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Accidental Cash Cows

The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it in your back pocket. - Kin Hubbard

Ted Harrison

Sep 12, 2023

Sometimes money just falls in your lap. Rarely, but sometimes. Let’s jump in.

The Daily Rabbit Hole: Where did the term cash cow even come from?

“And the cow requires only basic shelter and food, not heavy maintenance.”

Charlie Ayers - a name I can almost guarantee you haven’t heard before - is minorly famous for taking a $45,000 salary as the head chef at a small startup company in Silicon Valley and turning it into a $26 million fortune. The man made some cash by serving up some cows, and by taking the risk that the “other benefits” offered at … Google (the startup) would pay off in the long run.

I want to be like Charlie.

The ‘Wait, What?’ Vortex: The Beverly Hillbillies were worth HOW MUCH?

Stumbling into cash was the entire premise of the show, but I bet you didn’t realize ….
“In 1962, the Clampett fortune was $25 million, and when adjusted for inflation, it's actually closer to $215 million by today's standards. By the end of the show, that number had reached $100 million, which would be approximately $850 million in our current economic age.”

Anguilla

I’m sure you’ve come across an .AI web address more than once in the last few months. The world, or rather venture capital, is all in on artificial intelligence and just having a domainname.ai instantly ups your company’s valuation by a couple of million dollars.

Unless you’re fairly deep into how domain names work, you probably just assumed that .ai addresses were created for artificial intelligence companies. Just like you probably thought .tv was used for video companies. NOPE. These are cash cows for the tropical islands Antiguilla and Tuvalu, respectively.

From this article:

The total number of registrations of sites ending with these two letters (.ai) has effectively doubled in the past year to 287,432, according to Vince Cate, who for decades has managed the .ai domain for Anguilla. Cate estimates Anguilla will bring in as much as $30 million in domain-registration fees for 2023. (Government officials did not respond to requests for comment.)

The government officials did not respond to request for comment because … *checks notes* they were to busy buying another Island to annex with their $30 million.