#19 – Wiliam Erbey

Wiliam Erbey was a Mortgage Powerhouse to the tune of two and a half billion dollars last year, but after being accused of fraudulent activity and mistreating clients the favor of his backers started to crumble around him.

Erbey was forced to make a 2.1 billion dollar accord in order to make amends and pay back the money made through fraudulent sharking tactics; his employees were instructed to intentionally inflate the debts and percentages that clients owed, and even going so far as to inflate the same customers again when they called back later that day!

Within the span of a year Ocwen Finanical generated over 9,000 unique customer complaints that definitely caught the eye of the fair trade commissions; after investigations began into Ocwen’s practices Erbey was tasked with leaving the company so that someone could attempt to pull it out of ruins. Erbey is now worth $556 million but the chance of him getting another shot at managing a company that he doesn’t own is practically zero, but I guess that’s why they say that cheaters never prosper.

#18 – T. Boone Pickens

T. Boone Pickens, from the state of Oklahoma, is one of the most notable bigwigs within the oil industry, as well as a hedge fund manager: these two positions typically add up to a lot of money.

If you are looking for a CEO who is deeply entrenched into politics, then Pickens is definitely your guy: he has donated millions to the Republican Party, especially to his close friend, George W. Bush.

Pickens was a billionaire for a very long time. Although he isn’t exactly struggling financially (he currently has a net worth of $950 million), it must have bruised his ego a bit to get kicked off of the billionaires list. Why did Pickens lose so much money? Pickens lost a great deal of his wealth when green energies took over natural gas, and the rest was because his large donations; Pickens is a huge fan of Oklahoma State University athletics, to which he has given them hundreds of millions of dollars in charitable support.

#17 – Mark Vadon

Mark Vadon built his corporate empire as an online retailer in fine jewelry and gemstones, and his company, Blue Nile, is still the largest online retailer of diamonds to this day.

Vadon had an incredibly revolutionary idea about how to take the middle man out of the equation to make profit with jewelry, allowing users to search for their products by key terms and figures like the cut of the stone, carat weight, color, stone clarity, and anything else that can measured on your typical piece of luxury wear.

Customers found the intuitive process tantalizing and it didn’t take Vadon very long at all to make a smooth $1.4 billion, but when shipment procedures started taking a turn for the worse Vadon was unable to sustain the orders he was receiving, and started to lose money as fast as he was gaining it. In the last year Vader’s net worth has shrunk down to 653 million, and Vader is currently looking at how to transform that into a new business and regain his former billionaire status.

#16 – Manoj Bhargava

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Manoj Bhargava hails from the city of Lucknow, India, and emigrated to America with the interest of becoming an entrepreneur. After grinding away in jobs as a taxi driver and in manual labor, Manoj finally saved enough money to start his own plastics company; the company ended up being valued at $20 million when Manoj sold it and began his next business venture.

In 2004, Bhargava created “5-Hour Energy,” which proved to be an even more profitable venture for him.

As 5-Hour Energy took off, it seemed like from then on it would be smooth sailing for Bhargava. Although the company is still doing well, Bhargava lost his billionaire status in the process: the main reason for the hit in his net worth was when heart attacks started to being linked to the 5 hour energy shot. As a result of the unfortunate media coverage, the 5-Hour Energy stocks began to reflect the fears of the shareholders. Despite the decline of the stocks in his company, Bhargava is still worth $800 million today.

#15 – Petro Poroshenko

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Petro has been involved with the Ukraine Government in various capacities since 2012, starting out as the Minister of Trade and Economic Development, transitioning into the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and then finally becoming the fifth president of Ukraine in 2014.Prior to becoming Ukraine’s head of state he was the head of the national bank, but Petro is a perfect example of how sometimes money doesn’t corrupt a politician, and his case, can have quite the opposite effect: Petro has moved his attention away from his entrepreneurial pursuits in an attempt to help the Ukrainian people in a time of need.

Petry is actually known as the “Chocolate King” because he amassed his wealth via Roshen, a Confectionary company that he founded in 1996; Roshen is the leading manufacturer of all confectionary products in Ukraine, and is the 18th largest confectionary company worldwide. Nearly 40% of Roshen’s gross income was based out of Russia, which was great until 2012 when Russia instituted a national ban on Roshen products: I guess they’re thinking that if anyone is going to be making chocolate in Russia it’s going to be them. Petro’s net worth has dropped from $1.3 billion to $730 million as a result of the hit, but Petro has a sweet tooth for politics these days anyways.

#14 – Patricia Kluge

Unlike the first three people on our list, Patricia Kluge is not an entrepreneur, instead she wound up controlling a hefty sum of money through her marriage, and of course, her eventual divorce.

During the 1960s in London, Kluge was working as both a model and an adult columnist when she met and later married John Werner Kluge, her second husband; the marriage lasted from 1981 to 1990, during a time when John Werner was listed as the richest person in the United States.

Kluge received 1 billion dollars as a result of her divorce from Werner, and an additional $1 million each year in alimony; Kluge decided to invest the majority of this money into a vineyard, which was initially a success, however when Kluge tried to expand her wine business too quickly it ended up costing her millions. When her wine company wasn’t meeting her revenue expectations, Kluge had to file for bankruptcy and sell her precious vineyard to none other than Donald Trump.

#13 – Brij Bhushan Singal

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If learning about billionaires has taught me anything it’s to start investing into metal about forty years ago, because it seems like anyone and everyone who put their paychecks into the mining and metal industries is now absolutely filthy rich.Brij made his 1.15 billion dollar fortune through his investments into the steel industry and founding Bhushan Steel, which is to this day still the largest manufacturer of auto-grade steel in all of India.

Currently Bhushan Steel is in the process of spending just over 3.6 million dollars to expand its steel production capacity from one million tonnes, to an incredible 12 million tonnes, so Bhushan is about to skyrocket in worth.

Brij’s bank account has had to suffer in exchange for the planned growth, and his amassed fortune is now hovering around 375 million dollars, which is holding on to with a tight grip: if Bhushan Steel’s expansion plan fails, then Brij could find himself broke very quickly, but those risks are things which separate the mega rich from the people who are so rich that their bank accounts blot out the sun.

#12 – Olav Thon

Olav Thon purchased his first building in 1951 and became a real estate developer, and 15 years later he opened his first restaurant. Since then, Thon’s empire has ballooned, and now includes nearly 500 properties that span across malls, hotels, and office complexes.

Thon currently manages three companies: two of which are privately held. Before long Thon was one of the most profitable real estate entities to ever enter the industry, and it seemed like his assets just wouldn’t stop growing, and yet like Patricia Kluge, Olav Thon is now worth far less than $1 billion.

Despite his shortcomings, he never got into hot water like Kluge did with poor investments; Thon is still worth a quarter billion today, but has decided to be very liberal with the rest of his money: Thon has donated billions to charities, and now, any profits that his companies make are donated to those same charities by default. What does a charity even do with hundreds of millions of dollars of donations? I mean, can’t they just solve the problem they are trying to at that point

#11 – Yuri Kovalchuk

At the height of his business career in 2008 Yury was worth $1.9 billion, but things rapidly change in the business world and as of this year Yuri has fallen down to a 650 million dollar net worth.Yury has had an assortment of jobs in the past, but most of them will seem rather normal for a billionaire: Head of the Board of Directors for the Russia Bank and the Deputy Director for the largest research institute in Russia, which heads everything from military development as well as scientific research in the fields of physics.

Yury is a part of Russia’s financial elite, and lives directly next to some of the most powerful people in Russia, including Vladimir Putin; in 1996 they combined their property together, and so Yiry currently lives on one of the most well protected and highly influential places in the world. Yury is one of the few Russian emissaries that are sanctioned by the U.S. treasury department, as he is considered to be one of Putin’s “cashiers.” It is unknown why Kovalchuk’s net worth sunk down so steeply this year, but it’s safe to assume that something weird is at foot: perhaps Russia

#10 – Eike Batista

Eike Batista was born into success as his father was Eliezer Batista da Silva, who worked in the energy department of the cabinet in Brazil’s government.

Eike enrolled in college at the University of Aachen in Germany, but dropped out soon after to pursue a faster path into the business world; Eike returned to his home in Brazil and started working in the world of gold and diamond trading: he became a millionaire at the age of 23.

