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The $500 million 'sunk cost' mistake this CEO still thinks about
Posted
July 21, 2026
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July 21, 2026
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0:55Now PlayingDSM-Firmenich CEO Dimitri de Vreeze says one of the hardest lessons of his career came from a second-generation biofuels project that failed to scale.
Each year, he says, the project needed more money — and each year, the team believed it was close to working.
“I think we’ve burned more than half a billion,” de Vreeze told CNBC’s Steve Sedgwick.
The lesson, he says, was not just about sunk costs. It was about the danger of treating belief as fact.
Watch the full conversation on “Executive Decisions.”
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