On March 31, 1995, Selena drove to a motel in Corpus Christi to meet the woman who ran her fan club. The woman had asked her to come alone. Minutes later, Selena ran into the lobby with a bullet in her back and told the staff, "Yolanda, room 158." Yolanda Saldívar was 34, a former nurse. Selena's family said she had stolen more than $100,000 from the singer's businesses. Five days before the meeting, she bought a .38 revolver. In the video below, months later, she tells ABC's 20/20 her side. She speaks softly, in a bright pink jacket, like a woman explaining a misunderstanding. She says Selena loved her. "She would call me mom on the phone." The reporter asks if she stole any money from Selena. "No, ma'am. Not ever." At 1:40 she is asked how she didn't see the blood all over the room. "The pictures that I see, they're dots." After the shooting, she sat in her truck with the gun to her head for nine hours. She says Selena's voice kept her alive: "Don't commit suicide, because I'll never see you in heaven." At the end, she explains what she feels now: "I'm dead inside. Selena will always be a daughter for me." Selena was 23. Her album "Dreaming of You" came out months after her death and debuted at No. 1. Today Saldívar is 66. She has been in prison for 31 years and was denied parole in March 2025. Her next review is in 2030. Some people say a woman who shot a 23-year-old in the back should never walk free. Others say she has served the 30 years the law gave her. Should Yolanda Saldívar ever be released?

On December 8, 1980, John Lennon signed an album for a fan outside his New York apartment. Then he asked him, "Is that all? Do you want anything else?" Six hours later, the same fan shot him five times in the back. Mark David Chapman was 25, a former security guard from Hawaii. That morning he bought a copy of The Catcher in the Rye and wrote inside it, "This is my statement." In the video below, 12 years later, he tells Larry King everything from Attica prison. He speaks slowly and politely, like a man describing a long day at work. He says that when Lennon looked at him that afternoon, "he knew something subconsciously that he was looking into the eyes of the person that was going to kill him." King asks if he already knew he was going to shoot him. "Absolutely." At 2:10 he describes the shots. "All in his back." His first thought was that the bullets worked. He had been worried the humidity on the plane had ruined them. Then the doorman shook the gun out of his hand. Chapman took out the book and stood on the sidewalk trying to read it until the police came. At the end, he explains what Lennon was to him that night: "a two-dimensional celebrity with no real feelings." Today he is 71. He has been in prison for more than 45 years and has been denied parole 14 times. His next hearing is in February 2027. Some people say a man who killed for fame should never walk free. Others say 45 years is enough for anyone. Should Mark David Chapman ever be released?

Elon Musk promised voters $1 million a day, picked "randomly." His own lawyer later told a judge the winners were "not chosen by chance." This month, Musk settled. In the video below, Musk announces it on stage in Pennsylvania, 2 weeks before the 2024 election. "We're going to be awarding a million dollars randomly to people who have signed the petition, every day from now until the election." The petition came from America PAC, the super PAC Musk created to back Trump. To sign it, swing state voters had to hand over their personal information. When it was challenged in court, Musk's lawyer said it wasn't a lottery. The winners were picked to be paid spokespeople. The judge let it continue. Then two Arizona voters sued Musk for fraud. They said they would never have given up their data if they'd known it wasn't random. A federal judge refused to throw out the case. Musk was ordered to testify under oath. Even his PAC's director said he was "surprised" by Musk's choice of words. On October 15, Musk settled both cases. No testimony. No trial. Musk and his PAC deny any wrongdoing. So how much did he pay? Nobody knows. The terms are secret. The $1 million checks were handed out on stage, in front of cameras. This deal was signed behind closed doors. Smart legal move, or did voters hand over their data for a lottery that never existed? Save this video before the next "random" giveaway.

