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Kevin Spacey won 2 Oscars and was the star of House of Cards. Then a studio won almost $31,000,000 from him, and now he says he has no money left and owes "many millions." In the video below, he holds back tears as he tells Piers Morgan his house is being sold at auction and he's not sure where he's going to live. In 2017 he was accused of sexual misconduct. Netflix cut him from House of Cards. The studio, MRC, had to rewrite the final season and cut it from 13 episodes to 8. MRC took him to arbitration. In 2021 he was ordered to pay nearly $31 million for breaching his contract. His appeal failed, and a Los Angeles judge upheld the award. In 2023 a London jury found him not guilty on 9 charges. But the bill from House of Cards didn't go away. Asked how much money he has, he says: "None." Asked how much he owes, he says it's considerable. Millions. Many millions. Asked if he's facing bankruptcy, he says there have been a couple of times when he thought he would have to file. His waterfront home in Baltimore went to auction. These days he works mostly in low-budget indie films. Should a studio be able to take $31 million from an actor who was later cleared by a jury, or is that the price of breaking the contract?

Metallica has sold more than 163,000,000 albums. On April 11, 1983, the guitarist who co-wrote six of their early songs was woken up in New York, told he was out of the band, and put on a Greyhound bus back to Los Angeles. In the video below, Dave Mustaine tells how it happened. No warning, no second chance. James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich made the call before the band had even recorded its first album. They blamed his drinking. Mustaine says they all drank, which is why people called the band Alcoholica, and they kept drinking long after he was gone. He brought a quarter-inch reel of tape to New York with about two days of his guitar riffs on it. When he left, he told them not to use his music. They used it. Mustaine got co-writing credits on four songs from Kill ’Em All, including The Four Horsemen and Jump in the Fire, plus Ride the Lightning and The Call of Ktulu. He says he wrote much of Leper Messiah too and never got credit for it. Metallica has said he was fired for his drinking and his temper, and Leper Messiah is still credited only to Hetfield and Ulrich. He turned the anger into Megadeth. The band went on to sell over 50,000,000 records and won a Grammy in 2017. Did Metallica owe him more than a bus ticket?

At 15, Dwayne Johnson came home with his mom to an eviction notice taped to their tiny apartment in Hawaii. It gave them 5 days to get out, or the police would remove them. Decades later, he became one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. In the video below, he tells the part of that story he rarely shares. His mom was crying. He was crying too, trying to hold it together for her. His dad wasn’t there. He was living in Nashville. So Johnson flew to Nashville, believing he was going to live with his father. When he landed, his father wasn’t the one waiting. A stranger picked him up. He asked where he was going and where he was going to live. The answer was a motel. He says the hardest part of that time wasn’t the money. It was the shame of wanting to be anywhere else but where he was, and not knowing where his family would sleep next. He used that exact feeling to play MMA fighter Mark Kerr in The Smashing Machine, in the scene where Kerr wakes up after an overdose with the people he loves watching from the door. The movie opened to about $6,000,000 in October 2025, the lowest opening of his career as a leading man. He went back to the worst week of his teenage life for it anyway. What did your family’s hardest money moment teach you that no paycheck ever has?

In 2008, former NBA referee Tim Donaghy was sentenced to 15 months in prison for a betting scheme. That same year, he claimed the 2002 Western Conference Finals between the Lakers and the Kings had been manipulated, in a game where the Lakers shot 27 free throws in the 4th quarter alone. In the video below, Kobe Bryant is asked straight out: was that series rigged? His answer splits it in two. Donaghy had money on games, Kobe says, so from that standpoint, yes. But the Kings also missed a pile of free throws in Game 7, and he asks what anyone wants him to say about that. Kobe’s version goes further than the record. Donaghy admitted betting on games he worked from the 2003 to 2007 seasons, and federal investigators found no evidence to support his claims about 2002. Then Kobe gets asked whether there was ever a triple team he wouldn’t shoot through. He calls it an average person question, then answers anyway. If Smush Parker is open, he’s shooting. If it’s Derek Fisher, he’s passing. For Kobe, the scoreboard was the only argument that mattered. Win the championship, he says. How you get there doesn’t matter. The Lakers went on to win the 2002 title. If a referee was betting on games, does a missed free throw still make the result fair?

