Just how exactly did Mike Tyson blow over 400 million dollars?!
11 - Cars Mike Tyson’s decline into bankruptcy began
when he got out of jail in 1991 after being inside for three years.
His check writing became as legendary as his knockouts, and by the middle of the 90s, he
had spent a whopping four and a half million dollars on cars and motorbikes!
Throughout his career, the boxer had a love of fast machines, and he’s thought to have
bought more than a hundred vehicles over the years.
He certainly had a thing for Bentley’s.
One day Mike and his entourage visited a top-end dealership in Las Vegas and saw a Bentley
Azure.
With a price tag of three hundred and twenty thousand dollars, it was one of the priciest
cars in the world at the time.
Not happy with just buying one, he ordered four more!
He handed over one and a half million dollars in an afternoon.
Even though he was spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a car, Iron Mike was treating
them like he would with his underwear.
With so many cars, it was often hard for Tyson to keep track of them.
He’d often lend his friends vehicles from the fleet, and forget who had them.
His entourage would later go on a treasure hunt to recover the missing automobiles.
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10 - Clothes For Iron Mike, looking good has always been
important.
It may stem from his impoverished upbringing in the Bronx when his mother could barely
scrape a living.
Once he found fame and fortune, he had to keep up appearances, even when he wasn’t
boxing.
During the nineties, he would regularly spend a hundred thousand dollars on clothing and
jewelry every month.
He’d think nothing of spending fifteen hundred dollars on a shirt.
In his court documents during his divorce case, Iron Mike spent 400k a month to maintain
his lifestyle!
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Okay, back to Iron Mike: even when he was about to declare bankruptcy, his spending
habits didn’t change.
A few months before the court filing, Tyson walked out of a Beverly Hills jewelry store
with a gold and diamond necklace.
It was worth more than a hundred and seventy thousand dollars.
And the thing is, he did it on credit.
The store owner said it was typical to let stars like Mike take goods, as they were ‘good
for it’.
9 - Miscellaneous Expenses You know that just being Mike Tyson is a costly
business.
A multi-millionaire pro boxer has to look and act like a playboy, even if he was haemorrhaging
cash.
As we’ve seen, Mike always liked to be a snappy dresser with plenty of bling to go
with it.
Just day to day living took its toll on his pocketbook.
Like we said earlier, Mike was blowing around 400 thousand dollars a month.
Here are some examples for his miscellaneous expenses from 1995 to 1997.
He spent $9 million in legal fees, $230,000 on pagers and cellphones ALONE, and $410,000
on a birthday party.
Essentially, if Mike liked something, he’d buy it.
The same goes for people he met.
If he liked them, he’d given them a little cash to go on their way.
If you do the math, he was spending about 10 dollars a MINUTE every minute of each day
and night, and nothing much to show for it in return.
8 - Homes And then there are of course the homes and
estates he bought around the country to live in whenever it took his fancy.
He had homes in Las Vegas, Ohio and Maryland.
They were all decked out with as much bling as possible.
This of course meant gold fittings in the bathrooms.
At one time he purchased a 21-bedroom/24-bathroom mansion in Connecticut that came complete
with its own nightclub and casino!
And gold fittings throughout the house of course.
Obviously, the maintenance on these estates wasn’t a cheap deal either.
The bill for just the gardening and mowing the lawns was over three hundred thousand
dollars!
7 - Entourage Looking after ‘Iron’ Mike required an
entourage of people dedicated to making sure their boss didn’t need anything.
At one point Tyson had a payroll that had almost two hundred people.
All of the cooks, bodyguards and chauffeurs required to be paid a salary, along with their
health and liability insurance.
In 1996 he hired a guy named Steve Fitch, who also goes by ‘Crocodile’, to join
him at news conferences dressed in combat uniform.
His only job was to shout out ‘guerilla warfare’ during the events – for which
he was paid the princely sum of three hundred thousand dollars a year.
Keeping in touch with each other and their boss meant pagers and cell phones, and the
bills that go with them.
In one two year period during his spending spree, the phone and pager bills amounted
to a staggering two hundred and thirty thousand dollars!
6 - Extravagances Everyone loves a party, and Mike Tyson wasn’t
an exception.
Mike wanted to be flashy, and his parties were definitely Jay Gatsby-esque.
For his thirtieth birthday in 1996, Mike spent more than four hundred thousand dollars on
the party.
We only know he spent this amount from his bankruptcy filings, and unfortunately, they
don’t give any details of what exactly the 400k was spent on for the party.
And then there’s the bathtub!
Yes, it’s true, a bathtub is on the list of Mike Tyson’s craziest things he’s ever
bought.
