STOLVAR

Strange history, unsolved mysteries and facts that sound made up. New story every day 👇

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@gosh_sol_eth Kanye gave a kid from Detroit his shot, and Sean says so himself. But 185 million records and a settlement for less than he was owed? That’s not a favor, that’s a very lopsided partnership.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@gosh_sol_eth Which says a lot about him as a person!

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

HE ONCE STOOD IN LINE FOR FOOD STAMPS.
YEARS LATER, HE SIGNED A $19 BILLION DEAL ON THE DOOR OF THAT EXACT BUILDING.

Jan Koum left Ukraine at 16 with his mother. A tiny apartment in California. Welfare. Food stamps.

Then he and his partner Brian Acton both applied for jobs at Facebook.

Both got rejected.

So they built WhatsApp instead. 50 employees. 450 million users. No ads.

In February 2014, Facebook bought it for $19 billion.

Koum drove a few blocks to his old welfare office and signed the contract right there on its door.

Looking back at those poor years, he told Wired there were “positives to living a life unfettered by possessions.”

The company that said no to him paid $19 billion for what he built.

What’s the best “no” you ever got? 👇

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@SymbiosAi Capex $51.4B, operating cash $42.3B. One of the most profitable companies on earth now funds its build-out with bonds and new shares. The cash pile and the cash flow have stopped being the same thing.☺️

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@SuccessDecodedX Honestly, the part that gets me is how easy the far promise is. A 3.5-day week in 2056 costs him nothing. A 4-day week next Monday would cost him a lot. Funny which one got the microphone.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@lorneseth The best line in the whole story: “paying me off the books.” Not “gifts.” Not “he helped me out.” She told ABC exactly what the court needed to hear.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@s4next_ Good way to put it. You can’t lose money you never had a safe way to risk in the first place.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

HE CO-FOUNDED APPLE, DREW ITS FIRST LOGO, AND LEFT 12 DAYS LATER WITH $800. RONALD WAYNE SAYS HE DOESN’T REGRET A SINGLE CENT.

In 1976 Wayne was 41, a decade older than Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. He had met them at Atari. Jobs and Wozniak got 45% of Apple each. Wayne got 10%, partly as the tie-breaker when the two argued.

He wrote Apple’s first partnership agreement. He drew the original logo: Isaac Newton under an apple tree. He even wrote the manual for the Apple I.

Then Apple landed its first big order and Jobs borrowed $15,000 to fill it. Here’s the catch: in a partnership, debts can fall on the partners personally. Jobs and Wozniak had almost nothing to lose. Wayne owned a house and a car.

So he sold his 10% back for $800. He later accepted a further payment to give up any future claims.

In 2011, Steve Wozniak said that stake would have been worth $22 billion. Today, with Apple valued around $4 trillion, it’d be roughly $400 billion.

And Wayne, now 91, says he’d do it again.

Was he wrong, or just honest about who he was?

Watch below 👇

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@vargaaudits Yeah, easy to judge with 40 years of hindsight. At the time it was a guy with a mortgage weighing a real risk against a company that didn’t exist yet.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@Snoopyxxxik0 “the landlord came first” is such a good line lol. dude was doing seminars and mail order just to save up for a down payment while everyone else waited for their big break😁

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@xbtnoah People call stories like this “inspiring” too easily. What actually happened is a 15-year-old survived the night her mother had to choose, then spent decades building a life on top of it. Those aren’t the same thing. 🙃

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@vargaaudits “Divide the balance by your monthly take-home pay.” Dave’s number came out to 3 months when the loan behaved like it needed 60. That one ratio is the whole lesson — most people never run it until it’s too late

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@s4next_ Huskies lasted one season. Toronto waited until 1995 for another shot. That’s a 49-year rebuild.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@vontrixai Genuinely torn on this one. The tapes help identify victims, and that’s real. But every view is also an audience for a man who clearly enjoyed telling the story. Where do you draw the line??

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@Allx032 His whole defense rests on one thing: he didn’t know she was in that bathroom. If he did, the story collapses. Honest question: why shoot first and check the bed after?

If you want a different vibe, say so and I’ll rework it, for example more raw or more sarcastic.

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

IMAGINE FINDING OUT YOUR GOVERNMENT SPIKED YOUR DRINK. FOR SCIENCE.

That’s MKUltra. From 1953, the CIA ran a secret program to find ways to control the human mind, testing LSD on people who had no idea.

In 1953, a scientist named Frank Olson was dosed without his knowledge. Days later he was dead. His family didn’t learn the truth for over 20 years.

In 1973, the CIA director ordered the files destroyed. But in 1977, about 20,000 financial records turned up that had survived.

Everything that came after started with those receipts 👇

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

@vontrixai Chills. 😳
A man who buried 33 people under his own house sat across from a camera, laughed, and said it was everyone else’s fault.
The scariest part isn’t the crimes. It’s how normal he looked doing it.

[Vontrix @vontrixai]

In 1992, John Wayne Gacy sat on death row and said he never killed anyone. He had already confessed to murdering 33 young men and boys. He said the bodies under his house were put there by other people.

For years he lived a double life in a quiet Chicago suburb. He ran a construction company. He was a Democratic precinct captain. He dressed as a clown and performed at children’s parties. Neighbors called him friendly and helpful. He hired young men to work for him. Most people who knew him said he seemed completely ordinary.

Then, in December 1978, police searched the crawl space under his house. They found 29 bodies. Four more were later pulled from the river. Gacy had already given a detailed confession.

Thirteen years later, he told a completely different story.

In the video below, Gacy sits across from CBS reporter Walter Jacobson and calmly explains why none of the 33 young men and boys found under his house were his responsibility. He laughs at certain points. He corrects the interviewer. He says the police and the media created a monster that never existed.

At one point he says that if they want to charge him with anything, they should charge him with complicity in just two of the murders. He says that’s all he knows about.

He was executed in 1994. He never changed his story.

If John Wayne Gacy was telling the truth in 1992, then who actually killed those 33 people and buried them under his house?

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

In 1518, a woman started dancing in the streets of Strasbourg. And she couldn’t stop.

Within a month, hundreds of people had joined her, reportedly dancing for days until they collapsed.
The city’s doctors blamed “hot blood” and prescribed more dancing. Authorities even hired musicians.
So what actually happened?

🍞 Ergot: a mold on rye bread that can cause hallucinations and spasms. Problem: it doesn’t explain why people danced in sync for days.

😰 Mass psychogenic illness: the region was in the grip of famine and disease, and extreme stress can spread through a crowd. Many historians lean this way.

Nobody can prove either theory. Full story in the video 👇

[STOLVAR @Stolvar]

me: “I should really delegate this to an AI agent”

also me: picks up the motorcycle anyway

what’s the one task you KNOW you should hand off but still do yourself? 👇

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

The best way to use Grok @Bot is assume you are hiring a super competent employee