Teen's Twitter Wager on Derrick Rose Goes Viral

Gaashaan Yusuf was watching the Chicago Bulls take on the Milwaukee Bucks Saturday when he casually sent out a wager on Twitter.

“If Derrick Rose doesn’t get hurt during the 2015 NBA Playoffs, I’ll PayPal $10 to everyone who RTs this,” he wrote.

Little did he know by Monday afternoon the tweet would have garnered more than 4,600 retweets.

Approaching $50,000 in the hole quickly, he had no idea only 103 characters could get so costly.

“I just thought it would be funny, so I tweeted it as a joke,” Yusuf told NBC Chicago.

The 16-year-old is a junior at Attleboro High School in Massachusetts who likes to play basketball in his free time, and doesn’t have a part-time job.

He said he sends out up to 10 tweets a day and never thought this one would be different, but it started picking up traction quickly – especially after a few well-known athletes, like Eric Dunn, re-tweeted it to their thousands of followers.

“Some people actually thought that I was going to give them the money, so that’s another reason it went viral,” Yusuf told NBC Chicago. “It just exploded.”

Yusuf said he is trying the best he can with his 15 minutes of Twitter fame, and although he can’t manage to pay off his debt to social media he is planning on making a donation to After School Matters, the Chicago-based charity that Rose gave $1 million to last year.

 
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