Back during the time he was married to actress Robin Givens, he wanted to give her an amazing
birthday gift.
And of course, anything that’s normal had to be better in gold right?
So he bought her a gold bathtub that cost 2.2 million dollars.
It may not have been the best bath in the world, but it was undoubtedly one of the most
expensive one at the time!
5 - Legal Troubles Oh, and that marriage to Robin Givens cost
him a ton of money.
Unfortunately for Mike, the gold bathtub wasn’t enough for Robin.
When the couple broke up, she received ten million dollars as a settlement.
Tyson’s second wife Monica didn’t fare quite so well in her divorce proceedings.
Well, it wasn’t as much, but nine million dollars isn’t too shabby either.
His divorce settlements weren’t the last time Mike Tyson needed to get lawyered up.
Unfortunately, even the best can’t win against the taxman.
When he filed for bankruptcy in 2003, Mike reputedly owed tax authorities in the US,
UK, and the states of Georgia and Michigan close to eighteen million dollars.
With all the other creditors, his total debt came to around twenty-seven million dollars.
A far cry from the hundreds of millions he started with.
Mike Tyson isn’t the first boxer to earn a fortune and lose it in the space of a few
years.
He, along with lots of other boxers, have blamed bad managers, crooked promoters, and
incompetent financial advisers for their decline.
4 - Don King
And talking of promoters, Mike Tyson had an ongoing feud with mega-promoter Don King for
almost a decade.
Tyson has always maintained that Don King had stole money from his earnings from his
fights at the height of his fame.
So much so, just after he got out of prison in 1995, he filed a lawsuit against Don King
claiming a hundred million dollars in damages.
The legal battle raged on for eight years and was only brought to a head by Tyson’s
bankruptcy.
In a settlement, Don King agreed to pay fourteen million dollars to Tyson, but he never saw
a penny.
All the money went to pay off his creditors as part of his agreement with the solvency
court.
But the bad blood between the two men lives on.
At the 2018 induction into the Boxing Hall of Fame, Mike threw a glass of water at Don
King after King had tapped him on the shoulder.
Some grudges never end!
3 - Animals Most of us like to have a pet around the home.
A dog or cat is enough to give most of us entertainment on end!
But for Mike having a regular old boring domesticated pet wasn’t enough!
For him the pet of choice was the very rare Siberian Tiger.
And not just one, but a pair of these awesome giant cats.
Each one is reputed to have cost him seventy thousand dollars.
But it’s not the cost of them that’s that expensive, but it was the upkeep.
Just keeping them fed costs thousands of dollars a month, as each one of them would eat about
forty pounds of meat a day!
Mike also had to have a specially designed enclosure for the Tigers built at his home,
that way they could play all day.
And of course, he knew that tigers are ferocious and dangerous animals.
He hired an animal trainer to look after his tigers and to care for them at the cost of
a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars a year!
2 - Iron Mike Today
Even after going through all that he’s gone through in his life,Mike has never lost one
of his best attributes – his self-confidence.
He says being sure of oneself can extend to every facet of someone’s life.
And he’s proven that better than most people.
Since his bankruptcy, Mike has lived up to his nickname of ‘Iron’ Mike.
After losing 400 million dollars, and being in debt for millions, he’s shown a steely
determination to come back whatever the cost.
Boxers like George Foreman have been able to use their clean image to get lucrative
advertising contracts, but not so with Mike.
He’s had to survive and claw back using the skills he showed so powerfully in the
boxing ring.
In his autobiography, Tyson talks about his flaws, and how he’s had to own up to them
and look at ways of improving himself.
Mike’s friends have told him to stop thinking about the past, and what has passed.
Instead, he knows that he has a lot to look forward to for the future.
He’s taken that to heart as you can see in the positive attitude Mike shows when talking
about his life.
Today he knows he’s a much wiser man in a better place in life, even if he has less
money.
He knows the mistakes he’s made and how crazy his life used to be.
1 - Tyson’s Earnings Now
Now in his 50s, Mike Tyson has rebuilt himself a future.
He’s become an actor playing in a dozen or so successful Hollywood movies.
Admittedly he’s used to playing himself, or a character not very far from his real
life.
His best known parts on the big screen are his cameo roles in the Hangover franchise.
He’s also appeared in a number of television shows such as the series Entourage.
He also has been on a series on Animal Planet about pigeon racing!
He’s still a businessman today and apparently choosing better partners than he did during
his boxing career.
His latest money-making venture is a successful greenery farm in Nevada.
Watch this next video on billionaires who don’t want you to know they’re billionaires!