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Nickelodeon offered Jennette McCurdy $300,000 to never talk publicly about her time there. She turned it down. But the worst part of her childhood wasn't the network. It was her mother. In the video below, she explains what really happened at home. Her mom would chase her dad around the house with a steak knife. There were outbursts every day. A neighbor threatened to call social services. Jennette was just scared of her anger. At 11 she felt a lump in her chest and thought she had cancer like her mom. It was just her body starting to develop. Her mom didn't explain anything. She put her on a diet. From then on they counted calories together every night after everyone was asleep. Her mom weighed her and measured her thighs. Jennette thought it was bonding. She says her mom simply did not want her to grow up. Then she overheard her mom talking to a doctor about anorexia. She felt something was wrong and pushed it down. Mom would never do that to me. By the time she got into therapy, she was throwing up eight times a day. The first time a therapist told her that her mother was abusive, her body felt like it was on fire. She ran. Today, she says, she is able to just miss her sometimes.

Teresa Giudice and her husband were charged over about $5,000,000 in mortgages and loans taken out with fake documents. She says all she did was sign the papers because he asked to use her credit. She got 15 months in federal prison. He got 41 months, then deportation. In the video below, she goes back to her first night inside. She shared a room with six women. That first night, two of them were having sex in the room. She pulled the covers over her head. Her credit score was over 800. Joe was flipping houses and needed her name to refinance. She went to the closing, signed, done. Then came the fraud charges. Joe had not filed his personal taxes. At sentencing, she says the judge brought up her Jimmy Choo shoes and said she was trying to keep up with the Joneses. She turned to her lawyer and asked: am I going to jail? Before she reported, she took her four daughters ice skating, horseback riding, to the movies. Every day. So they would not forget her. She came home after 11 and a half months. Three months later Joe went in. Then her mother got sick and died. She says that's when she knew the marriage was over. Joe did his time, then sat in ICE for 8 more months fighting deportation. He lost. She says he lives in the Bahamas now and just sent his first $1,000 for the kids. Would you have signed those papers?

Anna Delvey told New York she was a German heiress with a trust fund of about €60,000,000. She was actually a Russian truck driver's daughter. She stole about $275,000 from banks, hotels and a friend, went to prison, and Netflix paid her around $320,000 for her story. In the video below, the interviewer asks her the simplest question. When did you start lying? "My case is still on appeal, so I'm not going to give you a confession." How did she come up with the idea to fake the bank documents? "I don't know. I can't say that." Did she really think it would work? "Yes, obviously." She says she never believed anyone would actually wire her $60 million. Everyone was going to get repaid. Then the host does something you rarely see. She stops and tells Anna she has interviewed thousands of people, many of them ex-prisoners, and this is the hardest conversation she has ever had. Anna's answer: she'd rather focus on what she's doing now. There's nothing left to say. The host points out that the podcast, the book and the fame only exist because of what she did. "I would say I have the life that I have now in spite of what I've done, not because of it." She ends by reminding the host that she was on house arrest with an ankle monitor. "So here I am giving you this platform." Does she owe anyone an apology?

Johnny Manziel won the Heisman Trophy as a college freshman and went 22nd in the 2014 NFL Draft. Cleveland cut him in less than two years. Then, by his own account, he went on a roughly $5,000,000 bender and planned to end his life. In the video below, Shannon Sharpe asks whether there were heavier drugs than alcohol. "Oh yeah, 100%." Not in college. In the league. He thought he could do what nobody else could: take hard drugs and still function. The confidence of Johnny Football on the field followed him into the club. It went from cocaine to OxyContin to Percocet, and days of wandering around the Hollywood Hills. He was 210 pounds when he left Cleveland and 170 in Las Vegas a few months later. He only noticed when he stepped on a scale at the Cosmopolitan. His reaction: "We'll figure that out later. Let's go again." Shannon asks about the moment he thought about taking his own life after spending his money. He says everyone was reaching out, and he blocked them at every turn. The real reason came later, in a locker room in Canada. He realized he never truly loved football. He was just immensely talented at it. He calls it wasting "the biggest golden opportunity" you could ever imagine. In 2018, he said he had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Can you really waste a gift you never wanted?

