As amazing as it might sound, Tom Cruise is not the most unpopular man in Hollywood. Not by a long shot. Everyone's favourite Scientologist literally would have to bring down the US Government and install L. Ron Hubbard's cryogenically frozen head as president before he came anywhere near to rivalling LA's real Mr Unpopular of the hour.

Hollywood is a company town, after all, and what company towns care about most of all is green and comes with Benjamin Franklin's portrait on the front. Which puts the head of the striking writers' union somewhere near the top of the list. But the $1 billion cost of the strike is a pittance compared with the other big Hollywood rumpus: the hyperdeflation of the property market.

Every morning, an entire city logs on to zillow.com to see exactly how much farther their overmortgaged Spanish colonial in the Hollywood Hills has fallen into the abyss. (I made the mistake of doing this myself the other day - only to discover that on average, I am losing $2,226 per day.) Imagine, then, how pleased everyone felt when they picked up The Wall Street Journal last week and saw Jeff Greene grinning out from the front page. “In Beverly Hills, A Meltdown Mogul Is Living Large” read the headline.

In case you've never heard of Greene, here are the facts: he is a 53-year-old real-estate investor who lives in a 40,000 sq ft Beverly Hills mansion called Palazzo di Amore. He owns three aeroplanes and a yacht, and Mike Tyson was best man at his $1 million wedding.

But the most important thing to know about Greene is that he found a way to bet in advance that America's property market would implode. How? By trading in the extraordinarily complex area of “asset-backed credit default swaps”. Greene essentially made insurance payments that guaranteeed him a huge payout if mortgage companies ever defaulted on their loans. And how much did he make? In six months, about $500 million. That's $2.8 million a day. Yes, meet Mr Unpopular of Hollywood, 2008.

And there's more: Greene reportedly got the idea from his friend John Paulson, who has done exactly the same thing, only with slightly different results: he made $4 billion in the past six months. That's $22 million per day.

These trades are surely right up there with George Soros's mugging of the pound on Black Wednesday, 15 years ago. But why didn't Paulson take the ultimate unpopularity title? Because he lives on the East Coast, of course. But Greene shouldn't take it too hard. After all, when Hollywood gets back to work, there will almost certainly be a screenplay in the works about the great property bubble of the past five years.

Come to think of it, Gordon Gekko is supposedly returning for a sequel of Wall Street. Perhaps they can reincarnate him from a Wall Street arbitrageur to a Beverly Hills real-estate investor. And how flattering would that be? As long, that is, as Tom Cruise doesn't get the part.

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us