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?
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?
Tupac sold 566,000 copies of All Eyez on Me in its first week. Seven months later he was dead, and his own label wanted $7 million from his estate.
In the video below, filmed inside a maximum-security prison in 1995 and released in full this month, he talks about the bullets he already took.
"I already took five bullets, and if I can help it, I don't plan on taking no more."
In 1995 he was serving up to 4 1/2 years in New York. Me Against the World hit No. 1 while he was inside. His mother was about to lose her house.
Suge Knight reportedly sent her $15,000. Then he came to the prison with a deal.
Three albums. A $1 million advance. It was drawn up in the visiting room. Big Syke, who stood next to him: "He signed on a napkin."
The $1.4 million bail was put up by Interscope. According to his authorized biography, Tupac was expected to pay it back out of his own royalties.
He walked out in October 1995. 11 months later he was shot four times at a red light in Las Vegas. He was 25.
Then the bill came.
Death Row wanted $7 million from the estate. His mother sued and said the label owed Tupac at least $9.9 million, plus $7.1 million in expenses charged to his account, including $120,000 for a house the label's lawyer rented.
On October 13, almost 30 years later, Duane "Keffe D" Davis got 40 years to life for the murder. He had told the story in interviews and in a memoir he urged people to buy. "This guy's scrapbooking his murder," the prosecutor told the jury.
The case for Death Row: without that napkin, Tupac sits in a cell for years. The case against: he paid for his own bail, made them millions in 11 months, and they still sent his estate a bill.
Did Suge Knight free Tupac, or buy him with Tupac's own money?
Full 1995 interview, filmed inside Clinton Correctional by Patrick Heaphy: youtube.com/watch?v=MdQbj2Sw…
Shaquille O'Neal was $80,000 in the hole before he played a single NBA game. In 1992, at 20, he got a $1 million endorsement check, forgot about FICA and sales tax, and what actually landed was about $600,000.
I wrote up where it went. First a black Mercedes for $150,000, with no negotiating: "Guy could have told me 200,000, I would have bought it." His dad said, "That's nice. Where's mine?" so he bought a second one. His mom wanted "a little one," and that cost $200,000.
Then came suits for the draft, jewelry, earrings, a car stereo and an alarm that paged him. A couple of days later the bank manager, a family friend, called and asked him one question: "You know how to read bank statements?" He was $80,000 overdrawn.
The manager told him he would put it to the side and added one line: "I don't want you to be like all these other athletes." Shaq skipped the advisors promising to turn $40 million into $200 million and hired the one who talked about savings bonds.
Table 1 shows the whole check line by line, and Figure 1 shows how fast it disappeared. The same $600,000 at 7% a year since 1992 would be about $6 million today.
The case for Shaq: he knew more money was coming, and he wanted his parents taken care of first. So would you have bought the cars for your parents, or invested the first check?
On January 31, 1940, Ida May Fuller, a retired legal secretary from Ludlow, Vermont, received check number 00-000-001: the first monthly Social Security check ever issued, for $22.54. She had paid into the system for just three years.
In total she paid $24.75 in Social Security tax. How much did she collect before she died? Answer before you scroll.
$22,888.92, about 925 times what she paid in. She lived to 100, so the checks kept coming for 35 years.
Table 1 in the document shows that the timing still matters more than the check. With a full retirement age of 67, claiming at 62 cuts the benefit to 70%, and every year past 67 adds 8%, up to 124% at 70. Fig. 1 plots the lifetime totals for each choice.
Table 2 uses a $2,000 benefit at 67. Claiming at 62 pays $1,400 a month, waiting to 70 pays $2,480, and the later claimer pulls ahead around age 80. Live to 90 and waiting is worth about $125,000 in today's dollars.
At what age are you planning to claim, and why?
In April 1720, Isaac Newton sold all his shares in the South Sea Company and booked a profit of about £20,000. Then the stock kept climbing, and in June the greatest mind in England bought back in at higher prices and kept buying as it started to fall.
Before the bubble he was worth just over £30,000. What was he worth a year later? Answer before you scroll.
About £20,000. He lost the early profit and a good part of what he started with, according to mathematician Andrew Odlyzko, who rebuilt Newton's trades from archival records. The famous line about calculating the heavens but not the madness of people has no primary source.
Table 1 in the document puts the same mistake in modern numbers. $10,000 left in the S&P 500 for 20 years grew to about $82,300, but missing just the 10 best days cut it to $35,700, and 7 of those 10 days came within two weeks of one of the worst. Fig. 2 shows the drop.
Table 2 scales it to $100,000: about $823,000 for staying invested versus $357,000 for missing ten days. Sitting through the scary weeks is worth roughly $466,000.
What is the longest you have held an investment without selling?
