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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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$40,000 to kill Young Dolph. The shooter got $800.
$500 in a letter. $300 from a stranger in a face mask. Then nothing.
Dolph was home in Memphis for his Thanksgiving turkey giveaway. He stopped at a cookie shop. Cornelius Smith was one of the two men who opened fire.
In the video below, he prices it out under oath.
"It was almost like a catalog."
$50K on one head. $5K on another. $10K on the next.
"If you kill Young Dolph, you get $100,000."
That's the list as Smith tells it.
The lawyer: "You went and killed a man on your daughter's birthday?"
Smith: "I ain't had no money, I'm trying to get some money that day."
All for "a beautiful birthday."
Then payday.
An old woman hands him the first $500. One day of p*lls, the lawyer says. "Yeah."
He's expecting $20K to $30K next. His girlfriend meets a stranger, both in face masks. $300.
Then the payments stop.
2 cents on the dollar.
The real money went to his lawyer. $50,000, Smith testified, from Big Jook, the man he says put out the hit. 62 times the shooter's cut.
Big Jook was never charged. He was shot dead in Memphis.
Smith took 20 years, no parole. That's $40 a year.
Justin Johnson, convicted as the second shooter, got life plus 35. His own lawyer told the jury there was "no proof that Justin Johnson got a penny."
Contract killer, or the cheapest labor in Memphis?
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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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Changpeng Zhao isn't allowed to run Binance anymore. He gave that up in a guilty plea. This week $6,300,000,000 left Binance's wallets in about 20 minutes, per TRM Labs, and he's the one saying users should expect to be made whole.
He has been here before. In May 2019 hackers took 7,000 bitcoin from Binance, about $40,000,000 at the time, and Zhao went live to explain. He said he hadn't slept in 29 hours. Then he floated something wild: getting Bitcoin miners to rewrite the blockchain and erase the theft.
"To be honest we can actually do this probably within the next few days," he told viewers. Within a day he backed off. Binance covered the loss from its emergency fund, called SAFU.
Below is that livestream, and the day he was sentenced.
In November 2023 he stood in a Seattle federal court and pleaded guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money laundering program. He paid $50,000,000 personally. Binance paid $4,300,000,000. He served four months in prison.
In October 2025, President Trump pardoned him.
On October 29 the money started moving. Binance's first statement pointed to one DevOps engineer's laptop. CEO Richard Teng later said: "This was not carried out by one person." TRM Labs and Chainalysis say North Korea is almost certainly behind it.
Co-founder Yi He posted four words: "User funds are SAFU."
Tether froze more than 1.5 billion USDT. Circle froze more than 800 million USDC. Zhao wrote: "as a shareholder, I expect all user funds will be fully covered."
The SAFU fund holds about 15,000 bitcoin, roughly $1,170,000,000 by Forbes' estimate. That's less than a fifth of what was taken this week. Binance says it will cover the rest from its own money.
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Jordan Belfort went to federal prison for scamming investors out of millions of dollars. Years later, it came back around: a hacker broke into his crypto wallet and walked off with about $300,000.
In the video below, he admits it on live TV, almost in passing.
Belfort ran Stratton Oakmont, the Long Island brokerage behind The Wolf of Wall Street. His brokers cold-called ordinary people, pushed them into penny stocks the firm controlled, then dumped their own shares on them.
1,513 clients. Roughly $200 million in losses.
In 1999 he pleaded guilty to securities fraud and money laundering. He wore a wire on his own partners, got four years and served 22 months.
His cellmate was Tommy Chong. Chong told him to write it all down. The book became a Scorsese movie with Leonardo DiCaprio.
The court ordered him to pay back $110.4 million. He later agreed to a minimum of $10,000 a month, for the rest of his life.
BusinessWeek reported that out of roughly $1.2 million he got for the movie rights, $21,000 went to his victims.
In 2021, a hacker got into his MetaMask wallet. About $300,000 in tokens, gone. He brought it up on Yahoo Finance while explaining why FTX was a fraud.
That's what his $10,000-a-month minimum sends his victims in two and a half years.
For once, the money moved the other way.
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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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Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy locked their frat brother out of the app he came up with. That app became Snapchat, worth close to $30,000,000,000 when it went public. Each of them ended up with more than $5,000,000,000. Reggie Brown got $157,500,000, and only after he sued.
In the video below, Spiegel tells Steven Bartlett whose idea it was, 14 years later.
The Snapchat story you've heard has two founders. The lawsuit had three.
Reggie, Spiegel and Bobby Murphy were brothers in the same Stanford fraternity. In the spring of 2011, Reggie came up with an app for photos that disappear. Spiegel called it a "million-dollar idea," according to court documents. The plan, Reggie says: Spiegel would be CEO, Murphy would write the code, and Reggie would run marketing. His lawsuit says he also came up with the first version of the ghost logo Snapchat still uses.
In August, Reggie filed a patent application for the app. Later that month, a phone call with Spiegel got heated and Spiegel hung up. Days later, the passwords were changed and Reggie was out.
