One of the hottest topics for prestige TV these days is the foibles and failures of what were once world-changing tech startups. Showtime has Super Pumped, about Uber. Hulu has The Dropout about Theranos. This month sees the debut of WeCrashed on Apple TV+, chronicling the meteoric rise and fall of office-space-sharing company WeWork. But what other tech company sagas are ripe for dramatic reinterpretations? Here are our picks for 10 tech sagas ripped from the headlines.
1. Triton
Crowdfunding has created a world where all kinds of big ideas can become reality if enough people buy into them. But it also created a bunch of scams and frauds. One of the most notorious projects of all time is the Triton, advertised as the world’s first “artificial gills” that would let people extract oxygen from water and swim submerged for extended periods of time. This isn’t scientifically possible yet, and the initiative collapsed under scrutiny shortly after it submerged. Watching the inventors frantically try to get their product to work while contending with journalists and infuriated backers would be a fun show.
2. Saygus
Competing in the cell phone market seems like a fool’s errand, but companies keep on stepping up to the plate and trying it. One of the most notorious in recent history is Saygus, a Utah-based company who claimed to be right on the verge of releasing a revolutionary new mobile device up until the US Attorney’s Office charged its CEO, Chad Sayers, with fraud. Sayers managed to get more than $10 million from investors, which he allegedly used for all kinds of wild personal expenses. Watching people frantically try to hide their misdeeds is great TV, as watchers of shows like Ozark know, so the Saygus saga is ripe.
3. Napster
The story of Napster is one of the foundational stories of the Internet. The World Wide Web was designed to allow people to link up and share information, but when that information was something big companies wanted people to keep paying money for, such as music, things got serious real fast. Record companies and artists like Metallica mobilized against the company, opening up a discussion on media rights, the sharing economy, and more before multiple lawsuits forced them to take it offline. Without Napster’s rise and fall, there’d be no streaming music at all.
4. Boo.com
The first dot-com boom and bust was a fertile time for crazy people spending money like it was going out of style—and what was more stylish than British fashion retailer Boo? Featuring a kicky “virtual assistant” named Miss Boo and a $135 million marketing budget, the site was too massive for the 56K modems of the day and a disaster to actually use. The intersection of youth culture and an Internet straining to keep up, along with the massive parties and other expenditures racked up at the company, would make for a great series.
5. Nikola
The electric vehicle market is one of the 21st century’s most competitive spaces, as upstart companies compete with titans of industry as they pivot away from gasoline. Obviously, Tesla is the market leader there, but there are others—most notably the curiously-named Nikola, founded in 2014 by a guy named Trevor Milton. They presented numerous prototypes for electric trucks and got enough trust to sign a partnership with General Motors. Unfortunately, two days after the announcement, a report alleging massive fraud from Milton dropped claiming that most of what they’d announced was nonfunctional or deceptive. In the report, it was revealed that one of the company’s electric truck promotional videos actually showed the vehicle rolling down a slight incline, not moving under its own power. Milton left the company, but the remaining employees are still trying to soldier on and meet their contractual obligations.
6. Quibi
The media business is full of wacky characters spending massive amounts of money, and no story shows that quite like Quibi. Launched in April of 2020 by former Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and HP CEO Meg Whitman, the gimmick was video for the Zoomer generation: short, vertical, and “trendy.” They raised over a billion dollars in funding and pumped it into 175 original shows and movies that ranged from bizarre to deeply awful. Less than a year later, Quibi was all done—the service shut down in January and sold its library to Roku. This story has it all: hubris, absurdity, and Chrissy Teigen in a People’s Court reboot.
7. Gizmondo
The video game industry is one that rewards big bets, and the Gizmondo looked like it was going to be a sure thing. Coming from electronics manufacturer Tiger, it seemed like a slam dunk—powerful, Bluetooth-enabled, able to send and receive text messages, and the list goes on. But the rollout was a massive disaster, featuring huge parties, celebrity endorsements, and only eight games. Tiger spent money like crazy, even once buying a modeling agency, and behind the scenes, things were bizarre and chaotic. Throw in the Swedish Mafia connections of Gizmondo Europe director Stefan Erikkson and an ultra-rare Ferrari crash, and you have a wild story indeed.
8. Ambrosia
Anti-aging technology is a hot subject, as the 1% look to conquer death through whatever methods they can find. One of the most disquieting methods is through blood transfusions, the idea being that cycling out the red stuff has a variety of health benefits. California startup Ambrosia was one of the most notable, offering plasma transfusions from young people for $8,000 a liter (or $12,000 for two liters, if you want to buy in bulk). After a warning from the FDA, Ambrosia shut down, but the blood-selling business is just an unbelievably weird idea for a show.
9. 1983 Video Game Crash
To go retro for a little bit, one of the most compelling periods in gaming history came after its early peak. The Atari 2600 dominated rec rooms across America at the beginning of the 80s, but just a few years later competition had become so intense that the entire industry was on the verge of collapse. Getting inside the companies furiously trying to carve out a chunk of the oversaturated market like Coleco and Mattel, as well as the cash-ins and scammers on the periphery, would be a ton of fun.
10. Mt. Gox
The world of cryptocurrency is full of scams, frauds, and other nonsense, but this isn’t a new thing. One of the most notorious disasters in the space happened all the way back in 2014 when Bitcoin was still the new hotness. It involved Mt. Gox, a website originally set up as a way for people to trade Magic: The Gathering Online cards. The site reinvented itself as a way to buy and sell Bitcoin in 2010, but just a few years later a massive hack caused the site to shut down. More than $450 million in Bitcoin went missing, and the collapse sent huge reverberations through the space. A financial crime of that magnitude has to have fascinating and bizarre figures both perpetrating and investigating it.
