Bill Perkins: Net Worth, Poker Career and Biggest Bets
Did you know that Bill Perkins is a high-stakes poker player who made his fortune outside the game and later wrote the book Die With Zero? What is Bill Perkins’ net worth, and why did he once walk away from a huge poker hand before it was even over because he had a plane to catch? Find the answers to these questions and more below.
Who Is Bill Perkins?
Some poker players found the game after moving away from careers in professional tennis or golf. Others, like Bill Perkins, came from the business world. For Perkins, poker is not a way to make a living, but a form of entertainment and another way to put money into play. William Osborne Perkins III was born in the United States on February 2, 1969.
Perkins earned a degree in electrical engineering from the University of Iowa, but never built a career as an engineer. Instead, he found success in energy trading, later founded a hedge fund and became involved in business and investing. He has also produced several movies, including After.Life (2009), Unthinkable (2010) and Cat Run (2011).
Details | |
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Full Name | William Osborne Perkins III |
Born | February 2, 1969 (57 years old) |
Education | University of Iowa, Electrical Engineering |
Live Tournament Earnings | $5.4+ million (according to HendonMob) |
Biggest Live Tournament Cash | $2.67+ million (according to HendonMob) |
How Did Bill Perkins Make His Money?
Bill Perkins started his career much closer to the bottom than his later success might suggest. After college, he got an opportunity at the New York Mercantile Exchange, where he jokingly described his first position as an "assistant assistant peon", essentially an assistant to a clerk. From there, he worked his way into brokering and eventually trading.
During those early years, Perkins also drove a limousine at night. According to him, he actually made more money doing that than at his day job. But the value of the day job was not the salary he was earning at the time. It was where the opportunity could eventually take him.
By the age of 21 or 22, Perkins already wanted to become extremely wealthy, and one of the things that attracted him to trading was leverage: the ability to control much larger positions with relatively little capital.
He did not want to remain a broker either. Perkins wanted to become a trader, and El Paso Energy gave him that opportunity. He moved from New York to Houston, and the decision paid off. Perkins recalls being around 28 or 29 when his net worth first reached $1 million.
But even that was far from his ultimate goal. At the time, he was aiming for a net worth of more than $100 million, enough that he would not have to think about the price of a car or a house.
Perkins later worked as a trader and risk manager for several energy companies, with one of the most important stops in his career coming at John Arnold's Centaurus Energy. Their relationship was not always smooth. Arnold once fired Perkins for being too volatile and taking too much risk, only to hire him back later. According to Perkins, he generated around $1.1 billion for Arnold and the fund during his time at Centaurus.
Perkins eventually founded his own hedge fund. Skylar Capital focuses on energy markets, particularly natural gas. His business interests later expanded beyond energy trading: Perkins co-founded satellite imagery company SkyFi and founded SynMax, a satellite data analytics company.
What Is Bill Perkins' Net Worth?
Bill Perkins' exact net worth is not publicly known. Estimates found online vary significantly and should therefore not be treated as established fact. In 2026, Fortune described Perkins as a multimillionaire and noted that his wealth continues to fluctuate because of his high-risk investment strategy.
What is clear is that Perkins built his fortune primarily through energy trading and investing, not at the poker tables.
His poker results are significant nonetheless. According to his current Hendon Mob profile, Perkins has more than $5.4 million in live tournament earnings, with his biggest single live cash worth more than $2.67 million.
In televised and livestreamed cash games tracked by HighRollPoker, however, Perkins was down nearly $2 million as of May 8, 2026. Importantly, this figure covers only the cash games tracked by the database and does not represent Perkins' lifetime cash game results.
Is Bill Perkins a Professional Poker Player?
Perkins does not consider poker his profession, but he regularly appears in high roller tournaments and some of the biggest cash games in the world. As early as 2013, he was competing in the $100,000 Super High Roller at the PCA.
