Sometimes running away to join the circus can provide a pretty good foundation. Guy Laliberté was born September 2 in Quebec, in 1959. When he was a boy, his parents took him to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus, which turned out to be a big event for him. He liked it so much he read P.T. Barnum’s biography and started producing his own performing events at school.
As soon as he graduated from high school at 18, he hitchhiked around Europe, playing accordion on street corners to make some money. He met other street performers there, and learned stilt-walking and fire-eating. When he got back home he continued his street performance career, and joined a traveling troupe (Les Échassiers) performing around Canada. They were a traveling troupe, but don’t imagine a bus or circus train or anything; they just hitchhiked.
When he got back to Quebec he got a more normal job at a hydroelectric dam, but the workers went on strike soon afterward and he returned to street performing. He was still at it in 1984 when, with his friend Gilles Ste-Croix and a few other street performers, he got a government grant (to support celebrations of the 450th anniversary of the discovery of Canada) and formed a performing group he called Cirque du Soleil. Maybe you’ve heard of it. Cirque du Soleil now has troupes on five continents, employs over 4,000 people from 40 countries, and is a pretty big business.
But Laliberté was never a businessman at heart, and he sold all of his stock in Cirque du Soleil by 2020. That made him possibly the world’s first billionaire street performer. He keeps busy, though — he plays high-stakes poker, and organized a huge tournament in 2011. You had to pay $1 million to enter — and 48 players did. The first prize was millions, but Laliberté’s goal was his charity, the One Drop Foundation. It works to provide clean drinking water around the world, and the poker tournament raised over $5 million for it. He also tried to raise awareness about water issues when he became the first Canadian “space tourist” in 2009, riding the Soyuz TMA-16, visiting the International Space Station, and landing in another Soyuz.
He didn’t, though, land on his own private island. That’s Nukutepipi in French Polynesia. He bought it for the same reason several other ultra-rich white guys have been buying property in remote regions: to be a shelter “in the event of a global catastrophe.” Even though he owns the place, though, he got arrested for growing cannabis there. His two children, Kami and Naïma, haven’t followed him into street performing, although Kami races cars in Europe and Naïma competes in horse-riding dressage. So on his 63rd birthday today, what do you think he might be doing? Poker? Stilt-walking? Juggling? Hanging out on his own private island? Or just thinking about the $31 million he’s lost playing poker? (He plays high-stakes poker; I didn’t say he was good at it.)
