Comet
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A man sold his website that made no profits to Yahoo for a whopping $5.7 BILLION on April Fool's Day. Yahoo that is was an amazing deal, but ended up shutting down the site three years later. Mark Cuban grew up in Pittsburgh selling garbage bags door to door at 12 years old so he could buy a new pair of basketball sneakers. In 1995, he created a company called The concept was interesting, it let people listen to out of town sports radio on the internet. By 1998, he was taking the company public and on the first day of the IPO the stock jumped 250%, the market cap hit $1 Billion as well. Cuban owned 30% of the company at that point. The site had 570K users, but the company also never made any profit. Yahoo at the time was in a massive war with AOL and microsoft to be the biggest homepage on the internet. All of the companies were spending billions of dollars in order to achieve this. Especially Yahoo. On April 1st of 1999, on April Fools Day, Yahoo bought for $5.7 Billion, and Cubans share of that was $1.4 BILLION. Cuban was nervous about it though. The dot-com bubble was really getting out of control so he paid $20 million in fees to Wall Street banks to have a guaranteed price on his Yahoo shares before the market tanked. 6 months after the bubble completely burst. Yahoo stock fell from $300 to $5 per share. And Cuban's $1.4 billion would have turned into $25 million. Luckily he was able to walk away with every penny. Wall Street called it one of the best trades of all time. In 2002 Yahoo shut down the site, three years after its $5.7 Billion purchase. In 2017 Verizon bought all of Yahoo for $4.5 Billion, which is even less than what Yahoo paid Cuban. Cuban used the money to buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and what he's most known for, being one of the strong faces on Shark Tank. A website that had no profits was sold for $5.7 Billion and sparked one of the strongest careers and personalities of the century.
Comet220,786 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
A 28 year old paid $18,000 to invent 4 MILLION fake customers. JPMorgan paid her $175 MILLION without checking a single name. Then paid another $100 MILLION for the lawyers who put her in prison. > Charlie Javice founded Frank in 2017 at 24 years old. > A platform that helped college students apply for financial aid. It worked. Just not at the scale she was about to claim. > By 2019 she was on Forbes 30 Under 30 and by 2021 JPMorgan wanted to acquire her. > The bank offered $175 MILLION but on one condition: prove you have the customers you say you have. > Frank had fewer than 300,000 real users. > Javice paid a data science professor $18,000 to generate a list of 4.25 MILLION fake students. Fake names, fake emails, fake birthdates and even fake income levels. > JPMorgan signed the check without verifying a single one. > She personally walked away with $29 MILLION and a managing director title at the largest bank in America. > Then JPMorgan tried to send marketing emails to Frank's supposed 4 MILLION customers. > 70% bounced. > An engineering director testified that the week before the deal closed, Javice asked him to help fabricate the numbers. > He refused and she told him: "We don't want to end up in orange jumpsuits." > She was arrested in 2023. While out on $2 MILLION bail awaiting trial, she became a Pilates instructor in South Florida. > In March 2025 a jury convicted her on all four counts bank fraud, securities fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy. > Sentenced to 85 months in federal prison and was ordered to pay $287.5 MILLION in restitution. > Then the final twist. Because the acquisition contract had made her a JPMorgan employee, the bank was legally required to cover her entire legal bill. It exceeded $100 MILLION. > The judge told JPMorgan they had "a lot to blame themselves" for not checking before signing. Then sentenced her anyway. She paid $18,000 to fake 4 MILLION customers and sold the lie to the largest bank in America. JPMorgan paid $175 MILLION for the company. Then $100 MILLION for the lawyers who sent her to prison.
