Linko

Money, investing, and lessons from the rich.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@Kv0r1n Revenue is vanity, cash is sanity. His mom understood that before most MBAs do.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

Daymond John's mom took a $100,000 loan on a house worth $75,000 to fund FUBU.
Three months later, $500 was left.

He had $300,000 in orders from stores. 27 banks still turned him down.

In the video below, he remembers what his mother told him: "Let's take all the money we can out of the house."

He turned the house into a factory. Friends slept in sleeping bags next to the sewing machines. He rented rooms to strangers and kept his shifts at Red Lobster.

Here's the part nobody warns you about.

He paid for fabric 90 days ahead. Then staff, then shipping. The stores paid him in 30, 60 or 90 days.

"It wasn't that I was spending on lavish things. I just didn't know how money worked."

He was selling more than ever and running out of cash at the same time. The bank was talking about taking the house.

Then his mom had one last idea. A $2,000 newspaper ad: "Million dollars in orders. Need financing."

33 people called. He says most of them were loan sharks.

But one call came from Samsung's textile division. FUBU got a manufacturing and distribution deal.

My takeaway: orders aren't money. Cash in the bank is. I've had months where people owed me more than I had.

Would you let your mom put her house on the line for your business?

[Linko @Llinkoy]

We can’t know who booked whom, but when the company advising the NFL on headliners is also executive producing a show with its own founder on stage, there’s no independent check on the choice. “Union scale” covers only the performer’s pay, not the economics of the whole project, whose terms haven’t been disclosed since 2024.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@Flinzou Lost the percentages, won everything else. A rare case where the “bad deal” turned out to be the best deal of his life.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@SuccessDecodedX Cutting headcount is the easy part. Changing how work actually gets done is hard. Without that, you just get the same bureaucracy with fewer hands.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@0_oRai Right? That’s what keeps me up at night too.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@QBXMubarak61 Thanks for reading! Which part left you confused?

[Linko @Llinkoy]

I think he wasn’t running from the clients or the marriage, but from the reckoning. A motorcycle stashed with cash under a fake name the day before isn’t “snapping,” it’s planning. And cops giving a ride to a soaking wet man in pilot goggles after a canoe story is its own kind of art.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@verumidest One winner and 32 loan sharks is a rough ratio. I’d want better odds before picking up

[Klilvi @klilvi]

Lil Wayne says Birdman sat on $10 million of his money and 49% of the label that signed Drake and Nicki Minaj. So he sued the man he called his father for $51 million.

In the video below, the two of them sit side by side on Rap City in 2007. Then Tampa, 2025, when Birdman tries to give a speech on stage.

Wayne joined Cash Money in 1997.

In 2006 he and Birdman put out a joint album. It was called Like Father, Like Son. The single was "Stuntin' Like My Daddy."

Wayne started his own label inside Cash Money, Young Money. It signed Drake. It signed Nicki Minaj.

Then his album Tha Carter V got stuck. In December 2014 he tweeted: "I am a prisoner and so is my creativity."

And: "I want off this label and nothing to do with these people but unfortunately it ain't that easy."

A month later he sued Cash Money and Birdman for $51 million.

His side said Birdman owed him an $8 million advance for the album and $2 million more once it was done. He said he never got the 49% of Young Money he was due.

The label had registered Young Money under Cash Money. So, he said, he never saw an accounting of what Drake made for it.

It took three and a half years. In June 2018 they settled. The terms are secret. Reports said more than $10 million.

Hours later, a photo showed the two of them in the studio together. Tha Carter V finally came out that September.

Then came Tampa. February 2025, the Hot Boys reunion. Birdman was talking to the crowd. Wayne cut him off mid-speech: "Alright, let's go, let's go, let's go."

Like Father, Like Son, the album said. The son needed a $51 million lawsuit to get paid.

Was Birdman the father who made Lil Wayne, or the boss who kept his money?

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@kryneeex 27 banks looked at $300K in orders and saw $500. Their loss.

[SuccessDecoded @SuccessDecodedX]

Who fixes the culture after AI deletes the meetings?

Eric Schmidt sat down with Nicolai Tangen, who runs Norway's sovereign wealth fund, and gave Fortune its story. He used to sit in meetings 12 hours a day, and AI, he said, can strip out that coordination tax. A 10,000-person company probably has a couple of thousand people it doesn't need.

Asked how AI reshapes business, he said almost none of the companies listening "will actually do the necessary changes in their culture." Companies are organized around belief systems, he explained, where the morning is predictable and everyone is comfortable. You'd sit through 13 minutes of regulation talk to reach it. The meetings quote Fortune ran comes 23 minutes later.

This is my reading; he never said it. The cut is the easy part. A friend of his laid off 20 percent of his people, mostly the glue people who did planning and shuffled numbers, and got death threats for it. A company can do exactly that and still run the old approval chain with fewer hands.

So the scarce skill is a manager willing to make the morning unpredictable. A team lead who deletes the weekly status meeting but keeps the same three sign-offs gets the layoff without the speed.

Plenty of the people cheering the coordination tax line work at exactly the kind of company he says won't change.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@gosh_sol_eth Nobody says ‘pure hell’ on national TV, next to the man they’re accusing, just to get a settlement. That sounds like someone trying to get out

[Linko @Llinkoy]

What got me is that he was right about the crisis and the market still went the other way. That really hits your confidence. And I guess that’s exactly why he survived: he stopped just believing himself and started checking. I’ve noticed the same thing in my own life: the more sure I am, the more likely I am to be wrong.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@Fenzoox Exactly. An order is a promise, not money. You have to pay for the fabric, the production and the shipping months before the customer pays you, and that gap kills more good companies than bad products do.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

Patron won here because of the selling, not the tequila. Anyone can find a good product. It took one person to convince the market to pay $37 a bottle when everyone else was paying $5, and to not give up after hearing “the ceiling is 20,000 cases.” In the end it was 3.3 million cases against the “impossible” 20 thousand.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@georgeyitb Right. FUBU had the orders and the demand, but not the cash to cover the gap. Liquidity is what keeps you alive long enough for the hit to matter.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@lorneseth Walking away from $3 million that just sits there waiting for you to stick it out? Strange strategy for an inheritance hunter.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@lorneseth She did, and a $2,000 ad that got one serious call out of 33 is a good return. Her last idea was the one that counted.

[Linko @Llinkoy]

@Yumzlef Thousands of telemetry nodes, absolute physical autonomy, and it’s a duck dribbling a ball. Peak 2026.