Richest People in History Who Blew It All on One Purchase

"Pope Leo X emptied the Vatican treasury on banquets where dishes arrived wrapped in gold foil. Caligula spent something close to Rome's annual budget building two enormous floating marble palaces on a lake. Vast fortunes are harder to destroy than they look, and everyone in this episode found a method. In this episode: Leo X and the gilded banquets that drained the papal accounts Caligula's pair of floating marble pleasure barges Arthur Conan Doyle spending the Sherlock Holmes money on spiritualism John Washington Steele, known as Coal Oil Johnny, running through an inherited oil fortune in the 1860s Evalyn Walsh McLean building a social life around the Hope Diamond she bought Howard Hughes bought television stations and casinos outright during his most isolated years, and Kim Basinger paid twenty million dollars for a whole town in Georgia. Wealth buys options, and every one of these people reached for the most expensive one available."