:29]They shelved it. Never released it. took the tax write off instead because apparently destroying a finished movie is worth more than releasing one. CNN Plus launched and shut down in one month. 300 million gone. These aren't accidents. This is a debt structure doing what debt structures do. 3 years in, S&P Global stamped the bonds as junk. Too much leverage, not enough cash from cable. Zazlov's solution was to split the company in two. Studios and streaming on one side, CNN and TNT and TBS handed a fresh pile of debt on the other. The channels your parents watched for 40 years cut loose. When the balance sheet breaks, apparently you just break the company with it. Through all of it, Zazlov collected $51.9 million in fiscal year 2024 compensation. And at that same shareholder meeting, nearly 60% of votes came back against the pay package.

[00:05:27]Non-binding vote. Check cleared. Anyway, you're probably wondering how 60% of shareholders voted against it and he still got every dollar. The vote was non-binding. Corporate governance 101.

[00:05:38]Companies put executive pay to a shareholder vote, but they don't have to listen. It's called say on pay. You get the say, they keep the pay. If you're paying for Max, search what you want to watch before you subscribe. If it's gone, you're paying for a debt structure. Warner Brothers Discovery is down more than 60% from the day the merger was announced. He mortgaged Bugs Bunny to protect the executive bonuses.

[00:06:02]At least Zazlov needed the debt load to insulate himself from consequences. The next guy built something cleaner, a governance structure so tight that he literally cannot be removed no matter what he does. And he funded the whole thing using your attention. Three, Meta Platforms, Reality Labs. Here's what's different about Meta. Meta isn't failing. Meta is making money. $164 billion in revenue in 2024. Almost all of it from showing you ads. Open Facebook right now. Scroll for 30 seconds. Every ad that just went past your eyes. That money is what pays for what I'm about to tell you. You are the product. And the product is bankrolling a hallucination. In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg announced that the future was the metaverse. renamed the entire company to prove he meant it. Built virtual offices, virtual concerts, spent billions on headsets, created a whole digital world, put millions into making the avatars look less like hostages, and launched it to the public. Nobody came.

[00:07:07]By now, you're probably thinking, "Okay, but $80 billion and the board just lets this keep going. There is no board that can stop him. He built the governance to make that impossible. The board serves at his pleasure. Voting him out requires his own permission. He is the check and the balance. Reality Labs, the division built to run all of this, has burned past $80 billion in losses since 2020.

[00:07:33]That's from Meta's own filings. In recent quarters, it's been torching more than $4 billion every 3 months. to maintain a virtual world with fewer active users than a midsize Costco parking lot on a Tuesday. Just the 2024 loss from Reality Labs alone was bigger than Exxon Mobile's entire annual profit, more than everything Nike earns in a year, gone into a digital office park where the lights are on and nobody's working. Now, here's why this keeps going. Zuckerberg set up Meta's share structure so that his class of stock carries 10 votes per share. The board can't override him. Shareholders can't remove him. He built the governance to make himself immune from the consequences of his own calls. And he did that before he made the calls.

[00:08:20]Google Glass failed. Amazon's Firephone failed. The story is always the same.

[00:08:26]CEO sees the future. Shareholders fund the vision. Users don't show up.

[00:08:31]Zuckerberg's version is $80 billion larger than any previous attempt. and he's the first one who made himself impossible to fire before placing the bet. Meta is a cash machine funding a hallucination. And you're the cash machine. At Meta, Zuckerberg's own money rises and falls with the stock. He's got skin in the game, even if you can't touch him. The next company has the exact same structure. No votes for the public. Founder in total control except the CEO owns a small fraction of the economic value. And the losses are still piling up after nine straight years.

[00:09:08]Subscribe to Inplain Bite if you haven't already. We read the filings, name the executives, and take no sponsors.

[00:09:16]Nobody's paying us to soften this. Four, Tesla. Zuckerberg needed a governance structure to make himself untouchable.

