klaxxon
@klaxxon_ • 1,315 subscribers
Exploring the future of AI
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Jordan Belfort owed 1,513 victims $110.4M and the clock ran out in April 2026 with $96.65M still unpaid. The tape is from December 1994. Lake Success, Long Island. A 32-year-old grabs a hand mic in front of a room of brokers who are standing on their chairs, and he screams at them about a telephone. He is not hiding. He is being filmed. On purpose. That's the part everyone misses. By that Christmas, Stratton Oakmont had been under NASD scrutiny for 5 years. 1,378 employees. 35 offerings. The largest over-the-counter firm in the country, built on one move: buy the stock cheap, scream it up the phone, then refuse to place a client's sell order. He threw a party and taped it. In April 1996 regulators barred the firm from retail transactions. In December they expelled it. In 1999 he was indicted for manipulating at least 34 companies across 7 years. Then he wore a wire on the men in that room. 4 years. He served 22 months. The court ordered $110.4M back to 1,513 clients. By 2018 they had been credited $12.8M, and roughly $11M of that came from government seizures, not from him. His own payments over 11 years: about $1.8M. He sold his life rights for $1.2M. $21,000 of it reached the victims. The film about him grossed more than $390M. After 2018 the obligation was $10,000 a month. 95 months of that is $950,000. On April 28, 2026, exactly 20 years after his release, the federal collection window closed and he posted that he had completed his restitution. He didn't pay it off. He outlasted it.
klaxxon2,196,863 views • 8 days ago
Steve Ballmer is worth $179B for screaming one word at a developer conference in 2000. The clip is 26 years old. A 44-year-old CEO sprints across a stage in Orlando, dress shirt already soaked through, and howls "developers" until his voice tears. The room laughs. The internet has been laughing ever since. Everyone read it as a breakdown. It was a budget line. Windows never won on code. It won because 3rd parties shipped 100,000 apps that only ran on it, and every app made switching cost more. Ballmer wasn't chanting at a crowd. He was chanting at his own executives, who kept calling Microsoft a platform company and then acting like the platform was the product. Then he spent 14 years proving the doubters right. Vista. The Kin, killed 48 days after launch. Nokia's phone business bought for $7.2B in 2013, written down $7.6B two years later. In 2007 he watched the iPhone and said $500 was the most expensive phone in the world, no keyboard, no chance with business customers. He left in 2014 with the stock lower than the day he took the job. Forbes-adjacent lists called him one of the worst CEOs in tech. He bought the Clippers for $2B and stopped talking. He also never sold a share. Microsoft is worth $3.81T. Ballmer still holds roughly 4%. The stock went from $348 to $513 this year alone, which moved him past every founder-adjacent name on the board. Gates is at $114B. He gave nearly $100B away and owns less than 1%. Gates gave his stake away. Ballmer just kept screaming. $65B is the difference.
klaxxon252,248 views • 9 days ago
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