In this first round matchup in the bankruptcy discharge regional, we face Thomas Jefferson against Walt Disney, and none of this went the way I was expecting it to.

Thomas Jefferson was plagued with financial problems due largely to his expensive tastes: he had an appetite for French wines, books, and many other luxuries. Jefferson also got into trouble after he cosigned a sizable loan for a friend who died a year later; Jefferson was stuck with the debt. He also struggled after the Panic of 1819 and a severe recession that ensued. Jefferson tried to sell lottery tickets at $10 apiece to raise money to pay his debts. The winner would obtain parts of Jefferson’s Monticello home and other memorabilia. The lottery idea failed due to overvalued real estate and Jefferson died hopelessly in debt.

His name may be iconic today, but early in his career, Walt Disney was just a struggling filmmaker with too many bills. In 1922 he started his first film company named Laugh-O-Gram. Disney even signed a deal with a New York company to distribute the films he was producing, but the distributor stole from him. Without the distributor’s cash, Disney couldn’t cover his overhead, and his studio went bankrupt in 1923. He then left Kansas City for Hollywood, and after a series of increasingly successful creations, Disney debuted a new character named Mickey Mouse in 1928.

In the fame competition this contest proved that just because your face is on Mount Rushmore, you’re not the most famous person around. That honor went to Walt Disney in this category, who is the most famous person in bankruptcy brackets; and he really dismantled Thomas Jefferson, even though Jefferson has a remarkable eight million hits on Google. On the debt side, I was expecting that Disney, being a more modern debtor, would take out Jefferson, but this was a case where the inflation adjustment really paid off for Jefferson, who ran up what was actually an astronomical amount of debt by the time he died in 1826. And, so, adjusted for inflation, Jefferson handily defeated Walt Disney during this period. So once again, it was up to the panel to decide who won this competition. And the panel had some surprising comments. Chloe Drescher thought that it was contradictory that Thomas Jefferson, who founded our country and assisted in forming its economic policies, couldn’t keep his own economic house in order, and Jessica Blau thought that it was inspirational that Walt Disney was able to bounce back from his bankruptcy to become such an iconic figure. So, at the end of the day, Thomas Jefferson did manage to defeat Walt Disney in this competition and will move on to the second round.