A closer look
Pepsi faced a massive breach of contract lawsuit in 1996 after joking in a commercial that consumers could redeem seven million points for a military-grade Harrier fighter jet. A savvy twenty-one-year-old business student named John Leonard realized it would only cost about seven hundred thousand dollars to buy the required points directly from the beverage company, which was an absolute steal for a thirty-two-million-dollar aircraft. He convinced wealthy investors to back his play, mailed the soda giant a check, and demanded his personal weapon of mass destruction. The corporation panicked and argued in court that no reasonable person would expect them to actually hand over a tactical strike jet for drinking carbonated sugar water. A federal judge eventually sided with the corporate lawyers, denying this young visionary his daily commute by military aircraft and ruining the greatest arbitrage opportunity of the twentieth century
