the stories behind the money that nobody tells on the red carpet
e4
Joined October 2026
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BREAKING: Binance just got hacked for $5.6B
"user funds are safe." CZ says losses will be covered
here's the number nobody's checking:
binance's emergency fund, SAFU, holds 15,000 BTC
the attacker walked out with 18,270 BTC
he took more bitcoin than the insurance fund owns
and BTC is just one leg:
> ~$5.6B out across 6 chains (on-chain estimate, binance hasn't confirmed the figure)
> ~$2.3B in stablecoins frozen by Tether and Circle
> ~$3.3B in BTC, ETH and tokens nobody can freeze
> SAFU at today's price: ~$1.2B
so if users get made whole, most of it isn't coming from the fund built for exactly this night. it's coming straight off binance's balance sheet
"safe" used to mean nobody can take it.
tonight it means someone else pays for it
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On July 31, 1979, a judge in Miami sentenced Ted Bundy to die in the electric chair. In the same breath, he told him he would have made a good lawyer.
Bundy really had gone to law school. By the summer of 1979 he was 32, and police in several states believed he had killed young women from Washington to Florida.
On January 15, 1978, a man got into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in the middle of the night. Lisa Levy, 20, and Margaret Bowman, 21, were killed. Two more girls were beaten in their beds and survived. Eight blocks away, another student was attacked the same night.
The trial was moved to Miami. 250 reporters from five continents showed up, and it became the first trial in America shown on national TV.
Bundy had five lawyers paid for by the state. He kept pushing them aside and doing the job himself.
In the video below he stands up in a sweater and questions one of the first police officers who walked into Lisa Levy's room. He wants details. Could he describe the room? Did it look neat, or messy? Was there blood anywhere else?
He is on trial for killing her, and he wants to hear what her room looked like.
What sank him was a bite mark. A dentist showed the jury that the marks on Lisa Levy's body matched Bundy's teeth. They took less than seven hours to find him guilty.
At sentencing he told the court he wasn't asking for mercy, because it was "absurd to ask for mercy for something I did not do." Judge Edward Cowart gave him death anyway. Then he said this:
"You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer. I'd love to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner."
The part almost nobody remembers is that this trial never had to happen. Before it started, prosecutors offered him a deal: admit to the two sorority girls and a 12-year-old named Kimberly Leach, get 75 years, no electric chair. At the last minute he said no. His own public defender said he just couldn't stand up in front of the world and say he was guilty.
Being his own lawyer had worked for him before. In Colorado in 1977 a judge let him go without shackles so he could study his case in the courthouse law library. He jumped out of its window.
He got a third death sentence for Kimberly in 1980. He was executed on January 24, 1989, after confessing to 30 murders in his final days. Judge Cowart had died two years earlier.
So what was the judge really seeing that day: a bright young man who took the wrong road, or the exact charm that let Bundy kill for four years before anyone stopped him?
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THIS 40-SECOND MISTAKE COST ELON MUSK $768 MILLION. WATCH HIS FACE WHEN THE GLASS BREAKS.
November 2019. Los Angeles.
Musk walks out to show the world the Cybertruck. Steel body. "Armor glass." The words are on the screen behind him.
His lead designer picks up a metal ball and throws it at the driver's window.
It cracks.
The crowd goes quiet. Musk says maybe that was a little too hard. They try the back window.
That one cracks too.
He stands next to two broken windows in front of the whole internet and says, "Well, it didn't go through. Room for improvement."
The next day Tesla stock fell 6%. Bloomberg estimated about $768 million of his net worth was gone overnight.
Most CEOs would have cut the stream. He finished the show.
Was it the worst product demo in history, or the best free ad Tesla ever got?
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BINANCE HAS BEEN HACKED $2,800,000,000 JUST LEFT BINANCE WALLETS IN 17 MINUTES.
BINANCE HASN'T SAID A WORD.
At 20:24 UTC, a wallet Etherscan labels "Binance 14" sent about 167,464 ETH and roughly 1.6 billion USDT to a brand-new address. At 20:41, "Binance: Hot Wallet 34" sent 780 million USDC to the same address.