Perkins has also taken improving his game seriously. He has worked with poker coaches and used modern poker software to study. During his heads-up challenge against Landon Tice, for example, he worked with Matt Boyd and MJ Gonzales of Hybrid Poker, reviewing hands with solvers and using the team's software to train specific situations.
The Airport All-In: Why Bill Perkins Left a $331,600 Pot
One of Perkins' most memorable and entertaining poker moments came in April 2023 during a livestreamed $100/$200/$400 cash game at The Lodge Card Club in Texas.
Perkins had already announced that he was playing his final hand because he had a plane to catch. The hand, however, was taking longer than expected.
On the river, Perkins moved all-in against Handz, creating a $331,600 pot. His opponent still had a decision to make, but Perkins said catching his flight was more important because his wife would be very angry if he missed it. He got up, said goodbye to the table and left for the airport.
By the time the hand was finally decided, Perkins was already on his way and following the livestream to see what his opponent would do.
What made the story even better was that Perkins was bluffing. Handz had the better hand but eventually folded, allowing Perkins to win a pot worth more than $330,000 without even being at the table when the hand ended.
The 2020 Bill Perkins Ghosting Scandal
In 2020, Perkins found himself at the center of a very different poker story. He publicly revealed that cheating had been uncovered in a private high-stakes online game in which he had been playing.
According to Perkins, an unnamed top professional had played through another player's account in exchange for a share of the profits. Perkins said he had actually won money in the games where cheating had been confirmed, arguing that the issue was about the integrity of the game rather than his own results.
The controversy later expanded when Dan Bilzerian accused a player named Sina of allowing Daniel "Jungleman" Cates to play through his account. Cates initially described Bilzerian's accusation as misleading, but later acknowledged that he had played on Sina's account and apologized to Perkins. He said he had played only a small number of sessions and believed at the time that ghosting was already widespread in those games.
What Are Bill Perkins' Most Famous Prop Bets?
Alongside high-stakes poker, Perkins has become known for unusual prop bets involving physical challenges, lifestyle changes and weight loss, sometimes with hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake.
In 2016, he bet $600,000 that Dan Bilzerian could not cycle from Los Angeles to Las Vegas within 48 hours. Bilzerian ultimately completed the challenge and won the bet.
One of Perkins' best-known prop bets involved poker streamers Jaime and Matt Staples. In 2017, Jaime weighed more than 300 pounds while Matt weighed 134. Perkins offered the brothers 50:1 odds that they could not get within one pound of each other's weight within a year. They risked $3,000 for a chance to win $150,000.
One year later, Jaime and Matt both weighed exactly 188.3 pounds, completing the challenge and winning the bet.
What Is Bill Perkins' Die With Zero About?
Bill Perkins had a clear goal when he was young: he wanted to become rich. By his late twenties, he had made his first million dollars, but even then he wanted to go much further. In a later interview, however, Perkins said that as a young man he had not really thought about what he wanted to do with all that money. It was only much later that he began asking himself what he actually wanted from life.
That thinking eventually led to his 2020 book, Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life. In the book, Perkins explores how people can use their money during their lifetime to get as many valuable experiences from it as possible. He now also describes his philosophy in terms of maximizing "net fulfillment" rather than simply "net worth." The book has since been translated into 25 languages.
Die With Zero also overlaps with the way Perkins thinks about poker. Risk, uncertainty, expected value and the use of limited resources all appear in the way he talks about both poker and life. We explore the connection between Die With Zero and poker in more detail in a separate article.
Private Life |
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Bill Perkins has two daughters from his previous marriage to Stephanie Park. In July 2022, he married dancer Lara Sebastian, and the couple welcomed their first child together, Kai, in early 2026. |
Social Media & Online Presence
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About the Editor
Zsolt is SoMuchPoker’s Content Writer and Interview Specialist, exploring poker beyond the cards and the tables through stories, interviews, profiles, historical pieces and curiosities. He focuses on the people, places and ideas that have shaped the game, while looking at the wider world around poker, how it has evolved, what makes its culture unique, and how the people within it think, compete and make decisions.
