Papermech

famous people, real money, in their own words. one story a day.

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

Paul McCartney is officially a billionaire. The songs that made him famous were bought by Michael Jackson, on advice McCartney gave him for free. Forbes just put him at $1.4 billion.

In 1981 he told Jackson to get into music publishing. Four years later, Jackson bought the rights to McCartney's own songs for $47,500,000. In 2016, Jackson's estate sold its half of the company holding them for $750,000,000.

In this clip from 2009, the year Jackson died, McCartney tells David Letterman what his friend said back. At 2:17 you hear the line that ended it.

It started with a Christmas call. A small voice asked if he wanted to make some hits.

Jackson stayed at Paul and Linda's house while they recorded. "Say Say Say" spent six weeks at No. 1.

Jackson kept asking for business advice. McCartney showed him a thick book of songs he owned. Whoever owns a song's publishing gets paid every time it's played or sold.

"I'm going to get yours," Jackson told him. McCartney thought it was a joke.

It wasn't.

When a catalog holding about 250 Beatles songs went up for sale, McCartney could have bought it first. His lawyer called it too pricey. Jackson bought it.

McCartney says the Beatles signed their deal at about 21, in a back alley in Liverpool. The terms never changed. So he asked his friend, now his publisher, for a raise.

"He kept saying, 'That's just business, Paul,'" McCartney remembers. They drifted apart.

In 2017, McCartney sued Sony to get his U.S. share back. They settled.

"The trouble is, I wrote them for nothing," he told Howard Stern in 2001.

After Jackson died, McCartney called him "a lovely man, massively talented."

One friend handed out the advice for free. The other used it to buy his songs.

Your call: was Jackson just doing smart business, or did he betray the friend who taught him the game?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

@fuelmeupcc ruthless is fine. doing it behind a sick partners back is the part i cant get past. would you have forgiven it?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

Paul Allen says he was fighting cancer when he overheard Bill Gates planning to shrink his Microsoft stake to almost nothing. They'd been friends since school. Allen kept every share, and when he died in 2018, Forbes put his fortune at $20.3 billion.

He told the story in his 2011 memoir, Idea Man. In this interview, he tells 60 Minutes what he heard that night outside Gates's office. The clip opens on the line he put in his book 29 years later.

They met at a private school in Seattle. Allen was 15. Gates was two years younger.

It was Allen who spotted a new computer called the Altair in a magazine in 1974 and ran to show his friend. That idea became Microsoft.

Then Gates said he'd done almost all the work on their first product. He asked for 60% of the company. Later he pushed it to 64%.

Allen said yes both times.

Then came the cancer. One night he walked past Gates's office and heard him talking with Steve Ballmer about shrinking Allen's stake.

"It was really a shocking and disheartening moment for me," Allen says. He burst in.

Ballmer came to his house that night to apologize. Gates didn't.

The next year, Gates offered to buy him out at $5 a share. Allen said no.

That "no" was worth billions.

He left Microsoft and kept every share. He was 30, the cancer was gone, and he owned nearly a third of the company.

When the cancer came back in 2009, Gates visited him at home several times. "There's a bond there that can't be denied," Allen says.

When Idea Man came out, Gates said he remembered those years differently, but that he valued the friendship.

Be honest: was it betrayal, or is this just how billion-dollar companies get built?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

@ZeroExpAI the $5 a share offer the year after is what gets me. would you have sold?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

Jensen Huang started Nvidia in a Denny's booth in 1993 and ran it for 33 years. He turned it into a $4 trillion company, for a while the most valuable in the world. On Thursday he resigned, less than a week after the first report about another woman.

In this interview from 2024, Huang tells 60 Minutes how three engineers started the company at that Denny's.

Last weekend The New York Times and the Financial Times reported on a memo from Secretary of State Marco Rubio. According to those reports, U.S. intelligence believed Huang was in a relationship with an executive working for China's spy service.

She held a senior job at Megaspeed, a Singapore company that bought Nvidia's advanced chips. Megaspeed is under U.S. criminal investigation over alleged chip smuggling into China. China called the claims "purely unsubstantiated."

On Sunday the board opened an investigation. Huang wrote to his staff: "I was unfaithful to my wife. My actions hurt her and our children. There is no excuse for what I did. I am deeply sorry."

In two trading days Nvidia lost more than $427 billion in market value.

On Wednesday the Times reported a second relationship, citing five people who worked at Nvidia. This one was with a married executive who reported directly to him. Nvidia didn't comment.

The board met that night. On Thursday it announced that Huang had resigned as CEO, effective immediately. His CFO, Colette Kress, is running the company for now.

The board's statement was short. "Jensen's contributions to NVIDIA are profound."

