Billions to Bust - and Beyond (New and Updated Edition)

Thor Bjorgolfsson is a self-styled adventure capitalist who became Iceland's first billionaire: by his 40th birthday he had assets of around $4 billion. Among them was investment in Iceland's oldest bank, Landsbanki - but in the 2008 financial meltdown, Landsbanki crashed, taking Bjorgolfsson with it. He lost nearly everything, yet amazingly by 2014 had made good his losses, repaid his creditors and rebuilt his empire. This new and extensively revised edition brings the buccaneering story of his extraordinary and ambitious achievements fully up to date.

A must-read for anyone with entrepreneurial spirit, A self-confessed deal junkie afloat on the turbulent seas of global capitalism, this latter day Thor's life story of triumph, disaster and, it seems, redemption is in the finest tradition of Viking sagas. He provides a gripping insider's perspective on the causes of the financial crisis and its aftermath that you won't read anywhere else, Thor Bjorgolfsson made $4billion by the time he was 40 and lost most of it by the time he was 41. His story has much to tell about entrepreneurship. dogged ambition and the brutal might of global markets. A classic tale of how a young man from a small island reached for the sky, achieved riches beyond his dreams and then saw the sky come crashing in on him, Though the global financial crisis has spawned shoals of instant histories, mostly by small-fry journalists, there are precious few first-hand accounts of what it was like to be one of the big fish swimming in the treacherous economic seas of the past two decades. Now comes Icelandic entrepreneur Bjorgolfur Thor Bjorgolfsson with a gripping autobiography that describes not only his part in his homeland's banking blow-up but also his earlier career as a brewer in the "Wild East" that was post-Soviet Russia. Anyone who wants to understand the animal spirits that propelled the world economy all the way underwater in 2008 - and then slowly raised it back to the surface again - will relish Billions to Bust and Back, Thor has lived a classic story of boom to bust; of youthful ambition and exuberance; of sheer passion and determination. Now he has emerged to tell the tale. Inspiring!

Thor Bjorgolfsson made his first $100 million in 2002 from the sale of the Russian Bravo brewery business to Heineken. He set up and heads the investment firm Novator, a platform for global investments from generic pharmaceuticals to mobile telecoms. He lives in London.