“What’s The Most Ridiculously Absurd Way You’ve Seen Someone Get Rich In No Time?” (30 Answers)

My uncle invented micro machines. Little toy cars in the early 90’s.
EDIT: when I see my uncle next I will show him this and all the people he brought joy to.

Kim Kardashian f****d a low rent rapper and got her mom to sell the tape. As far as ridiculous and absurd goes this is about as good as it gets. .

My cousin recorded the audio of a fan for 8 hours about a decade ago and now has north of a billion “white noise” YouTube views and is one of the top podcasts on Spotify.

A friend of mine once struck it rich overnight by selling "designer" pet rocks online, complete with little outfits and backstories. It was a wild idea that somehow took off!

Go to work for a little startup called Dell straight after college in Austin, Texas in the 80s. Get a bunch of meaningless ‘future shares’ as a sort of ‘welcome to this startup’ sweetener. Work there for a while, company goes public, meaningless shares were suddenly worth a fortune. Epitome of ‘right place at the right time’.

Forgot that he mined a dozen or so Bitcoins over a decade ago on his spare notebook.

Remembered three years ago that he still had that laptop in a drawer.

My uncle's company made wood shaving tools. One day martha stewart used one to grate cheese on her tv show. Thus the Microplane was born.

I once knew a guy who bought a lottery ticket on a whim while waiting in line for coffee. He won, quit his job, and spent the next year traveling the world on a “find myself” tour. He came back with a massive tattoo of a pineapple on his chest and a story that made him richer in life than most millionaires. Turns out, the real jackpot was the freedom to be absurd.

Friend of mine started selling her socks after wearing them at her retail job. She started making $7k a month just from that alone.

The person who made bank by livestreaming themselves sleeping on TikTok. Literally getting paid to nap—today’s dream job!

Ok so university lecturer at my uni, he was a deep sea biologist. He was given a sea slug which had been collected on an automated underwater vehicle dive.

In the mucus of this sea slug, he isolated a bacteria which produced a protein digesting enzyme which worked at low temperatures. He sold this biological enzyme to one of the big company's I think proctor and gamble.

The whole "wash your clothes at 30/ low temperatures" biological washing powder etc. that was him .

Went from driving a ford escort,.to a jaguar, to retiring in about a week.

The guy that made the Million Dollar Website.
Selling 1 pixel advertisements for 1$ must be some of the most absurdly genius ways of making loads of money.

Friend of an friend sold d***s in the early 2010s. Some sales were done in bitcoin. Went to jail for five years and came out with a what was now a few million in Bitcoin that he didn't touch during it's biggest booms. I suppose it took a decade but what had seemed like a huge f**k up left him an accidental millionaire and meant he didn't need to return to a life of crime when he got out. Went on to live a frugal lifestyle as a humble "crypto trader".

He and his brother developed an online game where two cowboys walk away from each other, then turn around and shoot and one dies.


The game was entirely automated. You could just bet money on who wins, and if you got it right you would x1.95 your money, with 5% going to the house.


They got unfathomably rich. Saw them race sports cars around the world. Last time I checked though, they went to prison for tax fraud.

My brother's friend worked minimum wage jobs. Then he and his wife started buying lube in large quantities from overseas and repackaging it in much smaller quantities in their garage and reselling it on Amazon.

Really just classic middleman stuff, but they made SO MUCH money that they quit their day jobs almost immediately and haven't looked back.

Do y’all remember silly bandz? My friend’s dad came up with rainbow silly bandz and became a millionaire from that.

I went to high school with Bo Burnham. One day he had a youtube video go viral. Like a week later he was represented by the same agent as Drew Carey.

Ironically, the kid who joked about being unpopular was suddenly really popular due to the success from his jokes.

A good friend of mine started trading stocks after retirement. He trades ETFs everyday in his underwear. He does it all on his phone or ipad. He retired 3 yrs ago. So far this year he's made $1.3 million. It is ridiculous.

Not rich but my friend told me about how he went to the strip club one night downtown. He stayed until 3:00 a.m. and then when he left, he walked outside to find a ton of $20 bills just blowing in the wind down the street, so he grabbed as much as he could. He couldn't explain where it came from, no one was around at the time and the streets were empty.

A friend was employee number 8 at a tech startup and resigned after they listed on the stock exchange with $35 million.