Tallied across five blockchains, it comes to about $2.8 billion.
The market didn't wait for an explanation. On Binance's own price feed, BNB fell as much as 8.7% in under an hour. ETH dropped 4.4%. Bitcoin lost 3.2%.
On-chain investigators are calling it a possible hack. Others say Binance could be moving its own money. A trader we know says BTC and USDT vanished from his Binance account tonight without a withdrawal from his side. We can't verify that yet.
Three years ago Binance pleaded guilty to federal charges and agreed to pay more than $4 billion. That press conference is in the photo.
If it's a hack, it's the biggest in crypto history. The current record is Bybit, about $1.5 billion, in February 2025.
If it isn't, someone just moved $2.8 billion of other people's money and nobody thought to tell them.
Would you leave your coins on an exchange tonight?
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Seven months before police started digging bodies out from under his house, John Wayne Gacy posed for a photo with the First Lady of the United States. He's smiling, and pinned to his suit is a little "S" from the Secret Service.
In 1978 he was one of the most liked men in his Chicago suburb. He ran a construction company, organized the city's Polish Constitution Day parade, threw summer parties for hundreds of neighbors, and dressed up as Pogo the Clown to cheer up sick kids.
On December 11, 1978, a 15-year-old named Robert Piest told his mom he was going to talk to a contractor about a summer job. The contractor was Gacy. Rob never came home.
Ten days later Gacy was in custody. Police found 26 bodies in the crawl space under his house. Three more were buried elsewhere on his property, and four had been thrown in a river, Rob among them. 33 young men and boys. The youngest was 14.
In the video below he sits in prison flipping through photos of all of them. He says he has studied their faces for 12 years, looked into their schools and their friends, and has no memory of a single one.
"None of them ever worked for me."
Then a Chicago TV reporter asks him about one victim, John Butkovich. Gacy says that's not one he killed, and that the only thing he knows about him is that he was an employee. The reporter stops him: "Not one that you killed" sounds like there were others you did. Gacy backs up fast. "Strike it."
John Butkovich worked for Gacy for about two years. In 1975 he went to Gacy's house to pick up his paycheck and was never seen again. Gacy later drew police the exact spot in his garage floor where he was buried. At least three other victims had worked for his company too.
Gacy confessed to police in 1978, then spent the rest of his life saying he was innocent. He was sentenced to death in 1980 and executed in May 1994.
Decades later, DNA is still putting names to the boys from that crawl space. A few still don't have one.
So what was he really doing with those photos for 12 years: trying to remember them, or making sure his story still held up?
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ELON MUSK OFFERED TO BUY HIS FATHER A CAR. HOW ABOUT A JEEP? BUT HIS ANSWER SURPRISED EVERYONE... "I WANT SOMETHING DECENT. I WANT A BENTLEY" — ERROL MUSK
Vlad asks Errol a simple question: your son is worth almost half a trillion dollars. does he help the family?
Errol starts with "I don't really need help. I'm self-supporting"
then he tells the story anyway
Elon suggested buying him a car. the first idea was a Tesla. but shipping one to South Africa, in Errol's words, the price was "astronomical", and there's no service where he lives
so the family comes back with a practical option:
"why don't you get a Jeep or something?"
"I don't want a Jeep. I want something decent"
"so what do you want?"
