Gunther

She divorced her husband at 9 AM. At 12:30 PM, he bought a lottery ticket that won $40,000,000. In a staged Southern Justice courtroom episode, Diana Taylor sues her ex-husband Mark for half the prize. She tells the judge the ticket was bought with money from their shared account. She also says she gave up her career and spent seven years following Mark as he chased his dreams. Mark brings a receipt showing he bought the ticket after the divorce. Diana says the winning numbers match dates from their relationship. She points to their wedding, their first date and even their dog's birthday. Mark says he didn't choose the numbers. The machine did. He also files a counterclaim for $2,500, which the judge throws out. The judge rules that the winnings belong to Mark because he bought the ticket after the divorce. Diana gets none of the $20 million she requested.

Lana Rhoades says she kept her son's father a secret without an NDA or a payout. She says he's an NBA player who has only met their child once. During her pregnancy, she barely heard from him. When he did call, she says he was concerned about whether his identity would stay private. "He was expecting me to protect him." According to Rhoades, she hadn't signed an NDA and hadn't received a payout to keep his name to herself. She says she was in love with him, and that was why she kept quiet publicly about who he was. The expectation of secrecy was there even though, in her account, he was barely checking in on her during the pregnancy. Then she made a joke about having "NBA DNA in me for 10 months." The joke didn't include his name, but it referred to the father through the league he played in. She says her phone rang again after she made jokes about him. "He did not like those jokes."

Ryan Reynolds paid Deadpool's writers from his own salary so they could stay on set. He had spent nearly a decade trying to get the first film made. When Fox finally approved it, he still couldn't get the studio to pay for Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick to be there during filming. The two writers had worked on the script with him for at least six years. Reynolds wanted to keep that team together while they shot it. "I took the little salary I had left and paid them to be on set with me so we could form a de facto writers room," he told The New York Times. Reese and Wernick confirmed it back in 2016: Fox wouldn't pay for them to be on set. Reynolds paid out of his own pocket. He later said he hadn't been expecting a hit when the film was approved. In the interview below, he talks about what the small budget forced them to do. Tim Miller, he says, "squeezed $10 out of every dollar they gave us."

Five billionaire investors laughed at a guy selling a Wi-Fi doorbell. They passed on a company that later sold for over $1 billion. Watch Jamie Siminoff pitch DoorBot on Shark Tank in 2013. He asked for $700,000 for 10% of his company. That put its value at $7 million. Look at how the Sharks smile and brush off his idea. They make fun of the design. They joke that thieves will just steal the doorbell. They tell him he can't compete with big tech companies. Siminoff left without a deal, close to tears. His company was running out of money. He didn't quit. He changed the name from DoorBot to Ring. Five years later: amazon bought Ring for over $1 billion. siminoff returned to Shark Tank as a billionaire guest judge, sitting next to the investors who had turned him down. Even the smartest investors can be wrong 90% of the time. What is the greatest comeback story in startup history?

Tim Cook's answer to an Android video complaint: "Buy your mom an iPhone." At the Code Conference in 2022, a journalist told Apple's CEO he couldn't properly send videos to his mom because she had an Android phone. Cook didn't offer a fix for sending videos between the two platforms. He told him to buy her a different phone. The exchange got a laugh. It also gave critics a clear example of the problem: someone asked why two phones couldn't work better together, and Apple's CEO suggested buying another Apple device. The US Department of Justice later quoted Cook's words in its antitrust complaint against Apple. Apple has since added RCS support, improving messaging between iPhones and Android phones. The joke is easy to remember. So is the proposed solution: your mom needs to buy into the same ecosystem. How much inconvenience is acceptable to keep people inside Apple's ecosystem?

At 18, Aaron Carter says he owed $7.8 million in taxes his parents never paid. He had sold a million albums before turning 10. His second album sold more than 3 million copies in the US. He toured with the Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. Carter says his parents never paid those taxes. He says he also wasted money on cars, shoes and things he calls stupid. Years later, he was performing off-Broadway for $654 a week. He says he did 500 shows because it was the only place willing to hire him. The IRS was taking money out of his wages. By 2013, his bankruptcy filing listed just over $8,000 in assets and more than $2 million in debt, including a $1.3 million tax lien. Carter says the judge gave him a choice that could send both parents to prison for 10 years each. “I will never let you put my parents in prison, no matter how dirty they've been to me.”

