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In 1972, a 14-year-old Michael Jackson talked a grown man out of $9 on live television.
Flip Wilson split a $28 lunch bill seven ways. $4 each. Simple math.
Michael walked up to the chalkboard and did a “proof” instead: long division, multiplication check, even adding the number seven times by hand.
Every single step was wrong. Every single step sounded right.
By the end, Wilson was standing there agreeing he owed $13, not $4. The audience was in on the joke the entire time — he wasn’t.
Michael didn’t even let him mail a check. He wanted the $9 difference immediately.
He was still a kid. He’d just conned an adult out of real money using fake math, in front of a studio audience, on national TV.
Was this proof he was a born performer, or the first sign of how good he’d always be at getting exactly what he wanted?
In 1972, a 14-year-old Michael Jackson talked a grown man out of $9 on live television.
Flip Wilson split a $28 lunch bill seven ways. $4 each. Simple math.
Michael walked up to the chalkboard and did a “proof” instead: long division, multiplication check, even adding the number seven times by hand.
Every single step was wrong. Every single step sounded right.
By the end, Wilson was standing there agreeing he owed $13, not $4. The audience was in on the joke the entire time — he wasn’t.
Michael didn’t even let him mail a check. He wanted the $9 difference immediately.
He was still a kid. He’d just conned an adult out of real money using fake math, in front of a studio audience, on national TV.
Was this proof he was a born performer, or the first sign of how good he’d always be at getting exactly what he wanted?
Fogel retweeted
Hulk Hogan took enough fentanyl to kill an average person, and his own pharmacist told him so.
Two 300-milligram fentanyl patches on his legs. Six 1,500-milligram fentanyl lollipops. 80-milligram doses stuffed under his gums at 2am. “You should be dead,” the pharmacist said. “We have never seen a human being take this much fentanyl.”
He didn’t die then. He died years later, at 71, officially of a heart attack.
No medical examiner ever opened a case. His death certificate was signed by his own personal physician, not the county. A private autopsy was done for the family, but the results were never released, not even to his daughter Brooke.
Brooke publicly said the investigation “missed the mark from day one.” She called police asking why no autopsy had been ordered before cremation was even on the table. Then she offered to pay for an independent one herself.
The documents that did surface showed something else nobody had talked about: leukemia.
Here’s the part that doesn’t add up for a lot of people. A man who once took a fentanyl dose that should have killed him, by his own pharmacist’s words, dies of “natural causes,” and the one official review stops before it starts.
My take: that’s not proof of a cover-up. It’s proof that “no signs of foul play” and “full picture” aren’t the same thing, and families are usually the last to get told the difference.
Should the daughter of a man that famous have had to fight this hard just to see the results of his own autopsy?
Hulk Hogan took enough fentanyl to kill an average person, and his own pharmacist told him so.
Two 300-milligram fentanyl patches on his legs. Six 1,500-milligram fentanyl lollipops. 80-milligram doses stuffed under his gums at 2am. “You should be dead,” the pharmacist said. “We have never seen a human being take this much fentanyl.”
He didn’t die then. He died years later, at 71, officially of a heart attack.
No medical examiner ever opened a case. His death certificate was signed by his own personal physician, not the county. A private autopsy was done for the family, but the results were never released, not even to his daughter Brooke.
Brooke publicly said the investigation “missed the mark from day one.” She called police asking why no autopsy had been ordered before cremation was even on the table. Then she offered to pay for an independent one herself.
The documents that did surface showed something else nobody had talked about: leukemia.
Here’s the part that doesn’t add up for a lot of people. A man who once took a fentanyl dose that should have killed him, by his own pharmacist’s words, dies of “natural causes,” and the one official review stops before it starts.
My take: that’s not proof of a cover-up. It’s proof that “no signs of foul play” and “full picture” aren’t the same thing, and families are usually the last to get told the difference.
Should the daughter of a man that famous have had to fight this hard just to see the results of his own autopsy?
In 2024, Matthew McConaughey told Nick Kyrgios he once turned down $14.5 million for one movie.
It didn’t start there. Hollywood offered him $8 million for a comedy. He passed. They came back at $10 million. Passed again. $12 million. Still no.
Then came $14.5 million for the exact same script, just a slightly better draft. He actually asked to read it twice, just to make sure he wasn’t crazy.
He still said no.
He’s said that one decision was the most rebellious thing he ever did in that town. Not because of the money he turned down, but because it told everyone he wasn’t bluffing.
Two years of silence after that. Then The Lincoln Lawyer. Then Dallas Buyers Club. Then he’s holding an Oscar.
Could you really walk away from $14.5 million on principle?
Phil Ivey has won more than $55 million playing poker. He says he’s never actually felt joy doing it.
Just relief.
His whole family tried to talk him out of poker. No money behind him, no one in his corner except his grandfather. So he played to prove everyone wrong.
It worked almost too well. 11 WSOP bracelets. More money on the felt than nearly anyone alive. And somehow it still wasn’t enough.
He used to play 16 hours a day chasing a high that never showed up. Win a tournament, feel nothing but relief, go again.
Recently he won something smaller and did something he’d never done before. He stopped. Called his girlfriend. Let himself feel it.
Took him 20+ years and $55 million to learn how to enjoy winning.
What’s the point of chasing something if you never let yourself feel it?
RJ Mitte died on October 12. He was 34.
Less than a year earlier, he told a podcast how he invests his money.
Breaking Bad didn’t make him rich. He says a business manager stole his tax payments, and it took him 10 years to pay off the bill.
So how did he invest what he had left?
“I treat my stock account like gambling. I like penny stocks.”
“Lately I’ve been using ChatGPT to do a lot of the research.”
The host couldn’t believe it. “No, are you serious?”
He bought about $200 of one of its picks.
Burned by a person, he trusted a chatbot.
RJ Mitte, Walt Jr. from Breaking Bad, died on October 12. He was 34.
A year ago, he told a podcast he paid more in taxes than the show ever paid him.
He was a teenager when the money started coming in. He hired a business manager to protect it.
“I write a check to go pay my taxes, and she would send me a fake filing and keep the money.”
Five years later, the IRS came knocking.
Compound interest at around 17% for each year.
“10 years to pay it off.”
The host asked if she was in jail.
“She’s around.”
RJ didn’t hide it. He kept talking about it so other young actors wouldn’t lose what he lost.
Breaking Bad made him a household name, and he spent years paying for one person’s betrayal.
In 1999, Elon Musk bought a car that cost more than most people’s houses. Three years earlier, he was showering at the YMCA.
In the video below, CNN films the moment his McLaren F1 gets delivered, and him driving it through his own neighborhood.
Musk had just sold his company Zip2 to Compaq for $307 million. His own cut was around $22 million. He used some of it to buy the McLaren F1, which cost roughly $1 million and was, at the time, the fastest production car on Earth.
He says there were only 62 in the world. He’s off by a bit: it was closer to 64 road-legal cars, ever.
In the clip, a reporter asks if buying it makes him an “imperialistic rat.” He says no, then half-jokes that it’s “not consistent with the rest of my behavior.”
He also says something that’s stuck with people for 25 years: “My values may have changed, but I’m not consciously aware of my values having changed.”
My take: that line is more honest than most people manage after their first big payday. Most people don’t admit they can’t see themselves clearly. He just said it on camera.
Does buying the fastest car on Earth prove your values changed, or is noticing the question enough to prove they haven’t?
By age 22, Shirley Temple had earned $3,207,666. Her trust fund had $44,000 left.
In the 1988 video below, she talks about her father without a trace of anger. At three she was already working, and she says that’s where she learned discipline: “time is money, it’s work, not play.” Her mother got a $250 weekly stipend from Fox and had no say over her contracts or films.
Her father became her business manager in 1934. A court ordered him to put her earnings into a trust. Most of the money never made it there.
In the clip, she calls her mother “the best mama that one could have,” and doesn’t say a bad word about her father either. She says she had “two loving brothers and a loving father and just a great life.” She later said she felt neither disappointment nor rage, and chose to just get on with it.
