It’s all very sad for a lot of these athletes, too. A lot of these guys literally never had an unspoken-for $5 in their pocket growing up and when they find out they’re getting a $2MM signing bonus, it must seem to them to be indistinguishable from infinity. Mom gets a house, Mom gets a car, I get a car, oh, and my sister needs some help, my girlfriend needs a shopping spree, and my best friend wants me to put money into his… and that $2MM is gone in a hurry. Then they get injured in their third year and never play again and they’ve got nothing but a bunch of overly-leveraged assets and nobody to help them out.
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Spending $3 million (or $5 million) to have Hunter S. Thompson’s ashes shoot out of a cannon is in order; this was Thompson’s idea/plan in the first place.
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All this shit costs more to maintain then you could believe.
I got to the detail about the yacht and I just thought “oh”. Those big motor yachts cost 10s of thousands of dollars and hour to run. Just in fuel costs. They can’t be run by one person. So even if you’re rated to pilot it you’re hiring a staff. Even just parking it somewhere and not using it it’s 10s of thousands in dockage fees. Can’t exactly pull something like that and store in your yard.
For that reason those things are usually operated as a business. Rented out. At the very least for tv or dock side parties. Just often enough to cover expenses for keeping the damn thing and whatever use you actually put on it.
Same deal castles n shit. Apparently it’s really common for entertainment business money to rent out real estate like that for photo TV and film shoots. Bring in some money to mitigate continuing expense.
And the guy bought his family a horse ranch. The horse business is a good and profitable one. And Depp has direct connections to the end of the entertainment business that needs a solid supply of quality horses. Why is that an expense instead of something that’s bringing money in? At least enough to mitigate the cost. Even an unprofitable business can be a good thing at this level. It’s a damn tax write off.
It just sounds like no-one involved thought very much about this stuff. Especially Depp.
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Still, the price I charge for shooting ashes out of a cannon is no more than $1 million, so I’d say he overpaid by quite a bit.
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A great actor. I am sad though not surprised to hear he is struggling with demons. I only hope it means we will see more of his work. In the end it’s the work that matters.
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If you can do it for less than $1 million you are obviously doing it wrong.
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Hmm… should have opened up a bidding process. I could have undercut you and gone with 500k for a custom forged cannon to shoot it from.
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Sad. I really liked him/his work a long time ago. From Gilbert Grape to the opium addict detective in that super dark Jack the Ripper story (From Hell?). Lots of cool off beat stuff.
Then all of a sudden he only worked for Tim Burton on his (mostly crap) projects and morphs into a Hunter Thompson, Keith Richards hang around. Bummer that is has to turn out this way.
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“A lifestyle he can’t afford.” He has made $650 million in his career. What a fucking fuck. Fuck you Johnny Depp.
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Still, the guy had a fortune that could last multi-multiple lifetimes. Poor guy… fuck him.
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That’s got to make matters so, so much worse. But I wonder if financial literacy helps, necessarily. I’m financially very careful and tend to think that if I suddenly ended up with tons of money, I’d continue to be so. But when the amount of money you have is many orders of magnitude more than what you’d ever seen before, such that spending a million or two isn’t that big a deal, and especially if you’re introduced to the world of luxury consumer goods, which are many orders of magnitude higher in price than their normal counterparts, I can see how it could be very easy to lose touch with any sort of financial reality. I can see how being in the world of celebrity actors could also cause one to easily lose touch with reality (in that and other ways).
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Having seen this up close and personal once (on a vastly smaller scale), there may be a very good reason why these tales of being able to unable to rationally deal with success are fairly common.
While not directly applicable to the Depp case, stories of people who have achieved unimaginable success going bankrupt aren’t uncommon. We read them and imagine that if we were in those shoes, we would be at least somewhat rational and sane to ensure that we aren’t eating cat-food once the gravy train ends its run.
But that’s the catch. The sane and rational never make what is, at heart, an utterly foolish gamble to vie in an industry where only one in 1,000 manage to make a living, and one in milliions become massive successes. Instead, it requires a sense of utterly irrational confidence in oneself that somehow you will be different.
And 99.999% of them go splat and if they’re not too irrational, bail from the industry, or keep on trying their entire life, failing time and time again.
But there will be the 0.001% who will succeed. And then the very nature of the mental characteristics that allowed them to gamble their livelihood away will also prevent them from recognizing that their career must inevitably come back to earth, and preparing for it.
It’s a catch-22. The rational don’t gamble, so only the irrational are winners.
Of course, there are exceptions, but boy are there a lot of cases where the prerequisites for even the possibility of early success are what guarantees the impossibility of long-term success.
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He only gets one, however, and appears to be living it accordingly. I’m just glad he’s seen the writing on the wall and has the sense to change course. With any luck, he’ll be able to enjoy a modest middle class lifestyle in retirement while getting the occasional grandpa or voice acting gig to keep things rolling.
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Thompson supposedly advised Depp that if he did a good job portraying him in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas then Thompson would hate him for the rest of his life.
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Fabulously put. I’ve said things like this about the creative world for a long time, but never said it as well.
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Evidently “financial therapy” does not mean “Make me feel better by giving me lots of money.”
I am disappoint.
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That is the most succinct summation I’ve ever read, nicely done!
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Many types of financial therapy exist, including
Financial Domination
and
Financial Coaching
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I was going to write something exactly like this. This happens often when I read the comments here. So, excellent observation! 
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