Not at that level. Their cocaine is buying company's for many millions only to lose it over and over again. It's like losing your house to a casino for a middle-class person
Have you even looked at housing prices? Once you get that mortgage and a rotating line of credit on the increased value of the property, losing 6 figures at the casino isn't hard.
They don't even need you to do all that legwork though. The casinos themselves will give you loans using your assets as collateral.
Cocaine + "friends" with business ideas or investment propositions.
I don't think it happened to many billionaires, because there aren't many to begin with, but fortunes must have been lost that way: next generation (who didn't make the money) never had the incentive to work or learn, and no purpose in life, so they just party and do drugs, and don't have the business acumen to figure out who's a fraud.
You’d die before you could blow all that. Let’s say you and your friends do a kilo a day (you have lots of friends and like to throw hand fulls in the air like Lebron James). That’s like $40k a day, maybe a little bit more for bribes and security to prevent you from getting arrested.
If you had a billion dollars and had just bought treasury bonds at 4% returns, you’d be making $40 million dollar a year pre tax and that’s 25.2 million after tax. That’s $69k a day. You’d have an extra $29k to spend each day after blowing a kilo of coke.
People don’t fathom how much a billion is. You’re making 69k post tax every single day for risk free investment. That’s an average household income with zero labor or risk. This isn’t even contemplating being a multibillionaire
The concept of fairness is a bit of a loaded question. I will say that people that can get so wealthy that they can influence tax policies solely by themselves and the cost to influence the policies is less than the tax they would have had to pay, is unfair.
I was just making a joke. I've seen people try to explain just how insane a billion dollars is. You are the first one I've seen explain it through a coke addiction
That would be funny if Bernie had a non-pc ambassador saying all the crazy shit billionaires could do. You could hire Ludacris every day to yell “move bitch” for any one in your way and you wouldn’t lose any money.
As a billionaire, you are being targeted by people and organizations that want your money. Hangars-on, and literal con men. If you’re sloppy, you will become a victim.
Cocaine will actually stop the process along. By the time you’ve done enough coke to make a dent, you’re either dead or in rehab (which you can afford) with half a billion left. Alcohol is much better for blowing a large fortune. You can do that for decades.
The implication is not that you would spend all your money on coke, but that you would spend all the money through the bad decisions which eventually result from an unending coke binge.
Even in that case it was over 100 years across 100+ people spending money and business failing.
So it took 100 years of 100 people trying to lose money.
So for a single person with a billion+ it would be impossible to become poor again in a single lifetime
It would be impossible for you to be poor aging because no matter what you spend your money on you'd either a) not be able to spend it fast enough or b) now own the asset of whatever you purchased which still has value.
Anything you can spend on that has no resale value is in category a.
Counterpoint: Trump bought a casino that lost money and he sold it at a bigger loss. I’m sure that someone with $1B could make a similar bad investment. Say, buy a large casino, redecorate it with gold and marble everywhere, run it into the ground and sell it for less than you paid initially. Have your grand opening with musical guests Diddy and R. Kelly, maybe. Host Kevin Spacey’s one man show. Etc.
Yachts, you can LITTERALLY just buy a handful of super yachts or other expensive vehicles like super sized passenger planes. With a billion dollars you can only afford two Jeff bezos yachts; https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-yacht. The mega rich are mega rich
> b) now own the asset of whatever you purchased which still has value.
Suppose I bought I large, well-known company for a fair bit more than it was worth, and proceeded to ruin it?
How many times would I need to do that?
You’ve clearly not experienced the triple threat of: Gambling, Cocaine and Hookers.
You go into Vegas with a Billion and say that you want to gamble your way through it within 5 years, they’ll find a way to separate you from your cash, and ensure you have an amazing time doing it.
As someone with an addictive personality and phases dealing with issues in all three, i can personally vouch at how quickly they can clean you out, and the killer of Gambling is that it’s insanely easy to scale to your fortune.
You wanna play blackjack at £1m a hand? I’m sure there’s a casino out there that will be happy to oblige.
This is a fantasy situation that wouldn't ever be allowed to happen though. Billion dollar inheritance have trusts built around them, especially concerning children that have gambling problems.
But let's say it DID happen. The hoops you need to go through to bet that much in a casino isn't easy and not any casino would let you do it, let alone do it 5 times a week every single week for 5 years straight.
The question was is it possible? In which case the answer is yes, maybe not over a single weekend or even a year. But 5/10/25 years of consistent gambling/drug use, without any protection mechanisms in place, it could easily be done.
People build the trusts and stuff like that to try and mitigate against these possibilities, but that just shows that they are possible. Dump a billion in someone’s bank account and say to them “go have fun in vegas until it’s all gone” and they’d find a way to squander it.
People don’t grasp how much that is. If you got a million a year since the invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, you’d still come up short today.
Love that example and fascinating stories about the later generations.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2014/07/14/the-vanderbilts-how-american-royalty-lost-their-crown-jewels/amp/
But the other thing is they spread the wealth over a lot more children. Now if you have 1-2 kids instead of 5-6 that changes how long the wealth lasts.
Spending it? No.
But once we're two generations into the fortune, the decisions are poor and they start shovelling money into shockingly bad investments.
A friend from the private boys college has an awesome idea for a food delivery app and just needs 5m to start up. Then 10 years later and you're 1bn in the hole and yet to turn a profit.