She did more than move on. In 1974 she became US ambassador to Ghana, and in 1989 ambassador to Czechoslovakia, right as the Velvet Revolution happened.
My take: she clearly knew what happened to her money. She just decided it wouldn’t define her, and I don’t think that’s naivety, it’s a harder kind of strength than anger would have been.
Was her father just bad with money, or did he spend 20 years living off his daughter’s paycheck?
He died with $800 in his pocket. Ten months earlier, he’d won the main event for the third time.
On the last hand he had Ace-4 against an Ace-8. He needed a deuce or a four. The river was a deuce.
In the winner interview, he held up a photo of his daughter Stefanie, who was 14. “I love you, honey, and I’ll be seeing you soon,” he said.
He told Gabe Kaplan that nobody ever beat him at cards except himself.
In November 1998 he died in a Las Vegas motel with $800 in his pocket.
Did he come back because he was the best player alive, or because that was the only hand left he could still control?
Follow for more stories behind the numbers :)
Elon Musk just wrote a letter to India’s “Prime Minister.” It wasn’t Modi.
It was billionaire Mukesh Ambani. Musk apologized for not realizing he’s “the real boss of India,” then asked him to let Starlink compete.
Sarcasm aside, here’s what’s actually going on.
Musk says Starlink has waited five years and “oligarchs” are blocking it. India’s government calls that baseless. Starlink, Jio’s satellite arm and OneWeb all hold licenses, and all three are still in security review.
So when Musk asks “why still no license?”, that’s not quite right. Starlink has one. What it doesn’t have is spectrum and the security sign-off.
Naming Ambani without showing any evidence is a bad look. Jio even agreed to sell Starlink last year.
But India isn’t off the hook either. Five years, 20 gateway sites already built, and still no launch date. Jio and Airtel control about 80% of the market, so people are going to ask questions.
Monopoly, or just slow bureaucracy?
In 2023, Elon Musk stood in front of Indian flags and said “I am a fan of Modi.” Three years later, he’s accusing “oligarchs” of “a crime against the people of India.”
In the video below, Musk speaks right after meeting Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New York in June 2023.
He says India “has more promise than any large country in the world.” He says Modi is “pushing us” to invest. And he wants to bring Starlink to remote villages with no internet.
He also says he’s tentatively planning to visit India the following year.
What happened next:
February 2025: Musk meets Modi again, this time in Washington.
March 2025: Jio and Airtel, India’s two biggest telecom giants, agree to sell Starlink.
2025: Starlink gets its license.
October 2026: Starlink has built 20 gateway sites with hundreds of antennas in India. It still can’t launch.
Musk now says unnamed “oligarchs” are blocking it. India’s government calls that “baseless and misconceived”: Starlink, Jio’s satellite arm and OneWeb all hold licenses and are in security review at about the same stage.
Starlink has been trying to enter this market for more than five years.
Did India shut the door on its biggest fan, or is Musk learning that charm doesn’t skip a security review?
A woman spent 21 days in a Las Vegas jail over a casino debt of about $100,000. Years later, she and Phil Ivey took almost $20 million from casinos without touching a single card.
In the video below, you can see how the biggest "legal" casino heist in history actually worked.
Kelly Sun signed a marker for a friend who never paid. In Nevada, that's treated like a bad check. She came out of jail wanting revenge on MGM.
She taught herself to spot tiny cutting flaws on the backs of playing cards. But in baccarat, players can't touch the cards. She needed someone casinos would say yes to: Phil Ivey, 10 WSOP bracelets and over $30 million in tournament winnings.
So they acted like superstitious high rollers. A dealer who spoke Sun's language. The same deck. An automatic shuffler. "Lucky" cards rotated 180 degrees.
The casinos approved everything. Their edge was about 6%, versus the house's usual 1%.
£7.7 million at Crockfords. $9.6 million at the Borgata.
Then the cards came back clean. Crockfords refused to pay. The Borgata sued to get the money back. Ivey lost in 2014, 2016 and 2017.
Did Sun find a flaw the casinos were too careless to see, or was this revenge dressed up as superstition?
