Billions to Bust—and Back: How I Made, Lost And Rebuilt a Fortune, And What I Learned on the Way. By Thor Bjorgolfsson with Andrew Cave. Profile Books; 244 pages; $29.95 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com; Amazon.co.uk

IN MARCH 2007 Thor Bjorgolfsson celebrated his 40th birthday. He flew 120 friends to Jamaica on a Boeing 767 with business-class seating only. James Bond (really Sean Connery) delivered a video greeting. Jamiroquai, 50 Cent and Bob Marley’s son, Ziggy, provided the music.

Mr Bjorgolfsson partied as if he had money to burn. And why not? He was the 249th richest man in the world with a fortune of more than $4 billion. He was also a folk hero in his native Iceland: its first billionaire and the embodiment of the Icelandic economic miracle. Prime ministers called him Thor. Masters of the universe competed for his attention. He gave Mikhail Gorbachev a lift in his private jet.

Within 18 months the Scandi-hero had been reduced to an Icelandic zero. Ninety-nine per cent of his fortune had gone up in smoke. Seven major banks were on his heels. His personal debts were heading towards $1 billion. Many of his former friends shunned him. Icelanders treated him as a villain—a man who had tempted them with fool’s gold and then plunged the country into bankruptcy.

“Billions to Bust” is the story of Mr Bjorgolfsson’s business career. The book is far from perfect; it reads as if it were dictated by a busy man rather than carefully crafted. There are only so many times you can be told that Mr Bjorgolfsson put money into the Icelandic economy before the crash. And it spends too much time rehashing the details of long-dead business deals. For all that, Mr Bjorgolfsson provides one of the first insider’s accounts of the financial crisis. Journalists such as Andrew Ross Sorkin have provided first-rate blow-by-blow accounts of what went wrong. But as a participant Mr Bjorgolfsson does a better job of explaining why people who have more money than they can spend are tempted to spin the roulette wheel one more time.

Mr Bjorgolfsson has a remarkable story to tell. He made his first fortune in the wild east of post-Soviet Russia with Bravo Brewery. Selling alcohol to thirsty Russians does not sound like a challenge, but it is impossible to read about Mr Bjorgolfsson’s dealings with leathery thugs and corrupt politicians without thinking that he deserved the $100m he got for selling his company to Heineken. Over the next six years he multiplied it 40-fold by investing in telecoms (mostly in eastern Europe), building up Activis, a generic drugs company, and then, disastrously, by becoming the biggest investor in one of Iceland’s three largest banks, Landsbanki.

This story is made all the more intriguing by the local flavour: “Billions to Bust” is an Icelandic saga recrafted for the new gilded age. Mr Bjorgolfsson is full of anger for his homeland, a country of 320,000 people run by an inbred elite of politicians who profess socialist virtues but who are forever scratching each other’s backs. His mother was briefly married to George Rockwell, the founder of the American Nazi Party; his father, a businessman and reformed alcoholic, repeatedly incurred the wrath of the authorities. Mr Bjorgolfsson fled this claustrophobic environment while still a young man and spent over a decade in Russia and eastern Europe. But he could not resist the temptation to stick it to the Icelandic establishment by turning himself into a mogul in his native land. Alas, the logic of the Icelandic sagas proved irresistible: the bank he bought imploded and the country turned against him.

Mr Bjorgolfsson has put his life back together. He took out a front-page advertisement in Iceland’s biggest newspaper apologising for his role in the crisis. His investment group, Novator, is flourishing again. He says he has learned from the debacle. Whether the global financial system has is moot. Mr Bjorgolfsson notes that two of the world’s biggest bankers—Jamie Dimon, the boss of J.P. Morgan, and Brian Moynihan, the boss of Bank of America—have recently phoned him offering help in any future deals. In a book about irrational exuberance that is a terrifying discovery.