this man was worth $36 BILLION but for only a week

In 2012 Bill Hwang hedge fund pleaded guilty to insider trading charges he paid $44 million in fines and got banned from Hong Kong markets for four years
Most people would given up but Bill Hwang didn't he came back quietly and launched a new firm called Archegos Capital
Structured it as a family office instead of a hedge fund that meant he didn’t have to publicly disclose his trades
Nobody could see how huge his positions were becoming, then he started borrowing insane amounts of money from major Wall Street banks
Goldman Sachs, morgan Stanley, credit Suisse, nomura.
What makes it crazier is that, none of those banks fully knew how much money the others had already lent him
Everyone thought the exposure was manageable, nobody saw the real size of the trade
Using leverage and hidden derivative trades, Hwang turned a few BILLION dollars into exposure worth around $160 billion
He made massive concentrated bets on a handful of stocks, especially ViacomCBS
On paper, his net worth reached around $36 billion, banks kept giving him more money because the trades looked unstoppable
But remember no one owns the market, the market reversed in the opposite direction
One stock started falling, that single drop triggered margin calls across Wall Street, imagine the leverage on that 💀
Banks demanded more collateral immediately, Hwang didn’t have the money, that’s when they realized they are cooked,
the banks all rushed to dump his positions before the others could get out first, Billions of dollars worth of stock hit the market at once, the prices collapsed
More than $100 billion in market value disappeared within days, credit Suisse alone lost $5.5 billion from this one client
the losses were so brutal they later became part of the chain of events that pushed the bank toward collapse
And somehow, during the chaos, an Archegos employee accidentally wired $500 million to Goldman Sachs instead of requesting the money back
A judge later called it one of the biggest financial collapses he had ever seen
In 2024, Bill Hwang was sentenced to 18 years in prison