Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, sons of the legendary Texas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, spent the late 1970s attempting one of the most audacious financial gambits in history: an effort to corner the global silver market. Beginning in the early 1970s and accelerating sharply at the decade’s end — often with Saudi partners and their younger brother Lamar — the brothers bought silver bullion and silver futures contracts on an enormous scale, taking physical delivery rather than settling in cash and tying up a large share of the world’s deliverable supply. By late 1979 they were estimated to hold over 100 million troy ounces, about a third of the world’s privately held silver.
The campaign drove the price of silver from roughly $6.08 an ounce on January 1, 1979, to a peak of $49.45 an ounce on January 18, 1980 — a 713 percent run that, on paper, briefly made the Hunts’ holdings worth billions. But a corner is only profitable if you can sell into it, and the same surge that enriched them on paper alarmed the commodities exchanges and federal regulators, who saw a single family distorting a strategic metal market.
In early January 1980 the COMEX exchange imposed emergency restrictions — the rule remembered as “Silver Rule 7” — limiting positions and tightening margin, effectively halting new buying and forcing liquidation. The price went into reverse. On March 27, 1980 — “Silver Thursday” — silver collapsed roughly 50 percent in a single session, from $21.62 to $10.80 an ounce, and the Hunts, unable to meet a margin call of about $100 million owed to their broker Bache, triggered fears of a chain-reaction failure on Wall Street.
A consortium of banks arranged a roughly $1.1 billion bailout loan to wind down the position in an orderly way and prevent a wider crisis. But the rescue only delayed the reckoning for the Hunts themselves. They lost well over a billion dollars on silver, faced years of litigation, and in August 1988 a federal jury found that Bunker and Herbert Hunt had conspired to manipulate the market, awarding the Peruvian minerals firm Minpeco roughly $134 million. The following month both brothers filed for personal bankruptcy — among the largest individual filings in U.S. history at the time.
William Crapo Durant was one of the great empire-builders of the American automobile age — and one of its most complete financial casualties. Having already made a fortune in horse-drawn carriages, he founded General Motors on September 16, 1908, by bundling together a string of fledgling car and parts companies, and he later co-founded Chevrolet. At his peak in the 1920s his fortune was enormous — popularly estimated as high as nearly $1 billion at the height of the boom — and he was a titan of American industry.
Durant’s genius was promotion, expansion, and the audacious deal; his weakness was that the same restless, leveraged optimism that built his empires repeatedly cost him control of them. He was forced out of General Motors not once but twice — in 1910 by the bankers who refinanced his over-extended company, and again in 1920 when a postwar slump and his own stock-market commitments left him unable to hold on.
After losing GM the second time he launched Durant Motors and threw himself into the booming stock market of the late 1920s, trading and promoting shares on an enormous scale and on heavy margin. The 1929 crash destroyed him. The man who had built the world’s largest automaker saw his fortune wiped out, Durant Motors was liquidated in 1933, and in 1936 he filed for bankruptcy, listing assets of only a few hundred dollars against liabilities of roughly a million.
Durant spent his final years in Flint, Michigan — the city where his career had begun — running modest ventures including a bowling alley (the North Flint Recreation Center, opened 1940) and an attached drive-in restaurant, the Horseshoe Inn, which he promoted with the same enthusiasm he had once brought to building GM. A stroke in 1942 ended his plans to build a national chain, and he died on March 18, 1947, his bills reportedly covered by Alfred P. Sloan and the Chrysler family. He remains the archetype of the builder who could create vast wealth but never learned to hold it.
Charles Goodyear gave the modern world one of its most important materials and got almost nothing for it. In 1839, after years of obsessive and impoverishing experiments, he stumbled on the process of vulcanization — treating rubber with sulfur and heat so that it stayed strong and stable in heat and cold instead of melting into a stinking goo or cracking solid. It was the discovery that turned India rubber from a useless novelty into the foundation of a colossal industry: tires, hoses, belts, seals, insulation, footwear. Goodyear himself spent his life in poverty, in and out of debtors’ prison, and died in 1860 owing some two hundred thousand dollars.
The discovery was, by his own account, partly an accident — a piece of sulfur-treated rubber that landed on a hot stove and charred rather than melted, hinting that controlled heat held the key. But the years of misery before and after it were no accident. Goodyear had no business sense, no capital, and a near-religious conviction that the world owed him the chance to keep experimenting. He licensed his patents cheaply, defended them ruinously, and died before the industry he had created made anyone but his rivals and lawyers rich.
His patent, granted in 1844, should have made him wealthy. Instead it made him a perpetual litigant. Imitators sprang up immediately, and Goodyear spent his remaining years and most of his money suing them. The high point was the 1852 “Great India Rubber Case,” Goodyear v. Day, in which the famous statesman Daniel Webster argued on Goodyear’s behalf in Trenton — and reportedly took a fee larger than Goodyear had earned from the invention in his entire life.
The final irony is the one most people know without knowing it. The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company was founded in 1898 — thirty-eight years after Charles Goodyear’s death — and named in his honor by a man with no connection to him or his family. Goodyear the company became a global giant. Goodyear the inventor left his family deep in debt, having proved that being the one who changes the world and being the one who profits from it are very different things.
William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody was, for a stretch of the late nineteenth century, plausibly the most famous human being on earth — a frontier scout turned showman who packaged the American West into a touring spectacle and sold it to millions of people across the United States and Europe. Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, founded in 1883, earned him several fortunes over three decades. He spent or lost every one of them, and died in 1917 effectively broke, his great show foreclosed and auctioned out from under him.
