KaiWestro

true stories about money, fame and the people who lost both

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@1onetouch1 No. A board full of statesmen and generals with zero diagnostics expertise was already the biggest red flag

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@Kaivo0x Cash from cows and ‘french fries’ in an Arby’s bag. Peak celebrity finance

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@0xlexlab Retention compounds. Reach is rented

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

Frank Abagnale told Johnny Carson he cashed $2.5 million in bad checks while posing as a Pan Am pilot. Prison records show that for most of those years, he was inmate 25367 in upstate New York.

In the video below, he walks the Tonight Show audience through the con, step by step. He calls Pan Am pretending to be a pilot whose uniform was stolen. The uniform company sends the $289 bill straight to Pan Am payroll. He makes an ID card with decals peeled off a model airplane. The audience applauds. "Most people don't realize how gullible the average store keeper is," he says.

That story became a bestselling book in 1980. In 2002 it became Catch Me If You Can, with Leonardo DiCaprio as Abagnale and Tom Hanks as the FBI agent chasing him. It made about $350 million worldwide. Then came a Broadway musical, and decades of paid talks on fraud.

In 2020 author Alan Logan published The Greatest Hoax on Earth. He pulled the prison card. Abagnale entered Great Meadow Correctional Facility in September 1965 and, apart from a few months on parole, stayed there until Christmas Eve 1968. He was 17 when he went in and 20 when he came out. Those were the years he said he was flying the world.

What Logan found instead was smaller. In early 1969 Abagnale did pose as a TWA pilot, for a few weeks. He followed a flight attendant named Paula Parks to her parents' home in Baton Rouge, moved in, slept in her bed and stole about $1,200 from the family. Police arrested him on Valentine's Day.

In 1981 Louisiana's attorney general said: "Far as I'm concerned, he's a fraud."

Hollywood paid for the story of a great con. The con may have been the story.

Was he the greatest con man of his era, or did he just pull the one con nobody checked?

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

Evander Holyfield made more than $200 million in the ring. Today Rick Ross owns his 109-room mansion, on a road still called Evander Holyfield Highway. Holyfield says part of the reason he lost it was his own sister.

In the video below, he tells VladTV what happened. A family member had taken out a second mortgage on a house that wasn't theirs. How much? "Too much," he says. Then the line that stings: "After my mama passed, now everybody want to steal from me."

The house sat on 235 acres south of Atlanta. 54,000 square feet, 109 rooms, a bowling alley, a 135-seat movie theater and a dining room for 100. Holyfield said it cost more than $1 million a year just to keep running. One December, the electric bill hit $17,000, mostly for the Christmas lights.

By 2008 the cracks were public. Washington Mutual scheduled an auction over a $10 million loan. A Utah company sued him for $550,000 he had borrowed for landscaping. Holyfield told reporters: "I'm not broke. I'm just not liquid."

He went through foreclosure at least three times.

The last one came in March 2012. The house went at auction to JPMorgan Chase for $7.5 million. He reportedly owed more than $14 million on it. In 2014 Rick Ross bought it for $5.8 million.

Holyfield says he chose not to call his sister out or send her to jail. "I'm the youngest one in my family," he explains. His older sisters were almost like mothers to him.

The case for Holyfield: he trusted family, and family borrowed against his home behind his back. The case against: nobody forces a man to build 109 rooms he can't afford to run.

The house was once valued at around $20 million. The road out front still has his name on it.

Was it his sister who cost him the mansion, or a mansion that was always going to cost him everything?

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@Veltrixmoon Vision + relentless work. That’s the real formula.

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

Jim Carrey wrote himself a check for $10 million when he was broke and dated it Thanksgiving 1995. Just before that date, he found out he was getting $10 million for one movie.

In the video below, he tells Oprah in 1997 how it worked. "I wrote myself a check for $10 million for acting services rendered," he says. "And I gave myself 5 years. 3 years, maybe."

At 15 he was working full time as a janitor while his family lived out of a van. By around 1990 he was a Canadian comic in Los Angeles with almost nothing. At night he drove up to Mulholland Drive, parked, and pictured directors who wanted to work with him. "I had nothing at that time," he says. "But it just made me feel better."

He carried the check in his wallet until it fell apart.

Then came 1994. Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber all came out in a single year. "I found out that I was going to make $10 million on Dumb and Dumber," he tells Oprah.

His father, Percy, died that same year. He never saw the date on the check. Carrey put it in his father's pocket, and it was buried with him.

In 1996 Carrey became the first actor ever paid $20 million for one film, The Cable Guy. One studio executive called it a dangerous precedent.

He doesn't sell it as magic. "Visualization works if you work hard," he says. "You can't just visualize and then go eat a sandwich."

