Arthur

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.

$101 billion in one day. That’s what Larry Ellison made in September 2025 from a technology he once called “complete gibberish” and “insane,” and it was enough to push him past Elon Musk as the richest man on earth. He even said the tech industry was “more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.” Then he went and did exactly what he’d been mocking. 2008. Analysts ask Ellison what Oracle is doing about cloud computing. His answer became famous: “It’s complete gibberish. It’s insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?” It didn’t stop. Amazon, Microsoft and Google built the cloud while Oracle fell far behind. For years it was the company everyone said had missed it. Then AI arrived, and AI needs one thing more than anything else. Computing power, rented by the hour, in giant data centers. Cloud. On September 10, 2025, Oracle told investors how fast that business was about to grow. The stock jumped more than 30% in a day. Ellison’s fortune hit $393 billion. Musk was at $385 billion. For a moment, the man who laughed at the cloud was the richest person alive. Oracle’s big yearly conference used to be called CloudWorld. Now it’s called AI World. Ellison jokes about it on stage himself. And the man who once said this industry chases fashion harder than Paris now tells the room that AI is “the largest, fastest growing business in human history, bigger than the railroads.” Oracle is building a data center for OpenAI in Texas that runs on 1.2 billion watts, enough for a million homes. His words: if you’d told him a couple of years ago he’d be building power plants, he’d have said “you need to get more rest.” He never admitted he was wrong about the cloud. He just changed sides faster than the people who were right. Musk took the top spot back soon after. Ellison doesn’t seem to mind. He’s busy renaming things.

On Thursday Donald Trump hung the National Medal of Science around Elon Musk’s neck and called him “our modern-day Thomas Edison.” Sixteen months ago the same president had a very different idea for him, and it cost Musk’s shareholders more in one afternoon than most companies are worth. June 5, 2025. Musk had just left the White House and was publicly tearing into Trump’s spending bill. Trump answered on Truth Social: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of Dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.” Musk fired back that Trump was “in the Epstein files.” Then he deleted it. Tesla fell more than 14% that day. About $150 billion in market value gone, the biggest one-day loss in the company’s history. Musk himself lost roughly $34 billion between breakfast and the closing bell. Nothing had changed at Tesla. No recall, no bad earnings, no factory fire. The cars were the same cars. One argument between two men did all of that. Now look at where it ended. They made up. Musk is a trillionaire again. And this week he got a medal and the title of modern Edison from the man who threatened his contracts. So here’s my take, and I know half of you will hate it. Musk’s engineering talent isn’t up for debate. SpaceX, Tesla, Grok and SI speak for themselves. But notice that Musk only started calling it SI last week, right after Trump renamed AI. If you own Tesla today, you’re not betting on his engineering. You’re betting on Trump’s mood. The medal is the same as the $150 billion drop, just pointing the other way.

Michael Dell started his company in 1984 with $1,000 in a college dorm room. Last December he stood next to Donald Trump and pledged $6.25 billion to American kids. Not to schools. Not to a foundation. Straight into the investment accounts of 25 million children, and what each one actually gets is the part almost nobody mentions. $250. That’s the deposit. $250 per child, into a “Trump Account,” the new investment accounts for American kids that went live this July. Washington seeds $1,000 for babies born from 2025 through 2028. The Dells are covering the kids born too early to qualify, mostly 10 and under. On paper it sounds small. A concert ticket. A pair of sneakers. But Dell knows better than almost anyone what a small number can turn into. He was 19, selling computer upgrades out of his dorm at the University of Texas. That $1,000 became one of the biggest tech companies on earth. The White House’s own economists ran the math on a $1,000 balance. Left in the stock market with nobody adding a cent, it grows to about $18,100 by age 28. Same assumptions, a $250 seed lands around $4,500. Add $5,000 a year from parents and the same account could pass $1 million. So the $250 was never really the point. The account is. Once it exists, a grandparent can drop in $20 on a birthday, an employer can add up to $2,500 a year tax free, and a kid grows up with a stock balance that has their name on it. “We believe the smartest investment that we can make is investment in children,” Dell said. Most of us were well into our twenties before we opened our first brokerage account. For 25 million kids, the first lesson about money will be a number that grows while they sleep. Honestly, that lesson might be worth more than the $250.