Terry Sanderson, a 76-year-old retired optometrist, sued Gwyneth Paltrow for $300,000 over a 2016 ski crash. His lawyer later asked the jury for $3,200,000. Paltrow countersued him for exactly $1, and won it. In the video below, his lawyer asks her what the crash actually cost her. Her answer: she lost half a day of skiing on a very expensive vacation. She went back down after lunch and got a massage. She didn’t get her knee checked, because it didn’t feel serious. He pushes on the $1. She says it’s an actual dollar she is asking for, and that it’s symbolic because her real damages would be more. He asks whether she got the idea from Taylor Swift, who once sued for $1 in symbolic damages. She says she didn’t know about that at the time. Asked if they are good friends, she says they are friendly. Then he goes after the real number. She is asking the jury for $1, he says, but she also asked the judge to make the other side cover her attorney’s fees, potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars. In March 2023, the jury decided Sanderson was 100% at fault and gave Paltrow her $1. In the final judgment, she agreed not to seek attorney’s fees. Neither side has said what the trial cost them. Was Gwyneth Paltrow’s $1 lawsuit about principle, or a very expensive way to win a dollar?

Headlines said Amazon gave MrBeast $100,000,000 to make Beast Games. He says he lost tens of millions of dollars making it, and the difference came out of his own pocket. In the video below, he walks Steven Bartlett through where the money went. Episode 1 alone used more than $15,000,000 worth of towers. He says they built 1,000 of them, each about 10 feet tall, safety-tested them, wired them and wrote custom software to drop players. Episode 2 needed a full city for contestants to live in. That set cost $14,000,000. On top of that, he gave away more than $20,000,000 in prizes. By his math, that’s over $50,000,000 spent, and they were only 2 episodes in. Asked if the whole show cost more than $100,000,000, he says of course. He calls it a bad financial decision. He says he would have more money today if he had never filmed it. He has no regrets. Amazon says Beast Games drew more than 50,000,000 viewers in its first 25 days and became Prime Video’s most-watched unscripted series ever. Did MrBeast lose tens of millions on Beast Games, or did he buy the most expensive ad in YouTube history?

In the 3 years after Mike Tyson left prison, reports say he spent about $4,500,000 on cars and motorcycles, $240,000 a month in walking-around money and close to $100,000 a month on jewelry and clothes. He earned somewhere around $400,000,000 in his career and still ended up filing for bankruptcy. In the video below, he hears those numbers read back to him and can barely believe them himself. He says he grew up broke and never learned how to handle money as a kid. He calls managing money an art, and says that’s why so few people keep it. He blames an addictive personality, his ego, and the anger and bitterness of growing up poor and doing time. That same drive, he says, can either build him up or destroy him, depending on what it’s pointed at. He compares the spending to drugs. You have it all, and there is still an empty hole you keep trying to fill, and it has no bottom. Today, he says, he has far less money and does far more with it. His main goals now are his health and his kids. He still doesn’t know what he was so angry about back then. He only knows he doesn’t want that life again. Was Mike Tyson’s money ever really the problem, or was it the hole he was trying to fill with it?

Jordan Belfort says his biggest night at a casino cost him $1,200,000, and back then it barely mattered. Years later, after pleading guilty to securities fraud, he was ordered to pay $110,400,000 in restitution to investors. In the video below, the man known as the Wolf of Wall Street explains why he no longer trusts gambling. At 18 or 19, he took $1,000, his entire savings, to Atlantic City and lost all of it. He says they couldn’t even pay the tolls home. In 1986, in Puerto Rico, a stranger offered to teach him craps. Belfort handed over $300, then $100, then $50, and watched it vanish in seconds. At the next casino he gave the man his last $40. In 30 minutes it was $12,000. The stranger was a professional dice player, and he taught Belfort everything. That started a 2-year winning streak, with bets of $5,000 a roll on each number. It broke at a tiny casino in Saint Martin with a $50 limit. He lost about $100 there, then kept losing until a couple of million dollars were gone. He says he still finished ahead. Now a friend who just won $4,000,000 to $5,000,000 at blackjack keeps sending him photos of cash. Belfort tells him he has seen that movie, and it ends one way. If the Wolf of Wall Street won’t bet against the house, why would anyone else?

