[1024core]

According to the article, the mistake was admitting there was a problem and recalling the phones.

If that's what Wall Street calls a "mistake", then I don't know what they'd call the engineering problem(s) that caused the fires in the first place.

[mcphage]

According to the article, the mistake was saying it was the batteries and then doing a recall to replace the batteries, even though they weren't actually sure that's what the issue was. When it turned out they were wrong, and the replacement phones were catching fire as well, it made Samsung look a lot worse and led to them killing the product entirely.