5 Billionaires Who Lost All Their Money

[Music] your golfer gunman s'en was one of the most famous figures in all of iceland and only the second person in that country's history to reach billionaire status he made his fortune in the 1970s and 80s in shipping publishing and communications in the 1990s he was prosecuted for bookkeeping offences having to do with his shipping company hop skip receiving a suspended sentence and putting a sizable dent in his fortune amazingly he was able to make back all of the sizable amount he lost over just the next few years starting a successful brewery in Russia this operation Bravo brewery international came under scrutiny for possible ties to the Russian mafia particularly after a rival st. Petersburg brewery burned to the ground despite this Bravo was sold to Heineken in 2002 for 400 million dollars later that same year Goodman sin returned to Iceland and entered his most financially successful period in addition to holding a large stake in Iceland's biggest publishing company and a 45 percent share in its second largest bank the former football player was able to acquire 90% ownership of West Ham United of the English Premier Football League during this time he also became known as his country's biggest philanthropist making him a well-known and popular public figure his donations to arts programs universities and sports organizations helped to fuel his country's culture but it only took the blink of an eye for the national hero to become a national disgrace during the worldwide economic crisis of 2008 Iceland's banking system underwent an almost total collapse Iceland's media singled out a few key figures in their national banking system that helped contribute most of the collapse and good Munson was front and center among them his enormous fortune evaporated within a few short months as the value of his holdings plummeted in March 2008 he was named one of the richest people in the world by Forbes magazine by December of that year the same publication declared him to be worth nothing in 2009 he declared personal bankruptcy to the tune of 750 million dollars still thought to be the largest individual bankruptcy claim ever filed worldwide even the international press took notice in 2010 Time magazine named Goodman sin one of the one most influential people of the year due to the role he played in destroying Iceland's economy allen Stanford first began to build his fortune in the early 1980s as the Texas oil boom was coming to a close the area was in an economic recession and Stanford's investment group made a killing buying up real estate in depressed areas and strategically selling them off after the market had recovered with seed capital from this company Stanford moved to the Caribbean and started Guardian international bank on the island of Montserrat but was soon forced to move to Antigua due to a British government crackdown on shady offshore banks the newly renamed Stanford international bank under the umbrella of parent company Stanford financial operated for the next two decades and seemed to offer impossible returns on investment Stanford had amassed a personal fortune of over two billion dollars when it all came crashing down beginning in early February 2009 based on statements given by a former Stanford financial executive the Securities and Exchange Commission announced that they were launching an investigation of Stanford financial questioning the ridiculously high returns the company was offering its investors the former executive claimed that purely hypothetical financial data was presented to potential investors as fact and that Stanford himself had claimed that his certificates of deposit were as good or better than the US government's by late February Stanford financials offices were being raided by federal agents and Stanford was being charged in a massive ongoing eight billion dollar fraud SEC investigators would later describe it as a Ponzi scheme siphoning billions from investors while blatantly falsifying records to make it appear as if investments were generating a profit in reality the SEC claimed that the company had no income and that its bank statements were complete fiction while awaiting trial all of Stanford's banks and business holdings were taken over by various governments after several health-related delays he was finally put on trial in early 2012 a jury took only three hours to convict him of 14 charges related to his outrageous fraud in addition to fines and penalties totaling more than twelve billion dollars far more than he was ever worth Stanford was sentenced to 110 years in a federal prison his earliest possible release date is in 2105 provided he can manage to live to 155 still he did get less than half the sentence prosecutors had asked for [Music] patrícia Cluj was once incredibly rich but her fortune was not exactly self-made it came through her marriage to media mogul John Kluge whose company Metromedia had gained ownership of a large number of television stations by the mid-1980s in 1986 Cluj sold those stations to 20th Century Fox making them the backbone of what would eventually become the Fox television network for an astounding four billion dollars at that time John Kluge was the richest man in America he had married Patricia a former exotic dancer 35 years his junior in 1981 during their stays at John's shooting ranch in the Scottish Highlands Patricia tried with a limited degree of success to make friends with neighboring royalty disaster struck however when the British tabloids got their hands on nude photos from Patricia's past after the couple were asked to host an event for Prince Charles and Princess Diana this forced the couple to retreat from the public eye and it was only a few years later that John asked for a divorce and indicated his willingness to pay up the divorce settlement made Patricia an instant billionaire speculated to have been worth