Five Highly Regrettable Guinness World Records
Have you ever met someone in the Guinness Book of World Records? Don’t say “I don’t know” — you’d know. They’d make sure you did. Some world records, however, are nothing to brag about. Such as…
The Most Fraudulent Election
In 1927, Liberian President Charles D.B. King was reelected in a landslide, with almost 230,000 votes to his opponent’s paltry just under 9,000. It was all the more impressive considering Liberia was home to only about 15,000 registered voters, giving the election a turnout of more than 1,590 percent and earning it the title “Most Fraudulent Election in World History,” according to Guinness. If only we could get turnout like that! Wait. Wait, no.
The Highest Blood Alcohol Level
You might think you can party, but the good folks at Guinness guarantee that you’ve got nothing on a 40-year-old Polish man found passed out on the side of the road in 2013, who somehow managed to blow a 1.374. Let’s do some quick math — that’s more than 17 times the typical legal limit, which is 0.08. The cops who administered the test were sure it was a mistake until the hospital they took him to confirmed it. We don’t know what happened at that point, but man, we don’t have a lot of hope for this addition to the Marvel canon.
The Biggest Meal
Unfortunately, we do know what happened to the woman acknowledged by Guinness as the eater of the biggest meal ever recorded. The 23-year-old U.K. woman died after eating almost four pounds of various meats, a pound of cheese, two slices of bread, two glasses of milk and about 12 pounds of vegetables. In one sitting. It was such a grisly incident that, even though she wasn’t going for a record, Guinness has forbidden anyone from trying to top her. They allow people to compete for most motorcycles driven over the body while laying on a bed of nails, but this is too dangerous.
The Most Big Macs Eaten
While they won’t let you compete to eat the most food, you can try to eat the most of one disgusting menu item. In 1999, a Wisconsin man set the record for most Big Macs ever eaten, and he just keeps topping it — in 2024, he hit 34,000. And we don’t want anyone to know if we eat even one.
The Biggest Loss of Personal Wealth
That’s right: You can fail your way into the Guinness Book of World Records, and Elon Musk did it in 2022 after losing a total of $165 billion in one year. Amazingly, it was actually not due to buying Twitter but largely “poor performance of Tesla stock.” The record was previously held by Japanese tech investor Masayoshi Son, who lost $58.6 billion in 2000. Now this is a competition we can get behind.