In a world of instant windfalls where companies go public without ever earning a profit, a 10-figure fortune buys more freedom than nine, an eight-figure sum buys more than seven.
Heineken has spent an undisclosed sum buying highly distressed bonds and bank debt to become the controlling creditor at property entrepreneur Robert Tchenguiz's Globe Pub Company, the troubled landlord company which slipped into default last month.
Both groups spent significant sums buying advertising on Facebook with the help of Canadian political consultancy and tech firm Aggregate IQ.
Carriers have spent large sums buying up rights to the radio spectrum, and they're being creative about ways to squeeze more out of what they already have.
If people are foolish enough to spend large sums buying items from near-anonymous sellers, then perhaps they deserve what they get.
And some of the most innovative recent social networking ideas have come from upstarts, which Facebook has either spent huge sums buying (up to $19 billion for WhatsApp, $1 billion for Instagram) or trying and failing to buy ($3 billion offered for Snapchat).
Bent on turning the bank into France's equivalent of Germany's mighty Deutsche Bank, Mr Haberer allowed it to build up a costly portfolio of stakes in some 1,500 industrial companies, to lend recklessly to property developers and to splash out large sums buying other European banks.
In the late 1990s, when the biotech revolution was threatening the pharmaceutical industry's R&D model, a few pharma firms, including Roche and Bristol-Myers Squibb, spent large sums buying biotech firms in order to gain access to their strong pipelines of innovative ideas.
Investors bought into bonds, betting that prices would continue to rise with the ECB willing to spend huge sums buying them up.
But, before this happens, companies often spend considerable sums buying up patent portfolios that they can use as bargaining chips during negotiations.
