Fox is making a fortune off World Cup water breaks. A senator wants to end how billionaires dodge taxes for good. Steve Bannon has quietly cashed Seinfeld checks for over two decades. And two founding fathers pledged their fortunes for independence, then lost everything.

Now, show me the money!

Every World Cup match this summer includes two three-minute stoppages, officially added to give players relief from the heat across host cities in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada. Fans see them as a basic safety measure. Broadcasters, meanwhile, see something else entirely in that stoppage time. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox Sports is charging between $200,000 and $750,000 for a single 30-second commercial during those breaks, the same rate as some of the network's premium primetime inventory.

Across the tournament's 104 games, those hydration breaks add up to 624 minutes of stoppage time. Forbes estimates the ad revenue from that stoppage time alone at more than $500 million, a figure that on its own exceeds the $485 million Fox reportedly paid FIFA for the broadcast rights to the entire tournament. A deep run by the U.S. men's national team could push ad rates even higher before the final on July 19.

A break built for player safety turned into one of the most valuable slots in television advertising.

Somewhere between the whistle and the water bottle, the World Cup became one giant commercial break with a scoreboard attached.

On June 2, Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona introduced the ROBINHOOD Act, which stands for Redistribution Of Billions by Instituting New High-income Obligations on Overlooked Debt. It targets a maneuver known on Wall Street as "buy, borrow, die," where a wealthy person buys assets like company stock, borrows against them tax-free to cover their lifestyle, and passes the assets to heirs at death without ever paying capital gains tax on the growth. Representative Dan Goldman of New York introduced a matching version in the House on the same day. Gallego stated that the strategy allows billionaires to live tax-free while regular workers pay their share out of every paycheck.

The bill only applies to people earning more than $100 million a year or holding assets worth over $1 billion, so it would not affect the average investor. Goldman pointed to billionaires borrowing against stock portfolios, real estate, and even art collections without paying a dime in tax on that money. The legislation now heads to committee, where similar attempts to close this loophole have stalled before.

Borrowing against your own wealth isn't a loophole that nobody noticed. It's a strategy so common that it now needs a superhero-themed bill to fight it.

Congress has talked about this loophole for years. Now it finally has a bill blunt enough to explain itself in its own name.

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In the early 1990s, years before Donald Trump's campaign or the White House, Steve Bannon was an anonymous investment banker running his own boutique firm, Bannon and Co. His firm advised Westinghouse Electric on the sale of Castle Rock Entertainment, the production company behind a still-unproven NBC sitcom, to Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting. When Turner came up short on cash to close the deal, Westinghouse offered Bannon a choice. Instead of taking his full advisory fee in cash, he could take a slice of the upside in a media rights package.

That sitcom was Seinfeld, once dismissed as a show about nothing, which has since generated more than $4.8 billion through syndication, DVD sales, and a Netflix deal worth over $500 million. The exact size of Bannon's stake has never been made public. Financial outlets estimate that even a 1 percent participation in that revenue would have paid out roughly $50 million over three decades, all from taking equity instead of cash on a single advisory deal.

A man now known for reshaping American politics quietly built part of his fortune on a joke about nothing.

Take less cash, take more upside. Sometimes the smartest trade on Wall Street looks like a rerun on Netflix.

When 56 men signed the Declaration of Independence in 1776, they closed it with a pledge of "our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." Robert Morris, a Philadelphia trader who became known as the financier of the Revolution, backed up those words with cash. He donated ships from his own trading fleet, turned to privateering against British convoys, and helped pay off George Washington's soldiers when the government ran dry. At his financial peak, Morris was considered the richest man in America.

The peace that followed the war ended up ruining him. British merchants cut off credit to American traders, colonial currency became worthless overnight, and Morris's land speculation collapsed when nobody had money left to buy. He was hounded by creditors and spent three years in a Philadelphia debtors' prison, blocks from Independence Hall, where he had helped found the country. Alexander Hamilton, who designed the entire American financial system, fared no better. When he died in a duel with Aaron Burr in 1804, he was so broke that his friends had to take up a collection just to pay for his funeral.

The men who built America's financial system did not always benefit from it.

Two hundred fifty years later, America still runs on the system these broke men built.

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