The Secret Lives of Billionaires: 30 Facts You Never Knew

Billionaire pastor Edir Macedo is accused of using $2 billion in donations intended for charity overseas from his poor followers to buy jewelry, TV stations, and other businesses for himself.

2. Snapchat founder Evan Spiegel's net worth is $1.5 billion at the age of 24, making him the world's youngest billionaire.

3. Lynsi Snyder, the 34-year-old owner of In-N-Out Burger (and effectively the USA's youngest female billionaire) has been the target of two attempted kidnappings and keeps a low public profile as a result.

4. Billionaire cocaine smuggler Sal Magluta won 3 National Powerboat Championships and frequently appeared on TV despite being a fugitive. Nobody noticed for 6 years.

5. Billionaire Peter B. Lewis, chairman of Progressive Insurance, has donated over $2.3 million towards marijuana legalization.

As early as the 2040s, billionaire Yuri Milner plans to propel thousands of miniature satellites at 20% the speed of light by aiming minutes-long 100-gigawatt laser pulses at light sails. They will be set to arrive at Proxima B, the nearest Earthlike planet in the Goldilocks Zone of Alpha Centauri, by the 2060s.

7. Billionaire Shahid Khan from Pakistan, the owner of Jacksonville Jaguars and Fulham F.C spent his first night in USA in a $2/night room at the University Y-YMCA, and his first job was washing dishes for $1.20 an hour.

8. Thomas Peterffy was told by NASDAQ that his algorithmic trading was illegal because it lacked a keyboard so he created a robot with fingers to type all trades on the keyboard which made it legal. The robot typed so fast it sounded like a machine gun.

9. Billionaire Haim Saban made his fortune importing and adapting Japanese productions such as the Power Rangers. He wrote the theme song for the Power Rangers movie himself under a pseudonym.

10. Billionaire John Goodman who was on house arrest in Florida was allowed in 2013 to charter a plane and fly himself and his guards to Texas to see his ailing mother.

When Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook in 2004, he bragged about people trusting his site with personal information. He called the users "dumb f*cks" for trusting him.

12. Billionaire Sean Parker was considered a genius at a young age. In high school, he was recruited by the CIA after winning a computer science fair and was making $80,000 per year by the time he was a senior.

13. In 2010, an Azerbaijani billionaire named Ibrahim Ibrahimov decided to build an artificial archipelago with a $100 billion city on it, which would include the new world’s tallest building. His vision was to make a new Venice. After oil prices crashed in 2015, the project was stalled and his vision still remains unfinished.

14. Billionaire Tom Perkins spelled out a secret message using nautical code flags strung along the length of his enormous yacht. The message? "Rarely does one have the privilege of witnessing vulgar ostentation displayed upon such a scale."

15. Broadcom billionaire Henry Nicholas built a secret sex lair under his house, was charged with distributing cocaine and meth, and once smoked so much weed on his jet that his pilot had to put on an oxygen mask.

Billionaire Sheikh Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan has had his name carved out in the Saudi Arabian desert so that it can be seen from space.

17. An Indian billionaire named Dadi Balsara lived in a 5-star hotel for 36 years.

18. India's richest person, Mukesh Ambani, built a $1 billion home. It has 27 habitable floors, including six parking floors for the capacity of up to 168 cars. A staff of 600 maintain the home.

19. Elon Musk believes that the United States is "[inarguably] the greatest country that has ever existed on Earth", describing it as "the greatest force for good of any country that's ever been" and believes outright that there "would not be democracy in the world if not for the United States."

20. Billionaire and Titanic victim, Benjamin Guggenheim, "—played the game out straight to the end." , and no woman was left aboard because Ben Guggenheim was no coward.

While in middle school, Bill Gates and Paul Allen had their computer privileges revoked for taking advantage of software glitches to obtain free computer time from the company that provided the computers. They were allowed back in the computer lab when they offered to debug the program.

22. Michael Dell, the founder of Dell Inc., once had a high school summer job selling newspaper subscriptions for the Houston Post. By targeting the demographics of newlyweds and recent home buyers, Dell made $18,000 in one summer, exceeding the yearly payroll of two of his teachers.

23. When billionaire Li Ka-Shing paid HK $2 billion ransom to the kidnapper of his eldest son, he told the gangster "to become a good man or become miserable". He later called Li several times for investment advice but still gambled all the money away and was later executed in China.

24. A Japanese businessman named Masayoshi Son once suffered from the biggest recorded net worth loss to happen to a person. In 2004, he lost nearly $77 billion when the value of the stock of his company, Softbank, plummeted.

25. Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison once hired a guy to follow his yacht in a powerboat and retrieve basketballs that go overboard.