Cody made money the way few entertainers ever have, and he gave it away and gambled it away with equal abandon. He was famously, almost compulsively generous, handing cash to old friends, broke cowboys, and anyone with a hard-luck story. He was also a serial sucker for investment schemes wholly outside his expertise: an Arizona gold-and-tungsten mine that swallowed money for years, irrigation and land-development ventures in Wyoming, a hotel, ranches. The show kept refilling the well, and the schemes and the generosity kept draining it faster.
The two enterprises that defined his decline were a mine and a loan. The Campo Bonito mine near Oracle, Arizona, which he organized into a $600,000 company around 1910, never came close to paying back what he sank into it. And in January 1913, short of cash to keep his combined “Two Bills” show afloat, Cody borrowed twenty thousand dollars from Harry Tammen, a Denver Post owner and circus operator — a loan that, when Cody fell behind, gave Tammen the lever to seize and auction the entire Wild West show that July.
For his last years the most famous showman in the world was, in effect, an employee — performing for the very circus interests that had taken his show, unable to retire because he could not afford to. He died in Denver on January 10, 1917. By the most cited accounts his once-enormous earnings had dwindled to under a hundred thousand dollars in assets, much of it encumbered. Buffalo Bill is the classic case of the great earner undone not by a single crash but by a lifetime of bad bets and open-handedness that no income could outrun.
Clarence Saunders was the Memphis grocer who reinvented how the world buys food. On September 6, 1916, he opened the first Piggly Wiggly store at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, where shoppers — for the first time — passed through turnstiles, pulled their own goods from open shelves, and paid at a single checkout. The self-service layout he patented in 1917 became the template for the modern supermarket, and within a few years Piggly Wiggly franchises spread across the country; the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 1922.
Saunders was a flamboyant, self-made man who believed his own legend. When bear raiders on Wall Street began selling Piggly Wiggly stock short in late 1922 and early 1923 — wagering the company would fall after several independently owned Eastern franchises failed — Saunders took it personally. Rather than ignore the speculators, he resolved to beat them at their own game by quietly buying up nearly every available share of his own company, attempting one of the last great stock corners in American history.
He nearly pulled it off. Borrowing roughly $10 million, Saunders bought so heavily that within weeks he controlled almost all of Piggly Wiggly’s freely traded shares, squeezing the short sellers who now had to buy from him to cover their positions. The price climbed from about $39 to roughly $124 by March 20, 1923. But with the shorts trapped, the New York Stock Exchange declared that a corner existed, suspended trading in Piggly Wiggly the next day, halted it permanently on March 26, and granted the short sellers extra time to deliver their shares — breaking the squeeze Saunders had built.
The reprieve was fatal. Saunders was left holding millions in stock he could not sell at the prices he had paid, crushed by the loans he had taken to buy it. In August 1923 he resigned as president and surrendered his property — his stock, his cars, even his unfinished Memphis mansion, the “Pink Palace” — to his creditors, and personal bankruptcy followed. He spent the rest of his life chasing comeback ventures, including a second grocery chain and an automated store called the Keedoozle, but never recovered the fortune the corner had cost him.
Ulysses S. Grant won the Civil War for the Union and served two terms as President of the United States, yet he spent the final year of his life racing against bankruptcy and a fatal cancer. After leaving office, the famously incorruptible general proved a disastrous judge of business partners, and in 1884 a Wall Street Ponzi scheme bearing his own name destroyed nearly everything he had.
The firm was Grant & Ward, a brokerage in which Grant invested alongside his son and the dazzling young financier Ferdinand Ward. Ward, hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Wall Street,” was in fact running a fraud, paying old investors with new investors’ money and inventing imaginary government contracts. When the scheme collapsed on May 6, 1884, Grant — who had put his savings and his name behind it — walked out of his office a pauper, reportedly left with about $80 to his name while his wife Julia had another $130.
Destitution arrived alongside disease. Later in 1884 Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer, almost certainly linked to his lifelong cigar smoking, and he understood he was dying with no estate to leave his wife. To provide for Julia and the family, the dying general undertook one last campaign: writing his “Personal Memoirs,” a two-volume account of his Civil War years, published through Mark Twain’s company on extraordinarily generous terms.
Grant laid down his pen on July 16, 1885, having written some 366,000 words in less than a year, and died on July 23, 1885, at Mount McGregor, New York. The memoirs became a publishing triumph — both a literary masterpiece and a financial one — ultimately earning roughly $450,000 in royalties for his widow. The man who had been ruined by a swindle saved his family with his own pen in the last weeks of his life.
The Stroh Brewing Company was founded in Detroit in 1850 by Bernhard Stroh, a German immigrant, and grew over five generations into one of the largest brewers in the United States — and one of the largest private family fortunes the country had ever produced. At its 1980s peak the family was worth at least $700 million by Forbes’s reckoning, with the family name on the Forbes 400 and Stroh’s the third-largest brewing empire in America, behind only Anheuser-Busch and Miller.
Then, in the space of roughly two decades, it all came apart. A debt-fueled gamble to go national — above all the 1982 takeover of the failing Joseph Schlitz Brewing Company, financed with hundreds of millions in borrowed money — left the company saddled with debt just as the industry consolidated around two giants. Stroh’s missed the light-beer wave, lost market share year after year, and could never out-earn its interest payments.
By February 1999 the family was selling the 149-year-old brewery for parts, its brands divided between Pabst and Miller. The proceeds went largely to debt and pension obligations; what trickled to the family through trusts ran out within a few years. Forbes later estimated that, had the family simply sold the business at its peak and invested in the S&P 500, the fortune could have been worth roughly $9 billion by 2014. Instead it was essentially gone.
The Stroh story has become a textbook case of generational wealth destruction — the old proverb of “shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations,” here stretched across five or six. It was not a swindle or a market crash but a slow, self-inflicted unwinding: a strategic bet too big for the balance sheet, made in a brutally consolidating industry, by a family that gambled a profitable status quo on becoming a national champion and lost.