"I want a Bentley"
"so Elon said: sure. Bentley"
there's a Bentley Flying Spur in his garage now. he hasn't even put the number plates on
and the car is the small part
according to Errol, the family company pays every single woman in the family a monthly income. married ones get "a little bit of help". his ex-wife gets a monthly income too
when his medical bills came to almost a million and insurance covered 600,000, they paid the gap
his summary: "if you ask them, they help you. it's as simple as that"
now remember who's talking
this is the father Elon publicly called "a terrible human being". the one he said had done "almost every crime you can possibly think of"
and he's driving a Bentley his son paid for
for the record: this is Errol's version, from Errol's interview. nobody in the family has confirmed the details
but it shows something about money at this level that nobody puts on a Forbes list
a half-trillion net worth isn't one person's money. it's a whole family's payroll. ex-wives, siblings, a father he barely speaks to, all running on one balance sheet
you can cut someone out of your life. at Elon's level, you can't really cut them out of your money
the richest man on earth can say no to his father. he just didn't say no to the Bentley
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ELON MUSK: "AT TIMES I'VE WONDERED IF IT WAS REALLY THE RIGHT CHOICE... IT HAS BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT JOURNEY"... AFTER A QUESTION ABOUT THE HARD TIMES OF 2008, ELON ASKED TO STOP THE INTERVIEW... IT'S STILL HARD FOR HIM TO TALK ABOUT
a Danish TV crew sits down with Elon. Tesla is alive, SpaceX is flying. the worst is supposedly behind him
the correspondent walks him through the money first
after PayPal he had about $180M. the plan was simple: put half into the new companies, keep the other half. "that's not how it worked out"
$100M in, and they still needed more. then the 2008 crisis hit
"in the end I had to invest everything"
"I was borrowing money from friends to pay the rent"
"were you on the edge of bankruptcy?"
"I didn't even own a house"
then the question everyone thinks about:
"you could have bought an island and sipped cocktails for the rest of your life. why take the risk?"
he doesn't answer with a slogan. he pauses
"at times I've wondered if it was really the right choice. but it has actually been a very difficult journey, I have to say"
then the line that explains all of it:
"creating a company is almost like having a child. once you have the company, you have to feed it and nurse it and take care of it, even if it ruins you"
and then the correspondent asks about the end of 2008. how did you get through that crisis?
watch his face here
he looks down. silence. for a few seconds the richest-man-to-be just doesn't speak
"can we just break for a second?"
years later, with both companies alive, one question about a few months in 2008 still stops him cold
here's what he was carrying back then:
SpaceX had just failed three launches in a row
Tesla was burning cash in the middle of a financial crisis
every dollar he made from PayPal was already inside the two companies
the fortune you see today was built on a stretch of time when he was one bad month away from losing all of it
people look at his net worth and see a number
he looks at 2008 and still needs a minute
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In June 2005, the president of a church council stood up in a Kansas courtroom and explained ten murders to a judge like he was walking his boss through a work assignment. He even had a work word for them. Projects.
His name was Dennis Rader. For 31 years Wichita knew him only as BTK, the name he gave himself in letters to the police and the newspapers. Between 1974 and 1991 he killed ten people. Two of them were children, an 11-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother.
Then he went quiet for more than a decade. He had a wife, two kids, a job as a city compliance officer handing out fines for tall grass and loose dogs, and a seat on the council of his Lutheran church.
In 2004 he started writing to the police again. He wanted attention. Eventually he asked them a question: if he sent them a floppy disk, could they trace it? The police answered with an ad in the newspaper. "Rex, it will be OK."
He mailed the disk. Inside was a deleted file. Its properties said Christ Lutheran Church, and the last person to edit it was named Dennis. Nine days later he was in handcuffs.
In the video below the judge asks him, count by count, what he did. He answers in the calm voice of a man filling out a form. He chose his victims through what he calls a "selection process." If one didn't work out, he moved on to the next. When the judge asks what he means by "trolling," Rader explains it like a lecturer, the different phases serial killers go through, as if he's talking about somebody else.
One of the ten was Marine Hedge, 53. She lived a few houses down from him.
"We'd walk by and wave," he says. "It wasn't anything personal. Just a neighbor."
He even had special clothes for it. He called them his "hit clothes."
The detail almost nobody remembers is how they confirmed it was him. Police didn't want to tip him off with a swab, so they got a tissue sample his daughter had left at a college clinic years earlier. Her DNA matched the killer's as his child.
In August 2005 he got ten life sentences in a row, at least 175 years. Kansas had no death penalty when he killed, so he never faced it. He is still in prison today.
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ELON MUSK: "MY BRAIN HURTS AND MY HEART HURTS. I WORKED 22 HOURS A DAY..." OTHERWISE TESLA WOULD HAVE DIED, AND ME ALONG WITH IT
2018. Axios on HBO sits down with Elon, and he looks nothing like the guy on stage
tired eyes. hand on his face. long pauses
they ask why this was the hardest year of his career
he doesn't talk about the stock or the critics. he talks about the factory
"Tesla really faced a severe threat of death due to the Model 3 production ramp"
"the company was bleeding money like crazy"
"if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time, we would die"
how close?
"single-digit weeks"
think about what that means. a car company with billions in revenue, thousands of employees, a stock everyone argues about. and the real number that mattered was weeks of cash
so what does the CEO do with single-digit weeks?
22 hours a day
7 days a week
sleeping in the factory
working the paint shop, general assembly, the body shop himself
"do you ever worry about yourself imploding?"
"yeah, absolutely. no one should put this many hours into work. this is not good"
then the line that hits different:
"it hurts my brain and my heart hurts"
"this is not recommended for anyone. I just did it because if I didn't do it, Tesla, good chance, would die"
here's the part people forget
in the same year he described Tesla as weeks from death, Tesla posted a ~$312M profit in Q3 2018. the market had been betting on bankruptcy. the factory floor bet against it
the comeback is on the stock chart. the price isn't
no investor deck has a line for "founder sleeps under his desk for months". but that was the actual collateral behind the Model 3
he's not selling hustle here. he's warning you off it
the stock chart shows the miracle. the factory floor shows the bill
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For nine days, Susan Smith cried on national TV and begged a stranger to bring her two little boys home. They were at the bottom of a lake a few miles away the whole time, and she was the one who put them there.
On the night of October 25, 1994, she ran up to a house in Union, South Carolina, screaming. She said a Black man with a gun jumped into her car at a red light, made her get out, and drove off with her sons in the back seat. Michael was 3. Alex was 14 months old.
The whole country went looking for a man who didn't exist. His sketch was on every channel. Hundreds of volunteers searched the woods on foot and on horseback, divers went into the lakes, and the town tied yellow ribbons on every tree.
In the video below she tells the story herself. She says her son asked "Mom, where you going?" and she told him she loved him before the man slammed the door.
"I just felt like such a failure."
A week later she stands next to her husband David and begs whoever has her children to bring them home. On Good Morning America she says she has put her faith in the sheriff.
The sheriff had stopped believing her almost from the start. The light she described only turns red at that empty intersection when another car is waiting on the cross street, and she swore there was no other car. She failed a lie detector test. And a rich man she was seeing had just written her a letter saying he didn't want children.
The video ends on November 3. That morning she was on TV saying the hardest part was not knowing. That afternoon she confessed.
She had let the car roll down a boat ramp into John D. Long Lake with both boys strapped into their car seats, and watched it float, flip over and sink. Divers had already searched that lake, close to shore. The car was 122 feet out, upside down.
The jury needed about two and a half hours to convict her. She got 30 years to life. In November 2024 she told the parole board she would give anything to go back. David told them it wasn't a tragic mistake. The board said no, unanimously.
On November 19 she goes before them again.
Her lawyers said she meant to die in that car too and got out at the last second. So which was it: a broken mother who lost her nerve, or a woman who killed her sons for a man and then cried for the cameras for nine days?
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A CRAZY STORY ABOUT ELON MUSK AND HIS FATHER ERROL... AT ERROL'S 70TH BIRTHDAY, WORLD-FAMOUS STARS ASKED HIM "YOU SUPPORT TRUMP?" HE SAID YES. ELON TOLD HIM SUPPORTING TRUMP IS EVIL... "BUT NOW HE SUPPORTS TRUMP HIMSELF," ERROL RECALLS
2016. cape town. Errol Musk turns 70
Elon and Kimbal fly in and bring about 20 guests from america. Errol says they were all Hollywood. he names Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Jon Favreau. plus one of the people behind Google
the lunch goes on for hours
then Favreau leans over with a big laugh:
"we believe you support Trump"
"yes. I support Trump"
the whole table laughs. "that's stupid." "he's a terrible person"
Errol: "no he's not"
after the lunch Kimbal is furious. "I've never seen Kimbal so angry." his father embarrassed them in front of their friends
and Elon says it straight:
"it's evil to support Trump"
now fast forward to 2024. Elon endorses Trump, puts a fortune behind the campaign, and jumps on stage at his rallies
Errol's take, said with zero modesty:
"he had been brainwashed by these Democrats. because now Elon supports Trump"
the interviewer asks the obvious question: so did you two not speak for 7 years?
