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I recently came by a quote about comparing gambling to drugs - "Even at the height of my using I could never blow $10k in 20 minutes on drugs."
AFAIK truly great fortunes are almost always lost on investments and stocks (for lesser men it's the 3 F's). Even the most profligate spender finds it hard to spend more than a few million on cars - where do you put them? And there is only so much Dom Pérignon that a man can shove down his gullet before it comes back up.
I have heard it said that 1MDB fraudster Jho Low was the only person ever to spend a whole billion dollars on debauchery and loose living. And he had to do things like paid dates with Miranda Kerr in order to do it.
Above the "sufficient to endow an upper-middle class standard of living for life" level, the biggest destroyers of generational wealth are division (which overlaps with the 3 F's in that one of the things that divides fortunes is divorce settlements, but the central case is division between children) and confiscation. Investing your entire life savings in pets.com is what retired dentists who think they are smart do. The failure mode of dumb old money is to halve a fortune over a generation by overpaying for mediocre investment advice, which does about the same amount of damage as the entirely standard practice of splitting it between two siblings, and a lot less damage than being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Lenin or Harold Wilson comes calling.
This is why old money tends to be more present in societies where estates can be entailed- prevented from being divided in a regulated inheritance regime. The extreme form is titles of nobility, but you also see a pattern in the US where leaving aside actual robber-baron descendants, who are usually tracked into very high income jobs anyways, you tend to see medium-level old money in unexpected places due to historic preservation laws more than actual wealth generation. This is why newcomers to DFW are surprised that the actual old-school high culture is mostly on the fort worth side, for example- historic preservation status makes it a PITA to subdivide(although it could be sold entirely) some subset of land used for cattle in ~1900, and almost all of this land has oil on it, so a higher percentage of the fort worth elite were elites back when cattle was the main industry.
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Yeah. To a certain degree I think that's one of the 'benefits' of the Gambling industry in that it allows that money to be recirculated, especially before the modern eras where a lot of the big gambling operators were also insane degens in their own right so there was a natural recycling effect for failsons to turn large fortunes into nothing. Also generally the sort of personality that's capable of massively running it up is going to be a bad combination of addictive and prone to all-inning which doesn't mix great when exposed to gambling.
Also people end up gambling since they've essentially capped out their local scenario. If you're sitting on a pile of crypto obtained shadily, already paid for maximal lifestyle in Albania, Costa Rica or whatever (which really doesn't cost that much in grand scheme of rich person things) and can't travel that much due to potential sanctions then you might as well start blasting 200k a hand blackjack. Atleast I've seen a lot of ultra highrollers that essentially describes.
While gambling is definitely addictive, I'd assume that a harem and a menagerie and de facto immunity from Kosovar law is a more appealing prospect to shady millionaires. Obviously you'd expect less attachment to normie status symbols because these people are almost definitionally not normies.
I mean the point is more that once you've established your harem, unlimited party passes and mansion in the balkans that a lot of that stuff doesn't really cost thaaaaat much by shady black market millionaire standards. You can probably get it all set for a couple M a year, inclusive of bribes to relevant local parties. So you've got a massive inflow of cash coming from whatever you're running in the background to make you the top dog and nothing else to really spend it on but gambling. Plus there's maybe some laundering effects but in my experience it's more 'I have huge amounts of money stuck on the blockchain/in cash, what else am I gonna do with it' than really explicitly trying to turn it into legal tender.
Also these people are turbonormies. Generally what makes you top dog in these things is a combination of ruthlessness, timing and being compulsively prone to go all in. It's a lot more 'Guy who owns 50 car dealerships' energy than 'this is a delicate political operator who used deft genius to climb the ranks of crime'
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