You know what they say about business: sometimes its a gamble.

Should you take that big buyout offer? Should you haggle for more? Or maybe you should stick to your guns and keep plugging away.

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It can be difficult to know when you’ve got something worth keeping, and when it’s time to cash out.

We hear the success stories of huge businesses like Starbucks, Apple, and Facebook all the time.

However, what we often don’t hear about are the moments when those businesses were on a knife edge. Where their future could go one way or the other with no telling which.

For example, have you ever heard of Roy Wayne? Wayne was one of the original founders of Apple. However, he sold his shares in the company after just 12 days for $800. Today, those shares are worth $883.82bn. Not a great business move.

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On the other hand, there are the success stories.

George Lucas, for example, gambled big with his Star Wars franchise. Originally, he had been offered a fee of $500,000 to direct Star Wars: A New Hope. However, after some negotiation he took a fee of just $150,000. That might sound like a loss, but there was a twist. In return for his taking a much-reduced fee, George Lucas retained merchandising and franchise rights to the Star Wars films.

If the series hadn’t taken off in the way it did, these rights might have been worthless. However, since the series became so success, those rights are thought to have generated around $13bn for Lucas. Not bad at all.

The trouble is, it’s often impossible to know what the future will hold.

Will you business become a huge success or collapse into total failure? Roulette Online have collected some of the biggest business gambles, both good and bad so at least you can learn from the past!

10 of the biggest business gambles ever made


See infographic here(via www.rouletteonline.net).