In 1985 Michael Jackson bought the Lennon–McCartney song catalog for $47.5m then used it in many commercials which saddened McCartney. Jackson reportedly expressed exasperation at his attitude, stating “If he didn’t want to invest $47.5m in his own songs, then he shouldn’t come crying to me now”
It started as one of the great music friendships—two icons, two geniuses, two men who had both reshaped the industry in their own ways. Michael Jackson and Paul McCartney, together, had created some of the catchiest collaborations of the 1980s: Say Say Say, The Girl Is Mine. They admired each other, respected each other.
And then, Michael Jackson bought the Lennon-McCartney song catalog.
It was 1985, and Michael—fresh off the Thriller phenomenon, flush with cash, and increasingly obsessed with his long-term financial empire—saw an opportunity. ATV Music Publishing, which owned 250 Beatles songs, including Yesterday, Hey Jude, and Let It Be, was up for sale. It was a valuable asset—the crown jewels of rock ‘n’ roll songwriting.
Paul McCartney, the man who had written many of those songs, certainly wanted the catalog. But business had never been Paul’s strongest suit. He hesitated. He expected a fair deal, maybe even a bit of goodwill.
Michael didn’t hesitate.
He swooped in and paid $47.5 million, outbidding McCartney, Yoko Ono, and everyone else. Overnight, the Beatles’ greatest songs belonged to the King of Pop.
At first, McCartney tried to be diplomatic. He congratulated Michael, even saying, “Well done, well done.” But as the reality set in, it started to eat at him. This was personal. These were his songs—his legacy, his history, the words and melodies he had crafted with John Lennon in smoky studios, dingy hotel rooms, and tiny Liverpool flats.
And now?
Now, Michael Jackson—his friend—was licensing those songs for Nike commercials, department store ads, fast food chains.
McCartney was crushed.
In interviews, he admitted he was “hurt” and “disappointed.” He had once told Michael about the lucrative world of music publishing, advising him that owning the rights to songs was where the real money was. McCartney never imagined that advice would backfire spectacularly.
Michael, for his part, was unmoved. If McCartney had wanted the songs, he should have outbid him. Business was business.
“If he didn’t want to invest $47.5 million in his own songs, then he shouldn’t come crying to me now,” Michael reportedly said, with an exasperated shrug.
It was a rift that never healed.
Years later, when Michael faced financial trouble, he sold half of the catalog to Sony, a move that gave them control over the Beatles’ music for the first time. It wasn’t until 2017—long after Michael’s death—that McCartney finally regained rights to his own songs, after a decades-long legal battle.
By then, the damage had been done. The friendship that had once been playful, joyful, full of mutual admiration, had never recovered.
It was a classic Hollywood tale: friendship, betrayal, and the cold, hard reality of business.
Nazi general Erwin Rommel was allowed to take cyanide after being implicated in a plot to kill Hitler. To maintain morale, the Nazis gave him a state funeral and falsely claimed he died from war injuries.
By 1944, Nazi Germany was unraveling. The Allies had stormed the beaches of Normandy, the Eastern Front was a slow-motion collapse, and within Germany itself, Hitler’s grip on power was slipping. Desperation breeds paranoia, and nowhere was that more evident than in the Führer’s response to the failed July 20th assassination attempt. Hitler’s inner circle wanted heads on pikes—figuratively and, in some cases, literally. The conspirators were arrested, tortured, and executed en masse. Rommel’s name surfaced in connection with the plot, and while his precise involvement remains debated, it was enough. And in Nazi Germany, “enough” was all it took.
But Rommel wasn’t just another general. He was a national hero, the golden boy of the Wehrmacht, a figure so widely respected that even Hitler knew he couldn’t simply drag him before a firing squad. Rommel had spent years building his reputation as the brilliant, audacious commander of the Afrika Korps. His victories in North Africa had won him a mystique that extended beyond Germany; even the British, his battlefield adversaries, spoke of him with grudging respect. Unlike the Party loyalists and SS fanatics, Rommel had never fully embraced Nazi ideology—he was a professional soldier, not a political creature. But that didn’t matter. The regime was purging anyone who could be considered disloyal.
