Celebrities Who Went Broke After Achieving Fame and Fortune

Few bands were hotter in the late 1960s than Sly and the Family Stone. Songs like “Everyday People” and “Dance to the Music” topped the charts, and their Woodstock performance became legendary. Behind the music, though, frontman Sly Stone was sinking into drug addiction.

Missed concerts and addiction wrecked his career, and he claimed he had been cheated out of royalties. In 2011, reports said he was living in a van in Los Angeles, though he pushed back on being called homeless. He later got sober, wrote a memoir, and died in 2025.