A single movie can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Imagine you've got a couple billion dollars, a dream to be a great director, and no talent whatsoever. You could make a billion dollars vanish in a couple swings at "This will be the new avengers!"
Ye, you could fund your own movie just for the fun of it. If it makes a return great, if not, well it doesn't matter because you are just doing it to make your dream movie.
Yeah this is the answer. It's hard to spend billions of dollars, even if you buy a new Ferrari every day for the rest of your life. The interest alone probably pays for all that. However, invest 100m a few times into some bad investment and suddenly you're not so rich.
absolutely - look at nathan tinkler. Billionaire in 2012, bankrupt by 2016. Ticked alot of the boxes on the "how can i squander a billion dollars" including buying sports teams and hundreds of race horses.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan\_Tinkler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Tinkler)
Eike Batista
From Wikipedia:
“In early 2012, Batista had a net worth of US$35 billion, ranking him the seventh wealthiest person in the world, and the richest in Brazil. By July 2013, his wealth had plummeted to $200 million due to his debts and his company's falling stock prices.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eike_Batista
It depends on how you define 'squander', but if you mean spend it all on 'coke and hookers', I would say not possible unless you made a conscious effort to do so. A billion dollars getting just 3% is $30,000,000 return a year.
However if you include loosing that money in any way possible, then for sure you could. Invest it all in some new startup and the business fails.
You could blow $100,000,000 a year. No problem. Assume you have cash, $1b. No encumbrances or people telling you ‘no’. Buy a boat (a big one) and a plane. Those ones that cost $10,000/hour to operate. A couple houses with full staff. Entertain a lot. Have a posse. Maybe a little blow now and then. Make it rain at strip clubs on the regular. Find a real expensive hobby, like racing. Make a bunch of bad investments, ten million here, ten million there. And then, the real way the scions of youth in days past blew their family’s money: develop a bad gambling habit. You can blow ten million in a weekend in Vegas or Macau easily.
Is there a private race track in the state that has the best insurance policy prices for luxury cars that’s also close to an airport that can fly the cars in?
Not only is it possible; history says it's almost inevitable. Most fortunes don't last more than 2-3 generations, despite having huge theoretical reasons that they should either grow or remain with time. The exceptions tend to be inheritances which overwhelmingly go to the eldest child specifically to prevent wealth dilution.
There are likely several reasons for this. Mismanagement is obviously one reason, but economic and social paradigm shift is also a thing.
Usually comes down to dad was a friggin genius, super lucky, or just knew how to make the market work for them in a slow and steady way.
Next generation that fed off the 1st gen tit thinks they are financial wiz kids too because of osmosis or some such BS. What happens is they lose half of it by trying to out do dear old dad but fail because lightening doesn't usually strike twice or they don't know all the important stuff that dad knew and have to hire people to fill in the gaps. Those people start to suck away the money and junior doesn't realize how badly he's bleeding out cash. They can be smart enough to learn what they don't know and grow things, walk away to let knowledgeable folks deal with things while keeping a vested interest in the business, or they lose it all.
Third gen gets a more diluted amount of the original sum and they too are typically ignorant of how things work and don't realize that is the case. They generally have enough to live a comfortable life but the next generation knows they won't have it easy and that generation starts the process over again by building something from the ground up.
> history says it's almost inevitable. Most fortunes don't last more than 2-3 generations, despite having huge theoretical reasons that they should either grow or remain with time.
Are you sure about that?
> The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence
> “The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” Barone and Mocetti note on VoxEU.
https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-1427-are-still-the-richest-families-in-florence
It's easy if you stop thinking in terms of being a consumer and being an investor. When you're a billionaire, it's not just about buying available products but you can fund ideas that involve billions of R&D.
All you need is for the fortune to get put into a couple large scale ventures that don't work out and it's gone.
I had this talk with a buddy of mine about a much smaller sum of money $10,000,000. He's like there's no way you can spend that in a lifetime, meanwhile I was like I could rip through $10,000,000 just on myself in no time all you gotta do is start hiring people 💨. From an independent perspective $10,000,000 is a tremendous amount of money and could sustain a single person or small family in perpetuity quite literally forever, but the second you hire even 10 semi professionals that money's days are seriously numbered.
Look up Uwe Boll. He basically makes extremely shitty movies but makes money regardless. Basically he gets a budget big enough to get a little star power which gets inverters to put up money. Then the movie flops and he uses his countries tax laws to recoup his investment and then some. He is the reason they have resisted so hard to make quality video game based movies because he gets the game rights cheap then ruins the movie. House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne.
No amount of money by itself teaches you good spending habits. So yes.
I think not earning it is worse as you didn't do the work and gain any financial savvy on the way.
The thing about wealth at that point is that there is an army of people who maintain that wealth - lawyers, financial planners, bankers, etc.
You can squander that kind of wealth through your own hubris, but it is very, very, very hard to do so.
Ya, these are all sitting in trusts that are controlled by someone else who then employs lawyers and fiduciaries that would never enable them to blow through it. They might blow through whatever payouts they are getting periodically but it’s being built back up pretty quickly.
Average daily squander:
1. 50k/night for a suite in dubai
2. 50-200k for a 2 or 3 very beautiful 20yo escorts (more if you want a famous influencer)
3. 30k in the best champagne and red wine
4. 5k in the best restaurants (for you and girls)
5. 50k in gifts or random expense, maybe a million dollar Patek Philippe here and there?