a billion in cash alone in addition to several extravagant homes one of these luxury estates Albemarle house in Charlottesville Virginia was to become the ultimate drain on Patricia's fortune on its grounds she hosted lavish parties for celebrities and elite friends and decided that the grounds of a feature of their own winery she spared absolutely no expense in making this dream a reality employing pricy consultants and French wine masters and filling hundreds of imported oak barrels with wine that as it turns out nobody wanted to buy Patricia made only the most half-hearted of efforts in marketing her wine failing to establish a regional market before attempted to go national with a marketing campaign that barely existed predictably her entire billion-dollar fortune along with the value of most of her assets was sucked into the black hole of the winery after filing for chapter 7 bankruptcy Patricia finally had another stroke of good luck when in 2011 the winery was purchased for about a fifth of its original value by none other than Donald Trump it continues to operate today under the name what else Trump winery Sean Quinn began building his fortune in 1973 with little more than a $200 loan he began extracting gravel from his family's farm and selling it to local builders and before long the business had expanded enough to allow it to transition into cement Quinn used the profits from this business to gain financial interest in an impressive number of diverse sectors by 2008 his quaint group employed over 5,500 people and had interests in hospitality glass real estate plastics and health insurance and Sean Quinn was the richest man in all of Ireland with a net worth of over six billion dollars unfortunately one of his boldest investments would also be his ultimate downfall Quinn and his family having gotten their start in construction were eager to capitalize on an Irish construction boom in the early 2000s they began funneling money into Anglo Irish Bank the single biggest lender to Irish Construction Companies and before long the family owned a 28 percent stake in the bank a fact which they kept secret from other stock holders in all the family pumped over 1.3 billion dollars into the bank and Sean Quinn would later admit that he illegally used derivatives known as contracts for difference to invest money back into it essentially this means that Quinn was gambling on the fact that his shares would go up as a contract for difference or CFD allows an investor in a broker to pay each other the difference in the value of an asset as it changes over time this gamble failed spectacularly as the financial crisis of 2008 caused the value of the bank's shares to dramatically fall and led to its nationalization in 2009 in effects totally wiping out Quinn's investment he was declared bankrupt in Ireland in 2012 in that same year served nine weeks in jail for inappropriately stripping the assets of his company and failing to cooperate with government officials not only did his entire personal fortune go up in smoke but all of his business holdings are in various states of seizure as well because he still owes a whopping 3.5 billion dollars to the bank in which he once had partial ownership born into success Eike Batista was the son of Brazilian engineer a Vaz Batista de Silva who worked in the energy department of the cabinet in Brazil's government and was responsible for helping transform the mining company Vale into one of the world's largest at 18 i ka enrolled in college at the University of Aachen in Germany but dropped out soon after to pursue a faster path into the business world returning to Brazil in working in gold and diamond trading at the age of 23 he had made his first million and started a gold trading firm that would be valued at six million dollars within its first two years between 1980 and 2000 IQ Batista's companies generated over twenty billion dollars from gold and silver mines in Brazil Canada and Chile by 2011 he was named by Forbes magazine as the eighth richest person in the world with a net worth of 30 billion dollars the 58th most powerful person in the world and the second most powerful person in all of Brazil behind only the president however Batista's forays into the oil and natural gas industries would swiftly lead to what many financial experts would later call the quickest destruction of wealth in history Batista's company OGX was involved in the exploration for and production of natural gas and their initial surveys indicated that they were sitting on deposits that were worth up to one trillion dollars this turned out to be wildly optimistic as most of the company's wells were found to be complete duds similarly the company ridiculously overestimated the amount of crude oil its petroleum facilities could produce speculating that they could pump out 750 thousand barrels a day when in reality they could only ever manage about 15,000 OGX was forced to file for bankruptcy in 2013 but this was simply the largest factor in what was called a perfect storm of financial catastrophe a serious downturn in the precious metals market at around the same time combined with poor management decisions and fluctuations in the economy led IKEA Batista's personal net worth to plummet to negative 1 billion dollars in only about 18 months he has written in the Brazilian press about his regrets in mismanaging his companies and fortune and claims that he will leave no creditor unpaid [Music]

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Keywords: billionaire, millionaire, billionaires who lost everything, millionaires who lost everything, millionaire gone broke, winning the lottery, richest, richest man in the world, luxurious lifestyle, supercars, mansions, yatchs, the richest, lottery winners who lost it all, house, luxury, rich, money

Id: ugO5uSWCSoU

Length: 10min 45sec (645 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 08 2017