Oh, I just remembered the guys from Bacon Salt - first of all they sell, kosher vegetarian bacon seasoning, which is strange enough – but in addition they got their seed money by winning “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
I know a guy who turned into a millionaire by having bought and held on to stocks of the Nokia company (then making car tires and rubber boots), before Nokia turned into the biggest mobile phone manufacturer in the world.
…to suckers.
My current plan is to sit at home in misery wishing I had a lot of money. So far it’s not been much of a success, but I live in hope.
Then there are the people who have a fortune, want to enlarge it, and wind up blowing it all.
I knew a guy in the 90s who thought that the ostrich would replace cattle as America’s red meat source. Didn’t happen.
I worked for a company who’s business was selling treatment systems for hazardous waste from photo labs. They sold the systems, then had a profit stream swapping the consumable filters. The used filters were full of silver, which they extracted and sold… Mostly to jewelers. So they had a lot of jewlers as customers so they expanded into a jeweler supply business. When I was working for them, it was on an idea to replace the film photography based business with something comparable with digital photography.
But I thought the whole filter thing was pretty clever: sell the filter, charge for disposal, extract and sell the hazardous waste at a huge profit. Nice to have your supplier pay you to accept your feedstock.
The guy who developed liquid soap. He was starting his own company but he realized as soon as his product hit the market, all of the established soap companies would be right behind him selling near identical products with establish brand names.
Then he found out that the company that was selling him the pump nozzles for his jars was the only manufacturer of that product in the world. So he placed a huge order with them that basically meant nobody else could place any new orders for the next year.
The magic that is Coinstar. Three guys come up with the idea, build a prototype and sell one to a grocery store, which gets a line around the block of people using it. Three guys found a business and become millionaires.
Well, the richest woman in the world got her bucks by writing young adult fiction. That’s got to be pretty unconventional.
Which, for the life of me, I cannot understand. Don’t banks do the same thing?
Not back then. You had to roll up the coins yourself and take them to the bank. Coinstar was the first to eliminate the annoying rolling part.
Who is that?
This list hasn’t got any writers mentioned in the top 20.
Do you ever watch How I Made My Millions on CNBC? Lots of stories there. Just watched the Turbo Tap guy yesterday. He invented a quicker way for bars, stadiums, etc to dispense beer. Less waste, more customers = wealthy inventor.
I imagine he meant JK Rowling. It’s interesting that the first 18 women on that list got rich the old fashioned way.
They were prostitutes?
How exactly did he lose all of his wealth due to this misjudgment of the meat market?
Well, I don’t know if this qualifies as rich, but I made an extra $43,000 in 1990-91 just because I was walking through the mall.
One of those clipboard people stopped me to fill out a survey. Afterward, he said i qualified for a second interview for $50. I was pretty broke at the time and agreed. I did a second interview that was videotaped. I was told that they were chosing 15 people out of the several thousand they were interviewing, and if I was chosen, I’d get another $100.
Two weeks later they called and said I’d been chosen.
The day of the interview I was picked up in a limo. They did my hair and makeup and dressed me. I was interviewed standing on a sidewalk outside a bright yellow brake shop. The camera was covered and I spoke with the same woman who had interviewed me prior.
When the 45 minute interview was over, they took me back to the makeup trailer and told me they had lied. It wasn’t for research, but an AT&T commercial. I was to be paid at Screen Actors’ Guild scale as long as the commercial ran.
There were two commercials and one radio spot that ran for about a year and a half. I got full health coverage, life insurance and a total of just over $43,000.
Invested $$ in ostrich trios (one male, two hens) when the market was high. Trios were selling for around 30 thousand bucks. Built barns, fenced acreage, purchased incubators, etc. Market collapsed. Birds that had cost ten grand a piece were selling for around a hundred a bird by that point.
In 1997, I was in the audience when someone gave a talk on his idea for a new search engine. Later I got to know him a bit and he took me on a guided tour of SF. We walked halfway across the Golden Gate bridge (to where the cable hit its minimum) and back. If only I had said to him, “Sergei, if you ever start a company with your new browser, let me invest.”
Just to give you an idea of how much money you might have had, a couple of Stanford professors were very early investors in Google. I think one of them invested a million dollars and is now worth a billion or two. But the thing is that there was no guarantee that it would succeed. I remember hearing about Google early on as this great new search site, at a time when there were many others. It was a good search site, but at the time, it wasn’t clear (at least not to me) how they were going to make money at providing search results.