Buzz
“If I had a million dollars, I’d...” This is a common refrain in many imaginative conversations, where we dream of how we’d use our newfound wealth. Whether it’s exploring the world, making investments, or enjoying early retirement, we envision better futures. However, we certainly wouldn’t be splurging on things like embedding a diamond in our forehead or sponsoring hamster battles, which are just two examples of some of the ridiculous financial mistakes ahead.
From the extravagant to the absurd to the downright foolish, here are ten prime examples of money that most of us would have spent with far more sense.
10. The Diamond Dilemma
Any time a discussion involves rappers and their love of jewelry, it’s bound to touch on questionable purchases, but this one really takes the prize... or should we say carat? Rapper Lil Uzi Vert made headlines when he implanted a $24 million diamond in the center of his forehead.
His justification? He was concerned that he might lose the jewel if it were set in a more traditional piece, like a ring. So, a man who couldn’t trust himself to keep track of a $24 million ring decided he could trust himself enough to have a $24 million diamond implanted directly into his forehead.
According to Simon Babaev of the New York-based jeweler Eliantte & Co, Lil Uzi's massive diamond is securely in place thanks to a custom mounting that 'clips and locks' into position. Instead of using common materials like stainless steel or surgical-grade steel, Babaev explained that the entire setup is crafted from precious metals. 'There’s an entire mechanism involved, not a typical piercing. A specially engineered piece was created with millimeter precision to make this work,' he said. Quite the use of skill for something so senseless.
To ease any concerns, Babaev assures that an expert team carefully planned the entire procedure before embedding the jewel. 'We made sure Uzi had a consultant before doing anything. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision,' he stated.
And fear not, Babaev continued: the procedure is completely safe. 'As long as it’s properly maintained and cared for, it’s as safe as any other piercing.' Babaev, however, declined to comment on the 'safety' of someone eventually deciding to cut open Lil Uzi’s head while he sleeps to snatch the $24 million diamond.
9. Brazil’s Phantom Stadium
There’s no shortage of badly planned stadiums around the globe. In England, one could fill entire libraries with the negative reviews of London Stadium, home to the West Ham football club. Meanwhile, Florida’s Tropicana Field, home to the Tampa Bay Rays, is a domed baseball stadium with a roof too low for pop flies, painted in the exact color of... a baseball.
Yet, the most financially foolish sports venue might be Brazil’s Arena da Amazonia. Plopped in the middle of the Amazon, it was built in time for the 2014 World Cup, with a hefty price tag of $300 million. In a testament to the country’s stellar safety record, three workers tragically lost their lives during its construction, which dragged on for a grueling four years.
The Arena da Amazonia hosted four matches during the World Cup, plus a few more soccer games for the 2016 Summer Olympics. Since then, its 40,000-seat stadium rarely attracts more than 1,000 spectators for local matches. The venue’s operational expenses are three times higher than its revenue.
Arena da Amazonia is far from the only sports venue built for a one-off international event that now serves as a monument to wasted funds. Other examples include Montreal’s costly Olympic Stadium and Beijing’s flashy Bird’s Nest, the centerpiece for the 2008 Summer Olympics.
8. Rodent Rumble
For over twenty years, researchers at Northwestern University in Illinois received National Institutes of Health funding to observe hamsters battle each other. The project, which sounds even more fascinating if you're high, reportedly secured more than $3 million in funding, including over $300,000 in 2015 alone. That’s a massive budget for some intense rodent brawls.
Some of these highly educational (and even more entertaining) experiments involved a ‘roid rage test in the hamsters’ home turf: they were injected with steroids, then placed with another hamster to see if the drugged rodents became more territorial and aggressive. In other trials, a sober hamster faced off against one that had been dosed with cocaine.
Other studies examined whether hamsters who’d had two weeks of regular fights became more aggressive. This research led to one of the most legendary thesis titles in history: 'Prior fighting experience increases aggression in Syrian hamsters: implications for a role of dopamine in the winner effect.'
The experiments ended after animal rights activists—lacking a sense of humor—successfully pressured the university to shut down the program. Sadly, no funds were made available for rodent rehab for those hamsters jacked up on cocaine.
