Would A Billionaire Or Super-Rich Celebrity Take The Time To Deposit A Teeny Tiny Paper Check? There's Only One Way To Find Out…

Hypothetical question: If someone randomly sent you a 13-cent check, would you cash it? Before you answer, imagine you're living in a time before mobile deposits existed. No tapping your Chase app from the couch. No snapping a photo and forgetting about it. We're talking about the old-fashioned routine: finding your keys, driving to a bank, hunting for parking, standing in line, filling out a deposit slip… all for the privilege of adding a little more than a dime to your net worth.

Would it even be worth the gas you'd burn getting there? The time? The parking meter? In nearly every scenario, you'd lose money in the process. Rational people would laugh, toss the check in a drawer, or assume it was a mistake not worth fixing.

Now imagine this same scenario, except you're not just an everyday person, you're a multi-millionaire celebrity. Now imagine you're a billionaire business tycoon sitting atop private jets, superyachts, and sprawling real estate portfolios. Surely, someone with that kind of money wouldn't bother cashing a check worth pennies… right? Believe it or not, a couple decades ago, Spy Magazine conducted a hilarious real-world experiment to find out the answer to this question.

First Test: $1.11

Back in the early 1990s, Spy magazine devised a devilishly simple experiment. They created a very official-sounding but completely fake company called the National Refund Clearinghouse and mailed out small refund checks to 58 of America's best-known millionaires and billionaires. The accompanying letter claimed they were owed a refund due to a "computer error." That was it. No catch. No scam. Just a tiny bit of free money — if the recipient could be bothered to cash it.

The first wave of checks was worth $1.11. Not a fortune, but not pocket lint either. And the results were genuinely surprising: within two months, 26 out of 58 wealthy recipient, including Donald Trump, Michael Douglas, Faye Dunaway, Cher, and Kurt Vonnegut, actually cashed their $1.11 checks. The other 32 ignored them, perhaps assuming such a trivial refund was beneath their financial dignity.

But Spy wasn't done. They wanted to find out exactly where the line was: The point at which a check becomes too small for the ultra-rich to care.

How High Will They Go? Spy Raises The Stakes

To test the upper boundary of effort and incentive, Spy sent the 32 holdouts from the first experiment a second check worth $2.00. Six more celebrities caved. Richard Gere and Candice Bergen joined the experiment, proving that even a modest increase can tempt the wealthy.

Still unsatisfied, Spy escalated a third time, mailing $3.47 checks to the remaining holdouts. Two more celebrities finally deposited their refunds. At this point, Spy had learned how high the check needed to be to lure certain millionaires and billionaires into action. Now they wanted to test how low people would go.

How LOW Will They Go?

Spy returned to the 26 people who cashed the original $1.11 check and sent them new checks worth 64 cents. Only 13 of those celebrities deposited the tiny refund. Spy saved the best twist for last. Those 13 persistent penny collectors were mailed one final refund check worth just 13 cents.

And in the end, only two people cashed the final 13-cent check:

• Donald Trump
• Adnan Khashoggi

Two billionaires — one a New York real estate showman, the other a Saudi arms-trading tycoon — both willing to take the time to deposit a check worth less than the price of a gumball.

So what does all of this prove? On the surface, it's just a silly stunt — a mischievous magazine sending pocket-change checks to rich people to see who takes the bait. But buried inside the joke is a strangely revealing truth. When it comes to money, even the ultra-wealthy aren't always as different from the rest of us as you might think. Some ignore small windfalls without a second thought. Others cash everything, no matter how trivial, because money is money.

The Largest Check Ever Written?

Ok, that was the story of a fun experiment involving teeny tiny checks. Want to know the real-life story of the LARGEST check ever written in history? Click that link in the previous sentence for the full insane story. And btw, I'm not talking literally about the "largest" check as in its physical size, but the largest dollar amount that was ever printed on a check and deposited into a bank in real life to secure a transaction. Hint: it involved the 2008 financial crisis, and here's what the actual check looked like: