5 Famous People You Didn’t Know Were in Deep Debt

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You might see photos of your favorite celebrity on the red carpet decked out in the latest fashions from the hottest designers and wish you could step into their lives. You might daydream about having a private chef and personal assistant, living in a palatial Los Angeles mansion, and jet setting around the world as all in a day’s work. 

However, there’s a darker side of being a star. Many of the celebrities who inspire you with their talent are actually dealing with significant debt or even bankruptcy. Whether they’ve been led astray by bad financial advisors, had their assets stolen by corrupt managers or are simply bad with money, these stars have racked up considerable debt.

Nicolas Cage

Known as equally for his eccentricities as his talent, Nicolas Cage is one of the most recognized working actors today. However, the Academy Award-winning actor and scion of the celebrated Coppola clan is also infamous for his considerable debt.

In an interview with “60 Minutes,” Cage admitted that some of his more head-baffling choices in parts came from a need to pay back about $6 million in debt he accrued from over-investing in the real estate market.  

Johnny Depp 

Johnny Depp may be a number of years away from his heyday as a heartthrob, but he still makes headlines — just not exactly the ones he wants. The actor’s multimillion-dollar debt once prompted Vanity Fair to ask, “How did Johnny Depp find himself in a financial crisis?”

Years later, a Variety article dove into the specifics of the crisis, saying that in a meeting with his accountants, Depp supposedly learned that he’d lost $650 million in movie earnings. When Business Insider broke down Depp’s financial peril, it found that Depp was spending $300,000 a month for a full-time staff and paid $10,000 a day — that’s right, every day — to a security manager. 

T-Pain

Rapper T-Pain was once at the top of the charts and living on the top of the world. However, his time at the top — where the rapper said he once had $40 million in the bank — was short-lived. 

In a recent article about celebrities whose poor money management skills put them on the wrong side of easy street, BuzzFeed shared the rapper’s story, which includes returning a Bugatti five months after he purchased it for $400,000 less than he paid for it. T-Pain said that he ended up having to borrow money to pay for his kids’ Burger King meals before working to get back on top. 

Kim Basinger 

While getting into financial trouble with real estate isn’t exactly uncommon, many people can’t say that they mucked up their money by buying an entire town. However, that’s exactly what Academy Award winner Kim Basinger did in early 1990. 

Along with a group of business partners, she used $20 million to buy a bank, industrial park, 50 buildings and 1,700 acres of land in tiny Braselton, Georgia. While the actress had a grand plan of turning the town into a major film and recording studio, as well as a theme park, a suite of homes and shopping centers, nothing came of the plan. Several years later, her group would resell the property for just $4.3 million. 

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Basinger’s loss is doubly ironic, and doubly compounded, by the fact that today, Georgia is enjoying massive success as a hub for filming TV and movies — with Gwinnett County, where the town is located, seeing particular popularity.

50 Cent

As one of the most popular rappers in the world, Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson was earning a whole lot more than his namesake for years. However, a stretch of bad luck financially — where he lost a multimillion-dollar lawsuit and filed for bankruptcy with $36 million worth of debts and less than $20 million in assets — leveled him, according to BuzzFeed. 

Not to be deterred, 50 Cent used his period of bankruptcy to regroup financially and creatively. He’s responsible for the hit TV show “Power” and the forthcoming origin series. 

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