not exactly. "we were on bad terms." happy birthday. happy christmas. that's it
"he was never very happy. but now he's very happy"
"so did he come to you and say: dad, I was wrong, you were right?"
this is the part that got me:
"no. I'm a dad. I don't want to put my kids through that, where they have to say sorry to me... obviously from what he's doing he should be saying something like that. but I would never put him through that"
and then the ending
december, after a big rocket launch in florida. a SpaceX party, about 250 people
Elon stops the whole room, puts his arm around his father:
"everybody. this is my dad. he taught me everything I know about engineering"
from "it's evil" to "he taught me everything" in front of 250 SpaceX engineers
fair warning: this is Errol's version. Elon has said very harsh things about his father over the years, and the family's history with Errol is far darker than one party story
but notice what actually changed Elon's mind
it wasn't an argument at a birthday lunch. it wasn't his father
it was Trump himself
in 2016 a table of Hollywood stars laughed at the idea of supporting him. 8 years later he'd won the white house twice and turned one of his loudest skeptics, the richest man on earth, into his biggest backer
whatever you think of him, very few people have ever changed what the world thinks of them that hard, with their own actions
in 2016 saying "I support Trump" got you laughed at in Cape Town
in 2024 Elon was jumping on stage next to him
the old man at the end of the table just saw it 8 years early
in markets that's the whole game. being early feels exactly like being laughed at
so who was really right at that lunch: the stars, or the guy they were laughing at?
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Jeffrey Dahmer's father once carried a locked metal box down to the basement and got ready to smash it open. Inside was a human head. He never opened it.
In 1994, Jeffrey sat next to him in a Wisconsin prison and told the story on national TV.
Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 men and boys, most of them in Milwaukee. He was arrested in July 1991, after one man escaped his apartment with a handcuff still on his wrist and flagged down a police car.
Two months before that, police had been at the same door. A 14-year-old boy was found on the street, drugged, naked and bleeding. Two women called for help. The officers believed Dahmer when he said the boy was his 19-year-old boyfriend, walked him back inside, and left. The boy was killed that night.
His father, Lionel, wrote a book about raising him called A Father's Story. In the video below, they sit side by side with Stone Phillips, and Phillips asks about the box.
Jeffrey kept it locked in his bedroom closet. One week his dad came to visit, saw it, and asked what was inside. Jeffrey wouldn't open it. They argued. Lionel took it down to the basement to break it open himself.
"I was thinking, I've got to stop this from happening," Jeffrey says. "It's all going to come crashing down now."
It didn't. The box was never opened in front of his dad. "And so the lies continued," he says. "The whole scenario just continued for years after that."
Then the cameras stop, and at the end of the tape you see what happened next. On his way out, Dahmer casually pointed at a box in the room and wanted the crew to know: that's the type of box. It looked almost exactly like the one his father had found.
He got 15 life sentences. Wisconsin has no death penalty. In November 1994, a few months after this interview, another inmate beat him to death with a metal bar while they cleaned a prison gym bathroom. He was 34.
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THESE FRAMES ARE HARD TO WATCH. A RUTHLESS KILLER IN A COURTROOM. THE PARENTS OF HIS VICTIMS CAN'T HOLD BACK THEIR TEARS.
Rostov, Russia. April 1992.
The man in the cage is Andrei Chikatilo. A grandfather. A former schoolteacher. A Communist Party member.
Between 1978 and 1990 he killed at least 52 people. 21 boys, 14 girls, 17 young women. He found most of them at bus stops and train stations.
The cage wasn't there to keep him in. It was there so the families couldn't get to him.
