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These billionaires had it all, multi-million-dollar yachts, sprawling mansions, and private jets, but through a series of bad decisions, bad luck, and fraud, they managed to lose it all and go broke in a spectacular fashion.

Not all members of the richest 0.001% manage to stay there. When you possess massive wealth, you don’t just hoard cash in a vault. Billionaires tend to keep their wealth secured in real estate, business holdings, or other investments. Many factors can contribute to these assets losing value, economic downturns, risky investments, and even massive fraud can lead to one-time billionaires filing for bankruptcy.

Bad Decisions

Economic downturns are hard on everyone, but for billionaires, they can be absolutely devastating, and nobody knows that better than Patricia Kluge. Kluge met her future husband, John Kluge, in New York City. He was 35 years old than her and had a fortune estimated at $5.9 billion in 1990. The couple enjoyed a jet-setting life with a sprawling Albemarle estate located in the Virginian countryside.

The couple decided to call it quits in 1990, and the $1 billion she got in the breakup was the largest divorce settlement ever at the time. She also received the lavish countryside estate and was determined to invest her wealth, so she took her chance and established the Kluge Estate Winery and Vineyard. The wines were well received, and she was initially successful.

Kluge expanded her vineyard quickly and entered the real estate business with a hefty $65 million loan to build more than a dozen luxury houses. These assets would never see a positive return. Just a few years later, the housing market would collapse, which left her with inescapable debt. To avoid bankruptcy, she was forced to sell the vineyard, along with her personal jewelry and furniture. It didn’t work, and by 2011 she to filed for bankruptcy protection with debts between $10 and $50 million.

Bad Luck

Working on Wall Street can be high-risk/high-reward, and that’s exactly how Bill Hwang played the game. Hwang, 57, was known as the greatest trader you’d never heard of, and starting in 2013, he parlayed more than $200 million that was leftover from his shuttered hedge fund into a mind-boggling fortune by betting big on stocks.

At his peak, Hwang's fortune briefly surpassed $30 billion. Hwang’s high-risk strategy only worked for so long, and it was in March 2021 when Hwang’s luck ran out. The modest billionaire ended up at the center of one of the greatest margin calls of all time. In just two days, Hwang ended up losing $20 billion, and Mike Novogratz told Bloomberg it amounted to “one of the single greatest losses of personal wealth in history.”

RELATED: 15 Former Billionaires Who Lost Their Riches

Alleged Fraud

In 2014 Elizabeth Holmes was the darling of Silicon Valley, a disruptive genius lauded as the next Steve Jobs. She founded Theranos in 2003 when she was just 19, a company that promised to revolutionize the blood-testing market. Her claims revolved around a machine called Edison, which she claimed had proprietary technology that could perform life-saving tests cheaply just about anywhere using only a finger prick of blood rather than a full vial from a vein. People certainly believed her claims, and Theranos became a hot investment. She had received funding from Rupert Murdoch and grocery store giant Safeway.

By 2015, Forbes had named Holmes the youngest and wealthiest self-made female billionaire in the United States based on a $9 billion valuation of her company. She became a celebrity, and her name appeared on TIME’s 100 most influential people. She lived in a lavish Los Altos mansion and was a part of the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship program.

But none of her claims were true. In 2015, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that the proprietary technology owned by Theranos operated inconsistently, if at all. Not only had Theranos been lying about their technology, but claims suggest Holmes played a role in covering it all up. Just a year after being named by Forbes as a billionaire, she had lost it all, and fortune had named her one of the 'World's Most Disappointing Leaders'.

She lost her billions; now, she might be losing her freedom. Holmes was charged with massive fraud, and her company was forced to end up all operations. Her trial is currently underway, and if she is convicted, Holmes faces up to 20 years in prison, plus $2.75 million in fines, as well as restitution to be paid out to the victims.

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Sources: Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider