From the Hermes heir to Nicolas Cage: Millionaires who went bankrupt

Having money is not always a guarantee of continued economic success. Though Benjamin Franklin held that “money makes money,” and while it’s true that a larger range of possibilities are open to those who possess funds, like access to financial services and the ability to buy property and live off their tenants’ rent, the rich are also capable of making bad decisions. Actors, investors, heirs, athletes — as the following list proves, no one is safe when greed, vice or excessive confidence come knocking.

Nicolas Puech Hermes

Nicolas Puech Hermes first rose to infamy halfway through 2023, when it was announced that the French octogenarian, one of the heirs of the Hermes luxury house, sought to legally adopt his gardener. His intention was to facilitate the employee’s inheritance of his fortune, valued at $13.4 billion, nearly all of it comprised of six million shares of the company’s stock.

That magnanimous gesture towards his staff, however, remained just that — a gesture. In July, Puech’s lawyers revealed to a Swiss court that he was no longer the owner of the Hermes shares. According to a court order, for 24 years, Puech employed a financial manager named Eric Freymond. In 1998, he gave Freymond power over his accounts.

In 2022, the heir reversed that mandate, looking to take back control of his finances in order to bequeath it to others. A year later, he sued Freymond, alleging that the financial manager withheld information and had not returned the shares. The court ruled against the heir on the grounds that he had willingly given the manager carte blanche over his accounts, and had not properly supervised their management. According to Bloomberg, the current whereabouts of Puech’s shares are unclear, but that it is known where they cannot be found: in the heir’s possession.

Bill Hwang

Although his name is little-known outside of financial circles, Bill Hwang rose to infamy in 2021. He arrived in the United States as a young boy from South Korea, and began his career in finance in 1996. In 2001, he started his own hedge fund, Tiger Asia Management. In 2012, the Securities and Futures Commission in Hong Kong found evidence that the firm participated in insider trading and price manipulation activities, forcing it to shut down. The following year, Hwang opened a “family office” named Archegos Capital Management.

Under more lax oversight and the collusion of large banks like Credit Suisse and Nomura, the new firm was allowed to operate in an even more suspect manner. At its peak, it managed $75 billion in assets and loans. In March 2021, one of its large positions collapsed, starting a domino effect that resulted in the loss of $20 billion in a matter of days. The firm did not survive, leaving losses to the tune of nearly $4 billion at the now-defunct Credit Suisse. In 2022, U.S. federal prosecutors indicted Hwang on 11 counts including lying to banks to obtain financing. Last July, a jury found him guilty on 10 of those counts.

Pamela Anderson

The TV star skyrocketed to global fame thanks to her role on Baywatch, but wound up living in a trailer park, beset by financial woes. Of course, hers was no ordinary trailer park — it was a luxury complex frequented by celebrities.

It was 2009, almost 20 years after Anderson first became a household name. Her career had been deeply impacted by the leak of a sex tape that had been stolen from her home. Renovations on her Malibu mansion ran over budget and schedule. According to The Daily Mail, at the end of October that year, Anderson had around $3,000 in the bank and was $636,000 away from finishing out the update of her home. To her credit, the actress eventually managed to bounce back. She left the park, paid off her debts and sold the trailer. Today, she has settled down in Vancouver, Canada, in the house she inherited from her grandmother.

George Best

Soccer player George Best was quite the legend at Manchester United. Between 1963 and 1974, the year he left the club that brought him to athletic greatness, he won two league titles, one European Cup and the Ballon d’Or trophy. Infamous for his bohemian lifestyle and alcoholism, once he left Manchester, he’d play for 15 different clubs, though he never stayed with another squad for more than a year.

According to local publication Manchester Evening News, towards the end of his career, between 1982 and his retirement in 1984, he was fined for unpaid taxes and spent various weeks in jail for drunk driving and assaulting a police officer. Four years after he bid adieu to the soccer field, a benefit match was held to raise $100,000 to get him out of bankruptcy. “I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars — the rest, I just squandered,” he’d eventually respond when asked as to his economic woes. In 2005, he died at just 59 years of age.

Hui Ka Yang

The one-time second-richest man in China, according to Forbes, amassed a fortune valued at $36.2 billion by 2019 — and is currently facing grave financial problems. Hui Ka Yang founded and ran Evergrande, a gigantic property development firm that became the second largest in its sector in China. The question was how he got the job.

