From the bizarre to the eccentric to the purely whacky, if there is not a who’s who of elite eccentrics in our time, there ought to be. CNN has a good start with their online collection of biographies covering the lives of America’s wealthy eccentrics; “Sometimes the rich are a little different.”

From Hetty Green, who in today’s money was worth 2 billion when she died, yet abjured heat and hot water while she lived, to former Microsoft co-founder Paul Ellen’s search for extra-terrestrials,to the rather tragic Huntington Hartford,heir to the A&P grocery fortune, (depicted above) who proved “the adage that it takes three generations to go from rags to riches and back to rags.”

“It was his grandfather who founded the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, and little Hunt himself, with a nine-figure fortune, never much saw the point of working. He dabbled in this and that - models, Paradise Island, Show magazine, once even clerking at an A&P. He dated Lana Turner and raced speedboats with Sean Connery. In 1964, he built the odd 10-story building that housed his Gallery of Modern Art (it closed after five years). Hartford made a fetish of hating abstract impressionism and his serial marriages drained his fortune. His Manhattan townhouse became so squalid that the Health Department sent warnings; He filed for bankruptcy in 1992. He now lives on Paradise Island.”
CNN Money.com