Jessica Pegula: The Quiet Billionaire Who Turned Wimbledon into a Diplomatic Cocktail Party By Dave’s Locker International Desk PARIS—If you squinted past the green-and-purple bunting at this year’s Roland-Garros, you could almost mistake Jessica Pegula for just another baseline grinder with a sponsorship patch and a dream. That, of course, is precisely the sort of…
**The Global Hunger Games: How America’s Mega Millions Became the World’s Favorite Fantasy** While inflation ravages purchasing power from Lagos to Lisbon, there’s one American export that remains blissfully immune to currency fluctuations: the dream of instant, unearned wealth. The Mega Millions lottery—America’s weekly exercise in mathematical masochism—has transcended its humble origins to become a…
The Mega Millions jackpot—now swollen to a cartoonish $1.35 billion—has once again achieved what UNESCO summits and Davos panels can only fantasize about: uniting the planet in a single, perfectly synchronized daydream. From Lagos to Lisbon, from Manila to Manitoba, office printers wheeze out identical spreadsheets of “lucky” numbers, and grandmothers who have never set…
Nantucket—an island whose name sounds like a sneeze and whose property prices make Swiss bankers weep—has quietly become the world’s most exclusive lifeboat. While the rest of the planet trades memes about climate apocalypse, the global elite have been rehearsing for it on this 14-by-3.5-mile sandbar 30 miles off Cape Cod. Their rehearsal, naturally, involves…
**The Pan-European Pipe Dream: How a €220 Million Jackpot Became the Continent’s Collective Midlife Crisis** From Lisbon to Ljubljana, millions of Europeans are currently engaged in their favorite form of mathematically-sanctioned delusion: the EuroMillions lottery. This week’s jackpot has ballooned to a modest €220 million—roughly the GDP of a small Baltic nation, or what Amazon…
The planet woke up yesterday to the latest Set for Life draws, a phrase that scans like a particularly bitter punch-line in an era when most of us are simply set for Tuesday. From Sydney to Sheffield, five fresh millionaires discovered they will receive a drip-feed of wealth—roughly $20,000 a month for twenty years—while the…
Canelo Álvarez and the Global Price Tag of a Perfect Left Hook By Diego “Debt-to-GDP” Morales, Dave’s Locker International Desk Somewhere between a cartel checkpoint and a Dubai brunch, Saúl “Canelo” Álvarez has banked roughly $200 million. That figure—current as of this morning’s peso wobble—doesn’t include the ghost streams, crypto side bets, or the tequila…
Bryce Harper: The $330 Million Poster Child for a Planet That Would Rather Watch Baseball Than Fix Itself By the time the news reached a rain-soaked café in Sarajevo, Bryce Harper had already been traded—by the algorithm, naturally. ESPN International’s push alert pinged every phone from Lagos to Lahore, informing humanity that a man who…
Global Lottery Numbers Drop Like Guilt at 3 a.m.—and the World Pretends It’s Hope By the time the last ball clacked into its acrylic cage on Wednesday night, the “national lottery lotto results” had already ricocheted through six continents, three tax shelters, and one WhatsApp group containing your cousin in Lagos who swears he “had…
Ferrari 849 Testarossa: A Global Love Affair with Speed, Sin, and Selective Amnesia By Dave’s Locker International Desk Maranello, Italy – The world’s billionaires have a new collective crush, and its name is the Ferrari 849 Testarossa. While the rest of us queue for eggs that cost more than last year’s rent, the planet’s .001…
Dirtbag Billionaire: A Global Field Guide to the New Gilded Age’s Anti-Hero By the time you finish this paragraph, another hoodie-clad centi-millionaire will have declared himself a “dirtbag billionaire” on a podcast recorded from the cargo hold of his Gulfstream. The phrase—equal parts self-deprecating marketing stunt and accurate character assessment—has already achieved the rare linguistic…
The Global Gospel of the Scratch-and-Pray: Why the World Gambles on Six Magic Numbers By “Lucky” László Kovács, International Desk Somewhere between the refugee camp outside Cox’s Bazar and the air-conditioned lottery kiosks of Madrid’s Barajas Airport, the same slip of paper is doing the rounds: a lottery ticket, flimsy as a cease-fire promise and…
