Vivendi spent $77B buying Universal, Seagram and Canal+ — and reported a €23B loss

In 1998 Vivendi was a French water and waste utility called Générale des Eaux. Its chairman, Jean-Marie Messier, decided it should be a global media company. Over four years he acquired Havas, Canal+, Seagram (which owned Universal Studios and Universal Music Group), MP3.com and Houghton Mifflin, spending roughly $77 billion and renaming the company Vivendi Universal.

The acquisitions were funded with debt and Vivendi's own inflated stock. By mid-2002 the company was carrying unsustainable liabilities, its shares had lost most of their value, and the dot-com crash had destroyed the media-meets-internet thesis. Vivendi Universal reported a corporate loss of €23.3 billion in its 2002 annual report.

Messier was forced out on 3 July 2002 and replaced by Jean-René Fourtou, who spent two years selling everything: 80% of Vivendi Universal Entertainment went to GE to form NBCUniversal, Houghton Mifflin went to a private-equity consortium for $1.66 billion, and the publishing arm went to Lagardère.

In 2011 a French court found Messier guilty of embezzlement related to a severance package worth over $20 million. The water utility that had existed quietly for decades was nearly destroyed by four years of dealmaking, and the media empire it briefly owned ended up in the hands of an American industrial conglomerate.