Gold bath worth $2 million and Bengal tigers: Mike Tyson’s most luxurious purchases that made him bankrupt

The box­er earned hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in the sport, but end­ed his career in debt.

Mike Tyson became the youngest world cham­pi­on in heavy­weight his­to­ry. By the mid-90s, the box­er was the rich­est ath­lete, and approx­i­mate­ly half a bil­lion dol­lars had accu­mu­lat­ed in his account. But due to his lav­ish lifestyle, he lost every­thing and became bank­rupt.

How did Tyson become so rich?

When Tyson became the absolute world cham­pi­on, he earned tens of mil­lions for fights. In 1988, Mike set the record for the largest pay­day in his­to­ry at that time — $22 mil­lion against Michael Spinks.

Tyson had so much mon­ey that he didn’t know where to spend it: “When I was young, I didn’t know how to han­dle mon­ey. He gave peo­ple mon­ey, threw par­ties and orgies. I went crazy then. Was so sick and had no idea I was that sick. I bought a lot of cars for the girls.”

What did Tyson spend millions on?

Dur­ing his career, Tyson pur­chased 111 cars for him­self, and anoth­er 19 for friends. The Bent­ley Con­ti­nen­tal SC, which cost $500 thou­sand, stood out in the col­lec­tion. Also in the fleet were Fer­rari, Lam­borgh­i­ni, Range Rover, Mer­cedes and Rolls-Royce.

But Tyson con­sid­ers the wildest pur­chase to be a bath­tub made of pure gold, which he gave to his first wife Robin Givens for Christ­mas. It cost Mike an incred­i­ble $2 mil­lion.

Mike Tyson's gold bath

Why did Tyson get tigers?

Anoth­er crazy thing Tyson did was buy­ing three Ben­gal tigers, each of which cost $70,000. Anoth­er 12 thou­sand a month was spent on their main­te­nance. Tigress Kenya was Box­er’s pet: she lived with him for 16 years, but was con­fis­cat­ed when she bit her neigh­bor.

“Some­one jumped over the fence where the tiger was and start­ed play­ing with it. The tiger did­n’t know the girl, so it was an acci­dent. They tried to sue me until they found out about her pen­e­tra­tion. When I saw what the tiger did to her hand, I gave her 250 thou­sand dol­lars. I was a fool then, there is no way to curb these cats one hun­dred per­cent,” said Mike.

Accord­ing to Forbes, Tyson earned $685 mil­lion dur­ing his career, but declared him­self bank­rupt in 2003. More­over, Mike owed the US tax author­i­ties 23 mil­lion, so at the end of his career he agreed to fights that seri­ous­ly dam­aged his lega­cy and led to depres­sion.