My idea of a “useless waste of money” is the clearance Christmas crochet kit I bought for $15 and have yet to open three months later. Some celebrities, on the other hand, have been known to throw thousands or even millions of dollars into the toilet with completely useless purcahses.
Here are 18 times celebs spent an embarrassing amount of money on something that wound up totally useless:
1.
Cardi B has a collection of expensive cars — but she doesn’t have a driver’s license. In 2018, she told The Late Late Show with James Corden, “I have a Lambo. I have a Lamborghini truck. I have a Bentley truck. I have a Maybach, and I have a Suburban.” When James asked her what the point of having all those cars she couldn’t drive was, she replied, “To take pictures with it.” She also said she couldn’t just take pictures in the showroom because “that’s being an imposter.” She also said that learning to drive was “scary.”
2.
In 2008, Brad Pitt bought a thousand-acre estate in Provence, Château Miraval. A few years down the road, a man convinced him that millions of dollars worth of gold was buried on the property, hidden by a medieval owner who supposedly took it from Levant amidst the Crusades. So, Brad spent an undisclosed amount of money on radar equipment to search for the hidden treasure. In 2022, he told GQ, “I got obsessed. Like for a year, this was all I could think about, just the excitement of it all. Maybe it has something to do with where I grew up, because in the Ozark Mountains there were always stories of hidden caches of gold.”
However, the man who told him about the gold turned out to be somewhat of a charlatan who just wanted Brad to invest in his radar company. The actor felt it was “pretty foolish in the end.”
3.
On a 2025 episode of The Kardashians, Kim Kardashian revealed that, when she got engaged to Kris Humphries in 2011, she covered 80 percent of the $2 million engagement ring. Their marriage infamously lasted only 72 days, and she didn’t even get to keep the ring! She said, “I was pregnant with North, still married to him, and in order to divorce him, he said I had to give him the ring in my divorce.”
4.
In 2021, Lil Uzi Vert spent $24 million on the 11-carat pink diamond from Elliot Elliant and had it implanted in their forehead. They tweeted, “I’ve been paying for a natural pink diamond from Elliot for years now. This one Stone cost so much I’ve been paying for it since 2017. That was the first time I saw a real natural pink diamond. A lot of M’s in my face.”
However, a mere four months later, they were no longer wearing the jewel. Uzi told TMZ, “I had a show at Rolling Loud. And I jumped in the crowd, and they kind of ripped it out…I still have the diamond, so I’m feeling good.”
5.
In 2022, the New York Times reported that Saturday Night Live castmates Pete Davidson and Colin Jost were part of the group that jointly purchased a retired ferry for $280,000. Two years later, Colin told People, “It is absolutely the dumbest and least thought-through purchase I’ve ever made in my life. The way I justified it is for the amount of money we were putting into buying it, on just a basic square-footage level, is if you found the right place for it to be, you were essentially buying a building on its side, that’s 65,000 square feet. So around New York, that is a very good price per square foot.”
He also said that he “soft-floated” the idea by his wife, Scarlett Johansson, before making the investment, but she didn’t take him seriously. He said, “She was just like, ‘Wait, so you own this boat now?’ Very fair question. She now obviously sees the value in it, but also, I think she’s like, ‘It’s now become something that is a defining thing for you guys and an interesting thing for you guys. So you should take it seriously and figure out the best version of it, because for better or worse, it’s going to reflect on you.’ We don’t care because we’re comedians.”
They’re still working towards making their vision for the boat come to life. In 2025, Pete told The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, “A lot of people joke about it, but we have a really extensive plan, and we’re a lot closer than people seem to think. It’s like four or five floors, and on each floor, we’re going to do something interesting. A hotel up top. Movie theater, an entertainment theater, some little shopping kiosks.”
6.
Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montag blew through millions of dollars because they believed in the Mayan apocalypse. In 2013, Spencer reportedly told OK! Magazine, “We made and spent at least $10 million. The thing is, we heard that the planet was going to end in 2012. We thought, ‘We have got to spend this money before the asteroid hits.’ Here’s some advice — definitely do not spend your money thinking asteroids are coming. But the world didn’t end. I would give my friends $15,000 for their birthday. Just cash. I would buy people cars. Every valet I met got a tip of a couple of hundred pounds. I would pay people $200 just to open doors for us.”
7.
Per the New York Times, in 2007, Nicholas Cage bought a dinosaur skull — a Tyrannosaurus bataar skull, to be exact — at auction for $276,000. However, seven years later, the Department of Homeland Security got in touch to inform him that the artifact had actually been stolen from Mongolia’s Gobi desert. The actor agreed to turn it over so it could be returned to its rightful home.
8.
Noel Gallagher has an expensive car collection he can’t drive. In 2021, he told Radio X, “Not interested [in driving]. I do like cars. Got a few cars, but I can’t drive any of them. Yeah, it’s never interested me. I think I’d be involved in a road rage incident within an hour of passing my test…I’ve got a chauffer.”
