Monday, October 7, 2013

Bad Celebrity Investments That We Remember

By Cornelius Nunev


Celebs and their cash are often parted. Here are some of the most memorably bad celeb investments, ever.

Investing as Mark Twain

One bad investment was made by the first modern celebrity in America, Mark Twain. In the last 19th century, he got a Paige Compositor that was intended to be a typesetter faster than the standard Linotype. It wound up not working well because it had over 18,000 parts and needed to be cared for too much. Over 11 years, Twain spent $150,000 to $300,000 on the machine, which was a lot of cash back in his day.

Hotels by Jay-Z

Another example of a very bad investment was when Jay-Z decided to put up a 15,000-square-foot luxury hotel in the Chelsea neighborhood in 2007. He got a $52 million loan, and wound up not being able to pay it when the economy crashed in 2008. He defaulted on the loan, and the lender got the land back. The construction as never finished. It wasn't until Dec. 2010 that the whole ordeal was over with out-of-court settlements.

Massive losses for Bono

The U2 front male is a managing director for the private media and entertainment equity firm Elevation Partners. After making a killing with investments in Yelp, Facebook and video game corporations BioWare and Pandemic Studios, later investments in Palm ($460 million) and Forbes, Inc. ($300 million) turned into massive losses. Ultimately, Elevation's return on those investments was only $25 million, which was enough to convince the site 24/7 Wall Street that Bono is "the worst investor in America."

Bad investment by Larry King

A huge life insurance scam was put on King when he invested into two policies worth $15 million. He ended up only getting $1.4 million out of the sale.

Everybody associated with Madoff

More than 200 investors, including celebs were taken in by Bernard Madoff's $65 billion Ponzi scheme. Madoff is now in jail serving 150 years for 11 federal felonies, while celebrities and lower-profile investors are still trying to find ways to make up for their sizable financial loss.

Another bad investment from a movie star

The most popular movie star of the 1970s, Burt Reynolds ended up dealing with the urge many celebrities face: opening a restaurant chain. The chain was PoFolks, and outlets existed in California, Texas and Florida. By the late 1980s, however, the cupboard was bare and Reynolds was out $15 million. His eventual divorce from Loni Anderson and diminished star power led to a 1996 bankruptcy. Even though he was more than $10 million in debt, bankruptcy court allowed him to keep his $2.5 million mansion and all of his personal property that Anderson had not already claimed.

Reynolds investment

Debbie Reynolds decided she wanted to open a Las Vegas casino and hotel in 1991, although she did not realize that being off the strip would make it extremely hard to stay in business. It was called the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino, but she ended up selling it for $10 million to the World Wrestling Federation in 1998 after a 1997 bankruptcy. She wound up broke, and was even worse off when having to sell all her movie career memorabilia in 2010 when her museum went bankrupt.




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