Arthur

Master P had $500 in his pocket when Jimmy Iovine offered him $1 million. He said he was going to get lunch and never came back. By 1998, Forbes ranked him the 10th highest-paid entertainer in the world, at $56.5 million that year. In the video below, Master P tells the story himself, and the woman who helped negotiate his next deal explains what he got instead. Iovine's warning on the way out: "If you don't come back, you'll never get a deal in this town." His brother C-Murder wanted the money. They nearly fought about it on the flight home. Lunch was peanuts and a Coke. Master P's math was simple: if a man who barely knows you offers a million, you're worth a lot more than a million. So he sold CDs out of his trunk, city to city. Once he had moved more than 300,000 albums on his own, he signed with Priority: an 80/20 split in his favor, a $600,000 advance, and he kept his masters. His rule now: "Never do a deal while you're desperate." Be honest: with $500 to your name and a $1 million check on the table, you're the brother who takes it, aren't you?

21 Savage asked T.I. for $1 million to sign with him. T.I. said no. That no is why 21 now keeps 70% of his music money and owns every song he has ever made. He still calls T.I. "cheap as hell" for it. In the video below, 21 tells the story, T.I. explains why he turned the money down, and 21 breaks down the deal he signed instead. T.I.'s logic: "If I give you a million dollars, I'm gonna take 10 times as much." Take the advance, give up the ownership. So 21 stayed independent. He watched rappers around him sign for $200,000 because they had no leverage. He waited until he had a hit album of his own. Then he signed with Epic on a 70/30 split in his favor and kept his masters. "I make more money off my album sales than I do off touring," he says. For most rappers it's the other way around. Asked if he'd ever sell his masters and cash out: "I really wouldn't. That's some s*** you pass down for generations." So if you were a new artist with one hot video and bills due, would you take the $1 million or bet on yourself?

Michael Jackson died owing more than $500 million. Seventeen years later his estate is worth about $2 billion, and the executors want a court to sign off on $109 million in fees. His daughter Paris is fighting them in court. In the video below, Paris explains the one money rule her father raised her on, then E! News lays out what she wants from the judge. The rule: five toys meant five books. "It's about earning it, not just being entitled," she says. Michael left his money to a family trust for his three kids. Paris is 28. Prince is 29. Bigi is 24. According to her filing, the trust has never been funded. In October she asked a judge to move about $600 million into it, and to cut the executor's share of the estate's entertainment money. The estate fired back. Under the will, none of the kids get a payout until their 30s. Millions have already been spent on them, and the IRS once came after the estate for $700 million in taxes and penalties. Then its lawyers dropped a number: Paris alone has received about $65 million since 2009. She says that isn't true. On December 4, a judge hears it. So is Paris protecting her father's money from the people running it, or is she the kid who wants the toys before reading the books?

Cardi B won $4 million from a blogger who told her audience Cardi had herpes and used to be a prostitute. The blogger's plan to pay it: ask that same audience. One of the donors was Nicki Minaj. In the video below, Cardi explains what those videos did to her, and the blogger, Tasha K, answers how she'll pay. The videos ran for two years. Herpes, hard drugs, cheating. On the stand in 2022, Cardi told the jury: "I felt extremely suicidal." The jury sided with Cardi. Asked if she had the money, Tasha K laughed: "I ain't got it." She filed for bankruptcy. The judge said the debt stays. This March, she opened a GoFundMe for $3.5 million and asked fans to chip in. She says she pays $20,000 a month on her own. Then Nicki, Cardi's longest rival, dropped about $3,000 on her TikTok Live. "Thank you, Nicki," Tasha said on air, a minute before learning TikTok keeps a big cut. In June, a court made her pay $60,000 more for posts about Offset and Stefon Diggs that broke her promise to stop talking about Cardi. So if you sent Tasha K money, are you helping her pay her debt, or paying her to call Cardi a prostitute?

Jungkook of BTS was in army boot camp when a phone line he had never seen moved $5.7 million of his stock. The hackers chose him because he couldn't check his phone. Their other targets: prison inmates and the recently dead. In the video below, Jungkook and Jimin tell whoever keeps trying to break into their accounts to stop, and the news shows how his shares were taken. Weeks after he enlisted, the ring opened that line with his stolen personal data. It got them past every identity check. They opened a brokerage account in his name and moved 33,500 of his HYBE shares. His agency froze most of them in time. But 500 had already been sold to a buyer for about $90,000. Jungkook sued to get them back. The buyer argued they had bought in good faith. The judge didn't buy it. The buyer had only been told the shares were a major shareholder's stake and never checked whose. Serious negligence, the court said. In their chats, aired by MBC, one hacker noted that a CEO who loved crypto had died days earlier and his coins probably hadn't been inherited yet. The reply: no way we get caught. In August, a Seoul court gave a Chinese national from the ring 20 years. So who should eat the loss: the buyer who paid for stolen shares, or the star whose identity was stolen?

