10 Billionaires Who Are Now Broke

though billionaire status is becoming increasingly common it's hard to imagine amassing such a prodigious fortune over the course of a human lifetime most individuals who have the skill or luck to stockpile this much money managed to invested wisely and build generational wealth but others don't have the business acumen to maintain their fortunes today we're looking at billionaires who lost it all Allen Stanford is a Texas native who ran the second biggest Ponzi scheme of all time bail he made off with an absolutely incredible sum of money he was discovered a mere two months after Bernie Madoff and thus did not make the same headlines but unlike the victims of Bernie Madoff who have gotten back large chunks of their principal the eighteen thousand customers of Stanford have recovered practically nothing in total he stole more than eight billion dollars and remained unchallenged because he donated millions of dollars to politicians in both the United States and the Caribbean initially judges ruled that insurance companies were liable to pay 65 million dollars to the victims of this terrible scheme but in the end they voided this ruling after the SEC raided Stanford's offices in 2009 his business empire was essentially shut down while Stanford claimed the accounts were backed by solid assets and posted returns that consistently beat the market the SEC alleged the entire operation was a fraud that financed Stafford's lavish lifestyle he's now serving a 110 year sentence for his misdeeds but the bottom line is that his victims many of them elderly retirees will never see a penny of their money back [Music] Yoga for Goodman s'en was once Iceland's richest man he became Iceland's second billionaire after his own son he was at one time the majority owner and chairman of the now nationalized icelandic bank Landsbanki the second largest company in iceland he was ranked by Forbes magazine in March 2008 as the one thousand 14th richest person in the world with a net worth of 1.1 billion dollars in the 1990s he was sentenced to 12 months in prison and suspended for two years for bookkeeping offences having faced around 450 charges he went to Russia remade his fortune and returned to Iceland where he also had interests in shipping publishing food communications and property fast forward to 2009 when he was seven hundred fifty nine million dollars in debt it was the largest bankruptcy filing in Icelandic history essentially Landsbanki was hit by the credit crunch that rolled the financial industry in 2009 in good Mundson lost everything although they were both implicated in the Panama papers his son is still a billionaire it reads almost like a cliche movie plot the sad tale goes like this a beautiful young woman marries a billionaire divorces and uses her hefty settlement to strike out into a celebrated business only to lose it all rather than a contrived film plot this is the real-life story of Patricia Cluj her former husband John Kluge was a legendary businessman who at one point was the richest man in the world born in Chen it's Germany he eventually became a media mogul and made a huge four billion dollar fortune in 1986 after selling his production company to 20th Century Fox Patricia Cluj married the billionaire John Kluge 34 years her senior in 1981 their jet-setting life became a myth among the ultra rich and when Cluj divorced her in 1990 she walked away with 1 billion dollars and their family home Kluge's plan was to use their Virginia stayed as a vineyard and established the area as the California of the East Coast she took out millions of dollars of loans to accomplish this and obviously Virginia did not become the epicenter of fine wines deeply in debt Clues sold her winery to future president Donald Trump he still owns the property and allowed Clues to work there for one year before firing her as of 2008 Sean Quinn was the richest man in Ireland with a wealth of roughly five billion dollars only three years later he was filing for bankruptcy when he was only 14 years old he dropped out of school in order to borrow 100 pounds in sell gravel this eventually became a massive conglomerate with arms and construction banking and health care Quinn became a legend for Irish people during the 90s when he allegedly punched a British soldier who tried to detain him at a checkpoint this goodwill served him when he lost the entirety of his fortune on bad banking investments in the end he served a small period of jail time and was released for good behavior he still doesn't have another business empire but he continues to try and attract lucrative investments he was recently in the news because gangsters beat the director of his company and claimed that Quinn was threatening the conglomerate to allow him back on the board Quinn vehemently denies these claims but it's clear that he is fallen from grace Alberto Pilar is another billionaire who led a life of crime he made his fortune investing in tech stocks but in 2008 he was convicted of money laundering for mr. Vela who lived in luxury apartment with marble floors and a large bronze statue of Mozart the fall from grace was Swift he was a legendary arts patron and had a particular penchant for opera but after the revelation that he had defrauded thousands of people the arts community responded with a unified front the Met took his name off its grand tier the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden in London removed goulart from its Laurel Hall and the Salzburg Festival took his picture out of its programs finally a judge sentenced him to nine years in prison for his role in a 22 million dollar fraud scheme but now he is a free man his first act after his release from prison was to buy tickets to an opera at the Met though he remains an extremely controversial figure it's clear that the septuagenarian will not make his billions back anytime soon [Music] nicknamed Catwoman for the results of her unbelievably unflattering plastic surgery Jocelyn Wildenstein is an American socialite who made her billions by marrying rich she was born in Lausanne Switzerland in 1940 and was introduced to Alec and Wilden steam by Saudi arms dealer Adrian Khashoggi at a shooting weekend at his ranch in Africa the two were married when they were both in their 30s Wilden Steen was a horse breeder and art dealer with a net worth of over 10 billion dollars when they