the stories behind the money that nobody tells on the red carpet
e4
Joined October 2026
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In August 2018, Chris Watts stood on his front porch in Colorado and told a TV reporter he hoped his pregnant wife and two little girls were "somewhere safe." He knew exactly where they were.
The day before, at 2 a.m., his wife Shanann came home from a work trip. She was 15 weeks pregnant with a boy. They were going to name him Nico. Their daughters, Bella and Celeste, were 4 and 3.
That afternoon a friend couldn't reach Shanann, went to the house and called the police. Chris drove home from work. His wife's car was still in the garage. Nobody was inside.
The next day he talked to the cameras. In the video below he says he left every light in the house on that night, hoping the kids would run through the door and tackle him. He talks about their Minnie Mouse couch and about not getting to kiss them goodnight. Then he looks into the camera and asks his family to come home.
"I hope that she's somewhere safe right now, and with the kids."
One day later he failed a polygraph. A few hours after that he confessed. Shanann was in a shallow grave at the oil site where he worked. The girls were inside two oil tanks nearby.
He pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty. Shanann's family didn't want him executed. He got five life sentences with no chance of parole. Months later, in prison, he finally told the whole truth: the girls were still alive in his truck when he drove them out to that oil site.
The part almost nobody knows: on the same day his family "went missing," Chris called the girls' school and told them the kids wouldn't be coming back. He also called a realtor about selling the house. He had been seeing a woman from work since June.
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ELON MUSK: "MY FATHER HAS SOME SERIOUS ISSUES, MY CHILDHOOD WAS VERY VIOLENT"... ERROL MUSK: "THEY WANT TO HURT ME"..."THEY THINK I'M TOO LUCKY"
an Australian reporter flies to a small coastal town in South Africa to sit across from Elon's father
he reads him his son's words:
"my father has some serious issues"
"my childhood was very violent"
Errol laughs
"no, no, no. he's playing to the audience he's got in America"
the reporter keeps going
Elon's mother Maye says the same thing
"she's not telling the truth"
his brother Kimbal says it too. on camera, years apart:
"emotional, psychological torture... a lot of love, and then here's some insanity"
"I don't know what to say to that"
so the reporter asks the only question left:
why would three of your closest people say that?
"they want to hurt me"
"they think I'm too lucky"
then he's asked if he took discipline too far
"no. no. no. no"
"you raise men, not sissies"
"I was able to send Elon to America when he was two weeks short of 18, all on his own. I knew he'd be all right"
he says it like it's a proof of good parenting
now look at this the way you'd look at any story with conflicting sources
source 1: Elon. says violent childhood
source 2: Maye. says the same
source 3: Kimbal. says the same, and he's the one who was in the house with him
source 4: Errol. says all three are lying, because they're jealous of his luck
three people who don't agree on much (Kimbal is a Democrat, Elon isn't, Maye left that house decades ago) tell one story. one person, the one being accused, tells another
no analyst would take source 4 and throw out 1 to 3
and here's what stays with me
a 17-year-old kid leaves that house alone, with no plan except "get to America". he sleeps in an office, showers at the YMCA, builds Zip2, then PayPal, then puts everything into rockets and cars
his father's explanation for all of it? "I knew he'd be all right"
maybe he was right about that part
but "he turned out fine" is not the same as "it was fine"
the richest man in the world still talks about his childhood like a wound. his dad still laughs about it on TV
who do you believe here?
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ELON MUSK AND HIS BROTHER KIMBAL HEARD FROM NASA: "OKAY, YOU DESERVE TO LIVE"... SPACEX'S FOURTH LAUNCH, ON THE EDGE OF BANKRUPTCY
september 28, 2008
spacex has blown up three rockets in a row. the money is gone. Kimbal says it plainly: "at this point we had no capital left"
this is launch number four. there is no number five
so where are the Musk brothers on the most important morning of their lives?