[00:09:23]Elon Musk didn't bother with any of that. He just made himself the product and then he made the product something millions of people didn't want to be associated with. Tesla sold fewer cars in 2024 than in 2023. First time in the company's history. No supply chain crisis, no factory shutdown. The company just sold less. 1.79 million vehicles versus 1.81 million the year before.

[00:09:48]That number came from Tesla's own quarterly filing. Then 2025 made it worse. In key European markets, Tesla registrations fell off a cliff, while Volkswagen, BMW, and Stellantis all picked up share on the exact same roads in the same quarter. This wasn't an electric vehicle slowdown. Other EVs were selling fine. This was specifically a Tesla problem. China told the same story. BYYD edged ahead of Tesla on pure electric vehicle deliveries in the fourth quarter of 2024, both near the half million mark. and BYD crossed the line first. BYD didn't stumble into Tesla's territory. Tesla handed it over quarter by quarter. The Cybertruck was supposed to change the conversation, the big proof that Tesla still built things no one else could imagine. Instead, it piled up recall after recall from federal safety regulators, covering defects across nearly the entire production run on a vehicle that was already years late and looked like a prop from a movie where the future went badly wrong. The stock is down roughly half from its 2024 peak. Here's what the sales numbers can't fully show. At some point in 2024 and 2025, Tesla, the car, became inseparable from Elon Musk, the political figure, the platform, the government role, the persona that became impossible to ignore. When the CEO turns himself into a national controversy, the car in your driveway becomes a statement. And a lot of people decided that was a statement they didn't want to make. There are Tesla owners who won't park in certain neighborhoods. Now, that's not a sales problem. That's a brand autopsy. A new model year doesn't fix that. You can't update the brand out of it. The damage is structural and it started at the top. If you're shopping for a used EV, check Tesla resale values against other brands in the same segment. Brand toxicity hits the used market before it hits new sales. And right now that spread is telling you something. Tesla's problem came from a CEO who got too big for the product and took the product down with him.

[00:11:55]Ubisoft's story is slower and sadder. A company that had everything its fans wanted decided that wasn't enough and spent a decade chasing a trend that was never meant for them. Five. Ubisoft.

[00:12:08]Someone in your family has put serious hours into an Assassin's Creed game. Old or young. And a large number of us have invested in gaming companies because of these money-making franchises. Those franchises are now owned in part by Tencent. The founding family packaged the company's biggest names into a new subsidiary and sold a piece to a Chinese conglomerate. Here's how a 40-year company ends up there. Here's what Ubisoft forgot. Adults over 50 are now nearly 30% of all US gamers, up from 9% in 1999, per the Entertainment Software Association. The generation that put quarters into Pac-Man machines that bought the Atari 2600 that played the original Assassin's Creed when it dropped. They never stopped. They just want a real game they pay for once and own. Older gamers are also the ones most likely to refuse battle passes. Only about 45% of Gen X players make any in-game purchases at all. They buy the game, play the game, and don't want to rent access from a company that might shut the servers down in 3 years. That audience was Ubisoft's to keep. They walked away from it on purpose. Around 2015, Fortnite proved you could give a game away and make billions selling things inside it.

[00:13:23]Ubisoft believed that was the future.

[00:13:26]For a decade, they chased it. live service shooters, battle passes, free-to-play titles built to replace the games people used to just buy and own.

[00:13:35]THQ went bankrupt chasing the same model. Konami abandoned console gaming, trying the same pivot. Ubisoft watched both and ran the same play anyway. In the gaming industry, this is apparently considered research. In August 2024, Star Wars Outlaws launched their big return to the games they knew how to make. Missed internal targets badly.

[00:13:56]stock hit a 12-ear low that same month.

[00:13:59]Assassin's Creed Shadows finally came out in early 2025, delayed twice, and it actually worked. Strong launch, millions of players in the first weeks. The fans were still there. The company just couldn't save itself with them. Still posted hundreds of millions of euros in losses, hit on the books and all. The fans showed up. The executives had already spent the money, so the family sold. Tencent came in for roughly a quarter stake in a new subsidiary, holding the three biggest franchises.

