[Scoundreller]

> In 2000, when the Hearst Corporation was facing antitrust concerns (including from Fang) over its acquisition of the San Francisco Chronicle, she acquired the San Francisco Examiner from them for $100 while also receiving a $66 million subsidy from Hearst to run the Examiner for three years, becoming the first Asian American to own a major daily newspaper in the US.[4][7][5] In 2004, she sold it to Philip Anschutz for $11 million.[7]

How do I get this kind of deal?

[seanhunter]

Most of the time when people acquire something for $1 or $100 or whatever the deal includes them assuming some of the existing liabilities. Sometimes you have to pay a consideration of value to make the contract enforceable but the $100 isn't what she's actually providing, she's probably underwritten some of the creditors or agreed to pay staff and suppliers or whatever. It's not actually $100 is the whole amount she would have been on the hook for.

[rsynnott]

I suspect for every person who's bought a company for nothing, and ended up in profit, there are _many_ people who've bought a company for nothing, and ended up blowing millions on it. Unless you're really good at this sort of thing and/or lucky it may not be a deal you _want_.

[Workaccount2]

The whole set of wealthy people is a small subset of the tried-to-get-wealthy set.

Society has a hyper-fixation on the winners, and is largely blind to the much larger set of losers. "School of Hard Knocks", the social media channel where the kid goes around interviewing wealthy and ultra wealthy individuals about how they made it, has a very common theme: "Be willing to take risks".

This pretty much translates to "I put it all on black 3 times, and it hit 3 times". He never interviews the losers.

[OkayPhysicist]

It's not a subset, as there are plenty of people who are wealthy because someone up their family tree tried and succeeded at getting wealthy, and subsequent generations simply failed to be in the "actively try to get poor" set.

[conception]

By plenty you mean most. Class movement is generally a fiction.

[psunavy03]

The difference is that "I put it all on black 3 times" is purely up to chance, whereas business is generally not. There is luck involved, but skill or at least expertise about what the market will support still comes into play.

Someone who knows what they're doing has a much greater likelihood of success, unlike when you put it all on black.

[Workaccount2]

Correct, you have to work hard and know what you are doing just to get a chance to sit at the table.

[bluGill]

It helps to have success. I know someone who the bank called (before I was born - likely 1960s) to buy a nearly bankrupt plumbing business. He turned the company around and sold it for a lot of money a few years later. However the banks called he has a history of success running businesses. He did a similar story with a trash pickup service a different time.