DDW magazine | don’t die wondering ®

The strangest stories money can buy. Heirs, feuds, vanished fortunes and quiet money — a magazine for the curious.

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Full story: https://t.co/aTebL2c6eu

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Tyler Perry has bought a $30M mansion in Puerto Rico ahead of his planned move there in 2027, according to reports.

📸 PhilipRomanoPhoto / Wikimedia Commons

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@HGACinema Hello, Dolly! reportedly cost Fox around $25 million, then among the priciest musicals ever made, and it took years to look profitable. Even Dolly couldn't charm a balance sheet.

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@CHC_1927 Cary Grant married Woolworth heiress Barbara Hutton in 1942 and reportedly refused to touch her fortune. She went on to seven husbands in all; he went on to wear a suit better than anyone.

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From a 2014 board seat to the IPO stage.
The full story: https://t.co/WHKMrD1wfg

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India's largest share sale closed on Akash Ambani's 35th birthday. Less than 3% of Jio was actually up for sale.

Akash was born on 23 October 1991, twin to Isha. Both joined Reliance boards in 2014. His seat was at Reliance Jio Infocomm, which had not yet switched on for paying customers.

Jio launched commercially in 2016. In August 2019 his father promised it a separate listing within five years, which set the deadline at August 2024.

Then came 2020. Reuters says Meta joined Google and other investors in putting 1.52 trillion rupees, then $20.5bn, into the company. Google paid ₹33,737 crore for 7.73%. Reports of the draft prospectus put Meta's affiliate at 9.98%.

In June 2022 Mukesh resigned as a director of Reliance Jio Infocomm and Akash became chairman. Mukesh kept the chair of Jio Platforms, the holding company above it, where Akash is managing director. Reuters says the move was widely seen as succession planning. Isha leads Reliance Retail. Anant sits on two Reliance energy boards. Three plausible candidates, no announcement.

The deadline came and went. Jio filed its draft prospectus with SEBI on 19 June 2026: a fresh issue, no offer for sale, so no existing shareholder sells a single share. Up to ₹27,500 crore of the proceeds is earmarked to repay borrowings at Reliance Jio Infocomm, the subsidiary Akash chairs.

At the investor event, Akash led the pitch and Isha shared the stage. Their father, according to Reuters, skipped it. "I'm here as a representative of the entire company," Akash said.

Bidding opened on Wednesday 21 October. The $3.2bn issue was fully subscribed in under two hours. The offer values Jio at up to $108.3bn, and roughly 97% of the company stays exactly where it was.

One figure deserves a second look. Jio made about $3.2bn in profit on roughly $15.5bn of revenue in the year to March. The largest share sale in Indian history raised about what the company earns in a year.

The prospectus opens with "We are a technology platform." Telecoms still brings in nearly 90% of the revenue. Akash's own summary: "There is no either-or at Jio: the network is our technology."

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A prince, a selfie and a persistent tight end. The full story: https://t.co/W74WMePNnJ

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Prince William says that in the photograph that made Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Instagram official, he was trying to move Kelce out of the shot.

The picture dates from 21 June 2024: the first night of the Eras Tour at Wembley, and William's 42nd birthday. He brought his two eldest children. Swift and Kelce were both 34.

Two photographs came out of the evening. Kensington Palace posted one, with Swift in a sparkling pinstripe suit taking the selfie. Swift posted another, of herself with the royals and Kelce, captioned "Happy Bday M8! London shows are off to a splendid start." The palace and the pop star each published the version that suited them.

The next morning she put her photograph on her verified Instagram. CNN reported it was the first photo of Kelce she had shared to her main feed. She had posted footage of him in February, and the relationship had been public since a Chiefs game the previous September, so the qualifier matters. Nine months from first sighting to the main grid, and when it came, a prince was in the frame.

William and Swift go back further than Kelce does. On 26 November 2013, at the Centrepoint Winter Whites Gala at Kensington Palace, Swift, Jon Bon Jovi and the prince sang on stage together, according to WWD.

Kelce took the royal cameo gracefully. On his podcast New Heights he told listeners, "We met royalty."

On 26 August 2025 the couple announced their engagement, and that post passed 37 million likes. They married on 3 July 2026 at Madison Square Garden. Hours before the wedding, New Heights released an episode with William, who talked for about 30 minutes about football, the Eras Tour and the World Cup. Asked about the King's enthusiasm for the game, he said, "My father hates football."

Then, on 23 October 2026, he sat down with Graham Norton on BBC One. Asked whether he had known the significance of Taylor's post, he said he hadn't appreciated it. "I was trying to move him out of the photo!" he said. "Travis kept coming back in, and I couldn't work out why he kept coming back in!"

The audience laughed in shock.

It is a very good joke, and it fits the last 13 years. A man who has spent his adult life as the fixed point in other people's photographs finally met someone determined to stay in his.

Kelce had not yet responded publicly. He hardly needs to. The photograph is on his wife's Instagram, and he is still in it.

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Another fortune that sold before a crash: the Goldsmiths, figure by figure: https://t.co/vOTsw6Jbow

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Bernard Baruch started on Wall Street in 1891 as a $5-a-week runner. At 32, he wrote, he had $100,000 for every year of his age, in cash.

He began by losing $8,000 of his father's money on speculation.

A $60,000 win in a sugar stock paid for a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, at $19,000.

Selling Amalgamated Copper short, Time reported, cleared him about $700,000. In 1916 he made nearly half a million selling U.S. Steel short in a peace scare.

Time put his fortune at its peak at about $25 million. He laughed when people called him the third or fourth richest man in America.

He saw 1929 coming and sold a large part of his investments in advance.

Watch the Universal Newsreel of 21 June 1965, made when he died: the park bench he was known for, and the company he kept.

He died in Manhattan that June, two months short of his 95th birthday.

$5 a week in 1891. About $25 million at the peak. Out before the crash.

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Full story: https://t.co/VHs2NYjtiH

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Hubert Perrodo built Perenco on an offshore field in Gabon that Amoco no longer wanted. He had founded the drilling company Techfor in 1981 and sold it in 1992 to buy oil and gas interests outright. The model held: take over mature fields the majors consider marginal and keep them producing. Perenco now reports gross output above 510,000 barrels of oil equivalent a day across 14 countries, and according to Forbes it is owned by his widow and three children. Forbes and Bloomberg sit $2.7 billion apart on what that is worth.

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Related: the billionaires who are not leaving their money to their children. https://t.co/EfppDLDSTO

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Warren Buffett, $44bn. His granddaughter Nicole, on Oprah in 2006: “I feel completely excluded from it.” The letter that followed was signed “Warren”, not “Grandpa”. 99.5% of the fortune goes to charity, and his children decide where.

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The richest man alive and the customer keeping receipts. The full story: https://t.co/NuQhEyLxCy

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On Wednesday 21 October, Elon Musk's fortune briefly passed $1.019 trillion. Two days later he wrote that other people had grown very rich off Ukraine.

Forbes reported the peak came during trading after SpaceX's third-quarter results. He closed at about $989 billion. Bloomberg had put him at $921 billion the day before.

On X, which he owns, he wrote that Ukraine's elites "have grown very rich off the hundreds of billions flowing to Ukraine". A second post said some American taxpayer money returns through "multiple laundry machines" to fund political campaigns. He attached no evidence to either.

The awkward part is what the fortune is made of. Forbes reckons he owns around 11% of Tesla and 38% of SpaceX, and Benzinga says SpaceX is now more than four-fifths of his net worth. SpaceX supplies Starlink, which Ukraine's forces rely on. In March 2025 Musk himself called it the "backbone of the Ukrainian army".

Poland says it pays for it. Radosław Sikorski, the foreign minister, said in March 2025 that Poland's Digitisation Ministry pays about $50 million a year and supplied half of Ukraine's 42,000 terminals. Musk told him to "Be quiet, small man". The figure is a minister's, not an audited contract value.

Then, on 14 October, SpaceX restricted speeds on Starshield, the military version, in Ukraine. Who ordered it is disputed. The Wall Street Journal says Musk did. Donald Trump said he and Musk had "nothing to do" with it.

Sikorski's reply on Friday stayed on the bill. He said the United States stopped funding Ukraine last year and wrote: "U.S. companies make money on American weapons for which we Europeans pay." The more Musk plays "politics with your products", he added, the more he damages his own brand.

