SOME of the world’s top earners have gone from rags to riches… but occasionally it happens the other way round.
Earlier this week, we revealed how Bob Bull, Britain’s biggest bungalow builder, went from being a billionaire to facing bankruptcy to the tune of £725million.
Bungalow Bob, 46, entered the Rich List last year at £1.9billion and splashed out on a £10million mansion boasting its own bowling alley and a £4million collection of 12 supercars.
Bull, who lives with his blonde Norwegian model wife Sara Nilsen, 30, near Southampton, made his fortune turning caravan parks into luxury bungalow villages.
His company employed 2,000 workers and was said to be worth £4billion.
But now the house is up for sale, the cars have been repossessed and even his £15,000 Hublot Ferrari Grand Prix watch has been returned.
The furious businessman claims he has been the victim of an organised crime network and has launched a fightback to appeal the bankruptcy.
But he isn’t the only mega-wealthy billionaire to suffer a spectacular fall from grace.
Undertaker’s grave error
Kevin Leech was a Manchester undertaker who transformed his family’s business and turned them into billionaires.
He was just 21 when his dad died, leaving Kevin to take the reins of the one-parlour funeral business.
He built it into a chain of 38 undertakers, sold it for £2.3m in 1982 and moved to Jersey.
He then invested in ML Laboratories, which was developing a potentially life-saving technology to replace kidney dialysis.
By 2000, he was Britain’s 17th richest man worth a whopping £1.2billion.
The Leech family’s diverse portfolio of assets included Land’s End, Reliant Robin and the Snowdon Mountain Railway as well as stakes in dotcom start-ups across the world.
But ML Laboratories’ share price fell from 250p to 10p, destroying the value of Leech’s 40 per cent stake, against which he had borrowed millions to fund his dotcom investments.
As the tech market collapsed, Leech was in financial trouble and admitted he had been “caught with his pants down”.
He was declared ‘en desastre’, or insolvent, by Jersey’s Royal Court in October 2002.
However, in 2004 he reached a settlement with his creditors and was discharged from bankruptcy.
£50m wedding to debts disaster
Pramod Mittal was used to a life of luxury.
His steel magnate brother Lakshmi has an estimated fortune of £7billion.
Thanks to the success of the family’s steel business, Pramod, 67, lived in a multi-million pound London mansion and was rumoured to have splurged a staggering £50million on his daughter Shristi’s three-day wedding in Barcelona in 2013.
No expense was spared, with a museum hired for the event and a two-starred Michelin chef cooking for the 500 guests.
More than 200 staff were reportedly flown in for the occasion from India and Thailand.
But in 2020, Pramod, whose name means ‘happiness’, was declared bankrupt by a judge in the London High Court with debts of around £140million.
Some sources said he was driven by a desire to be as successful as his brother, but claimed he had a reputation for running up business debt.
Downfall of teenage billionaire
World's richest people
Elon Musk is the world's richest man, according to Forbes' real-time billionaires list. Here's who makes the top 10*:
Elon Musk – $224.2bn
Bernard Arnault and family – $183.8bn
Jeff Bezos – $179.6bn
Larry Ellison – $143.7bn
Mark Zuckerberg – $138.4bn
Warren Buffett – $124.9bn
Larry Page – $124.8bn
Bill Gates – $122.1bn
Sergey Brin – $119.5bn
Steve Ballmer – $118.5bn
* Figures as of January 24, 2024
At the age of just 19, Elizabeth Holmes dropped out of Stanford to start a business that saw her named by Forbes as America’s richest self-made woman, with an estimated fortune of £3.5billion.
She had used her own fear of blood tests to launch Theranos, which promised to revolutionise medical testing with inexpensive blood tests that only used a fingerpick.
But in 2015 a series of allegations arose around the company’s claims, inaccuracies around patient testing and whether investors and the government had been misled.
Holmes and her company were charged with fraud and her net worth was listed by Forbes as zero.
In 2022, she and her business partner Sunny Balwani were convicted of defrauding investors and acquitted of defrauding patients.
She was sentenced to serve 11 and a quarter years in prison.
Jewellery splurges & £3.5k phone bills
Jocelyn Wildenstein became a billionaire in 1999 thanks to her £1.9billion divorce settlement when she split from the late art dealer Alec Wildenstein.
The Swiss-born, New York-based socialite became as famous for her plastic surgery as for her fortune, earning herself the nickname ‘catwoman’.
But she was also renowned for her spending – she once told Vanity Fair that she and her then-husband used to rack up bills of up to £750,000 a month.
Easily done when your purchases include a £275,000 Chanel dress, almost £8million worth of jewellery, a rumoured £2.5million on plastic surgery and a monthly mobile phone bill of £3,500.
As well as the £1.9billion lump-sum, Wildenstein, now aged 83, also got a payout of around £80million a year for the next 13 years.
But that still wasn’t enough to fund her lifestyle and she filed for bankruptcy in 2018.
She has just filmed a Kardashians-style reality show about her life.
Monster of Wall Street
Bernie Madoff was a high-flying financial advisor who made his billions via one of the biggest frauds ever known.
The man dubbed the ‘Monster of Wall Street’ executed the largest Ponzi scheme in history, defrauding thousands of investors out of tens of millions for a period of over 17 years.
In 2009 he pleaded guilty to a £50billion fraud, was convicted of 11 counts and sentenced to 150 years in prison.
Some of those he defrauded were rich and famous, including director Stephen Spielberg and actor Kevin Bacon.
But many were ordinary folk who lost thousands and some even took their own lives, including his own son Mark, whose lawyer said was “an innocent victim of his father’s monstrous crime”.
Madoff died in prison in 2021, aged 82, due to chronic kidney disease.
‘King of good times‘
Vijay Mallya was the party tycoon of the 90s who quite aptly made his fortune from selling beer.
He made £1.1bn from his Kingfisher beer brand before branding out into Formula 1 and aviation, launching Kingfisher airlines.
He became known as the “King of good times” for his lavish lifestyle including private jets, supercars and celebrity parties onboard his very own super yacht.
Kingfisher became India’s second domestic carrier before it collapsed in 2012 with claims that pilots and staff had not been paid for months.
Mallya, 68, left India for London in 2016 after defaulting on debts of more than £800million.
He fought extradition to India but was sentenced to four months in jail in 2012 by India’s top court, which said he failed to disclose his assets after defaulting on a loan.
He is still believed to be living in the UK.
Grapes of wrath
In 1981 socialite Patricia Kluge married America’s richest man, TV mogul John Kluge, who had an eye-watering £3.8billion fortune.
They built a 45-room mansion in Virginia, decorated with antiques from across the globe with grounds including a golf course and a game reserve.
Her 1990 divorce settlement of £80million was one of the biggest in American history, including the Albemarle estate in Virginia.
She bought a vineyard next to her property and hired winemakers from Europe to make critically acclaimed wines.
It was a hit and by the mid 2000s the Kluge wine estate was estimated to be worth £50million.
But she also took out loans to grow the business, and when the financial crisis hit in 2008 Patricia was in trouble.
She auctioned off her antiques and jewellery but she could not save the business, filing for bankruptcy in 2011.
Donald Trump bought the Kluge estate and Patricia went back to work managing the vineyard for him.