Batista lost one of the largest sums of money in all of history: Batista’s move away from mining made a nice dent to his net worth, and his aspirations for pumping oil were overblown when it was revealed that his company could only produce 15,000 barrels per day; when the news broke out of the inability to meet demand, the stocks sunk down to almost nothing: plummeting Batista’s net worth from $32 billion to an astonishing negative $1 billion. Police have even seized Batista’s assets due to his inability to pay back creditors. If I ever lost 33 billion dollars I might just give up on everything, or murder my old accountant: one or the other

#9 – Cesar Mata Pires

If you’re a Soccer fan then you owe a lot of thanks to one of the primary men who make the World Cup possible each year; Cesar Mata Pires was a 7 billion dollar powerhouse that was responsible for building the World Cup Stadiums that would house each year’s teams, but that wasn’t the sole source of his vast wealth.

Pirez (like many billionaires before him) chose to go into the oil industry when he was still young, and as his wealth continued to build he was a primary force behind the construction of off-shore oil drilling platforms.

Cesar was revered for the quality of his constructions, and he was the man responsible for the highways that connected Haiti to Angola (although he definitely had more convenient routes of trade in mind).

These days Cesar is lugging around about 311 million dollars to his name. Why the big drop? He was accused of some seriously shady paperwork that gave his companies (and himself) some rather significant kickbacks. The fastest way to find heaps of your money disappearing overnight is to piss off the authorities: don’t mess with the tax man unless you want the axe, man

#8 – Viktor Nusenkis

Viktor Nusenkis is a self-made billionaire from the country of Ukraine whose career began in mining and natural energy. Nusenkis’s financial success started when the Soviet Union was still a thing: this allowed him the opportunity to circumvent some of the rules of communism in order to become an independent exporter of coal.

Since Nusenkis was able to get a step up on his competition, it quickly made him into a billionaire even after the fall of the Soviet Union.

Nusenkis was worth $2.2 billion as recently as 2013, but within a year his net worth dropped down to just $350 million. As Russia’s oil industry started to fall into peril, Nusenkis was one of the first industry moguls that were hit the hardest; add this to the fact that the world is trying to get farther away from natural gas and mining to “go green,” and the past couple of years have been a personal disaster for Nusenkis and his companies. No wonder these big businesses hate the green peace movement so much, I’d burn down the world for 2 billion dollars as well

#7 – Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson

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Gudmundsson was the chairman of the world famous West Ham United FC: a professional English Football Club that competed in the “Premier League,” or the highest available level in England.Of course, Bjorgolfur didn’t make his billions only from the sport world; he dabbled in banking, and built an entire beverage empire that served as the foundation for his luxurious lifestyle. Bjorgolfur wasn’t just an impressive business mind, he was also the second person to ever become a billionaire in Iceland, although unlike the first billionaire, he didn’t get to keep his money!

In 2008 Iceland suffered a massive banking crisis that spelled disaster for everyone in the Country, and one of the hardest people to be hit by the financial tragedy was Gudmundsson; in addition to being a bit unlucky, he was also a bit unfaithful since he got caught committing some rather serious book keeping “errors” that forced him to forfeit a great deal of his wealth. By the end of the 2008 year Gudmundsson was fantastically broke, and he has never been able to recover sinc

#6 – Robert Friedland

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Robert Friedland is a self-made billionaire from Chicago; Friedland started the Ivanhoe Capital Company after college, at which time he was introduced to Steve Jobs.

Robert made big bucks through his interest in Canadian and Asian stock markets, as well as with his investments in mining, which seems to be a common recurrence in this list. To date Friedland has had a majority share in a total of seven successful companies. Friedland relinquished control of Ivanhoe Mines when Rio Tinto stepped in and changed the company’s name to Turquoise Hill.

Since the acquisition, Friedland has launched more of his own companies, but he hasn’t found the same level of success that he had prior. Friedland isn’t exactly struggling with money, but it’s worth noting that he has rapidly dropped from the ranks of the billionaires’ list: although he’s no longer a billionaire, his citizenship in three countries (Canada, USA and Singapore), leaves him with a great opportunity to travel with the remainder of his fortune and see some of the world he helped mine out

#5 – Allen Stanford

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Making billions isn’t exactly easy, but depending on who you ask some will make it seem like a walk in the park. One of the lines that movies love to shout out when dealing with business savvy characters is “buy low and sell high, how difficult can it be” but it turns out that that is exactly what Allen Stanford did, and it worked out for him swimmingly; Stanford made billions of dollars by selling depressed real estate and then selling it off whenever the market bounced back: you might be thinking that you can see where this is going, but we aren’t so sure.