In 2003, Jerry Selbee, a retired convenience store owner from Evart, Michigan, picked up a lottery brochure and worked out in about three minutes that the game could be beaten. Over the next nine years he and his wife Marge won nearly $27 million.
How much of that $27 million did they actually keep? Answer before you scroll.
About $7.75 million before taxes. When a WinFall jackpot passed $5 million with no winner, the money rolled down to the smaller prizes, and on those weeks buying thousands of tickets paid more than it cost. In Massachusetts they won 42 of 43 plays.
Table 1 in the document lists their first bets, $3,400 returning $6,300 and $8,000 returning $15,700, and where the $27 million went: about $19.25 million back into tickets and costs. Fig. 1 compares the return per dollar.
Few people will ever find a lottery like that, but most offices have one. Table 2 runs a 401(k) match of 50 cents per dollar up to 6% of a $70,000 salary: over 30 years at 7%, the match alone grows to about $272,000. Putting in only 3% leaves about $136,000 unclaimed.
Are you putting in enough to get your full 401(k) match?
In 1980, Fed chairman Paul Volcker pushed interest rates to a record 20% to break inflation. Homebuilders mailed him bricks and two-by-fours, auto dealers mailed him car keys, and farmers drove tractors to Washington to blockade the Fed.
By October 1981, the average 30-year mortgage hit 18.63%, the highest Freddie Mac has ever recorded. On a $100,000 loan that meant $1,559 a month. How much of the very first payment actually paid down the loan? Answer before you scroll.
$6.08. The other $1,552.50 was interest, and over 30 years that borrower would pay $461,090 in interest, 4.6 times the loan itself.
Table 1 in the document compares 1981 with the 2021 low of 2.65% and this month's 7.40%. Fig. 1 shows a $400,000 loan at today's rate: year one sends $29,474 to interest and $3,760 to principal, and principal doesn't overtake interest until year 22.
Table 2 is the fix. Adding $231 a month, the same as one extra payment a year, pays the loan off 6.6 years early and saves about $154,000 in interest.
Are you paying anything extra on your mortgage, and how much a month?
In June 2014, Ronald Read died in Brattleboro, Vermont, at 92. The former gas station attendant and JCPenney janitor, who drove a used Toyota Yaris and pinned his coat together, left an estate of about $8 million.
He owned at least 95 stocks, many held for decades, like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson: companies that pay their owners dividends. $10,000 in the S&P 500 in 1960 with the dividends spent was worth about $1.14 million by the end of 2025. What is it worth with the dividends reinvested? Answer before you scroll.
About $7.58 million, 6.6 times more from the same stocks. Hartford Funds calculates that 85% of the index's total return since 1960 came from reinvested dividends and compounding.
Table 1 in the document shows the gap opening over 65 years, 7.44% a year without dividends versus 10.57% with them. Fig. 1 plots both on a log scale.
Table 2 puts $500 a month into each version for 30 years. Spending the dividends ends at about $635,000, reinvesting them at about $1.15 million. Switching on dividend reinvestment is worth roughly $517,000.
Is dividend reinvestment turned on in your brokerage account right now?
Elon Musk says he will give every kid in America one share of SpaceX. That's about $146 a child, roughly $10.5 billion in total.
Today his fortune went up $88 billion. In one day. More than eight times the whole gift.
In the video below, NYU professor Scott Galloway runs the numbers.
"He's kind of giving away the crumbs, not the meal."
Musk posted the pledge on Monday: "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America." Then: "This will be the first of many."
The shares are expected to go into Trump Accounts, the new investment accounts for American children. President Trump thanked him publicly the next day.
Do the math. Musk is worth about $1 trillion. $10.5 billion is roughly 1% of that. For a family with $100,000, it's like giving away $1,000.
The case for Musk: no one is making him do this, and $10.5 billion is bigger than Michael Dell's $6.25 billion gift to American kids last year. The case for the critics: he made eight times that before dinner today.
$146 for every child in America. Generosity, or crumbs?
In 2003, economist Linda Babcock published data on the first job offers of Carnegie Mellon master's graduates. 57% of the men had negotiated and only 7% of the women, and the ones who asked got 7.4% more, about $4,053 a year.
So what is a $4,053 bump on a first offer worth over a 40-year career? Answer before you scroll.
About $306,000, nearly double the $162,000 most people get by multiplying. The bump sits inside the base salary, so every raise for the next 40 years is calculated on top of it.
Table 1 in the document follows both careers from 25 to 64 with identical 3% raises. The yearly gap starts at $4,053 and ends at $12,836, and Fig. 1 shows that if the extra pay went into a 401(k) at 7%, it would grow to about $1.19 million.
Table 2 runs the same 7.4% on other offers. On a $70,000 offer it is $5,180 a year, about $391,000 over a career, or roughly $1.5 million if invested. That is what one conversation at the start of a job is worth.
