Down and Out?

So now I hear Michael Jackson (search) is facing a cash crisis.

And Mike Tyson (search) is down to his last five thousand dollars. Five thousand dollars!

These two guys together were once worth a billion bucks.

Now Jackson apparently can't pay a $70 million loan from the Bank of America due on Tuesday. And Tyson can't pay any loan apparently due any day.

How do these things happen? I think precisely because you never think it can happen.

You know, the rich aren't all that different from the rest of us. They too over-extend. They too can live beyond their means.

It's nice if you have tens of millions. Just don't live like you have hundreds of millions, I guess.

I remember asking a once very rich former CEO friend of mine this very question. He had left the work-a-day world with more than a hundred million bucks.

"I thought I had it all, Neil," he told me.

"But then there was the divorce and some bad investments and all those people I started giving money to."

"Before I knew it," he said, "It was gone. Just gone."

"But couldn't you have put a couple of million in just a checking account or something?" I asked. "Just to have something to fall back on?"

I never forget what he said then.

"When you have a lot of potatoes, Neil, you don't think small potatoes."

Michael Jackson and Mike Tyson both had a lot of potatoes. They both had a lot of homes and cars and planes and fancy things and hangers-on -- a lot of hangers-on. Moochers and fair weather friends who gave little, but took much.

I wonder where those friends are now?

Will they be so loyal to Iron Mike if he doesn't have any cool cash?

Or Jackson's pals: Will they still stick by him when he's down to his last amusement ride or worse, his first prison cell?

I doubt it.

It's incredible how you can be on top of the world and think you belong there and ignore the possibility that there is no guarantee in life that you will stay there.

Watch Neil Cavuto's Common Sense weekdays at 4 p.m. ET on Your World with Cavuto.