10 Times People Made Money in Very Crazy Ways

by Unbelievable Facts5 years ago

6 Born in extreme poverty, a Chinese woman began to sell her chili sauce, Lao Gan Ma, that she originally made for her noodle shop after finding it to be more popular than the noodles. She is now a billionaire with a net worth of $1.05 billion as of 2015. 

Lao gan ma
Image credits: Globaltimes, Walmart

Born in 1947 in the remote mountain village of Zun’yi, Guizhou Province, Tao Huabi was too poor to go to school, and her husband died when she was 20 years old. To support her two sons, Tao set up a noodle shop in 1989 in the Nanming District of Guiyang. Her shop, which sold noodles simply mixed with her own spicy sauce with soybeans, flourished. The poor students to whom she used to give discounts and extra food came to call her “godmother.”

Tao soon realized that what clicked with her customers weren’t the noodles, but her hot sauce. People would come to her to buy the sauce rather than the noodles, and other shops used her sauce with their noodles and did good business. When, in the 1990s, truck drivers working at the construction of a new highway nearby would pass her shop, Tao would give them free samples to take home.

Her word-of-mouth advertising paid off, and people from outside the city began coming to buy Tao’s sauce. She then turned her restaurant into a hot sauce and condiments shop. When she was 49, she decided to start her own hot sauce company and sell the product Lao Gan Ma (Old Godmother). Twelve years later, she was earning a revenue of $540 million, and in 2015, with a net worth of $1.05 billion, she was included in Forbes list of the richest families in China. (source)

7 In 2013, a Chinese millionaire sold cans of fresh air for $0.80 each as Beijing’s air pollution began to reach high levels. In just 10 days, he sold over eight million cans.

Recycling entrepreneur, philanthropist, and environmental activist as well as one of the richest people in China, Chen Guangbiao, is known for his weird, charitable endeavors. With air pollution becoming more and more hazardous in Beijing resulting in an increase in respiratory problems, he decided to raise awareness among the public. So, in January, he began to sell cans of fresh air, saying that, “If we don’t act in the next 10 years, our descendants will have to carry oxygen tanks and wear masks all the time.”

The cans also came in different flavors such as “pristine Tibet” and “post-industrial Taiwan.” During the next 10 days, Chen sold over eight million cans, the proceeds of which were to be donated to charity at five Chinese Yuan ($0.80) each. (1, 2)

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8 In 2005, an English student created a website full of a pixel grid, blocks of which he sold at $1 per pixel to display ads. He sold all the pixels, raising a total of $1,037,100 for his university fee. 

Alex Tew
Image credits: Calm, Milliondollarhomepage

On August 26, Alex Tew from Wiltshire, England, launched the website MillionDollarHomepage in order to raise money for his university education. The home page had one million pixels (1,000 x 1,000), and he sold each pixel for $1 in 10 x 10 blocks. The blocks would hold an image with a hyperlink to the related website, and when the cursor hovers on the link, a slogan would be displayed. Needless to say, the website garnered much attention.

On January 1, 2006, Tew auctioned the final 1,000 pixels on eBay, and they were sold on 11th for $38,100 making him a total of $1,037,100. The website was subjected to DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack during the auction and was down for a whole week while its security was upgraded. As of 2019, almost 40% of the original links in the website suffered link rot, common as the site is restructured or falls into disuse causing the links to go to pages that are permanently unavailable. (source)

9 Since 1980, a man who claimed ownership of the Moon because of a loophole in the UN’s Outer Space Treaty began selling lunar real estate and made millions off it. 

Moon
Image credits: Pixabay

According to the Outer Space Treaty first established in 1967 by the United Nations, all outer space comes under international commons and forbids any nation or anyone from claiming to own space or any part of it. Before that and even after that, several people have claimed ownership and sold extraterrestrial objects to gullible people.

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One of them is Dennis Hope. He sent the UN a letter declaring his ownership of the Moon, and when he didn’t hear back from them, he decided to use the loophole. The treaty doesn’t say anything about individuals owning extraterrestrial real estate.

This American entrepreneur started a business called the Lunar Embassy Commission in 1980 which sells extraterrestrial real estate. He claims Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, the two former US Presidents, were customers of his. The method he uses to allocate land on Moon is to close his eyes and randomly point at its map. His price is $20 per acre, and as of 2009, he claims to have sold 2.5 million one-acre plots. (1, 2)

10 In 1984, Michael Larson, a contestant of Press Your Luck, noticed that the random patterns of the game board aren’t exactly random when he used stop-motion on his VCR. He simply memorized the sequence and won 45 consecutive spins, earning a total of $110,237.

Larson was a self-described, unemployed, ice cream truck driver when he went on the show. In that single game, he was slightly uncertain the first time and hit a Whammy. But after that, he won 45 consecutive spins. The game, which aired on CBS, went on for so long that it had to be made into two parts. After a while, Larson lost concentration and passed his remaining spins as he was missing the target squares.

Later, CBS investigated Larson and found that he memorized the patterns on the board. However, they determined that it was not cheating and his winnings were not taken back. This prompted them to reprogram the board to operate with up to 32 patterns so that other contestants wouldn’t be able to memorize like Larson. (source)

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