Afritab

In 1720, shares in the South Sea Company were the hottest investment in England. Isaac Newton, one of the greatest minds in history, bought in early and sold at a solid profit. Then he watched the price keep climbing while people around him got rich. He bought back in, much bigger, near the top. The bubble burst. He reportedly lost around £20,000, a fortune at the time. He is often quoted saying he could calculate the motions of the heavens but not the madness of people. Historians are not sure he ever said it. The loss is well documented. Being smart does not protect you from FOMO. Have you ever sold, then bought back in higher?

Back in 2011 Stefan Thomas made an animated video explaining Bitcoin and got paid 7002 coins for it. He saved the keys on an IronKey, the kind of encrypted drive that erases itself after ten wrong password attempts. Then he lost the paper with the password written on it. Over the years he tested eight guesses. Every single one failed. Two attempts remain. When the story surfaced in 2021 the coins sat around 220 million dollars. A security firm reached out in 2022 claiming it could open that exact model. He passed. Today those same coins sit near 530 million. As far as anyone knows the drive is still locked. Two guesses left. One wrong move and the coins vanish for good. A backup you cannot get into is not a backup. Would you burn the last two guesses now or hold out for better tools?

Bybit treated it as routine. Move Ethereum from the cold wallet. Approve and done. The signers looked at their screens and saw a normal transaction. The wallet interface had been changed. They were signing something else entirely. About $1.5 billion in Ethereum left in one go. The biggest crypto theft on record. The FBI put it on North Korea. Within days the stolen funds started moving through thousands of addresses. Bybit kept the exchange running. They covered every withdrawal from their own reserves and loans. They posted a bounty on the money. The attackers kept laundering anyway. Even the people who do this every day will sign whatever the screen puts in front of them. Do you actually check what you are signing, every single time?

Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford at 19 to start Theranos. She promised hundreds of medical tests from a single drop of blood. By 2014, when she was 30, Theranos was valued at $9 billion and Forbes named her the youngest self-made female billionaire. Behind the scenes, the technology did not work as claimed. Many tests were run on modified commercial machines. In 2015, a Wall Street Journal investigation exposed the problems. Forbes revalued her fortune to zero. In 2022 she was sentenced to over 11 years in prison for fraud. Confidence can raise money. It cannot make the product work. Who is the biggest fake genius you have seen get rich?

In 2008, Elon Musk was running SpaceX and Tesla. Both were close to running out of money. SpaceX's first three Falcon 1 launches had failed. It had money for roughly one more attempt. Tesla was burning cash in the middle of the financial crisis. He was putting his own money in to keep it alive. On September 28, 2008, the fourth Falcon 1 launch reached orbit. In December 2008, NASA awarded SpaceX a contract worth about $1.6 billion. Days later, Tesla closed a funding round on Christmas Eve. Both companies survived by days. Musk went on to become, for a time, the richest person in the world. The bottom is where most people quit. That is exactly why it matters. Would you have bet everything on a fourth launch?

In April 1976, Ronald Wayne co-founded Apple with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. He owned 10%. He drew Apple's first logo and wrote its partnership agreement. Wayne was older than the other two, and worried. If the company failed, he could be personally on the hook for its debts. Twelve days after founding, he sold his 10% back for $800. He later accepted another $1,500 to give up any future claims. Apple became one of the most valuable companies on Earth. That 10% would be worth hundreds of billions today. Wayne has said in interviews he does not regret it. The safest decision is not always the cheapest one. Honestly, would you have sold for $800?

In 2013, Welsh IT worker James Howells had a hard drive holding the private keys to about 8,000 Bitcoin he had mined years earlier. That summer the drive went out in a rubbish bag and ended up in a landfill in Newport, Wales. At the time one Bitcoin was worth around $100. He realised the wrong drive had been thrown out a few months later. For over a decade, Newport City Council refused to let him dig, citing environmental risks. He offered to pay for the excavation himself and share the Bitcoin with the city. The council still said no. In January 2025, the High Court dismissed his legal claim to access the landfill. He then offered to buy the part of the landfill he believes holds the drive. The council did not accept. At today's Bitcoin price of $77,927, 8,000 BTC is worth about $623 million. In 2025 he stopped trying to dig and pivoted to launching a token tied to his claim on the lost coins. The 8,000 Bitcoin have never moved. They are still sitting in the same wallet. If the only copy of your keys is on one device, you do not really own Bitcoin. You own a risk. Would you have kept fighting for over a decade, or let it go?

In 2022 Axie Infinity was one of the biggest play-to-earn crypto games. Players around the world earned real income from it. A senior engineer at Sky Mavis was approached about a job at another company. After several rounds of interviews he received a generous offer sent as a PDF. The PDF carried spyware. It gave the attackers a way into Sky Mavis systems. In March 2022 attackers drained about $625 million in crypto from the Ronin bridge. Nobody noticed for six days. The US government attributed the hack to Lazarus Group, North Korea's state-backed hackers. Only a small part was ever recovered. Sky Mavis raised money and used its own funds to pay users back. One of the biggest hacks in crypto history did not start with code. It started with a job offer. Be honest. Would you have opened that PDF?

He became the youngest heavyweight champion in history at 20. That kind of early peak pulls in serious money. Over his career the total reached an estimated 300 million or more. He spent it on mansions and cars. A huge entourage came with the lifestyle. Famously there were pet tigers too. The money moved out as fast as it arrived. In 2003 he filed for bankruptcy. The filing showed around 23 million in debt. That is the point where most stories end. He started over anyway. A one-man stage show became the first step. A podcast came after that. New businesses followed. At 58 he stepped back into the ring. It was against Jake Paul. The payday came in at a reported eight figures. It does not matter how much comes in. It matters how much stays. What would you do differently with $300 million?