Entrepreneur by Profession. Creative by Nature. 🚀 Building Businesses | Creating Experiences 🎧 DJing | 🏀 Basketball | 🚁 Drones 📺 Daily #studiostis3
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Michael Kalf retweeted
Eddie Murphy paid about $50,000 for a painting from Marvin Gaye's estate. In 2022 a copy of that same painting sold at Christie's for $15.3 million.
Eddie still owns the original.
In the video below, Eddie tells Jimmy Kimmel how he got it, and you can watch the copy sell.
The painting is The Sugar Shack, by Ernie Barnes, a former NFL lineman. Marvin Gaye put it on the cover of his album I Want You.
But it kept moving around, uninsured. "I needed a back up," Barnes wrote. The backup ran in the credits of Good Times.
Gaye still had the original when he died. Eddie bought it from his estate. "I think I paid 50 grand for that picture," he says.
Christie's estimated the backup at $200,000 tops. After ten minutes of bidding, it went for $15.3 million.
The buyer, Houston trader Bill Perkins, had expected to pay $2 million. "As shocking as the price is," he said, "I still feel like I stole it."
Perkins wrote a book called Die With Zero. Spend it while you're alive. Eddie apparently read a different book.
Same Eddie once tracked down the truck from Sanford and Son. The sellers named their price, and he walked. "I'm not paying it."
In fairness, a painting pays no dividends. A price like that takes two rich men wanting the same thing on the same night.
But his is the one Marvin Gaye kept.
On the Street, the hardest trade is the one you never make.
You're sitting on $15 million and it's hanging over your couch. Do you sell it, or do you admit you're keeping it for your ego?
Michael Kalf retweeted
Simon Cowell had a top 2 hit, a house, a Porsche and a gold credit card at 30.
A few months later he owed the bank almost £500,000 and had £5 left to his name.
Today he’s worth hundreds of millions.
In the video below, he tells Steven Bartlett how he lost everything right after his first smash hit.
The bank pushed him to borrow so he could buy shares in the company he worked for. They told him the shares could only go up. He spent the rest on a house, a Porsche and a credit card nobody explained to him.
Then the company collapsed. The shares were worth nothing. The debt was all his.
When the bank asked where the money was, he said: “You lent it to me. It’s just gone.”
He lost the Porsche. He sold the house and still owed on the mortgage. He moved back in with his parents and took a cab home with his last £5. He tipped the driver 10p.
Some say it wasn’t his fault. He was a kid with one hit, and a bank handed him half a million to gamble on his own employer.
Others say nobody forced him to buy a Porsche with borrowed money.
He talked a second bank into paying off the first, got one year at BMG to prove himself, and built Pop Idol, The X Factor and Britain’s Got Talent.
So was Simon Cowell a victim of a reckless bank, or a guy who spent his first million before he made it?
Michael Kalf retweeted
Steve Jobs was worth over $200 million at 25. He paid his daughter $385 a month.
Her mother cleaned houses and went on welfare. The county had to sue him to pay it back.
In the video below, his daughter Lisa talks about growing up with him.
Jobs was 23 when she was born. He helped pick her name. Then he denied she was his.
A DNA test said he was the father. He told Time magazine that 28% of men in America could be.
The same year, Apple went public. He became one of the richest young men in the country.
He named a computer after her: the Apple Lisa. For years, he refused to admit it.
One day her mother was on the phone with him, sobbing, begging for money. Lisa, a little girl, took the phone and said: “Just give her some money.” Then she hung up.
Another time, her mother asked him for a house. He said yes. Then he bought one for himself.
At 14 she moved in with him. His condition: she couldn’t see her mother for six months.
Years later, he was dying of cancer. She sat by his bed.
“The thing he kept on saying is, ‘I owe you one, and I’m so sorry.’”
Did she forgive him?
“I think not at the time.”
“In many ways, yes.”
When her memoir came out, his widow and his sister released a statement: her story “differs dramatically from our memories.”
The case for Jobs: he was young, he came back, and he tried to make it right before he died.
The case for Lisa: a billionaire’s daughter shouldn’t have grown up on welfare.
He named a computer after her. He wouldn’t say she was his. On his deathbed, he said, “I owe you one.”