In 2014, Warren Buffett promised $1,000,000,000 to any ordinary person who could correctly predict one entire sports tournament bracket. Spoiler: he made millions before the tournament was even halfway over. It all started when mortgage giant Quicken Loans wanted to run the biggest advertising promotion in US history. The idea was simple: anyone could enter for free by filling out a bracket for the NCAA college basketball tournament, known as March Madness. Pick the winners of all 63 games, and you win $1 billion. But under US law, you can't just promise a billion dollars. The organizer has to insure the prize through a financial backer that can actually pay it. The only person with the money to cover a check that big without a mountain of paperwork was Warren Buffett, through his company Berkshire Hathaway. The whole country went crazy. Around 15 million people stayed up late, studied college basketball stats, and submitted their picks. The press seriously debated what the 83-year-old billionaire would do if someone simply got lucky. But Buffett wasn't watching basketball. He was looking at the math: If you picked the winner of each of the 63 games by flipping a coin, your chance of getting every pick right was 1 in 9.2 quintillion. Even if you were a top sports analyst and knew the clear favorites in the early rounds, your chance of filling out a perfect bracket was about 1 in 128 billion. For taking on this "huge risk," Berkshire Hathaway received an insurance fee from Quicken Loans. Insiders estimated it at $10 million to $15 million. It was all over within 48 hours. In the first round, the University of Dayton, an 11th seed, unexpectedly beat the favorites, Ohio State. Then Harvard knocked out Cincinnati. By Friday evening, after just the 25th game out of 63, officially not a single person in the world had a perfect bracket left.

Michael Jackson died more than $500 million in debt. Years later, his daughter alleged that $464 million was sitting in cash earning under 0.1%. John Branca and John McClain were put in charge of his estate. By June 2024, it was valued at over $2 billion. In November 2025, Paris Jackson challenged the estate's financial records for 2021. She said the two men had been paid about $148 million through that year. They responded that Paris herself had received around $65 million in benefits from the estate. She also challenged $625,000 in bonuses paid to outside law firms in 2018. In May 2026, the court ordered the lawyers to return the money. It said there wasn't enough evidence to justify those bonuses. That decision was about the lawyers' bonuses. It did not find that the two men running the estate had wrongly paid themselves $148 million. The court also praised their work rebuilding the estate and creating wealth for the family. Who should decide how much the people running an estate get paid?

GTA's publisher paid to make parents hate the game. A $1 million production went on to generate $40 million in first year revenue. Reviewers were attacking its outdated graphics and design. Its PR man gave the tabloids a better story: a bloody game that would corrupt children's souls. He approached tabloids and lawyers himself. The people selling GTA were feeding the campaign against it. The violence needed no fabrication. You could steal cars, shoot pedestrians and burn people who hadn't attacked you. Every complaint described something a customer could do in the game. The scandal gave GTA coverage beyond game reviews. People who weren't reading about graphics were hearing about a threat to their children. The publisher paid to provoke the condemnation. The newspapers spread it. The game brought in 40 times its development budget in its first year.

Warren Buffett bought $10.6 million of Washington Post stock. The market marked it down to $8 million. 1973. Berkshire bought into a company the stock market valued at roughly $100 million. Buffett estimated the business was worth $400 million to $500 million. In his later shareholder letter, he said most media executives and analysts would have reached the same estimate. By the end of 1974, Berkshire was sitting on a paper loss of about 25%. Buffett said the business had continued to do well. Its intrinsic value had grown. The shares had become cheaper than the bargain he originally bought. Katharine Graham, the company's CEO, bought back large quantities of stock at those depressed prices. The business grew, and the remaining shares represented larger pieces of it. Then investors began paying closer to what the business was worth. By the end of 1985, Berkshire's remaining shares plus proceeds from a proportionate redemption totaled $221 million. In an interview broadcast in 1985, Buffett said he didn't need to be in Washington to know what the Washington Post was worth. "Prices don't tell me anything about a business." A $10.6 million purchase. Marked down to $8 million. Then $221 million in shares and redemption proceeds.

Warren Buffett gave his kids 75 cents in allowance. Then he used a slot machine to win it back. He bought the machine and installed it on the third floor of the family home. The children did not have to get to Las Vegas. They only had to go upstairs. Buffett said he could give them any allowance they wanted. There was one condition: the money had to be in dimes. "I mean, I had it all back by nightfall." His son Howard remembered the arrangement. As soon as the allowances started, the machine appeared in the attic. The children went upstairs, and their father won the money back. "In 10 years, I couldn't get three of those melons to line up." His daughter Susie said the neighbors' children brought their dimes over too. At Berkshire Hathaway's 2007 annual meeting, Buffett said he had thought the machine would be a good lesson for his children. They were there as he told the story. The shareholders laughed. The allowance came from Dad. The slot-machine money went back to Dad.