Comet3,032,816 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
A retired convenience store owner read a lottery brochure for 3 minutes and found a loophole worth $26 MILLION that the state's own mathematicians had missed for years. > Jerry Selbee was 65 and retired in Evart, Michigan. A town of 1,800 people. Nothing particular to do. > In 2003 he walked into his old store and picked up a brochure for a new state lottery game called Winfall off the counter. > He read it standing up in the aisle. He never sat down and never took it home. > In less than 3 minutes he found it. > When the jackpot hit $5 MILLION and nobody won, the prize rolled down to lower tier winners multiplying their payouts several times over. > He did the math in his head. Spend $1,100 on tickets during a rolldown week and the numbers guaranteed an $800 profit. Every single time. > He bought $3,600 on his first attempt and made $2,700. Told nobody. > One evening beside a campfire he finally told his wife Marge. She sat quietly for a moment. Then said she could see the numbers too. > They formed a corporation and sold $500 shares to neighbours, friends and family. > Among the shareholders, three state troopers, a factory plant manager and a bank vice president. > Every six weeks they drove 900 miles to Massachusetts, checked into a motel and spent up to $720,000 on tickets in a single session. They sorted 360,000 tickets by hand in that room. > The Boston Globe investigated in 2011 and found no wrongdoing. > A state official called them "math nerd geniuses who found a way to legally win a state lottery." > The state made $120 MILLION from the Selbees buying tickets. They were the lottery's best customer for nearly a decade. > They kept 65 plastic tubs of losing tickets in their barn in case the federal government ever came asking. They never bought a sports car. Never bought a hot tub. > Their corporation grossed $26 MILLION over 9 years. Bryan Cranston played Jerry in the 2022 Hollywood film Jerry and Marge Go Large. The most profitable skill in the world is not coding, not investing, and not sales. It is the ability to read something everyone else ignored and see what they missed.
Comet552,690 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
A broke Australian bartender walked to an ATM drunk at 2am with $3 in his account and accidentally became a millionaire > Dan Saunders was 29 years old earning $700 a week pulling beers at a pub in Wangaratta, three hours north of Melbourne > One night in 2011 he stopped at an ATM to get cash for another round and tried to transfer $200 from his maxed out credit card > The machine said the transaction was cancelled and spat his card out. Then gave him the $200 anyway > He tried $500. Then $600. The money came out every single time but his balance never changed > He went home and figured out exactly what was happening > Between 1am and 3am every night Australian ATMs go offline for maintenance. > Any transfer made during that window would not process until the next day. > If he made another transfer the following night to cover it the system never caught up > He could create money from nothing. Every night. Indefinitely. > For the next four and a half months he did exactly that > Private jets across Australia. Five star hotels. He paid off friends debts and bought someone a horse for $50,000 > The bank called regularly to verify the transactions. He said yes that is me. They apologised for disturbing him and hung up > He had panic attacks in hotel lobbies and nightmares about SWAT teams storming his room every night > After $1.6 MILLION he stopped himself. Contacted the bank. They said it was a police matter. Then nothing happened for two years > He went to a newspaper and told them everything just to force the police to act. > He appeared on national television and walked through exactly what he did > Police charged him in 2014 with over 100 counts of fraud and theft > Neither the judge nor the prosecutor understood how the glitch worked. > The bank provided minimal evidence and refused to explain publicly how their own system had failed > He spent 12 months in prison and paid a $250,000 fine and went back to bartending at $22 an hour > National Australia Bank quietly fixed the glitch and never explained what went wrong or how long it had existed Bro found an infinite money glitch in one of Australia's biggest banks, spent $1.6 MILLION in four months, and went back to being broke
Comet38,125 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
A hacker is trying to break into Trezors holding $75 MILLION. The biggest one has $66 MILLION sitting on a single device. > Joe Grand has been a hardware hacker since he was 10 years old. He works out of a backyard lab. > For the past 3 years he has been doing one thing. Breaking into hardware wallets for people who locked themselves out years ago and forgot their PIN. > The method he uses was not invented by him. > In 2017 a 15 year old self-taught programmer named Saleem Rashid was sitting in his bedroom in the south of England. > He found a flaw in the Trezor wallet that nobody else had found. > He used it to recover $30,000 in Bitcoin for a Wired editor who had locked himself out of his own wallet. > Trezor patched it. But old devices running the old firmware were still vulnerable. > Thousands of them are sitting in drawers and full of Bitcoin people thought they would never see again. > Joe Grand spent 3 years learning how to exploit that same flaw. > He is now working through a backlog of wallets totaling $75 MILLION > The single largest device on his list holds $66 MILLION. > A 15-year-old figured this out with a pair of tweezers in his bedroom to save $30,000. The same exploit is now unlocking $66 MILLION from a backyard lab.
Comet30,357 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
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