at Disneyland. with their kids. standing in regular lines, no VIP passes
"it's a way to use up the day"
at 2:30 they check their watches. the launch is at 4. they get back to mission control (a mobile home in a parking lot in LA) a few minutes before liftoff
"we almost missed it"
the rocket reaches orbit
and this is the part that got me. nobody cheered
"it wasn't like a celebration. everyone just started crying"
"it was just this emotional release of years of working"
"and then I started tearing up and crying as well"
because everyone in that room knew what Kimbal says out loud:
"it was the last shot we had before we'd be out of business"
look at who pulled it off:
spacex: ~500 people
Boeing's comparable division, per Kimbal: ~50,000
a startup did what only governments did
then, a couple of days before christmas, the phone rings. NASA. a $1.6B contract for cargo flights to the space station
Kimbal's version of that call:
"it was NASA saying: okay, you deserve to live"
think about how that sounds from the inside
three months earlier spacex was one failed rocket away from zero. now the US government was its biggest customer
that same december Tesla closed a funding round on christmas eve, hours before it would have missed payroll. both of Elon's companies survived 2008 by days
people look at spacex today and see a giant
what they don't see is a room full of engineers crying in a trailer, and two brothers who almost missed the moment because they were in line for a ride at Disneyland
the market only rewards the version where the 4th rocket works. it never shows you how close the other version was
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In 1986, Charlie Rose sat across from Charles Manson inside San Quentin and asked him one simple question: was the murder of Sharon Tate a murder? Manson stared at him for a few long seconds. Then he said "no."
In August 1969, members of his "Family" killed seven people over two nights in Los Angeles. One of them was actress Sharon Tate. She was 26 and eight and a half months pregnant. Manson wasn't in the house that night. Prosecutors said he didn't need to be. He sent them.
In 1971 he was sentenced to death. A year later California's Supreme Court struck down the death penalty, and his sentence quietly turned into life in prison.
Fifteen years later Rose flew out to San Quentin for CBS. In the video below he asks Manson what he thought about Sharon Tate and her unborn baby. Manson says "it's not my world." He says he doesn't know what "care" even means. Then he says that if he had been the general, he would have told the killers "good job."
Rose keeps pushing. Manson keeps talking about war.
"There's no murder in a holy war, man."
Then Rose asks one more time. Was it murder? Silence. "No."
He was denied parole 12 times. In November 2017 he died in a hospital bed at 83. He never walked outside a prison again.
The part almost nobody knows: the house where Sharon Tate died wasn't really hers. She was renting it. Until January 1969 it belonged to Terry Melcher, a music producer and Doris Day's son. Melcher had come out to Manson's ranch to hear him play, and he said no to a record deal. Manson had been to that house before. He knew it.
And one of Manson's songs did end up on a record. Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys let Manson and his girls live with him in 1968. That year the band released Manson's song "Cease to Exist" as "Never Learn Not to Love." Manson's name wasn't on it.
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Around 1990, a reporter sat across from Richard Ramirez in a San Francisco jail and asked him if he admitted to being evil. He smiled, said "we are all evil in some form," and then gave a straight answer anyway.
In 1984 and 1985 Los Angeles called him the Night Stalker. He came in through open windows at night, while people slept. In 1989 a jury convicted him of 13 murders, plus rapes, burglaries and attempted murders. One man he shot in the head still lives with the bullet in his brain.
When the jury voted for death, deputies walked him through an underground garage to the jail bus. He told the reporters waiting there: "Big deal. Death always went with the territory. See you in Disneyland."
A few months later he sat down with reporter Mike Watkiss. In the video below Ramirez mostly reads from a script he brought with him. Asked who he is, he says "just a guy." Asked if he killed 13 people, he says it would be "improper" to comment because of his appeals. Then he reads a line about serial killers doing on a small scale what governments do on a large one.
Then comes the question about evil.
"Yes, I am evil. Not 100%, but I am evil."
The strangest part isn't him. It's the women. By then women from all over the country were lining up to visit him in jail, and some of them fought each other over him. One of them had sat on the jury that convicted him.
In 1996 he married one of his fans, a 41-year-old magazine editor named Doreen Lioy, in the visiting room at San Quentin.
He was sentenced to die 19 times over. It never happened. He spent more than 23 years on death row while his appeals dragged on, and in June 2013 he died in a hospital bed at 53.
The part almost nobody knows: he was caught because of one fingerprint and about two months. Police lifted a print from a car he had stolen and dumped. The LAPD's new computer fingerprint system only held people born in 1960 or later. Ramirez was born in February 1960. His name came back, his face was on the front pages, and people in East LA recognized him on the street, chased him down and beat him until the police got there.
