Cats are a popular house pet, but Mike Tyson wasn’t content just to have any old regular feline friend. No he needed two – two tigers to be exact. Tyson didn’t adopt the jungle cats from a friend either, no, he paid $140,000.00 for them. He didn’t stop there; in addition to the tigers, Iron Mike hired a trainer who he then paid $125,000.00 per year. That’s a lot of money, but is also pretty awesome.

There are two types of people in the world, those who hate their birthday and those who love their birthday. It is safe to say that Mike Tyson loves his birthday. One way he went broke is by spending $410,000 on a birthday party that he threw for himself. Sure, $400,000,000 would buy you almost 100 parties at that price, but with Tyson’s other expensive hobbies and tastes, he went broke well before then.

How much could a bathtub possibly cost? Clearly, for Mike Tyson, the answer was the sky is the limit. He only wanted the best for his first wife, actress Robin Givens, and that included where she bathed. Mike spent two million dollars on a bathtub for Givens. Sadly, their marriage would last about as long as his massive fortune and the two were divorced on Valentine’s Day of 1989.

Mike Tyson certainly had expensive taste, but he also didn’t seem to know the value of a dollar. One example of this is his car collection. Iron Mike loved fast cars and had some of the best exotic cars on the market. He owned Lamborghinis and Ferraris as he showed off his wealth and spent his boxing fortune. The most expensive car he had was a Bentley worth nearly half of a million dollars. It featured – this was the 1980s, remember – an in-car phone well before cell phones were popular and cheap.

Mike TysonAlso Ranks:more #6OF 68The Best Boxers of the 21st Century#32OF 2198The Best Athletes Of All Time

Nobody likes cutting the grass; it’s a chore usually done when it’s hot out and then the mower won’t start, all that is to say it is a pain. However, Mike Tyson only does pain in the boxing ring so he hired a gardener to do the work for him – well, several of them. With homes in Ohio, Maryland, and Connecticut, Tyson had a lot of ground for his groundskeepers to keep. All in all, his gardening bill topped $100,000.

Not many people can walk into a jeweler store and walk out with a diamond covered chian without paying, but Mike Tyson isn’t most people. The boxer had a reputation for spending lavishly and many of the retailers he frequented extended him lines of credit. Shortly before declaring bankruptcy in 2003, Tyson walked out of a jeweler’s in Las Vegas with a $173,000.00 chain festooned with diamonds without paying. The owner of the store said a lot of retailers had extended Mike credit in the city but that they believed he would pay them back.

Back in the days when pagers were an every day carry necessity, Mike Tyson racked up a huge bill for them. Along with his cell phone service, Mike managed to run up a $230,000 bill for the devices in just two years between 1995 and 1997. That might not seem like a lot when he went through $400 million in that time, but it shows how much trouble Tyson had with managing his money.

Mike Tyson may have wasted millions of dollars, but he also ran with a crowd who was looking to make a buck or two off of him. According to Tyson, boxing promoter Don King misled him about a contract he signed while he was incarcerated after a rape conviction. When he declared bankruptcy in 2003, Tyson was in the middle of suing King in order to get the money he claims was defrauded out of him by the promoter.

Mike Tyson called himself the “biggest fighter in the sport” and had earned the money to prove it. His boxing success was so lucrative that at one point he was spending $400,000 a month to support his lavish lifestyle. Tyson would have done well to save some of his money though, he ended up deeply in debt and by 2003 was bankrupt.

Although he had expensive taste, it wasn’t just buying tigers and cars that got Mike Tyson in financial trouble. Throughout his career he made hundreds of millions of dollars and it turns out that there may have been some irregularity with his income reporting, and it turned out he was deeply in debt to several governments. Between the State of Georgia, the United Kingdom, Michigan, and the Internal Revenue Service, Mike Tyson owed almost $20 million in taxes.

Mike Tyson was paid millions for his fights but he still went broke. Part of what drove him to bankruptcy was his costly divorce after his first marriage. Tyson married actress Robin Givens in 1988, but things quickly soured. Givens told Barbra Walters in an interview that Tyson had a bad temper and scared her. Soon after the two divorced and Givens got a cool $10 million in the aftermath of the dissolution of the marriage.

Mike Tyson was certainly irresponsible with his money. At one point he had hundreds of millions of dollars, but he watched it turn into millions in debt. He lost a lot of money in the years since he rose to fame, but the ways he lost it varied from surprising to comical. One night after partying too hard Tyson realized he had misplaced some of his cash – $1 million, in fact. Someone who worked for him eventually found it, but the story clearly shows how much trouble Tyson had keeping track of his cash.