Open records
5 of 21 records, free, exactly as they appear in the set. 5 more verified records are in the purchased files.
| Company | Fork date | The fork | Options | Choice | Stated rationale | What happened | Judgment analyst | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coca-Cola Read the story → verified | 1899-07-21 | Whether to grant away national bottling rights to Coca-Cola or keep bottling in-house |
| Grant bottling rights away | Candler believed bottling would fail and thought the men were doomed | 5 years · 2024 refranchising of bottling operations: sold Philippines bottling operations for net cash proceeds of $1.652 billion and India territories for $474 million | reversibility low verdict partial | Tennessee Encyclopedia (Tennessee Historical Society) (2018); Chattanooga Times Free Press (2026-06); American Business History Center (2025-09); Coca-Cola UNITED (2018-04); The Coca-Cola Company (2024); Virginia Museum of History & Culture (business archives of Central Coca-Cola Bottling Company, Inc.) (2003); U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission / The Coca-Cola Company (2025-02); U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission / The Coca-Cola Company (2025-02); The Coca-Cola Company Investor Relations (2024-02) |
| Hilton Read the story → verified | 2017-01 | Whether to keep owning hotel real estate or spin it off and become an asset-light brand franchisor |
| Spin off real estate | Franchise fee cash flow is far steadier than the lumpy, leveraged property cycle, and each new franchised hotel adds near-pure-margin royalty with almost no added cost | 5 years · 2023 Owned/leased footprint: about 51 of 7,530 properties owned or leased at end of 2023 — under 1% of its portfolio | reversibility low verdict held | SEC / Park Hotels & Resorts Inc. (2017); Franchise Help (2024); SEC / Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (2025-02); SEC / Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (2025-02); SEC / Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. (2025-02); Hilton Worldwide Holdings Inc. via BusinessWire (2025-02); Wikipedia / Hilton Worldwide (2024) |
| Marriott Read the story → verified | 2024 | Whether to honor the contractual put option and buy the Sheraton Grand Chicago |
| Buy the hotel as obligated | A contract obligated Marriott to buy, via a put option granted in a 2017 litigation settlement from the Starwood acquisition. | Latest · 2024 hotel ownership vs asset-light model: Marriott owns a $500M skyscraper despite owning or leasing less than 1% of its hotels | reversibility low verdict held | CoStar (2024-02); Marriott International, Inc. (SEC EDGAR) (2025-02) |
| Mars Read the story → verified | 1935 | Should a candy company enter and hold pet care as a long-term adjacency? |
| Enter and hold pet care | Permanent private ownership let Mars treat pet care as a habit it could compound rather than a bet on a schedule. | 5 years · 2017-09-12 deepening into veterinary care via VCA: Mars completed its ~$9.1 billion purchase of VCA, divesting 12 hospitals for the FTC | reversibility low verdict held | Britannica Money (2026-04); Fortune / Yahoo Finance (2025-01); SEC / VCA Inc. (2017-09) |
| Red Bull Read the story → verified | 2007 | Build an owned content and media machine to defend a commodity drink, rather than renting brand meaning through conventional advertising |
| Own the content machine | Content is the cheapest way to move a can and to make a commodity product un-poachable | 5 years · 2024 net sales: net sales rose 6.4% to €11.2 billion, on 12.7 billion cans sold | reversibility low verdict held | Northdata.com (Austrian Firmenbuch registry) (2007); Georgia Straight (2016-01); Bloomberg (2025-01) |
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- Fork date at the precision the record supports, never sharper.
- The fork, the options, the choice in the form the company faced them.
- Stated rationale as the company gave it or the record documents it, not our theory.
- Capital committed where the record states it; blank where it does not.
- Outcomes at one, three and five years or latest, each dated and cited.
- Reversibility and verdict as analyst judgments, marked as such.
- Every source, with dates and links, per record and in an appendix.