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Bill Cosby thought the interview was over when he asked an AP reporter to make sure his answer about the rape allegations never aired. His microphone was still on, and the AP released the tape. It was November 2014, and he was there to talk about his art collection. A few weeks earlier a comedian had called him a rapist on stage, the clip went viral, and accusations that had been around for years were news again. So the reporter asked. Cosby smiled and shook his head. "No, no, we don't answer that." His wife Camille sat next to him. Then the interview ended. Both of them were still wearing microphones, and the camera was still running. In the video below Cosby appeals to the reporter's "integrity" and says he would appreciate it if the footage was "scuttled." "I think if you want to consider yourself to be serious, that it will not appear anywhere." Two weeks later the tape was everywhere. More than 60 women came forward. In a 2005 deposition he had admitted getting Quaaludes to give to women he wanted to have sex with. He had paid one accuser about $3.4 million. In 2018 a jury convicted him of drugging and assaulting her. He got 3 to 10 years. In 2021 Pennsylvania's Supreme Court threw out the conviction, because a prosecutor had promised back in 2005 not to charge him. He walked out that day. He was never declared innocent. He just went home. Was the court right to free him over a promise made 16 years earlier?
Verax3,227,887 views • 3 days ago
Richard Hatch won $1,000,000 on the first season of Survivor. The IRS says he now owes $3.3 million on it. 51 million people watched him win in August 2000. He never paid the tax on the prize. His defense: he says he caught producers sneaking food to other players, and the show promised to cover his taxes if he won. CBS never commented. The appeals court said he never showed any proof of a deal. In 2006 a jury convicted him. He served 51 months in federal prison. In 2011 he went back for nine more, for not fixing his returns. Then the bill kept growing. This March, 26 years after the finale, a federal judge let the IRS collect about $3.3 million with interest. The government put liens on two of his homes in Newport. He is appealing on his own, without a lawyer. In the video below he explains why he thinks the tax was never his to pay. "The taxes on the million were required by law… to have been paid to Malaysia before we left the island… by CBS or Mark Burnett." The case for Hatch: if the show made that promise, he was set up. The case for the IRS: a $1 million check is income. Everyone else pays theirs. Was the first Survivor winner played by the show, or did he try to outwit the wrong player?
Verax2,644,043 views • 11 days ago
Matthew Perry made $1 million an episode on Friends and spent about $9 million trying to get sober. In his last month, a doctor charged him $57,000 for 20 vials of ketamine that sold for about $15 each. In the video below, a year before he died, he describes the night doctors gave him a 2% chance to live. "Five people had an ECMO machine that night, and the other four died, and I survived." On September 30, 2023, the doctor met Perry for the first time. That day he texted a colleague: "I wonder how much this moron will pay." Then: "Let's find out." Same day, he bought $795 worth of ketamine and supplies from another doctor. Perry's assistant paid him $4,500. Over the next 12 days: 20 vials, $57,000. One shot was given in the back seat of Perry's car in a parking lot. That's about $2,850 a vial. Roughly 190 times the going price. Then the assistant found a cheaper source. He was paid $150,000 a year to manage Perry's medical care. In 11 days he bought 51 vials from a dealer prosecutors called the "Ketamine Queen." On October 27, the doctor texted that he'd been "stocking up." The next day, the assistant gave Perry at least three shots. Perry was found dead. He was 54. Then came the sentences. The dealer: 15 years. The assistant: 41 months. The doctor who called him a moron: 30 months and a $5,600 fine. The doctor who supplied him: 8 months of home detention. Netflix releases a documentary about Perry's life on Tuesday. Wednesday marks three years since he died. The doctor made $57,000 and was fined $5,600. Was 30 months enough?
Verax1,009,394 views • 6 days ago
Six days after JonBenet Ramsey was found dead in her own basement, her mother went on CNN and warned every parent in America to keep their babies close. The next day the mayor of Boulder went on camera and suggested the killer knew the house. On December 26, 1996, Patsy called 911 at 5:52 a.m. Her 6-year-old daughter was gone, and a ransom note was lying on the kitchen stairs. It asked for $118,000, almost exactly the bonus John had been paid the year before. It was written on a notepad from inside the house. Police waited all morning for a call that never came. At 1 p.m. a detective asked John to search the house. He found his daughter in the basement under a white blanket and carried her upstairs. Then, before they sat down for a formal police interview, they went on CNN. In the video below Patsy is crying so hard she can barely finish the sentence. The next day the mayor answers her: no sign of forced entry, and no crazed killer “wandering the streets of Boulder.” “If I were a resident of Boulder, I would tell my friends to keep your babies close to you.” The Ramseys didn’t give formal police interviews for four months. In 1999 a grand jury voted to indict both parents, and the DA refused to sign it. In 2008 DNA from an unknown man led a new DA to clear the family. Patsy died in 2006. John is 82 and still pushing for new DNA tests. Netflix’s series with Melissa McCarthy as Patsy comes out December 10. So which one was she: a mother warning America about a killer still out there, or a mother who knew there was nobody out there?