In 2008, Elon Musk nearly went broke building cars and rockets. Today, Tesla has shown a car lifting off with SpaceX thrusters. The two companies behind that demonstration almost died in the same year. Musk had made about $180 million from PayPal. Instead of retiring, he poured his fortune into businesses that were rapidly running out of cash. SpaceX's first three launches failed. A fourth failure could have ended the company. Tesla was trying to turn its original Roadster into a viable business. Then the financial crisis hit, just as Musk was going through a divorce. He later told 60 Minutes that the Sunday before Christmas was the closest he had ever come to a nervous breakdown. Survival came in stages. The fourth Falcon 1 reached orbit in September. On December 23, NASA awarded SpaceX a $1.6 billion resupply contract. On Christmas Eve, Tesla closed the financing that kept it alive. That is the history behind this clip. The original Roadster belonged to a company struggling to survive. Its successor has now demonstrated a brief flight using technology from the other company Musk nearly lost. The car is not in production yet. But a man who once struggled to keep both companies alive is now bringing their engineering together in one vehicle.

In 2011, a Bloomberg reporter told Elon Musk that BYD was ramping electric cars, and that Warren Buffett owned 10%. Musk laughed before he answered. "Have you seen their car?" The reporter had seen them at the Berkshire Hathaway meeting. He pointed to a lower price. Musk still said no. "I don't think they have a great product." Not particularly attractive. The technology was not very strong. Their focus, he said, should be "making sure they don't die in China." A famous owner did not make BYD a competitor. A lower price did not either. He graded the car. In 2025, BYD sold 2,256,714 battery electric cars. Tesla delivered 1,636,129.

The second richest man in the world paid six figures for his granddaughter's art school. When she asked for a mattress, he said no. The tape puts Warren Buffett there at $44 billion, behind Bill Gates. Nicole called his office about a futon for an off-campus apartment. His secretary told her the rules: school expenses only. Her mother married his son Peter when Nicole was 4. Peter later adopted her. She grew up visiting the house in Omaha and taking vacations at Laguna Beach. A card from Warren was signed Grandpa. In the clip she says the money stopped after school. She was in San Francisco, organizing another wealthy family's home and their children's toys. School-trip money was usually turned down too. A yes would have set her apart from the other grandchildren. On camera she says she fears his judgment. "Money is the spoke in my grandfather's wheel of life." On Oprah she said she felt excluded from the fortune. A month later he mailed her a letter. "I have not emotionally or legally adopted you as a grandchild." He signed it Warren. The card from the year before said Grandpa. By December 2008 she was getting by on about $40,000 a year and still could not afford health insurance. She says she is at peace with the rule. Then she admits she wishes she did not have to worry.

Jeff Bezos explains how he came up with the idea for Amazon. In 1994, he found a statistic: web usage was growing roughly 2,300% a year. Most people still had no internet access. Bezos started looking for a business that this growth would make possible. Books were the first product, but not because he loved reading. There were millions of titles in print, while even the largest physical bookstores carried only about 100,000 to 150,000. Shelf space imposed a limit that an online catalog could remove. That gave Amazon a specific reason to exist: help people find books their local store could never stock. Putting a bookstore online mattered because it changed the selection customers could access. The useful lesson is in the sequence. Identify a fast-growing technology. Find a customer problem it can solve better than the existing alternatives. Start with the category where that advantage is clearest. For Bezos, that category was books. The larger ambition was selection.

A Carnegie Mellon professor who spent ten years building rides for Disney walked on stage with ten tumors in his liver and spent 76 minutes explaining how to get what you want out of life. For free. Keynote speakers charge $30,000 for a thinner version of it. Randy Pausch showed the audience his scans and told them the doctors had given him months of good health. Then he did pushups. He wasn't there to deliver a farewell speech. As a child, he wanted to float in zero gravity. Years later, his students won access to a NASA flight, but the rules kept faculty off the plane. Pausch read the fine print: the team could bring a journalist. He stepped down as faculty adviser and applied as press. He called obstacles "brick walls." The point wasn't to pretend they weren't there. It was to find out whether you cared enough to look for a way through. He had already explained the "head fake": children play football and, without noticing, learn teamwork and persistence. At the end, he revealed that the entire lecture was one too. The stories about childhood dreams were a way to talk about how to live. Then came the second reveal. The talk was for his children. You can read the advice in a minute. Hearing him arrive at that last line is different. The full lecture is free.

