I enjoyed a recent article in the New York Times having a go at most of the figures that one reads on the Internet as to what celebrities are worth.  Most of these figures come from a website www.celebritynetwork.com and what is quite interesting is that the company has no computer scientists or data specialists on its staff, so nobody has any idea as to how they get those figures.  They recently listed the Cosby Show actor, Jeoffrey Owens, as being worth $500,000 until it was discovered he was working as a packer at Walmart at which time they revised his figures downwards. 

Apparently, most of these figures are vastly inflated and nobody complains about it, because publicists prefer it if you believe that their clients are rich.  All the websites seem to get their figures from the same Celebrity Network Website and even Google, for example, if it refers to Lindsay Lohan, saying that she is worth $500,000, gets their information from Celebrity Network.  Many people will recall that Donald Trump used to have arguments as to what he was worth and apparently often tried to game Fortune 400 List by inflating reports of his wealth so that he could obtain a higher position.  In many respects, this is fairly simple to do – you buy a golf course, most golf courses are actually struggling and then you value the golf course at an amount that you cannot sell it.  I had my own experience of that with my house in Blair Atholl, Lanseria.  A few people who have left the estate seem to have left it on a basis of being virtually bankrupt and have had their houses auctioned and yet, when you were around them they all made out that they were multi-millionaires and extremely rich.  The reality is that the vast majority of them undoubtedly have mortgages on their houses that are bigger than what their houses are now worth, given the shocking state of that particular property where more than 120 houses are on the market, but only one or two are sold a year.  In other words, you cannot say somebody is worth R25 million because their house is on the market for R25 million.  It is probably worth R16 million and it might very well be that they have a mortgage bond of R20 million which actually means a deficit of a negative R4 million in terms of the house as an “asset”.  The vast majority of people are driving cars that are financed on credit, so it is very easy to fake money and it seems that when it comes to celebrities this is equally true!  We only have to think of our own athlete and murderer, Oscar Pistorius, who used to drive a McLaren car which ultimately turned out not to be his as well as boast about a property he owned in Italy which was also not his and which was just lent to him for him to stay in.