Evander Holyfield built a 109-room mansion outside Atlanta for more than $30,000,000. He earned over $200,000,000 in the ring, and in 2012 the bank took the house anyway. Rick Ross later bought it for $5,800,000. In the video below, Holyfield explains how he lost it. He says one of his older sisters took out a second mortgage on the house without him. It was his house, not hers, and he says she borrowed too much. It happened after his mother died. Holyfield says that once she was gone, it felt like everyone wanted to steal from him. He chose not to press charges. He is the youngest in his family, and he says his older sisters were almost like mothers to him. He decided he had made too much money to stoop that low. It wasn’t only family. Business partners he trusted took from him too, he says, and when he caught one, another would take their place. He also put millions into a record label that never produced a hit, and went through 3 divorces. Holyfield says none of it broke him. He forgives, moves on, and doesn’t think about what’s gone. Should Holyfield have sent his sister to jail, or was forgiving her worth losing the house?

Warren Buffett paid $12 a share for Berkshire Hathaway in 1965. Today one share trades for roughly $750,000. Not with a split. Not with any dividends paid out along the way. The same single piece of paper. He took control of a dying New England textile mill because the price looked cheap. He has called it the single dumbest trade of his life. He never changed the name. He never split the A shares. He never paid a dividend to his common shareholders. In 2026, one share of Berkshire Class A costs more than three median American houses. $750,000 for one slip of paper, up from $12 in 1965. That is a 62,000 fold return. Nineteen and a half percent compounded every single year for six decades. That is nineteen percent annual return on what the earliest buyers paid. Not on what the share is worth today. On the twelve dollars they wrote down in 1965. He held through the oil shock of 1973. Through stagflation. Through the crash of 1987. Through the dot-com bust of 2000. Through the financial crisis of 2008. Through COVID in 2020. The price went up decade after decade. Berkshire has never paid a dividend to common holders. Every dollar earned by the company gets reinvested, compounded, and sent back to work. Sixty years of that math produced the single most expensive share in American stock market history. People watch stocks because they move every second. The thing that actually compounded was a textile mill that stopped making textiles, refused to split its shares, and quietly turned every dollar it earned into another dollar it kept. He paid $12 for one share of Berkshire in 1965. The same share now trades for $750,000. He never sold the ones he bought, and he never let the company sell any of them back.

In 1991, NBC gave The Tonight Show to Jay Leno instead of David Letterman. In 1993, CBS signed Letterman for $14 million a year, double his NBC salary, and he hosted his own show for the next 22 years. Before he left, Letterman sat on Johnny Carson’s couch, on the very show he’d been passed over for. In the video below, Carson asks him the question the papers had been circling: “Just how pissed off are you?” “I’m not angry at NBC about this,” Letterman said. “Not angry at Jay Leno about this. Not angry at you or the Tonight Show about this.” “I wouldn’t have socks, actually, if it weren’t for you.” Then he explained why. “If the network had come to me and said, Dave, we’d like you to have this show, and then a week later they said, Dave, we don’t want you to have the show, then you could be angry about that. But I have a show.” So he drew a clean line between what was promised and what was wanted. “NBC can do whatever they want with this show,” he said. Would he like to have it? “Oh, sure.” He handled the rumors the same way. Asked about reports he would firebomb NBC, he answered: “Well, I hate waiting in lines, but I’d do it.” Then Carson showed what that goodwill looked like from the other side. More than ten years later, he still remembered Letterman’s very first joke on the show, about chipping dried toothpaste out of the sink and serving it as dessert mints. NBC decided who got the chair. Letterman decided how he looked walking away from it. When you get passed over, are you angry about what you were promised, or about what you only wanted?

Warren Buffett paid $1.3 billion for 7 percent of Coca-Cola over seven years. Today that same stake mails Berkshire about $816 million a year in dividends. Not the stock price. The checks that clear into the account every quarter. He wrote the first check in 1988 and the last in 1994. By then Berkshire owned roughly 400 million shares after splits. He has never bought another share and he has never sold one. In 2025, those same shares paid Berkshire roughly $816 million in dividends. $2.24 million every day. $93,000 every hour. $26 every second. For doing nothing. That is a 63 percent annual return on what he paid. Not on what the stake is worth today. On the check he wrote in the late 80s. He held through the 1990 oil crisis. Through the Asian crisis of 1998. Through the dot-com bust of 2000. Through the financial crisis of 2008. Through COVID in 2020. The dividend arrived every quarter. Coca-Cola has raised its dividend for 63 consecutive years. Every year since the Kennedy administration, that number has gone up and never come down. People watch stock prices because they move every second. The thing that actually compounded for Buffett was a sugar water company that raised its dividend exactly one time a year. He paid $1.3 billion for Coca-Cola. The dividend alone is now $816 million a year. He has never written another check and he has never cashed the first one.

