In the first three decades of the 20th century, he built up an industrial empire founded on the most humble of innovations, the Swedish-made safety match, that lit a fire of speculative excess around the world creating, then burning through, fortunes that would be measured now in the billions.
One of Jon's suggestions was to deliver a narrative through fortunes in fortune cookies, which would have been convenient, since Bakkila lived across the street from a fortune-cookie factory in Bushwick.
Through fortunes of marriage and inheritance, Warwick emerged in the 1450s at the centre of English politics.
A distant relative of the earls of Stafford, Humphrey Stafford became the greatest landowner in the county of Dorset through fortunes of inheritance.
People are also more inclined to see the wealthy as having gotten that way through family fortune, rather than through their own hard work and education.
He burned through his fortune.
"I've gone through a fortune, and the system stinks," J. said.
Colet (Kay Francis) -- a widow determined to burn through the fortune her late husband, a perfume magnate, has left her.
Start-Up: Blowing It After selling her start-up for $70 million at age 25, the founder blows through her fortune and heads to prison.
Last November, another grace found Mr. Muñoz when he acquired a one-bedroom apartment in a supportive housing complex in Harlem through the Fortune Society, a nonprofit organization.