In 2014, Forbes put Elizabeth Holmes’s net worth at $4,500,000,000. Today she is in federal prison, and a judge has ordered her to repay $452,000,000 to the people she deceived, including $125,000,000 to Rupert Murdoch. In the video below, from October 2015, she goes on CNBC the same day The Wall Street Journal says her blood tests don’t work. Theranos is valued at $9,000,000,000, and she is being called the next Steve Jobs. The Journal cites a former employee who says that of the 240 tests Theranos offered, only 15 ran on its own Edison machine. The rest ran on regular lab equipment bought from companies like Siemens. Holmes doesn’t answer the number. She says this is what happens when you try to change things. First they think you’re crazy, then they fight you, and then you change the world. She says her company sent the paper more than 1,000 pages proving the story was false. Asked directly how many tests Edison can do, she talks about FDA submissions instead. Her board at the time included Henry Kissinger, George Shultz and James Mattis. Theranos shut down in 2018. In 2022 a jury found Holmes guilty of defrauding investors, and she was sentenced to 11 years and 3 months. Who should have caught it first, the investors or the board?

Elon Musk put $100,000,000 of his own money into a rocket company he admits he did not believe would work. By August 2008 SpaceX had launched three rockets and all three had failed to reach orbit. He says there was money for exactly one more try. If the fourth Falcon 1 failed, SpaceX was finished. In the video below, 60 Minutes asks him about that bet, and he goes quiet when his own heroes come up. He came in with no aerospace degree and taught himself from books. His own words: "I would have to be insane if I thought the odds were in my favor." Asked how much of his fortune went in, he answers: "$100 million." The third failure came down to a two second timing glitch. Asked if he thought about packing it in, he said: "I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated." Eight weeks later, on September 28, 2008, he bet the company on flight four. It reached orbit. He says if it had failed, "that would have been it," because there was nothing left for a fifth launch. That December NASA gave SpaceX a cargo contract worth up to $1,600,000,000 for 12 flights to the space station. The company that was one launch from death suddenly had a customer. Then two of his childhood heroes, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan, testified to Congress against commercial spaceflight. Musk: "Those guys are heroes of mine, so it's really tough." He stops. "Difficult." He called SpaceX "a little kid fighting a bunch of sumo wrestlers." In 2020 it became the first private company to fly NASA astronauts to the space station. Would you put $100 million into something you believed would fail, or is that the only kind of bet that ever creates a fortune?

Adam Robinson, the Austin founder who died in Sunday's Florida jet crash, was once asked if he would sell his company for $15,000,000 to $20,000,000 in cash. He said probably not, because he thought a fair price was $50,000,000. In the video below, from a 2021 interview, he walks through what the company was worth and why he wouldn't take the money. Before startups, he spent 10 years at Lehman Brothers trading credit default swaps. Then he left Wall Street, built an email marketing company with no investors and sold it for 8 figures. His second company was 18 months old. It was doing $4,000,000 a year with 6 employees and a 50% profit margin, and he paid out every month's profit as dividends, with checks going to his staff too. He put the low end at $25,000,000 and a good price at $50,000,000. 15 or 20 was too low, he said, because it was growing so fast that somebody out there would pay more. He kept it. Renamed Retention, it was doing $22,000,000 a year by 2024. That spring he launched a second company, RB2B, which went from about $5,000 to $200,000 a month in revenue in roughly 4 months. At the end of the interview, he was asked what he wished he had known at 20. His answer: skip Wall Street and learn how to build software. Wall Street had made a lot of people rich, he said, but this was more satisfying. He bet on himself instead of taking the check, and the bet paid off. He was 44. Would you turn down $20,000,000 in cash if you were sure you could build something worth more?

In August 2018, Elon Musk tweeted that he might take Tesla private at $420 a share, with funding secured. The SEC fined him $20,000,000 personally and fined Tesla another $20,000,000, and he had to step down as chairman for three years. In the video below, he explains where the number comes from. It starts with a teenager in South Africa going through an existential crisis. He read every religious text he could find, and none convinced him. Then he moved on to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, which he says is a bad idea for a depressed kid. What helped was The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a book Douglas Adams first published in 1979. In it, a supercomputer spends 7,500,000 years on the meaning of life and comes back with 42. Ten times 42 is 420. Musk calls it a philosophy book dressed up as comedy. Nobody knows the right question to ask, and in the book Earth itself is an even bigger computer built to find it. So he treats the universe as the answer. To find the question, he says, humans have to expand consciousness, become a multi-planet species and keep asking. When SpaceX sent his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster into space in 2018, with a dummy in a spacesuit at the wheel, the dashboard screen said DON’T PANIC, and a copy of the book rode in the glovebox. In 2022, he bought Twitter for $54.20 a share. Was the $40,000,000 joke worth it?

