7 Completely Unhinged Things Celebrities Wasted Money On

7 Lady Gaga’s Ghost Detector

I’ve really never understood the concept of ghost detection devices. Suppose, for one second, that they’re not absolute bs. Great. You’ve entered a complete state of idiocy. Stay there. But then, from what I’ve seen on these bogus devices, they just kind of ping a few readouts and meters, and some fat dude with a ponytail looks at you and says, “Yep, there’s ghosts here.” And that’s it? You just now have to be one hundred percent certain that there are ghosts in your spot. It’s not like you can start rounding them up. They’re ghosts. Their whole thing is that you can’t get your arms around them. But either way, Lady Gaga is apparently not huge into ghosts, so much so that she dropped 50k on her own state-of-the-art ghost detector to help let her know that ghosts were, indeed, hanging around. 

My favorite part of this outrageously stupid purchase is that I like to picture that at this price point, it’s basically a perfect machine version of those kinds of dirtbags you see on ghost hunting shows. 

Maybe the size of a toaster? Sleek and black. But it’s got a ponytail and a goatee just taped onto the plastic to up the authenticity. Every time Gaga is lying there in bed and a ghost rolls into her room, it lights up like an Alexa, but a faint waft of Marlboro Reds overtakes the room, and a voice chimes in, “Yep, we got ghosts again. Them ghosts are back. A’ight then, Lady Gaga. Just lettin’ you know about them ghosts, Miss Gaga. Ain’t jack we can do about ‘em from here, but just lettin’ you know there are ghosts here.”

6 Bono’s First Class Hat

Everyone’s got that one hat that they love above all else. That just fits the best. That makes you feel your most confident. Whatever. Not everyone is a big enough douchebag to go on a trip, forget that had, and then spray money at the world through a money firehose until it travels across the country to get back to you like the world’s least sympathetic Pixar tale. But that’s exactly what Bono did in order to have his favorite hat reunited with his head before a gig. 

Before going on stage in Italy, Bono realized that he forgot hat, had it thrown onto a flight back in England to be delivered to him before the show. The hat was then placed in the cockpit with the pilots and ushered across Europe with outrageous levels of care before it got to Bono safely, all for only around $1500. If this world were a just place, during the travels through the air, that hat would have been imbued with some sort of dark spirit that, once it was reunited with its owner, would turn them into a horrific, awful, purely evil lifeform that would do something as truly diabolical as pre-populate the phones of millions with its ear-murdering music. But no, surely such a level of malice cannot exist in this cruel world. Nobody could be that purely evil, right?

Wait … the hat was trilby? The “M'lady” hat? Never mind.

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5 Brad Pitt’s Treasure Hunt

Not every stupid celebrity purchase needs to be a one-time thing. In fact, in the case of Brad Pitt’s treasure hunt, they can show you how they’re capable of spending both outrageous amounts of money AND time on something purely wasteful. Back in 2008, Pitt was tipped off that there might be some lost Crusader gold hidden beneath his $60 million dollar French estate, so he got to digging. And buying treasure-hunting gear, and just generally becoming obsessed with this search for gold for a year, ultimately never coming up with anything to show for it. Is there a point where these people have enough money?

Maybe that point is when you’re sitting in your SIXTY MILLION DOLLAR HOME, and some dude in a tan vest and a tan hat and a tan pair of khakis with a presumably extremely tan penis knocks on your door and tells you that there’s lost gold beneath your mansion and he can help you find it? Maybe that’s when you look around at your SIXTY MILLION DOLLAR HOME, one of what has to be at least 20 homes just like it that you also own, and you look at the tan-cocked adventurer swindler, and then, once again, you look around your SIXTY MILLION DOLLAR HOME, and you say, “You know what? I’m good. Even if there is gold buried beneath this place, I think it can stay there for now. I’m actually set on money for now, believe it or not. But may I still see this tan adventurer dong that matches your all-tan outfit and leathery skin, please? Since money no longer entertains me, I need to see bootleg adventurer cocks to get my rocks off. This was all an elaborate ruse to get YOU here. Now remove those khakis.”

4 Johnny Depp’s “Far More” Than 30k Monthly Wine Tab

Look, it’s maybe the least surprising thing in the world to learn that Johnny Depp spends a buttload of money every month on wine. Just take a look at his alcohol-bloated face from the recent trials. 

