the stories behind the money that nobody tells on the red carpet
e4
Joined October 2026
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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.
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SINCE CHILDHOOD HE LIVED IN FEAR... THE STORY OF ANDRE AGASSI
he won 8 grand slams. he says he never once chose tennis.
his dad built a ball machine in the garage and called it "the dragon". the goal was 2,500 balls a day. he was 7.
at 13 he was sent away to a tennis academy in florida. no parents. just other kids.
what he says in this clip:
→ 0:01 "i never chose tennis"
→ 0:10 page one of his book: he hated tennis
→ 0:17 "i saw what it did to my family"
→ 0:29 you're driven by 2 things. fear or love
→ 0:32 "it was fear of my father"
→ 0:40 the academy was "lord of the flies with forehands and backhands"
→ 0:46 "this place is a hell. i want to burn it down"
→ 1:21 tennis was "the thing responsible for the misery of my whole life"
→ 1:27 the only way out was to win
what actually got me is that he wasn't trying to be the best. he was trying to escape.
every trophy was a way out of the room his dad put him in.
i rewatched 0:32 three times. he says it so fast, like he's said it a hundred times and it still costs him something.
a kid who hits 2,500 balls a day out of fear isn't a story about a tough dad. it's what happens when a parent's dream gets a child's whole life as the price.
what did your parents push you into that you never chose?
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BEN AFFLECK (BATMAN) SWORE HE'D NEVER BECOME HIS FATHER. THEN HE DID
he watched his dad drink every day. then his own relapse went around the world.
0:12 → two trips to rehab in three years. married, three kids
0:17 → "i don't want my children to pay for my sins. to be afraid for me"
0:27 → "that's one of the hard parts of being the child of an alcoholic"
0:32 → "what if my dad gets drunk. what if he ends up on tmz and it's on my newsfeed"
0:38 → asked if he watched his own relapse video: "i saw a little bit"
0:53 → "i know what it looks like to be drunk. i don't need to watch anymore"
1:03 → his grandmother took her life amid alcohol and barbiturates. his aunt had an addiction. so did his father
1:14 → "my dad was drunk every day. that was just life"
1:22 → "i always said that'll never be me"
1:39 → "i never thought i was gonna get divorced"
2:01 → "it meant i wasn't who i thought i was"
what got me is the tmz line.
he's not scared of the drinking. he's scared of his kid scrolling past it at school.
an oscar, batman, millions in the bank. none of it stopped the thing he watched as a boy from walking into his own house.
that isn't a fame story. that's what it looks like when a family habit outlives the promise you made to break it.
i break down the craziest stories behind the money, so don't lose me.
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In 1913 Andrey Markov counted the first 20,000 letters of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin by hand to win a fight with another mathematician. Pavel Nekrasov claimed the law of large numbers only works for independent events - and used it to argue for free will. Markov needed a sequence where every step depends on the last one and the averages still settle. The machine he built from that count is the exact object every LLM samples from when it picks the next token.
The mechanism is two numbers. In Onegin a vowel follows a vowel 12.8% of the time and follows a consonant 66.3% of the time. Run a chain on only those two odds and it predicts the book is 43.2% vowels - exactly what the count showed. Dependence doesn't break the law of large numbers. Shannon used the same chains in 1948 to generate fake English one letter at a time. An LLM is still a Markov chain, but its state is the whole context window: with a 100,000-token vocabulary and 128,000 tokens of context, the transition table would need 10^640,000 rows against 10^80 atoms in the universe. So the transformer learns a function that writes any row on demand. Markov's table had 4 numbers. The weights are what we pay for the rest.
The 1913 letter count that settled a fight about free will and became the engine of every chatbot.
