Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta was one of the hardest hit billionaires once the pandemic began. With his business being centered on casinos, hotels, and restaurants, basically the first ones shuttered during the shut-down, he had to take drastic action else risk his company going under.

The Houston native made the highly publicized move to lay off 40,000 as early as March of last year. There was even buzz at the time that he'd be forced to sell the Rockets, which obviously never materialized.

“We are doing basically no business,” the Rockets owner said via KHou11 in March of 2020. “I want to hire every employee back. This is very hard on a lot of working families but we have to survive or there is no company.”

But now more than a year after being on the brink of financial turmoil, the Rockets owner is richer than ever which is thanks to “seismic market shifts and his own ambitious SPAC strategy.”

Via Forbes:

Fertitta could have ended up going broke under $4.6 billion in debt accumulated to build his empire. Instead, he’s getting richer by making use of the era’s hottest financial trend: the special purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. Thanks to creative SPAC financing and what appears to be some serious self-dealing, Fertitta has already increased his net worth, Forbes estimates, from $4.1 billion a year ago to $6.3 billion today.

The article on Forbes goes well into detail about the financial gymnastics and savvy business decisions Tilman Fertitta made to turn a dire situation into a fortuitous one. Hopefully, the Rockets owner was able to make good on his promise to hire back most of the workers he had to let go.