Celt: Are you saying John Denver committed suicide?
From the good folks at CNW: Robin Williams Was Not Broke When He Died. Let’s End This Rumor Right Now Please.
That’s what Courtney Love wants you to think.
Robin said in interviews last year that he was hurting for money. That’s why he returned to tv. Was he down to his last dollar? I seriously doubt it. But he was trying to unload a 30 million dollar estate. Money may have been tight until he could convert hard assets into cash.
More importantly at 63 he probably didn’t want to be stuck grinding out one movie after another. It was time to cut back a little and he wasn’t able to to do that financially.
That’s pretty much a summary of most of the information I’ve seen about his financial condition, but their conclusion is just the opposite of what I’ve seen. Most of the articles, including this one, generally say that his net worth is $50 million with the big estate for sale comprising the bulk of it. On the upside, they list that asset at $37 million. Without the sale of it, that leaves $13 million for the upkeep of his lifestyle. Property taxes on that property alone could run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe even approaching a million dollars a year. Then he has to pay salaries and maintenance to the people who maintain that property, along with the maintenance of his own lifestyle. $13 million is a lot of money for people who have smaller assets to upkeep, but isn’t as big when expenses are high.
The question in this thread is the same one that they just assume at the end of the article:
If he had the health and optimism to work as he had in the past, the problems might not have been daunting. If his depression or health condition prevented that, it’s a different scenario.
From what I’ve read in articles (that may or may not have been accurate), his neighbors and a friend spoke about how he was concerned about his financial issues a lot. Whether anyone else felt like he could easily earn enough to maintain his lifestyle, based on their reports, he seems to have been in doubt. The depression could have led to the doubt or the doubt could have led to the depression, or maybe neither if the reports are inaccurate.
The man is gone. His financial problems (if any) are of no consequence to him any more. Let’s not rifle through the man’s financial assets. What next, his pockets?
Yeah, I think lot of us may have enjoyed his financial assets. I don’t think that was his issue.
FWIW I posted that before that detail was revealed but to limit his effort (and honestly probably increase the amount of money he made) he could have inked a deal to do an exclusive show at a Las Vegas casino for x amount of months. Huge money for him and no travel beyond having to live in Vegas for a while. Again assuming he physically could do it.
All these questions about finances are really academic; certainly, enough real options were there that the man wasn’t going to be eating dog food, even in a worst case scenario. Hell, he could probably have sold his nail clippings on eBay and made a halfway decent living.
However, to someone caught in the jaws of the “black dog”—and I have absolutely no idea what kind of history of treatment he’d had for it, or how effective it was, or what the future prognosis was—with your morale horribly broken, even giving the man a magic button that would give your a billion dollars per press might have felt too harrowing a task. Or worse, just felt like an act of pointlessly prolonging a trip down a weary road. 
I suppose his estate could sign him up for a reboot of Weekend At Bernie’s.
Something no one has mentioned is residuals: wouldn’t he be raking in a significant amount of money just from them each year?
We’ll never know for certain, but many people believe it was. I certainly think so. 
*I started to list my reasons, but don’t wish to start the argument here. If anyone is interested in discussing, please start another thread and I’ll pop in.