In March 2008 a man named Peter wrote to Jim Cramer with one question. Should he pull his money out of Bear Stearns before it's too late? Cramer didn't just say no. He yelled it on live TV. "No! No! No! Bear Stearns is fine." Five days later Bear Stearns was sold to JPMorgan for $2 a share. A year earlier it traded at $160. The clip became the most famous wrong call on Wall Street. For 18 years people have used it to laugh at Cramer and feel sorry for Peter. But Peter was fine. He asked about his money, not the stock. His account moved to JPMorgan untouched. Every dollar still there on Monday. The people who got destroyed never wrote in. They owned the stock. And every share sold that week had a buyer. Someone looked at a famous bank down from $160 to $62 and thought: bargain. $10,000 in a Bear account that Tuesday: $10,000. $10,000 in Bear shares that Tuesday: about $320. Same words. Same bank. Same five days. Cramer answered the question he was asked. The buyers heard a different one. "Is my money safe?" quietly became "Is this cheap?" Fear and greed don't listen to the question. They listen to the tone. Peter kept every dollar because he asked the right question. The people who lost almost everything never asked one. Cramer was right that week. Most of the people still laughing at this clip would have been the ones buying at $62.

This summer Elon Musk lost more than $600 billion in about six weeks. That's more money than any other human being has ever owned. On Monday he made it all back and became a trillionaire again. But the number that explains him isn't a dollar figure. It's three years on a concrete floor. 2018. Tesla is "on the ragged edge of bankruptcy the entire time," in his words. The Model 3 line is broken everywhere, from battery cells to the paint shop. He'd later admit they "messed up almost every aspect" of it. So he moves into the factory. Literally. He sleeps on the floor in Fremont and Nevada so the people working 18-hour shifts "could see me on the floor." Meanwhile Tesla is one of the most shorted stocks in market history, and the banks are threatening to pull its working capital. He calls those years "three years of hell." Eight years later, he could hand every person on the planet about $89 and still be richer than the second-richest man alive. People love to argue about whether anyone deserves a trillion dollars. I keep thinking about the guy sleeping next to a paint shop in 2018. Would you do three years of that for any amount?

Donald Trump started his run for president by reading his net worth out loud, down to the last thousand dollars: $8,737,540,000. He held up a one-page summary in the lobby of Trump Tower and said he wasn't doing it to brag. One line on that page should have ended the conversation right there. In the same speech he said a big bank had just offered to lend him $4 billion, and he told them he didn't need it. $3.3 billion of the total was his brand. Not buildings. The name on the buildings. Forbes, which had tracked his money for 30 years, valued that brand at about $125 million and put his whole fortune at $4.1 billion. Less than half of what he read out. A month later his campaign said he was now worth "in excess of TEN BILLION DOLLARS," and complained that the government disclosure form "was not designed for a man of Mr. Trump's massive wealth." One detail made it even worse. The summary he showed was dated June 30, 2014. His own financial statement for that same day put his net worth at $5.8 billion. Same man, same date, $2.9 billion apart. Years later a New York judge ruled that he had padded his financial statements for years to get better terms from lenders and insurers. An appeals court threw out the roughly $500 million penalty in 2025, but it did not clear him of the fraud finding. That precise $540,000 at the end of the number is the trick. Nobody invents a figure that specific, so people assume somebody counted. Somebody did. Just not the way he said. Those figures were already inaccurate ten years ago, on the first day of his campaign. Those who are still surprised by the figures and not just the ones he’s citing today, simply haven’t been following the situation.

