Today Batista is perilously close to losing his billionaire status. His losses have mounted as shares of his oil and gas driller OGX Petroleo e Gas have tumbled 88% in the last year. During the height of his ascendancy in March 2012, Batista’s 61% stake was worth nearly $20 billion on its own–now the whole company is worth less than a tenth of that.
As his portfolio has collapsed, Batista has been forced to draw multi-billion dollar debts. A $2 billion equity investment made by Abu Dhabi sovereign fund Mubadala in Batista’s companies back in March 2012 was reportedly recently converted into debt. Batista repaid a portion of that debt, according to Reuters, bringing the amount owed to around $1.6 billion. He also reportedly owes Brazilian bank BNDES $1 billion.
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While some reports have said Batista fell out of the billionaire ranks entirely, Forbes still estimates his current net worth at just over $1 billion after that heavy debt load is taken into account. Spokespeople for Batista and Mubadala did not respond to requests for comment.
Billionaires do frequently fall off our lists. Recent high-profile names to drop off include Zynga’s Mark Pincus (once $2 billion) and Chesapeake Energy‘s Aubrey McClendon (once $3 billion). But neither of those falls were as large as Batista’s in pure dollar terms.
A $30 billion crash doesn’t happen every day, but Batista has company among people who have amassed such fortunes. While the smartest billionaires survive for decades with their ten- and eleven-figure balance sheets, Forbes has seen more than a few lose their way in similarly shocking fashion–and we’ve also seen many of them rebound. After all, the skills and resources that allowed them to reach such heights are still within their reach.
For example, Masayoshi Son was once nearly the world’s richest man. The founder of Softbank, Japan’s leading Internet and telecom services company, had a net worth of $76 billion at the height of the dot-com bubble. But the value of his holding fell 98% when the bubble popped and he made a questionable investment in the bankrupt Nippon Credit Bank.
Son stuck on Forbes’ billionaires list (barely) and has slowly re-built his fortune. He is once again the second-richest person in Japan, with a net worth of $14 billion; just in the last year Softbank shares have increased nearly 120% and Son bought a $117 million estate in Woodside, Ca., the highest purchase price ever recorded for a U.S. home. Son is still doing big deals. Softbank was recently given regulatory go-ahead to buy mobile carrier Sprint-Nextel for $21.6 billion.
The 16th-richest person in Japan has a similar story. Yasumitsu Shigeta, founder of mobile phone distributor Hikari Tsushi, peaked at $42 billion during the dotcom boom, then lost nearly everything. He returned to the billionaire ranks this year (now $2 billion) as the company’s stock price doubled after strong performance.
India’s Anil Ambani was the world’s biggest gainer in 2008, reaching a peak fortune of $42 billion. But the tycoon lost $32 billion of that the very next year as shares in his Reliance empire crumbled. Ambani hasn’t returned to his past heights, but he still has $6 billion, enough to make him the 11th-richest person in India. (His brother Mukesh Ambani is India’s current richest.)
In a sadder story, Adolf Merckle had net worth of $9.2 billion in 2008 but made some risky bets and accumulated debt at a rapid pace. Germany’s fifth-richest man committed suicide in January 2009 at age 74 after trustees were appointed to oversee the businesses his family had spent over a century building. However, Adolf’s son Ludwig Merckle eventually inherited and restructured his father’s debt-plagued fortune. Today, the son is back on the list with a net worth of $7.4 billion–quite the turnaround story.
With reporting from Kerry Dolan. Follow Brian Solomon on Facebook and Twitter.