Brian Moynihan told Buffett his bank didn't need $5 billion, then signed the deal In 2011, Buffett called Bank of America. Moynihan said the bank didn't need capital. Buffett's reply, as Moynihan tells it: "I know. That's why I'm calling." The bank faced a confidence problem amid mortgage litigation. Buffett's name could offer something a routine capital raise couldn't: an endorsement people would notice. But Berkshire didn't hand over $5 billion for ordinary shares. It received preferred stock paying a 6% dividend and warrants to buy 700 million common shares at about $7.14. Moynihan says employees returned to work knowing Buffett had backed their bank. The endorsement mattered, but Buffett made sure Berkshire was paid for the risk.

At 22, Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo’s $1 billion offer for Facebook, then watched his entire management team leave within a year. In 2006, Facebook had 10 million users. The team had been adding schools and photos one next step at a time. Then Yahoo arrived with a number big enough to interrupt that routine. Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz chose not to sell. They believed the network could reach people far beyond schools. For many early employees, a sale after two years looked like the win they had joined a startup to get. Zuckerberg admits he had not clearly explained that he was building for a longer mission. That was the fracture. He says the painful part was not refusing Yahoo. It was watching the whole management team disappear over the following year. Then came News Feed and open registration. The bet looked right within months. Zuckerberg does not pretend he saw every outcome: “I got really lucky.” Later bets, he says, can take five or ten years to judge. There is no launch next month to settle the argument. A big offer forces a founder to price more than the company. It reveals whether the people building it ever agreed on the destination. The full interview is free online. Do not stop at the $1 billion headline.

At 22, Mark Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo $1 billion offer for Facebook, then watched his entire management team leave within a year. In 2006, Facebook had 10 million users. The team had been adding schools and photos one next step at a time. Then Yahoo arrived with a number big enough to interrupt that routine. Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz chose not to sell. They believed the network could reach people far beyond schools. For many early employees, a sale after two years looked like the win they had joined a startup to get. Zuckerberg admits he had not clearly explained that he was building for a longer mission. That was the fracture. He says the painful part was not refusing Yahoo. It was watching the whole management team disappear over the following year. Then came News Feed and open registration. The bet looked right within months. Zuckerberg does not pretend he saw every outcome: “I got really lucky.” Later bets, he says, can take five or ten years to judge. There is no launch next month to settle the argument. A big offer forces a founder to price more than the company. It reveals whether the people building it ever agreed on the destination. The full interview is free online. Do not stop at the $1 billion headline.

In 1988 Ross Johnson bid $112 a share to buy his own company, RJR Nabisco. The board sold it to someone else for $109. He was not outbid. His number was the highest in the room. The man who won did worse than the man who lost. Johnson started it. In October 1988 the CEO of the company behind Oreos and Camels offered $75 a share to take it private with his own management team. He picked the price and he picked the moment. The logic was not stupid. Nobody knew that business better than the man running it every day, and a CEO buying his company from a market that underprices it is one of the oldest trades there is. What he did not price was the announcement itself. The moment a CEO says his company is worth $75, everyone else gets to bid. KKR came in. For 6 weeks the numbers went up, until Johnson's group reached $112 and KKR stopped at $109. The board took the lower number because it trusted it more. Johnson lost the company and left with a payout estimated at more than $50 million. KKR paid about $25 billion, $31 billion counting debt. By Bloomberg's count in 1995, it had bought in at an adjusted $5.62 a share and sold its last stake 7 years later at $5.73. The biggest buyout in history earned its investors well under 1% a year. The footage is Henry Kravis telling it himself. He makes a point of saying his firm did not start the fight, management did. They borrowed $14 billion from banks, he says, and were afraid of being the people who brought down the banking system. Then the detail almost nobody repeats: while the board argued all day, it offered KKR something like $250 million, in his words, to give it 2 more weeks. KKR refused on the spot. We want to own this company, he says, we are not in the fee business. I have won an auction I started and later wished I had lost. The price looked fine the day I paid it. It was just the one number I had stopped questioning. You do a smaller version of this every time you say a number first. The salary you ask for. The price you list your house at. The offer you open with. The first number does not only anchor the person across the table. It tells everyone else the thing is for sale. Almost nobody asks who else is listening before they name a price.