[guelermus]

Once, Nortel Networks was a $100 billion telecommunications giant and could have bought Cisco for $20 billion. It was too late for Cisco when they realized they were awfully behind in IP networking race. So they bought Bay Networks for $4 billion. It didn't work and soon after, the company of 96,000 people dropped to 30,000 in a few months, and then silently disappeared from the history.

[tguvot]

back then, Nortel bought some Israeli startup. Deal was mostly paid by in nortel stock. Everybody in startup became millionaire over night. So they went to Israeli IRS to negotiate a "deal" for reduced taxes/etc. While they were negotiating nortel stock dived and everybody lost everything.

edit. startup was chromatis. but it was lucent who did buying and not nortel.