The Smoke & Mirrors of MODERN FORTUNES

Crypto was king, until it wasn't. The market is crashing, but you can't get a hotel room in Paris. And some of America's most extravagant moguls are suddenly penniless. Has there ever been a more confusing money moment? Just ask Wall Street's most famous enigma.

- WILLIAM D. COHAN

In May 1989, four years after he shocked Wall Street by buying the cosmetics company Revlon for $2.7 billion, Ronald Perelman, then 46, was named America's richest man by Institutional Investor. At the time, Perelman had a net worth estimated at $5 billion, derived from a decade of buying and selling all manner of companies, from a grocery store chain and a group of jewelry stores to a cigar manufacturer and an obscure maker of licorice extract. In achieving this pinnacle of success in American capitalism, Perelman surpassed Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, who had long occupied the top spot. Perelman, the magazine proclaimed, was a "latter-day Midas."

In a way it was fitting that Perelman was the country's richest person at the end of the 1980s, a decade that celebrated greed and glory on Wall Street and in its various practitioners. The '80s gave us Michael Milken and the junk bond, Lew Ranieri and the securitization of car loan, mortgage, and credit card receivables, and a murderer's row, including Carl Icahn, Asher Edelman, and Saul Steinberg, of newly dubbed "corporate raiders." Towering above them all was Perelman, an unlikely-looking titan who shaved his head before it was fashionable and wore tight dress shirts before they were fashionable too, but who nonetheless had all the trappings of modern moguldom.