Kim Kardashian's 2011 wedding was reportedly set to bring in $17.9 million from TV and magazine deals. The marriage lasted 72 days. Then her husband went to court and called it a fraud. In the video below, Kim explains why she said yes, and the moment she knew it was over. She was 30, at the age when, as she puts it, all your friends are having kids. "I better get this together. I better get married." The night before the wedding, Kris Jenner went upstairs and offered her a way out: "I'm gonna put you in a car, no one will find you, just leave. And I'll handle it." Kim stayed. She was scared of being "known as the runaway bride forever." So she walked down the aisle in Vera Wang, in front of the E! cameras, and married NBA player Kris Humphries. Then came the honeymoon in Italy. "I think I made the wrong decision." In October, millions watched the fairy tale on E!. Weeks later, she filed for divorce. Humphries asked a judge to annul it as a fraud, saying she married him for the show. The case for Kim: she says she poured her entire TV fee, "and probably Kris'," into a bigger wedding. "If that was fake, I would have saved my money." The case against: by her own account she knew on the honeymoon, and the cameras kept rolling. Years later she was asked if she owes him an apology. "Absolutely." So was it a real marriage that fell apart on camera, or a show where only the groom didn't know the script?

Sante Kimes went on 60 Minutes and said she prayed the missing 82-year-old millionaire was all right. Her son later told the truth. Sante zapped the woman with a stun gun, and he strangled her. In the video below, they sit side by side in jail and call themselves "just a mother and son." Watch what Kenny does when the reporter asks about his college grades. Irene Silverman was a retired ballerina who owned a $7 million townhouse in Manhattan. Kenny moved into one of her rooms under a fake name. The plan was to forge the deed and take the house. In July 1998 she disappeared. Police picked up mother and son that same day, carrying her passport, her keys, a forged deed, a stun gun, handcuffs and a loaded gun. Her body was never found. Sante had already done three years in federal prison for keeping maids as slaves. Asked to describe herself, she says, "Kindness is very key." No body, no murder, their lawyer argued. The jury gave them more than a century each anyway. Sante died in prison in 2014. The question that made Kenny walk out was about his A in acting. Who is the real killer: the son who strangled her, or the mother who raised him to?

Frederic Bourdin has had more than 500 fake identities. In 1997, a family in Texas flew him home as their missing son. He was 23, French, and his eyes were the wrong color. They let him live with them for almost five months. In the video below, Bourdin explains how he got the case of a real missing boy, and what the boy's sister said when she first saw him. Nicholas Barclay was 13 when he vanished in San Antonio in 1994. Three years later Bourdin was in a children's home in Spain, posing as a lost teenager. He called a US missing children center, posing as a worker at the home, and they gave him Nicholas's name. Then a photo arrived. A blond boy with blue eyes. Bourdin thought he was going to prison. Instead he dyed his hair and copied the boy's tattoos. The brown eyes, he said, had been changed by the men who kidnapped him. A private investigator noticed the ears in old photos did not match. An FBI psychiatrist needed a few minutes. DNA did the rest, and Bourdin got six years. Nicholas was never found. Bourdin later claimed the family knew he wasn't Nicholas all along. Nicholas's mother failed a polygraph about his disappearance, and his half-brother died of an overdose after Bourdin's arrest. No one in the family was ever charged, and his mother said they just kept making excuses for him. "She knew I wasn't," Bourdin says of the sister. "But she knew I had to be." Was it grief that made them take a stranger home, or did they already know Nicholas was never coming back?

She poisoned her own mother. Then two elderly people she was paid to look after. Then her boyfriend, when he was about to find out she was forging his checks. Velma Barfield was a grandmother in North Carolina. She used rat poison. In the video below, she talks from death row about the drugs, about God, and about the hurt she caused. After a hysterectomy and years of back pain, she got hooked on tranquilizers. She took jobs caring for elderly people in their homes. It all came out when her boyfriend's autopsy found arsenic. Police dug up her second husband. Arsenic again. She confessed to four murders. On death row she got off the drugs, found God and spent six years ministering to other inmates. Billy Graham praised her work. She told her lawyers to drop her last appeal. On November 2, 1984, she became the first woman executed in America since 1962. Her last meal was Cheez Doodles and a Coke. Her boyfriend's family was not moved. "She is a dangerous person," a relative said as the execution neared. She was buried near her first husband. He had died in a fire. If a killer truly changes on death row, should the state still execute her?

