It’s winter 1929. Stocks are crashing. But it’s not clear just how bad it will be. What did the most prepared and aware (or just lucky) individuals do to prepare for the turmoil to come?

George Whittell, Jr., (1881-1969) was the sole heir of two enormous fortunes from Gold-Rush-era San Francisco (both his grandfathers had made millions as investors). Whittell refused to work and was, simply, an obnoxious playboy who did little to manage his investments, although he frequently had to buy off women for sexual assault or men who threatened to sue him when his pet lion, "Bill," mauled them.

Whittell inherited large swaths of real estate on the San Francisco peninsula, but it was easy after the crash to be land rich but cash poor, and even the rich could sometimes find it impossible to pay real estate taxes. In what was perhaps his only act of initiative and business acumen, Whittell realized in August 1929 that it was time to draw his money out of the stock market. He later claimed that he sensed that the party was over and that when people stop drinking and having a good time, it's time to pull back: he withdrew $50 mil out of the stock market, an incredible fortune for the time, and thus avoided the really horrible effects of the crash.

This gave him the funds to continue living extravagantly and yet still pay his taxes, etc., so that his fortune was not jeopardized (he purchased six Duesenbergs and a DC2, for example). He also bought 27 miles of Lake Tahoe shoreline, land that extended from water's edge to the crest of the mountain - real estate worth billions today. He claimed that he wanted to build a hotel casino on the Lake Tahoe shore (his holdings represented almost all of the Nevada side of the Lake), but he never got around to doing it, committed as he was to doing nothing productive. He did manage to build himself the "Castle," a lavish estate on the edge of the lake.

All this meant that he was either aware or lucky enough to watch the economic disaster from afar while not having it affect him in any substantial way - except to make the cash he had on hand being even more valuable for purchasing power.

In short, to weather economic disaster: Step 1. pick your parents well so that you start with lots of money; Step 2. be lucky enough or perceptive enough to consolidate your holdings in the right way before the crash; Step 3. continue your life as a totally reprehensible expression of humanity.

My wife and I wrote a biography about Whittell together with a portrait of his Lake Take estate: Castle in the Sky, which is the accumulation of research on this not very pleasant person.

edit: because of the unexpected interest in this post, here is a page related to Whittell's speedboat, "Thunderbird - one of the wildest rides I ever took outside an amusement park. And here is a page on the history of Whittell and what has become known as the Thunderbird Lodge, what Whittell called his Castle.