In 2013 Tesla had two weeks of cash left, and Elon Musk agreed to sell it to his close friend Larry Page for $6 billion. They shook on it. Two years later, one word from Page made them rivals. In the video below, Musk tells Tucker Carlson what Page called him. "I would stay at his house in Palo Alto, and I would talk to him late into the night about AI safety." Google would buy Tesla and put in $5 billion more for factories. Musk would run it for 8 years. In a buyout, the buyer owns every future dollar the company makes. Then sales picked up, Tesla posted its first profit, and the deal died. In a 2015 argument about AI, Page called Musk a "speciesist," someone who puts humans ahead of future digital minds. "I'm a speciesist. OK, you got me," Musk says. "That was the last straw." Google had about 3/4 of the world's AI talent, he says, so he co-founded OpenAI to compete. He hired Google's Ilya Sutskever. Page stopped speaking to him. Page almost bought Tesla for $6 billion. Today it's worth over $1 trillion. With two weeks of cash left, would you have sold to your best friend? Save this one, and follow for more stories about how the rich really got rich.

Anna Nicole Smith was 26 when she married J. Howard Marshall, an 89-year-old oil billionaire. A judge once awarded her $474 million from his fortune. She never got a cent. In the video below, Anna Nicole tells Larry King why she married him. "He took me out of a horrible place and was taking care of me and my son, and I loved him for that." They met in 1991 at a Houston strip club. She turned down his first proposals. They married in 1994. He died 14 months later. His will left her nothing. Everything went to his son, Pierce. She said he promised to take care of her. A will decides who gets the money. A spoken promise counts only if a court believes it. In 2000 a judge believed her. Pierce said his father's will was clear. Higher courts threw it out. In 2006 her 20-year-old son died in her hospital room, 3 days after her daughter was born. Five months later she died too, at 39. The case reached the Supreme Court twice. Her side got nothing. She married a billionaire. She died still fighting for his money. Did she marry for money, or did his family make sure she'd never see it? Keep this video, and follow for more stories the headlines left out.

Mark Zuckerberg was 22 when Yahoo offered $1 billion for Facebook, and his own team wanted him to take it. He went to Steve Jobs instead. Jobs told him to go to India. In the video below, Zuckerberg tells India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi what happened next. "This is a story that I haven't told publicly and very few people know." Facebook was 2 years old, with about 10 million users. Zuckerberg said no to Yahoo. It was a tough patch, he says. A lot of people wanted to buy Facebook and thought he should sell. So he went to one of his mentors, Steve Jobs. Jobs told him to visit the temple in India he had gone to while figuring out what Apple should be. Zuckerberg traveled for almost a month. It "reinforced for me the importance of what we were doing." For early employees with stock, a $1 billion sale is a life-changing payout. Saying no means years of waiting, maybe for nothing. Within a year of saying no to Yahoo, his entire management team had quit. He never sold. Today Meta is worth over $1.4 trillion. Yahoo offered $1 billion. Steve Jobs offered a temple. Would you have taken $1 billion at 22, or the ticket to India? Save the video, and follow for more money stories from behind the world's biggest names.

Taylor Swift signed with Big Machine Records at 15 and became its biggest star. In 2019 the label was sold, with her first six albums, in a deal worth about $300 million. Nobody asked her. In the video below, Taylor tells a room full of music executives what that felt like. She was the label's first artist. The label owned her masters, the original recordings. When her contract ended, she says the only offer was to "earn" back one old album for every new one she made. She left. Then Scooter Braun's company bought the label. Her albums came with it. "This just happened to me without my approval, consultation or consent." She said he thought he could "buy me." "But I'm obviously not going willingly." Whoever owns the masters gets paid every time those recordings are streamed, sold or licensed. She found out when the deal was announced to the world. Braun later sold the masters to an investment firm. Taylor re-recorded her albums, fans switched, and in 2025 she bought the originals back for a reported $360 million. She signed away her recordings at 15. She owned them again at 35. Was Braun buying a record label, or buying Taylor Swift? Save the video, and follow for more money stories from behind the world's biggest names.

Paul McCartney taught Michael Jackson the smartest move in the music business: buy the rights to songs. In 1985, Michael bought Paul's. $47.5 million for about 4,000 songs, 251 of them Beatles songs. In the video below, Paul tells Howard Stern what happened next, in 2001. Paul says he told Michael to think about music publishing. Michael looked at him and said: "I'm gonna get yours." Paul thought it was a joke. Then it came true. Whoever owns a song gets paid every time it's played, sold or used. Years later, Paul says, he wrote to Michael: "After 30 years of being reasonably successful for this company you now own, don't you think I could have a raise?" Michael's answer: "Oh Paul, that's just business." Paul says Michael won't even answer his letters. In 2016, Michael's estate sold its half of Sony/ATV, by then a company with millions of songs, for $750 million. Paul sued Sony in 2017 to reclaim his US copyrights. Paul gave a friend business advice. The friend used it to buy Paul's songs. Was Michael just doing business, or did he owe a friend more than that? Save the video, and follow for more money stories from behind the world's biggest names.

