The World’s Most Unusual Billionaires

There’s just something about billionaires.

The world has plenty of celebrity billionaires with larger-than-life personas made even more outlandish by their outsized wallets.

And there are more of them now than ever before — more than 2,000 at last count.

Maybe it’s their wealth, or how they acquired it, that makes them so fascinating or reviling. But no matter if you’re envious or inspired by ungodly rich people, it’s hard to ignore them.

We like billionaires, and we like them to be odd and eccentric. But not so much so that they’re always in the news — like Mark Zuckerberg, Warren Buffett, Richard Branson or Bill Gates. Or the 45th president of the United States.

In compiling this list of odd billionaires, we looked for a certain edge or two that makes them unique. And we wanted to find people who aren’t household names. Our decidedly non-scientific approach went for the “je ne sais quoi” among the world’s most well-heeled.

In no particular order, they are …

Residence: Scotland

Worth: $650 million (Forbes, 2017)

Age: 52

For starters, we are bending the rules here, but this might be the oddest billionaire story of all.

There exists a person in this world, a woman, who cared so little about having three commas attached to her net worth that she reduced those commas to two (albeit a heavy two).

That woman is J.K. Rowling, who only five years ago was estimated to have amassed a billion-dollar fortune thanks to her creative whims. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and movies are popular beyond belief: the seven books have sold 450 million-plus copies worldwide and the movies brought in $7.7 billion on their own.

But instead of maintaining the exclusive title of self-made billionaire, Rowling donated some $150 million to various charitable causes and thus became a mere multimillionaire.

Perhaps being a single mother living on welfare before her fame and fortune gives Rowling a different perspective on wealth. Either way, we applaud her for being a unique force in a world all too obsessed with riches.

Residence: London, Cyprus

Worth: $9.9 billion (Forbes, 2017)

Age: 73

When you’re a billionaire who’s known as the “lifeline of the Ayatollah” and the “Viking king,” chances are you’re an oddball. Such is the case with shipping magnate John Fredriksen.  

Fredriksen used to be Norway’s richest man until he defected to Cyprus in the mid-1990s to avoid taxes (he lives in the Chelsea neighborhood of London in a $172 million estate). He controls the largest fleet of supertankers in the world. He’s a high school dropout who made his own fortune. And he likes to make potentially life-changing business decisions on his gut instinct alone.

It all started in the 1960s when Fredriksen began trading oil in Beirut before running U.S. military supply shipments to the Mekong Delta amid the Vietnam War, according to a 2012 profile by Bloomberg. It was in the ‘80s when he would acquire the title of “lifeline to the Ayatollah” for handling crude oil shipments for Iran first under the U.S. embargo following the embassy seizure in 1979 and then during the Iran-Iraq conflict.  

This relationship would sour quickly after the Iranian national tanker company stopped making lease payments for Fredriksen’s tankers, leading Iran to try to forcibly reclaim its goods using navy fighter ships. Fredriksen eventually agreed to sell Iran the tankers, which avoided further conflict.

Aside from such international intrigue, Fredriksen is a man set in his ways. Per Bloomberg: “Proudly old school, Fredriksen shuns computers and is fond of wearing a cravat. He insists on reading everything on paper and personally maintains records on his companies in 19 suitcases. He constantly rummages through them at his Chelsea office, hunting for patterns that will help him discern the state of play in the tanker cycle.”

 Ion Tiriac

Residence: Romania

Worth: $1.25 billion (Forbes, 2017)

Age: 78

If you’re a former pro tennis AND ice hockey star who became a billionaire, you’re the kind of odd we want to know. It also helps when you have nicknames like “Count Dracula” and “Brasov Bulldozer,” speak upwards of nine languages, and you were once known to eat six steaks, four plates of pasta, and 12 eggs just for breakfast.

“The mustache is still there, graying at the ends, and it still suggests, as John McPhee once wrote, ‘that this man has been to places most people do not imagine exist,’” reads a fantastic 1993 bio of Ion Tiriac in the New York Times.

Known for his deadpan humor and expressionless face, it’s said that few people have ever seen Tiriac smile. He was an Olympic hockey player for Romania before switching to tennis, where his greatest feat was winning the men’s doubles title at the 1970 French Open. He made his fortune after his playing career, founding Romania’s first post-communist bank in 1990, which he named after himself. He also got into retail, insurance, autos, and airlines in his home country. And he even appeared in a Miller Lite commercial in 1987 with legendary baseball personality Bob Uecker. 

Tiriac is still involved in tennis as a player manager.

Residence: Slovakia

Worth: $1.1 billion (Forbes, 2017)

Age: 49

Unlike Tiriac, our next odd billionaire is most known for being a complete unknown.

It’s certainly common for rich people to be reclusive, but Ivan Chrenko takes it a step further. Slovakia’s first and only billionaire is basically an enigma.  

In a profile of Chrenko earlier this year announcing he’d made the list of world’s billionaires, Forbes wrote: “[H]e does not communicate with the media about his wealth. Neither has he done so on this occasion. And, even the profile on Forbes of the Slovak-born businessman has no photo him.”

Alas, there is one photo of Chrenko on the Web, and it accompanies his incredibly curt bio on the website of HB Reavis, a real estate developer for which Chrenko is the majority owner and chairman: “Ivan Chrenko is a Co-founder of HB Reavis. He served as CEO of the HB Reavis Group from 1994 to October 2013.”

But it seems that unless you’re ready to make a hefty real estate deal, Chrenko is as good as a ghost.

We’ll file this under that urge to want something we cannot have.