Bill Perkins Net Worth 2026: $100M-$500M, Die With Zero & Triton Million

Bill Perkins’s net worth is estimated at $100M-$500M, a range that owes almost nothing to the $5,449,826 he has cashed for in live poker tournaments. The founder of the energy hedge fund Skylar Capital wrote Die With Zero and has bankrolled some of poker’s most expensive prop bets.

His poker ledger is short but heavy: 11 live cashes, a third place in the 2013 WSOP One Drop High Roller and a sixth in the 2019 Triton Million, worth $4.6M between them. The money came from natural gas trading, and he calls himself an amateur at the table.

This profile separates verified figures from estimates. Below are quick facts, the net worth breakdown, his trading and business career, the tournament and cash game record, the major prop bets on the public record, the 2020 ghosting case and his personal life.

Bill Perkins’s net worth sits between $100M and $500M, the range Fortune published in April 2026. He has never disclosed a figure, his fund is private and his own book argues for spending everything before he dies, so any number is a moving target by design.

That range is the only one from a business outlet that has interviewed him. Everything else in the search results is unsourced: figures from $50 million to $2.5 billion appear on biography sites that also invent his birthplace and a WSOP bracelet he never won.

How much is Bill Perkins worth?

The $100M floor is the defensible end. In May 2022 he paid $15.3M at Christie’s for Ernie Barnes’s painting The Sugar Shack, roughly 76 times its high estimate, and in 2016 he gave $1.5M to his old school. Nobody writes those cheques from a balance under nine figures.

The $500M ceiling comes from the same Fortune piece. It is unverified, and it may conflate his personal wealth with the roughly $500M that Skylar Capital managed for clients in 2023.

Why do Bill Perkins net worth estimates vary so much?

Three things keep the number private. Skylar Capital files nothing public about its principal’s stake, SkyFi and SynMax are venture-stage companies whose valuations surface only at funding rounds, and his stated goal is to run the balance down to zero.

He told Fortune his wealth is always in flux and called himself a risk taker. That sets him apart from Maverick Gaming casino CEO Eric Persson, whose company filed for Chapter 11 in July 2025, and from Tony G, who has put a $300 million figure on himself.

How much has Bill Perkins won playing poker?

The Hendon Mob records $5,449,826 across 11 live cashes, 467th on the all-time money list and 13th among Texas players. Two results make up 85% of it: $2,678,386 in London in 2019 and $1,965,163 in Las Vegas in 2013.

Those are gross payouts. Against them sit buy-ins of £1,050,000 and $111,111 for those two events alone, and his own statement to Bloomberg that he has lost millions at poker and considers himself an amateur.

Perkins grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, the son of a criminal defence attorney who served two terms in the New Jersey General Assembly and played four games at running back for the New York Jets. His mother was a schoolteacher.

He went to St. Peter’s Preparatory School, then to the University of Iowa, his father’s alma mater, where he walked on as a defensive back and left the team before his senior year. He graduated with a BS in electrical engineering.

From NYMEX clerk to Houston trader

In 1991 he started as a trainee clerk on the New York Mercantile Exchange, checking trade logs against computer entries. His starting salary was under $16,000 a year.

Texas deregulated its electricity market in 1995 and Perkins moved to Houston to run a derivatives and options desk. He traded and managed risk at El Paso Energy, Statoil, AIG Energy Trading and Zahr Securities, and in 1997 founded Small Ventures USA, lead investor in an El Salvador power project.

Centaurus and the Amaranth trade

In 2002 he joined his friend John Arnold, a former Enron trader, at the new hedge fund Centaurus Energy as a trading principal. The firm’s most famous trade came in 2006, when Centaurus took the opposite side of the natural gas positions that sank Amaranth Advisors.

The fund made Arnold a billionaire and its traders rich, Reuters reported in 2013. Despite annual gains, Centaurus closed in 2012 as natural gas prices fell, and Perkins was not ready to retire.

Skylar Capital, named after his daughter Sky, opened in 2012 to trade US natural gas futures, options and swaps. It raised $102M in its first three months, per Reuters, and was managing roughly half a billion dollars by 2023.

Perkins is founder, managing partner and head trader. The speaker circuit bills him as the Cowboy of Wall Street and the Natural Gas King.

SkyFi and SynMax

In 2021 he co-founded two satellite-data companies. SkyFi, based in Austin with co-founder Luke Fischer, built a marketplace where anyone can search, buy and task satellite imagery from multiple providers through one platform.

SynMax, run by chief executive Eric Anderson, does geospatial analytics for the maritime and energy sectors. It announced a partnership with Satellogic in June 2026.

SkyFi closed a $12.7M Series A in January 2026 led by Buoyant Ventures and IronGate Capital Advisors, per TechCrunch. US Special Operations Command evaluated its mobile platform in May 2026, and the company was selected for NATO’s DIANA accelerator the same year.

Die With Zero

Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life came out from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2020. Its argument is that money left at death means experiences never had, and that wealth should be spent, given or passed on while it can be enjoyed.

