Back when I was in high school I worked in a service station…A Shell station across the street from a local beer joint…
At the time Shell was running a promotion where you got a plastic coin with a presidents face and features if you bought over a certain amount of gas…
If you collected all five faces you would win $10,000. Now in 1967 10 grand was LARGE!!
We all knew the most valuable coin…I think it was Jefferson
One night a man came into the station, He asked me if the coin was the correct one…Indeed it was…He just nodded and went back across the street…
It was late and I was curious…I closed the station and I went to watch…Turns out he had won it in a pool game and then bet it on the next!!! Needless to say he lost!!
Don’t know what happened to it after that…
Kinda cool to be that close to a $10,000 coin though… I even got to hold it for a second…
I worked for a medium sized company that almost went out of business in 1996. The stock was down below $2 and many of us got a huge pile of stock options. When the options came due, the stock was worth over $60. I immediately cashed mine in and made more in that transaction than my annual salary. Two of my friends did similarly.
Our CEO made a bonehead move that got lots of bad press and the stock tanked to $30 and then creeped back up to $40. My friends loaded back up on the stock thinking it would go up over $100. One of them did this instead of putting a down payment on a house. The other told me she was going to do it and I liteally begged her not to.
Over the next year, the stock dropped down below a dollar and the company eventually went bankrupt. They lost it all.
First time I went to Vegas (1986, I think) - and I KNOW Vegas is a bad example for this - I was standing in line waiting to get in to the OmniMax Theatre at Caesar’s Palace. Under the walkway we were standing on was a craps table. At the craps table was a man who kept buying $1000 stacks of chips - and losing them almost instantly.
We stood in that spot for roughly 20 minutes waiting for the theatre to open. In that time, we estimated that this guy threw away somewhere between $30,000 - $40,000.
Maybe not a fortune, maybe not even a blink of an eye in Vegas, but at the time it was more than I made in a year…