Of course, having more money than most people would know what to do with tends to make some people a little odd. And what's the point of having all that money if you can't do whatever you want, no matter how bizarre? Here are the extreme cases of people who would be oddities anyway - even if they were broke!
Nicolas Berggruen - the homeless billionaire
Nicolas Berggruen has a net worth of $3 billion. He made that by being born into the famous family of art collectors. He made even more money through his involvement in private equity and hedge fund businesses. Yet he has no house, preferring to live out of hotels. Every meal he eats is at a restaurant. He doesn't even own a car! In his interview, he explained, "Living in a grand environment to show myself and others that I have wealth has zero appeal. Whatever I own is temporary, since we’re only here for a short period of time."
Bill Gates - the technophile
You'd expect the founder of Microsoft to be enthusiastic about technology, but he takes it to an extreme beyond all reason. His mansion includes an underground music system for his swimming pool, two secret bookcase doors, speakers hidden in the wallpaper so that music flows into the room from nowhere, and an RIF-chip system so that the house can adjust the thermostat in a room according to the preferences of whoever is in that room. Sometimes he pushes technology too far - he has been caught onstage with a 50-foot "blue screen of death" when he's demoing Windows and it crashes, he spent his first night in his mansion trying to figure out how to turn off the TV, and he once wrote a blistering letter to his engineers when he spent a whole day trying to get his own computer to install a media codec.
Carl Icahn - the predator
Carl Icahn is self-described "corporate raider". His specialty is hostile takeovers, his greatest being TWA in 1985. His latest move has been a years-long battle to take over Yahoo!, Inc., for pretty much no reason except he feels like it. While other billionaires build fortunes, he waits for somebody else to build one - then he goes in to take it away! He has also described himself as an "investor activist". The Wall Street Journal is even up in arms about him, as written in their article "Why Carl Icahn Is Bad For Investors": He pushes for strategies that raise prices in the short term while harming companies' long-term prospects. Carl Icahn is a bad boy that won't play nice with others. But he's fun to watch!
Sultan of Brunei - the playboy
Bored? Well, just build your own amusement park! That's apparently what Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah was thinking when he built Jerudong Park, a $1 billion theme park which boasts a steel looping roller coaster, carousel, pedal boats, pirate ship, skydiver, bumper cars, go-carts, shooting gallery, amphitheater, and a musical fountain show. Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston have performed at the amphitheater. Can't he just watch TV like the rest of us?
Zimbabwe - the starving "billionaires"
OK, we're cheating with this one. The "billionaires" of Zimbabwe are only "billionaires" in Zimbabwe dollars - a one-billion-dollar Zimbabwe banknote is currently worth one United States penny - and falling! Zimbabwe has inflation at the rate of 2.2 million percent. 80% of the population of Zimbabwe lives below the poverty line. It is an especially sad sight to see a filthy Zimbabwe child in rags and bare feet walk down a muddy path to the store to buy a slice of bread for today's meal, while carrying huge armloads of worthless paper money to do so.
Steve Fossett - missing forever?
Billionaire Steve Fossett was a world-class adventurer, with five nonstop circumnavigations of the Earth to his credit including as a long-distance solo balloonist, as a sailor, and as a solo flight fixed-wing aircraft pilot. As a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society and the Explorers Club, Fossett has set 116 records in five different sports. Now, how does a guy like this manage to lose an airplane over the bare, clear Nevada desert in September 2007 so thoroughly that no searcher can find him? The biggest search and rescue team in America's history can't even confirm he's dead. Not a single bolt of his plane wreckage has turned up anywhere. Several reporters have brought up the possibility that he might have faked his own death. Lieutenant Colonel Cynthia Ryan of the US Civil Air Patrol, who has been part of the search effort, has stated, "I've been doing this search and rescue for 14 years. Fossett should have been found. We're pretty good at what we do."