The Customer

Uber recruited drivers by advertising what they would earn. The FTC said the company claimed a median income of more than $90,000 a year for uberX drivers in New York and more than $74,000 in San Francisco, when the actual medians were $61,000 and $53,000 and fewer than 10 percent of drivers in those cities earned the advertised amounts. Uber also promoted car financing as the best available, with purchases from $140 a week and leases from $119, while drivers' median payments ran above $160 and $200 and the unlimited-mileage leases had mileage limits. Uber agreed on 19 January 2017 to pay $20,000,000 and admitted nothing. Its 2019 prospectus told investors the rest of the model in plain terms: fares lowered and discounted to win riders, an operating loss of $3,033,000,000 for 2018, and the reclassification of drivers as employees listed among the risks to the business.

“They didn't disrupt the industry. They deregulated it from the inside.”

The FTC sued Facebook on 9 December 2020, alleging it bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to remove them as rivals, and 46 states, the District of Columbia and Guam filed alongside. The states' case was dismissed as filed too late. The FTC's went to trial in April 2025, and on 18 November 2025 Judge James Boasberg ruled for Meta, finding the agency had not proved a monopoly today in a market that now includes TikTok and YouTube. The FTC has appealed. The other line of cases went the other way. Forty-two attorneys general sued in October 2023, alleging that Instagram and Facebook were built to hook children. On 26 August 2026, partway through the federal trial, Meta settled with 51 attorneys general for a guaranteed $12,190,000,000 over ten years, with new restrictions on teen accounts and no admission of wrongdoing.

“They didn't build a network. They built a net.”

BP rebranded itself as Beyond Petroleum in 2000 with the advertising agency Ogilvy & Mather. In 2004 it unveiled a calculator that let anyone work out a personal carbon footprint, and from 2004 to 2006 it spent more than $100,000,000 a year on the campaign around it, by the account climate researcher Geoffrey Supran gave WBUR. Almost 250,000 people used the calculator in its first year. Ecologists had been measuring footprints since the early 1990s. BP's contribution was to attach the idea to the individual and put the tool in the individual's hands. The phrase has outlasted the campaign by two decades, and each time it is used the accounting starts with the consumer.

“They didn't shrink their footprint. They handed me the shoe.”

ABACUS 2007-AC1 was a security Goldman built in 2007 out of bets on subprime mortgage bonds. Goldman told buyers the portfolio had been selected by an independent manager, ACA Management. It left out that the hedge fund Paulson & Co. had helped choose the bonds and was betting they would fail. On 15 July 2010 Goldman paid $550,000,000 and acknowledged that its marketing materials contained incomplete information and that leaving Paulson's role out was a mistake. It neither admitted nor denied the SEC's fraud allegations. The short position in this deal belonged to Paulson, Goldman's client.

“They didn't just sell the ship. They bought the torpedo.”

JPMorgan took $25,000,000,000 from the Troubled Asset Relief Program on 28 October 2008 and repaid it the following June. On 19 November 2013 it agreed to pay $13,000,000,000 over the mortgage securities that it, Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual had sold before 2009, and acknowledged that its employees knew loans in those securities did not meet underwriting guidelines and let them be sold without telling investors. The Justice Department called it the largest settlement with a single entity in American history. A year earlier traders in the bank's Chief Investment Office had lost $6,200,000,000 on credit derivatives, the episode known as the London Whale, and four regulators fined the bank about $920,000,000 on 19 September 2013.

“They got bailed out. We got foreclosed on.”

From 2002 to 2016 Wells Fargo pressed its branch employees with sales goals they could not meet honestly. The bank admitted that employees created false records, forged customers' signatures and opened accounts and cards without consent, and that it collected millions of dollars in fees and interest it was not owed, damaged customers' credit ratings and misused their personal information. The first regulators' action, on 8 September 2016, counted about 1,500,000 deposit accounts and 565,000 credit cards and cost $185,000,000. On 21 February 2020 the bank agreed to pay $3,000,000,000 under a three-year deferred prosecution agreement.

“They didn't just sell me a card. They forged the application.”