Verax511,507 views • 4 days ago
Lori Loughlin paid $500,000 to get her two daughters into USC as rowers. Neither of them rowed. In the video below, one of them explains what she wanted from college. "I do want the experience of like game days, partying. I don't really care about school, as you guys all know." Lori and her husband, designer Mossimo Giannulli, paid a college consultant to have both girls listed as recruits for the USC crew team. The family staged photos of them on rowing machines. In 2019 the FBI arrested them. Lori served two months in prison and paid a $150,000 fine. Mossimo served five months and paid $250,000. She lost her Hallmark movies and her role on Fuller House. Last month, after almost 29 years of marriage, Lori filed for divorce. She asked the court to split everything under their prenup, signed in 1997 and changed in 2015. This week Mossimo answered. His filing doesn't mention the prenup. It asks the court to decide whether either of them should pay the other spousal support, and whether one should cover the other's legal fees. $500,000 to buy two spots at USC. Now the fight is over what's left. Did they get what they paid for, or did that $500,000 end up costing them everything?
Verax876,584 views • 13 days ago
Michael Jackson’s will has one line for the mother of two of his children: “I have intentionally omitted to provide for my former wife, Deborah Jean Rowe Jackson.” Everything else went into a trust, run by two men he named. One of them, John Branca, was a lawyer Michael had fired more than once. In the video below, his daughter Paris talks about meeting her mother for the first time. She was 15. “I came in and I was just like, ‘Hey, Mom.’” When Michael died in 2009, he owed more than $500 million. His trust splits what’s left: 40% to his mother, 40% to his three children, 20% to charity. The estate says it has since earned billions for his kids. Paris says the two executors were paid $148 million from her father’s estate through 2021. In 2021 alone, more than double what any of his children received, her filing says. And $464 million of the estate is sitting in cash, earning less than 0.1%. In May a judge ordered $625,000 in bonuses, which the executors paid out to other law firms, returned to the estate. Her lawyers say Branca told the court he’d rather the family “just said ‘thank you’ and went on your way.” This year he helped produce the Michael biopic. Miles Teller plays him. Paris called the film “sugar-coated.” The executors’ answer: Paris herself has received about $65 million from the estate, money they say would never have existed without them. Did John Branca save Michael Jackson’s fortune, or is he getting rich off his children?
Verax946,597 views • 15 days ago
Ivanka Trump was about 10 when her father pointed at a homeless man outside Trump Tower and told her the man had $8 billion more than he did. In the video below, she tells the story herself, in Born Rich, the 2003 film made by an heir to Johnson & Johnson. "I remember my father pointing to him and saying, 'You know, that guy has $8 billion more than me,' because he was in such extreme debt at that point." He wasn't joking. At the start of 1990, Donald Trump owed more than 70 banks about $4 billion. $800 million of it he had guaranteed personally. The banks didn't take everything. They put him on an allowance. $450,000 a month for personal spending, less in the years after. There's an old saying on Wall Street. Owe the bank $100, and it's your problem. Owe the bank $4 billion, and it's the bank's problem. The man on the sidewalk owed nobody anything. On paper, he really was richer. The richest-looking man on Fifth Avenue was worth less than the one sitting outside his own front door. Was he broke, or was he just too big for the banks to let him fall?
Verax1,420,253 views • 22 days ago
Elon Musk's team offered the mother of his child $40 million to never talk about him, she says. She said no. In the video below, Ashley St. Clair says it out loud. "I was offered the opportunity not to speak for $40 million." She says the offer came through Jared Birchall, the man who manages Elon Musk's money. The Wall Street Journal reported how it was built. $15 million up front. Then $100,000 a month until their son turns 21. Do the math. $100,000 × 12 × 21 years is $25.2 million. Plus $15 million. About $40 million, in exchange for silence. She didn't sign. Instead she went on camera for a documentary about him, out at the end of this month. Musk says the offer never happened and that she "has a history of making false claims." Two days ago he posted: "Ashley St Clair was not my girlfriend. We only saw each other a few times." "I want to set the example for my kids," she says, "that you should never take being materially comfortable over speaking the truth." Would you have taken the $40 million, or is she right to talk?
