Linko

Money, investing, and lessons from the rich.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@Flinzou Honestly, my wife. She hears my “brilliant idea” and just asks “ok, but what if it goes wrong?” Annoying every time, right every time.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

Shaquille O'Neal got a $1 million endorsement check at 20 and spent it in one day.
A couple of days later, he was $80,000 in the hole.

In the video below, he explains the first mistake. "There are two words you forget about: FICA and sales tax."

The $1 million was really about $600,000.

He bought a black Mercedes for $150,000. No negotiating. "The guy could have told me 200,000, I would have bought it."

His dad looked at it and asked, "Where's mine?" So he bought a second one. Then his mom wanted one too, just smaller.

Then suits, jewelry and a loud stereo for the car. The money was gone before he noticed.

The bank manager, a family friend, called and asked if he knew how to read a bank statement.

That call is where his story splits from so many others.

Advisors lined up. One promised to turn his first $40 million into $200 million by the time he was 23.

Shaq went with a man named Lester who talked about savings bonds. "I've been with him ever since."

The flashy guys promised to multiply it. The boring guy promised to keep it.

He still slipped sometimes. Mike Tyson bought three Rolls-Royces, so Shaq bought two. Lester called. "Hey, you've got to stop this."

My takeaway: the advisor promising the most is usually the one to walk away from. My first paycheck was gone in a week, and it wasn't even close to a million.

What did you blow your first big paycheck on?

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@Flinzou Same trick works for inflation too: at 4%, your cash loses half its value in about 18 years. Kinda scary

[Flinzou @Flinzou]

Yale students pay thousands of dollars for lectures like this. You’re watching for $0

Bonus: the Rule of 72. Divide 72 by the annual interest rate to see how many years it takes your money to double. At 8%, that’s 9 years.

[george @georgeyitb]

In 1962, Stan Lee's publisher told him he couldn't call a hero Spider-Man. In 2002, the Spider-Man movie grossed more than $800 million, and Lee sued Marvel for his share.

In the video below, Lee recalls the answer: "You can't call a character Spider-Man. People hate spiders."

Martin Goodman let him try the character once, in Amazing Fantasy #15. It was the last issue of a title already being cancelled.

In 1998, as he stepped back from daily work, Lee signed a lifetime deal: $1 million a year, plus 10% of the profits Marvel made from movies and TV shows using its characters.

The first Spider-Man movie came out in May 2002. Lee had a cameo. He stood in a crowd.

Marvel collected more than $50 million in profits from the film, NBC News reported.

In November 2002, Lee sued. He said he hadn't seen any money from it.

Marvel argued the 10% only counted after production and distribution costs were taken out. In January 2005, a federal judge ruled for Lee. Marvel said it would appeal.

In April 2005, the two sides settled. Marvel booked a one-time charge of $10 million, covering Lee's past and future claims.

In the same announcement, Marvel said it would start making its own movies. Three years later, its studio released Iron Man.

Lee kept his salary and his cameos. The 10% stayed with Marvel.

Did Marvel shortchange the man who pitched Spider-Man, or did Lee sell his share too soon?

[Denon @denon_opg]

Paris Bennett his IQ 141. The mind of a genius, but the actions of a monster. He was 13 years old when he stabbed his four-year-old sister Ella seventeen times while she slept.
He says he had planned to kill his mother first. Then he decided death was too quick. He wanted her to live with it for the rest of her life, so he took the one thing she loved most.
Under Texas law a 13-year-old could not be given life or the death penalty. He got the maximum available: 40 years.
He has never apologised to her. He becomes eligible for parole in February 2027.

Afterwards he called a friend and talked about nothing for ten minutes.

Then he called emergency services, put panic into his voice, and pretended to be giving his sister CPR.

The first officer walked past him into the bedroom.

"I remember hearing him mutter oh my god when he saw what I had done."

"I just felt like I was drowning in shame."

In the video below Piers Morgan notices that he is talking about his dead sister in the present tense, and stops him on it.

"I loved her. I loved her with every fibre of my being."

She's dead, Morgan says. Because you killed her.

Yes.

But you love her?

"Yes. I do."

Asked whether he even understands what love is, he says he cannot answer that. That he cannot point at something and say, that is love.

His mother is sitting beside him. She answers it for him.

"There is at least one thing he should be able to point at and say that's love. And that's the fact that I'm still here."

He says he spent his childhood feeling alone, left out by his family.

She says he was her only child for years, that her life revolved around him, that he was loved by everybody, and that she remembers his childhood completely differently.

Morgan puts the arithmetic to him plainly. His mother lost both her children in one night. One to death, one to prison.

"At no point did I ever feel like I had accomplished something."

