I was 21 when 2008 hit.

Having less than $300 to my name, I wasn’t exactly devastated… 

But I knew it was bad.

I wanted to understand how bad. What happened? Why? What did it mean?

The more I learned, the more confused (and worried) I became.

I bought my first ounce of silver that year because, according to one Youtube account, it was definitely going to $2K by 2009. (Still waiting, by the way.)

I would watch videos with titles like:

ECONOMY COLLAPSING?! MUST SEE!!!

And, because Youtube was still the Wild West…

It’d be a collection of jittery news clips—someone filming CNBC with a flip phone, splicing it together with captions and dramatic music.

Of course, this was before bots. So the comments were the best part.

“I’m hiding in a storm drain under Denver Airport. This is the last message you’ll get from me. It’s starting.”

“The lizard people are fighting the robot people and Earth is the battlefield.” (1 like from a user named “reptiletruth777”)

“Trust me, I’m a time traveler. This all ends with digital dog money and a guy named Elon.” (Hey... wait a minute.)

It was all ridiculous. But then I noticed something even more ridiculous happen.

The Most Valuable Bug in the World

In the middle of all this chaos—banks failing, markets puking—Volkswagen became the most valuable company in the world.

Volkswagen.

Not Microsoft. Not Exxon. Not General Electric.

The company that made your uncle’s Jetta.

Hedge funds were shorting Volkswagen stock because Porsche was maybe going to buy them.

Nobody believed it would happen. So the big guys bet against VW.

Then Porsche did what no one expected: They admitted they were secretly hoarding Volkswagen stock.

Boom.

For about 48 hours, VW stock became a black hole, devouring hedge funds and logic alike.

It shot from a couple hundred euros to over €1,000, making it—briefly—the most valuable company on Earth.

Bigger than ExxonMobil, Apple, and PetroChina.

Infested With Opportunities

2008 is remembered as carnage. Lehman. Foreclosures. Bailouts. The kind of year people carry around like scar tissue.

But not for everyone.

Somewhere, there’s a guy who bought VW before it skyrocketed. Maybe he didn’t know why it was going up. Maybe he just saw something weird in the tape.

He remembers 2008 differently.

Not as the year everything fell apart—but as the year he made out like a king.

That’s the thing nobody tells you.

Life is infested with opportunities.

Even in disaster—especially in disaster—someone is getting rich in the weirdest way possible.

No matter how bad things get, there’s always some bizarre, undercover opportunity lurking in the chaos—something that makes zero sense…

Right up until it makes someone rich.

We’ll call those opportunities:

“The 10X Files”

10X Files aren’t about safe bets or obvious plays.

They’re about the moments when:

• The wrong company becomes the most valuable in the world
• A single tweet moves a billion dollars
• A joke token beats the S&P 500
• A meme turns retail traders into millionaires overnight

The 10X Files remind us there’s always a backdoor, a glitch in the matrix, a move hiding in plain sight.

You just have to be looking in the right direction… when everyone else is screaming the wrong one.