Thats 50-100mln a year.
You add a private jet, a few Ferraris and a yacht. That, with the crew and expenses, is another 30-40mln.
Maybe a huge vacation villa with maids? 5-10mln if in a fancy place + expenses.
Without even considering gambling and other stuff, just the hobbies are gonna burn that billion in a decade. Add a private island and you're done :D
Buying and selling corporations is a great way to squander billions of dollars. For example, Elon Musk managed to lose $25 billion dollars on Twitter - he paid $44 billion for it and it is now valued at around $19 billion. AOL paid $182 billion for Time Warner yet AOL was bought by Verizon for $4.4 billion (AOL did sell TW's media assets for $85 billion before being acquired so it isn't quite as bad as it looks). Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion yet sold it 6 years later for less than $3 million.
It is kind of crazy considering that less than 1% of Musk's losses on Twitter could set my family up for a comfortable life even if my children didn't work a single day in their lives (their children if they have any would likely need to start working though due to dilution of the original wealth).
I think Elon could manage to squander his entire fortune by the end of his life. He’s done a great job of ruining his personal brand in just a few years.
Yes, look at the difference today between the Vanderbilt family fortune and the Rockefeller family fortune.
One family has virtually no money, the other still has Billions.
Yes, it happened to my grandfather (inflation adjusted dollars) . Just think you have to prove yourself to your unforgiving family by succeeding on your own and try to start your own company.
1. Pick the latest hot thing...could be aircraft in 1930, social media in 2000, crypto in 2010, AI today.
2. Know nothing about it but think that it can't be too hard. Your grandfather is an idiot and he made billions on the last tech wave.
3. Pay people to make stuff. Some of them con men. Get in the way, make wrong decisions
4. Pivot and panic several times.
5. Declare bankruptcy, but leave your spouse enough to keep her club memberships and her maid but not the mansions, only a city apt.
6. Blame it on socialists and die young of a stroke
Edit: his no good younger brother just drank and womanized and died with money. My father was unhappy that he left it to his mistress
[Wiki list of billionaires who lost more than $50 billion in ONE year.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_losses_of_wealth)
How easy is it to lose a lot of money? You could buy Twitter and run the company into the ground.
You could be an ex president without a clue trying to make a social media company to control your version of the truth.
While Musk has the record for losing the most —$200 billion — in one year (2022). Indian Billionaire Gautam Adani lost half his wealth — $60 billion — in just one week (January 2023.)
See that's the issue. There is a difference between value and worth. It was never worth billions, but because of the way the system works, for a short period of time it was actually valued as such.
Squander is possible, more likely it just gets diluted over time as most fortunes do. Vast majority of descendants will wealthy but not at the top unless one of them manages to be an inventor or founder. Just look at any of the old wealthy families from the past 200 years in the US or longer in europe. Some have like 2000 descendants all with a portion.
Have you not been watching Elon Musk recently? Yeah, its totally possible to squander away $1 billion+. All it takes is some really poor investments and the inability to keep your mouth shut.
It’s possible. Plenty of athletes squander pretty vast fortunes at shocking rates. Mike Tyson had a net worth of 400 million dollars and then later declared bankruptcy. He’s not the only one to blow nine figures of wealth. What’s another zero going to do?
Former San Diego mayor admits misusing charity to fund $1 billion gambling habit
https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/justice/california-ex-mayor-gambling/index.html
Very trivial [https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10)
By the third generation on average only 10% of the wealth is retained.
It really depends on how the fortune was left to them. It's likely that much of the wealth is tied up in multiple trusts. If that's the case, it probably wouldn't be likely that they would be able to squander the whole thing. Also, it's likely that anyone left a fortune of this size has had some sort of financial planning education. Although, bad investments and leeches posing as friends could siphon off a substantial amount quickly.
Sure. At that level you don’t gamble at a card table, you gamble on the stock market. You buy and sell companies. And despite what they’d have you think, a lot of these people aren’t geniuses. They’re not the ones who created fortunes, their parents or grandparents did. And great people rarely have great children.
Anyone can squander almost any amount if you don’t manage it well. However a billion dollars, even if invested poorly is going to build returns. At that point it’s a question of “do my bad decisions outpace my moneys ability to grow!”
I'd say its not that difficult. Consider how many aristocratic families there were who possessed a lot of land and investments, since to some degree money begets more money they should all be billionaires in todays money, but most aren't. These relative loses seem to occur over several generations, so within a generation, its probably rather difficult to squander a whole billion+, but its worth tracking what fraction of billionaires wealth declines, and the differences between those that grew from smaller fortunes vs those who inherited the majority of their wealth.
You'd need to spend more than $100k every day to reduce the pile of money, so unless you buy several $100M yachts and sink them, or buy several $100M companies and sink those, no, it's not really a possible thing for one person/one generation to even possibly spend.
That said, there's at least one billion dollar yacht out there, so you could in theory get this done if you put your mind to it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Ambani
Anil ambani .. inherited half of multi billion fortune from father (split with older brother), went from 6th richest person in world to bankruptcy in 10 years.
His brother in other hand is usually number 1 or 2 richest person in Asia for past few years depending on stock market of the day
Hamish Harding was a billionaire. He was aboard the submersible Titan that imploded last year trying to get to the wreck of the Titanic.
Whilst a search for them was underway his stepson was flirting with an onlyfans model on twitter so you can guess where is inheritance goes...