At 0:20 you see a mother break down in the hallway. At 0:30 the guards walk him in, and the room surges toward the bars.
Then he starts talking to the crowd like it's nothing.
Over the next 6 months he shouted, sang, ripped off his clothes, and claimed he was being "radiated." When the verdict was read, he grabbed the bars and yelled "Why me?"
A woman tried to push through the guards. "Give him to us," she screamed.
The judge said he had "an iron psyche and nerves of steel."
But the worst part isn't on this tape.
In 1984, police already had him. A knife and a rope in his briefcase. His blood type didn't match the samples from the bodies, so they let him go. He had a rare condition that made the tests read wrong. He killed 21 more people after that.
And his first victim, a 9-year-old girl in 1978? Police had already blamed another man, Aleksandr Kravchenko. He confessed under pressure, took it back in court, and was shot anyway in 1983.
Chikatilo was executed on February 14, 1994. One bullet, in a prison in Novocherkassk.
Two men were shot for the same little girl. Only one of them killed her.
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MICHAEL JACKSON: "TOMMY MOTTOLA IS A RACIST"
HE SAID IT INTO A MICROPHONE. ABOUT THE BOSS OF HIS OWN LABEL
july 6, 2002. harlem. al sharpton's office. michael jackson walks in wearing sunglasses and calls out the man who runs his record company.
tommy mottola = the head of sony music. the company that put out michael's albums.
what he says in this clip:
→ 0:07 black artists "have been taken advantage of"
→ 0:26 james brown. sammy davis jr. "the real pioneers"
→ 0:41 record companies "really, really do conspire"
→ 0:47 "especially the black artists"
→ 1:00 he names tommy mottola
→ 1:08 "racist"
→ 1:23 "i need your support"
→ 1:37 "it's a conspiracy"
→ 1:40 "the story always ends the same"
what actually got me is how calm he is. no shouting. he reads it like a verdict.
his album invincible came out 8 months earlier. he said sony let it die.
sony's answer: "ludicrous, spiteful and hurtful."
i rewatched 1:08 twice. after that word there's a 15 second gap before he can talk again.
6 months later mottola was out at sony.
the scariest part isn't the word racist. it's that the biggest star alive felt he needed al sharpton to be heard.
have you ever had to go public because nobody inside would listen?
THE MOST TERRIFYING MICHAEL JACKSON MOMENT
THE LAWYER HANDED HIM HIS OWN NOTES...
march 1, 1996. michael jackson is 37. he's under oath in a lawsuit, and a camera is rolling.
the lawyer slides two handwritten pages across the table. michael reads them and says it's his handwriting.
deposition = you answer a lawyer's questions under oath, on camera, before the trial. anything you say can be played to a jury.
what's on his list:
→ 0:09 "yes, it's mine"
→ 0:26 things he wanted to set straight in a tv interview
→ 0:35 the interview was with diane sawyer
→ 0:43 "people have lied on me"
→ 0:48 the bleached skin rumor
→ 1:01 a rumor about president clinton's inauguration
→ 1:07 "don't judge a person unless you walk a mile in their shoes"
→ 1:26 "jesus said to love the children"
→ 2:04 "people completely lie on me"
what actually got me is that he wrote it down. the most famous man on earth sat at home and made a list of what people said about him.
i rewatched 1:26 three times. he's quoting the bible to a lawyer. he looks like he means every word.
he was never convicted of anything. in 2005 a jury found him not guilty on all 10 counts.
but the list didn't get shorter. it got longer every year until 2009.
the scariest part isn't the rumors. it's a man who had to keep a written list of them.