[00:14:28]The designers, the writers, the animators, the people whose names scroll by in the credits nobody watches got another round of layoffs. The live service projects that were supposed to be the answer canled or shut down one after another. They chased a Fortnite that was never going to be theirs and walked away from the audience that would have stayed. Ubisoft had the product and lost the business model. PayPal is the mirror image. They had the business model locked in for two decades and just never bothered to maintain it until the internet built something better underneath them. Six, PayPal. You know that yellow button, you've clicked it 10,000 times without thinking about it.

[00:15:06]It felt safe, like handing your credit card to a website wasn't completely insane. PayPal built that feeling. And for a long time, that feeling was worth an enormous amount of money. They just never updated what was underneath it.

[00:15:19]PayPal shares hit about $300 in July 2021. By late 2022, they were in the 50s. $300 billion in market value didn't disappear in a scandal. There was no regulator, no fraud, no single bad moment. It quietly bled out while Apple Pay made payments invisible. Stripe made Checkout disappear and Cash App made sending money feel like texting. PayPal was standing at the same counter it had always stood at, charging the same fees, while the rest of the internet rebuilt the counter around them. Active accounts peaked at 435 million in 2022. By end of 2023, that number fell for the first time ever in the company's history as a public company, confirmed in their own SEC filing. So, they went shopping. $4 billion for Honey, a browser extension that found coupon codes and was supposed to pull users back into the PayPal ecosystem. That was the growth plan. In December 2024, a YouTuber named Megalag investigated Honey and alleged it had been gaming affiliate marketing, taking credit for discounts users found themselves while cutting out the creators whose content actually drove those sales. Honey lost millions of users. Class action lawsuits stacked up.

[00:16:31]PayPal confirmed a code issue and disabled it. $4 billion for a browser extension that became a lawsuit. This is where you ask yourself, who approved that? Who looked at Honey and said, "Yes, 4 billion. Let's go." Dan Schulman, the CEO who spent a decade at the helm. He signed off on it in 2020.

[00:16:51]He left in 2023. The lawsuit arrived in 2024. He was already gone by the time the bill came. The CEO who bought Honey is already gone. His replacement launched something called Fast Lane to compete with Stripe on guest checkout.

[00:17:05]18 months in, zero adoption metrics released. Not one number, the button is still on millions of checkout pages.

[00:17:13]PayPal invented digital trust and forgot that trust needs maintenance. Snap has never made money. Not one year, not once. 450 million people use the app.

[00:17:23]The CEO controls almost all the votes, and the people who actually own the stock have zero say in any of it.

[00:17:29]They're financing someone else's losses with no exit and no recourse. Seven, Snap, Inc. If you have a teenager in your life, you know about the streak.

[00:17:38]The number of consecutive days they've sent a snap to someone. Some have kept streaks going for years. They'll hand their phone to a friend just to keep it alive over a vacation. 453 million people use Snapchat every month. The company has never made a profit. Not one year, not once, nine years as a public company. Net losses since Snap went public in 2017 total over 12 billion dollars confirmed in their SEC filings.

[00:18:05]698 million burned in 2024 alone. Tik Tok took the youngest users. Instagram reels took the slightly older ones.

[00:18:14]Advertisers followed. Layoffs every year since 2022. You heard about Meta's governance setup. Dual class shares.

[00:18:21]Founder in total control. Board can't touch him. Snap has the same architecture, but worse. At Meta, Zuckerberg's wealth is tied to the stock. His money falls with the company.

[00:18:33]At Snap, the shares the public bought carry zero votes. Not reduced, zero. You can own 10 million shares and have no say in a single decision the company makes. Evan Spiegel and his co-founder control about 99% of all voting power, their own 2025 proxy filing. Spiegel owns a small fraction of the economic value. He controls everything that matters. And yes, you're probably thinking, "How is this even legal?"

[00:19:00]Completely legal. The SEC allows it. The exchanges allow it. When Snap went public, they disclosed the share structure right in the perspectus.