Warren Buffett paid roughly $2.4 billion for GEICO over 20 years. Today it sends Berkshire about $7 billion a year in underwriting profit. Not the stock price. The actual cash from writing car insurance for 15 million Americans. He started in 1976 when GEICO was weeks from bankruptcy and the stock had crashed from $61 to $2. He bought about half the company for $46 million. Twenty years later, in 1996, Berkshire bought the other half for $2.3 billion and took the whole business private. In 2024, GEICO underwrote more auto policies than almost anyone else in America and sent Berkshire roughly $7 billion in profit. $19 million every day. $800,000 every hour. $222 every second. For writing policies while people sleep. That is a 290 percent annual return on what Berkshire paid. Not on what the company would fetch today. On the total check he wrote across two decades. He held through the auto insurance pricing wars of the early 2000s. Through the financial crisis of 2008. Through the self-driving car panic. Through the pandemic shock of 2020. Through the inflation shock of 2022. The policies kept renewing every month. GEICO wrote its first policy in 1936 for government employees stationed in Washington. Ninety years later, it still underwrites by the same simple rule. Price your risk correctly, and never pay a commission to a middleman. People watch stock prices because they move every second. The thing that actually compounded for Buffett was a boring insurance company that most of its own customers can only identify by the gecko in the ad. He paid $2.4 billion for GEICO. It sends him $7 billion a year now. He has never written another check and he has never sold a share, because he owns every one of them.

Warren Buffett paid $44 billion for BNSF Railroad. Today it mails Berkshire roughly $5 billion a year in profit. Not stock. The actual earnings of a 32,000-mile iron road. He closed the deal in 2010 after chasing it for years. He called it an all-in wager on the economic future of the United States. He bought out the remaining 77 percent of a company Berkshire already owned, and has not touched the ownership since. In 2024, that same railroad shipped grain, oil, cars and container boxes across the continent and sent Berkshire roughly $5 billion in profit. $13.7 million every day. $570,000 every hour. $158 every second. For doing nothing. That is an 11 percent annual return on what he paid. Not on what the railroad is worth today. On the check he wrote in 2010. He held through the 2011 debt ceiling crisis. Through the oil collapse of 2015. Through the trade war of 2018. Through the pandemic shock of 2020. Through the supply chain mess of 2022. The trains kept rolling and the earnings kept arriving. BNSF traces its first track back to 1849. One hundred and seventy-six years of hauling coal, grain and freight through every war and every panic the United States has ever had. People watch stock tickers because they move every second. The thing that actually compounded for Buffett was a business with 32,000 miles of iron that nobody is ever going to lay again. He paid $44 billion for BNSF Railroad. The earnings alone are now $5 billion a year. He has never written another check and he has never sold a single mile.

Warren Buffett paid $1.3 billion for American Express. Today it mails Berkshire roughly $500 million a year in dividends. Not the stock price. The cash wired to the account. He wrote the check in 1991 after Amex had been battered by bad loans and brand questions. Buffett negotiated preferred shares that converted to common, ended up with 151 million shares, and has never sold a single one. In 2025, those same shares paid Berkshire roughly $500 million in dividends. $1.37 million every day. $57,000 every hour. $15 every second. For doing nothing. That is a 38% annual return on what he paid. Not on what the stake is worth today. On the check he wrote in 1991. He held through the Asian crisis of 1998. Through the dot-com bust of 2000. Through 9/11 and the collapse of travel spending that followed. Through the financial crisis of 2008. Through COVID in 2020. The dividend arrived every quarter. American Express has paid shareholders every year since 1870. One hundred and fifty-five years of a check in the mail without a single miss. People watch the stock price because it moves every second. The thing that actually compounded was a 175-year-old company that quietly paid its owners the same way every quarter. He paid $1.3 billion for American Express. The dividend alone is now $500 million a year. He has never written another check and he has never cashed the first one.

Every dollar you spend is actually two decisions, not one. You chose what to buy, and you also chose how much poorer your future self will be when he arrives. Most people never see the second decision because the first one is louder. Warren Buffett saw it when he was 11 years old. He had been saving nickels and dimes for five years to buy his first stock. By the time he had 120 dollars in 1941, he had already done the math at every age he would ever reach. He has never undone that math. Today he is worth over 140 billion dollars and still eats breakfast at McDonald’s. Sausage and egg sandwich three mornings out of four. He drives his own five-year-old Cadillac. He has lived in the same house since 1958 and tells interviewers he would not swap it for any mansion. He is not performing modesty. He is applying the equation. A dollar spent on a McMuffin he actually enjoys does not count against him. A dollar spent on a mansion he does not want would steal from the 90-year-old version of himself, compounded at whatever rate the market offered in between. He has said this is not discipline. He frames it as refusing to be robbed by the version of himself that wanted to look rich at 40. Here is the practical part for everyone who is not Buffett. Most of your spending is not greed. It is habit, inattention, or a dopamine hit that lasts 36 hours. You can keep almost all of it and still save a huge percentage of your income if you just cut the one or two categories where neither your current self nor your future self actually wanted the purchase. So before you buy anything over a round number this week, picture the 70-year-old version of yourself in the room. Then ask him whether he signed off on this one, because the receipt is going to his account.

