Posted on 01/06/2009 8:26:55 AM PST by TigerLikesRooster
German tycoon Adolf Merckle commits suicide
25 mins ago
FRANKFURT (Reuters) – German billionaire Adolf Merckle, assailed by financial turmoil and struggling to salvage his business empire, has killed himself, his family said on Tuesday.
"The desperate situation of his companies caused by the financial crisis, the uncertainties of the last few weeks and his powerlessness to act, have broken the passionate family entrepreneur and he took his own life," a family statement said.
Prosecutors in the southern German town of Ulm, near Merckle's home, said the 74-year-old died when a train struck him late on Monday. There was no sign anyone else was involved, they said.
/snip
Banking sources had told Reuters the family lost hundreds of millions of euros on investments, with losses of about 400 million euros ($539.4 million) on Volkswagen shares alone.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
It is quite sad. Very very sad what he had to do, when he was not even near broke.
As for the 1 US$ a day part .....actually it is Billions. Billions of human beings live each day on the equivalent, or less, of US$ 1 a day. Yet they never commit mass suicide.
This guy still had a lot of money left ...yes, less than what he had the same time last year, but all the same a lot of money by the standards of 99.999% of the World's population (or even 99% of Germany's population).
Yet he threw himself in front of a train, mangling himself, definitely throwing his family into a tailspin, and traumatizing the poor driver!
So now he’s worth ‘only’ $100 Mil. and can’t mix in the same circles. SO TAKE EARLY RETIREMENT! Go live in a foreign country, buy a village and have a slower, yet peaceful life. Come On!! This is nut.
Good Lord, what a way to go. Suicide does damage to their family & friends who must to carry on with “life”. Sad.
“... definitely throwing his family into a tailspin, and traumatizing the poor driver!”
AND THAT’S WHY I CALL HIM A SCHMUCK!
It is a cowardly act. Those left behind have to cope with what he couldn't.
I was raised in an Iowa farming community where most were descended from Germany immigrants. I remember several suicides. They were always men and usually ill. Usually using a gun, but sometimes hanging. My Aunt's father killed himself seemingly on the spur of the moment when he could no longer cope with the death of my uncle and the senility of his own wife. The doctor who delivered me, killed himself when I was a teenager after a cancer diagnosis.
I think people that resort to this are not in their right mind. They needed friends, that sadly, they did not have.
People that high up the ladder of wealth probably don’t think like that... And they’re probably surrounded by people who will desert them - and in the case of the spouse and anyone who invested money with him - will turn around and sue him. So he took “the easy way out” rather than face the failure of losing all the money and his family and “friends”. Goes to show that wealth certainly doesn’t buy happiness and security people.
Yes, it is sad, indeed. To have a person so entirely wrapped up in their own monetary value that they’d prefer death to the “shame” of being reduced to $100 million in worth. I hear various “learned explanations” of how we got here and such. I also heard a long time ago that “if you laid all the economists in the world end-to-end, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion”. I’m nothing more than a regular person and know that there are so many variables to all this mess that all I can do is try to walk on through it somehow instead of trying to figure it out or, worse, look for answers from some sefl-proclaimed “economic guru”. There is a God. He is in charge. He has a will and a way towards which He directs us.
So true. There’s a famous saying from Ethic of Our Fathers that says “Increase possessions, increase worry”. This is an extreme example of how true that ancient statement is.
If only he were an American — we would have bailed him out...
As I recall, the folks who lost money on VW shares were the folks shorting the stock.
It’s tragic that this jackass killed himself, and I hope that God manages to save him anyway. But I don’t have much sympathy that he lost over a half a billion dollars by shorting stock in VW. That part, he earned.
“Increase possessions, increase worry”.
And that is the lesson in all this. That the Almighty is greater than everything you can see, hear & perceive. The moment you view something else (Eg. money or self) as either equally greatness or greater, you’ve lost the goal of life and are destined for disappointment and misery.
Regardless of who you are and what you have, life always has a curve ball with your name on it. A humble man will know his place in life and deal with the challenge. But if you are pumped up in physical possessions and empty honor, when you lose it all you are nothing but an empty shell.
It’s like 1929 again.
Prayers for his family. How sad that he gave up on life because of money. It seems he never knew the real purpose of life.
Yes, for some maybe this is a reminder of that inescapable truth. It’s all too easy to become distracted by our selves and our possessions.
“He who dies with the most toys wins” is the mindset of many of these people, and the perceived humiliation from his peers was too much for him to bear.
His whole life was wrapped around the competition with others like him to make the most possible, he lost and people like him don’t handle failure at anything well.
I sure hope you’re right that “it is ok to be broke” because I think a whole lot of people are going to be real broke, real soon. Lack of money sure isn’t a reason to off yourself.
C.S. Lewis once wrote that it all comes down to pride. It’s not even really greed after a certain point where one has enough and more than enough. It’s the pride of having that much more than the other guy. Certainly seems clear that “pride goeth before the fall” is the lesson here. I think that many of us are equally vulnerable to the same kind of physically and spiritually fatal thinking, but maybe at less obvious levels. I know I am and this serves as an instructive reminder.
You would think.
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