Swimming beyond their depth

County View
John Healy

It has been a bad few weeks for the super rich. A succession of revelations have disclosed that some of the so-called wealthiest people in the world are, at worst, no more than con-artists and, at best, possessing feet of clay.
RTE’s three night feast of ‘Quinn Country’ was a salutary lesson in the risks of swimming out of one’s depth when not knowing where the undercurrents are. SeΡn Quinn bemoaned the fact that one bad mistake led him to lose all he had built up over a lifetime. That one bad decision was believing that he could never lose the Midas touch, and that betting the house on the fortunes of Anglo Irish Bank by way of Contracts for Difference – a world removed from making cement and concrete blocks – would merely add more to his billions. Lucky for SeΡn, we have been all made to feel his pain; every policy holder in Ireland will be chipping in, for years to come, to make good the loss on Quinn Insurance.
But the world of mega wealth is full of SeΡn Quinns. A tousle haired young American, Sam Bankman, was worth $16 billion by the time he was 28. In the words of the financial press, ‘he walked on water’. He had set up a crypto currency exchange called FTX which, up to a few months ago, was a miracle of high finance. A million investors had ploughed their savings into FTX. It was so awash with money that Sam donated $40 million to the Democratic Party for the midterm elections, just concluded.
Unfortunately, a pesky financial journalist smelled a rat. He discovered that the financial statements of FTX were a fraud. As soon as the word got out, panicked investors rushed to get their money back. But Sam’s cupboard was bare. Millions were gone missing, a large chunk of which was allegedly ‘stolen’, the rest having been siphoned off to shore up the fortunes of Alameda, a sideline trading firm owned by the now bankrupt Sam himself.
As of now, Sam is still living in the Bahamas, out of harm’s way, but he is a hunted man.
He will likely follow in the footsteps of Elizabeth Holmes, a high flying wonder child who led supposedly sensible investors a merry dance before crashing to earth. At age 30, Elizabeth had been hailed by Forbes magazine as ‘the world’s youngest self-made female billionaire’. She had founded a company called Theranos to develop a new miracle invention called Edison, a device which allowed a pinprick of blood to instantly diagnose a whole range of diseases from cancer to diabetes. Rupert Murdoch and Henry Kissinger, no babes in the wood, were among the cheerleaders for the investors who fell over each other to invest $700 million in Theranos.
The device, alas, was a total fraud. Its science was a con-job. Last month, Holmes was sentenced to eleven years in prison for defrauding investors in Theranos.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest man in the world, the swashbuckling Elon Musk, has been discovering that hubris has its limits. Having paid $44 billion dollars for Twitter, and then trying to pull out of the deal, he had his wings clipped by the Irish High Court, which ruled against his cavalier attitude to staff dismissals. To add to his woes, a host of fake accounts were playing havoc with Twitter, among them a fake Pepsi account declaring that ‘Coca Cola is a better drink’.
The one common thread in all the sad stories is that, inevitably, it was someone else’s fault. But maybe, to become mega wealthy enough to walk on water, it helps to be delusional.