In 1980, John Fogerty gave up his artist royalties on Proud Mary, Fortunate Son and the rest of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s hits, just to get out of his record contract. In 1985, the label’s owner still sued him for $142,000,000. In the video below, Fogerty describes the meeting where he realized how little he controlled. By then the rest of the band had been released, but he still owed Fantasy Records a mountain of recordings. He says the label could decide, almost on a whim, which records counted. When he made a country album, they told him it didn’t. So he sat down with owner Saul Zaentz and told him the contract was crushing him. He couldn’t feel musical anymore. Zaentz’s reply stuck with him for life. The greatest art in history, Zaentz told him, was made under depression and oppression. The deal stayed the same. Any music Fogerty made had to go to Fantasy. He says the label had already made a fortune off him, and he couldn’t take a single song anywhere else. On top of that, he says, the band had been put into an offshore tax shelter, and they all lost their life savings in it. The 1985 lawsuit claimed his new song The Old Man Down the Road copied his own old CCR song, Run Through the Jungle. It failed. In 2023, more than 50 years after he started fighting, he finally bought back a majority of his publishing rights. How much would you give up just to own your own work again?

Jennette McCurdy says Nickelodeon offered her $300,000 to never speak publicly about her time at the network. She said no. Years later, she wrote about it in a memoir that spent 8 weeks at number 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. In the video below, she talks about the moment she turned the money down. The offer came after Sam & Cat was cancelled. It was framed as a thank-you gift, she says, on the condition that she stay silent about her experience, especially with a man she calls the Creator. In her book, she says he once encouraged her to drink while she was still underage and gave her a shoulder massage. She says she told them no right away. Then she leaned against her bed and thought about what she had just given up. That money, she says, could have put her nieces through college. She is still proud of the decision. She calls it a path of integrity, and gets emotional saying it. Asked for a response, Nickelodeon told ABC News it had no comment at that time. The memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, came out in August 2022. In 2025, it was announced as an Apple TV+ series starring Jennifer Aniston, with McCurdy as a showrunner. Was turning down $300,000 the bravest thing Jennette McCurdy ever did, or the smartest business decision of her life?

Faizon Love, the actor from Friday and Elf, spent 16 days in jail this summer over child support. The mother of his daughter claims he owes her around $250,000. In the video below, he explains why he thinks that number was stacked against him from the start. He says it started with a one-night stand. Five days later, the woman told him she was pregnant, and she was married to another man at the time. When he first went to court in Florida, he says, the judge excused him, explaining that a child born to a married woman legally belongs to her and her husband. For about 2 years, he says, he asked when he could see his daughter. He says she answered that it depended on how much money he would make. Then she divorced her husband and filed for child support. Love says that’s how he ended up owing money for years when he was not legally treated as the father. He calls it unfair. In court this June, his lawyers said he has no permanent home, no savings and drives a 1999 car. Asked if he could pay $2,500 a month, he said not right now. The mother’s lawyers disputed that. She says he told her she wouldn’t get a dime, and that he’d stop working so she couldn’t collect. Should a father owe back child support for years when the law didn’t treat him as the father?

Dave Foley says a Canadian court ordered him to pay $17,700 a month in child support, about 5 times what he was earning. To afford it, he says, he would need at least $1,000,000 a year, basically a weekly sitcom. In the video below, the former NewsRadio star explains how he ended up there. The payment was based on what he made on NewsRadio. That show ended in 1999. In 2007, he asked an Ontario judge to lower it because he hadn’t found steady work since, and the request was reportedly refused. He says Canadian courts start from one idea: after a divorce, the children should keep the same standard of living they had at the moment the parents split, no matter what happens to the parents’ income afterward. He calls that insane, because if the marriage had lasted and his income had dropped, the whole family’s lifestyle would have dropped with it. Today, he says, he lives in a small loft in downtown Los Angeles, while his family in Toronto lives in a $2,500,000 house on a park. He once told Marc Maron he’d happily give away half his money, but he was obligated to give away 400% of his income or go to jail. He says he can face arrest if he goes back to Canada. This is his side. The court’s full reasoning isn’t in the clip. Should child support follow what a parent used to earn, or what he earns now?

