In the history of almost getting extraordinarily rich, few stories come close to what happened to Sanmay Ved at 1:20am on September 29th, when he purchased Google.com for $12. Not a typo. Google had somehow failed to renew its own domain name, and Ved, a former Google employee, noticed it sitting there available on Google's own domain registration service and bought it.
He owned Google.com for one minute before the transaction was reversed. Google's way of saying thank you was an offer of $6,006.13, which, if you squint, spells Google. They doubled it when Ved donated the money to charity. A man bought the most valuable web address on earth for $12 and got to keep it for sixty seconds. The story has everything.
The same year that Sanmay Ved briefly owned Google.com, a Welsh IT engineer named James Howells was doing a routine house clear-out and accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 Bitcoin. In 2013, Bitcoin was worth almost nothing. By the time he realized what he had done, the drive was buried somewhere beneath thousands of tonnes of waste in a Newport landfill.
His Bitcoin had become worth somewhere between $500 million and $1 billion, depending on the day you checked. Howells spent the next twelve years attempting to convince the local council to let him excavate the site. They said no every single time. He has since abandoned the search entirely. The hard drive is still there, and his regret may well outlive it.
If these stories teach us anything, it is that the simplest idea is the one worth billions, and nothing proves that quite like the Post-it note. The story begins with a scientist named Spencer Silver, who invented an adhesive that was not strong enough to permanently bond anything. A solution, in other words, to a problem nobody had.
It sat unused for years until a colleague realized it was perfect for keeping bookmarks in place without damaging the page. The three-inch yellow square that resulted from that generates an estimated $3.47 billion annually and can be found in virtually every office, school, and kitchen in the world. The moral of the story is to never throw away your failed ideas because you might end up on this list, too.
The thing that will probably get you the richest with the least amount of effort is winning the lottery. But the odds of winning a major lottery jackpot are, statistically speaking, not odds at all. Your chances of hitting the Powerball top prize sit at around 1 in 292.2 million. You are approximately 300 times more likely to be struck by lightning in your lifetime than to win.
And yet. In 2023, Edwin Castro won the $2.04 billion Powerball jackpot, the largest lottery prize in history. After taxes, he walked away with a lump sum of $628.5 million. Castro was an architecture consultant before the win. He is something considerably different now. The lightning struck.
Sadly, most of us will never invent a Post-It 2.0 or be struck by a lottery lightning bolt. But we can dream, right? Dream of weekdays on a golf course, summer on a yacht, and Michelin meals every other night. Maybe even just buying the name-brand cheese would be good enough for you.
The gap between the people on this list and everyone else is not always intelligence or ambition, or vision, either. Sometimes it is timing. Sometimes it is an accident. The uncomfortable truth is that the next story like this is already happening somewhere. The only question is who is paying attention.
Do you know a guy who knows a guy who struck it rich, quick? Tell us about it in the comments!
