Barbara Hutton inherited a Woolworth five-and-dime fortune as a child — by some estimates around $50 million at the depth of the Great Depression, when that sum was almost unimaginable — and spent the next five decades giving it away to husbands, hangers-on, jewelers, and hotels. When she died in 1979 at the age of 66, she is widely reported to have had only a few thousand dollars left.
The press named her the ‘Poor Little Rich Girl’ when she was still a teenager, and the cruel paradox stuck because it was true: Hutton had everything money could buy and almost nothing it could not. Her mother died when she was four (likely a suicide); her father, the stockbroker Franklyn Hutton, was distant and exploitative of her trust. She grew up fabulously rich and profoundly alone, and she spent her life trying to purchase the affection that had been missing from the start.
She married seven times, almost always disastrously and almost always expensively. Several husbands were titled Europeans who left the marriage richer than they entered it; one, the actor Cary Grant — the only husband who reportedly took none of her money and whom the papers dubbed ‘Cash and Cary’ in unfair anticipation — was the exception that proved the rule. Each divorce cost her a settlement; each marriage cost her more.
Hutton is the defining case of the heir’s ruin: a fortune large enough to last many lifetimes, dissolved in a single one through a combination of grief, generosity, exploitation, and the simple fact that a great deal of money spent steadily for fifty years on the most expensive things in the world will eventually run out.
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.