Misadventures of 5 Celebrity Investors

Investing Resume: Though it’s unclear if Mr. T owns stocks, either actively or through a money manager, he’s clearly one of America’s most high profile gold bugs. By most accounts, the gold jewelry he donned during his heyday in the 1980s was worth about $300,000 at the time. He’s been buying gold since 1977.

The Payoff: Strangely enough, Mr. T has been pretty vocal lately about his feelings of a gold bubble. As the pop-culture icon told Bloomberg TV just this week[2], when he was younger he thought that nothing could beat the yellow stuff. Mr. T proclaimed “… the Incas or the Mayans, they said gold was the sweat from the sun, or the tears, you know?” and that “Gold was special. Gold was the gift the three wise men brought to Jesus!” Now, however, Mr. T says “I’m about to tell other people it’s time to sell.”

Investing Resume: Launched a high-end jet charter and luxury magazine targeting professional athletes known as Player’s Club. From 2005 to 2009, was an investing columnist for TheStreet.com (see archive here[3]) and endorsed by Mad Money star Jim Cramer.

The Payoff: Lenny Dykstra is spending what little money he has left on legal bills. Dykstra filed for Chapter 11 in 2009 and even auctioned off his World Series ring. Apparently boondoggles such as the doomed Player’s Club or the purchase of a $17.5 million home from Wayne Gretzky had taken their toll. But strangely enough, “Nails” is lucky if it turns out that his worst problem is that he’s a bonehead investor gone broke. In June 2010, a bankruptcy trustee charged that Dykstra had lied under oath, improperly hid assets, and repeatedly acted in a “fraudulent and deceitful manner.” And though never criminally charged, Randall Lane’s skewering Wall Street tell-all book The Zeroes alleges that Dykstra was paid to pump stocks on TheStreet.com[4] and make Cramer look good.

Investing Resume: President and CEO of penny stock mining and oil drilling firm, The UC Hub Group. (PINK: UCHB[5])

The Payoff: According to the SEC[6], Larry Wilcox and 11 others have been investing in bribes and kickbacks to boost UC Hub’s share price — among other microcap stocks. Specifically, the SEC claims Wilcox ran “schemes generally involved the payment of kickbacks to purportedly corrupt pension fund managers or stockbrokers, who would use their clients’ accounts to purchase the publicly traded stock.” The funny thing is, if that’s true he’s been doing a mighty poor job — because aside from a fleeting spike to two cents per share in May before the market crashed, UC Hub has been struggling to trade for more than a penny all year. We can only assume that from here on out, he’ll be investing in a good lawyer.

Investing Resume: Bono is a founder and director of the Elevation Partners private-equity firm. Elevation invests in intellectual property and media and entertainment companies, with about $1.9 billion in assets under management. U2 guitarist The Edge also went halvsies with Bono on purchase, renovation and management of the 70-room Dublin property, the Clarence Hotel.

The Payoff: Bono and his Elevation Partners firm is perhaps best known for plowing $460 million into smartphone company Palm as the company continued to bleed cash and market share before a buyout by Hewlett-Packard (NYSE: HPQ[7]). But the most recent investment from Elevation Partners reportedly came this spring, with a 1% buy-in to Facebook[8] for $90 million. Time will tell if that move will pay off. Other holdings of Bono and Elevation include Forbes Media, the parent of both paper and digital forms of the financial magazine, and the publicly traded website Move, Inc. (NASDASQ: MOVE[9]). Move Inc. is off 15% in the last year, compared to a 10% gain for the broader market.

Investing Resume: Like many Hollywood stars, Kevin Bacon apparently left his investing to other experts instead of gumming up the works himself. Considering some of the other yahoos on this list, that seems wise.

The Payoff: Unfortunately for Kevin, the “expert” that he trusted to manage his money was a rather dubious character you may have heard of — by the name of Bernie Madoff. According to reports[10], Kevin Bacon and his starlet wife Kyra Sedgwick got taken to the cleaners for a cool $50 million by the Ponzi scheme. The star’s solution? To shore up his finances by taking any and every script thrown his way. So apparently aside from the money disappearing, nothing has really changed.