For his 31st birthday, Jho Low rented the Chairman Suites, at $25,000 per night, at the Palazzo hotel in Las Vegas. The suite had a pool terrace overlooking the Strip. But the suite was just the staging room room for the grander celebration in store later that night, one of the wildest Vegas has ever seen.
The Wall Street Journal writes that the host was a mysterious figure. Low, who hailed from Malaysia, had a boyish round face with glasses, and though polite and courteous, also displayed awkwardness and a lack of ease in conversation. But word on the street was that he was incredibly rich — maybe even a billionaire. One rumor swirling around the party was that he was the money behind Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest film, The Wolf of Wall Street. The guest list for the party included Hollywood stars, top bankers from Goldman Sachs, and powerful figures from the Middle West, but very few knew Low’s story.
So who is he? WSJ writes “Low might have hailed from Malaysia, but his was a 21st-century global scheme.” He is suspected of pulling off global heists so unlikely they seem made up. His alleged co-conspirators came from the world’s wealthiest 0.1 percent, or those who aspired to enter the ranks of the richest of the rich: young Americans, Europeans and Asians who studied for the MBAs together, got jobs in finance and then partied all over the world. And the backdrop to it all? The global financial crisis, which sent the U.S. economy plummeting into recession that the country has yet to fully recover from. Another notable element in the allure of a spendthrift foreign billionaire like Low, observed the WSJ.
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