The book gave Perkins a second public identity well outside poker. The Wall Street Journal ran a Money Interview with him in April 2026, and Fortune followed the same month with a piece on his plan to spend everything, down to fine art, longevity treatments and $16,000 gifts to friends.

Perkins has 11 live cashes on The Hendon Mob and almost all of the money came from two of them. Seven of those cashes came at buy-ins from $25,000 to £1,050,000, with long gaps between them and no bracelet.

The 2013 One Drop High Roller

The $111,111 One Drop High Roller at the 2013 WSOP drew 166 entries, a record for a six-figure buy-in, and a $17,891,148 prize pool with a share of every entry going to the One Drop water charity. The final needed an unscheduled fourth day.

Perkins came back for it as chip leader with 14,700,000 among the last four, alongside One Drop champion Antonio Esfandiari, Anthony Gregg and Chris Klodnicki. Esfandiari went first, and Perkins then doubled Gregg up in a big pot.

He got the rest of his stack in with ace-five against Gregg’s ace-queen and went out in third for $1,965,163. Gregg beat Klodnicki for $4,830,619 and the bracelet.

What is Bill Perkins’s biggest poker win?

Sixth place in the 2019 Triton Million for Charity in London, which paid £2,200,000, booked by The Hendon Mob at $2,678,386. The £1,050,000 buy-in, with £50,000 of it going to charity, was the largest in poker history at the time.

How the Triton Million played out

The event was an invitational from the tour founded by Triton Poker co-founder Paul Phua and Richard Yong: 54 entries, half of them recreational players who each invited one professional, a £54,000,000 prize pool and £2,700,000 raised for charity.

Perkins bagged the Day 1 chip lead with 3,560,000, 178 big blinds. He reached the final eight and outlasted Timothy Adams and Alfred DeCarolis before going out in sixth.

Triton Million runner-up Bryn Kenney and Aaron Zang then cut a heads-up deal. Zang won the title for £13,779,491 and Kenney took £16,890,509, which put Kenney top of the all-time money list at the time.

Does Bill Perkins have a WSOP bracelet?

No. He has two WSOP cashes, the 2013 One Drop third place and a 17th in the $10,000 Short Deck event at the 2019 series for $14,615. Short deck removes the deuces to fives and reorders the hands; the guide to how short deck poker strategy works covers the adjustments.

His other seven cashes before 2025 all came at PokerStars events: a fourth in the £50,000 EPT London Super High Roller in October 2013 for $470,368, and six on Paradise Island in the Bahamas, topped by an eighth in the $50,000 event at PCA 2019 for $117,980.

Perkins’s cash game record is the part of his poker life nobody can total. He has played online as GASTRADER and on televised shows where the pots are public and the session results are not.

Perkins sat in Poker After Dark’s Prestige week in January 2018, a $50/$100 game with a $20,000 minimum buy-in that played far bigger because he and the businessmen around him kept straddling. He played three pots against Esfandiari of $236,500, $221,000 and $169,200.

Five years later the same opponent won a $606,400 pot from him on Season 10 of High Stakes Poker, in March 2023.

Online and private games

His online hands under GASTRADER are logged by third-party high-stakes trackers, which are not cited here. The point is that his cash game results sit outside any tournament ledger, and none of them is published as a total.

He was also the recreational player in the 2020 private app game that produced the ghosting case covered below. Wikipedia lists him on the High Stakes Poker cast for seasons 7 and 10, alongside the Poker After Dark weeks on PokerGO.

Perkins has been on the other side of several of poker’s best-known prop bets since 2016, usually laying odds against somebody else getting fit, crossing a desert on a bicycle or suffering for 48 hours.

What was the Bill Perkins lunge bet?

At the 2016 PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in the Bahamas, Perkins bet Esfandiari $50,000 that he could not lunge everywhere he went for 48 hours.

On Day 2 of the $5,300 Main Event, rather than lunge to the bathroom, Esfandiari urinated into a container under the table. Tournament staff disqualified him from the event on 10 January 2016.

He finished the 48 hours, won the $50,000 and gave all of it to charity. The story followed him, and coverage of Esfandiari’s later return to televised poker still carried the lunge bet.

Did Dan Bilzerian win his bet with Bill Perkins?

Yes. In February 2016 Perkins bet Instagram-famous poker player Dan Bilzerian $600,000 a side, even money, that he could not cycle the 300 miles between the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign and his Los Angeles home inside 48 hours, starting by the end of March.

Bilzerian trained with Lance Armstrong, set off from Las Vegas on 29 March 2016 and reached Los Angeles in under 33 hours. High Stakes Poker regular Rick Salomon had $250,000 against Bilzerian’s private jet that he would die or be left brain-damaged trying.

The Staples brothers and the body fat bets

In March 2017 Perkins offered the poker-streaming brothers Jaime and Matt Staples 50-to-1 on $3,000 that they could not weigh within one pound of each other a year later. Jaime weighed 304 pounds, Matt 134.

On 25 March 2018 both brothers weighed exactly 188.3 pounds and collected $150,000, a story CNBC covered. A follow-up bet on both reaching sub-10% body fat went the other way.