In 2003, a pizza delivery man sat handcuffed in a parking lot in Erie, Pennsylvania, with a bomb locked around his neck. Police kept their distance and waited for the bomb squad. It went off minutes before they arrived. He had just robbed a bank. He said someone forced him to. In the video below, Brian Wells sits on the pavement asking the troopers why nobody is trying to get the thing off him. That afternoon his pizzeria got an order for two pizzas to an address at the end of a dirt road. There was nothing there but a radio tower. Next he walked into a PNC bank with a note demanding $250,000. He left with $8,702 and a cane that turned out to be a homemade shotgun. In his car police found nine pages addressed to "Bomb Hostage." A scavenger hunt across town, with the keys to the collar at the end and a clock running. "I don't have a lot of time," he kept saying. He asked a trooper to call his boss. Four years later, prosecutors said the plan belonged to Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. She needed money to pay a man to kill her father for the inheritance. His price was $250,000. The FBI says Wells was in on the plan and believed the bomb was fake. His family says he never knew these people and was lured to that tower. In a 2018 Netflix series, a woman said she gave the plotters his name for money and drugs. Officially, Brian Wells is an unindicted co-conspirator in the plot that killed him. If he really was in on it, does that make what happened to him any less of a murder?

In 1973, college girls in Santa Cruz were warned to stop hitchhiking. If they had to, they should only get into cars with a university parking sticker. The man killing them had that sticker on his car. The local police already knew him. They called him Big Ed. In the video below, Ed Kemper explains how girls in his car would talk about the killer on the loose, and why none of them thought it was him. At 15 he shot his grandparents dead. He said he wanted to see what it felt like to kill Grandma. At 21 he was let out. He was polite, huge and tested at an IQ of 145. He drank beers with cops at a bar across from the courthouse and asked them about the case. In September 1972, two court psychiatrists found he was no longer a danger. That November his juvenile record was sealed. He had already killed three young women that year. When deputies came to his house to take a gun, the purse and student IDs of his last two victims sat in the same closet. They never saw them. The next April he killed his mother. Her last words to him, he said, were "I suppose you're going to want to sit up all night and talk now." He drove to Colorado, called Santa Cruz police from a phone booth and confessed. They told him to call back later. Kemper says that right after his first murders, three different groups of people saw enough to stop him, got scared and looked the other way. The doctors who cleared him saw what everyone saw: a calm, smart, helpful young man. Years later, on camera, he repeats her last words, then adds: "God, I wish I had." Could anyone have stopped Big Ed sooner, or was he just too good at looking normal?

Kourtney Kardashian had one of the biggest shares of a reported $150 million TV deal. She stepped back from it to spend more time with her kids. Kim's response: she would show up to work on her deathbed. In the video below, Kourtney explains why she stopped wanting the job that made her family famous, and Kim explains why she never could. The show was the family business. Kim, Kourtney and Khloé reportedly took the biggest shares of the E! deal. Kris took her 10%. By 2019, Kourtney was filming less. Kim: "If I was on my death bed, I would still show up." Kourtney: "If I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom, then that's fine." The argument turned into a fist fight on camera. Kourtney, on why she pulled back: "It's hard to come to work when you feel this intense attitude and being ganged up on every day." Then, flatly: "I don't like being a celebrity." She stepped back to "take control of my schedule back." Within a year, E! announced the show would end after 20 seasons. The case for Kim: it was a shared paycheck. When one sister films less, the others carry her part of the show. The case for Kourtney: she signed up for a TV show, not for missing her kids growing up. Two years later, she was back on camera for the family's new show on Hulu. When the whole family shares the paycheck, should everyone work as hard as Kim, or was Kourtney right to put her kids first?