split in 1999 she walked away with 2.5 billion dollars in her divorce settlement and 100 million dollars each year for the following 13 years but her lavish lifestyle took its toll and the sad divorcee filed for bankruptcy in 2018 Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford University at 19 to start blood-testing startup farah naaz and grew the company to a valuation of nine billion dollars they claim to have revolutionized the blood testing industry but it all came crashing down when the shortcomings and inaccuracies of the company's technology were exposed and fairness and homes were charged with massive fraud the decline of theranos began in 2015 when a series of journalistic and regulatory investigations revealed doubts about the company's technology claims and whether Holmes had misled investors and the government in 2018 the SEC charged Thera notes and Holmes with deceiving investors by massive fraud through false or exaggerated claims about the accuracy of her blood testing technology Holmes settled the charges by paying a $500,000 fine returning shares to the company relinquishing her voting control of fairness and being barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for 10 years after making Forbes list in 2014 Holmes has been embroiled in a legal scandal the following years and can't even afford to pay her lawyers this has been a spectacular fall from grace the J Mallya is a former liquor baron who made his fortune with United spirits the largest spirits company in India and continues to serve as chairman of United Breweries group in Indian conglomerate with interests including beverages aviation infrastructure real estate and fertilizer he has been the chairman of Sanofi India and the chairman of Bayer CropScience in India for over 20 years and the chairman of several other companies his father actually founded these businesses which Mallya inherited when he was 28 years old since then the group has grown into a multinational conglomerate of over 60 companies with an annual turnover which increased by 64% over 15 years to 11 billion dollars in 1998 but as with most individuals on this list Mallya made one bad investment that tanked his entire fortune Kingfisher Airlines went down in 2013 and had one point five billion dollars in bad loans connected with the Indian air carrier Mallya was recently convicted as a wilful defaulter in his fighting extradition in London at the moment Ike Bautista was once Brazil's richest man but he lost his fortune in monumental fashion Batista's meteoric rise and fall mirrored the recent portions of Brazil where a commodities boom faded as his energy mineral and logistics empire fell apart earlier this decade his swashbuckling attitude and confident forecasts of a prolonged golden era for Brazil evaporated as Latin America's largest economy suffered its worst recession on record in early 2012 Batista had a net worth of 35 billion dollars ranking him the seventh wealthiest person in the world by July 2013 his wealth had plummeted to 200 million dollars due to his debts and his company's falling stock prices bloomberg reported in January 2014 that Batista has a negative net worth he was convicted for paying sixteen point six million dollars to get government contracts as part of a sprawling corruption probe known as car wash and sentenced to 30 years which he is serving under house arrest but earlier this year he was also sentenced to seven years of prison for insider trading adding to his already hefty prison time here is a billionaire whom you probably recognized Bernie Madoff became the face of the 2008 financial meltdown when it became clear that he was responsible for the single largest Ponzi scheme in world history Madoff founded a penny stock brokerage in nineteen which eventually grew into Bernard L Madoff investment securities he served as its chairman until his arrest on December 11th 2008 despite claiming to generate large steady returns through an investing strategy called split strike conversion which is an actual trading strategy Madoff simply deposited client funds into a single bank account that he used to pay existing clients who wanted to cash out in total he smuggled more than 64 billion dollars away in order to pay for his own lavish lifestyle On June 29 2009 he was sentenced to 150 years in prison with restitution of 170 billion dollars though some of this money has been reclaimed and distributed amongst his victims the vast majority of this wealth will never be returned almost 5,000 individuals lost their savings in this scheme and they were not able to retire comfortably as a result Madoff recently asked President Trump to commute his sentence proving he still has no signs of remorse in prison Adolph Merkel was born in Dresden Germany and over the course of his lifetime became one of the wealthiest people in his home country he developed his bohemian grandfather's chemical wholesale company into Germany's largest pharmaceutical wholesaler Phoenix Pharma Handel in the early 1970s he founded germany's first generic drug manufacturer ratio farm for several decades he also held large parts of cement company heidelberg cement as well as vehicle manufacturer Casper in 2007 he was worth twelve point eight billion dollars according to Forbes but Merkel never had an appetite for the finer things he lived so modestly that he cycled to work on a 15-year old bike for most of the year and in bad weather he drove a four-year old VW Golf he had no bodyguards or servants lived in an unimposing Chalet style house in a small town of blubberin his home for the past 60 years without so much as a CCTV camera for protection and stopped off at his local pub on the way home each night to share a drink with the regulars but just like most other billionaires on this list Merkel lost a fortune during the 2008 economic downturn this was accompanied by a poor investment in Volkswagen in the end merkel cave to the external pressure and took his own life

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Keywords: billionaires, billionaires who went broke, Billionaires Who Lost All Of Their Money, richest man in the world, forbes, fraud, business, failure, jail, prison, bernie, bernie madoff, Allen Stanford, Sean Quinn, Jocelyn Wildenstein, Elizabeth Holmes, top 10, viral, new

Id: U78EAQqpcaw

Length: 11min 33sec (693 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019