Oleksandr Mykhailenko

Warren Buffett could value any company on Earth. He couldn't value one shoe company. It cost him $17 billion. In 1993 Buffett was the richest man in America. Putting a price on a business was the thing he did better than anyone. Then he looked at Dexter Shoe, a family shoe maker from Maine. A strong brand. Loyal customers. Buffett was sure it would stay strong for decades. So he bought it for $433 million. But within a few years cheap shoes from overseas hit the US market. Dexter couldn't compete. The business he was so sure about ended up worth almost nothing. A bad deal. Every investor has one. But this one hid a second mistake. Buffett didn't pay in cash. Instead he paid with 25,203 shares of his own company, Berkshire Hathaway. The shoes went to zero. The shares kept growing. Every year his mistake got more expensive. In 2007 he wrote it down himself: "Dexter is the worst deal that I've made." Today those same shares are worth more than $17 billion. So he got the value wrong twice. He thought the shoe company was worth more than it was. And he thought his own stock was worth less. The man who could value any company on Earth got one deal wrong from both sides. Next time you sell something great to buy something that only looks good, ask yourself one question. What will each of them be worth in 20 years?

Sting earns £550,000 a year from one song. His bandmates got nothing. The song is Every Breath You Take. And the guitar riff playing in your head right now? Sting didn't play it. Andy Summers did. And according to him, the song almost died before anyone heard it. In the studio, Sting and drummer Stewart Copeland couldn't agree on where the drums and bass should sit. The track was about to be cut from the album. Then Sting turned to Summers: "go in there, make it your own." He nailed the riff almost in one take. In his words, "everybody stood up and cheered." That riff turned a dead track into one of the most played songs in radio history. But only one name went on the credits. Summers puts it bluntly in this interview: "That song was going in the trash until I played on it." Ask him about the credit, and he goes quiet. Then one line: "Watch the press. Let's see what happens in the next year." He wasn't bluffing. In 2025, Summers and Copeland took Sting to London's High Court. By January 2026, Sting's own lawyers had acknowledged about £595,000 in underpaid royalties. Their lawyers say the full bill, with streaming, could pass £8 million. One take saved the song. One name got the money. So who really wrote it: the man who wrote the words, or the man who made the whole world remember it? Watch Summers tell the studio story himself. 2 minutes.

George Foreman fought Muhammad Ali for a record $5 million. His grill paid that monthly. He didn't even want to try it. For years brands rented his face. Doritos, McDonald's, KFC. One fee, one ad, then they moved on to the next star. So a friend asked him why he kept making other companies rich. Get your own product. They found a little grill nobody wanted. His wife had to cook him a burger on it before he said yes. The deal: no fee, no advance. Foreman would only get a cut of every grill sold, and he had to sell it himself. The first check was about $1,500. The next one was $15,000. Then came the last fight of his life, in Atlantic City. He lost on a decision, the crowd booed, everyone said he'd been robbed. His attorney walked up with a $1 million check from the grill. "That's not what we call being robbed." On camera, the interviewer guesses the checks hit $4 million a month. Foreman corrects him. $5 million. By 1999 the manufacturer paid $137.5 million just to stop paying him. The fight paid him once. The grill kept paying, because this time he owned a piece. Watch the champ tell it himself below.