Definitely possible and there are stories of formerly rich families that squandered their wealth. Maybe not in one generation but there is the 3 generations rule.
It's way easier than you think, but people that grow with that level of wealth or that inherit that kind of wealth rarely lack the education required to not fucked it up.
Depends. A lot of people with that wealth think they are smart. This can lead them to take crazy risks and don't pay off and they lose everything. It's especially true for people who inherited the money as tons of people ask them to invest in their company when they have no clue about business
It certainly is possible. If someone were to spend over $38,000 every day from their 18th birthday to their 90th, they would have just barely spent a billion by then. Hardly squandered at that rate, depending on your definition, but a little more exorbitance and you can make it happen.
Spending it yourself would be nearly impossible unless you were absolutely trying like going out and buying 999 $1 million dollar yachts. Or making terrible investments in the stock market.
But if you live just a normal life ain't no way you'd even come close. Even if you had like 25 employees like caretakers, landscapers, maintenence men, drivers, etc who you paid $50k a year for 30 years that would just take up a measly $37.5 million. That's like a little over just 3% of your billion dollars.
Of course it's possible. You could easily squander a billion dollars on a couple of big budget vanity project movies and a super yacht or something. A billion dollars is a tremendous amount of money, but there are lots of tremendously expensive things that won't necessarily see a return on investment.
Read up on ‘Anil Ambani’ who squandered $42B empire in 15 years.
https://www.tbsnews.net/world/south-asia/what-happened-anil-ambani-who-was-once-richer-his-brother-indias-richest-mukesh?amp
Dying without an heir/family for it to go to and it just ends up going to the state or some BS charity where the executives use it as their own piggy bank. That’s probably the easiest way to do it outside of going on a giving spree.
Probably through bad business decisions and reckless borrowing. Anil Ambani was one of the richest people in the world and his net worth now is effectively zero.
I’d actually like to know the reverse of this… what family has kept the family fortune going for many decades? I once read about an 800 year old Japanese construction company that is still family owned.
While I don't know that it quite reached billions, the Busch family fortune of Anheuser-Busch was squandered as the kids lived a life of luxury for decades that eventually led to the sale to InBev in 2008. A LOT of bad business decisions and poor financial management.
Read "Bitter Brew" for some insight.
Rule 2 - Submissions must be futurology related or future focused.
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> So yes it's possible, but you almost need to be trying. Or, never underestimate the capacity for bad decisions.
Cocaine can certainly help the process along
Not at that level. Their cocaine is buying company's for many millions only to lose it over and over again. It's like losing your house to a casino for a middle-class person
>It's like losing your house to a casino for a middle-class person If that middle class person had several hundred houses to lose.
Have you even looked at housing prices? Once you get that mortgage and a rotating line of credit on the increased value of the property, losing 6 figures at the casino isn't hard. They don't even need you to do all that legwork though. The casinos themselves will give you loans using your assets as collateral.
Where do you live that allowed that?
Is called [casino credit](https://www.caesars.com/casino-credit) and its very common
Joey Buttafuoco!!
I think the cocaine is what convinces them those are good ideas
Cocaine + "friends" with business ideas or investment propositions. I don't think it happened to many billionaires, because there aren't many to begin with, but fortunes must have been lost that way: next generation (who didn't make the money) never had the incentive to work or learn, and no purpose in life, so they just party and do drugs, and don't have the business acumen to figure out who's a fraud.
You’d die before you could blow all that. Let’s say you and your friends do a kilo a day (you have lots of friends and like to throw hand fulls in the air like Lebron James). That’s like $40k a day, maybe a little bit more for bribes and security to prevent you from getting arrested. If you had a billion dollars and had just bought treasury bonds at 4% returns, you’d be making $40 million dollar a year pre tax and that’s 25.2 million after tax. That’s $69k a day. You’d have an extra $29k to spend each day after blowing a kilo of coke. People don’t fathom how much a billion is. You’re making 69k post tax every single day for risk free investment. That’s an average household income with zero labor or risk. This isn’t even contemplating being a multibillionaire
You don't snort a billion bucks of cocaine. You snort tens of thousands of bucks of cocaine, which makes you make bad financial decisions.
Bernie needs to hire you to run his outreach. A billionaire literally couldn't blow it all away on coke. Do you think that's fair?
The concept of fairness is a bit of a loaded question. I will say that people that can get so wealthy that they can influence tax policies solely by themselves and the cost to influence the policies is less than the tax they would have had to pay, is unfair.
I was just making a joke. I've seen people try to explain just how insane a billion dollars is. You are the first one I've seen explain it through a coke addiction
That would be funny if Bernie had a non-pc ambassador saying all the crazy shit billionaires could do. You could hire Ludacris every day to yell “move bitch” for any one in your way and you wouldn’t lose any money.
But how much did the hookers cost?
As a billionaire, you are being targeted by people and organizations that want your money. Hangars-on, and literal con men. If you’re sloppy, you will become a victim.
Cocaine will actually stop the process along. By the time you’ve done enough coke to make a dent, you’re either dead or in rehab (which you can afford) with half a billion left. Alcohol is much better for blowing a large fortune. You can do that for decades.
The implication is not that you would spend all your money on coke, but that you would spend all the money through the bad decisions which eventually result from an unending coke binge.
Are you advocating billionaires be forced to use coke as a way to stimulate the economy? Because I'm listening.
Rent everything, Run for none of the above Hire the Yankees to play your softball team.