7. Crushing Student Loans? Enter Mudd
This refers to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California.
The two priciest universities in the United States are (1) the University of Chicago and (2) Columbia. Both are prestigious institutions with top-ten academic reputations. A degree from either school provides such incredible career opportunities that paying upwards of $300,000 for a four-year education seems like a solid investment.
The third most expensive college, however, is a bit less well-known but still famous for its academic excellence... Oh wait, it’s Harvey Mudd College, a $79,539-per-year school that not many have heard of.
Harvey Mudd College does have a unique focus: its curriculum is heavily centered on science and engineering. Still, many other more recognizable colleges offer similar programs without the risk of a future employer seeing a graduate’s resume and thinking, “Wait, where did they go again?”
An honorable mention goes to Scripps College, an all-women’s institution, whose $77,588 yearly tuition ranks it as the sixth most expensive school in the country, despite its relatively low profile.
6. A Legendary Box Office Failure
In 2017, Warner Brothers Studios released “Arthur: Legend of the Sword,” an epic fantasy action film directed and co-written by Guy Ritchie. This tribute to the legendary king and his Knights of the Round Table was meant to kick off a six-movie franchise.
The goal was to create a Medieval version of the Fast & Furious franchise, combining horse-riding action with the hope of launching a profitable, long-running series. To fuel this vision, Warner Bros. gave Ritchie and his team a generous $175 million production budget.
However, critics weren’t impressed. The film holds a poor 30% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with the critical consensus stating, “King Arthur: Legend of the Sword piles mounds of modern action flash on an age-old tale – and wipes out much of what made it a classic story in the first place.”
The general audience agreed. In its opening weekend in the US, Legends of the Sword landed in third place, grossing only $15 million across 3,200 screens. That’s a lot of empty theaters. The studio ended up recovering just $25 million from its investment, making it the biggest box office disaster of all time.
Completing the top three historical movie money-losers are (#2) 2003’s “Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas,” which lost $125 million; and (#3) 2012’s “John Carter,” which lost $122 million.
5. Dumpster Diving for a Fortune
In 2013, James Howells, an IT worker from the UK, was cleaning out his house. He came across two identical hard drives and decided to part with one. He drove to a landfill in Newport, South Wales, and tossed it.
Howells was an early adopter of Bitcoin, accumulating 7,500 bitcoins when they were cheap. He had stored his digital fortune on a hard drive as an investment. By 2013, each bitcoin was worth $17,000, meaning he was unknowingly sitting on a nest egg worth over $125 million.
Unfortunately, the crucial cryptographic “private key” needed to access his Bitcoin fortune was on… you guessed it… the very hard drive he had just discarded at the landfill.
Eight years later, Howells’ discarded digital fortune is now valued at a staggering $280 million. To this day, local authorities have rejected his requests to search the landfill for his lost treasure, citing environmental and budgetary concerns. In an attempt to sweeten the deal, Howells has offered to donate 25% of the haul — around $71 million — to a “Covid Relief Fund” for the city if he succeeds in recovering the hard drive.
As of late January, the Newport City Council has turned down Howells’ nine-figure treasure hunt, with no signs of reconsideration. A town spokesman explained, “The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds, without any guarantee of either finding it or that it would still be in working order.” It seems Howells is out of luck, with his digital treasure well and truly lost.
4. So Dumb They Made It A Day
The most revered day in American sports is April 15. That’s the date in 1947 when Jackie Robinson stepped onto the field as a Brooklyn Dodger, breaking baseball’s racial barrier and cementing the game as America’s national pastime.
The most ridiculed day in American sports might be July 1. On that day each year, the New York Mets pay a player more than a million dollars… despite the fact that he hasn’t played a single game this CENTURY.
Here’s the tale: By 1999, the Mets were fed up with Bobby Bonilla, a highly-paid flop who failed to deliver on his promise. The team decided it was time to part ways with the aging third baseman, even though they still owed him $5.9 million for the 2000 season.
