Wow. That's a lot buyers. You likely know some of them.
It’s a little over 0.2% of the current US adult population.
That’s not a lot of people in general.
It is a lot of people for the king to have scammed.
590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
81–90 of 122 posts
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that…
He's estimated to have made $10-12m in the 80's. I had some of the details wrong btw, you had to mail in $120 for the chance at 4 tickets, and he only held it for 6-8 weeks. Part of what was so shitty though was that very many of his fans couldn't really afford what was about a months rent but scrapped it together anyways. Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for…
>Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money.
Your own article contradicts your narrative that Jackson was somehow doing it for evil/greed reasons:
1. The scheme seems to have been cooked up by the promoters, with Jackson himself being against it
2. The "he filtered by zip code" allegation was entirely unsubstantiated, and seemed to be a side effect of making the tickets expensive.
3. Jackson donated his earnings to charity, so the "... for his own profit" claim was also questionable.
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#83It used to be that the thought process of receiving a portion of sale money before delivering any product allowed the company to pay suppliers and keep afloat as they drove towards the finish line of delivery. Now it seems the grifting-meta is to make promises around a product with no plans on delivering it, take in pre-order money, and then just park it in an investment account to grow during a bull market. By the t…
[flagged]
> Then when the ticket winners were selected, he filtered by zip code so he had an almost entirely white audience
How did that work in the 80s? Did he spend days and weeks poring through (paper) census data and correlating it with ZIP codes? Did he use VisiCalc on an Apple ][ or Lotus 1-2-3 on an IBM PC?
Whatever his other misdeeds, I never got a racist vibe off MJ.
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#84Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why is this getting downvoted?
The many followers.
Or bots, but yea the many followers is also likely.
If you check news.ycombinator.com/active regularly instead of the main feed you’ll see that anything critical of the king or Musk is regularly flagged to oblivion quite quickly.
It’s one of the failure modes of how self moderation works in this site.
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bait and switch is a scam.
I don't disagree. As far I understand this is 100 dollar deposit up until now. So the customer would have to actually go through the order process where they would see the updated website with new specs etc. so it's not fully a switch yet. I am from the EU and no a lawyer so I would not know the legality of it all.
You recognize it’s a bait and switch scam but don’t want to call it a scam, and then you hedge with claiming you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Why don’t you say you’re opinion directly instead of trying to put it out there and having a fallback to defend yourself when you are properly called out.
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's estimated to have made $10-12m in the 80's. I had some of the details wrong btw, you had to mail in $120 for the chance at 4 tickets, and he only held it for 6-8 weeks. Part of what was so shitty though was that very many of his fans couldn't really afford what was about a months rent but scrapped it together anyways. Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for…
>Maybe it was a poor financial decision on their part, but he took advantage of those people for his own profit, when he didn't even really need the money. Your own article contradicts your narrative that Jackson was somehow doing it for evil/greed reasons: 1. The scheme seems to have been cooked up by the promoters, with Jackson himself being against it 2. The "he filtered by zip code" allegation was entirely unsubs…
1. "Oh no don't make me more money. Okay if you insist..."
2. Kansas City was 30% black but his audience at that show was almost entirely white. I have a hard time believing none of them could afford a ticket.
3. Yeah which he announced after the public letter from his 11 year-old fan which had a ton of press coveeage saying how it wasn't fair
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#88Recent and related comment: "I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094961
It seems to me that it feels that the world, or at least the US, decided that far far worse things are acceptable too.
Not easy to be a parent and explain to kids that no, this is not how the world should be run. How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#89Recent and related comment: "I can’t prove it, but it feels like the world recently decided that spamming/scamming is acceptable..." https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094961
It seems to me that it feels that the world, or at least the US, decided that far far worse things are acceptable too. Not easy to be a parent and explain to kids that no, this is not how the world should be run. How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
> How do we expect them to have any confidence in the institutions and the rule of law ?
They shouldn't. The reality is that the rich and powerful have never been particularly beholden to the law.
For a while, there was a lot of energy spent maintaining the illusion that we had rule of law, and I don't doubt there are some who believed it was an ideal to strive for that we'd get closer and closer to over time, but Trump and his administration stopped pretending.
Re: 590k buyers paid $59M for Trump's gold phone, but not one has shipped
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
>Michael Jackson did this with concert tickets, sort of. You had to pay hundreds of dollars for the chance to buy a ticket to his mega tour, to be refunded if you didn't manage to get one. People send their money in and have to wait like three months to find out if they managed to get one. Meanwhile, he's making money by the dump truck on the interest from all this. This doesn't pass the sniff test. If we assume that…
I referenced the article and the math seems fine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_Tour_(The_Jacksons)#Ti...
Tour attendance: 2.5 million Only 1 in 10 purchases were honored, so purchase for 25 million tickets were attempted. $750 million in Money market at 7% for 6 to 8 weeks.
So, 6 to 8 million in interest depending on the weeks (6 to 8) in money market.