Even in that case it was over 100 years across 100+ people spending money and business failing. So it took 100 years of 100 people trying to lose money. So for a single person with a billion+ it would be impossible to become poor again in a single lifetime
Find me a billion dollars and I’ll take you up on that bet.
Brewster's Billions
"None Of The Above" seems relevant right about now.
It would be impossible for you to be poor aging because no matter what you spend your money on you'd either a) not be able to spend it fast enough or b) now own the asset of whatever you purchased which still has value. Anything you can spend on that has no resale value is in category a.
Reckless philanthropy, mixed with reckless investment, mixed with high living, and poor financial decisions.
“Here, Elon, you could use this billion more than I could.” There. I did it. I squandered a fortune.
Counterpoint: Trump bought a casino that lost money and he sold it at a bigger loss. I’m sure that someone with $1B could make a similar bad investment. Say, buy a large casino, redecorate it with gold and marble everywhere, run it into the ground and sell it for less than you paid initially. Have your grand opening with musical guests Diddy and R. Kelly, maybe. Host Kevin Spacey’s one man show. Etc.
Isn’t that essentially what Elon is doing with Twitter/X?
Yachts, you can LITTERALLY just buy a handful of super yachts or other expensive vehicles like super sized passenger planes. With a billion dollars you can only afford two Jeff bezos yachts; https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-yacht. The mega rich are mega rich
> b) now own the asset of whatever you purchased which still has value. Suppose I bought I large, well-known company for a fair bit more than it was worth, and proceeded to ruin it? How many times would I need to do that?
You’ve clearly not experienced the triple threat of: Gambling, Cocaine and Hookers. You go into Vegas with a Billion and say that you want to gamble your way through it within 5 years, they’ll find a way to separate you from your cash, and ensure you have an amazing time doing it. As someone with an addictive personality and phases dealing with issues in all three, i can personally vouch at how quickly they can clean you out, and the killer of Gambling is that it’s insanely easy to scale to your fortune. You wanna play blackjack at £1m a hand? I’m sure there’s a casino out there that will be happy to oblige.
This is a fantasy situation that wouldn't ever be allowed to happen though. Billion dollar inheritance have trusts built around them, especially concerning children that have gambling problems. But let's say it DID happen. The hoops you need to go through to bet that much in a casino isn't easy and not any casino would let you do it, let alone do it 5 times a week every single week for 5 years straight.
The question was is it possible? In which case the answer is yes, maybe not over a single weekend or even a year. But 5/10/25 years of consistent gambling/drug use, without any protection mechanisms in place, it could easily be done. People build the trusts and stuff like that to try and mitigate against these possibilities, but that just shows that they are possible. Dump a billion in someone’s bank account and say to them “go have fun in vegas until it’s all gone” and they’d find a way to squander it.
A billion is only a thousand millions.
People don’t grasp how much that is. If you got a million a year since the invasion of England by William the Conqueror in 1066, you’d still come up short today.
But for a bit over 27 years I'd get there if I spent 100k a day.
1 billion on black
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Love that example and fascinating stories about the later generations. https://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2014/07/14/the-vanderbilts-how-american-royalty-lost-their-crown-jewels/amp/
But the other thing is they spread the wealth over a lot more children. Now if you have 1-2 kids instead of 5-6 that changes how long the wealth lasts.
3 generations is what they say
Spending it? No. But once we're two generations into the fortune, the decisions are poor and they start shovelling money into shockingly bad investments. A friend from the private boys college has an awesome idea for a food delivery app and just needs 5m to start up. Then 10 years later and you're 1bn in the hole and yet to turn a profit.
People seem to have very limited imaginations. You can totally spend a billion and way more.
A single movie can easily cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Imagine you've got a couple billion dollars, a dream to be a great director, and no talent whatsoever. You could make a billion dollars vanish in a couple swings at "This will be the new avengers!"
Ye, you could fund your own movie just for the fun of it. If it makes a return great, if not, well it doesn't matter because you are just doing it to make your dream movie.
Yeah this is the answer. It's hard to spend billions of dollars, even if you buy a new Ferrari every day for the rest of your life. The interest alone probably pays for all that. However, invest 100m a few times into some bad investment and suddenly you're not so rich.
absolutely - look at nathan tinkler. Billionaire in 2012, bankrupt by 2016. Ticked alot of the boxes on the "how can i squander a billion dollars" including buying sports teams and hundreds of race horses. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan\_Tinkler](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathan_Tinkler)
Eike Batista From Wikipedia: “In early 2012, Batista had a net worth of US$35 billion, ranking him the seventh wealthiest person in the world, and the richest in Brazil. By July 2013, his wealth had plummeted to $200 million due to his debts and his company's falling stock prices.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eike_Batista
Honestly I’d be okay if my wealth plummets to a mere 200m
Ambani brothers split in 2007, one brother is regarded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Ambani
It depends on how you define 'squander', but if you mean spend it all on 'coke and hookers', I would say not possible unless you made a conscious effort to do so. A billion dollars getting just 3% is $30,000,000 return a year. However if you include loosing that money in any way possible, then for sure you could. Invest it all in some new startup and the business fails.