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THE PAIN IN ELON MUSK'S VOICE WHEN HE TALKS ABOUT THIS... THE COMPANY HAD 4 MONTHS LEFT TO LIVE
april 2023. Twitter HQ, San Francisco. a BBC reporter sits across from Elon and asks about his first days as owner
he doesn't start with the bots or free speech. he starts with the money
"definitely spending money like it's going out of fashion"
then he lays out what he walked into:
Twitter was tracking to lose over $3 billion a year
and it had about $1 billion in the bank
"so that's four months to death. so this is your starting position. how would you feel?"
the reporter: "pretty intense"
here's where the hole came from, in his own rough numbers:
before the deal: ~$4.5B revenue, ~$4.5B costs. basically break even
after the deal: revenue drops to ~$3B as advertisers pull out
costs jump to ~$6B, because the takeover loaded ~$1.5B a year of debt interest onto the company
napkin math:
$3B burn a year = ~$250M a month
$1B in cash / $250M = 4 months
4 months = ~120 days
and then the line he says almost quietly:
"unless drastic action was taken immediately, this company is going to die"
you know what the drastic action was. thousands of people lost their jobs within weeks. by the time of this interview he said it was down to about 1,500 people
the part nobody talks about: a big chunk of that $3B hole wasn't Twitter's fault. it was the debt he used to buy it
he paid $44 billion for a company, and the purchase itself cut its life to 4 months
he didn't buy a company. he bought a countdown
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THE MOST TERRIFYING MICHAEL JACKSON MOMENT
THE LAWYER HANDED HIM HIS OWN NOTES...
march 1, 1996. michael jackson is 37. he's under oath in a lawsuit, and a camera is rolling.
the lawyer slides two handwritten pages across the table. michael reads them and says it's his handwriting.
deposition = you answer a lawyer's questions under oath, on camera, before the trial. anything you say can be played to a jury.
what's on his list:
→ 0:09 "yes, it's mine"
→ 0:26 things he wanted to set straight in a tv interview
→ 0:35 the interview was with diane sawyer
→ 0:43 "people have lied on me"
→ 0:48 the bleached skin rumor
→ 1:01 a rumor about president clinton's inauguration
→ 1:07 "don't judge a person unless you walk a mile in their shoes"
→ 1:26 "jesus said to love the children"
→ 2:04 "people completely lie on me"
what actually got me is that he wrote it down. the most famous man on earth sat at home and made a list of what people said about him.
i rewatched 1:26 three times. he's quoting the bible to a lawyer. he looks like he means every word.
he was never convicted of anything. in 2005 a jury found him not guilty on all 10 counts.
but the list didn't get shorter. it got longer every year until 2009.
the scariest part isn't the rumors. it's a man who had to keep a written list of them.
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"YOU WERE RIGHT," THE PRESIDENT TOLD KIMBAL MUSK (ELON MUSK'S BROTHER). ELON AND KIMBAL'S COMPANY PROVED WHAT KIMBAL SAID BACK IN 1995
1995. toronto. kimbal is in his early 20s, pitching zip2 to the president of the toronto star. elon is in silicon valley, sleeping in the office.
the pitch was simple. the internet will be the yellow pages of the future.
what happens in this clip:
→ 0:20 "a multi-billion dollar business with their yellow pages"
→ 0:34 the president picks up the book. it's this thick
→ 0:43 he throws it at kimbal. "do you ever think you're going to replace this?"
→ 1:10 kimbal's first thought: "he doesn't realize he's already dead"
→ 1:22 two years later, zip2 puts the toronto star on the internet
→ 1:33 the same man: "you were right"
what actually got me is the order of his thoughts. not "why did you throw a book at me." just "this guy is already dead."
to be fair, this is kimbal's memory, 30 years later. nobody filmed that meeting.
but the numbers don't need his memory. compaq bought zip2 in 1999 for $305M. canada's yellow pages company lost 90% of its share value in 2011 and 2012. the printed books still exist, just thinner every year.
the book didn't lose to a better book. it lost to a search box.
the scary part isn't being wrong. it's being rich enough to not notice.
