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Legendary Losses: Biggest Losers In History

Khalid Elhassan July 25, 2023 32 min

Loser - The Battle of Red Cliffs — The Battle of Red Cliffs. Rebellion Research

The Silver-Mad Siblings

Nelson Bunker Hunt, right. America’s Best Racing

With a lock on much of the East Texas Oil Field, one of the world’s biggest oil deposits, H.L. Hunt (1889 – 1974) was one of the world’s richest men. His sons Nelson, William, and Lamar – the last a founder of the American Football League and Major League Soccer – were also quite wealthy. Especially Nelson, who drilled for oil in Libya and made a fortune. However, Nelson Hunt became a crackpot who feared a US government conspiracy to steal his wealth. So to protect it, he decided to buy a lot of silver, and hoard it in Switzerland. Then he decided to buy all the silver, and persuaded his brothers to join him in a bid to corner the global silver market.

The Hunt brothers went on a silver buying spree in the 1970s. When they ran out of money, they borrowed heavily to buy more silver. By 1979, they had accumulated about 100 million troy ounces – almost 7 million pounds – of the stuff. That was almost half the world’s transportable supply. That speculation caused the price of silver to spike by over 800%, from $6 an ounce in early 1979, to over $50 by early 1980. The brothers made about $4 billion in paper profits, but in reality they had simply created a huge asset bubble, that was bound to burst sooner or later. When it did, they lost big, and Nelson Hunt in particular went from visionary genius to crackpot loser.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.