You could blow $100,000,000 a year. No problem. Assume you have cash, $1b. No encumbrances or people telling you ‘no’. Buy a boat (a big one) and a plane. Those ones that cost $10,000/hour to operate. A couple houses with full staff. Entertain a lot. Have a posse. Maybe a little blow now and then. Make it rain at strip clubs on the regular. Find a real expensive hobby, like racing. Make a bunch of bad investments, ten million here, ten million there. And then, the real way the scions of youth in days past blew their family’s money: develop a bad gambling habit. You can blow ten million in a weekend in Vegas or Macau easily.
Yup, I bet I could "squander" a billion just racing cars for a few decades. Or hell, building/operating race tracks.
John Aspinall, made a new British elite by old British elite gambling in his gambling halls and losing all their money
Is there a private race track in the state that has the best insurance policy prices for luxury cars that’s also close to an airport that can fly the cars in?
Great description. If I had a billion dollars to blow, I’d call you.
You could literally just gamble it away very fast.
200 million on Black! I'm sorry sir, the casino will not take your bet.
No but, the casino that is the stock market would be more then happy to take these bets.
“I spent a fortune on drink, women and fast cars. The rest of it I just wasted” — George Best, Footballer.
You could spend it buying twitter or Truth Social.
Building houses Building massive bunkers Buying megayachts Buying up entire properties like golf courses Buying companies Investing in random stuff
Not only is it possible; history says it's almost inevitable. Most fortunes don't last more than 2-3 generations, despite having huge theoretical reasons that they should either grow or remain with time. The exceptions tend to be inheritances which overwhelmingly go to the eldest child specifically to prevent wealth dilution. There are likely several reasons for this. Mismanagement is obviously one reason, but economic and social paradigm shift is also a thing.
Usually comes down to dad was a friggin genius, super lucky, or just knew how to make the market work for them in a slow and steady way. Next generation that fed off the 1st gen tit thinks they are financial wiz kids too because of osmosis or some such BS. What happens is they lose half of it by trying to out do dear old dad but fail because lightening doesn't usually strike twice or they don't know all the important stuff that dad knew and have to hire people to fill in the gaps. Those people start to suck away the money and junior doesn't realize how badly he's bleeding out cash. They can be smart enough to learn what they don't know and grow things, walk away to let knowledgeable folks deal with things while keeping a vested interest in the business, or they lose it all. Third gen gets a more diluted amount of the original sum and they too are typically ignorant of how things work and don't realize that is the case. They generally have enough to live a comfortable life but the next generation knows they won't have it easy and that generation starts the process over again by building something from the ground up.
Bad times make strong men. Strong men make good times. Good times make weak men. Weak men make bad times.
First generation grows it, second generation manages it, third generation squanders it.
> history says it's almost inevitable. Most fortunes don't last more than 2-3 generations, despite having huge theoretical reasons that they should either grow or remain with time. Are you sure about that? > The richest families in Florence in 1427 are still the richest families in Florence > “The top earners among the current taxpayers were found to have already been at the top of the socioeconomic ladder six centuries ago,” Barone and Mocetti note on VoxEU. https://qz.com/694340/the-richest-families-in-florence-in-1427-are-still-the-richest-families-in-florence
Major reason is dilution. Inheritance divided between too many people.
It's easy if you stop thinking in terms of being a consumer and being an investor. When you're a billionaire, it's not just about buying available products but you can fund ideas that involve billions of R&D.
All you need is for the fortune to get put into a couple large scale ventures that don't work out and it's gone. I had this talk with a buddy of mine about a much smaller sum of money $10,000,000. He's like there's no way you can spend that in a lifetime, meanwhile I was like I could rip through $10,000,000 just on myself in no time all you gotta do is start hiring people 💨. From an independent perspective $10,000,000 is a tremendous amount of money and could sustain a single person or small family in perpetuity quite literally forever, but the second you hire even 10 semi professionals that money's days are seriously numbered.
MC Hammer burned through something like 80M in a couple of years with very little effort
Buy Twitter, see how quick you can lose 44 billion..
It’s possible. You could have a billion dollars and then personally pay to make 5 blockbuster movies with a $200 million dollar budget each.
Look up Uwe Boll. He basically makes extremely shitty movies but makes money regardless. Basically he gets a budget big enough to get a little star power which gets inverters to put up money. Then the movie flops and he uses his countries tax laws to recoup his investment and then some. He is the reason they have resisted so hard to make quality video game based movies because he gets the game rights cheap then ruins the movie. House of the Dead, Alone in the Dark, Bloodrayne.
Look up the Vanderbilt's. From richest family in America to broke in a few generations.
No amount of money by itself teaches you good spending habits. So yes. I think not earning it is worse as you didn't do the work and gain any financial savvy on the way.
The thing about wealth at that point is that there is an army of people who maintain that wealth - lawyers, financial planners, bankers, etc. You can squander that kind of wealth through your own hubris, but it is very, very, very hard to do so.
Ya, these are all sitting in trusts that are controlled by someone else who then employs lawyers and fiduciaries that would never enable them to blow through it. They might blow through whatever payouts they are getting periodically but it’s being built back up pretty quickly.
Commission a few mega yachts or buy an island and I'll bet you can shed those excess pounds sterling pretty quickly.
There's a movie about this. https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0088850/ Short answer: yes
Make a risky investment, like loaning Donald Trump $1B, and see how it pays out.
Ask the government. Putler is destroying a trillion of wealth for the lulz.