Previously, in 2019, he told Radio X that his “most expensive mistake” was his “£110,000 Jaguar.” He said, “I think it’s got 12 miles on the clock and just sits in the garage. It’s been there since the ’90s…I thought when I became a fully-blown rock star, I was gonna need a car. I’d heard about this firm that buy old vintage cars and put a modern car inside them. So I got a Mark 2 Jaguar from 1967, the year I was born. But they take about 18 months to two years to build, so I thought I’ll easily will have learned to drive in two years. I was in the kitchen one day, and this low-loader pulled up outside the house with this car on the back. I was putting the kettle on, thinking, ‘Fucking lovely car, that. I’m gonna get one of those one day.’ And the guy knocked on the door and said, ‘Mr. Gallagher? Your car!’ I’d forgotten that I’d bought the car.”
9.
Meek Mill purchased a mansion in Georgia but never even moved in. In a since-deleted 2023 Instagram post, he reportedly said, “MANSION FOR SALE IN ATL. My realtor not getting this off fast enough & I think I can lol I never moved in it had for a few years. sandy springs/buckhead area! When somebody get traded to the hawks or falcons come grab this Jawn! I’m not even gone tag who shot this shitty video lol.”
10.
In 1989, the New York Times reported that Kim Basinger, along with a group of investors, paid $20 million for Braselton, Georgia, a town with a population of 500. She reportedly planned to develop it into a commercial center and tourist attraction and possibly add movie studios.
However, by 1992, only a dentist office and a furniture store were still in business, and the promised redevelopment was nowhere in sight. As the Chicago Tribune reported, anytime townspeople asked when it would begin, they received the answer, “We don’t know.” According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Kim and her investors sold Braselton for $4.3 million in 1995.
11.
EastEnders actor Danny Dyer reportedly bought a Louis Vuitton bag on eBay, but it turned out to be counterfeit. In 2022, his daughter, Dani Dyer, told the False Economy podcast, “We was at the airport, and my dad loves eBay. He’s an eBay person now. And he turned up, and he was like, ‘I’ve got this really lovely, like, Louis Vuitton bag. This is how many years old.’ And I went, ‘Well, how much did you spend on it?’ He spent a few hundred quid on it. We were at the airport, and it just snapped. It ripped. So the new Louis Vuitton bag that he bought — this big bag — just snapped. All of the clothes went everywhere.”
She continued, “So then we had to go to the real Louis Vuitton then buy a Louis Vuitton bag. I was like, ‘Well, Dad, you need to pack that bag.’ I was like, ‘Send it back. Send the bag back.’ And he was like, ‘I ain’t gonna do that. Going straight in the bin, that.’ He got conned badly. It was just really funny. He said, ‘You know what? You live, and you learn. You never order from eBay anything like that.’ I was like, ‘No, Dad, just order a bottle of Zoflora or something, not a Louis Vuitton bag.'”
12.
For his 2011 Halloween costume, Justin Bieber commissioned a custom-made gold grill for his teeth from the jewelry maker If & Co. According to Business Insider, it cost an estimated $5,000. On his blog, Ben Baller, the jeweler, wrote, “remember, I don’t even make grills anymore unless its for someone really special. and obviously, this is someone special. so I’m gonna swag it the f*&k out! …disclaimer: TO ALL THE BILLIONS OF JUSTIN BIEBER FANS (I do NOT make permanent grills, I only do the ones that are removable, you can put them on and take them off within seconds and they’re for fashion and fun. relax, your little heart throb is not ruining anything) ok.”
13.
In a 2025 YouTube video, streamer Kai Cenat called his $6,000 Chrome Hearts biker hat “probably the dumbest purchase [he] ever made in [his] life.” He said, “I hate it. I ain’t gonna lie. I don’t like it no more. Like, I just can’t, like. It’s, like, you gotta wear it on certain occasions…When are you ever gonna be able to wear this? …I’m an idiot. Like, chat, let me go ahead and say something — do not fall for a lot of this shit that be going out, ’cause I be falling for it, bro.”
14.
In 2011, Kesha told Vanity Fair that her annual glitter budget was “pretty exorbitant.” She said, “It’s probably more like a few thousand every month. If you come and see a show of mine, there is no shortage of glitter. By the end, everyone from the back of the auditorium to the very front is covered and potentially choking on glitter. I am shooting glitter from glitter guns and out of every orifice in my body. It’s really a big part of what I do. It’s my goal to cover the planet in glitter and take the fuck over. I can’t do that if I don’’t have a shit-ton of glitter.”
15.
In a series of since-deleted tweets from 2021, Chrissy Teigen said, “what’s the most expensive thing you’ve eaten that you thought sucked? …one time john [Legend, her husband] and I were at a restaurant and the waiter recommended a nice Cabernet. We got the bill and it was 13,000 dollars. HOW DO U CASUALLY RECOMMEND THAT WINE. we didn’t even finish it and it had been cleared!!!”
16.
In 2019, GLOW actor Betty Gilpin told Glamour, “I did a shampoo commercial when I was 20, and somebody told me to save all of it, but I [didn’t take the advice and] spent it all on marijuana and cabs in New York. I could have really used that money for other things!”
17.
In 2021, Logan Paul spent $623,000 on an NFT from the Azuki collection. A year later, its value reportedly dropped to a mere $10. In 2022, he tweeted that the NFT was “worth essentially nothing,” but he “immortalized this mistake” with his own NFT collection.
18.
And finally, similarly, in 2022, Kevin Hart reportedly purchased a Bored Ape NFT for $200,401. ZyCrypto reported that, two years later, he sold it for an “81% discount” — $47,000.