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THE INCREDIBLE STORY OF HOW ELON MUSK AND LARRY PAGE BROKE UP... AND IT ALL HAPPENED BECAUSE OF AI
in 2014 Larry Page said that instead of giving his fortune to charity, he'd rather give it to someone like Elon. so he could go to Mars
that's how close they were
Elon would crash at Larry's house in Palo Alto. they'd stay up late talking about AI
and that's where it started to crack
Larry wanted digital superintelligence. in Elon's words, "basically a digital god", as soon as possible
Elon asked one question: how do we make sure humanity is okay?
Larry called him a "speciesist"
basically, someone biased toward humans over machines
"and there were witnesses"
Elon's answer: "okay, yes, I'm a speciesist. busted"
they haven't really talked since, Elon says
now look at the board at that moment
Google had just bought DeepMind. by Elon's estimate, Google + DeepMind held about three quarters of the world's top AI talent, the most money and the most compute
one company. and the guy running it, in Elon's view, didn't care about safety
so Elon built the opposite: a nonprofit, open, "pro-human"
OpenAI
he put in around $38M. he poached Ilya Sutskever from Google. Larry, he says, never forgave him
then the plot twist
the "open" nonprofit turned into the most valuable AI startup on earth. ~$852B at its last closed round
Elon left, sued, and in May a jury ruled against him. he says he'll appeal
and now he runs xAI. a for-profit racing to build the same digital god
the whole AI race, Google vs OpenAI vs xAI, now burns hundreds of billions in capex
and it started with one word, one night
one friend wanted a digital god. the other wanted a guarantee. neither of them got what he wanted
so who was right, Larry or Elon?
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Shohei Ohtani's interpreter, who was also his best friend, bet on credit with an illegal bookie until he owed over $40,000,000. So he called the bank, introduced himself as Shohei Ohtani and took $17,000,000 to pay off the bookie. Then he spent $325,000 of Ohtani's money on baseball cards, including signed cards of Ohtani himself.
In the video below, you can hear Ippei on the phone with the bank, pretending to be Ohtani. He tells them a $200,000 wire is for a car loan.
Later, Ohtani had to go to court to get those cards back.
When it all came out, Ippei texted: "Technically I did steal from him. It's all over for me."
Ippei Mizuhara met Ohtani in 2013, when Ohtani was an 18-year-old rookie in Japan. In 2018 he followed him to America. He translated every interview, drove him around until he got his license and even caught for him at the 2021 Home Run Derby.
He also helped him open his first US bank account. In 2021 he started betting, and he switched the phone number and email on that account to his own. When the bank called to confirm a wire, it reached Ippei. Some of the wires to the bookie were labeled "loan."
About 19,000 bets in two years. His winning bets, $142 million, went into his own account. His losing bets came to $183 million. Prosecutors said the money he took was almost half of everything Ohtani earned with the Angels.
Everyone remembers the interpreter. Almost nobody remembers the man on the other end.
Mathew Bowyer took bets from more than 700 clients in Southern California and Las Vegas. He was a big player at Caesars Palace from 2017 to 2024. Nevada regulators said Caesars never checked where his money came from, even after a tip that he was a bookie.
In 2025, Nevada fined three casino companies over illegal bookies, Bowyer among them:
Resorts World: $10.5 million
MGM: $8.5 million
Caesars: $7.8 million
Caesars' CEO said: "We didn't catch Bowyer and we should have."
Ippei got 57 months. For Bowyer, prosecutors asked for 15. The same judge gave him 12 months and a day, and his lawyer said he had already paid back the $1.6 million he owed the IRS.
Ippei's lawyer called it an addiction. Prosecutors said there was almost no sign he gambled before he started stealing.
Addiction can explain 19,000 bets, but it doesn't explain lying to your best friend and stealing money from his bank account.
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In February 1992, a woman screamed "Jeffrey, I hate you" and charged at Jeffrey Dahmer in a Milwaukee courtroom. Later that day he stood up and told the judge he had never wanted to go free. He had wanted to die.
Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 men and boys. Wisconsin tried him for 15 of them. He pleaded guilty but insane, so the whole trial came down to one question: was he sick, or did he know exactly what he was doing?