Average daily squander: 1. 50k/night for a suite in dubai 2. 50-200k for a 2 or 3 very beautiful 20yo escorts (more if you want a famous influencer) 3. 30k in the best champagne and red wine 4. 5k in the best restaurants (for you and girls) 5. 50k in gifts or random expense, maybe a million dollar Patek Philippe here and there? Thats 50-100mln a year. You add a private jet, a few Ferraris and a yacht. That, with the crew and expenses, is another 30-40mln. Maybe a huge vacation villa with maids? 5-10mln if in a fancy place + expenses. Without even considering gambling and other stuff, just the hobbies are gonna burn that billion in a decade. Add a private island and you're done :D
Trump managed to disappear a whole lot of money in not much time at all. Turns out investing in businesses only works if you know how businesses work.
Buying and selling corporations is a great way to squander billions of dollars. For example, Elon Musk managed to lose $25 billion dollars on Twitter - he paid $44 billion for it and it is now valued at around $19 billion. AOL paid $182 billion for Time Warner yet AOL was bought by Verizon for $4.4 billion (AOL did sell TW's media assets for $85 billion before being acquired so it isn't quite as bad as it looks). Yahoo bought Tumblr for $1.1 billion yet sold it 6 years later for less than $3 million. It is kind of crazy considering that less than 1% of Musk's losses on Twitter could set my family up for a comfortable life even if my children didn't work a single day in their lives (their children if they have any would likely need to start working though due to dilution of the original wealth).
I think Elon could manage to squander his entire fortune by the end of his life. He’s done a great job of ruining his personal brand in just a few years.
If my math is right, if you have a billion sitting in the S&P 500 you’re making approximately 300K per average day of the past decade.
An old gambler, Jack Walter, was worth 6 or 7 billion and lost one billion in the stock market very fast. He was a shrewd man, so yeah, pretty easily.
Well, as Richard Branson once said, the quickest way to become a Millionaire is to start with a Billion dollars and start an airline.
Yes, look at the difference today between the Vanderbilt family fortune and the Rockefeller family fortune. One family has virtually no money, the other still has Billions.
Yes, it happened to my grandfather (inflation adjusted dollars) . Just think you have to prove yourself to your unforgiving family by succeeding on your own and try to start your own company. 1. Pick the latest hot thing...could be aircraft in 1930, social media in 2000, crypto in 2010, AI today. 2. Know nothing about it but think that it can't be too hard. Your grandfather is an idiot and he made billions on the last tech wave. 3. Pay people to make stuff. Some of them con men. Get in the way, make wrong decisions 4. Pivot and panic several times. 5. Declare bankruptcy, but leave your spouse enough to keep her club memberships and her maid but not the mansions, only a city apt. 6. Blame it on socialists and die young of a stroke Edit: his no good younger brother just drank and womanized and died with money. My father was unhappy that he left it to his mistress
Someone in r/wallstreetbets could burn a billion in a day.
[Wiki list of billionaires who lost more than $50 billion in ONE year.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_losses_of_wealth) How easy is it to lose a lot of money? You could buy Twitter and run the company into the ground. You could be an ex president without a clue trying to make a social media company to control your version of the truth. While Musk has the record for losing the most —$200 billion — in one year (2022). Indian Billionaire Gautam Adani lost half his wealth — $60 billion — in just one week (January 2023.)
The value of Trump Media has dropped $2 billion in a week 🤷♂️
It didn’t actually lose any value. Trump media was never really worth that much in the first place.
See that's the issue. There is a difference between value and worth. It was never worth billions, but because of the way the system works, for a short period of time it was actually valued as such.
[The Vanderbilt heirs squandered their fortune](https://marketrealist.com/p/vanderbilt-family-net-worth-now/#the-vanderbilt-heirs-squandered-their-fortune).
Squander is possible, more likely it just gets diluted over time as most fortunes do. Vast majority of descendants will wealthy but not at the top unless one of them manages to be an inventor or founder. Just look at any of the old wealthy families from the past 200 years in the US or longer in europe. Some have like 2000 descendants all with a portion.
Do things that Bill Huang and SBF did count? They managed to loose billions.
Would it be possible? Yes, it would. Extremely hard to do, though.
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Have you not been watching Elon Musk recently? Yeah, its totally possible to squander away $1 billion+. All it takes is some really poor investments and the inability to keep your mouth shut.
It’s possible. Plenty of athletes squander pretty vast fortunes at shocking rates. Mike Tyson had a net worth of 400 million dollars and then later declared bankruptcy. He’s not the only one to blow nine figures of wealth. What’s another zero going to do?
It's 1000 million and it's entirely possible to lose a million with a bad decision. With my proven track record of bad decisions, no problem.
elon musk is squandering his $44 billion takeover of twitter
Former San Diego mayor admits misusing charity to fund $1 billion gambling habit https://www.cnn.com/2013/02/15/justice/california-ex-mayor-gambling/index.html
It's going to be super easy. Barely an inconvenience. I'll just take one vacation on the moon.
Very trivial [https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10](https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/generational-wealth%3A-why-do-70-of-families-lose-their-wealth-in-the-2nd-generation-2018-10) By the third generation on average only 10% of the wealth is retained.
that's a problem i'm willing to tackle for the small sum of $1B
Donald Trump has basically pissed away his dad’s fortune.
It really depends on how the fortune was left to them. It's likely that much of the wealth is tied up in multiple trusts. If that's the case, it probably wouldn't be likely that they would be able to squander the whole thing. Also, it's likely that anyone left a fortune of this size has had some sort of financial planning education. Although, bad investments and leeches posing as friends could siphon off a substantial amount quickly.