There are five levels of effort, and only one of them produces excellence. Most people spend their entire career stuck at level one, convinced they are already putting in the work. Bill Beswick, the sports psychologist behind Manchester United and a string of Olympic champions, once drew the ladder on a whiteboard for a room of swimmers. At the bottom were the people who just turn up. Above them, the ones who turn up to train. Above them, the ones who turn up to compete. Above them, the ones who train to win. At the top, Beswick said, were the very few who train to dominate. They train so hard that winning on race day becomes a formality. In the room that day was a swimmer named Adam Peaty. He said the line clicked. He decided to train to dominate. For years after, Peaty walked up to the pool at 6 in the morning and stopped at the door. He said one sentence out loud before he went in. Today I will train like a champion. Then he trained for two hours like a champion. Nobody in the pool could get near him. He came home, came back at 6 in the evening, and said the same sentence again. Three Olympic finals later he said winning felt inevitable. Not because he was more talented than the men in the next lane. Because he had already done more work than any of them could remember doing. Beswick asks every athlete who walks into his office three questions. What do you want. How badly do you want it. How much are you willing to suffer. Most people never answer the first one honestly, so the other two never get asked. The gap between the person you want to be and the person you are is a thousand small sessions nobody is watching. Which rung on Beswick’s ladder are you actually training at this week?

Warren Buffett disowned his own granddaughter in 2006 over one sentence she said in a documentary about wealth inequality. Buffett has avoided publicly discussing what happened between them. In the video below, Nicole Buffett shows a filmmaker what life looks like inside the second richest family in the world. Nicole was raised as a Buffett after Warren’s son Peter married her mother. She called him Grandpa for decades, spent childhood spring breaks in Omaha with her twin sister, and in one of her photos the two of them are little girls on either side of the man who would become one of the most famous investors in American history. But being the granddaughter of the second richest man in America never meant living like one. Warren paid for her education, but Nicole did not have access to his fortune. She trained as an artist, worked with children in San Francisco, and spent her days running bath time and homework time for someone else’s family while carrying one of the most famous surnames in American business. Then their relationship fell apart after Nicole appeared in a documentary called The One Percent and said one sentence about her grandfather on camera. Money is the spoke in my grandfather’s wheel of life. A few weeks later a letter arrived from Omaha. It said their relationship was over and that she was no longer a member of the family. One detail of the timing made the letter even sharper. In the same month, Warren Buffett publicly announced that he was giving a majority of his fortune to charity. The world celebrated him for his generosity while his granddaughter opened a letter telling her he no longer considered himself her grandfather. Do you think Buffett was protecting his family, or punishing a girl for one honest sentence? Save the video to hear Nicole in her own words, and follow for more heartbreaking stories from behind the lives of the world’s most famous billionaires.

Warren Buffett paid $25 million for See’s Candy. Today it mails him roughly $60 million a year in profit. Not the stock price. The cash in the envelope. He started buying. Berkshire wrote one check for $25 million. 16 million pounds of chocolate a year. $4 million pre-tax. He has never bought another share, and he has never sold the business. In 2025, those same stores shipped 30 million pounds and sent Berkshire roughly $60 million in profit. $164,000 every day. $6,800 every hour. $1.90 every second. For doing nothing. That is 240% a year on what he paid. Not on what the stores are worth today. On what he wrote in 1972. He held through stagflation in 1979. Through the crash of 1987. Through the dot-com bust in 2000. Through the financial crisis in 2008. Through COVID in 2020. The chocolate kept selling every quarter. See’s has not opened a new factory in 50 years. It still raises prices on December 26th, right after Christmas, every single year. People watch the stock price because it moves every second. The thing that actually compounded was a candy shop that moves almost nothing. He paid $25 million for See’s Candy. It pays him $60 million every year. He has never written another check and he has never cashed the first one.