He wrote the number down first. Then he spent years doing the work to cash it.

Was it the check that got him there, or the years nobody saw?

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@fineprnt Yeah, visualization set the direction, but only the work in total obscurity actually cashed it

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@kryneeex Lost 10% of billions every year to rats and water. Cash that can't be banked is just expensive paper.

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@Rossst_03 Played Rocky. Never owned Rocky.

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@fineprnt Never let the guy who books your fights also keep your books

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@fomoliver Agreed. The equity plays (Mint, Aviation Gin) outperformed the acting career

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

Ryan Reynolds never built a network or a phone. T-Mobile still agreed to pay up to $1.35 billion for his phone company. It was running on T-Mobile's own network the whole time.

In the video below, he explains on CNBC, the day the deal was announced, what he actually did. "I didn't innovate the product," he says. "My job was to create as much awareness around this product as humanly possible."

Mint Mobile wasn't his idea. Its founder, David Glickman, sat with him on the board of the Michael J. Fox Foundation and liked how he had marketed Deadpool. In November 2019 Reynolds bought what he called "a pretty large chunk," reported at around 25%, and became its face.

When he joined, the average American was paying $65 a month for a phone plan. Mint started at $15.

His rule was the opposite of Hollywood. "People in my position, from showbiz, are looking at aspirational items," he says. "Our north star is anti-aspirational items." Something everyone already pays for every month.

The ads came from his own agency, Maximum Effort. Fast, cheap and built to feel like jokes, not commercials. App downloads jumped 34% in his first year.

The deal was 39% cash and 61% stock. If the 25% is right, his share comes to roughly $300 million before tax.

In 2020 Forbes ranked him the second highest-paid actor in the world, with $71.5 million. The phone company paid him about four times that.

It wasn't his first exit. He bought into Aviation Gin in 2018 and sold it to Diageo in 2020 in a deal worth up to $610 million.

T-Mobile already owned the network. It paid up to $1.35 billion for the face.

So what made him rich: the movies, or knowing which boring business needed a famous face?

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@klilvi She turned down $54.5M over a gag clause and took $64M from someone Pitt didn’t want involved. Hard to see that as anything but personal

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

@kryneeex Depositors carried all the risk. He just spent their money.

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

Macaulay Culkin was reportedly getting $8 million a movie by the time he was 14. At home, he and his brother slept on the couch, because there was no bedroom for them.

In the video below, he tells Barbara Walters about it himself: "Forget about how much money I was making, but I was sleeping on the couch."

Home Alone paid him $110,000 in 1990. Home Alone 2 paid him $4.5 million two years later. Between 1990 and 1994 he made 8 movies, and the man choosing them, negotiating them and taking every call was his father, Kit.

Culkin remembers him "sitting on the phone screaming his head off at God knows who" every day. He says his father was "very good at breaking people's spirits and holding them down, and he did that to all of us, including my mother."

At one point he went to his father and asked for time off. "I'm really, really exhausted." His father said yes. "The next thing I knew, I was on the next set." By 14, he had quit.

Then his parents split and went to court over custody, with a fortune reportedly worth $15 to 20 million in the background. During that fight his father hit him across the cheek. Culkin locked his door and called the police on him.

He later went to court to take both parents' names off his trust. On the day of the custody trial, his father didn't show up. "No note, no goodbye, no explanation."

They haven't spoken in more than 30 years. In the same interview, Culkin says his parents did lock away about 90% of his earnings in an account he couldn't touch until he turned 18.

Was Kit Culkin the reason his son became the highest-paid child in Hollywood, or the reason he walked away at 14?

[KaiWestro @kaiwestro]

Netflix paid a reported $500 million to stream Seinfeld.

George Costanza got nothing.

"None of that goes to me," Jason Alexander said.

In the video below, he explains why he, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Michael Richards wanted the show to end.

In 1997, Seinfeld was the biggest comedy on TV.

NBC offered Jerry $5 million an episode to keep going.

He said no.

The real reason was money.

Jerry and Larry David owned a piece of the reruns.

George, Elaine and Kramer didn't.

They asked NBC for $1 million an episode.

They got $600,000.

Years later, each was getting about $100,000 a year from reruns. Jerry and Larry were getting millions.

"Seinfeld wasn't going to be the annuity for us that it was going to be for Jerry and Larry."

Every new season made it harder to ever play anyone else.

On the last night, the 4 of them held hands backstage.

Jerry said: "For the rest of our lives, when anyone thinks of one of us, they will think of all four of us."

Jerry and Larry made the show. George, Elaine and Kramer made it famous.

Who deserved the reruns?