Man Becomes Overnight Millionaire After Meteorite Crashes Through His Roof | Hacker News Reader

Man Becomes Overnight Millionaire After Meteorite Crashes Through His Roof

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He tells the BBC a very different story.

>"Saya jual Rp200 juta, ternyata harganya Rp26 miliar"

>"I sold it for 200 million rupiah (~$16k USD), it turned out to be worth 26 billion rupiah (~$1.8M USD)"

>Uang itu pun sudah habis dibagi-bagi kepada keluarga, yatim piatu, gereja, dan perbaikan makam orangtua

>The money has been distributed towards families, orphans, churches and fixing parents' graves.

>"Uangnya sudah habis, cuma Rp200 juta"

>"The money is already gone, only 200 million rupiah"

>"Kalau betul (harganya) Rp26 miliar, saya merasa dibohongi. Saya kecewa."

>If it's true (that it's worth) 26 billion rupiah, I feel lied to. I am disappointed."

https://www.bbc.com/indonesia/majalah-54996882

That's awful if true. I guess technically the headline is still correct if you're talking about a millionaire in Rupiah terms (but 1 million Rupiah is only about USD 70). So is the man who became a millionaire (in dollar terms) the collector from the USA?

Maybe sounds more like it was bought for the "Centre for Meteorite Studies at Arizona State University"?

I would guess someone who's spending $16K on a meteorite is probably already very well off, if not a millionaire.

Or someone who knows that it's worth a lot more.

Sure, but I'm reasonably well off, not rich per se, but I am a SWE and I am able to save a good bit of money, and I would definitely have to think twice, and then think twice again, about spending $16K in one go on my hobby.

If you knew you could flip a $16k investment into a $1MM return practically overnight I bet you could come up with $16k in an instant.

Sure, except I'd never offer someone $16K for something I knew to be worth $1M.

Yes, I agree in this case it's exploitative.

Unless you are talking about profit sharing, you would probably offer the lowest amount that you knew you could get away with so that your chances of flipping a profit is maximized.

There is nothing right / wrong about this. It is just human nature / market dynamics. Companies do it all the time when they hire us.

No, in fact, I would not. If I were a dealer in such things, I would offer a fair amount that lets me make money and isn't an insult to the seller like $16K is. Given that something like this probably has to be sold at auction, I would guess $400-500K would be probably the minimum fair offer that takes into account seller's fees and the uncertainty as to how much the thing will sell for, while still protecting the former owner's interest. In any case, I would certainly offer a large multiple of $16K. And, if I couldn't swing that kind of offer, I'd be pointing the seller to someone who can.

That is not human nature. That is avarice. Your intuition that "everybody does it" does not make it right.

I doubt it's worth anywhere near a million pounds, but the article does say that the buyer immediately resold it to a collector, so I suspect it could have been worth considerably more than the $16 000 he got.

Based on the BBC article in the parent comment, the buyer wasn’t actually a buyer / reseller but just a middleman representing the collector. And he said that though he wasn’t privy to the price paid, it wasn’t $16K but was also not as much as $1M. He also said no meteorite is worth $1M.

A microcosm of human life on planet earth can be found solely in the market for meteorites ;)

See also:

"Islamic tradition holds that it fell from heaven as a guide for Adam and Eve to build an altar. It has often been described as a meteorite."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Stone

The law of large numbers says this should happen regularly.

> Josua Hutagalung, 33, is a coffin maker

> he indicated that the amount was over 1 million pounds.

> With the money he has received - estimated to be equivalent to 30 years worth of his salary

Which brings his yearly salary at 44K USD. Are coffin makers in extremly high demand in Indonesia?

Or is the average salary in Indonesia much, much higher than I thought?

Edit: Reading other comments, the simpler and much sadder explanation is that he actually did not sold it for 1M pounds at all.

How did this rock made it to the surface! Most of them burn up in the atmosphere so this must have been pretty big originally. Any idea if others are following?

> Any idea if others are following?

Well, we did just finish the Leonids meteor shower and the Geminids meteror shower is coming up in around a month, so the answer to your question would be "yes".