Verax757,869 views • 17 days ago
O.J. Simpson owed $33.5 million to the families. Ron Goldman's father offered to drop every dollar of it if O.J. would just sign a confession. O.J. said no. Nine years later he told the story on camera anyway. For a book deal. In the video below, he tells it. "I'm gonna tell you a story you've never heard before." He was acquitted of the murders in 1995. In 1997 a civil jury found him liable for the deaths of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman and ordered him to pay $33.5 million. Days later, Fred Goldman made his offer: a signed confession, broadcast across the country, and the judgment disappears. O.J.'s answer through his lawyer: "I would never confess to a crime which I did not commit." In 2006 he sat down for a book called "If I Did It." He walked through the night, "hypothetically." The publisher paid $630,000, routed through a company in his children's names. Asked if it was blood money, he said: "Every book that was written about this case was blood money." A bankruptcy judge called the company a sham and handed the book to the Goldmans. They published it as "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer." O.J. said he lived on his NFL pension, which the families couldn't touch. He played golf in Las Vegas almost every day. He died in 2024. His executor said: "It's my hope that the Goldmans get zero, nothing." With interest, the debt had grown to $117 million. His estate says it's worth $500,000 to $1 million. Less than a penny on the dollar. Should Fred Goldman have taken the confession, or was the money the only way to make him pay?
Verax645,074 views • 16 days ago
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Peter Thiel spent about $10 million in secret to wipe out a media company that had outed him. His weapon was Hulk Hogan's sex tape. In the video below, Thiel explains why he did it. "If you make a sex tape of someone with their permission, you are a pornographer. If you make a sex tape without their permission, we were told, now you are a journalist." It started in 2007. A Gawker blog ran a headline: "Peter Thiel is totally gay, people." He later called that blog the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda. In 2012, Gawker posted a clip of Hulk Hogan having sex with his best friend's wife. Hogan sued. Nobody knew who was paying his lawyers. In 2016 a Florida jury awarded him $140 million. Gawker went bankrupt and was sold for $135 million. Only then did the name come out. Thiel said it was "less about revenge and more about specific deterrence," and called it "one of my greater philanthropic things that I've done." Hogan settled for $31 million. Thiel's name never came up at the trial. About $10 million in legal fees, and a company that spent years exposing the rich was gone. Was it justice for a man whose bedroom was put on the internet, or a billionaire using his money to kill the press?
Verax642,919 views • 19 days ago
Ten years into a 30-year mortgage you have paid off about 15 percent of what you borrowed. Not a third. Fifteen percent. The schedule that does this was designed on purpose, by the US government, in 1933. And there's one line of arithmetic behind it that means no loan can ever surprise you again. Here it is. Interest each month is only ever your remaining balance times your annual rate divided by 12. That's the entire rule. Whatever is left of your payment goes to principal. Take a 300,000 dollar loan at 6.5 percent over 30 years. The payment is 1,896 dollars. In month one the balance is still the full 300,000, so the interest is 300,000 times 0.065 divided by 12. That's 1,625 dollars. Principal that month: 271 dollars. You aren't being robbed. You're paying rent on money you still owe, and at the start you still owe all of it. Run it forward and it gets heavy. After ten years you've paid about 182,000 dollars in interest and taken 45,672 off the balance. Half the balance isn't gone until month 257, more than twenty-one years in. Across the full term the interest comes to 382,633 dollars on a 300,000 dollar loan. The same rule hands you the lever. Interest is charged on the balance, so anything that cuts the balance early removes interest from every month after it. On that same loan, an extra 200 dollars a month against principal ends it in 23 years instead of 30 and takes 103,449 dollars of interest off the total. Do it on your own loan tonight. Balance times rate divided by 12 is this month's interest. What's left is what you actually bought. Now the part almost nobody knows. In 1932 this loan did not exist. You put down half the price in cash, you paid interest only for about five years, and then the whole principal came due in one payment. Loans got rolled over again and again, and when the rollovers stopped in the early thirties people lost the houses. What Washington built to replace that is the reason your first ten years look like this.
