A roofing supplier bought inventory for $4 each on September 7, 2001. After 9/11, prices jumped to $34, and he rode that windfall into nine-figure land deals and hotels in his twenties. The 2008 financial crisis erased it all. By 2010 he was living under a bridge on property he once owned.
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Will you take it for $4 a roll? I said, I'll buy two trucks at $3 a roll and have it here by next Friday. He said, done. That was September 7, 2001. Do you know what happened four days later? No. It was 9 11, 2001. The price of that roll went from $4 a roll to $34 a roll. And I just bought a warehouse full for $4 a roll. I put four. Four roofing companies out of business. Like when he was saying he went and got his competitors workers, I went and just got my competitors. I realized at 24 years old that I no longer needed to be the guy that did the stuff. I needed to be the guy that knew the guys that did the stuff. And I went out and I got 85 people to work for me between the ages of 23 and 26 years old. And life was good. Life was so good that by 2005, I was doing all kinds of crazy stuff. I had a roofing company. I had 480 acres of land doing developments at nine figures in the bank, and I'm not even 30 yet. That's dumb money. I don't want to cuss, but we have another word for it. It's called fu money. Right? I had fu money. And when you under 30 years old, you got a few money, you can do really dumb stuff. So some of the d stuff I did was like, you know, take over hotels in Orlando, you know, throw big parties just because I could. Love the raid scene back then. Yeah, it was crazy dumb stuff. There's a whole documentary on that we won't get into. But then something crazy happened in 2007. It was called the bond market. Does anybody know what happened in 2008? Anybody got an idea? Anybody suffer in 2008? Yeah. Okay. So all my money and all my land went away. By 2010, I was living under a bridge in a subdivision that I developed and now had a cattle pasture on it instead of the golf course that I planned.