A Ticket From Michael Jordan’s First NBA Game Auctions Big $$$, Adam Sandler Gets Respect (Finally!), and Why Germany’s Envy of Silicon Valley Helped Wirecard Commit Massive Fraud

Ok, just a roundup of some great recent reads.

Adam Sandler doesn’t need your respect. But he’s getting it anyway. (Geoff Edgers, WaPo) — Rare sitdown with Adam Sandler featuring this great line from SNL creator Lorne Michaels

“The nature of comedy is you get the audience, you get the money,” says Michaels, SNL’s creator and executive producer. “Respect is the last thing you get.”

How a ticket from Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls debut became priceless. (Justin Heckert, ESPN) — Unripped ticket from Jordan’s first NBA game in 1984 finds its way to auction. But the story behind the owner is the most enjoyable part.

The ticket made him famous with his neighbors. They already liked Mike Cole anyway for his odd place in the equilibrium of the cul-de-sac, the tall, bald guy who waited too long to shovel his driveway when it snowed and then slipped on the ice while coming back from retrieving the mail.

The Dystopian Underworld of South Africa’s Illegal Gold Mines. (Kimon de Greef, New Yorker) — If this story doesn’t make you incredibly thankful for winning the birth lottery…..

When the country’s mining industry collapsed, a criminal economy grew in its place, with thousands of men climbing into some of the deepest shafts in the world, searching for leftover gold.

How One Guy’s Car Blog Became a $1 Billion Marketplace. (Ben Cohen, WSJ) — Bring a Trailer’s origin story.

A hybrid of Craigslist, eBay, Reddit and Sotheby’s that facilitated $1.37 billion in sales last year was not quite what Randy Nonnenberg had in mind when he started a car blog with a college buddy as a hobby.

How the Biggest Fraud in German History Unravelled. (Ben Taub, New Yorker) —Wirecard was a massive multibillion dollar fintech fraud. And at times it seems like German authorities were willing to look the other way, just out of hopeful pride that their country had finally launched a unicorn startup.

On February 18, 2019, Germany’s financial regulator, known as BaFin, issued a ban on creating new short bets against Wirecard, citing the company’s “importance for the economy.” “It was at that moment that they sided with criminals,” a German parliamentarian later said. The same day, prosecutors in Munich confirmed to a German newspaper that they had opened a criminal investigation. But they weren’t going after Wirecard — they were going after the F.T. [for an investigative takedown piece about Wirecard]

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