On February 15 the jury said he was sane. Two days later the families got to face him. Between them stood an 8-foot wall of bulletproof glass, built just for this trial.
Errol Lindsey was 19 when Dahmer killed him in April 1991. His oldest sister, Rita Isbell, walked up to the microphone and said she didn't even need it.
In the video below she calls him Satan and says she never wants to watch her mother go through this again. Then she breaks. She starts toward him, and deputies have to pull her back.
Then it's Dahmer's turn. He reads from a paper in a flat voice. He says this was never about getting out. He says he didn't do it out of hate, and that he understands why the families hate him.
"I didn't ever want freedom. Frankly, I wanted death for myself."
Near the end he apologizes to two police officers. Nine months earlier they had walked a drugged 14-year-old boy back into his apartment and left. Both were fired. Dahmer says they did their best and he simply fooled them.
The boy was dead by morning. In 1994 a judge gave both officers their jobs back, with $55,000 each in back pay. One of them later became president of the Milwaukee police union.
Dahmer got 15 life sentences in a row. Wisconsin has no death penalty. Two years later another inmate beat him to death in prison. He got what he asked for, just not from the court.
The part almost nobody knows: Errol Lindsey had a daughter. She was born six months after he died, so she never met him. In 2022 Netflix recreated her aunt's speech in its Dahmer series almost word for word. Rita said nobody from Netflix ever called her, and that she hadn't planned a single word of what she said that day.
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BREAKING: Binance just got hacked for $5.6B
"user funds are safe." CZ says losses will be covered
here's the number nobody's checking:
binance's emergency fund, SAFU, holds 15,000 BTC
the attacker walked out with 18,270 BTC
he took more bitcoin than the insurance fund owns
and BTC is just one leg:
> ~$5.6B out across 6 chains (on-chain estimate, binance hasn't confirmed the figure)
> ~$2.3B in stablecoins frozen by Tether and Circle
> ~$3.3B in BTC, ETH and tokens nobody can freeze
> SAFU at today's price: ~$1.2B
so if users get made whole, most of it isn't coming from the fund built for exactly this night. it's coming straight off binance's balance sheet
"safe" used to mean nobody can take it.
tonight it means someone else pays for it
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On July 31, 1979, a judge in Miami sentenced Ted Bundy to die in the electric chair. In the same breath, he told him he would have made a good lawyer.
Bundy really had gone to law school. By the summer of 1979 he was 32, and police in several states believed he had killed young women from Washington to Florida.
On January 15, 1978, a man got into the Chi Omega sorority house at Florida State University in the middle of the night. Lisa Levy, 20, and Margaret Bowman, 21, were killed. Two more girls were beaten in their beds and survived. Eight blocks away, another student was attacked the same night.
The trial was moved to Miami. 250 reporters from five continents showed up, and it became the first trial in America shown on national TV.
Bundy had five lawyers paid for by the state. He kept pushing them aside and doing the job himself.
In the video below he stands up in a sweater and questions one of the first police officers who walked into Lisa Levy's room. He wants details. Could he describe the room? Did it look neat, or messy? Was there blood anywhere else?
He is on trial for killing her, and he wants to hear what her room looked like.
What sank him was a bite mark. A dentist showed the jury that the marks on Lisa Levy's body matched Bundy's teeth. They took less than seven hours to find him guilty.
At sentencing he told the court he wasn't asking for mercy, because it was "absurd to ask for mercy for something I did not do." Judge Edward Cowart gave him death anyway. Then he said this:
"You're a bright young man. You'd have made a good lawyer. I'd love to have you practice in front of me. But you went another way, partner."
The part almost nobody remembers is that this trial never had to happen. Before it started, prosecutors offered him a deal: admit to the two sorority girls and a 12-year-old named Kimberly Leach, get 75 years, no electric chair. At the last minute he said no. His own public defender said he just couldn't stand up in front of the world and say he was guilty.
Being his own lawyer had worked for him before. In Colorado in 1977 a judge let him go without shackles so he could study his case in the courthouse law library. He jumped out of its window.
He got a third death sentence for Kimberly in 1980. He was executed on January 24, 1989, after confessing to 30 murders in his final days. Judge Cowart had died two years earlier.
So what was the judge really seeing that day: a bright young man who took the wrong road, or the exact charm that let Bundy kill for four years before anyone stopped him?