So, instead of a show trial or public execution, Rommel was given a choice: take cyanide, and his family would be spared. Refuse, and he would be humiliated, arrested, and likely executed as a traitor. It was a brutal ultimatum, but Rommel understood the calculus. On October 14, 1944, two officers arrived at his home. He put on his field marshal’s uniform, stepped into their car, and swallowed the pill. Within minutes, he was dead.
Here’s where it gets even stranger. The Nazis couldn’t afford for the public to know they had forced their most famous general to commit suicide. Morale was already crumbling, and Rommel’s execution would have confirmed the growing whispers that the Reich was devouring itself. So they staged it. The official story? Rommel had succumbed to injuries from an air raid months earlier. A hero’s funeral was arranged, complete with state honors, and the German people mourned a man who, as far as they knew, had died from wounds sustained in battle.
Rommel’s death was a quiet coup for the Nazis—an assassination without a bullet, a political execution buried under the weight of propaganda. But it also exposed a deeper truth: even the most respected figures weren’t safe. The regime that had exalted Rommel when he was winning victories in Africa had no use for him the moment his loyalty was in question. The myth of the Desert Fox was preserved, but the man himself was erased.
Louis XVI literally did not know how to have sex. When he tried with Marie would ‘’ introduces the member,” but then “stays there without moving for about two minutes,” withdraws without having completed the act and “bids goodnight’
If you’ve ever felt socially awkward, spare a thought for Louis XVI, the king of France, who managed to turn sex—something even pigeons figure out—into a national crisis.
For seven years, France’s most powerful man was unable (or unwilling? or uninterested? history is unclear) to consummate his marriage with Marie Antoinette. This was not just a personal embarrassment but a geopolitical problem. Their marriage had been a carefully orchestrated Franco-Austrian alliance, meant to soothe centuries of European blood feuds with the time-honored tradition of making teenagers get married and hope for the best. That best, in this case, involved Louis XVI successfully putting Point A into Point B and producing an heir to secure the Bourbon dynasty.
Instead, the young king reportedly engaged in a ritual so baffling that it could pass for experimental performance art. According to one observer—because yes, courtiers and diplomats were keeping very close track of the royal sex life—Louis would “introduce the member,” then just… remain there. Motionless. For two minutes. Then he would withdraw, bid his wife goodnight, and presumably go to sleep, unaware that every salon, tavern, and European court was abuzz with speculation about what, exactly, was going on (or more accurately, not going on) in the royal bedchamber.
This would be funny—is funny—except that 18th-century monarchy was basically one long episode of Succession, and in this case, the entire future of France rested on whether a 19-year-old king could figure out how to do what barn animals accomplished without coaching. Marie Antoinette, a teenage girl who had been handed over to a foreign country and expected to produce royal offspring on command, bore the brunt of the court’s mockery. Satirical pamphlets, the social media of the day, depicted her as a barren, sexually frustrated wife, as if she alone could solve the mystery of her husband’s… static performance.
Historians have debated whether Louis suffered from a physical condition like phimosis (which would have made intercourse painful) or whether he was simply too emotionally repressed, confused, or indifferent to take the initiative. Either way, the problem was so severe that his own grandfather, Louis XV, tried to intervene. Worse, Marie Antoinette’s own mother, Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, started micromanaging from abroad, instructing her daughter to encourage her husband to consult a doctor—because nothing screams romantic intimacy like mom sending medical advice via courier.
Eventually, after years of awkwardness, mounting public ridicule, and subtle but undeniable political pressure, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette figured it out (whether through medical intervention or sheer trial and error remains unclear). Their first child was born in 1778—eight years after their wedding.
Of course, in true tragic irony, by the time Louis did manage to produce an heir, the entire French monarchy was already running out of time. Seven years of royal bedroom dysfunction may have been a scandal, but the real catastrophe was brewing outside the palace. When the French Revolution exploded a decade later, both Louis and Marie Antoinette would lose not just their thrones, but their heads.