[00:19:08]Investors bought in anyway, which means the real answer to how is this legal is because everyone agreed to it. They just didn't quite understand what they were agreeing to. $12 billion of not understanding what that means in practice. pension funds, retail investors, anyone who put real money into SNAP has absorbed $12 billion in losses and has no mechanism to do anything about it. No vote, no board seat, no leverage of any kind. You're not a shareholder in any meaningful sense. You're a donor who got a stock certificate. Before you buy any individual tech stock, take 30 seconds and look up whether it has dual class shares. If the founder controls more votes than his economic stake, you're not buying a piece of a company. You're financing someone else's vision. 12 billion gone. Same person in charge.

[00:19:58]Nobody can touch him. Every company on this list got here because someone at the top made a decision that cost everyone else. Intel bet on a factory it couldn't run. Zazlov bet on debt the content couldn't service. Zuckerberg bet on a world nobody wanted to live in. The last company on this list is different.

[00:20:15]Iroot didn't make a catastrophic decision. They made one mistake. They trusted someone else to rescue them. And that person took two years and then walked away. Eight. I robot. You've probably got a Roomba somewhere in your house. In a closet, on its charging dock, in the corner of a room, maybe it's running right now. Quietly navigating around the furniture. It still works. The robot is completely fine. Now, look up iRoot stock price.

[00:20:41]The company that makes that robot. The company that invented the entire category of home robotic vacuums just told its own auditors there is substantial doubt about whether it can survive the next 12 months. That's not a figure of speech. That specific language is in iRoot's 2024 SEC filing. Auditors only write that when they genuinely believe the company might not exist much longer. In 2022, Amazon announced it was buying iRoot for $1.4 billion.

[00:21:12]Great number, great exit, and iRoot stopped moving. For two years, they waited. No major new products. No real response to the Chinese robot vacuum brands that were undercutting them on price and outrunning them on features.

[00:21:26]Robbo Rock, Eovax, brands that barely existed in the US market 5 years ago, were now sitting on storeshelves next to the Roomba, often at half the price, and winning. iRoot's competitive strategy apparently was to wait for Amazon to save them. iRoot was waiting for the check. In January 2024, the European Commission blocked the deal. Amazon walked away. Iroot got a $94 million termination fee, which sounds meaningful until you learn that most of it immediately went to debt payments. What was left didn't fund a comeback, it funded a countdown. IDC's smart home device tracker found iRoot's global shipments had dropped about 30% in one year. They fell to fifth place worldwide in the category they invented. Robbo Rock surged in the same window. The Roomba is still a good product. The category is still growing. There are millions of people buying robot vacuums right now, and the brands they're buying are the ones that were building while iRoot was waiting. The robot works fine.

[00:22:28]The company that makes it may not exist long enough to build another one. Eight companies, eight completely different industries, one mechanism running through all of them. Remember the intro?

[00:22:38]Tech was supposed to be the safe bet.

[00:22:40]The one sector you hold while everything else burns. Tariffs, inflation, the jobs that aren't coming back. The company's too big, too essential, too embedded to fail. That story is over. Tech is eating itself now, faster than any industry has collapsed before. Intel took 50 years to build that reputation. It needed about four to destroy it. Iroot invented an entire product category and got wiped out in the time it took Amazon to change its mind. This is what Darwinian looks like when selection pressure is measured in quarters, not decades. The companies that forget to adapt don't get a warning. They get a going concern notice and a press release about strategic alternatives. The next 5 years will be worse. artificial intelligence is going to do to software companies what the internet did to newspapers and the executives running them are already paying themselves like the good times are permanent. They are not. The filing that matters most is always the one nobody read yet. When a company stops talking about customers and starts talking about synergies and restructuring and optimization, that's when the extraction has already started.

[00:23:48]If someone in your life is still holding one of these, send them this video. They deserve the receipts. Be careful where you invest. Make smart choices.

[00:23:57]Subscribe to InPlain Bite. We read the filings, name the executives, and take no sponsors. Nobody's paying us to soften anything. If this saved you from a bad position, super thanks is right below this video. No sponsors means every dollar from you actually matters.

[00:24:14]The governance was designed so you couldn't reach them. The filings were not. Read the filings.