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THIS 40-SECOND MISTAKE COST ELON MUSK $768 MILLION. WATCH HIS FACE WHEN THE GLASS BREAKS.
November 2019. Los Angeles.
Musk walks out to show the world the Cybertruck. Steel body. "Armor glass." The words are on the screen behind him.
His lead designer picks up a metal ball and throws it at the driver's window.
It cracks.
The crowd goes quiet. Musk says maybe that was a little too hard. They try the back window.
That one cracks too.
He stands next to two broken windows in front of the whole internet and says, "Well, it didn't go through. Room for improvement."
The next day Tesla stock fell 6%. Bloomberg estimated about $768 million of his net worth was gone overnight.
Most CEOs would have cut the stream. He finished the show.
Was it the worst product demo in history, or the best free ad Tesla ever got?
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BINANCE HAS BEEN HACKED $2,800,000,000 JUST LEFT BINANCE WALLETS IN 17 MINUTES.
BINANCE HASN'T SAID A WORD.
At 20:24 UTC, a wallet Etherscan labels "Binance 14" sent about 167,464 ETH and roughly 1.6 billion USDT to a brand-new address. At 20:41, "Binance: Hot Wallet 34" sent 780 million USDC to the same address.
Tallied across five blockchains, it comes to about $2.8 billion.
The market didn't wait for an explanation. On Binance's own price feed, BNB fell as much as 8.7% in under an hour. ETH dropped 4.4%. Bitcoin lost 3.2%.
On-chain investigators are calling it a possible hack. Others say Binance could be moving its own money. A trader we know says BTC and USDT vanished from his Binance account tonight without a withdrawal from his side. We can't verify that yet.
Three years ago Binance pleaded guilty to federal charges and agreed to pay more than $4 billion. That press conference is in the photo.
If it's a hack, it's the biggest in crypto history. The current record is Bybit, about $1.5 billion, in February 2025.
If it isn't, someone just moved $2.8 billion of other people's money and nobody thought to tell them.
Would you leave your coins on an exchange tonight?
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Seven months before police started digging bodies out from under his house, John Wayne Gacy posed for a photo with the First Lady of the United States. He's smiling, and pinned to his suit is a little "S" from the Secret Service.
In 1978 he was one of the most liked men in his Chicago suburb. He ran a construction company, organized the city's Polish Constitution Day parade, threw summer parties for hundreds of neighbors, and dressed up as Pogo the Clown to cheer up sick kids.
On December 11, 1978, a 15-year-old named Robert Piest told his mom he was going to talk to a contractor about a summer job. The contractor was Gacy. Rob never came home.
Ten days later Gacy was in custody. Police found 26 bodies in the crawl space under his house. Three more were buried elsewhere on his property, and four had been thrown in a river, Rob among them. 33 young men and boys. The youngest was 14.
In the video below he sits in prison flipping through photos of all of them. He says he has studied their faces for 12 years, looked into their schools and their friends, and has no memory of a single one.
"None of them ever worked for me."
Then a Chicago TV reporter asks him about one victim, John Butkovich. Gacy says that's not one he killed, and that the only thing he knows about him is that he was an employee. The reporter stops him: "Not one that you killed" sounds like there were others you did. Gacy backs up fast. "Strike it."
John Butkovich worked for Gacy for about two years. In 1975 he went to Gacy's house to pick up his paycheck and was never seen again. Gacy later drew police the exact spot in his garage floor where he was buried. At least three other victims had worked for his company too.
Gacy confessed to police in 1978, then spent the rest of his life saying he was innocent. He was sentenced to death in 1980 and executed in May 1994.
Decades later, DNA is still putting names to the boys from that crawl space. A few still don't have one.
So what was he really doing with those photos for 12 years: trying to remember them, or making sure his story still held up?
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ELON MUSK OFFERED TO BUY HIS FATHER A CAR. HOW ABOUT A JEEP? BUT HIS ANSWER SURPRISED EVERYONE... "I WANT SOMETHING DECENT. I WANT A BENTLEY" — ERROL MUSK
Vlad asks Errol a simple question: your son is worth almost half a trillion dollars. does he help the family?