"I realise we're talking about myself, but it doesn't feel like we are."

After the killing he met the criteria for conduct disorder. Standardised assessments later recorded significant psychopathic traits. The experts who examined him did not expect him to change.

His mother has since stopped speaking to him entirely.

"I finally accepted it is okay to love him as my son but really dislike the man he has become."

She has been told that she and her younger son will be at risk when he is released, and that she will probably have to move.

In February a parole board decides whether the thirteen-year-old who did this still exists somewhere inside the man who now talks about him in the third person. If they let him out, his mother has already been told to leave her home. So whose call should that be — the board's, or the one person alive who loved them both?

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@focuzzz_01 Legally fair, morally light. She wasn’t running the festival, but she was paid $275K to lend it her credibility and never said it was an ad.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@focuzzz_01 paying full price for two cars and still having money left is the real flex

[Kafadzhy @X1Kafadzhy]

ANTHROPIC MADE $16.3B IN 6 MONTHS AND LOST $80.7B DOING IT

the S-1 dropped today. ticker $ANT on Nasdaq, debut expected Thanksgiving week. the numbers that matter:

→ revenue H1 2026: $16.3B, up 13.5x from $1.2B a year ago
→ net loss $80.7B, but $72.4B of it is an accounting charge on convertible notes, not cash
→ compute and infrastructure: ~$8.9B in 6 months
→ ~250 customers pay over $10M a year
→ 1,900+ pay over $1M, 11,900+ pay over $100K
→ net revenue retention ~900%. customers from a year ago now spend 9x more
→ no revenue split by product. Claude Code isn't broken out
→ risk factors name a state-backed group that ran Claude Code against ~30 targets

the headline loss looks scary. the number to watch is the 900%

stop reading 10 recaps of it. the filing is public, let Claude read it for you:
→ open the S-1 on SEC EDGAR, save it as PDF
→ drop it into Claude with the prompt from the reply
→ ask follow-ups: risks for API users, compute deals, voting control
→ every number comes back with the exact quote, so you can check it

before: hundreds of pages of legal text. after: a 1-page brief you can trust

prompt in the reply ↓

follow @X1Kafadzhy for AI news you can actually use

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@georgeyitb the smartest move isn’t being good at everything, it’s knowing what you’re bad at and paying someone who isn’t

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@devb332 the real boss level is not blowing it afterwards

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@kryneeex the group chat always wins

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@gosh_sol_eth I feel for both. The contract wasn’t his doing, and she had every right to say no. But what he said on the radio went too far. He moved on, and she waited 28 years for a role. The apology is nice, but it came way too late.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@0numex Thanks, glad it landed.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@exotomicc Agreed, but the real test is whether Lester gets paid when you do nothing. A good advisor is boring on purpose, and you should still ask how they earn their fee.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@devb332 It’s remarkable how she turned the worst moment of her life into the foundation of a brand. But the cost was high, and it rarely gets mentioned in breakdowns like this.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@0numex Vaccaro bet the budget. Deloris bet on her son. A budget is a one time risk, but a royalty keeps paying for decades. For me the bigger credit goes to Deloris.

[Numex @0numex]

Michael Jordan signed with Nike in 1984 for about $500,000 a year, plus royalties. Last fiscal year, the Jordan Brand sold $7.03 billion.

The man who signed him says the idea that changed the deal came from Jordan’s mother.

In the video below, Sonny Vaccaro tells Rich Eisen how it came together.

Jordan was not on his A-list that day. Vaccaro had seen him play once, when North Carolina beat Georgetown, and never again until Jordan turned pro.

Eisen asks whether owning a piece of the company was Deloris Jordan’s idea. Vaccaro says it was.

He says he had already promised Michael a piece of the shoe. Then Deloris asked for more, and he and Phil Knight said yes.

Vaccaro says Jordan saved the company. “I don’t know if there’s a Nike today,” he adds. Nike would have been another Reebok or another Puma.

Forbes estimates Nike now pays Jordan nearly $300 million a year. His NBA salaries over his whole career added up to about $90 million.

The case for Vaccaro: he talked Nike into betting its marketing budget on one unproven rookie instead of several players.

So who deserves more credit for the deal: Vaccaro, who bet the budget, or Deloris Jordan, who asked for a piece?

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@verumidest The part that gets me is that the sons grieved for years while the “grief” was part of the plan. The money was never the real price here.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@SymbiosAi Fastest growing customers, most expensive to serve, flat price per seat. That is not a moat, that is a countdown.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@SymbiosAi Yeah, the gap between the headline and what lands in the bank is where most people get hurt. Read the contract and the tax math before the first check clears.