The Dumbest Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in History

The Dumbest Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in History

Khalid Elhassan - October 30, 2022

The Dumbest Get-Rich-Quick Schemes in History
Colonial Boston did not embrace Timothy Dexter. The Globe and Mail

Failure to Break Into Boston’s Elite Circles

Timothy Dexter thought his new status as a seriously rich man would finally earn him the respect of his posh neighbors. It did not. Try as he might to break into Boston’s upper crust, his efforts met with repeated failure. Part of it was that the crowd he tried to join were snooty snobs. A bigger part was that Dexter was, in many ways, a jerk. He had what was described as a “distasteful nature”, was given to “crude rhetoric”, and often blurted the wrong things at the most inopportune moments.

Dexter decided that his failure to make it into Boston’s upper society was not because he was a jackass – of course not. Instead, he decided it was because the city was too stodgy. So he upped stakes, told his posh neighbors where to shove it, and moved with his wife and family up the coast to Newburyport. There, a series of dumb luck breaks, each stranger than the one before, saw to it that he became even richer than he already was.

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