Greg Fleming now runs the firm born from the Rockefeller family office. In 2008 he was president of Merrill Lynch, a 94 year-old firm that owned half of BlackRock, and he had to sell it to Bank of America to keep it alive. Merrill wasn't killed by its brokers or its bankers. It was killed by one portfolio that most of the firm never touched. Bonds backed by late-stage subprime mortgages. About $70 billion of them, sitting inside the fixed income trading desk. Merrill ended up writing off roughly $55 billion against that one position. Everything else was working. The wealth management business was great. The investment bank was solid. The BlackRock stake was a deal Fleming had built himself with Larry Fink just two years earlier. None of it mattered. Bank of America paid $50 billion, $29 a share. Fleming calls it "the most stressful stretch of my life." One detail makes it even worse. The position wasn't his. "I wasn't yet president when that position was put on. It didn't report to me." He still had to be the one who sold the company. That fall Fleming showed up at his Yale Law School reunion. The dean took one look at him and said: "You look terrible." Most people judge a company by its best businesses. The market judges it by the one part nobody is watching closely enough. Almost two decades later, Fleming still asks himself if he could have done something differently. "It was a 94 year old company when I sold it."

Roaring Kitty, the man behind the GameStop squeeze, never earned more than $40,000 a year. In February 2021 Keith Gill sat in front of Congress next to Citadel's Ken Griffin and the CEO of Robinhood, with GameStop down 90% and millions of people waiting to see if he would sell. He did the opposite, and the reason is one sentence almost nobody noticed in his testimony. He opened with a joke, "I am not a cat," and then told his story. Son of a truck driver and a nurse from Brockton, Massachusetts. First in his family to finish college, class of 2009, straight into the worst job market in decades. Nearly two years unemployed before he landed a job at MassMutual. In 2019 GameStop fell below what he thought it was worth. He put about $53,000 into the stock and options and posted the screenshot on Reddit. People laughed. By late January 2021 that position was worth nearly $48 million. Then came the sentence: "When the stock price broke $20 in December, I knew my investment was a success." Not $48 million. Not $483 a share. Twenty dollars, the price where his own analysis said he had been right. Most people judge a trade by its peak, so every drop afterward feels like a loss. Gill judged it by his thesis, and a 90% crash didn't touch it. He closed with: "As for me, I like the stock." The next day he posted a new screenshot. He had doubled his GameStop shares.

Losing Facebook to Mark Zuckerberg was the best thing that ever happened to the Winklevoss twins. The movie about it made them a global punchline, and that punchline is exactly why a stranger in Ibiza walked up to them in 2012 and asked a question worth more than their entire fight with Zuckerberg. Have you guys ever heard of Bitcoin? They hadn't. Back in New York they read everything they could find, and Cameron later described the moment it clicked: "You could, for the first time ever, basically send value through the internet like an email." They already had money from Zuckerberg: a $65 million settlement, which they insisted on taking largely in Facebook shares. By the 2012 IPO that stock was worth around $300 million. Before putting any of it at risk, they tried to break the idea. In Cameron's words: "When we tried to kill the idea, we really had trouble figuring how this thing does not work long term." So they bought. Early, and a lot, when the entire Bitcoin market was worth under $100 million and most people knew it as the currency of online drug markets. By April 2013 their coins were worth about $11 million, roughly 1% of every bitcoin in existence. In between, the price crashed by around 80% more than once, and they kept holding. By December 2017 they were the first publicly known bitcoin billionaires. Years later Cameron sums up the whole origin story in one line: "It started on a beach in the Mediterranean." Most people spend years trying to outrun their most public failure. The twins got their second fortune because a stranger remembered the first one they lost.

In 1995 Jensen Huang flew to Japan and told Sega three things in one meeting. Nvidia failed. Cancel our contract. Give us $5 million anyway. Sega said yes, and that $5 million would be worth about $1 trillion today. The reason they agreed is the part most founders get exactly backwards. Huang was 33, skinny, still had acne. Nvidia had bet on the wrong technology in all three of its major design choices, while dozens of competitors got it right. Across the table sat Sega's CEO, Shoichiro Irimajiri, the former head of Honda in America. Huang laid it out: "the technology that we promised you doesn't work." Find another partner. But turn the last $5 million of the contract into an investment, "because if you didn't give me the money, we'd vaporize overnight." Irimajiri didn't pretend: "it's very likely your company will go out of business, even with my investment." Huang still agrees with him. In that seat, "I wouldn't have done it." Two days later he got his answer. Not because of a plan or a product. In Huang's telling, Irimajiri simply liked the young man in front of him. Most founders hide a failure until they have a fix. Huang walked in with no fix and the whole truth, and that was the only thing in the room worth $5 million. Sega sold that stake for about $15 million.