"You're going to burn this billion dollars." Bill Gates said that to Microsoft's CEO before its first check to OpenAI. Microsoft's stake in OpenAI was later valued at $135 billion. But the money isn't the strangest part. What Gates did three years later is. Satya Nadella told the story on TBPN. OpenAI was a nonprofit with no product, and Microsoft's own co-founder thought the check was gone before it was sent. Nadella sent it anyway, and Microsoft ended up committing about $13 billion. Then, in mid-2022, Gates set OpenAI a test: pass an AP Biology exam. He expected it to take two or three years. In September he watched it get 59 of 60 questions right and score a 5, the top mark. "I knew I had just seen the most important advance in technology since the graphical user interface." Honestly, the skeptic had a fair point. A nonprofit with no product is a reasonable thing to doubt, and $135 billion on $13 billion is about 10x, not the 135x the headlines like to say. What stays with me is that Gates wrote his own reversal down, in public. Being wrong in private is easy. When did you last change your mind about something you were sure of?

$450,000. That's what the banks allowed Donald Trump to spend. Not his salary. Not his net worth. His allowance. The year was 1990. He was 44. The casinos were underwater, the airline had defaulted, and the men he owed money to had just taken control of his checkbook. Ten years earlier, almost to the month, a much younger version of him sat for a TV interview and joked about exactly this moment — without knowing it. He's 34 in that interview. He'd just opened the Grand Hyatt, a $100 million remake of the old Commodore Hotel next to Grand Central — his first real deal. His father had to co-sign the $70 million construction loan just to get it built. Trump Tower didn't exist yet. The host asked if he ever wanted to be president himself. "I think it's a very mean life," he said. Then she asked the real question. What would he do if he lost everything? He didn't pause. "Maybe I'd run for president." He was laughing when he said it. Two years after that interview, Forbes put him on its first-ever rich list at $100 million, split with his father. He wanted the number closer to half a billion. The real figure, confirmed decades later from his own tax records: about $5 million. Twenty times smaller than what the world was told. You already know how this part of the story goes, even if you've never seen the clip. By 1989, Forbes said he was worth $1.7 billion. He himself was telling the magazine's editors, in writing, the real number was $3.7 billion. A year later, the real number showed up anyway: $3.4 billion in debt, roughly $830 million of it his personally. That's where the $450,000-a-month allowance came from. That's the same gap a trader learns to watch for. The price you'd quote someone at a dinner party, and the price you'd actually get if you had to sell today. One is marked-to-model. The other is marked-to-market. Only one of them pays your bills. Sit with that for a second. The man who joked about running for president if he went broke did, in fact, go broke. And thirty-six years after that joke, with the banks long since repaid, he did exactly what he said he'd do. So before your next trade, ask which number you're actually looking at: the one you'd say out loud in an interview, or the one you'd get if you had to sell today. Nobody plans to be right about their own joke. He just kept both hands in play long enough for one of them to land.

