Major U.S. Companies That Went Bankrupt — and What Brought Them Down

Updated: May 6, 2026 — refreshed with current data and fact-checked.

Companies fail. Even enormous ones. Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States allows a business to restructure its debts while continuing to operate — or, in many cases, to wind down as gracefully as a multi-billion-dollar collapse allows. Chapter 7, by contrast, means liquidation: the lights go off, the assets get auctioned, and the brand becomes a memory.

The list below spans both the largest bankruptcies in American history and several that hit closer to home — the stores and brands that ordinary people actually walked into. Some of these companies recovered. Most did not.

Lehman Brothers — September 15, 2008

The one that broke everything. Lehman Brothers, the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States, filed for Chapter 11 with $639 billion in assets — making it the largest bankruptcy filing in U.S. history, a record that still stands. The collapse triggered a global financial panic, froze credit markets, and is widely considered the single event that turned a housing crisis into the Great Recession.

The U.S. government had bailed out Bear Stearns months earlier. It chose not to bail out Lehman. That decision remains one of the most debated calls in modern financial history. Whether letting Lehman fail was the right move depends entirely on whom you ask — and when you ask them.

Enron — December 2, 2001

Before Lehman, Enron was the bankruptcy that defined an era. At its peak, the Houston-based energy company was valued at over $60 billion and employed roughly 20,000 people. The problem was simple: the books were fake. Enron executives, aided by accounting firm Arthur Andersen, used off-balance-sheet entities to hide billions in debt and inflate profits.

When the fraud unravelled in late 2001, stock that had traded above $90 fell below $1. Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms, was destroyed. The scandal directly led to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which overhauled corporate financial disclosure requirements in the United States.

General Motors — June 1, 2009

GM was, for most of the 20th century, the largest automaker on Earth. By 2009, it was bankrupt. The company filed for Chapter 11 with roughly $82 billion in assets and $173 billion in debt. The U.S. and Canadian governments injected approximately $49.5 billion to keep the company alive — a bailout that remains politically divisive.

GM emerged from bankruptcy in just 40 days, shed several brands (Pontiac, Saturn, Hummer, Saab), and returned to profitability. It went public again in November 2010. The "new GM" survived. Whether taxpayers got a fair return on their investment is a different question; the U.S. Treasury estimated a net loss of about $11.2 billion on the deal.

Bed Bath & Beyond — April 23, 2023

The slow death of Bed Bath & Beyond was painful to watch. The home goods chain, once a suburban staple with over 1,500 locations at its peak, had been bleeding cash for years. A brief reprieve came in 2021 when meme-stock traders on Reddit pumped the share price — but that was a sugar high, not a cure.

By the time the company filed for Chapter 11, it had already closed hundreds of stores. The remaining locations shuttered within months. Overstock.com bought the brand name and rebranded its own website to BedBathandBeyond.com — a bizarre afterlife for a company that once defined American retail.