The Most Absurd Ways People Have Gotten Rich Quick

Money, money, money... it's a rich man's world!

Now, imagine you suddenly find a windfall.

There are ways to acquire loads of cash... LEGALLY!!

I've heard of these rumors.

And I think we all want to know more.

Redditor randomprogrammer23 wanted to hear about all of the ways people have found sudden wealth, so they asked:

"What’s the most ridiculously absurd way you’ve seen someone get rich in no time?"

$1

"Back in the early 2000s, this one kid figured out how to make a website. He made a million-pixel square and sold each pixel as ad space for $1 each. So he made 1 million dollars. It became a game for people to buy 1 ad slot and try and find your ad."

- tjbelleville

Agencylife Bingo GIF by MX PlayerGiphy

The Princess

"A friend hooked up with a girl at a college party. They dated intermittently, nothing serious. Years later, they reconnected and eventually got engaged. Then she told him she was a heiress to a large company and was worth 10 million. The dude hasn’t had a real job in 10 years."

- CauseN3ffect

Go Daddy

"My little neighbor kid years ago, who was home-schooled, started buying all the domain names in the town where I sold real estate. This was circa 2000 and I didn’t really understand why I should care about any of that when he tried to get me to buy up a bunch of the names for the town. Long story short, GO Daddy bought out this 12-year-old kid for 2 million dollars. I still see the kid on Facebook traveling around the world & doing all kinds of cool stuff. He’s about 35 or so now."

- Golfnpickle

Tumbleweed

"A story I remember is a project in business school to create a product, sell it, and present the results. This guy decides to collect tumbleweeds and sell them. He does very well. He quit college and started a tumbleweed rental business for people making movies (or whoever else rents a tumbleweed, I am no expert). Since he was the only tumbleweed guy, he had a monopoly on the tumbleweed renting market."

- defdoa

Pure Luck

"A friend of my brother told him to invest 100 dollars in bitcoin in 2010. The friend did, my brother did but sold after having a 50% ROI."

"They both forgot about it for about 9 years until the friend heard on the news that Bitcoin was going crazy. He had like 500 bitcoins that he never thought anything about, even forgot that he had (he thought he had sold along with my brother, but he forgot to do so on that day and just never thought about it)."

"He sold it all and became a millionaire with literally no work whatsoever, just pure luck and lack of long-term memory."

- peilom

For Fun

"This guy bought bitcoin 'for fun' and ended up becoming incredibly wealthy when bitcoin took off and bought a large house for him and his family."

- SleepAfterWork

Make It Rain Money GIF by Tim and EricGiphy

The Old Job

"My friend is an electrician. At his old job, the factory was shutting down, and they were selling everything off. In the end, they sold the copper rights to the building, and he and another guy put in a bid for 500.00 and won. They each pulled in about 60,000.00 worth of copper in two weeks, then they ran out of time, and the building was torn down."

- Rollthembones1989

The Trust Fund

"My buddy dated this girl in school whose mom started dating and then married a very rich TV and IP creator. He sold some IP during the buy-up by streaming services. Well, then my buddy married the daughter for their wedding the rich TV creator gave them a $100m trust fund. So basically he married someone who he met when they both were poor and became rich because of her mom."

- Moron-Whisperer

The eBay Way

"My mom got a frankly ugly-looking oil painting for free from my brother's thrift shop coz he couldn't sell it, not even to a blind shopper who went there she hated it, but the thing was so big, my brother needed it out of the shop to use that space for stuff that actually sold, so she took it home, looked it up, and once it was appraised turns out it was worth £10000 because it was by some artist that is only well known by the art community, so ugly as f*** painting went on eBay, the winning bid was a few pounds over £15000, while she liked the money she was more delighted that she didn't have to put that eyesore up on a wall in her house."

- welshwonka

Less than a Year

"Hawk Tuah did the influencer speedrun - went viral off a random moment, started a merch line, podcast and hired a media team, went on live TV, then torpedoed her entire fanbase by rug pull scamming them through crypto. All in a span of less than a year. And the sad thing is that viral moment was like the dumbest thing ever."

- Ok-Amount-1562

Staffing

"Oh, a guy I know had a scam running - he opened a staffing business where he had people paying him to connect them to jobs in local corporate offices and such. It was usually stuff in sales and temp work - but he made tons of money doing it."

"Anyway, he eventually got sued by 3-4 people who claimed they paid him for his services, and he never delivered them jobs that lasted beyond a couple of weeks. He closes the business and dissolves everything, moves to another city - and f**king does it again - the guy is loaded and had no trouble securing investors and business partners. Again, he gets sued. Closes the business and starts over a 3rd time."

- will_write_for_tacos

The First Breath

"Lots of people get rich just by being born. They’ve never done anything to merit it. They never will have to. Their parents may be good, maybe bad. But they will have an advantage in life from their first breath."

- pabodie

Keeping Up With The Kardashians Reaction GIF by E!Giphy

Appalachia

"A girl I knew and her siblings inherited a bunch of land in the Appalachia, the siblings all wanted the flat ground along the rivers and basically bullied her into taking the hilly areas that were undevelopable. 3 years later, the oil and gas boom happened and because she was the highest point on the property, she owned the best access point to the minerals. She made probably north of a couple mil. Fulfilled her dream of owning and breeding racehorses. Her family barely made a couple of grand."

- LilMissMuddy

Movie Stuff

"People who randomly invest in a random stock that, for some reason, rockets. This isn’t something you can reliably do, though, especially with AI in the game now."

"Besides that though, it’s all movie stuff."

"The rich get rich from stealing wages and inheriting stolen wages from their parents, and then pretend they’re self-made, and the vast majority of entrepreneurs have a seriously solid financial start."

"I think it’s still a good method to just follow Congress trades though, if you’ve got enough money to do that. I don’t, or I would."

- jetstobrazil

BOOM

"My friend got hit by a car and used the insurance settlement to put a down payment on some condos he rented and flipped then sold after a boom and made millions on the deal. Good old-fashioned gentrification."

- InsomniaTroll

Awkward Make It Rain GIF by Lilly SinghGiphy

Well, what're the quickest ways you've heard of someone getting rich?