A lawyer walks into a casino, buys $3.35 million in chips, and walks out without playing a single hand. Why? Atlantic City, December 1990. The casino is Trump Castle. The money belongs to Fred Trump, and the man who needs it is his son. Donald has an $18.4 million interest payment due, and analysts doubted he could make it. The chips are a secret loan. Regulators later ruled it illegal. Eight months earlier, Donald Trump sat down with Larry King, two weeks after opening the biggest casino in the world. "The Taj Mahal is a tremendous success. The things that I do are trophies." Now do the math. The Taj was built on $675 million of junk bonds at 14% interest. That is $94.5 million a year, or about $259,000 every day, on the bonds alone. In its first 16 days, the state's own records show the Taj's bank account went below zero on four of them. In total, Trump owed $3.4 billion, and he had personally guaranteed $832.5 million of it. By August, contractors had sued for as much as $80 million. Regulators warned that a complete financial collapse of the Trump Organization "was not out of the question." The banks capped his personal spending at $450,000 a month. A year later, he was walking down Fifth Avenue with Marla Maples when he saw a man with a tin cup outside Tiffany. He told Esquire what he said to her: "that man is worth $900 million more than I am." In public, he called it a trophy. In private, he knew he was worth less than a man with a tin cup. So why didn't the banks finish him? The lawyer who represented them as a group said it was no longer about a bank and a piece of real estate. It was "a bank and Trump's actual survival." Sit with that for a second. Three casinos went through bankruptcy and he gave up half of the Taj. Yet between 1990 and 1996, the Wall Street Journal found he still pulled more than $160 million out of Atlantic City. You read that right. In 1995, he reported a $916 million loss on one tax return. In 2004, he was hosting The Apprentice. In 2016, he won the presidency. Owe the bank a little and it owns you. Owe it enough and it needs you to survive. Almost nobody learns this, because people who test it at your size get liquidated, not restructured. Before you size your next trade, ask one thing: if it goes wrong, whose problem is it?

IIT, chalkboard, zero slides A 22-year-old at IMC gets paid $500,000 in year one for exactly one skill. Not picking winners. Seeing every trade as a full spread of outcomes, each one with its own odds attached. Her name is Prabha Sharma. She teaches this exact skill on a bare chalkboard, for free, in a lecture almost nobody outside that room has ever watched. Most people see a trade as a coin flip. Win or lose. Nothing else. You already think this way about your own trades, don't you. That's the mistake. A trade is never just win or lose. It's a spread of outcomes, each with its own odds and its own payoff attached before a single dollar moves. The formula for this is called the binomial distribution, and it's far simpler than it sounds. Here it is: P(X = k) = C(n,k) × p^k × (1-p)^(n-k) n = how many bets you take p = your real win probability on each one k = how many of them you actually want to win Try it yourself right now. Say you have a genuine 55% edge (p = 0.55) and you take 10 trades (n = 10). What's the actual chance you win at least 6 of them? Plug in k = 6: P(X=6) = C(10,6) × 0.55^6 × 0.45^4 ≈ 23.8% Add that up across every value of k from 6 to 10, and your real odds of winning at least 6 out of 10 land around 47%. Just under a coin flip, with a genuine edge in your favor. Sit with that for a second. A 55% edge does not feel like 55% once you actually run the math over a small number of trades. This is the exact formula that decides how much to risk on any single bet, once you actually know your edge. Sharma builds the whole thing from zero, in notation simple enough for a complete beginner to follow every step. Wall Street pays $500,000 a year for this one skill. An IIT professor already gave the entire thing away, for free, on a blackboard nobody bothered to watch.

95 years old. Walks out. Opens a rival store right across the street. Starts stealing customers from the company she just sold. That's not a made-up risk. That's exactly what happened six years after Warren Buffett handed an 89-year-old woman $55 million with no audit, no lawyers, and a contract barely longer than one page. "We did not get an audit. We did not look at the property records. I just said, 'Mrs. B, do you owe any money?' And she says 'no,' and that was it." Her name was Rose Blumkin. In 1937, she borrowed $500 from her brother and opened Nebraska Furniture Mart in a basement, with one simple rule: sell cheap, tell the truth. When suppliers cut her off for pricing too low, she just found new suppliers who would sell to her instead. By 1983, one single store was outselling every local competitor combined. You already assume a deal this big needs a whole team of lawyers, don't you. Here's why it didn't, and it wasn't careless. Buffett had shopped at that store himself for years. He'd watched the numbers from the outside long before the deal happened. When the moment came, he wrote one and a quarter pages of contract, handed over a check, and Mrs. B gave him her word. That word was the entire background check, start to finish. Sit with that for a second. It worked, for six full years, better than most heavily audited deals ever do. Then, in 1989, at 95, Mrs. B had a fight with her own son and grandsons over how the store should be run. She walked out. Three months later, she opened a rival store directly across the street, pulling customers straight from the company Buffett still owned. Here's the part Buffett later called his own mistake, and it's worth remembering the next time you trust someone's word alone. Mrs. B never once broke her promise. She never lied. She never hid a debt or broke a single thing she'd agreed to in 1983. There was simply no rule stopping her from competing, because nobody had ever thought they'd need one. Three years later, at 99, she came back and rejoined the company. This time, Buffett made sure she signed a non-compete before a single dollar changed hands. Here's one question worth asking about any handshake deal you're relying on right now, in business or in life. Not "do I trust this person's word." Trust was never the actual gap. Ask instead what happens the day that person is technically free to walk away, because trust alone was never built to cover that. Trust closed the first deal. What trust forgot to cover is exactly what brought him back nine years later.