Was “I’m sorry” enough, or did it come 30 years too late?
Michael Kalf retweeted
Technotronic - Get Up! (Before the Night is Over) (#TOTP 1990)
From their debut, Pump Up the Jam: The Album, this was released as the second single & it's another hip house classic. Featuring Ya Kid K, who co-wrote the song, the track hit the top 10 in many countries inc UK.
Michael Kalf retweeted
At 19 Magic Johnson turned down Nike stock for Converse’s cash. By his own math, that stock would be worth about $1.5 billion today.
Nike later bought all of Converse for $305 million.
In the video below, Magic explains why a broke kid takes the cash, the day he announced he had HIV, and how he made up for it.
He had just beaten Larry Bird for the national title. Every shoe company came calling.
Converse offered the most money. Nike’s Phil Knight couldn’t match it, so he offered stock instead.
“When you’re Black and you’re broke, you take the most money,” Magic says. At 19, he didn’t know what stock was.
He found out in 1985, when Michael Jordan laced up the first Air Jordans.
Then, in 1991, at 32, he walked to a podium, told the world he had HIV, and retired the same day.
In fairness, at 19 the cash was the sensible choice. In 1979 Converse ruled basketball and Nike was a running shoe company. A guaranteed check for a kid from a poor family isn’t a mistake. It’s survival.
But Converse went bankrupt in 2001. Two years later, Nike bought it.
So he spent the next decades buying what he passed on at 19: equity. Starbucks stores, movie theaters, teams. His group paid $2.2 billion for the Dodgers in 2012. Forbes now values them near $7.8 billion and counts Magic a billionaire.
“God put me in a position to make up for it,” he says. “I’m doing okay.”
Your boss offers you stock instead of a raise. Do you take it, or do what 19 year old Magic did?
Michael Kalf retweeted
“Zombie” is from The Cranberries’ 1994 album No Need to Argue. Written by Dolores O’Riordan in response to the Warrington attacks, in which two children lost their lives. Although it was not released as a commercial single in the United States, it topped Billboard’s Modern Rock Tracks chart for six consecutive weeks, became the No. 1 single of 1995 in Australia and remains the band’s biggest international hit.
When O’Riordan first brought the song to the band on acoustic guitar, they started arranging it in their usual softer style. She stopped them and insisted it needed to be heavy and angry, pushing for more distortion and a harder sound, a deliberate shift from the band’s earlier material. Island Records was also initially reluctant to release such a politically charged track as a single.
Michael Kalf retweeted
A man sold his website that made no profits to Yahoo for a whopping $5.7 BILLION on April Fool's Day.
Yahoo that is was an amazing deal, but ended up shutting down the site three years later.
Mark Cuban grew up in Pittsburgh selling garbage bags door to door at 12 years old so he could buy a new pair of basketball sneakers.
In 1995, he created a company called Broadcast.com. The concept was interesting, it let people listen to out of town sports radio on the internet.
By 1998, he was taking the company public and on the first day of the IPO the stock jumped 250%, the market cap hit $1 Billion as well.
Cuban owned 30% of the company at that point.
The site had 570K users, but the company also never made any profit.
Yahoo at the time was in a massive war with AOL and microsoft to be the biggest homepage on the internet.
All of the companies were spending billions of dollars in order to achieve this.
Especially Yahoo.
On April 1st of 1999, on April Fools Day, Yahoo bought Broadcast.com for $5.7 Billion, and Cubans share of that was $1.4 BILLION.
Cuban was nervous about it though.
The dot-com bubble was really getting out of control so he paid $20 million in fees to Wall Street banks to have a guaranteed price on his Yahoo shares before the market tanked.
6 months after the bubble completely burst.
Yahoo stock fell from $300 to $5 per share. And Cuban's $1.4 billion would have turned into $25 million.
Luckily he was able to walk away with every penny. Wall Street called it one of the best trades of all time.
In 2002 Yahoo shut down the site, three years after its $5.7 Billion purchase.
In 2017 Verizon bought all of Yahoo for $4.5 Billion, which is even less than what Yahoo paid Cuban.
Cuban used the money to buy the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and what he's most known for, being one of the strong faces on Shark Tank.
A website that had no profits was sold for $5.7 Billion and sparked one of the strongest careers and personalities of the century.
Michael Kalf retweeted
Justin Bieber sold his songs for $200 million in 2023. 18 months later he owed $31.5 million to the company of Scooter Braun, the man who discovered him at 13, and TMZ reported the $200 million was already gone. He'd taken a $40 million advance for a tour he cancelled, and Scooter's company fronted $26 million to cover it.
His own business manager claimed Scooter had been overpaid $26 million in commissions. An outside audit by PwC said the opposite: Justin owed Scooter $8.8 million.
In the video below, Scooter Braun is asked where things stand with Justin Bieber now.
2022. Justin's Justice World Tour. Promoter AEG paid him $40 million up front. He pulled the plug early.
AEG wanted $26 million back. HYBE, the company Scooter ran, paid it. Justin agreed to pay HYBE back over 10 years.
He reportedly made 1 payment.
Weeks after the tour stopped, he sold his catalog of 291 songs to Hipgnosis for about $200 million.
Then the fight over who owed who. His business manager Lou Taylor said Scooter took $26 million too much. HYBE's internal audit said Justin owed Scooter $1 million. PwC spent 6 months on it and landed on $8.8 million.
In July 2025 they settled. Justin pays HYBE the full $26 million plus half of $11 million in back commissions. About $31.5 million.
TMZ's sources said there wasn't enough left from the $200 million after taxes, managers, lawyers and spending.
So the plan was to pay after his wife Hailey sold her beauty brand Rhode for $1 billion. Justin, an investor, was reported to get around $50 million.
Scooter doesn't see a cent of it. He'd already left HYBE.
15 years together. One audit to end it.
Did Scooter Braun take advantage of Justin Bieber, or did Justin spend $200 million and blame the man who made him?
Michael Kalf retweeted
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Michael Kalf retweeted
Paris Hilton was 19 when her boyfriend Rick Salomon filmed them having sex. He was 13 years older and kept pushing until she gave in. Two years later the tape leaked online, right before her show The Simple Life premiered on Fox. Then Salomon sold the full version to a porn studio. It opened with a dedication to the victims of 9/11. It became the best-selling porn title of the year. Paris says she never made a dollar from it. And later the same man married Pamela Anderson. Twice.
Paris met Rick Salomon at 18. He was a poker player in his thirties. In her 2023 memoir she writes that he kept asking to film them in bed. He told her that if she wouldn't do it, "he could easily find someone who would." "I got hammered, and I did it."
He shot it on a night-vision camera on a tripod. He promised it was just for them.
In 2003 Paris was in Australia when her manager called. A 37-second clip of her having sex was all over the internet. The Simple Life premiered days later to 13 million viewers.
In 2004 Salomon sold the full 45-minute tape to Red Light District Video. It came out on June 15 as "1 Night in Paris." The first frame read: "In memory of 9/11/01... We will never forget."
Paris sued for $30 million for invasion of privacy. The court threw the case out. In 2005 she settled for $400,000 plus a cut of sales and said she'd give it to charity. "I never received a dime from the video." Salomon reportedly made around $10 million from it.
At the 2005 AVN Awards "1 Night in Paris" won Best Selling Title of the Year and Best Renting Title of the Year.
Salomon married Shannen Doherty in 2002. The marriage lasted nine months. In 2007 he married Pamela Anderson, whose own sex tape had been stolen and sold a decade earlier. That marriage was annulled within months. In 2014 they married again. In the divorce he paid Pamela $1 million.
Paris Hilton never writes his name in her memoir. She calls him "Scum." In 2021 she said the tape is "something that will hurt me for the rest of my life."
He made millions off one night and married Pamela Anderson. She got a tape she can never erase.
Some lessons are written in other people's mistakes. Watch it once. Remember it forever.
Michael Kalf retweeted
Pamela Anderson married Tommy Lee four days after they met. On their honeymoon they filmed themselves having sex. An electrician Tommy refused to pay stole their safe with the tape inside, the one with their sex on it. In 12 months the tape made $77 million. Pamela got absolutely nothing from it and never even watched it. Then Hollywood made a whole TV series about it without asking her.