Kendall Jenner was paid $275,000 for one post promoting Fyre Festival. After it collapsed, she paid back $90,000 and kept the rest. The same month, Pepsi pulled her ad after a single day. In the video below, she explains why she said yes to Pepsi, and why she never saw the backlash coming. April 2017, the year she ends Gisele Bündchen's long run as the world's highest-paid model, with $22 million. Pepsi releases her ad. She walks off a photo shoot, joins a street protest and hands a police officer a can of Pepsi. The internet tears it apart. Pepsi pulls it the next day and apologizes, to the public and to her. Her reason for signing: "Michael Jackson's done it. Britney Spears has done it. Beyoncé has done it… I trusted everyone. I trusted the teams." April wasn't over. Three weeks later, guests land at Fyre. They were sold supermodels, yachts and a private island. They get disaster relief tents and cheese sandwiches in foam boxes. Kendall had told her followers she was "so hyped." The lawsuit says she never told them she was paid to be. The founder went to prison for fraud. The bankruptcy trustee came for her fee. She settled for $90,000. The case for Kendall: she was hired to post, not to run the festival, and the fraud was someone else's. The case against: she kept two thirds of the money. Plenty of guests never saw theirs again. Her followers had trusted her too. So should she have returned all of it, or was $90,000 fair for someone who was only paid to post?

Logan Paul says he never made a cent from his crypto game. The fans who bought in say they lost more than $4.1 million. A YouTuber called it a scam. Logan called him a liar, then thanked him in the same episode. In the video below, he answers the scam question head on, weeks after the accusation went viral. The game was CryptoZoo. Fans paid 0.1 ETH per digital egg that would hatch into animals earning a ZOO token. Coffeezilla spent a year on a series titled "Logan Paul's biggest scam." He reported that two anonymous accounts received about $1.4 million in payouts. Logan's side: "Made no money off CryptoZoo, never sold the token." He blames developers he calls con men. "I'm not a scammer." He says Coffeezilla "fabricated dangerously misleading falsehoods." Later in the same episode: "I do thank Coffeezilla for shining a light on this." His co-host pushes back: "They don't have our lifestyle. They're working paycheck to paycheck." Logan's promise: the game "is being made," and "I will make this right for the people who believed in me." A year later he admitted it would never come out. He put up $2.3 million to buy back the eggs, but only from fans who waived any claims against him. The case for Logan: he says he was the one who got conned, and still paid out of his own pocket. The case for the buyers: they bought because of his name, and the refund covered about half the claimed losses. Making it right came with a waiver. So was CryptoZoo a scam, or a celebrity who trusted the wrong people and paid for it?

Seinfeld was the Number 1 show on American television when NBC offered Jerry Seinfeld $110 million to make one more season. He said no. In the video below, he explains why he walked away at the top, and what he would tell his younger self about that money. When the host brings up the $110 million, Jerry doesn't flinch: "I could have got more than that." His reason was timing. "You go see a comedian. At an hour and 10 minutes you love the guy. At an hour and 30, it's like, I thought he was never going to finish." He says he could not let the show reach "that point where it starts to age and wither." So it ended on top. Then the reruns started paying. Bloomberg estimates syndication has brought Seinfeld himself about $465 million. In 2019, Netflix reportedly paid more than $500 million for the streaming rights. The case for taking the money: $110 million was guaranteed. The reruns were not. In 1998, nobody knew streaming would exist. The case for walking: Larry David had already left, and a tired final season could have cheapened everything before it. He did get more than that. Would you have taken $110 million for one more season, or walked away while everyone still loved it?

Kris Jenner, the matriarch who built the Kardashian empire, takes 10% off the top of every dollar her own children make from their deals. She says she's doing them a favor. In the video below, she explains how she set her own rate when she started managing her kids, with no formal agreement at all. "Most managers and those type of people, agents, are getting between 20 and 25 percent, sometimes 30 of the gross," she says. So she told her kids she would put her heart and soul into it and take 10. Just enough, in her words, that she "didn't need to get a day job." Those kids became Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, Kendall and Kylie. The deals became shapewear, cosmetics, tequila and nearly two decades of reality TV. Asked by Andy Cohen whether she felt guilty about the cut, she said no. She works hard and expects to be paid for it. The case for Kris: she built the machine. The deals, the lawyers, the team, the show. A stranger would have charged them double. The case against: a stranger can be fired. She's their mother. Years later, Kim talked about playing momager to her own daughter, North. Her line on the show: "Guess what? This momager is not taking 10 percent." So is Kris's 10% a mother's discount, or a cut no parent should take from their kids?

