There were coin sorters before Coinstar showed up. When I was in my teens and living in Reno I’d take my jars of loose change to a casino to turn into cash. Some of the larger banks had them too.
I haven’t rolled coins before taking them to the bank since 1988. Coinstar was founded in 1991.
Not exactly millionaire in terms of dollars, but if you’ll count airline miles, then a guy named David Phillips deserves an award for having the foresight to tell his wife, “I’m going to go to the bank and get some money. We have to buy as much pudding as we possibly can.”
Depends on how you define rich, but the guy who earned free airline miles for life due to a pudding promotion is worth mentioning here IMO.
ETA: ::shakes fist at Bricker::
I believe that only three people on the Forbes list (which goes down to the 1153-rd richest people in the world, who are worth a billion each) are in the entertainment business in a creative role (i.e., an actor, a writer, a singer, a director, etc.) - Opran Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas. There are others who are in that field on the business side who are on the list. Investing is what makes you really rich. Even the people in the entertainment field who are somewhat below the level of that Forbes list are as rich as they are because they did good business deals in the use of their creative talents.
I love the story of the Silna brothers. They owned the St. Louis Spirits of the old ABA. When the ABA merged with the NBA in 1976, the NBA would absorb only 4 of the 7 ABA teams and compensate the remaining 3. The Spirits were one of the 3 teams that would not make the transition. (Of the other 2 teams, 1 folded before they could make a deal, and the other took a one-time payout.) The deal the Silnas made with the NBA to compensate their loss was brilliantly inspired.
Not only did the Silnas get a set payout from the NBA for losing their team, they also got the NBA to agree to give them a 1/7 share of the television rights each of the 4 surviving ABA teams would receive. At the time, there was almost no money in TV rights, so the NBA probably thought they were selling the Silnas a bridge. As bad an idea as it eventually turned out to be, it got even worse for the NBA because not only would TV money skyrocket, the deal was made in perpetuity. To this day, and forever after, the Silnas effectively get about half of an NBA team’s worth of television money just for not making the cut more than 30 years ago.
So far, the deal has netted them about $250 million.
If you’re a fan of the Nuggets, Nets, Pacers or Spurs (the teams which have to pony up 1/7 each of their TV money to the Silnas), you can take some solace in the fact that the Silnas lost the trusts they set up for their grandchildren to Bernie Madoff.
Yeah, I know. One of them (Sergei’s thesis advisor and whom I know well) made $100,000,000 by being one of the founders of SUN (the one who created their cool logo) and for him a million dollar investment was pocket change.