What a first week, Players.

I won't bury the news: someone was veryyyyy close to winning The Button last week. But in the end, no one guessed correctly.

As such, the prize pool has doubled to $20. Make sure you read till the bottom of the newsletter to play.

For those of you who are new here, get ready for some some stats, some laughs, and maybe even some cash.

WINNER

Taking a profit

The hardest thing to do in life is to quit while you’re ahead. That is unless you’re early billionaire venture capitalist, Peter Thiel. The FT reported this week that Founders Fund, the VC firm co-founded by Thiel, cashed out its 8-year cryptocurrency position just weeks before the market began to crash last year. The move netted a cool $1.8 billion.

It’s another blow for the beleaguered crypto crowd since Thiel has been a staunch proponent of crypto, especially bitcoin, for the past decade. His fund made its first investment in bitcoin back in 2014 and supposedly continued to hold to this day, but now has "zero exposure" according to the FT report.

Let the conspiracies flow. How did Thiel abandon ship at the perfect moment? Did he see FTX’s books? Was it that Matt Damon ad? The world may never know.

LOSER

This guy's financial advisor

No matter how bad your investment decisions have been over the past few years, you literally cannot be worse than Robert Belfer. He's a New York oil baron that has somehow 1) lost billions in the collapse of Enron, 2) lost millions in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme, and 3) taken another multi-million dollar hit after the implosion of FTX.

He is literally the Thanos of bad investment collecting Ls like infinity stones.

The salt in the wound is that the elder Belfer has no one to blame but his own progeny. Belfer’s family office, Belfer Management, is run by his son.

New investment strategy: just do the opposite of whatever the Belfer's are doing.

WINNER

Persistence

Picture this: you go to a bar for a night out. You meet a girl. She gives you her number. But then you get home and see that she’s tricked you. There’s two numbers missing. Do you A) give up or B) spend hour upon hour calling random numbers to find her.

If you chose B, you’re not alone. The nameless cousin from the tweet above wouldn't take no for an answer and boy did it pay off. The best part of this viral love story—the lovely lady has been found.

Now yes, it’s a little suspicious that the napkin with her number on it is written in the same handwriting as the numbers the cousin was calling, but hey, we’re romantics here at The Game so we choose to believe this story is real.

Romance isn’t dead and for that, it goes in the Wins column

LOSER

Things that don't bring Elon joy

As part of his cost cutting measures, Elon has been auctioning off furniture and other items from Twitter's SF offices. If you tuned in to the live auction on Wednesday, you had a chance to buy everything from TVs and stools to espresso machines and boxes of KN95 masks. But one big ticket item stole the show.

A floor statue of Twitter’s logo sold for $100,000 despite being listed for just $25 initally. Even worse, it's apparently made of foam board.

On its heels was another Twitter logo, this one a neon sign that went for $40,000.

That one seems worth it actually.

Despite the hefty price tags fetched at auction Elon has some impending financial commitments that are going to take a lot more cash to solve. Twitter’s $1.5 billion annual interest payment is due soon as part of the $13 billion debt deal Musk used to buy the company. And with reports saying that Twitter revenue is down 40% since Elon took over, he's gonna to need a bigger statue.

WINNER

Asking for more

You know that feeling of putting on an old coat and finding $20 in the pocket? Flo Rida just felt that times a million.

The rapper has been in a prolonged court battle with the energy drink maker Celsius over some compensation he felt he was owed for acting as a brand ambassador. He sued the company for $30,000 originally.

But yesterday, a South Florida jury awarded him $86.2 million.

That’s a lot of apple bottom jeans and boots with the fur.

The huge sum comes from Flo Rida's ownership stake in Celsius which has skyrocketed to a $7 billion market cap in the past few years.

Either that or the fact that the judge liked some of Flo Rida’s songs that were played in court.

The man had some bangers.

STATS TO IMPRESS YOUR FRIENDS WITH

• Prince Harry’s book Spare sold a whopping 1.43 million copies in its first day in the US, UK, and Canada. It now holds the record for the fastest-selling nonfiction book of all time.

• Funerals outnumbered baby showers by about 850,000 in China last year as Covid, an aging population, and the country's one child policy all led to China’s first recorded population drop.

• The world's oldest living person, a French nun named Sister André, died on Wednesday aged 118. When asked how she lived so long she said, “I’ve no idea what the secret is.” Real helpful, Sister André.

• An average of 14,000 new business applications were filed in the US every day last year. In total over 5 million new businesses were opened.

GAMES

First ever crossword puzzle in The Game? Let's gooo.

It was created by Max from Long Island, NY.

Difficulty level: 7/10

Expected solving time: 20 minutes

Play the puzzle here.

THE BUTTON

Thanks to everyone participated in The Button last week. The final number of clicks was 112

Closest guess: 116 from Chris Milokay

For all you newcomers here is how the game works.

Reply to this email with a guess of how many times the button below will be clicked.

Whoever guesses the correct number of clicks wins the money in the prize pool. If no one guesses the correct number, the prize pool doubles and the game continues.

Here is some additional information for your Round 2 guesses:

• Newsletter open rate: 73%

• Click through rate: 30%

• Total subscribers: 730

Taking all that into account, make sure you get your guesses in before next Thursday at 11:59 PM ET.

Without further ado, The Button.

Good luck, Players. See you next week.

P.S. If you think a friend would enjoy The Game, forward them this email so they can sign up and play here.