Marvel Over These Bad Celebrity Investments

By Cornelius Nunev

Celebs are individuals, too. They make bad investments and lose cash like the rest of us. Here are a few bad celebrity investments people remember.

How did Mark Twain invest?

One poor investment was made by the first modern celebrity in America, Mark Twain. During the last 19th century, he got a Paige Compositor that was supposed 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 money back in his day.

Hotels by Jay-Z

Another example of a very poor 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 ended 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.

Enormous 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 businesses BioWare and Pandemic Studios, later investments in Palm ($460 million) and Forbes, Inc. ($300 million) turned into huge losses. Ultimately, Elevation's return on those investments was only $25 million, which was enough to convince the website 24/7 Wall Street that Bono is "the worst investor in America."

Larry King

A huge life insurance coverage 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.

Every person involved in Madoff

The Bernard Madoff $65 billion Ponzi scheme ended up stealing cash from over 200 investors, many of which were celebs. Many people are trying to make up for the financial loss now that Madoff is in jail serving 150 years for 11 federal felonies.

Burt Reynolds did not make investments right

Bert Reynolds really struggled after his film star days. He decided to put $15 million into the restaurant chain PoFolks. He started this restaurant in Texas, Florida and California. It passed away off, as would be anticipated, and he lost everything in the divorce with Loni Anderson. He wound up going bankrupt in 1996, which did not hurt too badly considering he was able to keep all property he owned that was not already claimed by Anderson such as a $2.5 million mansion. This was regardless of the fact that he actually owed $10 million at the time.

Just one more from Debbie Reynolds

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 film career memorabilia last year when her museum went bankrupt.

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