The fortune also moves about. Musk first crossed $1 trillion on 12 June, then a 31% multi-day selloff in SpaceX shares took him back under. Wednesday's visit lasted part of a single trading session, his fourth crossing since June.

The richest man alive is entitled to his opinions on Ukraine, on aid and on Washington. The one subject he gives up, by the arithmetic of his own position, is other people getting rich.

As of 22 October, Kyiv said the cap on its military terminals had not moved. Poland says it is still paying the subscription.

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A fortune nobody has printed, and what can be counted. The full story: https://t.co/Sun9k2kOp0

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The number of serious publications that have put a figure on Lara Cosima Henckel von Donnersmarck's fortune is zero.

She is 23, the daughter of an Oscar-winning director, the owner of a TikTok audience in seven figures and, according to Yahoo Entertainment, the wife of a Pinault. Three estimate websites have assigned her a net worth anyway, without saying where it came from.

What the press does record looks more like a working life. People described her as a fashion brand founder and named the label Cosima. Nobody has published its turnover or its stockists. New York Social Diary reported two summers interning with haute couture brands, and Hello named Dior as one of them.

The fame can be counted. Hello reported more than 40 million TikTok views in 2023, earned with "get ready with me" videos, and New York Social Diary said they arrived within two months. In September 2026 TikTok listed her account at 1.2 million followers. No serious outlet has reported a brand deal.

Her father is Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, who won his Oscar for The Lives of Others. Her mother, People says, is Christiane Asschenfeldt, a lawyer and the first International Executive Director of Creative Commons. Nothing published about either career points to inherited money.

The old money belongs to the family name. Guido Henckel von Donnersmarck, born in 1830, held Silesian coal mines, ironworks and zinc, became a close confidant of Bismarck and was made a prince in 1901. A Polish heritage centre puts the German part of his cousin Count Hugo I's estate at 72 million marks in 1912. Hello traces her title to her father's German ancestry. No serious outlet has traced her line to either fortune.

The modern chapter moves faster. A society account on TikTok said her relationship with François Pinault Jr. went public on Valentine's Day 2026. People reported the engagement on 15 March. By August, Yahoo was reporting a son and a marriage kept quiet, and the couple were photographed at a football match in Rennes.

None of it changes the record of her own money. No report shows her holding a Pinault stake. Her public holdings come to 1.2 million followers and a label called Cosima.

The last published price anywhere near the name dates from 1912.

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Momoa has been arriving quietly for years. The full story: https://t.co/A440lQKuQP

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Jason Momoa has never announced a move to New Zealand. He has been making it, one purchase at a time, for years.

First came a shareholding. In 2025 the NZ Herald found from company records that Momoa had become a shareholder in Grey Door Ltd, the company behind The Bunker, a Queenstown bar and restaurant. Multiple sources told the paper he was house-hunting nearby.

In April 2026, Āriki Group bought Studio West, a West Auckland film studio. Āriki is owned by Momoa, Taika Waititi and Cliff Curtis. Nobody has published how the shares are split or what the studio cost.

Now the Otago Daily Times reports he has paid NZ$15m for a 4.92-hectare lifestyle property on Mountain View Rd in Dalefield, on the rural fringe of Queenstown. The ODT understands he had rented it for some time before buying on 12 September.

Rent first, sign later. It is sensible advice, and few buyers can afford the patience. The premium suggests he liked what he found: OneRoof reported the sale came in NZ$3.5m above its rating valuation. The NZ Herald ranked it the second-biggest residential sale in Queenstown-Lakes this year, behind a NZ$16.5m lodge on Mooney Rd in Speargrass Flat.

Then there is Sir Sam Neill. The property is said to have once been his, and the papers hedge with care. The ODT says Sir Sam gave it to his former wife before the sale. OneRoof says "understood". The NZ Herald says "believed". Momoa inherited nothing. He bought on the market.

Neill died in Sydney on 13 July 2026, aged 78. His Two Paddocks vineyards in Central Otago are a separate matter, and no source says the sale included any of that land or a single vine.

Read in order, the list does the work of an announcement: Grey Door Ltd, The Bunker, Āriki Group, Studio West, and a block in Dalefield. None of it required a press release, and none came with one.

Queenstown has a long memory for people who came, bought loudly and left. It is less practised at the other sort.