Errol starts with "I don't really need help. I'm self-supporting"
then he tells the story anyway
Elon suggested buying him a car. the first idea was a Tesla. but shipping one to South Africa, in Errol's words, the price was "astronomical", and there's no service where he lives
so the family comes back with a practical option:
"why don't you get a Jeep or something?"
"I don't want a Jeep. I want something decent"
"so what do you want?"
"I want a Bentley"
"so Elon said: sure. Bentley"
there's a Bentley Flying Spur in his garage now. he hasn't even put the number plates on
and the car is the small part
according to Errol, the family company pays every single woman in the family a monthly income. married ones get "a little bit of help". his ex-wife gets a monthly income too
when his medical bills came to almost a million and insurance covered 600,000, they paid the gap
his summary: "if you ask them, they help you. it's as simple as that"
now remember who's talking
this is the father Elon publicly called "a terrible human being". the one he said had done "almost every crime you can possibly think of"
and he's driving a Bentley his son paid for
for the record: this is Errol's version, from Errol's interview. nobody in the family has confirmed the details
but it shows something about money at this level that nobody puts on a Forbes list
a half-trillion net worth isn't one person's money. it's a whole family's payroll. ex-wives, siblings, a father he barely speaks to, all running on one balance sheet
you can cut someone out of your life. at Elon's level, you can't really cut them out of your money
the richest man on earth can say no to his father. he just didn't say no to the Bentley
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ELON MUSK: "AT TIMES I'VE WONDERED IF IT WAS REALLY THE RIGHT CHOICE... IT HAS BEEN A VERY DIFFICULT JOURNEY"... AFTER A QUESTION ABOUT THE HARD TIMES OF 2008, ELON ASKED TO STOP THE INTERVIEW... IT'S STILL HARD FOR HIM TO TALK ABOUT
a Danish TV crew sits down with Elon. Tesla is alive, SpaceX is flying. the worst is supposedly behind him
the correspondent walks him through the money first
after PayPal he had about $180M. the plan was simple: put half into the new companies, keep the other half. "that's not how it worked out"
$100M in, and they still needed more. then the 2008 crisis hit
"in the end I had to invest everything"
"I was borrowing money from friends to pay the rent"
"were you on the edge of bankruptcy?"
"I didn't even own a house"
then the question everyone thinks about:
"you could have bought an island and sipped cocktails for the rest of your life. why take the risk?"
he doesn't answer with a slogan. he pauses
"at times I've wondered if it was really the right choice. but it has actually been a very difficult journey, I have to say"
then the line that explains all of it:
"creating a company is almost like having a child. once you have the company, you have to feed it and nurse it and take care of it, even if it ruins you"
and then the correspondent asks about the end of 2008. how did you get through that crisis?
watch his face here
he looks down. silence. for a few seconds the richest-man-to-be just doesn't speak
"can we just break for a second?"
years later, with both companies alive, one question about a few months in 2008 still stops him cold
here's what he was carrying back then:
SpaceX had just failed three launches in a row
Tesla was burning cash in the middle of a financial crisis
every dollar he made from PayPal was already inside the two companies
the fortune you see today was built on a stretch of time when he was one bad month away from losing all of it
people look at his net worth and see a number
he looks at 2008 and still needs a minute
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In June 2005, the president of a church council stood up in a Kansas courtroom and explained ten murders to a judge like he was walking his boss through a work assignment. He even had a work word for them. Projects.
His name was Dennis Rader. For 31 years Wichita knew him only as BTK, the name he gave himself in letters to the police and the newspapers. Between 1974 and 1991 he killed ten people. Two of them were children, an 11-year-old girl and her 9-year-old brother.
Then he went quiet for more than a decade. He had a wife, two kids, a job as a city compliance officer handing out fines for tall grass and loose dogs, and a seat on the council of his Lutheran church.
In 2004 he started writing to the police again. He wanted attention. Eventually he asked them a question: if he sent them a floppy disk, could they trace it? The police answered with an ad in the newspaper. "Rex, it will be OK."
He mailed the disk. Inside was a deleted file. Its properties said Christ Lutheran Church, and the last person to edit it was named Dennis. Nine days later he was in handcuffs.