The body fat format became his signature. Lodge Card Club co-owner Doug Polk bet him $200,000 in February 2022 that he could halve his body fat to 13.85% in a year, finished at 15.1% and paid.

WSOP bracelet collector Shaun Deeb did better. He put up $100,000 at 10-to-1 in March 2023 to get from over 40% body fat to 17% by the 2024 WSOP, and with Deeb on course to make it, Perkins bought out of the bet for $800,000 in February 2024.

Polk came back in April 2025 for a double-or-nothing rematch: halve his body fat again, from 22% to 11%, by 6 October 2025. No result has been made public, and the bet sits alongside dozens of others in the record of poker’s wildest prop bets.

Perkins describes himself as a recreational player and plays like a man who can afford to be one. His straddles helped push the Poker After Dark Prestige game far above its listed $50/$100 blinds.

Both deep runs came against many of the world’s best professionals, which is the case for a real game beneath the gambling.

The contrast with professional discipline is the whole point of the fundamentals of poker bankroll management: he plays with money that does not need to come back.

Is Bill Perkins a good poker player?

Good enough to lead the biggest buy-in tournament of its time after Day 1 and to reach two final tables at six- and seven-figure buy-ins. Not good enough, by his own account, to beat the games he chooses: he has told Bloomberg he has lost millions at poker.

For a man who bets this much, Perkins has a short controversy file. The one entry that matters is a case in which he was the one being cheated.

What happened with Bill Perkins and Jungleman?

In May 2020 Perkins posted on X that he had been cheated in a private high-stakes game on a poker app by a top professional playing on a recreational player’s account, a practice known as ghosting.

He said the money involved was substantial. He also stated publicly that Poker Hall of Famer Jason Koon was not involved.

Dan Bilzerian then publicly identified the player who had been ghosting as high-stakes cash pro Daniel Cates. Cates confirmed it in a written statement, described the game as “rampant with professionals who were ghosting” and apologised to Perkins.

Ghosting cases like this one sit inside a longer history, set out in the history of poker cheating scandals.

The Sugar Shack and the tax case

Two other items belong here without being scandals. In May 2022 he paid $15.3M at Christie’s for The Sugar Shack, Ernie Barnes’s 1976 painting made famous by the sitcom Good Times, against a high estimate of $200,000, and told Bloomberg why.

In 2017 he sued the United States Virgin Islands, claiming a $5M tax refund for the 2015 tax year. The filing is on the public record.

Perkins has two daughters from his first marriage, to Stephanie Park, and named his fund after one of them. He married the dancer Lara Sebastian in July 2022.

Where does Bill Perkins live?

Houston was home for nearly three decades after the 1995 move and remains his address on The Hendon Mob. In March 2023 he told Spear’s he was moving to London.

He gave $1.5M to St. Peter’s Prep in Jersey City for the athletic centre that carries his name, holds film producer credits, and in 2017 ran a Twitch channel from which he staked viewers into PokerStars Championship Bahamas events.

Among the famous faces who play poker for real money he is unusual in being famous for the money first and the poker second, and in having turned his own spending into a published philosophy.

How old is Bill Perkins?

He was born on 2 February 1969 in Jersey City, which makes him 57 in 2026. Fortune described him as 57 in April 2026, which fits that date and his 1986 graduation from St. Peter’s Prep; the 1964 birth year on some biography pages does not.

Satellites, not cards, have carried the Perkins name in 2026. SkyFi closed its $12.7M Series A in January 2026, had its mobile platform evaluated by US Special Operations Command in May and was picked for NATO’s DIANA programme, while SynMax announced its Satellogic partnership in June.

The Die With Zero message got its widest airing in April 2026, with the Wall Street Journal Money Interview on the 26th and Fortune’s profile on the 30th putting his net worth range into print.

At the tables the ledger shows one entry since the Triton Million: a 37th-place finish in a $250 Golden Nugget event in June 2025 for $354, his first recorded cash in six years. No Triton, WSOP or high roller result has followed it.

The 6 October 2025 deadline on his double-or-nothing rematch with Doug Polk has passed with no result made public. For the latest on the names in this profile, see the latest poker news coverage.

This player profile separates verifiable facts from estimates and public claims. We cannot accurately calculate any player’s net worth, but we aim to publish transparent, verifiable information.

How we handle ‘net worth’

Net worth figures for poker players are inherently speculative. We publish a range rather than a single number, explain the inputs that inform it, and flag what cannot be verified.

For Perkins the range comes from Fortune’s April 2026 reporting, checked against the discretionary spending on the public record. His own plan to spend the balance down means the figure will move.

How we report earnings

Tournament earnings on this profile are sourced from The Hendon Mob, which tracks live tournament cashes globally. We cite cash counts and earnings totals as gross payouts, not profit.

His cash game and online results are not tracked in any total, and his own statement that he has lost millions at poker is reported as his claim.

How we cover controversies

Where controversies exist, we report verified facts and clearly sourced claims without editorialising or assigning blame.

The 2020 ghosting case is stated from Daniel Cates’s own written admission and Perkins’s own posts; nobody beyond those two is named.