Horace Austin Warner Tabor — “Haw” to the men of Leadville — was a Vermont-born stonecutter and shopkeeper who spent two decades scratching at the edges of one mining camp after another before a single grubstake made him, almost overnight, one of the richest men in America. In 1878 he staked two German prospectors who blundered into the Little Pittsburg, a fabulous silver lode; the following year he bought the Matchless Mine outright. By 1881 he was reckoned worth around nine million dollars — the equivalent of hundreds of millions today — and he spent it on the scale of a man who could not quite believe it would ever stop coming.
Tabor built opera houses in Leadville and Denver, raised the Tabor Block downtown, served as the first mayor of Leadville and as Colorado’s lieutenant governor, and bought a thirty-day seat in the United States Senate. He also divorced Augusta, the frugal wife who had endured the lean years with him, and married Elizabeth “Baby Doe” McCourt in a Washington wedding so lavish and so scandalous that respectable society never quite forgave either of them.
The fortune rested on a single commodity, and that commodity rested on a single act of Congress. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 propped up the price of silver by obliging the Treasury to buy it; when the Panic of 1893 hit and President Grover Cleveland forced the Act’s repeal that autumn, the silver market collapsed. Tabor, leveraged and overextended, watched mine after mine and building after building slip away to his creditors within a matter of months.
He died in 1899, six years after the crash, having spent his last year as the postmaster of Denver — a patronage appointment arranged by friends who remembered what he had been. His widow Baby Doe kept her husband’s deathbed faith with the Matchless Mine, living in a cabin beside its played-out shaft until she was found frozen there in the winter of 1935. The Tabors became Colorado’s enduring parable of the silver age: the speed of the rise, the completeness of the fall, and the long cold coda no one could have written for them.
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.
Ludwig II came to the throne of Bavaria in 1864 at the age of eighteen, a strikingly handsome and intensely romantic young man with little taste for the duties of state and a consuming passion for art, music, and architecture. Over the next two decades he poured his wealth into two enthusiasms above all others: the operas of Richard Wagner, whom he rescued from his creditors and bankrolled for years, and a series of extravagant fantasy palaces — Neuschwanstein, Linderhof, and Herrenchiemsee — built to satisfy a private vision of medieval and Bourbon splendor rather than any public need.
Crucially, Ludwig financed these projects not from the Bavarian state treasury but from his own civil list — the personal income granted to the crown — and, when that ran out, from a mounting pile of personal loans. By the mid-1880s his debts had reached roughly 14 million marks, an enormous sum, and he was demanding that his ministers raise still more, threatening to dismiss the entire government when they balked. The building never stopped; Linderhof was completed, Neuschwanstein and Herrenchiemsee remained unfinished, and the king’s appetite for new and grander schemes showed no sign of slowing.
Unable to control the king’s spending or to extract more credit, Ludwig’s ministers moved against him in June 1886. They assembled a medical commission, headed by the psychiatrist Dr. Bernhard von Gudden, which declared Ludwig insane — paranoid and unfit to rule — without, by most accounts, ever personally examining him. On that basis he was deposed and placed under custody at Berg Castle on the shore of Lake Starnberg.
Three days later, on the evening of June 13, 1886, Ludwig and Dr. von Gudden went for a walk along the lake and never returned. Both were found dead in the shallow water hours later, in circumstances that have never been satisfactorily explained and remain disputed to this day — officially ruled a drowning, variously suspected to have been suicide, an escape attempt gone wrong, or even murder. The castles that ruined and arguably killed him became, within a generation, among the most visited and most profitable tourist attractions in Germany.
Michael Jackson was one of the highest-earning entertainers who ever lived, generating an estimated $1 billion or more across his career and, from 1985, owning one of the most valuable assets in popular music: the ATV catalog containing most of the Beatles’ songs. Yet by the time he died on June 25, 2009, at age 50, he was reported to be roughly $400 million to $500 million in debt, his finances hollowed out by decades of spending that vastly outran even his colossal income.
Jackson’s earnings in his peak years — reportedly $50 million to $100 million annually from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s — were matched by an extraordinary outflow: Neverland Ranch and its private amusement park, art, antiques, jewelry, and a lifestyle estimated at tens of millions of dollars a year. To sustain it he borrowed heavily, most consequentially a roughly $270 million loan secured against his music-publishing assets, and by the end he was said to be accruing debt faster than even his catalog could service it.
What makes Jackson nearly unique in this catalogue is what happened next: the ruin reversed after his death. His estate, run by executors John Branca and John McClain, sat atop assets — above all his 50% stake in Sony/ATV Music Publishing — that proved far more valuable than the debt. The “This Is It” documentary, Cirque du Soleil shows, reissues, and a series of landmark catalog sales generated billions, retired every dollar of debt, and turned a deeply insolvent estate into one of the most profitable in entertainment history.
This entry concerns only the financial story. The 1993 and 2005 child-abuse matters are noted strictly as documented public-record events with financial consequences — a reported civil settlement in 1993 and a full criminal acquittal in 2005 — and not relitigated here.