In the video below the judge asks him, count by count, what he did. He answers in the calm voice of a man filling out a form. He chose his victims through what he calls a "selection process." If one didn't work out, he moved on to the next. When the judge asks what he means by "trolling," Rader explains it like a lecturer, the different phases serial killers go through, as if he's talking about somebody else.
One of the ten was Marine Hedge, 53. She lived a few houses down from him.
"We'd walk by and wave," he says. "It wasn't anything personal. Just a neighbor."
He even had special clothes for it. He called them his "hit clothes."
The detail almost nobody remembers is how they confirmed it was him. Police didn't want to tip him off with a swab, so they got a tissue sample his daughter had left at a college clinic years earlier. Her DNA matched the killer's as his child.
In August 2005 he got ten life sentences in a row, at least 175 years. Kansas had no death penalty when he killed, so he never faced it. He is still in prison today.
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ELON MUSK: "MY BRAIN HURTS AND MY HEART HURTS. I WORKED 22 HOURS A DAY..." OTHERWISE TESLA WOULD HAVE DIED, AND ME ALONG WITH IT
2018. Axios on HBO sits down with Elon, and he looks nothing like the guy on stage
tired eyes. hand on his face. long pauses
they ask why this was the hardest year of his career
he doesn't talk about the stock or the critics. he talks about the factory
"Tesla really faced a severe threat of death due to the Model 3 production ramp"
"the company was bleeding money like crazy"
"if we didn't solve these problems in a very short period of time, we would die"
how close?
"single-digit weeks"
think about what that means. a car company with billions in revenue, thousands of employees, a stock everyone argues about. and the real number that mattered was weeks of cash
so what does the CEO do with single-digit weeks?
22 hours a day
7 days a week
sleeping in the factory
working the paint shop, general assembly, the body shop himself
"do you ever worry about yourself imploding?"
"yeah, absolutely. no one should put this many hours into work. this is not good"
then the line that hits different:
"it hurts my brain and my heart hurts"
"this is not recommended for anyone. I just did it because if I didn't do it, Tesla, good chance, would die"
here's the part people forget
in the same year he described Tesla as weeks from death, Tesla posted a ~$312M profit in Q3 2018. the market had been betting on bankruptcy. the factory floor bet against it
the comeback is on the stock chart. the price isn't
no investor deck has a line for "founder sleeps under his desk for months". but that was the actual collateral behind the Model 3
he's not selling hustle here. he's warning you off it
the stock chart shows the miracle. the factory floor shows the bill
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For nine days, Susan Smith cried on national TV and begged a stranger to bring her two little boys home. They were at the bottom of a lake a few miles away the whole time, and she was the one who put them there.
On the night of October 25, 1994, she ran up to a house in Union, South Carolina, screaming. She said a Black man with a gun jumped into her car at a red light, made her get out, and drove off with her sons in the back seat. Michael was 3. Alex was 14 months old.
The whole country went looking for a man who didn't exist. His sketch was on every channel. Hundreds of volunteers searched the woods on foot and on horseback, divers went into the lakes, and the town tied yellow ribbons on every tree.
In the video below she tells the story herself. She says her son asked "Mom, where you going?" and she told him she loved him before the man slammed the door.
"I just felt like such a failure."
A week later she stands next to her husband David and begs whoever has her children to bring them home. On Good Morning America she says she has put her faith in the sheriff.
The sheriff had stopped believing her almost from the start. The light she described only turns red at that empty intersection when another car is waiting on the cross street, and she swore there was no other car. She failed a lie detector test. And a rich man she was seeing had just written her a letter saying he didn't want children.
The video ends on November 3. That morning she was on TV saying the hardest part was not knowing. That afternoon she confessed.
She had let the car roll down a boat ramp into John D. Long Lake with both boys strapped into their car seats, and watched it float, flip over and sink. Divers had already searched that lake, close to shore. The car was 122 feet out, upside down.
The jury needed about two and a half hours to convict her. She got 30 years to life. In November 2024 she told the parole board she would give anything to go back. David told them it wasn't a tragic mistake. The board said no, unanimously.
On November 19 she goes before them again.
Her lawyers said she meant to die in that car too and got out at the last second. So which was it: a broken mother who lost her nerve, or a woman who killed her sons for a man and then cried for the cameras for nine days?
