Dex Marlow

Nicolas Cage owned castles in three countries and a dinosaur skull. a few years later he owed about $6 million to the IRS and his creditors. in the clip below 60 Minutes asks him where all the money went, and his pet crow keeps trying to stop the interview. Germany, England, Ireland, plus a mansion in New Orleans. Cage says the spending itself wasn't what sank him. "i was over investing in real estate. it wasn't because i spent $80 on an octopus." the real estate market crashed and he couldn't get out in time. he says he paid every dollar back and never filed for bankruptcy. then he moved to tax-free Las Vegas and took three or four movies a year, whatever came his way. "work was always my guardian angel." "it may not have been blue chip, but it was still work." a star who got hit by a crash - or a guy who just bought too many castles?

Warren Buffett pledged most of his fortune to charity. around the same time he sent his granddaughter a letter saying she was no longer family. in the clip below Nicole Buffett explains what set it off. a filmmaker was making a documentary about America's richest families. Buffett refused to talk to him. Nicole invited him into her home. after the shoot, a letter came. their relationship was over, it said. "upset to the extent that now he's going to say i'm not his real granddaughter." she and her twin sister spent spring breaks at his house in Omaha. it was just them, she says, bonding as his grandchildren. "with that monetary imbalance comes an emotional imbalance." "who my grandfather is publicly as a public figure and who my grandfather Warren Buffett is as a grandfather... are two completely different things." a private man protecting his family - or a billionaire punishing her for talking?

Terrence Howard says he gave up $1 million of his own Iron Man fee so Robert Downey Jr. could get the part. later Marvel offered him $1 million instead of the $8 million in his contract. in the clip below he tells Joe Rogan how that went. he had signed a three-picture deal, with $12 million set for the third film. the studio came back the week his mother died. his agent hung up on them, and the role went to Don Cheadle. years earlier, the producers wouldn't even let Downey audition. they couldn't get him bonded, Howard says, so he offered $1 million of his own fee. "robert is like, i love you. thank you so much." when Howard needed help, he called Downey 27 times. "i'm like, i need the help i gave you." he didn't hear back for three years. then Downey told him everything worked out for him. "that broke me a little." Marvel and Downey have never confirmed his version. a friend who forgot - or just how Hollywood works?

Kevin O'Leary's son was failing high school and counting on the family trust. O'Leary told him he'd be broke. years later the kid got into Harvard and MIT. in the clip below he tells the conversation that flipped it. after his first big payday he set up a generation-skipping trust in Boston with one rule. a full free ride from birth until the last day of education. drop out or don't make it to college, and you're cut off. his son didn't know that. a friend had a trust, so he asked about his. he wasn't worried. he had a trust. "this trust stops paying after you finish your education." "if you only make it through high school, i'm dead and you're broke." "the horror in his eyes when he figured that out." he spent the next three years fixing his grades. he became an engineer and worked at Tesla, and a Tesla director wrote him the letter for Harvard. so is that the smartest way to leave kids money - or too harsh for a teenager?

Charlie Munger was a billionaire who could buy almost any building. he said there was one group of owners he would never try to compete with. in the clip below he explains why he stayed away from the Patel families who run motels all over America. "they know more about motels than you do. they live in the goddamn motel." they pay no income taxes, he says, and not much in workers' compensation. every dime they get goes into fixing up the place, and then into the next motel. "you want to compete with the Patels? not I." for him that was the whole problem with real estate. the specialists know every trick, and the good deals go to people they already know. "in real estate, you don't even see the opportunities when you're a young person starting out." stocks are different, he says. there you're equal to everybody if you're smart. so is real estate still a smart place to start - or a game beginners lose before they even see a deal?

Bill Ackman turned $27 million into $2.6 billion in 10 days in March 2020. the next year he did it again. in the clip below he explains both trades. in January 2020 his father had lung cancer, and Ackman started reading about COVID to protect him. the deeper he went, the clearer it got that the economy would have to shut. "we could see the storm, but everyone else is just playing on a beach." over 10 days his fund bought insurance on a whole index of corporate debt. $74 billion of it, for $27 million. "10 days later, it became worth $2.6 billion." with the market down 30%, he used that money to buy stocks. nine months later he bet that stimulus and zero rates would bring inflation, with two year rates at 0.12%. that bet made another $2.6 billion. he keeps it to a small slice of capital, he says, insurance for when he sees a storm coming. so is that genius risk management - or a hedge fund cashing in on a crisis?

Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger could have borrowed their way to a much bigger Berkshire Hathaway. they chose not to, and Munger says it cost them. in the clip below the two of them explain why they never did it. Buffett goes first, on stage at a Berkshire meeting in Omaha. "i would rather be 100 times too cautious than 1% too incautious." people look back, he says, and see big opportunities they understood and passed on. taking them would have meant going out to borrow more money. then he turns to Charlie, who agrees right away. with the leverage a lot of successful operators used, Munger says, Berkshire would be a lot bigger. "but we would have been sweating at night. it's crazy to sweat at night." Buffett finishes the sentence for him. "over financial things." so is skipping leverage the smart way to stay rich - or the reason most people never get rich?

Charlie Munger watched his Berkshire stock lose half its value three separate times. he said it didn't bother him that much. in the clip below he explains why, and he reaches for a poem to do it. the drops were real. in the mid 1970s, around 2000 and again in 2008, Berkshire shares fell roughly 50 percent from their highs. Munger stayed put each time. he says he is continuously invested in American stocks, no matter what the market does. "that is just the natural consequence of adult life properly lived." then he quotes Kipling's poem If. meet triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same. "you just roll with it. sometimes it's going for you and some against, it's all part of the same game." he died worth about $2.6 billion, most of it in a stock that kept getting cut in half. real wisdom about holding through a crash - or easy to say once you're already a billionaire?