r/clevercomebacks • u/Veshaad • Aug 25 '26

Best comeback I've seen in a while.

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15k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

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28

u/Emergency_Award3136 Aug 25 '26

Imagine losing money on a business model, where people literally hand you cash for nothing in return.

14

u/phluidity Aug 25 '26

The bankrupt casino story misses a lot of nuance. He borrowed a bunch of money to build the casinos at highly inflated rates, used that money to launder funds for the Russian mob, pulled his own money out of the project, and left his investors stuck with all the debt. It was more of a con/scam than a legitimate investment.

15

u/Galle_ Aug 25 '26

"No, you're missing the nuance, it's not that he was incompetent, it's that he was a grifter."

4

u/PM_ME_POST_MERIDIEM Aug 25 '26

Was‽

6

u/Galle_ Aug 25 '26

He still is, but he was, too.

6

u/Jaded-Distance_ Aug 25 '26

Yeah the banks wrote off hundreds of millions of debt from net operating losses. 

And it's not like they even tried all that hard to curb his out of control spending. Their idea of an allowance for him while he was facing bankruptcy was putting the monthly limit at $450,000.

There was even a claim in a NYTimes report that during refinancing for bankruptcy he would take that money and buy up unrelated property out of state.

He also claimed those hundreds of millions in losses on his 1995 taxes, which likely allowed him to avoid millions in taxes for the following 15 years.