Charlie Sheen was making $1,800,000 per episode of Two and a Half Men in 2010. By 2018, he told a court he was in a dire financial crisis, with less than $10,000,000 left and nearly $5,000,000 in unpaid taxes reported. In the video below, he explains how he burned through it, and what it took to start living on less. He says he once owned one of the best vintage watch collections in the country and was still late to everything, sometimes by days. Today he wears a Timex and drives a Cadillac. At one low point, he told his friend Eddie Braun that he had ruined everything, given it all away and burned it all to the ground. Braun answered that he was still alive, and that at the old pace somebody might have died. After he got sober in 2017, he moved from mansions into much smaller homes. He says it was refreshing, because you can only fit so much stuff into a small place. The hard part was entitlement. He kept asking himself why things weren’t the way they used to be, even though he knew why. So he stepped back from what he wanted and settled into what he needed. Did Charlie Sheen lose almost everything, or did he finally find out how little of it he needed?

In October 2022, Piers Morgan told Kanye West he would apologize for his antisemitic tweet within the next 10 years. Ye said no. That same month, Adidas ended a Yeezy deal Forbes valued at $1,500,000,000. In the video below, Morgan spells out exactly what an apology could sound like, and Ye refuses it line by line. Morgan suggests three things. Say the language was offensive, say you wouldn’t use it again, and explain what you really meant. He tells Ye people would respect him for it. Ye says the interview is one-sided. He says nobody has tried to understand how he got there, and that his anger came from years of business disputes. His condition for saying sorry is a live public review of the top 10 contracts in the NBA, the NFL, Hollywood and music, with the best lawyers in the country asking questions. Morgan calls the interview over, then keeps going. Forbes estimated that after Adidas walked away, Ye’s net worth fell from $2,000,000,000 to about $400,000,000. On December 26, 2023, about 14 months after this interview, Ye posted an apology to the Jewish community on Instagram, written in Hebrew. The contract review he demanded never happened. Morgan gave him 10 years. It took a little over 1. What does it cost to wait 14 months to say a sentence you could have said on the spot?

Dan Bilzerian says he has flipped a coin for $6,000,000. He also says he came close to betting $2,000,000 on Floyd Mayweather against Manny Pacquiao, a bet Aria’s CEO Bobby Baldwin personally approved. In the video below, he explains why he walked away from that one. If Mayweather lost, Bilzerian figured, he would get a guaranteed rematch worth maybe $250,000,000. Losing might have been the best payday of his life. He says one current NBA star, whom he won’t name, lost about $12,000,000 gambling over just a few games. When that player had been up for 24 hours straight, Bilzerian bet against his team. Then there was the ocean. A man bet he could row solo across the Atlantic in 30 days. Bilzerian put up $500,000 against his $50,000. The rower built an ultralight 3-hull boat and packed food for only 30 days, because winning the bet was the whole point. Bilzerian started to think he might make it. So he bought his way out. He says he couldn’t stand checking GPS reports and losing sleep for a month. A coin flip for $6,000,000 is over in a second. A bet you have to watch for 30 days costs you every night. Is it the size of a bet that scares you, or how long you have to live with it?

Antoine Walker says he used his first big NBA check to buy his mother a house. He went on to earn more than $108,000,000 in salary, and two years after his last game he filed for bankruptcy with $12,700,000 in debts. In the video below, he explains where all of that money went. The Celtics drafted him 6th overall in 1996, when he was 19. He played 13 seasons, made 3 All-Star teams and won a title in 2006. He says he owned 5 or 6 cars at a time, including Bentleys and Maybachs, plus a collection of Rolexes. He traveled with 8 to 10 friends from his neighborhood and paid for their flights, hotels and meals in Cancun, Puerto Rico and Las Vegas. He had a financial advisor. He admits he was too young and too proud to listen. He lost a big chunk gambling in Vegas, and by 2009 he faced felony charges over bad checks to casinos tied to more than $800,000 in gambling debts. Real estate finished the job when the market crashed in 2007 and 2008. When he filed in 2010, he listed about $4,000,000 in assets against those debts. Was Antoine Walker generous with the people he grew up with, or did he pay for a lifestyle nobody could afford?