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DESPITE BEING #1 ON THE FORBES LIST, ELON MUSK DOESN'T OWN A HOME... AND THERE'S AN EXPLANATION FOR IT
september 2026. someone posts about Musk's new living setup. his reply: "it's a nice airstream"
Gwynne Shotwell, president of Spacex, puts it plainly: "he sleeps on the factory floor"
people call it a stunt. he explained it on camera years ago
TED, giga texas. Chris Anderson asks: your net worth moves by billions a day, how do you handle that?
"i actually don't think about that too much"
what keeps him up is something else:
"every high quality minute of thinking is a million dollars" of impact on Tesla
"i was able to improve the financial outcome of the company by $100 million in a half hour meeting"
then the line nobody expects from the richest man alive:
"i don't even own a home right now"
"i basically rotate through friends' spare bedrooms"
"i don't have a yacht. i really don't take vacations"
the one exception is the plane. and even that he justifies in hours: without it "i have less hours to work"
it wasn't new either. in 2020 he tweeted he was selling almost all physical possessions. "will own no house". then he sold the LA mansions
napkin math, his own numbers:
1 good minute = $1M
1 hour = $60M
one week of vacation, 8 hours a day = ~$3.4B the companies don't get
so a house isn't a house. it's a commute. a yacht isn't a yacht. it's a week offline
and the hundreds of billions everyone screams about were never cash in his pocket. it's shares of Tesla and Spacex. you can't sleep in them
a man who prices his own rest in billions will never find a good enough reason to stop. the airstream isn't humility. it's the cheapest way to never leave work
Elon Musk's story is unbelievable
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JORDAN BELFORT'S (THE WOLF OF WALL STREET) INSANE ADDICTION THAT ALMOST ENDED IN TRAGEDY
he told this story on camera like he was describing a bad day at work.
quaaludes = a sedative banned in the us since 1984.
0:18 → he takes old quaaludes. thinks they're duds because they won't kick in
0:24 → drives out to make a phone call because he thinks his house phones are bugged
0:30 → everything hits at once. he drives home at 1 mile an hour
0:38 → thinks he made it without a scratch. police show up. car is totaled
0:42 → "to this day i can pass a lie detector test. i don't remember having an accident"
0:50 → the fight with his wife. he grabs his 3-year-old daughter
0:59 → drives the car straight through the garage door
1:12 → "i was on a 3-month bender. i thought aliens were coming through the window"
1:21 → "i was like, i don't have a problem"
1:27 → his daughter wasn't hurt. it was april 16th. the next day he got sober
what got me is the 1 mile an hour.
he was so far gone he thought driving like that meant he was in control.
a man running hundreds of millions couldn't tell he was destroying his own car.
and a day later he almost did worse with his kid in the seat.
that isn't a money story. that's what addiction looks like when nobody around you can say no.
i break down the craziest stories, so don't lose me.
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ELON MUSK: "I DON'T THINK MOST PEOPLE WOULD WANNA BE ME"... THE HARD LIFE OF ELON MUSK
this post was hard to write. this story made me stop and think
Lex Fridman podcast, november 2023. Lex asks what he's going through that people don't see
first he laughs it off. then:
"my mind is a storm"
"they may think they would wanna be me, but they don't know. they don't understand"
"do you get lonely?"
"sometimes"
"there are many nights i sleep alone. i don't have to, but i do"
then Lex brings up isaacson's biography and the childhood in it. beaten at school until his face was unrecognizable. a father his own brother calls "psychological torture". will he ever forgive?
"what is forgiveness?"
"i don't think i have a resentment, so nothing to forgive"
"holding onto grudges does not affect the future in a good way"
read that again. no anger. no closure. no "i'm still working through it"
just one test: does it move the future? no? drop it
that's either the healthiest thing you've ever heard or the loneliest
because a man who can't afford grudges probably can't afford a lot of other feelings either. rockets, cars, ai, 24/7. the storm never gets a day off
everyone wants his money. almost nobody would take his head with it
the richest man on earth, sleeping alone by choice, and not even angry at the man who made him this way
would you trade places with him?