In 2021, Evergrande defaulted for the first time. Measures taken by Xi Jinping’s government to cool down an overheated real estate industry hit the corporation like a sack of bricks. Evergrande was indeed massive, but that largely turned out to have been made possible by an unmanageable amount of debt. According to Bloomberg, earlier that year, the company owed $300 billion to banks and bondholders, with its assets valued at $242 billion.

In September 2023, Hui was arrested amid accusations of having inflated Evergrande’s earnings between 2017 and 2020 by $78 billion. In 2023, Forbes continued to estimate his personal worth at $3 billion. The company he founded is now asking for $6 billion back that it paid out to him in fees and dividends, rendering his situation tenuous, to say the least.

Sam Bankman-Fried

Considered in his day to be one of the wunderkinds of the tech ecosystem, Sam Bankman-Fried founded Alameda Research in October 2017. At the age of 25, he founded the investment firm that began to bear fruit through bitcoin mining. By May 2019, the launched a firm that would become infamous: FTX. The company soon became the second largest cryptocurrency platform in the world, reaching a valuation of $32 billion.

According to Seven Pillars Institute, a financial ethics think tank, the decline began when Alameda applied for loans to make illiquid investments. Due to his inability to pay back those loans, Bankman-Fried used the money that people deposited into FTX to rescue Alameda. Ultimately, these bad practices caught up to him, leading to the collapse of FTX. In November of 2022, FTX declared bankruptcy. Bankman-Fried was arrested in December that same year. In March 2024, after being found guilty of robbing $8 billion from his clients, he was sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Nicolas Cage

Famed actor Nicolas Cage went through a moment of severe financial distress, though he seems to have bounced back from his one-time travails. In an interview with CBS News from April 2023, Cage confirmed that he racked up a $6 million debt after the real estate market crash.

“I was over-invested in real estate. The market crashed, and I couldn’t get out in time. I paid them [my creditors] all back, but it was about $6 million. I never filed for bankruptcy,” said the actor. The key to Cage’s comeback was work. His indiscriminate appearances in films at the time was the object of scorn online, but the actor has no regrets about this professional activity. “Work was always my guardian angel. It may not have been blue chip, but it was still work. Even if the movie ultimately is crummy, they know I’m not phoning it in, that I care every time,” he said. His formula of putting in the time paid off.

Delonte West

Throughout his career as an NBA star, Delonte West played for the Boston Celtics, alongside Lebron James for the Cleveland Cavaliers, the Seattle Supersonics and the Dallas Mavericks. They were first-class teams, and they compensated West with more than $16 million, according to several U.S. publications, throughout the eight years that his career lasted at the highest level of play.

Afterwards, West racked up various arrests, incidents involving the police and problems stemming from drug addiction, Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban attempted to get West to go to a rehab center in Florida. In June, the former player was arrested once again. His leaked mugshot, in which he looks unrecognizable, in addition to a video of him wandering through a parking lot, have set off alarm bells.

Fernando Martín

Having served as the unofficial president of the Real Madrid soccer team from February to April of 2006, Fernando Martín was also the man behind the firm Martinsa-Fadesa. His company became Spain’s second-largest real estate company, but after the property bubble burst, it filed for bankruptcy in Spain’s biggest ever corporate default, with liabilities of $7 billion. Martinsa-Fadesa and its creditors, mostly banks, reached a payment agreement in 2011. Unable to comply with its terms, in 2015, its liquidation process began.

Martín himself filed for personal bankruptcy in 2008, having racked up debts himself to the tune of $122 million. He managed, as Europa Press reported at the time, to get 95% of his creditors to support his payment plan, despite the fact that it included write-offs totaling more than 60%. In 2019, a judge fined him $79.1 million for his involvement in Gürtel, a corrupt bribes-for-contracts network that operated across six Spanish regions between 1999 and 2005. Asked by a shareholder at a Martinsa-Fadesa meeting about the $2.65 million salary he received in 2011 from the company, Martín replied, “It doesn’t seem just adequate, but fair and essential.”

Eike Batista

The richest man in Brazil, and the seventh wealthiest on the planet: this was how Forbes listed magnate Eike Batista in 2012. With a $34.5 billion fortune at his apex, he was never completely ruined, though he did lose nearly everything and even spent a few months in prison for bribing politicians.

In the 1980s, Batista got his start in mining, a sector with which he was well acquainted thanks to his father having been the minister who oversaw the industry in Brazil. With time, he founded EBX, a business conglomerate dedicated to mining, logistics, petroleum and ship construction. Batista inflated expectations of his ability to produce petroleum. His gas business’ fall was what began his decline. In the space of a single year, he lost $32 billion. His primary firms declared bankruptcy. Nowadays, he makes his living as a business coach.

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