Did you negotiate your first offer, and how much did it get you?
In 1999, Peter Thiel put 1.7 million PayPal shares into a Roth IRA at a tenth of a cent each, about $1,700 in total. IRS records obtained by ProPublica showed the same account was worth $5 billion by 2019.
What yearly return turns $1,700 into $5 billion in 20 years? Answer before you scroll.
About 111% a year. Doubling every single year for 20 years is not even enough, because that only gets you to $1.78 billion. Table 1 in the document shows the account needed about 21.5 doublings in 20 years.
The return is the headline, but the account is the real story. Qualified Roth withdrawals are tax-free, and the same $5 billion gain in a normal brokerage account would owe about $1.19 billion at the top capital gains rate. Fig. 1 plots both paths on a log scale.
Table 2 shrinks the same wrapper to normal size. Putting the 2026 limit of $7,500 into a Roth every year for 30 years at 8% builds about $918,000, and the $693,000 of gains would owe roughly $104,000 in a taxable account at 15%. In the Roth they owe nothing.
How many years in a row have you maxed out your Roth?
Mike "The Situation" Sorrentino made nearly $9 million in three years off Jersey Shore. The IRS sent him to federal prison for hiding part of it.
In the video below he describes the morning he left for prison, and the idea he had on the way.
"I said, listen honey, I want to go live on the way to prison."
Jersey Shore made him famous in 2009. Prosecutors said that between 2010 and 2012 he and his brother filed false tax returns on about $8.9 million he earned off his fame.
He admitted hiding part of his 2011 income. He made cash deposits under $10,000 at different banks so they would not be reported to the IRS.
Prosecutors asked for 14 months. His lawyer asked for probation. In 2018 the judge gave him eight months, a $10,000 fine and 500 hours of community service. He paid $123,913 in restitution.
In January 2019 he livestreamed the drive to Otisville federal prison with his wife. He walked out that September.
This May he said he might run for governor of New Jersey. His pitch: "I think the residents of New Jersey would like no property tax."
The case for Mike: he paid it back, served his time and got sober. The case for the IRS: he split cash into small deposits on purpose. That is not a mistake.
Was eight months fair for $123,913, or should the guy who hid it be the last one promising to cut taxes?
In December 2007, Warren Buffett bet $500,000 that a plain S&P 500 index fund would beat five hedge fund portfolios picked by professionals over ten years. In 2008, the first year, every one of the five beat the index.
So by the end of 2017, how far ahead did the professionals finish? Answer before you scroll.
They finished behind, all five of them. The index fund gained 125.8%, the best portfolio gained 87.7% and the average was 36.3%. Buffett's charity, Girls Inc. of Omaha, received $2,222,279.
Table 1 in the document lists every year for all six. As a group the funds trailed the index in each of the nine years after 2008, and Fig. 1 shows $1 million turning into $2.26 million in the index versus $1.36 million in the average fund.
Buffett's explanation was fees. In his own letter he estimated fixed fees at about 2.5% of assets a year, paid whether the funds won or lost.
Table 2 runs the same fee on $500 a month for 30 years at 8% before fees. At 1% you finish with about $585,000, at 0.05% with about $698,000. Moving to a low-cost index fund keeps roughly $113,000.
What's the annual fee on the fund your retirement money is sitting in right now?
In 1935, a secretary at Abbott Laboratories paid $180 for three shares of her employer's stock. She never sold a single one.
When she died in 2010, those shares were worth about $7 million. How much of that did they earn in the first 70 years?
Answer before you scroll.
About half.
Grace Groner lived in a one-bedroom house in Lake Forest, Illinois, bought her clothes at rummage sales and walked instead of owning a car. She reinvested every dividend, and almost nobody around her knew the shares existed until her estate went to Lake Forest College.
Turning $180 into $7 million over 75 years works out to about 15.1% a year, compounded.
At that rate, money doubles roughly every 4.9 years.
Table 1 in the document follows the $180 through all 15 doublings, assuming steady growth. By 1975 it is about $50,000. By 1995 it is about $846,000. By 2005 it is about $3.5 million.
Then one more doubling adds another $3.5 million in just five years.
That is the part people get wrong about compounding. The last doubling is always the biggest, and it only pays the person who is still holding when it arrives.
Fig. 1 shows the same curve on a normal scale. For the first 50 years it barely leaves the floor.
The same arithmetic works at an ordinary return. Table 2 assumes $300 a month and a 10% average annual return.
Start at 25 and you have about $1.9 million at 65. Start at 35 and you have about $678,000.
The ten extra years cost $36,000 in contributions. They are worth about $1.2 million.
Groner's $180 did the compounding. Her only job for 75 years was not to interrupt it.
The Mathematics of Never Selling
Compound Growth, Doubling Time and the Cost of Starting Late
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?
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?
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?