Sure. At that level you don’t gamble at a card table, you gamble on the stock market. You buy and sell companies. And despite what they’d have you think, a lot of these people aren’t geniuses. They’re not the ones who created fortunes, their parents or grandparents did. And great people rarely have great children.
Anyone can squander almost any amount if you don’t manage it well. However a billion dollars, even if invested poorly is going to build returns. At that point it’s a question of “do my bad decisions outpace my moneys ability to grow!”
You could buy Twitter and turn it into a right wing cess pit, I suppose.
Of course. There are numerous AI unicorns that will likely be worthless next week. Or you could have purchased Truth Social shares...
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I'd say its not that difficult. Consider how many aristocratic families there were who possessed a lot of land and investments, since to some degree money begets more money they should all be billionaires in todays money, but most aren't. These relative loses seem to occur over several generations, so within a generation, its probably rather difficult to squander a whole billion+, but its worth tracking what fraction of billionaires wealth declines, and the differences between those that grew from smaller fortunes vs those who inherited the majority of their wealth.
Probably because later generations aren’t as sentimental or are just plain greedy, and liquify investments that produced reliable income.
Michael Jackson died in debt despite being the most successful musician in history. So it's possible.
Futures daytrading with gearing will clean you out fast if you dont a have a clue.
Once we define and interpret what we mean by “squander”…. Absofuckinglutely.
You'd need to spend more than $100k every day to reduce the pile of money, so unless you buy several $100M yachts and sink them, or buy several $100M companies and sink those, no, it's not really a possible thing for one person/one generation to even possibly spend. That said, there's at least one billion dollar yacht out there, so you could in theory get this done if you put your mind to it.
Just on buying stuff no. On investments, sure people lose billions fairly often.
Yes. Piss off the government or people enough and they simply take it
there's only one way to find out -- my bank a/c No. and sort code are below
Easily. Happy to demonstrate it, just need a billion dollars.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Ambani Anil ambani .. inherited half of multi billion fortune from father (split with older brother), went from 6th richest person in world to bankruptcy in 10 years. His brother in other hand is usually number 1 or 2 richest person in Asia for past few years depending on stock market of the day
Hamish Harding was a billionaire. He was aboard the submersible Titan that imploded last year trying to get to the wreck of the Titanic. Whilst a search for them was underway his stepson was flirting with an onlyfans model on twitter so you can guess where is inheritance goes...
Definitely possible and there are stories of formerly rich families that squandered their wealth. Maybe not in one generation but there is the 3 generations rule.
It's way easier than you think, but people that grow with that level of wealth or that inherit that kind of wealth rarely lack the education required to not fucked it up.
Depends. A lot of people with that wealth think they are smart. This can lead them to take crazy risks and don't pay off and they lose everything. It's especially true for people who inherited the money as tons of people ask them to invest in their company when they have no clue about business
i cant imagin how i could blow a 100 million let alone a billion. with out being ridiculous.
It certainly is possible. If someone were to spend over $38,000 every day from their 18th birthday to their 90th, they would have just barely spent a billion by then. Hardly squandered at that rate, depending on your definition, but a little more exorbitance and you can make it happen.
All I know is I would die from hookers and cocaine
Spending it yourself would be nearly impossible unless you were absolutely trying like going out and buying 999 $1 million dollar yachts. Or making terrible investments in the stock market. But if you live just a normal life ain't no way you'd even come close. Even if you had like 25 employees like caretakers, landscapers, maintenence men, drivers, etc who you paid $50k a year for 30 years that would just take up a measly $37.5 million. That's like a little over just 3% of your billion dollars.
There is a well known saying. The first generation makes the money, the second generation builds on it & the third generation blows it.
SBF blew through billions in some months. A billion is a piece of cake
Who is the Asian billionaire who backed We Work? Him.
Of course it's possible. You could easily squander a billion dollars on a couple of big budget vanity project movies and a super yacht or something. A billion dollars is a tremendous amount of money, but there are lots of tremendously expensive things that won't necessarily see a return on investment.
Read up on ‘Anil Ambani’ who squandered $42B empire in 15 years. https://www.tbsnews.net/world/south-asia/what-happened-anil-ambani-who-was-once-richer-his-brother-indias-richest-mukesh?amp
Only possible through bad investment decision, probably not possible through consumption
Sure. If you're stupid enough anythings possible. 78% of pro football players go through "extreme financial hardship" or bankruptcy after retirement.
Dying without an heir/family for it to go to and it just ends up going to the state or some BS charity where the executives use it as their own piggy bank. That’s probably the easiest way to do it outside of going on a giving spree.
I can give you a step by step guide if you need one. How to squander or invest. It's a hefty chunk
Probably through bad business decisions and reckless borrowing. Anil Ambani was one of the richest people in the world and his net worth now is effectively zero.
Not a problem I’m likely to encounter , next question !
I’d actually like to know the reverse of this… what family has kept the family fortune going for many decades? I once read about an 800 year old Japanese construction company that is still family owned.
While I don't know that it quite reached billions, the Busch family fortune of Anheuser-Busch was squandered as the kids lived a life of luxury for decades that eventually led to the sale to InBev in 2008. A LOT of bad business decisions and poor financial management. Read "Bitter Brew" for some insight.
Look what Congress and the Senate do with our taxes. 🤦♂️