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A CRAZY STORY ABOUT ELON MUSK AND HIS FATHER ERROL... AT ERROL'S 70TH BIRTHDAY, WORLD-FAMOUS STARS ASKED HIM "YOU SUPPORT TRUMP?" HE SAID YES. ELON TOLD HIM SUPPORTING TRUMP IS EVIL... "BUT NOW HE SUPPORTS TRUMP HIMSELF," ERROL RECALLS
2016. cape town. Errol Musk turns 70
Elon and Kimbal fly in and bring about 20 guests from america. Errol says they were all Hollywood. he names Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Jon Favreau. plus one of the people behind Google
the lunch goes on for hours
then Favreau leans over with a big laugh:
"we believe you support Trump"
"yes. I support Trump"
the whole table laughs. "that's stupid." "he's a terrible person"
Errol: "no he's not"
after the lunch Kimbal is furious. "I've never seen Kimbal so angry." his father embarrassed them in front of their friends
and Elon says it straight:
"it's evil to support Trump"
now fast forward to 2024. Elon endorses Trump, puts a fortune behind the campaign, and jumps on stage at his rallies
Errol's take, said with zero modesty:
"he had been brainwashed by these Democrats. because now Elon supports Trump"
the interviewer asks the obvious question: so did you two not speak for 7 years?
not exactly. "we were on bad terms." happy birthday. happy christmas. that's it
"he was never very happy. but now he's very happy"
"so did he come to you and say: dad, I was wrong, you were right?"
this is the part that got me:
"no. I'm a dad. I don't want to put my kids through that, where they have to say sorry to me... obviously from what he's doing he should be saying something like that. but I would never put him through that"
and then the ending
december, after a big rocket launch in florida. a SpaceX party, about 250 people
Elon stops the whole room, puts his arm around his father:
"everybody. this is my dad. he taught me everything I know about engineering"
from "it's evil" to "he taught me everything" in front of 250 SpaceX engineers
fair warning: this is Errol's version. Elon has said very harsh things about his father over the years, and the family's history with Errol is far darker than one party story
but notice what actually changed Elon's mind
it wasn't an argument at a birthday lunch. it wasn't his father
it was Trump himself
in 2016 a table of Hollywood stars laughed at the idea of supporting him. 8 years later he'd won the white house twice and turned one of his loudest skeptics, the richest man on earth, into his biggest backer
whatever you think of him, very few people have ever changed what the world thinks of them that hard, with their own actions
in 2016 saying "I support Trump" got you laughed at in Cape Town
in 2024 Elon was jumping on stage next to him
the old man at the end of the table just saw it 8 years early
in markets that's the whole game. being early feels exactly like being laughed at
so who was really right at that lunch: the stars, or the guy they were laughing at?
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Jeffrey Dahmer's father once carried a locked metal box down to the basement and got ready to smash it open. Inside was a human head. He never opened it.
In 1994, Jeffrey sat next to him in a Wisconsin prison and told the story on national TV.
Between 1978 and 1991, Dahmer killed 17 men and boys, most of them in Milwaukee. He was arrested in July 1991, after one man escaped his apartment with a handcuff still on his wrist and flagged down a police car.
Two months before that, police had been at the same door. A 14-year-old boy was found on the street, drugged, naked and bleeding. Two women called for help. The officers believed Dahmer when he said the boy was his 19-year-old boyfriend, walked him back inside, and left. The boy was killed that night.
His father, Lionel, wrote a book about raising him called A Father's Story. In the video below, they sit side by side with Stone Phillips, and Phillips asks about the box.
Jeffrey kept it locked in his bedroom closet. One week his dad came to visit, saw it, and asked what was inside. Jeffrey wouldn't open it. They argued. Lionel took it down to the basement to break it open himself.
"I was thinking, I've got to stop this from happening," Jeffrey says. "It's all going to come crashing down now."
It didn't. The box was never opened in front of his dad. "And so the lies continued," he says. "The whole scenario just continued for years after that."
Then the cameras stop, and at the end of the tape you see what happened next. On his way out, Dahmer casually pointed at a box in the room and wanted the crew to know: that's the type of box. It looked almost exactly like the one his father had found.
He got 15 life sentences. Wisconsin has no death penalty. In November 1994, a few months after this interview, another inmate beat him to death with a metal bar while they cleaned a prison gym bathroom. He was 34.