Masabumi Hosono, who was the only Japanese passenger on the Titanic. While he survived, he was severely condemned in the United States and Japan.
The ship was supposed to be unsinkable. The world, at the turn of the century, believed in the infallibility of steel and rivets, in human progress, in the quiet and steady march of industry toward something greater. And Masabumi Hosono, a simple civil servant from Japan, believed, like the other passengers aboard the RMS Titanic, that his voyage was just another step in his life, an ocean crossed, a destination reached.
He was the only Japanese man on board. A foreign observer in a foreign place, his ticket carrying him into second class, not the stately dining halls of first, not the underbelly of steerage, but somewhere in between. Perhaps, on that fated night, he was already accustomed to being somewhere in between.
Then came the ice. Then came the sinking.
When the ship struck the iceberg, the call rang out: women and children first. The sea does not know race or class, but men do. And when men create rules in the face of disaster, some survive, and some do not.
Hosono found himself on the deck, watching the lifeboats fill. He later wrote that he had resigned himself to his fate, accepting the cold inevitability of the sea. But then, an opportunity—an officer calling for more passengers, for anyone who could fill the remaining space in a boat. A moment of hesitation, a decision, a step forward. He took a seat.
He lived.
And for the rest of his life, that would be his greatest crime.
Survival, in the aftermath of the Titanic, was not merely an act of self-preservation. It was, for men, a question of character. In the newspapers, stories of gallant gentlemen who had stood back, refusing their place in the boats, allowing death to take them with dignity, became legend. The ones who survived were scrutinized, judged, shamed. And for Hosono, it was worse.
Japan had a code. Bushido, the way of the warrior, the expectation of honorable sacrifice. In Japan, there was no honor in a man who had saved himself while others had perished. When he returned home, he was shunned, his reputation in ruins. He lost his job. His very existence became an embarrassment.
Even in America, where he had been merely an unknown foreigner aboard the ship, he became a spectacle. An article in The San Francisco Call called him a “stowaway in a lifeboat,” as if the act of surviving had been an act of cowardice. His name was dragged into the mythos of the Titanic, but not as one of the doomed, not as one of the brave, not as one of the mourned—but as one of the condemned.
Hosono faded into quiet obscurity, finding work again, keeping his head down. He kept the memories of that night to himself, the torn paper lifeboat ticket tucked away in his belongings, the written account he had made hidden from the world. He died in 1939, before the next great war would reshape ideas of honor and survival in ways no one on the Titanic could have imagined.
His story, long buried, was eventually found by his descendants. And when they shared it, the world saw it differently. A man had lived. He had taken a seat in a boat. He had not stolen it, nor forced his way in. He had survived. And that, in the end, was all.
IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad (who started the company when he was 17) flew coach, stayed in budget hotels, drove a 20 yo Volvo and always tried to get his haircuts in poor countries. He died at 91 in 2018 with an estimated net worth of almost $60 billion
Ingvar Kamprad understood something most people don’t: the way you handle small amounts of money is the way you handle big amounts of money. It’s why, even as a billionaire, he drove an old Volvo, bought his clothes at flea markets, and complained about paying $27 for a haircut in the Netherlands. For him, frugality wasn’t about necessity—it was a philosophy, a discipline that shaped both his life and the company he built.
IKEA became a global empire because Kamprad believed that waste was a failure of imagination. He saw luxury as an unnecessary indulgence, not just for himself but for his employees, his customers, and the business itself. Flying first class wasn’t just an expense—it was a symbol of inefficiency, a crack in the culture that could spread. He wrote The Testament of a Furniture Dealer to remind his employees that wasting resources, no matter how small, was unacceptable. Even writing on both sides of a piece of paper mattered.
That mindset wasn’t about being cheap—it was about focus. Kamprad understood that money, if not controlled, has a way of controlling you. He never let wealth distance him from the people who bought his furniture, because the moment he started living like a billionaire, he would stop thinking like the man who built IKEA in the first place. Most people spend their lives chasing money in the hope that it will eventually change them. Kamprad spent his life making sure that it never did.
