Sports fans may be have read that the 6ft 9in Darius Miles, whose total career earnings amount to more than $60 million, now has a relatively modest reported net worth.
Celebrity Net Worth currently lists Miles’ net worth as $100 thousand.
The 41-year-old – not to be confused with the Darius Miles whom The Guardian reports has just been arrested following an incident near the Alabama University campus – played his final NBA game on April 13, 2009, for the Memphis Grizzlies. His team lost by nine points to the Phoenix Suns (110-119).
Since February 2019, he has co-hosted The Knuckleheads podcast with Quentin Richardson. A few months before he teamed up with Richardson, he wrote an article titled ‘What the Hell Happened to Darius Miles?’ for The Players’ Tribune, which contains some interesting revelations.
What happened to Darius Miles’ net worth?
As Celebrity Net Worth notes, Darius Miles earned $66 million in salary alone during his career, but owing to a combination of bad investment opportunities and unfortunate business deals, he lost almost all of it by 2016.
Other sites say his total career earnings were actually $62.9 million. But the point is that he made a lot.
At the age of 18, Miles went from playing high school basketball to the NBA. He signed on with the Los Angeles Clippers. The deal made him $3 million a year. He had come from humble beginnings, and the contrast was stark.
In his own words, Miles wrote in The Players’ Tribune in 2018 that they “gave us millions of dollars and put us in Los Angeles, of all places.”
How Miles lost his money, in his own words
In his 2018 article for The Players’ Tribune, Darius Miles gives some indication as to how his net worth went from so high to so low, in such a short time.
“When you’re young, you think the money is gonna last forever,” he wrote. “I don’t care how street smart you are, or who you got in your corner, when you go from not having anything to making millions of dollars at 18, 19 years old, you’re not going to be prepared for it.”
But he didn’t “go broke” buying Ferraris. It takes a “long time to go broke buying Ferraris” for someone making millions every year. Instead, it was “shady business deals” that made his money “disappear.”
CNBC cites a Belleville News-Democrat report (paywalled) that Miles had lost more than $100,000 in a 2008 California real estate deal. And the St Louis Post-Dispatch has reported on multiple multimillion dollar lawsuits that emerged from what CNBC calls a “bad real estate deal” in downtown St Louis.
Read Related Also: Carmen Electra, 51, rocks just a tiny rainbow thong bikini as she leans against stripper pole and promotes adult site
Personal issues increased his financial problems
Miles used basketball as an “escape,” he writes. “When you grow up running from gunshots all the time, I think there’s something inside you that never leaves.”
He talks about having “some kind of PTSD,” from which basketball was among the only things that could provide respite. And six years after the Young Clippers had reached their zenith, he was “basically out of the league.”
He had injured his knee late in the 2005–06 season, and microfracture surgery kept him out of the game for the entire 2006–07 and 2007–08 seasons. Doctors were telling him his knee problems were too severe to continue playing. And as a result, he was unable to access the thing that, to his mind, kept him level-headed. That was when he was 27.
Then, in May 2013, his mother Ethel Mae Miles passed away. “I pretty much went insane,” he writes. “I lost my grandaddy to throat cancer. Lost my grandma to heart disease. Lost my best friend Geracy to the streets.” And when his mother died, he writes, “it broke me.”
What did Darius Miles do to recoup some of his lost net worth?
Miles declared bankruptcy in 2016. Afterwards, he auctioned off some of his belongings in order to raise money to pay off his debts.
He had listed $1.57 million in total liabilities, according to CNBC. These included $282,041 in debt to the Internal Revenue Service and a debt of $20,000 in child support.
Among the items he sold were an autographed LeBron James jersey. That fetched $1,500. There were also “thousands” of DVDs and video games, plus “expensive firearms.”
He relocated to Florida to live with Quentin Richardson. It’s from there that he has co-hosted The Knuckleheads podcast, mentioned above.
Have something to tell us about this article?