Verax1,360,814 views • 2 months ago
Marilyn Monroe made about $4 million in her entire career. A woman who married her acting teacher six years after she died made at least $40 million from her name. In the video below, two years before her death, Marilyn is asked if she is happy. "If I'm generally anything, I guess I'm generally miserable." Her will left her clothes and personal things to her acting coach, Lee Strasberg, with one request: "it being my desire that he distribute these, in his sole discretion, among my friends, colleagues and those to whom I am devoted." He also got 75% of everything else. Her psychiatrist got 25%. Her half-sister got $10,000. Her mother, in an institution, got a $100,000 trust. In 1968 Strasberg married Anna Mizrahi, a 28-year-old actress. When he died in 1982, Anna inherited three quarters of Marilyn. In 1999 she sold Marilyn's belongings at Christie's for $13.4 million. The "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" dress went for $1.26 million. She licensed Marilyn's face to vodka, lingerie and slot machines. In 2011 she sold the rights for a reported $20 to $30 million. The case for Anna: Marilyn left it to Lee. Lee left it to his wife. That is how a will works. The case for Marilyn: she asked for her things to go to the people she loved. They went to the highest bidder. Did Anna Strasberg do anything wrong, or did Marilyn's will do exactly what it said?
Verax199,828 views • 12 days ago
Mark Cuban's dad upholstered car seats his whole life and never made more than $40,000 a year. When Mark told him he had $100,000 in the bank, his father started crying. This is how Mark remembers him: "My dad was like, 'I don't know what the f*** you're doing, but keep on doing it.'" In the video below, Mark tells Theo Von the whole story, including how his dad lost an eye at work. Norton Cuban stapled fabric onto car seats in Pittsburgh. One day a staple broke and hit him in the eye. Mark was about 11. His dad wore a glass eye after that and kept going to work. Mark paid for his own college. He sold garbage bags door to door at 12. Years later he became a billionaire. But the number that made his father cry was 100,000. It's easy to say money doesn't buy happiness and just as easy to see what that number meant to a man who never got near it. Charlie Munger said the first 100,000 is the hardest. The math agrees with him. Put away 1,000 dollars a month at 7 percent. The first 100,000 takes about 6.7 years. The second takes 4.5. The third takes 3.4. Same 1,000 a month. The money just starts doing more of the work. At 100,000, your money earns about 7,000 a year without you lifting a finger. For Norton Cuban, in his best year, that was two months of stapling car seats. His son made billions. The moment his dad cried over was the first 100,000. How old were you when you hit your first 100,000, or are you still on the way?
Verax369,824 views • 24 days ago
You have 100 dollars and you want 200. Betting red one dollar at a time, your chance is one in 33,171. Betting the whole 100 on a single spin, it is 47.4 percent. The careful version is fifteen thousand times worse. This is also the arithmetic of your trading account, and it means almost everything you have been taught about managing risk is, in the strict mathematical sense, a method for losing more reliably. An MIT professor works this out on a blackboard in a lecture on random walks. The result is called gambler's ruin. Two and a half points of disadvantage is nothing on one spin. But a dollar at a time you are not making one spin, you are making hundreds, and the edge gets a fresh attempt at you on every one of them. It was never the size of the disadvantage. It is the number of times you agree to face it. One hundred on red, once: 47.4 percent. Twenty dollar bets: 37.3 percent. Five dollar bets: 11.1 percent. One dollar bets: 0.003 percent. Mathematicians call the right answer bold play. It was proved optimal for unfavourable games in 1965. It is not a strategy for winning. It is the least ruinous way to play a game you should not be in. If your edge after spread and fees is negative, and for most active retail accounts it is, then your position sizing rule is not protecting you. Risking one percent per trade is the one dollar bet. It arrives at zero with near certainty, just politely, over a longer period, with a spreadsheet. Discipline does not beat a negative edge. It schedules it. All of this reverses if you have a real edge. Then small and frequent is correct and bold play is madness. So the only question that has ever mattered is whether you have one, and the number of people certain they do has never resembled the number who do. Your broker does not need you to be wrong. It needs you to be frequent.
Verax85,472 views • 1 month ago
The casino is not worried about loaded dice. It is worried about the people who have learned to slide them. Persi Diaconis breaks down how it works. Players are taught to throw a die across the felt with just enough spin that it skims the surface without actually tumbling, leaving the same face on top. You don't even need to master the technique. A small edge over pure chance can already be enough when the casino's advantage is only a fraction of a percent. The defense has been sitting on craps tables the entire time. That diamond-shaped rubber lining the back wall isn't decoration. It's there to make the dice bounce unpredictably, and according to Diaconis, once they hit it, whatever control the thrower had is gone. Then he challenges his own theorem using a chocolate bar. With a Toblerone, he constructs what looks like a fair five-sided die, only to show that its fairness changes depending on what happens after the throw: catch it, land it in sand, or let it bounce off glass, and the answer can change. Pay attention to his hands when he demonstrates the sliding throw. For a moment, you stop watching the mathematician and start watching the magician.
Verax58,938 views • 1 month ago
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