In 2015, Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI to help make sure artificial intelligence turned out well for humans. In 2024, his own AI company, xAI, raised $6 billion at a $24 billion valuation. By then he had spent years warning about where the technology was heading. In the video below, he explains why he doesn’t expect humans to stay in charge. “I find it unlikely that humans would remain in control if there’s a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence,” he said. “So I hope the AI is nice to us.” His proposed fix isn’t a kill switch. It’s what the machines read. AIs are trained on everything online, he pointed out, and the internet is full of robot apocalypses. A model that has read 80 versions of the Terminator script might decide that’s simply who it is. So he wants more hopeful stories in the training data, enough that an AI might picture itself as a friendly overseer or a gardener instead of a killer robot. The goal itself needed changing too. A friend of his prefers protopia to utopia, because chasing a perfect world usually ends in a dystopia. A protopia is a future we can actually reach, not perfect, but good. Then he named what he’d build in from the start: truth-seeking and curiosity. Billions of dollars build the machine. What it turns into may depend on the stories it was raised on. If an AI learned everything about money from what you post online, what would it think money is for?

In 2021, Scarlett Johansson sued the most powerful studio in Hollywood over one clause in her contract. Disney settled within months, reportedly for more than $40 million. Years later, she was asked whether taking on Disney, and then OpenAI, ever scared her. “I felt right in my stance. And so then I didn’t feel scared,” she said. Then she added: “I believe very much in integrity.” The interviewer asked if she felt lonely. “Some, yeah, maybe a little bit,” she admitted. Not everyone is comfortable standing up to a large corporation, “or, you know, the man.” She didn’t move. “I can shoulder the burden.” Her contract promised Black Widow an exclusive run in theaters. Disney released it on Disney+ the same day for $30. Her pay depended on the box office. In 2024, OpenAI pulled its “Sky” voice after she said it sounded like hers. She had turned down Sam Altman’s offer to voice it. She could fight because she knew exactly what her contract said and what she was owed. Most people never check. Pew found about 70% of US workers did not ask for higher starting pay. Of those who did ask, 66% got more than the first offer. The fix is to know your terms before you need them. Read your offer, your bonus rules and your raise policy. Write down what you’re owed. Ask once, in writing. People have told Johansson her fight changed how they negotiated their own contracts. When was the last time you read your own contract?

SpaceX made $7.6 billion from AI in a single quarter, and Elon Musk says it could have rented its compute several times over. According to him, years-old Nvidia H100 chips now rent for more than they did when they were brand new. It came up on SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call this week. “Our belief is that the value of compute per watt will increase over time, not decrease,” he said. Then he added: “We are also, frankly, hounded relentlessly by every hyperscaler.” Wall Street has spent months worrying that the world is building too many AI data centers. Musk didn’t move. He said SpaceX tried to rent extra chips from other clouds and got the Monty Python cheese shop. No GB300s. No GB200s. No TPUs. Maybe some H100s overseas. Then no H100s either. AI made up 52% of SpaceX’s $14.6 billion in quarterly revenue. Its short-term compute contracts are renewing at higher dollars per watt. CoreWeave and Nebius stocks jumped 5% and 6% overnight. Musk keeps contracts short because he expects the price of what he sells to rise. Most people do the opposite with the one thing they sell: their time. A salary is a long contract at last year’s price. Freelancers sign 12-month retainers and never revisit the rate, even as their skills get more valuable. The fix is to shorten the contract on anything that is going up. Check your market rate every year. Ask for a raise at review time. Reprice freelance clients every quarter. Every renewal is a raise you can ask for. When was the last time you repriced your time?

Elon Musk is the richest person alive. He says going from $1 billion to $10 billion “doesn’t make you 10 times happier.” He said it while describing a future where AI and robots can make almost anything anyone wants. “Money becomes irrelevant,” Musk said. Currency, he guessed, would be measured in “wattage and tonnage.” Then he added: “There’s a limit to what any single human can consume. You hit that saturation point pretty fast.” A historian on stage pushed back. In the 1890s, new technology created robber barons, and people picked up pitchforks. Musk didn’t move. Past a certain point, he said, a fortune stops being consumption. It becomes “resource allocation.” The research backs the first half. Kahneman and Deaton found emotional well-being leveled off around $75,000 a year. A 2023 follow-up found it keeps rising for most people, but on a curve. Each doubling of income buys about the same bump, so $50,000 to $100,000 feels like $100,000 to $200,000. Musk can talk about saturation because he passed it billions of dollars ago. Most people never notice where theirs is. Every raise goes into a bigger apartment and a newer car, and each upgrade costs more for the same small lift. The fix is to split your money the way Musk describes. Spend raises on what clearly makes daily life better, like time, health and less stress. Past that point, send the rest to savings and investments. A dollar beyond your saturation point does more as an asset than as stuff. At what income would another upgrade stop making you happier?