Posted on 08/23/2016 4:04:38 PM PDT by bkopto
A fisherman in the Philippines is happy as a clam after finding out this mammoth pearl — which he has kept as a good luck charm — is worth $100 million.
The lucky angler, who has not been identified, discovered the 75-pound gem — believed to be the biggest ever — 10 years ago in the sea off Palawan Island....
Unaware of the massive gem’s value, he kept it as a good luck charm until a fire in his home forced him to move and he decided to take the pearl to the tourism office in remote Puerto Princesca.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
That’s true. That’s one thing I found about the Philippines when I visited the country. It’s a wonderful country and it has wonderful people. It’s also wonderfully libertarian.
BUT!!
Nothing is done for free. If you want anything done, including borrowing a pencil, you are going to pay for that.
For his sake, I hope Wiki-Leaks doesn’t find out.
Too many ‘spread-the-wealthers’ would be fine with violating his privacy, because they don’t think it’s fair one person should be so wealthy.
Guess he clammed up for almost too long.
Somebody call the Hillary campaign. They’ll want to clutch this.
Until family pressures sucks him dry.
“Officials plan to keep the fisherman’s pearl in the Philippines in a bid to increase tourism to the area.”
So did the officials buy it from him or does he simply get the honor of having it on official display?
...kept him awake and irritable for the first eight or so...
It is like finding a green diamond still in it's matrix. You sell it to a jeweler and they can break it out and make it into a ring or a necklace.
But if you sell it to a collector they will leave it as is and pay you twice as much.
Collectors are weird.
WOW! Lucky guy. Well done. Thank goodness he doesn’t live in the USA. Some government bureaucrat would declare it state property and sieze it. Then again, he’s in Philippines. I hope he gets to keep every penny and live a long comfortable life.
I just hope he did well by it.
Wow, that clam took a major leak.
Proof that people with 100 million dollars are often frivolous and irrational.
If the Philippine government is displaying it, they were probably the buyers. Obviously he didn’t get $100 million for it though.
So who is going to give him $100m for it?
Nah, it’s a white elephant.
Or even $1 million. Governments have a way of stealing things from you when they really want to.
That being said, I can't think of a more worthwhile purpose for the thing. It wouldn't bother me if all "Objet d'art" valued at more than a million were seized by the government and displayed to the public.
What people nowadays give for "works of art" makes me think the entire art industry ought to be financially destroyed. That and the fact that so much of it is crap nowadays.
If he didn’t know the value of it, by keeping it under his bed, there is no way that he could have known the value of it on the market nor how to reach the right buyers.
To me, it’s obvious that whomever bought it only gave him a relatively small fraction of its worth. He probably still made a couple of million from it, so he still did well for him.
Or a couple of hundred.
Yeah, maybe. I hope he did his homework and got what he thought was a reasonable value for it.
Well maybe you could make some gates with it
Palawan actually looks like a place worth a visit. Tropical paradise.
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