But rather than simply buying out his contract and ending it there, the Mets chose a strange arrangement that would defer payments until 2011, as if $6 million could make or break a franchise valued at half a billion dollars in 2002.
This deferment came with an 8% annual interest. As a result, since 2011, Bonilla has received around $1 million each July 1 – a date now celebrated in baseball as Bobby Bonilla Day – and will continue to get these yearly payments until 2035. By the end of the deal, Bonilla will be 72 years old, and the Mets will have handed out nearly $30 million to defer a $5.9 million debt.
3. A Trillion-dollar Paperweight
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… well, yes, it’s a plane. Only this one doesn’t fly, and it cost more than a TRILLION dollars to develop. In late February, the US Air Force confirmed what had long been suspected: a warplane more than 20 years in development turned out to be a complete failure.
In the 1990s, the Air Force embarked on creating a new generation of fighter jets aimed to be lighter and more advanced than the models before it. The plan was to replace the aging fleet of Cold War-era F-16 fighter jets.
Then the notorious US military-industrial complex stepped in. Over the course of (far too much) time, the once lightweight replacement grew bulkier and pricier as the Air Force and lead contractor Lockheed Martin stuffed it with an endless list of upgrades. Two decades later, the sluggish, cumbersome 25-ton “stealth” aircraft became the very problem it was supposed to address.
“They tried to make the F-35 do too much,” succinctly pointed out Dan Grazier, an analyst with the Project on Government Oversight in Washington, D.C. The final cost for this bloated disaster nearly hit a jaw-dropping $1.7 TRILLION. That amount is enough to give every single one of the 330 million living Americans a $5,000 cash handout.
What’s next? More of the same: in a nostalgic yet wasteful salute to the 90s, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown Jr. recently unveiled plans to design a lightweight fighter jet to replace the old F-16s. See you in 2040, General.
2. Fast Track to the Poorhouse
In 2008, California unveiled an ambitious plan: a decade-long initiative to build a high-speed rail line connecting its two most influential cities, Los Angeles and San Francisco. The goal was to offer an eco-friendly alternative to flights between the southern and northern regions of the vast state, while also narrowing the bullet train gap between the United States and other developed countries.
The initial price estimate was staggering: $33 billion, with services expected to launch by 2020. But many questioned whether the costs would justify the benefits, especially the wisdom of putting a high-speed rail station in Los Angeles, a sprawling, car-dependent city.
As we now know, 2020 has come and gone, and still, there’s no sign of high-speed rail in California. True to form, the state’s bureaucracy – filled with committees, permits, and legal hurdles – has pushed the project’s cost to over $100 billion, with no clear end in sight.
This translates to a jaw-dropping $192 million per mile for the 520-mile rail line. And that’s for a project with no ready-made ridership – Californians are not accustomed to taking the train due to the vastness of the state – in a place where the state is currently grappling with a $575 billion debt.
1. Bloomberg or Bust
In late 2019, things were looking grim for the Democratic Party establishment in the United States. Joe Biden, the presumed frontrunner and former Vice President, was falling short in debates and polls, paving the way for Bernie Sanders, a self-identified Socialist, to seize an opportunity at the presidential nomination.
Enter Michael Bloomberg, a towering 5'6” billionaire media mogul. A centrist so committed to his politics that he had served as a Republican mayor for three terms in New York City. Bloomberg's strategy for the primaries was anything but conventional: instead of competing in the February states, he focused entirely on Super Tuesday, a crucial date in early March when over a dozen states cast their votes.
What followed was an overwhelming media campaign the likes of which American politics had never seen. Bloomberg poured $188 million into his campaign in the fourth quarter of 2019, with $132 million of that dedicated to television ads and $8.2 million on digital platforms. By February, the total expenditure had surpassed HALF A BILLION dollars, marking the most expensive primary campaign in history.
However, despite the immense spending, Bloomberg’s campaign faltered. He never finished higher than third place in any of the 14 Super Tuesday contests, eventually suspending his bid. Under the Democratic primary's proportional voting system, Bloomberg ended up with just 58 of the 1,991 delegates required for the nomination, which means he spent $17,241,379 per delegate.