New Year's Eve, 1994. She was the biggest star on Baywatch and the most famous Playboy cover girl in the world. And her boyfriend was the drummer of Mötley Crüe. Six weeks later they ran into each other in Cancún. And four days later they got married on the beach. At her wedding she wore a bikini.
They filmed everything. Boats, beaches, bed. 54 minutes of a honeymoon.
Back in Malibu, Tommy was renovating the house. He fired an electrician named Rand Gauthier and kept his tools. Gauthier said he was owed $20,000.
So he came back at night and stole a 500-pound safe out of their garage. He was hoping for guns and jewelry. He found a videotape.
He took it to a porn producer. They cut it down to the sex. Then they sold it. In 1996 it hit the early internet, one of the first viral videos in history.
Pam and Tommy sued for years. In the end an internet porn company kept the right to stream it. The tape made $77 million in under a year.
"I blocked that stolen tape out of my life in order to survive."
Her career took the hit. His didn't. Late-night hosts asked her about it on air.
The marriage didn't survive either. In 1998 Tommy went to jail for spousal battery.
She says it was the only time she was ever truly in love.
Then the husbands. Kid Rock. Rick Salomon, the man who sold Paris Hilton's tape. Married, annulled, married again. A Hollywood producer: 12 days.
In 2022 Hulu released Pam & Tommy, a series about the worst thing that ever happened to her. Nobody asked her permission. She refused to watch it.
A year later she released her own memoir and her own documentary. No makeup. Her words.
Some lessons are written in other people's mistakes. Watch it once. Remember it forever.
Michael Kalf retweeted
Ben Affleck sold his AI company to Netflix for a reported $587 million. He started it in 2022, without a college degree.
His own review of his coding: "pretty shitty Python scripts."
In the video below, Affleck sits down with GQ and explains what Netflix actually bought, and what he found when he looked under the hood.
The first time he saw AI-generated video, he called Matt Damon. "Dude, we're fucked."
The panic lasted "a day or two," he says. Then he sat down with engineering teams and looked at the data. "Hold on, this doesn't work. You can't really control this."
He also found the part nobody advertises. AI video is "enormously expensive," he says, and takes far more computing power than chatbots.
So he built his own version. The company was called InterPositive. Its software learns from a film's own footage and fixes it after the shoot: lighting, wires, backgrounds.
In March, Netflix said it was buying it. In July, a Netflix filing put the price at about $587 million. The whole team moved to Netflix, and Affleck became a senior adviser.
He still draws a hard line. "I wouldn't just give an unpredictable, stochastic technology the controls over something that had a life or death impact on people."
The case for the skeptics: in 2023, Hollywood actors and writers went on strike partly over AI. Three years later, one of the biggest stars in the business sold an AI company to the biggest streamer in the world.
"Pretty shitty" code. A $587 million exit.
Does Ben Affleck actually understand AI better than most of Silicon Valley, or did Netflix pay for a famous name?
Michael Kalf retweeted
Kevin Hart had a shot at Uber for $50,000 to $75,000. He passed because it sounded “like murderville.” Uber went public at $82 billion.
Mark Cuban passed too, and he knew the founder.
In the video below, Hart and Cuban take turns telling how each of them missed Uber.
Music executive Troy Carter pitched it to Hart. There’s an app. You need a ride, and a stranger nearby comes and picks you up.
“Sounds like murderville to me,” Hart told him. “I don’t know that person. I ain’t picking them up.”
Years earlier, Cuban had rescued Travis Kalanick’s first company when it was running out of money.
Then Kalanick came to him with something called UberCab, at a $10 million valuation.
Cuban loved it. “I’ll do it at $5 million,” he said. Kalanick found someone else and never came back.
In fairness to both men: in 2010, getting into a stranger’s car did sound insane. And Cuban’s warning was right. He told Kalanick the taxi commissions would fight to put him out of business. They did, and Uber didn’t post a full year of operating profit until 2023.
Cuban was right about everything except the ending.
He shrugs it off. “I’ve done okay.” Hart can’t. “Until this day, I think about it,” he says. “I kind of avoid seeing Troy Carter.”
On the Street, the deal that sounds stupid in the room is the only one nobody else is bidding on.
Would you have put $75,000 into riding with strangers in 2010, or said what Kevin Hart said?