"I could end the deficit in 5 minutes." That's Warren Buffett, on CNBC, in 2011. Most people hear a line like that and expect a complicated tax plan. What actually follows fits in one sentence. "You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection." No new taxes. No spending cuts named. Just one rule that ties a single number directly to whether the people voting on the budget get to keep their jobs. You already know why this would probably work, and also why it will probably never happen. Here's how it works, and it's the same problem that shows up everywhere in finance, not just government. The person making a decision today rarely pays for it personally. A fund manager who takes a reckless bet gets a bonus this year. If the bet blows up two years later, they've often already moved on. A politician who votes for a deficit today isn't the one who pays it off. The bill lands on someone else, later, long after the decision-maker's name is forgotten. Buffett's rule closes that exact gap. Make the deficit a personal, immediate, career-ending problem, and the same people voting on it suddenly have real skin in the game. Sit with that for a second. This idea has been public for over fourteen years. It has never once become an actual law, and the reason is simple. The people who would have to vote it into existence are the exact people it would apply to. Here's the part worth understanding, because it explains why "just pass a law" is never actually five minutes. A rule this direct would likely need a constitutional amendment, not a normal law. That means two-thirds of state governments calling for a special meeting, then three-quarters of them approving it. Some amendments in American history took months. Others took decades. None of them took five minutes. Here's one question worth asking about any system you trust, whether it's a fund, a company, or your own trading rules. Does the person making the decision actually pay the price for getting it wrong? Or does that cost land somewhere else, on someone else, later? The idea is over a decade old. It's still just an idea.

1 in 37,648. That's the real number. You have $1,000. You want to walk away with just $1,100. You bet a dollar at a time, careful and patient, exactly the way every gambling guide tells you to play safe. Your actual odds of getting there before going broke: less than 1 in 37,648. "It is almost certain you will go broke, no matter how much money you bring, before you win $100." That's Tom Leighton, MIT, proving it live on a chalkboard. He built the whole lecture around his own mother-in-law, who plays red and black at roulette this exact way and swears she almost always goes home happy. She's wrong. The math shows exactly why, and you can check it yourself. Now change one thing. Bet the entire $1,000 in a single spin instead, same target of $100 profit. Your odds jump to 47%, almost a coin flip. Nothing changed about how much money you had. Nothing changed about your target. The only thing that changed is how many times you let the house edge take another swing at you. You already assumed small and careful meant safer, didn't you. Here's how it actually works, in plain terms. On every single bet, you're expected to lose about 3 cents on the dollar. A tiny, almost invisible edge against you. Leighton calls this the drift. The random ups and downs, what feels like "the game," only grow with the square root of how many bets you make. The drift grows in a straight line, bet after bet, with no pause. A straight line always beats a square root eventually. Always. That's not an opinion. That's what the proof on the board shows. Sit with that for a second. It was never about how big the disadvantage was on one bet. It was always about how many times you let it hit you again. Here's one question worth answering honestly about your own account tonight. If your edge after spread and fees is actually negative, is risking 1% per trade really protecting you? Or is it just the $1 bet, ending up in the same place, just slower, dressed up as discipline on a spreadsheet? If you genuinely have a real edge, all of this flips. Small and frequent becomes the right move. Betting it all becomes crazy. That's the only question that has ever really mattered, and the number of people sure they have an edge has never once matched the number who actually do. Your broker doesn't need you to be wrong. It just needs you to keep showing up.