He looks like a mutant extra at a bar on Mars in Total Recall at this point, so the fact that he’s walking around at all with that much liquor in his system is the really impressive part here. What sucks about the revelation that he spends $30,000 a year on wine is what he had to say about that, adding, when it was revealed in court documents, that he actually spends “far more” than that. 

What kind of next-level douchebag do you have to be to say something like this? How disconnected from the human experience can you possibly get to let money go to your head at this level? The absolute unchecked ego going on here is absurd, and I’d really like to have a word with him about it in my own quaint mega-millionaire home, where I spend 30k a month on Natty Ice that’s used exclusively to flood my home so that I can indoor jetski on my beer river and get sufficiently drunk when it sprays up into my face. Like a real, grounded, down-to-earth man that I am that just so happens to be wealthy. But you’ll never see me lose touch with reality like this. Never.

3 Celine Dion’s Seven Figure Humidifier

Performing a residency as a singer in Vegas seems like a special kind of successful artist jail. Are they making an absolutely incomprehensible amount of money for a pretty tiny amount of work? Of course. But do they also have to spend a year lip-syncing the same crappy songs of theirs they’ve been leaning on for decades in front of a family of drunken tourists barfing more than double their body weight in snow crab legs directly into their laps in the front row during every single show? Hell yes. And it’s only just.

In order to make it through her own snow crab puke Gwar show, Celine Dion had a casual $2 million humidifier installed to help protect her vocal cords and skin during her residency. Think about all the cool crap you could hang above your head for $2 million instead of a humidifier? 

For starters, how about just $2 million in change up there? I’d point to it all the time and be like, “Guys, check this out. This is TWO MILLION DOLLARS in pennies above our heads here. If the bags holding this snaps, it’s going to kill ALL of us.” And also, you could easily have a thousand stand-up jet skis hanging above your head for all of that money as well. Truly anything would be better than a lame-ass humidifier that 100% isn’t doing a damn thing for the vocal cords she’s most likely not using anyway.

2 Kim Basinger’s Actual Goddamn Town

Who’s the best actor you can think of that would swoop in and buy your cowdung rural American town? Clearly, nobody would ever say Kim Basinger. Who did exactly that in the late '80s when she, along with an ownership group, bought the entire city of Braselton, Georgia. But no, nobody would ever be sitting there, entirely stuck and mired in the bog of a forgotten and deserted American city, and hope that Kim Basinger is the actor to cruise down main street with the keys to the city. But then, who?

I know who could potentially be the worst. My money’s on Vin Diesel there. I’d imagine that he would have a bronze statue of himself in every possible position his body can get into in front of every building and home in the city. You live at 205 Fart Avenue in Vin’s new city? Well, damn, lucky you, you’ve got the statue of Vin spreading his ass cheeks as wide as humanly possible to walk by on your way to work in some lung-shredding mine for the rest of your day. I guess I’m not sure there even is a single actor who I’d want to purchase my town. Maybe because that’s just not something that should be an option. People, celebrities, up and buying towns. Just writing that it kind of sounds like a bad idea? We probably shouldn’t live in a country where Sinbad can collect enough residual checks from First Kid, spin a globe around, stop his finger somewhere in Arkansas, and become the town king.

1 Paris Hilton’s $300k Dog House

Jesus Christ. Sometimes, it just feels like there’s hardly even any room for satire anymore. Instead, I guess I’ll just try to write this one up like a hard-nosed, old-school, unbiased journalist simply reporting on the facts here.

Paris Hilton buys $300,000 dog house for her dogs. With two complete stories, lavish bedding, a staircase, chandelier, and air conditioning, this dog house– Wait. No.

Goddamit, no. What the hell are we doing here? I mean, really? Air conditioning? A DOG chandelier? Do we have any other assignments? Is there maybe some kind of warzone you could send me to that needs a frontline journalist to be immediately shot in the head by a stray bullet? Or better yet, I’ve got this dream article I want to write about what it feels like to dangle 60 pounds of ribeye steak from my nutsack and go dive with great white sharks. Can I just head out on that? I’ll pay for the expenses. Somebody else finish the story about the Paris Hilton doghouse that 98.9% of the country would kill to live in as their human home. I’ve got a carload’s worth of ribeyes to buy.

Top Image: Department of Defense, Stephen Carlile