The market never crashed for Allen and ruined his scheme, it actually turned out that bouncing properties for Allen was just as easy as bounding checks (except that second one can really get you). When the feds decided to investigate Allen for his blunders they found something much more major: his entire company was just a shell for him to run a massive Ponzi scheme, and now the only real estate he sees is the inside of a cell: marketing trends tell us that the property value for the prison will stay consistent over his 110 year sentence

#4 – Alberto Vilar

Alberto Vilar is from West Orange, New Jersey: he graduated there with a Master’s degree from both “Washington & Jefferson College” and “Iona College.” After graduating, Vilar started “Amerindo Investment Advisors” with Gary Tanaka; the company launched Vilar into millionaire status within two short years.

When Amerindo Investment Advisors expanded Vilar became even richer, but it would later backfire on him in a big way. A few curious moves made by Vilar resulted in his fall from grace and departure from the billionaire’s club.

The first financial blunder that Vilar made was the amount of money that he donated to opera houses, which totaled to nearly a quarter billion dollars (that’s enough to make me shout with glee too); while it seemed like Vilar was a great philanthropist the truth was later revealed after he was caught making money through fraudulent ventures. Once it was discovered that Vilar was donating funds earned in fraud, he had to spend some time in jail, and he had to kiss his luxurious lifestyle goodbye

#3 – Sean Quinn

Sean Quinn was the richest man in all of Ireland at one point, but alcoholism ran deep in his family and he drank all of his billions away. Just kidding!

He actually had to file for bankruptcy because of his involvement in some serious asset stripping, and ended up having to spend 9 months in jail for it (sentences tend to be a bit lighter when you’re a former billionaire). Nearly 6 billion dollars were lost in the frame of a year: a feat which I shouldn’t be surprised by given our previous entries, but which never seems to lose its shock factor for me.

Quinn was a very talented conglomerateur who greatly diversified his investments to ensure he never lost it (lot of good that did him); he bought into hotels, plastics, banking, hospital financing, and radiator research and was making an incredible amount of money. Quinn’s world was flipped upside down after making the single worst investing decision of his (and probably anyone else’s) life: he invested his entire fortune into the Anglo bank, and watched as it all dried up. If Quinn didn’t drink before he certainly does now

#2 – J.K. Rowling

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Everyone knows J.K. Rowling as the creator of one the most popular series to ever be released, which also made Rowling the first author to become a billionaire.When Rowling first started writing she relied on the government to feed her, and she had to write using publicly accessed devices. After Rowling made a fortune producing the magical world that has enchanted so many people everywhere she felt it was time to do something big.

As interesting and shocking as it would be to spin a story about how Rowling blew all of her money on drugs or lavish purchases that simply isn’t true: the reality is much easier to believe; Rowling decided to simply give her money away, and donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charities she supported, and who had helped her during her time of need.

Rowling also lost a portion of her fortune to the rather steep British taxes, but it’s a price she was willing to pay to do things “by the books.” It’s a bit surprising that a humble writer was wiser than some of the Ivy league educated business minds here on the list, but I guess Rowling just isn’t ready to spend her time in the real world equivalent of Azkaban

#1 – Ramesh Chandra

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Born in 1941, Ramesh Chandra attended school at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kharagpur with the intent to study engineering. Chandra’s degree was in such high demand that he almost immediately landed a job working with a pair of companies; he eventually started his own company in Delhi named Technical Consultant Private Ltd.

after he had saved up enough money from his long hours.

Chandra also had a stake in real estate, building middle class homes in India during the 1980s, which turned out to be a profitable venture, and served as the financial foundation for his founding of Unitech, one of his biggest companies.

Ramesh was worth nearly $10 billion during the height of Unitech’s prominence, but as the recession hit the world in 2008, property development came to a drastic halt in India, which cost Chandra billions of dollars in potential revenue; with his buildings quickly emptying of tenants, Chandra had to fit the bill and he exhausted nearly 90 percent of his net worth.On the edge of your seat and can't wait to read more? Or hey, maybe feeling even just a little entertained? If so we hope you please consider clicking the share and like buttons below. Thanks so much

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