In February 2013, he sued for a third of the company. That summer, investors valued Snapchat at $800,000,000. That November, Spiegel turned down $3,000,000,000 from Mark Zuckerberg.
In his deposition, Spiegel at first said Reggie hadn't really worked on the app with them. Then he was shown his own email from July 2011: "I just built an app with two friends of mine." Asked who the two friends were, he said: "Bobby and Reggie."
Murphy said he had never listed Reggie as an employer of the app. Then he was shown a Facebook notification where he had tagged Reggie under "Employers." His answer: "Well it looks like here that I did something to that effect."
Asked if Reggie deserved anything, Spiegel said: "Reggie may deserve something for some of his contributions."
In September 2014, Snap settled for $157,500,000 and said it acknowledged "Reggie's contribution to the creation of Snapchat." The amount stayed secret until the IPO filing in 2017.
Reggie Brown came up with the idea and got a check. Bobby Murphy wrote the code and got his name next to Spiegel's as co-founder in the IPO filing.
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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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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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Terrance Watanabe lost $127,000,000 in Las Vegas in 2007, about 5.6% of what Caesars' parent company won in Vegas that year. Witnesses say he fell asleep at the tables and was dealt back in. When he didn't pay back the last $14,700,000, he faced up to 28 years in prison.
In the video below, he explains what it was like to face 28 years in prison over casino credit.
Watanabe ran Oriental Trading, the party-supply company his father started in Omaha. He sold his stake in 2000, and the money went to the tables.
In 2007 he bet more than $825,000,000. Almost all of the $127,000,000 he lost went to Caesars Palace and the Rio.
The casino made sure he stayed. Per the Wall Street Journal, it created a new loyalty tier above its highest one and gave him $12,500 a month for flights, $500,000 in gift-shop credit and 15% cash back on table losses over $500,000.
A Harrah's marketing executive at the Rio had opposed raising his credit limit, calling him "out of control." The credit kept coming. The last $14,700,000 went from October to December 2007.
A former Caesars security officer said he spent 25 to 30 hours a week around Watanabe from June to December and never once saw him sober. A bellman said no employee "ever attempted to cut off or even slow down" his drinking or gambling, and that he saw security bring painkillers to his room in a children's candy box.
He had already paid back $112,000,000. The rest was 38 markers, the credit slips players sign at the table, from $200,000 to $875,000 each. In Nevada, an unpaid marker can be prosecuted as a bad check. It was the largest criminal case the Las Vegas bad check unit had ever handled.
He sued back, saying the casino kept him drunk and on pills to keep him betting. Harrah's called him "a criminal defendant who faces imprisonment for theft and writing bad checks."
Caesars' own investigators found that as many as 15 people saw him use marijuana or cocaine on the property, but rejected his claim that the casino supplied the drugs. He settled, and the charges were dropped.
He owed them $14,700,000 and got four felony charges. They took $112,000,000 from a man asleep at their table and got a $225,000 fine.
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Michael Milken made $550,000,000 in a single year. His ally Ivan Boesky got caught for insider trading and faced a choice: go to prison or give someone up. He started secretly recording Milken. Boesky served 20 months. Milken paid $600,000,000 and got 10 years.
In the video below, Milken tells Barbara Walters what he thought of the man who turned him in.
Milken was the junk bond king at Drexel Burnham Lambert. Companies the big banks wouldn't touch came to him for money, and his share of the profits made him the best-paid man on Wall Street.
Boesky was Wall Street's biggest takeover gambler. He bought a company's stock right before a takeover was announced, using tips from bankers who knew about the deal first. That's insider trading.
One of those bankers worked at Milken's own firm. In May 1986, Drexel banker Dennis Levine was charged with insider trading. Levine gave up Boesky. Boesky gave up Milken.
Before his deal went public on November 14, 1986, Boesky secretly taped three conversations with Milken. Prosecutors also had a $5,300,000 payment Boesky made to Drexel that year. Boesky had called it a "consulting fee." Prosecutors said it was Milken's share of illegal profits.
In 1989, Milken was indicted on 98 counts. Prosecutors charged his younger brother Lowell too. In 1990, Michael pleaded guilty to six counts, and the case against his brother was dropped.
The judge gave him 10 years. "I believe that a prison term is required for the purposes of general deterrence," she said.
How it ended:
Boesky: $100,000,000 fine, 20 months in prison
Milken: $600,000,000, a 10-year sentence, 22 months served
Six months before his deal went public, Boesky told Berkeley graduates, "Greed is all right, by the way." The next year, the movie Wall Street gave Gordon Gekko his own version: "Greed is good."
Three years after Boesky got out, his divorce came through. His wife, worth about $100,000,000, had to give him $20,000,000 in cash, a $2,500,000 house in La Jolla and $180,000 a year for life.
I keep going back and forth on who the villain is here. The man who sold out his ally to save himself, or the man who made $550,000,000 in a year and swore he never made a dishonest penny.
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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
tickmind retweeted
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
tickmind retweeted
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?
tickmind retweeted
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?