Image source, Michael Tran / FilmMagic via Getty Images
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- Author, Programa Good Bad Billionaire
- Author’s title, BBC World Service
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Reading time: 9 min
Meet the billionaire fire-breathing, stilt-walking clown: Guy Laliberté.
Half artist, half capitalist, as he defines himself, he helped “remodel” the circus, transforming it into a high-quality spectacle through the company he co-founded, now known worldwide as Cirque du Soleil (Circus of the Sun).
Laliberté was born in Quebec City, in eastern Canada, in 1959. A larger-than-life character who sleeps between one and six hours a night, and is a high-stakes poker player.
It is also famous for hosting extravagant parties filled with stars and acrobats.
Angry teenager
Table of Contents
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Guy Laliberté grew up in a noisy family of more than 120 relatives who held 48-hour parties in an atmosphere of music, card games and mischief.
At age 5, he sold baseball cards in the schoolyard and practiced with the accordion he discovered in his father’s closet.
A visit as a child to a traditional American circus left him fascinated. But not the school. At age 10, he was sent to a strict boarding school that, he said, “killed the soul” of some of the children around him.
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His adolescence was marked by anger. He was expelled from several schools, argued with his parents about what career to choose, and at the age of 14 he ran away from home.
When she finally returned, she made a deal: she would study, but keep her long hair and earn her own money. To achieve this, he played the accordion in the streets of Quebec.
At 18, he took the instrument and $50 in cash and traveled through Europe. He slept on park benches in London and met circus performers who taught him how to juggle, breathe fire and walk on stilts.
These skills learned in the late 1970s would become the foundation of one of the most recognized live shows in the world.
Reinvention of the circus
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Returning to Canada, he worked odd jobs—briefly in a factory, then at a hydroelectric dam—before a union strike sent him to the small Quebec town of Baie Saint Paul.
There he met two people who would change his life: Daniel Gauthier and Gilles Ste-Croix, a politically radical puppeteer from the Bread and Puppet Theatre.
Ste-Croix founded a company of acrobats who walked on stilts. Laliberté joined and quickly rose to become one of the group’s leaders, responsible for organizing the shows and raising funds.
The trio’s big idea came in 1982, in the form of a street festival filled with circus performers and a few clowns who were apparently dealing acid.
This festival inspired their ambition to create a new type of circus: one with artistic integrity and in which animals did not participate.
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Their big opportunity came in 1984, when Canada was looking for cultural projects to commemorate its 450th anniversary.
Laliberté proposed the idea of a traveling circus. Against all odds, the government accepted and awarded them a US$1 million contract.
Cirque du Soleil was born under a blue and yellow tent with capacity for 800 people.
Laliberté, only 25 years old at the time, acted like a fire breather, boasting of being one of the best in the world.
But the first years were difficult.
“We had all the problems that a beginning group can have,” he told Forbes in 2004.
“The tent collapsed on the first day. We had trouble getting people to the shows. It was only thanks to the courage and arrogance of the youth that we survived.”
Loan payments were piling up and banks refused to finance them.
Image source, Getty Images para One Drop Foundation
Only a small community bank opted for them.
Their first attempt to expand outside of Canada, to Niagara Falls, a major tourist destination, sold so few tickets that they had to cancel the show.
The company was on the verge of bankruptcy, but local suppliers extended credit and, according to Laliberté, they did so simply because “they loved us, they trusted us.”
His faith bore fruit. In 1987, Cirque du Soleil landed the opening slot at the Los Angeles Festival.
Laliberté bet everything, literally every penny, on that one performance. He filled the theater with celebrities, including Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
CBS quoted Laliberté in 2005 as saying that he tried to cross all cultures.
“Our approach was very simple. It was about creating a universal language. A show that would appeal to people all over the world. And that was a very important thing.”
The show became a huge hit and Hollywood fell in love with it.
Michael Jackson supposedly came every month in costume. “We contribute to the cultural and artistic growth of this city,” Laliberté told CBS.
“We showed that people could be sophisticated.”
Faithful to his ideals
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Soon, Cirque du Soleil was touring the world, selling out shows in London, Paris and Japan. But Laliberté set his sights on a permanent headquarters in Las Vegas.
After the unfortunate failure of an initial deal, he received a call from casino magnate Steve Wynn, who, in a show of faith, built Cirque du Soleil its own $36 million theater in the desert city.
Your show Mystery It became a resounding success. In one year, revenue reached US$30 million.
By the late 1990s, Cirque du Soleil productions in Las Vegas had transformed the city’s entertainment landscape, helping to reposition it from a gambling capital to a destination for big shows for the whole family.
In Las Vegas, in just two years, the income of Mystery they increased from $30 million to $110 million and in some ways reflected what was happening in the world of live entertainment at the time.
Great shows, great tours. By the late 1990s, the company employed 1,300 clowns, acrobats and dancers from 23 countries, and payroll alone totaled $80 million.
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Laliberté turned down offers to go public by selling shares, saying quarterly reports were “something I can’t live without.” He also refused to sell the company to Disney.
Instead, he expanded into merchandising, film production and high-profile collaborations, including shows themed to The Beatles, Elvis Presley and Michael Jackson.
Not everything was perfect. In 1999, Laliberté co-founder and Cirque du Soleil president Daniel Gaultier decided to leave the company, and several shows in the 2000s lost huge sums.
But by 2004, Forbes He valued Cirque du Soleil at $1.2 billion and Laliberté was officially a billionaire.
That year, the magazine Time also named him one of the most influential people in the world and probably the first clown to appear on the list.
In 2008, he sold 20% of the company to investors in Dubai, only to see his expansion plans thwarted by the global financial crisis. Revenue fell.
In 2015, Laliberté sold his majority stake to American, Chinese and Canadian investors for an estimated $1.5 billion.
The pandemic subsequently plunged Cirque du Soleil into hundreds of millions of dollars in debt.
Full life
Image source, Getty Images for Cirque Du Soleil
Laliberté’s personal life has been as interesting and colorful as his shows.
He has five children with two partners and once dated supermodel Naomi Campbell.
It is famous for its extravagant parties, especially during the Montreal Grand Prix, where acrobats mingle with the stars.
A book that alleged excesses led to a legal dispute and a subsequent apology from its author.
He is also an enthusiastic gambler, although probably not the best in the world. Between 2006 and 2009, he is said to have lost around $30 million in online poker games, but he has also won major tournaments.
Laliberté has also indulged in one of the most expensive adventures imaginable: in 2009 he became Canada’s first space tourist, spending 12 days on the International Space Station wearing a clown nose and chatting with Bono via satellite during a U2 concert.
Image source, AFP via Getty Images
He described it as a “business trip” to raise awareness about water shortages through his charity, the One Drop Foundation, although Canada’s tax court later ruled that the trip was not tax deductible.
Today, Laliberté divides his time between his homes in Montreal, Ibiza and Hawaii, and a private island in French Polynesia that can be rented for about $1.2 million a week.
In 2019, he was arrested for growing cannabis there, but was later released without charge after stating it was for personal use only.
Laliberté is known for being a billionaire who decided to leave with the money because he wanted to live a full life.
He is one of the few billionaire entertainers: proof that a long-haired street performer with a rebellious streak can claim a place at the table of the world’s richest and still insist on being known as a clown.
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