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/

These Stones contain lots of organic matter and water, they will degrade quickly on earth. I suspect that research on these objects is very rare to have such a fresh sample. Probably it does not have this value because of rare metals or something, however because of its freshness has tremendous research value.

My understanding is meteorites have potentially high value because they're increasingly viewed as equivalent to samples collected from foreign planets/asteroids. Viewed through that lens, the value competes with the cost of retrieving a sample from wherever the meteorite formed.

I wonder why they are storing it in liquid nitrogen.

Air is caustic, and depending on the exact type these meteorites can crumble very quickly.

Do you need to pay capital gains tax on such winnings (or may be some other tax). How will one declare the source.

IANAL and certainly not a tax lawyer but I believe this one is easy. In the US, the treasure trove case https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cesarini_v._United_States ... This also covers found precious metal on property and I'd imagine when these precious goods arrived isn't important, only when you found them.

Here's an example of it in action; arguably a pretty similar case to a precious metal falling out of the sky: https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertwood/2014/02/26/couple-fi.... Apparently the numismatists of the world have a name for this stash if you're interested: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddle_Ridge_Hoard

I don't think this is right. Treasure trove covers finding money on your property. Refined precious metals (gold and silver particularly) are historically and legally treated as money for many purposes. But a gold mine isn't.

This seems to me more like discovering a gold mine. You can't buy things with your meteorite, or divide it indefinitely into smaller pieces that keep their value pro rata. Even if it was filled with platinum ore, you'd need to smelt and refine it.

The tax treatment of treasure trove in the US is different from the treatment of discovering gold or oil: in brief, you owe taxes when you find it, instead of when you sell it or its products.

Edit: another legal question, what if you don't own the mineral rights under your own home?

Sorry I certainly cannot actually defend a position. I have no expertise in tax law. Hopefully someone with the appropriate knowledge can enlighten us

In Indonesia (where the man who found the meteorite lives), “Capital gains are considered ordinary income and are taxed at the standard corporate income tax rate.“ according to https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/Deloitte/global/Docume...

Yes, 4.5 billion years qualifies as a long term capital gain.

I assume that the procedure would be the like as you had discovered oil or gold mine in your property.

Here's a great in-depth news article from Science on a different carbonaceous chondrite strike, in Costa Rica, that touches on the same bargaining issue:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/unusual-meteorite-mo...

I believe it's not paywalled. If you enjoyed OP, this one adds a lot of local color on the finders, the buyers, and the science.

What if he had been renting the property?

That's the kind of lottery that requires buying zero tickets :).

Is it more, less or equally probably to win the lottery? If it is the same or less there is no need to buy lottery tickets, we are all playing all the time :-)

Much less likely. Thousands of people win $1 million or more in lotteries every year. Only a handful have their houses hit by million-dollar meteorites.

Extended over a sufficient time interval, odds increase markedly. Though the events themselves may effect market function and hence price.

https://io9.gizmodo.com/why-youre-more-likely-to-die-from-a-...

Its more like everyone getting one lottery ticket for free, but with the option of buying more. Anyway I suspect people winning lotteries is more frequent that people having meteorites hit their house.

> one lottery ticket for free

One lottery ticket for free for each property you own. I guess it could be ten, or zero.

I don't know what happens when a property is being rented though. E.g. Alice rents a house to Bob, they just signed the papers, suddenly they hear a crash and a meteorite lands on the table. Who can claim it?

Edit: I've found the answer at https://www.spacelegalissues.com/space-law-meteorites-and-th...

"What about meteorites and their legal status? Legal solutions similar to the French one can be found in Morocco (the meteorites belong to those who find them), in Japan (the property of meteorites can be acquired by occupation), in England (the meteorite belongs to the landowner) or in the United States of America. However, any meteorite that has fallen on any part of the U.S. federal land (lands in the United States of America owned by the federal government) is insusceptible of private property, since it belongs de jure to the federal government."

Sounds like a good premise for a comedy.

Buying tickets would render one ineligible?

you have to have a house ;) in some places it is quite an expensive ticket :D

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