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ELON MUSK KEEPS TELLING PEOPLE NOT TO BUY TESLA STOCK... BUT NOBODY LISTENS. SO WHAT DOES TESLA HAVE THAT MERCEDES DOESN'T?
november 2022. a room full of professional investors. Tesla is down ~40% from the top
an old man in a hat stands up and asks the question everyone is thinking:
Tesla trades at 70x earnings. Mercedes makes EVs too, trades at 6x and pays a 5% dividend
"why should i invest in Tesla rather than Mercedes-Benz?"
and the CEO of Tesla answers like this:
"i rarely try to convince anyone to invest in Tesla"
"many times i've recommended people don't invest in Tesla and i've said our stock is too high"
"but people just ignore me and keep buying the stock"
then he gives the only argument he has. and it's not a car argument
a car gets driven 10-12 hours a week. a week has 168
make it drive itself and it works 50-60. ~5x more useful. same cost to build
"if you think of net present value of future cash flows... if you actually do the math on that, it's insane"
then he goes further. a humanoid robot
"the economy is GDP per capita times capita"
"if you no longer have a constraint on capita... it is not clear that there is any limit to the size of the economy"
so that's the answer. Mercedes is priced as a car company. Tesla is priced as a bet that a car becomes a worker
read that again. the stock got more expensive, not less. the gap went from 12x to 45x
the "cheap" stock paid you to wait and went nowhere. the stock its own CEO called too expensive almost doubled
people weren't buying earnings. they were buying the 5x. and in 2026 robotaxis and Optimus still have to show up in the income statement to justify it
so who's right: the old man with the 6x multiple, or the crowd that ignored the CEO?
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AFTER ANOTHER SPACEX FAILURE, ELON WAS IN DESPAIR BECAUSE THE MONEY RAN OUT... KIMBAL MUSK (ELON'S BROTHER) REMEMBERS THIS DAY WITH FEAR
kwajalein. a military base on a tiny island in the middle of the pacific. a spacex rocket had just blown up.
elon put about $100M of his paypal money into spacex. kimbal says "in the rocket world, that money goes away really quickly."
what happens in this clip:
→ 0:00 "one of the hardest times in spacex"
→ 0:21 the rocket blows up
→ 0:38 "every rocket launch was do or die"
→ 0:50 "it was so depressing." nowhere to go. no distraction
→ 1:15 the cafeteria. "the worst food you can imagine"
→ 1:22 a tiny store. canned tomatoes. nothing fresh
→ 1:33 kimbal cooks a big pot of chili for everyone
→ 1:49 no table. one pot in the middle. paper plates
→ 2:09 "their hearts were broken"
what actually got me is 1:49. the people building rockets don't even have a table. they eat beans off paper plates.
to be fair, kimbal isn't even sure which launch it was. he says "i think it was the second one."
falcon 1 failed 3 times. the 4th flight in sept 2008 finally made it. there was no money for a 5th.
i rewatched 2:15 twice. "by the end of the night, we're actually having a good time."
that pot of chili wasn't just dinner. it was the reason a broken team showed up again the next morning.
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KIMBAL MUSK: "THE ROCKET LAUNCH WAS AT 4:00 PM. AT 2:30 PM ELON AND I WERE STILL AT DISNEYLAND"
september 28, 2008. spacex had 3 failed launches behind it. the 4th was the last shot. there was no money for a 5th.
the rocket was on an island in the middle of the pacific. the control room was a mobile home in a parking lot in la.
and the musk brothers went to disneyland with their kids. regular lines. no vip passes.
what happens in this clip:
→ 0:05 "literally as cheap as you can imagine"
→ 0:15 "my brother and i went to disneyland with our kids"
→ 0:34 the launch is at 4:00. it's already 2:30
→ 0:50 they get back a few minutes before liftoff
→ 1:08 "everyone just started crying"
→ 1:28 kimbal starts crying too
→ 1:42 "the last shot we had before we'd be out of business"
→ 1:47 a team of 500. boeing's version had 50,000
→ 2:13 "nasa saying okay, you deserve to live"
what actually got me is 0:34. they're checking their watches in a disneyland line while everything they own sits on one rocket.
kimbal calls it "a way to use up the day." when there's nothing left to fix, you just wait.
to be fair, falcon 1 flew only one more time after that. then spacex retired it.
3 months later, 2 days before christmas, nasa gave them a $1.6 billion contract.
i rewatched 1:08 three times. nobody cheers. they just cry.
the disneyland trip wasn't them being careless. it was 2 guys who had already done everything they could.