Wealth & Money Quote by Roy Horn

The line lands like a soft confession from a man whose entire career depended on spectacle. Roy Horn, half of Siegfried & Roy, spent decades selling audiences an engineered sense of wonder: big cats, sequins, illusion. Here, the “bank of white light” isn’t stage lighting but the oldest human special effect in the book - the near-death threshold. The phrasing is plain, almost childlike, which is part of its power. Horn doesn’t embellish; he reports. That restraint makes it feel less like branding and more like an unguarded moment from someone who usually controlled the frame.

The emotional center isn’t the light, though. It’s the reunion with “beloved animals.” For a performer forever linked to tigers and the ethics-and-mystique debate around them, the afterlife appears not as angels or applause but as the creatures that defined his identity and his controversies. It’s also a quiet dodge: animals don’t argue back. They don’t litigate exploitation. They offer uncomplicated devotion, a kind of moral asylum.

“For a moment I stepped out of my body” carries the subtext of a man forced to confront what the Las Vegas mythos tries to deny: fragility. Horn’s public narrative was control over danger, intimacy with predators, mastery of risk. An out-of-body moment flips that premise. The body - the instrument of performance - becomes something you can leave behind, while the bond he valued most persists. Even in crisis, he reaches for connection, not explanation, turning catastrophe into a final, private illusion: the promise that the animals were never just props.