Not everyone wanted him gone. President Trump called him "an honorable guy." Elon Musk said hiring him would be an honor.

Thirty-three years to build it from a diner booth. Less than a week to lose the chair.

Should the board have stood by the founder who built Nvidia, or did it have no choice?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

Taylor Swift tried to buy her own songs, and lost them for $300,000,000. In 2019 the rights to her first six albums went to Scooter Braun instead of her. She was already one of the biggest artists alive. Four years later her Eras Tour took $2,077,000,000 and became the highest-grossing tour in history. She still didn't own the records that made her famous.

In this clip, Swift tells Seth Meyers what she decided to do about it, in the plainest words she's ever used for it.

A master recording is the original version of a song. Whoever owns it gets paid every time it plays. It controls where the song goes next. For most artists, someone else owns theirs.

Swift says she made it clear for years that she wanted to buy hers. The chance never came. The catalog was sold to someone else, then sold again.

So she did something no one at her level had tried. She started re-recording the albums from scratch, one by one.

"I was the one who made this music first," she tells Meyers. "I can just make it again."

The label "Taylor's Version" on a song means she owns that one. Meyers called it a clever loophole, and she just tipped her cap.

Fans did the rest. They switched to the new versions, so the money followed the songs she owned.

It worked. In May 2025, Swift bought her original masters back from the company that held them, for a reported $360 million.

One side wagered she couldn't rebuild what they'd bought. She rebuilt all of it, then bought the originals too.

Was selling her catalog smart business, or the deal that handed her the whole industry's playbook?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

In 2000, Netflix offered to sell itself to Blockbuster for $50,000,000. Blockbuster had 9,000 stores and 84,300 employees at its peak. The men in that room laughed the offer out of the building. Ten years later Blockbuster was bankrupt. Netflix took in over $45 billion last year. Exactly one Blockbuster store is still open, in Bend, Oregon.

In the clip below, Netflix co-founder Marc Randolph describes the moment he gave them the number, and what the room did next.

Netflix in 2000 was tiny. It had about a hundred employees, it was two and a half years old, and it was on track to lose $50,000,000 that year.

Blockbuster was the giant. Six billion in revenue, stores in every town, more staff than most airlines.

Randolph and his partner Reed Hastings flew to Dallas to pitch a deal. Netflix would run the online side, Blockbuster would keep the stores. They'd rehearsed the whole thing on the way over.

Randolph remembers the Blockbuster executives in their expensive suits, him and Hastings in jeans and flip-flops. They made the pitch. Then came the question of how much. Hastings said fifty million.

Blockbuster laughed in their faces.

"The meeting went downhill pretty quickly after that," Randolph says. He remembers the flight home as long and quiet. All he could think was that now they'd have to beat them.

It took ten years. Blockbuster couldn't adapt to streaming and filed for bankruptcy in September 2010.

Randolph says the lesson stuck with him. You never know where the people who'll take you down come from. They rarely look like you.

One company laughed at a $50,000,000 offer. The other one spent a decade making sure they'd regret it.

Was Blockbuster blind, or just too big to believe a hundred kids in flip-flops could win?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

@axel0xe Best recruiting pitch ever, and the most expensive one. Sculley ended up running Apple until 1993, and Apple paid $427M for NeXT just to get Jobs back

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

Steve Jobs talked the president of Pepsi into running Apple in 1983. Two years later, that man pushed him out of the company he'd co-founded at 21. Jobs was 30 when it happened. Danny Boyle later made a $30,000,000 film about those years, with Michael Fassbender in the part. In 1996, Apple paid more than $400,000,000 for Jobs's next company just to get him back.

In the video below, Jobs is asked about the day he lost Apple. Watch him decide whether he's willing to talk about it at all.

He'd been 28 when he went after John Sculley. His pitch became famous. Did Sculley want to sell sugar water for the rest of his life, or come with Jobs and change the world?

Sculley said yes. For a while the two were joined at the hip.

Then the Macintosh launched. By late 1984 sales were falling, and the board had to choose between the founder in his twenties and the man from Pepsi. In 1985, it chose Sculley.

Jobs kept his title and lost everything behind it. The projects went to other people, and the meetings happened without him. His office was taken away.

He sat in a building on the Apple campus with nothing to do.

In September he resigned. "I hired the wrong guy," he says in the clip. "He destroyed everything I spent 10 years working for, starting with me."

He doesn't put it all on Sculley, though. "I was thirty years old, and I don't think I had enough experience to run a two billion dollar company," he admits. "Unfortunately, John didn't either."

Thirty years later Hollywood was still making films about him. Sculley is remembered mostly as the man who fired him.

Who was right in 1985: the board that backed the man from Pepsi, or the founder it pushed out?

[Papermech @0xPapermech]

This is new 💭