Wealth Built can be Destroyed at Once [the story of billionaires who lost their positions]
The race to the billionaire status is one race that a lot of people want to partake in. Although, not everyone will be in the billionaire club bearing the title of billionaires as suffix or prefix to their names but a few people will make this target and at this point, they can afford anything they want from Yatch, the most luxurious car, Jets, and luxurious houses.
When people become billionaires, their target now changes from becoming a billionaire to keeping the wealth for as long as possible but when they fail in accomplishing this goal, they then have to sell their assets or lose their entire wealth. I will tell you this for sure that it is difficult to maintain wealth than to make wealth. I will be looking at a few billionaires who lost their wealth due to one reason or the other after becoming billionaires.
Elizabeth Holmes
The Steve Jobs of the future as people called her, and featured in several billionaire magazines from Forbes, Bloomberg Fortune, New York Times and many more. She was the founder of Theranos, a company that was in the race to create a machine that could run all type of test within a short period of time with blood from a pinch with a needle on a finger nail. She had a net worth of $4.5B in 2014 and then people knew she was using the Theranos machine to scam people as the machine could not do the test she claimed it could do.
Bernard Madoff
Founder of investment securities LLC, which became the largest investment firm in its glory days being the largest market maker in Nasdaq. With such great achievement from the company, you should expect that its CEO be a billionaire and yes, you are right, the CEO is a true billionaire with the net worth of $17B. Bernard would have climbed the ladder to become one of the richest men in the world but then, the bubble got burst and people knew that Bernard was running a scam company which had a model related to a Ponzi scheme. He was robbing Peter to pay Paul and robbed people of over 65 billion dollars which were not accounted for.
Eike Batista
One of the top 10 richest people in the world at a point in time, owning goldmines and companies related to gold extraction and sales, he was the richest man in Brazil with the net worth of $35B. Well things changed and his profitable businesses started running at a loss and then his company filed for bankruptcy.
In Conclusion
Wealth is difficult to gather but more difficult to secure and maintain. The ability to make wealth is one skill to know and the ability to sustain wealth is another skill to learn.
Hmmm. A valuable lesson. Truly wealth is difficult to gather but also difficult to maintain