Kim Kardashian's best advice for women in business: "Get your f***ing ass up and work. It seems like nobody wants to work these days." Nine months before she said it, she was paid $250,000 for a single Instagram post. In the video below, she gives that advice twice: once to Variety, and once, far more gently, to a young interviewer. The post went up in June 2021. It promoted a little known token called EthereumMax, and opened with "Are you guys into crypto????" According to the investors who later sued her, the token fell 98% within a month. In 2022, the SEC said she never properly disclosed that she had been paid to post it. She settled for $1.26 million without admitting or denying the findings. The case for Kim: that post was never the business. She built SKIMS, now valued at $5 billion, with years of work that never made it onto her Instagram. The case for her critics: most women already work hard. They just don't start with her family's money and connections. The $1.26 million was about one caption. So did Kim earn the right to tell women to work harder, or did that one post prove her critics right?

In July 2018 Kylie Jenner sat on the cover of Forbes under one word that made her famous all over again: self-made. She was 20, and the magazine valued her at $900 million. Twenty-two months later the same Forbes ran a story called “Inside Kylie Jenner’s Web of Lies,” built around a number from someone else’s paperwork. The company started with a lip liner. As a teenager she couldn’t find one that matched her lips, so she made her own and sold it as the Lip Kit. In her words: “I built an empire.” In March 2019 Forbes made her the youngest self-made billionaire ever, at 21. That November, Coty bought 51% of Kylie Cosmetics for $600 million. The whole company was worth $1.2 billion on paper. Then Coty, a public company, had to file real numbers. The Jenners had led Forbes to believe sales were about $360 million in 2018. Coty’s filings pointed to roughly $125 million. Forbes also said the tax returns the family had shown its reporters were likely forged. In May 2020 Forbes took the title back. Kylie answered on Twitter: “i’ve never asked for any title or tried to lie my way there EVER.” And in her own founder video, she says this about her mom, Kris Jenner: “She’s definitely been a huge part of the success of Kylie Cosmetics.” I’ve read a lot of founder numbers. The ones told to a magazine and the ones filed with regulators are rarely the same story. Only one of them comes with consequences for being wrong. The same gap shows up in normal life. A friend’s business pitch, startup equity, a house someone swears doubled. Until somebody with money on the line has to put it in writing, it’s a story. Everyone remembers the billionaire cover. Almost nobody remembers that the real number came out of a buyer’s filing, not an interview. I’m not calling anyone a liar here. I’m reading the paperwork, and what you make of the word “self-made” is your call.

Jason Statham, one of the highest-paid action stars alive, got his first movie role for a fee so small he made more money on the street. Guy Ritchie hired him because of that street. Before acting, Statham sat on a milk crate outside Harrods with an open briefcase of perfume and cheap jewelry. In his words, the job was to “rip off lots of unsuspecting customers.” Ritchie was writing a film that opens with a guy doing exactly that. He didn’t want an actor pretending. He wanted someone who had done it. He also had no money. He needed about $6 million, spent two years raising it and got $1.5 million. Ritchie, on the same show: “No one got paid. If no one got paid, then it materialized. If people got paid, then it didn’t.” Statham’s fee for Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels: £5,000. In 1999 he went on a talk show to promote it. The host, Danny, admitted he’d bought a lot from street vendors over the years. “You mean I’ve been ripped off all these years?” Statham didn’t blink. “If you want your money back, Danny, I can’t afford it.” Someone on the couch said he made more money on the street than in the movie. “It’s very true.” His films have since grossed more than $8.5 billion. Danny never got his money back.

Nicolas Cage once outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for a 70-million-year-old dinosaur skull. He paid $276,000. Years later it turned out the skull had been stolen from Mongolia, and he had to hand it back. Everyone points to that skull as the reason he went broke. Cage says the real reason was far more boring, and far more common. At his peak he was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. His fortune was once estimated at around $100 million. He owned castles in Germany and England, a mansion in New Orleans, around 15 multi-million-dollar properties and dozens of cars. Then 2008 hit. In his own words on 60 Minutes: “I was overinvested in real estate. The real estate market crashed and I couldn’t get out in time.” That’s the whole story. Not the skull. Not the cars. Too much money in something he couldn’t sell fast when prices fell. By his count he owed the IRS and creditors about $6 million. Bankruptcy was right there. He refused. “I paid them all back. I never filed for bankruptcy.” He moved to Las Vegas, where there’s no state income tax, and started making three or four movies a year. Many were bad. Critics said he was just collecting paychecks. He didn’t hide from it. “Work was always my guardian angel,” he says. Even when a movie was crummy, he insists he never phoned it in. Then, debt paid, he made Pig in 2021. A small, quiet film about a man who lost everything. Cage calls it maybe the best movie he’s ever made. Most people will remember the dinosaur skull. I keep thinking about “I couldn’t get out in time.” A castle feels like the safest asset in the world right up until you need to sell it in a crash.