Companies that made billions off of killing their own customers😳#fyp #viral #History #interesting #crazy

Companies that made billions off of killing their own customers. In 1952, the tobacco giants had been booming for decades. That year, Americans smoked 430 billion cigarettes and spent over $5 billion on tobacco. But just a year later, something happened that changed everything. Scientists painted cigarette tar on mice and almost half got cancer. Word spread and sales fell for the first time since the Great Depression. So tobacco companies teamed up. They ran ads in over 400 newspapers saying there was no proof cigarettes cost cancer. And for 40 years, the ads worked. But in 1994, the FDA accused them of secretly controlling nicotine levels to keep smokers hooked and threatened to regulate cigarettes like a drug. So Congress forced CEOs of the seven biggest tobacco companies to testify under oath. One by one, they all said nicotine wasn't addictive. Then, weeks later, one man did something that would cost them billions. Hired to sort one company's files, he leaked thousands of secret pages, including proof they'd known for decades that nicotine was addictive. States sued. And in 1998, they agreed to pay $206 billion in damages. The biggest civil settlement in American history. But here's what makes this story genuinely insane. The Mar-Burrow Man, the cowboy who made Mar-Burrow the world's best-selling cigarette, died of smoking-related diseases.